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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of English Critical Essays, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: English Critical Essays
+       Nineteenth Century
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Edmund D. Jones
+
+Release Date: February 15, 2010 [EBook #31283]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH CRITICAL ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Irma Spehar and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                         The World’s Classics
+
+
+                                 CCVI
+
+                        ENGLISH CRITICAL ESSAYS
+                          NINETEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+                                OXFORD
+                           UNIVERSITY PRESS
+                      LONDON: AMEN HOUSE, E.C. 4
+                       EDINBURGH GLASGOW LEIPZIG
+                      COPENHAGEN NEW YORK TORONTO
+                       MELBOURNE CAPETOWN BOMBAY
+                       CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI
+                           HUMPHREY MILFORD
+                           PUBLISHER TO THE
+                              UNIVERSITY
+
+
+
+
+                        ENGLISH CRITICAL ESSAYS
+                          NINETEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+                        SELECTED AND EDITED BY
+                            EDMUND D. JONES
+
+
+                        OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+                       LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
+
+
+_The present selection of English Critical Essays (Nineteenth Century)
+was first published in ‘The World’s Classics’ in 1916 and reprinted in
+                   1919, 1920, 1921, 1924 and 1928._
+
+
+   PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD
+               BY JOHN JOHNSON PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The essays here brought together are meant to illustrate English
+literary criticism during the nineteenth century. A companion volume
+representative of Renaissance and Neo-classic criticism will, it is
+hoped, be issued at a future date. Meanwhile this volume may well go
+forth alone. For the nineteenth century forms an epoch in English
+literature whose beginnings are more clearly defined than those of
+most literary epochs. The publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ in
+1798, and of Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition in 1800, show
+the Romantic Movement grown conscious and deliberate, with results
+that have coloured the whole stream of English poetry and criticism
+ever since.
+
+The greater part of the present collection deals with general
+principles rather than with criticisms of individual books or authors.
+The nineteenth century, having discarded the dogmas and ‘rules’ of
+Neo-classicism, had perforce to investigate afresh the Theory of
+Poetry, and though no systematic treatment of the subject in all its
+bearings appeared, some valuable contributions were made, the most
+notable of which came from the poets themselves.
+
+The extracts from the _Biographia Literaria_ are placed next to the
+Wordsworthian doctrines which they criticize; otherwise the
+arrangement of the essays is chronological.
+
+American criticism is represented--inadequately, but, it is hoped, not
+unworthily--by the last two essays.
+
+In the preparation of this volume I have received much valuable help
+from Mr. J. C. Smith, which I now gratefully acknowledge.
+
+                                              EDMUND D. JONES.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                 PAGE
+WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850
+  Poetry and Poetic Diction. (1800)                                1
+
+SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1772-1834
+  Wordsworth’s Theory of Diction. (1817)                          40
+  Metrical Composition. (1817)                                    57
+
+WILLIAM BLAKE, 1757-1827
+  The Canterbury Pilgrims. (1809)                                 85
+
+CHARLES LAMB, 1775-1834
+  On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference
+  to their Fitness for Stage Representation. (1811)               95
+
+PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1792-1822
+  A Defence of Poetry. (1821)                                    120
+
+WILLIAM HAZLITT, 1778-1830
+  My First Acquaintance with Poets. (1823)                       164
+
+JOHN KEBLE, 1792-1866
+  Sacred Poetry. (1825)                                          191
+
+JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, 1801-1890
+  Poetry with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics. (1829)           223
+
+THOMAS CARLYLE, 1795-1881
+  The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakespeare. (1840)                   254
+
+JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT, 1784-1859
+  An Answer to the Question: What is Poetry? (1844)              300
+
+MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1822-1888
+  The Choice of Subjects in Poetry. (1853)                       356
+
+JOHN RUSKIN, 1819-1900
+  Of the Pathetic Fallacy. (1856)                                378
+
+JOHN STUART MILL, 1806-1873
+  Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties. (1833, revised 1859)     398
+
+WALTER BAGEHOT, 1826-1877
+  Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate and
+  Grotesque Art in English Poetry. (1864)                        430
+
+WALTER HORATIO PATER, 1839-1894
+  Coleridge’s Writings. (1866)                                   492
+
+RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1803-1882
+  Shakespeare; or, the Poet. (1850)                              535
+
+JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 1819-1891
+  Wordsworth. (1875)                                             558
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
+
+1770-1850
+
+POETRY AND POETIC DICTION
+
+[Preface to the Second Edition of _Lyrical Ballads_, 1800]
+
+
+The first Volume of these Poems has already been submitted to general
+perusal. It was published, as an experiment, which, I hoped, might be
+of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement
+a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation,
+that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted,
+which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart.
+
+I had formed no very inaccurate estimate of the probable effect of
+those Poems: I flattered myself that they who should be pleased with
+them would read them with more than common pleasure: and, on the other
+hand, I was well aware, that by those who should dislike them, they
+would be read with more than common dislike. The result has differed
+from my expectation in this only, that a greater number have been
+pleased than I ventured to hope I should please.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Several of my Friends are anxious for the success of these Poems, from
+a belief, that, if the views with which they were composed were
+indeed realized, a class of Poetry would be produced, well adapted to
+interest mankind permanently, and not unimportant in the quality, and
+in the multiplicity of its moral relations: and on this account they
+have advised me to prefix a systematic defence of the theory upon
+which the Poems were written. But I was unwilling to undertake the
+task, knowing that on this occasion the Reader would look coldly upon
+my arguments, since I might be suspected of having been principally
+influenced by the selfish and foolish hope of _reasoning_ him into an
+approbation of these particular Poems: and I was still more unwilling
+to undertake the task, because, adequately to display the opinions,
+and fully to enforce the arguments, would require a space wholly
+disproportionate to a preface. For, to treat the subject with the
+clearness and coherence of which it is susceptible, it would be
+necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public
+taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy
+or depraved; which, again, could not be determined, without pointing
+out in what manner language and the human mind act and re-act on each
+other, and without retracing the revolutions, not of literature alone,
+but likewise of society itself. I have therefore altogether declined
+to enter regularly upon this defence; yet I am sensible, that there
+would be something like impropriety in abruptly obtruding upon the
+Public, without a few words of introduction, Poems so materially
+different from those upon which general approbation is at present
+bestowed.
+
+It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a
+formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of
+association; that he not only thus apprises the Reader that certain
+classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that
+others will be carefully excluded. This exponent or symbol held forth
+by metrical language must in different eras of literature have excited
+very different expectations: for example, in the age of Catullus,
+Terence, and Lucretius, and that of Statius or Claudian; and in our
+own country, in the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, and
+that of Donne and Cowley, or Dryden, or Pope. I will not take upon me
+to determine the exact import of the promise which, by the act of
+writing in verse, an Author in the present day makes to his reader:
+but it will undoubtedly appear to many persons that I have not
+fulfilled the terms of an engagement thus voluntarily contracted. They
+who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of
+many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its
+conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings
+of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and
+will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts
+can be permitted to assume that title. I hope therefore the reader
+will not censure me for attempting to state what I have proposed to
+myself to perform; and also (as far as the limits of a preface will
+permit) to explain some of the chief reasons which have determined me
+in the choice of my purpose: that at least he may be spared any
+unpleasant feeling of disappointment, and that I myself may be
+protected from one of the most dishonourable accusations which can be
+brought against an Author; namely, that of an indolence which
+prevents him from endeavouring to ascertain what is his duty, or, when
+his duty is ascertained, prevents him from performing it.
+
+The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose
+incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe
+them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language
+really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a
+certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be
+presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above
+all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in
+them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature:
+chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a
+state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen,
+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. 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 influence of social vanity, they convey their
+feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions.
+Accordingly, such a language, 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 separate themselves from the sympathies of
+men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in
+order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of
+their own creation.[1]
+
+    [1] It is worth while here to observe, that the affecting
+    parts of Chaucer are almost always expressed in language pure
+    and universally intelligible even to this day.
+
+I cannot, however, be insensible to the present outcry against the
+triviality and meanness, both of thought and language, which some of
+my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical
+compositions; and I acknowledge that this defect, where it exists, is
+more dishonourable to the Writer’s own character than false refinement
+or arbitrary innovation, though I should contend at the same time,
+that it is far less pernicious in the sum of its consequences. From
+such verses the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at
+least by one mark of difference, that each of them has a worthy
+_purpose_. Not that I always began to write with a distinct purpose
+formally conceived; but habits of meditation have, I trust, so
+prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descriptions of such
+objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry
+along with them a _purpose_. If this opinion be erroneous, I can have
+little right to the name of a Poet. For all good poetry is the
+spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true,
+Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any
+variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than
+usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. For our
+continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our
+thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past
+feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general
+representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to
+men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings
+will be connected with important subjects, till at length, if we be
+originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind will be
+produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of
+those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such
+a nature, and in such connexion with each other, that the
+understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree
+enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified.
+
+It has been said that each of these poems has a purpose. Another
+circumstance must be mentioned which distinguishes these Poems from
+the popular Poetry of the day; it is this, that the feeling therein
+developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the
+action and situation to the feeling.
+
+A sense of false modesty shall not prevent me from asserting, that the
+Reader’s attention is pointed to this mark of distinction, far less
+for the sake of these particular Poems than from the general
+importance of the subject. The subject is indeed important! For the
+human mind is capable of being excited without the application of
+gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception
+of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not
+further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion
+as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that
+to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best
+services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this
+service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day.
+For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting
+with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind,
+and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state
+of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the
+great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing
+accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their
+occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the
+rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency
+of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the
+country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder
+writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are
+driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German
+Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.--When
+I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am
+almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble endeavour made in these
+volumes to counteract it; and, reflecting upon the magnitude of the
+general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy,
+had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible
+qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the
+great and permanent objects that act upon it, which are equally
+inherent and indestructible; and were there not added to this
+impression a belief, that the time is approaching when the evil will
+be systematically opposed, by men of greater powers, and with far more
+distinguished success.
+
+Having dwelt thus long on the subjects and aim of these Poems, I shall
+request the Reader’s permission to apprise him of a few circumstances
+relating to their _style_, in order, among other reasons, that he may
+not censure me for not having performed what I never attempted. The
+Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur
+in these volumes; and are utterly rejected, as an ordinary device to
+elevate the style, and raise it above prose. My purpose was to
+imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt the very language of men;
+and assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular
+part of that language. They are, indeed, a figure of speech
+occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such;
+but have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechanical device of
+style, or as a family language which Writers in metre seem to lay
+claim to by prescription. I have wished to keep the Reader in the
+company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall
+interest him. Others who pursue a different track will interest him
+likewise; I do not interfere with their claim, but wish to prefer a
+claim of my own. There will also be found in these volumes little of
+what is usually called poetic diction; as much pains has been taken to
+avoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it; this has been done for
+the reason already alleged, to bring my language near to the language
+of men; and further, because the pleasure which I have proposed to
+myself to impart, is of a kind very different from that which is
+supposed by many persons to be the proper object of poetry. Without
+being culpably particular, I do not know how to give my Reader a more
+exact notion of the style in which it was my wish and intention to
+write, than by informing him that I have at all times endeavoured to
+look steadily at my subject; consequently, there is I hope in these
+Poems little falsehood of description, and my ideas are expressed in
+language fitted to their respective importance. Something must have
+been gained by this practice, as it is friendly to one property of all
+good poetry, namely, good sense: but it has necessarily cut me off
+from a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from
+father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of
+Poets. I have also thought it expedient to restrict myself still
+further, having abstained from the use of many expressions, in
+themselves proper and beautiful, but which have been foolishly
+repeated by bad Poets, till such feelings of disgust are connected
+with them as it is scarcely possible by any art of association to
+overpower.
+
+If in a poem there should be found a series of lines, or even a single
+line, in which the language, though naturally arranged, and according
+to the strict laws of metre, does not differ from that of prose, there
+is a numerous class of critics, who, when they stumble upon these
+prosaisms, as they call them, imagine that they have made a notable
+discovery, and exult over the Poet as over a man ignorant of his own
+profession. Now these men would establish a canon of criticism which
+the Reader will conclude he must utterly reject, if he wishes to be
+pleased with these volumes. And it would be a most easy task to prove
+to him, 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. To illustrate the subject in a
+general manner, I will here adduce a short composition of Gray, who
+was at the head of those who, by their reasonings, have attempted to
+widen the space of separation betwixt Prose and Metrical composition,
+and was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure
+of his own poetic diction.
+
+    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_.
+
+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.
+
+By the foregoing quotation it has been shown that the language of
+Prose may yet be well adapted to Poetry; and it was previously
+asserted, that a large portion of the language of every good poem can
+in no respect differ from that of good Prose. We will go further. It
+may be safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any
+_essential_ difference between the language of prose and metrical
+composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and
+Painting, and, accordingly, we call them Sisters: but where shall we
+find bonds of connexion sufficiently strict to typify the affinity
+betwixt metrical and prose composition? They both speak by and to the
+same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said
+to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and almost
+identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry[2] sheds
+no tears ‘such as Angels weep’, but natural and human tears; she can
+boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from
+those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of
+them both.
+
+    [2] I here use the word ‘Poetry’ (though against my own
+    judgement) as opposed to the word Prose, and synonymous with
+    metrical composition. But much confusion has been introduced
+    into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose,
+    instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of
+    Fact, or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is
+    Metre; nor is this, in truth, a _strict_ antithesis, because
+    lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing
+    prose, that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them, even
+    were it desirable.
+
+If it be affirmed that rhyme and metrical arrangement of themselves
+constitute a distinction which overturns what has just been said on
+the strict affinity of metrical language with that of prose, and paves
+the way for other artificial distinctions which the mind voluntarily
+admits, I answer that the language of such Poetry as is here
+recommended is, as far as is possible, a selection of the language
+really spoken by men; that this selection, wherever it is made with
+true taste and feeling, will of itself form a distinction far greater
+than would at first be imagined, and will entirely separate the
+composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life; and, if
+metre be superadded thereto, I believe that a dissimilitude will be
+produced altogether sufficient for the gratification of a rational
+mind. What other distinction would we have? Whence is it to come? And
+where is it to exist? Not, surely, where the Poet speaks through the
+mouths of his characters: it cannot be necessary here, either for
+elevation of style, or any of its supposed ornaments: for, if the
+Poet’s subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit
+occasion, lead him to passions the language of which, if selected
+truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated,
+and alive with metaphors and figures. I forbear to speak of an
+incongruity which would shock the intelligent Reader, should the Poet
+interweave any foreign splendour of his own with that which the
+passion naturally suggests: it is sufficient to say that such addition
+is unnecessary. And, surely, it is more probable that those passages,
+which with propriety abound with metaphors and figures, will have
+their due effect, if, upon other occasions where the passions are of a
+milder character, the style also be subdued and temperate.
+
+But, as the pleasure which I hope to give by the Poems now presented
+to the Reader must depend entirely on just notions upon this subject,
+and, as it is in itself of high importance to our taste and moral
+feelings, I cannot content myself with these detached remarks. And if,
+in what I am about to say, it shall appear to some that my labour is
+unnecessary, and that I am like a man fighting a battle without
+enemies, such persons may be reminded, that, whatever be the language
+outwardly holden by men, a practical faith in the opinions which I am
+wishing to establish is almost unknown. If my conclusions are
+admitted, and carried as far as they must be carried if admitted at
+all, our judgements concerning the works of the greatest Poets both
+ancient and modern will be far different from what they are at
+present, both when we praise, and when we censure: and our moral
+feelings influencing and influenced by these judgements will, I
+believe, be corrected and purified.
+
+Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, let me ask, what is
+meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address
+himself? And what language is to be expected from him?--He is a man
+speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively
+sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater
+knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are
+supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own
+passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the
+spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar
+volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe,
+and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To
+these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than
+other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of
+conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the
+same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts
+of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more
+nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything
+which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are
+accustomed to feel in themselves:--whence, and from practice, he has
+acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks
+and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his
+own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him
+without immediate external excitement.
+
+But whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest
+Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt that the language which it
+will suggest to him, must often, in liveliness and truth, fall short
+of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual
+pressure of those passions, certain shadows of which the Poet thus
+produces, or feels to be produced, in himself.
+
+However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of
+a Poet, it is obvious, that while he describes and imitates passions,
+his employment is in some degree mechanical, compared with the freedom
+and power of real and substantial action and suffering. So that it
+will be the wish of the Poet to bring his feelings near to those of
+the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of
+time, perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even
+confound and identify his own feelings with theirs; modifying only the
+language which is thus suggested to him by a consideration that he
+describes for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure. Here,
+then, he will apply the principle of selection which has been already
+insisted upon. He will depend upon this for removing what would
+otherwise be painful or disgusting in the passion; he will feel that
+there is no necessity to trick out or to elevate nature: and, the more
+industriously he applies this principle, the deeper will be his faith
+that no words, which _his_ fancy or imagination can suggest, will be
+to be compared with those which are the emanations of reality and
+truth.
+
+But it may be said by those who do not object to the general spirit
+of these remarks, that, as it is impossible for the Poet to produce
+upon all occasions language as exquisitely fitted for the passion as
+that which the real passion itself suggests, it is proper that he
+should consider himself as in the situation of a translator, who does
+not scruple to substitute excellencies of another kind for those which
+are unattainable by him; and endeavours occasionally to surpass his
+original, in order to make some amends for the general inferiority to
+which he feels that he must submit. But this would be to encourage
+idleness and unmanly despair. Further, it is the language of men who
+speak of what they do not understand; who talk of Poetry as of a
+matter of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse with us as
+gravely about a _taste_ for Poetry, as they express it, as if it were
+a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or
+Sherry. Aristotle, I have been told, has said, that Poetry is the most
+philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not
+individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon
+external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth
+which is its own testimony, which gives competence and confidence to
+the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same
+tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature. The obstacles which
+stand in the way of the fidelity of the Biographer and Historian, and
+of their consequent utility, are incalculably greater than those which
+are to be encountered by the Poet who comprehends the dignity of his
+art. The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, the necessity
+of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that
+information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a
+physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as
+a Man. Except this one restriction, there is no object standing
+between the Poet and the image of things; between this, and the
+Biographer and Historian, there are a thousand.
+
+Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered
+as a degradation of the Poet’s art. It is far otherwise. It is an
+acknowledgement of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgement the
+more sincere, because not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and
+easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it
+is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand
+elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and
+lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but what is propagated by
+pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathize
+with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried
+on by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that
+is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular
+facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by
+pleasure alone. The Man of science, the Chemist and Mathematician,
+whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with,
+know and feel this. However painful may be the objects with which the
+Anatomist’s knowledge is connected, he feels that his knowledge is
+pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge. What then
+does the Poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as
+acting and re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite
+complexity of pain and pleasure; he considers man in his own nature
+and in his ordinary life as contemplating this with a certain quantity
+of immediate knowledge, with certain convictions, intuitions, and
+deductions, which from habit acquire the quality of intuitions; he
+considers him as looking upon this complex scene of ideas and
+sensations, and finding everywhere objects that immediately excite in
+him sympathies which, from the necessities of his nature, are
+accompanied by an overbalance of enjoyment.
+
+To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these
+sympathies in which, without any other discipline than that of our
+daily life, we are fitted to take delight, the Poet principally
+directs his attention. He considers man and nature as essentially
+adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of
+the fairest and most interesting properties of nature. And thus the
+Poet, prompted by this feeling of pleasure, which accompanies him
+through the whole course of his studies, converses with general
+nature, with affections akin to those, which, through labour and
+length of time, the Man of science has raised up in himself, by
+conversing with those particular parts of nature which are the objects
+of his studies. The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of science
+is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary
+part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the
+other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us,
+and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our
+fellow-beings. The Man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown
+benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet,
+singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in
+the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion.
+Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the
+impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.
+Emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of
+man, ‘that he looks before and after.’ He is the rock of defence for
+human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him
+relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of
+language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently
+gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds
+together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as
+it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of
+the Poet’s thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man
+are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever
+he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings.
+Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge--it is as immortal as
+the heart of man. If the labours of Men of science should ever create
+any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in
+the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then
+no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the
+Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he
+will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects
+of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the
+Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art
+as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come
+when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under
+which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective
+sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying
+and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now
+called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as
+it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine
+spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus
+produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.--It is
+not, then, to be supposed that any one, who holds that sublime notion
+of Poetry which I have attempted to convey, will break in upon the
+sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and accidental
+ornaments, and endeavour to excite admiration of himself by arts, the
+necessity of which must manifestly depend upon the assumed meanness of
+his subject.
+
+What has been thus far said applies to Poetry in general; but
+especially to those parts of composition where the Poet speaks through
+the mouths of his characters; and upon this point it appears to
+authorize the conclusion that there are few persons of good sense, who
+would not allow that the dramatic parts of composition are defective,
+in proportion as they deviate from the real language of nature, and
+are coloured by a diction of the Poet’s own, either peculiar to him as
+an individual Poet or belonging simply to Poets in general; to a body
+of men who, from the circumstance of their compositions being in
+metre, it is expected will employ a particular language.
+
+It is not, then, in the dramatic parts of composition that we look
+for this distinction of language; but still it may be proper and
+necessary where the Poet speaks to us in his own person and character.
+To this I answer by referring the Reader to the description before
+given of a Poet. Among the qualities there enumerated as principally
+conducing to form a Poet, is implied nothing differing in kind from
+other men, but only in degree. The sum of what was said is, that the
+Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness
+to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater
+power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him
+in that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the
+general passions and thoughts and feelings of men. And with what are
+they connected? Undoubtedly with our moral sentiments and animal
+sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the
+operations of the elements, and the appearances of the visible
+universe; with storm and sunshine, with the revolutions of the
+seasons, with cold and heat, with loss of friends and kindred, with
+injuries and resentments, gratitude and hope, with fear and sorrow.
+These, and the like, are the sensations and objects which the Poet
+describes, as they are the sensations of other men, and the objects
+which interest them. The Poet thinks and feels in the spirit of human
+passions. How, then, can his language differ in any material degree
+from that of all other men who feel vividly and see clearly? It might
+be _proved_ that it is impossible. But supposing that this were not
+the case, the Poet might then be allowed to use a peculiar language
+when expressing his feelings for his own gratification, or that of
+men like himself. But Poets do not write for Poets alone, but for men.
+Unless therefore we are advocates for that admiration which subsists
+upon ignorance, and that pleasure which arises from hearing what we do
+not understand, the Poet must descend from this supposed height; and,
+in order to excite rational sympathy, he must express himself as other
+men express themselves. To this it may be added, that while he is only
+selecting from the real language of men, or, which amounts to the same
+thing, composing accurately in the spirit of such selection, he is
+treading upon safe ground, and we know what we are to expect from him.
+Our feelings are the same with respect to metre; for, as it may be
+proper to remind the Reader, the distinction of metre is regular and
+uniform, and not, like that which is 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; whereas, in the
+other, the metre obeys certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader both
+willingly submit because they are certain, and because no interference
+is made by them with the passion, but such as the concurring testimony
+of ages has shown to heighten and improve the pleasure which co-exists
+with it.
+
+It will now be proper to answer an obvious question, namely, Why,
+professing these opinions, have I written in verse? To this, in
+addition to such answer as is included in what has been already said,
+I reply, in the first place, Because, however I may have restricted
+myself, there is still left open to me what confessedly constitutes
+the most valuable object of all writing, whether in prose or verse;
+the great and universal passions of men, the most general and
+interesting of their occupations, and the entire world of nature
+before me--to supply endless combinations of forms and imagery. Now,
+supposing for a moment that whatever is interesting in these objects
+may be as vividly described in prose, why should I be condemned for
+attempting to superadd to such description the charm which, by the
+consent of all nations, is acknowledged to exist in metrical language?
+To this, by such as are yet unconvinced, it may be answered that a
+very small part of the pleasure given by Poetry depends upon the
+metre, and that it is injudicious to write in metre, unless it be
+accompanied with the other artificial distinctions of style with which
+metre is usually accompanied, and that, by such deviation, more will
+be lost from the shock which will thereby be given to the Reader’s
+associations than will be counterbalanced by any pleasure which he can
+derive from the general power of numbers. In answer to those who still
+contend for the necessity of accompanying metre with certain
+appropriate colours of style in order to the accomplishment of its
+appropriate end, and who also, in my opinion, greatly underrate the
+power of metre in itself, it might, perhaps, as far as relates to
+these Volumes, have been almost sufficient to observe, that poems are
+extant, written upon more humble subjects, and in a still more naked
+and simple style, which have continued to give pleasure from
+generation to generation. Now, if nakedness and simplicity be a
+defect, the fact here mentioned affords a strong presumption that
+poems somewhat less naked and simple are capable of affording pleasure
+at the present day; and, what I wished _chiefly_ to attempt, at
+present, was to justify myself for having written under the impression
+of this belief.
+
+But various causes might be pointed out why, when the style is manly,
+and the subject of some importance, words metrically arranged will
+long continue to impart such a pleasure to mankind as he who proves
+the extent of that pleasure will be desirous to impart. The end of
+Poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of
+pleasure; but, by the supposition, excitement is an unusual and
+irregular state of the mind; ideas and feelings do not, in that state,
+succeed each other in accustomed order. If the words, however, by
+which this excitement is produced be in themselves powerful, or the
+images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with
+them, there is some danger that the excitement may be carried beyond
+its proper bounds. Now the co-presence of something regular, something
+to which the mind has been accustomed in various moods and in a less
+excited state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and
+restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling, and of
+feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with the passion. This
+is unquestionably true; and hence, though the opinion will at first
+appear paradoxical, from the tendency of metre to divest language, in
+a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of
+half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole
+composition, there can be little doubt but that more pathetic
+situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater
+proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical
+composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose. The metre of the old
+ballads is very artless; yet they contain many passages which would
+illustrate this opinion; and, I hope, if the following Poems be
+attentively perused, similar instances will be found in them. This
+opinion may be further illustrated by appealing to the Reader’s own
+experience of the reluctance with which he comes to the re-perusal of
+the distressful parts of _Clarissa Harlowe_, or the _Gamester_; while
+Shakespeare’s writings, in the most pathetic scenes, never act upon
+us, as pathetic, beyond the bounds of pleasure--an effect which, in a
+much greater degree than might at first be imagined, is to be ascribed
+to small, but continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise
+from the metrical arrangement.--On the other hand (what it must be
+allowed will much more frequently happen) if the Poet’s words should
+be incommensurate with the passion, and inadequate to raise the Reader
+to a height of desirable excitement, then (unless the Poet’s choice of
+his metre has been grossly injudicious), in the feelings of pleasure
+which the Reader has been accustomed to connect with metre in general,
+and in the feeling, whether cheerful or melancholy, which he has been
+accustomed to connect with that particular movement of metre, there
+will be found something which will greatly contribute to impart
+passion to the words, and to effect the complex end which the Poet
+proposes to himself.
+
+If I had undertaken a SYSTEMATIC defence of the theory here
+maintained, it would have been my duty to develop the various causes
+upon which the pleasure received from metrical language depends. Among
+the chief of these causes is to be reckoned a principle which must be
+well known to those who have made any of the Arts the object of
+accurate reflection; namely, the pleasure which the mind derives from
+the perception of similitude in dissimilitude. This principle is the
+great spring of the activity of our minds, and their chief feeder.
+From this principle the direction of the sexual appetite, and all the
+passions connected with it, take their origin: it is the life of our
+ordinary conversation; and upon the accuracy with which similitude in
+dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude are perceived, depend
+our taste and our moral feelings. It would not be a useless employment
+to apply this principle to the consideration of metre, and to show
+that metre is hence enabled to afford much pleasure, and to point out
+in what manner that pleasure is produced. But my limits will not
+permit me to enter upon this subject, and I must content myself with a
+general summary.
+
+I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
+feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
+tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of
+reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion,
+kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is
+gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In
+this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood
+similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind,
+and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by various
+pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are
+voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of
+enjoyment. If Nature be thus cautious to preserve in a state of
+enjoyment a being so employed, the Poet ought to profit by the lesson
+held forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that, whatever
+passions he communicates to his Reader, those passions, if his
+Reader’s mind be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied with
+an overbalance of pleasure. Now the music of harmonious metrical
+language, the sense of difficulty overcome, and the blind association
+of pleasure which has been previously received from works of rhyme or
+metre of the same or similar construction, an indistinct perception
+perpetually renewed of language closely resembling that of real life,
+and yet, in the circumstance of metre, differing from it so
+widely--all these imperceptibly make up a complex feeling of delight,
+which is of the most important use in tempering the painful feeling
+always found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper
+passions. This effect is always produced in pathetic and impassioned
+poetry; while, in lighter compositions, the ease and gracefulness with
+which the Poet manages his numbers are themselves confessedly a
+principal source of the gratification of the Reader. All that it is
+_necessary_ to say, however, upon this subject, may be effected by
+affirming, what few persons will deny, that, of two descriptions,
+either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well
+executed, the one in prose and the other in verse, the verse will be
+read a hundred times where the prose is read once.
+
+Having thus explained a few of my reasons for writing in verse, and
+why I have chosen subjects from common life, and endeavoured to bring
+my language near to the real language of men, if I have been too
+minute in pleading my own cause, I have at the same time been treating
+a subject of general interest; and for this reason a few words shall
+be added with reference solely to these particular poems, and to some
+defects which will probably be found in them. I am sensible that my
+associations must have sometimes been particular instead of general,
+and that, consequently, giving to things a false importance, I may
+have sometimes written upon unworthy subjects; but I am less
+apprehensive on this account, than that my language may frequently
+have suffered from those arbitrary connexions of feelings and ideas
+with particular words and phrases, from which no man can altogether
+protect himself. Hence I have no doubt, that, in some instances,
+feelings, even of the ludicrous, may be given to my Readers by
+expressions which appeared to me tender and pathetic. Such faulty
+expressions, were I convinced they were faulty at present, and that
+they must necessarily continue to be so, I would willingly take all
+reasonable pains to correct. But it is dangerous to make these
+alterations on the simple authority of a few individuals, or even of
+certain classes of men; for where the understanding of an Author is
+not convinced, or his feelings altered, this cannot be done without
+great injury to himself: for his own feelings are his stay and
+support; and, if he set them aside in one instance, he may be induced
+to repeat this act till his mind shall lose all confidence in itself,
+and become utterly debilitated. To this it may be added, that the
+critic ought never to forget that he is himself exposed to the same
+errors as the Poet, and, perhaps, in a much greater degree: for there
+can be no presumption in saying of most readers, that it is not
+probable they will be so well acquainted with the various stages of
+meaning through which words have passed, or with the fickleness or
+stability of the relations of particular ideas to each other; and,
+above all, since they are so much less interested in the subject, they
+may decide lightly and carelessly.
+
+Long as the Reader has been detained, I hope he will permit me to
+caution him against a mode of false criticism which has been applied
+to Poetry, in which the language closely resembles that of life and
+nature. Such verses have been triumphed over in parodies, of which Dr.
+Johnson’s stanza is a fair specimen:--
+
+    I put my hat upon my head
+    And walked into the Strand,
+    And there I met another man
+    Whose hat was in his hand.
+
+Immediately under these lines let us place one of the most
+justly-admired stanzas of the ‘Babes in the Wood.’
+
+    These pretty Babes with hand in hand
+    Went wandering up and down;
+    But never more they saw the Man
+    Approaching from the Town.
+
+In both these stanzas the words, and the order of the words, in no
+respect differ from the most unimpassioned conversation. There are
+words in both, for example, ‘the Strand’, and ‘the Town’, connected
+with none but the most familiar ideas; yet the one stanza we admit as
+admirable, and the other as a fair example of the superlatively
+contemptible. Whence arises this difference? Not from the metre, not
+from the language, not from the order of the words; but the _matter_
+expressed in Dr. Johnson’s stanza is contemptible. The proper method
+of treating trivial and simple verses, to which Dr. Johnson’s stanza
+would be a fair parallelism, is not to say, this is a bad kind of
+poetry, or, this is not poetry; but, this wants sense; it is neither
+interesting in itself, nor can _lead_ to anything interesting; the
+images neither originate in that sane state of feeling, which arises
+out of thought, nor can excite thought or feeling in the Reader. This
+is the only sensible manner of dealing with such verses. Why trouble
+yourself about the species till you have previously decided upon the
+genus? Why take pains to prove that an ape is not a Newton, when it is
+self-evident that he is not a man?
+
+One request I must make of my reader, which is, that in judging these
+Poems he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by
+reflection upon what will probably be the judgement of others. How
+common is it to hear a person say, I myself do not object to this
+style of composition, or this or that expression, but, to such and
+such classes of people it will appear mean or ludicrous! This mode of
+criticism, so destructive of all sound unadulterated judgement, is
+almost universal: let the Reader then abide, independently, by his own
+feelings, and, if he finds himself affected, let him not suffer such
+conjectures to interfere with his pleasure.
+
+If an Author, by any single composition, has impressed us with respect
+for his talents, it is useful to consider this as affording a
+presumption, that on other occasions where we have been displeased,
+he, nevertheless, may not have written ill or absurdly; and further,
+to give him so much credit for this one composition as may induce us
+to review what has displeased us, with more care than we should
+otherwise have bestowed upon it. This is not only an act of justice,
+but, in our decisions upon poetry especially, may conduce, in a high
+degree, to the improvement of our own taste; for an _accurate_ taste
+in poetry, and in all the other arts, as Sir Joshua Reynolds has
+observed, is an _acquired_ talent, which can only be produced by
+thought and a long-continued intercourse with the best models of
+composition. This is mentioned, not with so ridiculous a purpose as to
+prevent the most inexperienced Reader from judging for himself, (I
+have already said that I wish him to judge for himself;) but merely to
+temper the rashness of decision, and to suggest, that, if Poetry be a
+subject on which much time has not been bestowed, the judgement may be
+erroneous; and that, in many cases, it necessarily will be so.
+
+Nothing would, I know, have so effectually contributed to further the
+end which I have in view, as to have shown of what kind the pleasure
+is, and how that pleasure is produced, which is confessedly produced
+by metrical composition essentially different from that which I have
+here endeavoured to recommend: for the Reader will say that he has
+been pleased by such composition; and what more can be done for him?
+The power of any art is limited; and he will suspect, that, if it be
+proposed to furnish him with new friends, that can be only upon
+condition of his abandoning his old friends. Besides, as I have said,
+the Reader is himself conscious of the pleasure which he has received
+from such composition, composition to which he has peculiarly attached
+the endearing name of Poetry; and all men feel an habitual gratitude,
+and something of an honourable bigotry, for the objects which have
+long continued to please them: we not only wish to be pleased, but to
+be pleased in that particular way in which we have Been accustomed to
+be pleased. There is in these feelings enough to resist a host of
+arguments; and I should be the less able to combat them successfully,
+as I am willing to allow, that, in order entirely to enjoy the Poetry
+which I am recommending, it would be necessary to give up much of what
+is ordinarily enjoyed. But, would my limits have permitted me to point
+out how this pleasure is produced, many obstacles might have been
+removed, and the Reader assisted in perceiving that the powers of
+language are not so limited as he may suppose; and that it is possible
+for poetry to give other enjoyments, of a purer, more lasting, and
+more exquisite nature. This part of the subject has not been
+altogether neglected, but it has not been so much my present aim to
+prove, that the interest excited by some other kinds of poetry is less
+vivid, and less worthy of the nobler powers of the mind, as to offer
+reasons for presuming, that if my purpose were fulfilled, a species of
+poetry would be produced, which is genuine poetry; in its nature well
+adapted to interest mankind permanently, and likewise important in
+the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations.
+
+From what has been said, and from a perusal of the Poems, the Reader
+will be able clearly to perceive the object which I had in view: he
+will determine how far it has been attained; and, what is a much more
+important question, whether it be worth attaining: and upon the
+decision of these two questions will rest my claim to the approbation
+of the Public.
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+ON POETIC DICTION
+
+Perhaps, as I have no right to expect that attentive perusal, without
+which, confined, as I have been, to the narrow limits of a preface, my
+meaning cannot be thoroughly understood, I am anxious to give an exact
+notion of the sense in which the phrase poetic diction has been used;
+and for this purpose, a few words shall here be added, concerning the
+origin and characteristics of the phraseology, which I have condemned
+under that name.
+
+The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited
+by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully
+as they did, their language was daring, and figurative. In succeeding
+times, Poets, and Men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the
+influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect
+without being animated by the same passion, set themselves to a
+mechanical adoption of these figures of speech, and made use of them,
+sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them to
+feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connexion
+whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differing
+materially from the real language of men in _any situation_. The
+Reader or Hearer of this distorted language found himself in a
+perturbed and unusual state of mind: when affected by the genuine
+language of passion he had been in a perturbed and unusual state of
+mind also: in both cases he was willing that his common judgement and
+understanding should be laid asleep, and he had no instinctive and
+infallible perception of the true to make him reject the false; the
+one served as a passport for the other. The emotion was in both cases
+delightful, and no wonder if he confounded the one with the other, and
+believed them both to be produced by the same, or similar causes.
+Besides, the Poet spake to him in the character of a man to be looked
+up to, a man of genius and authority. Thus, and from a variety of
+other causes, this distorted language was received with admiration;
+and Poets, it is probable, who had before contented themselves for the
+most part with misapplying only expressions which at first had been
+dictated by real passion, carried the abuse still further, and
+introduced phrases composed apparently in the spirit of the original
+figurative language of passion, yet altogether of their own invention,
+and characterized by various degrees of wanton deviation from good
+sense and nature.
+
+It is indeed true, that the language of the earliest Poets was felt to
+differ materially from ordinary language, because it was the language
+of extraordinary occasions; but it was really spoken by men, language
+which the Poet himself had uttered when he had been affected by the
+events which he described, or which he had heard uttered by those
+around him. To this language it is probable that metre of some sort or
+other was early superadded. This separated the genuine language of
+Poetry still further from common life, so that whoever read or heard
+the poems of these earliest Poets felt himself moved in a way in which
+he had not been accustomed to be moved in real life, and by causes
+manifestly different from those which acted upon him in real life.
+This was the great temptation to all the corruptions which have
+followed: under the protection of this feeling succeeding Poets
+constructed a phraseology which had one thing, it is true, in common
+with the genuine language of poetry, namely, that it was not heard in
+ordinary conversation; that it was unusual. But the first Poets, as I
+have said, spake a language which, though unusual, was still the
+language of men. This circumstance, however, was disregarded by their
+successors; they found that they could please by easier means: they
+became proud of modes of expression which they themselves had
+invented, and which were uttered only by themselves. In process of
+time metre became a symbol or promise of this unusual language, and
+whoever took upon him to write in metre, according as he possessed
+more or less of true poetic genius, introduced less or more of this
+adulterated phraseology into his compositions, and the true and the
+false were inseparably interwoven until, the taste of men becoming
+gradually perverted, this language was received as a natural language:
+and at length, by the influence of books upon men, did to a certain
+degree really become so. Abuses of this kind were imported from one
+nation to another, and with the progress of refinement this diction
+became daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight the plain
+humanities of nature by a motley masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses,
+hieroglyphics, and enigmas.
+
+It would not be uninteresting to point out the causes of the pleasure
+given by this extravagant and absurd diction. It depends upon a great
+variety of causes, but upon none, perhaps, more than its influence in
+impressing a notion of the peculiarity and exaltation of the Poet’s
+character, and in flattering the Reader’s self-love by bringing him
+nearer to a sympathy with that character; an effect which is
+accomplished by unsettling ordinary habits of thinking, and thus
+assisting the Reader to approach to that perturbed and dizzy state of
+mind in which if he does not find himself, he imagines that he is
+_balked_ of a peculiar enjoyment which poetry can and ought to bestow.
+
+The sonnet quoted from Gray, in the Preface, except the lines printed
+in Italics, consists of little else but this diction, though not of
+the worst kind; and indeed, if one may be permitted to say so, it is
+far too common in the best writers both ancient and modern. Perhaps in
+no way, by positive example, could more easily be given a notion of
+what I mean by the phrase _poetic diction_ than by referring to a
+comparison between the metrical paraphrase which we have of passages
+in the Old and New Testament, and those passages as they exist in our
+common Translation. See Pope’s ‘Messiah’ throughout; Prior’s ‘Did
+sweeter sounds adorn my flowing tongue,’ &c. &c. ‘Though I speak with
+the tongues of men and of angels,’ &c. &c. 1 Corinthians, chap. xiii.
+By way of immediate example take the following of Dr. Johnson:--
+
+    Turn on the prudent Ant thy heedless eyes,
+    Observe her labours, Sluggard, and be wise;
+    No stern command, no monitory voice,
+    Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice;
+    Yet, timely provident, she hastes away
+    To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day;
+    When fruitful Summer loads the teeming plain,
+    She crops the harvest, and she stores the grain.
+    How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours,
+    Unnerve thy vigour, and enchain thy powers?
+    While artful shades thy downy couch enclose,
+    And soft solicitation courts repose,
+    Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight,
+    Year chases year with unremitted flight,
+    Till Want now following, fraudulent and slow,
+    Shall spring to seize thee, like an ambush’d foe.
+
+From this hubbub of words pass to the original. ‘Go to the Ant, thou
+Sluggard, consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide,
+overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth
+her food in the harvest. How long wilt thou sleep, O Sluggard? when
+wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little
+slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. So shall thy poverty
+come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.’ Proverbs,
+chap. vi.
+
+One more quotation, and I have done. It is from Cowper’s _Verses
+supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk_:
+
+    Religion! what treasure untold
+    Resides in that heavenly word!
+    More precious than silver and gold,
+    Or all that this earth can afford.
+    But the sound of the church-going bell
+    These valleys and rocks never heard,
+    Ne’er sighed at the sound of a knell,
+    Or smiled when a sabbath appeared.
+    Ye winds, that have made me your sport,
+    Convey to this desolate shore
+    Some cordial endearing report
+    Of a land I must visit no more.
+    My Friends, do they now and then send
+    A wish or a thought after me?
+    O tell me I yet have a friend,
+    Though a friend I am never to see.
+
+This passage is quoted as an instance of three different styles of
+composition. The first four lines are poorly expressed; some Critics
+would call the language prosaic; the fact is, it would be bad prose,
+so bad, that it is scarcely worse in metre. The epithet ‘church-going’
+applied to a bell, and that by so chaste a writer as Cowper, is an
+instance of the strange abuses which Poets have introduced into their
+language, till they and their Readers take them as matters of course,
+if they do not single them out expressly as objects of admiration. The
+two lines ‘Ne’er sighed at the sound’, &c., are, in my opinion, an
+instance of the language of passion wrested from its proper use, and,
+from the mere circumstance of the composition being in metre, applied
+upon an occasion that does not justify such violent expressions; and I
+should condemn the passage, though perhaps few Readers will agree with
+me, as vicious poetic diction. The last stanza is throughout admirably
+expressed: it would be equally good whether in prose or verse, except
+that the Reader has an exquisite pleasure in seeing such natural
+language so naturally connected with metre. The beauty of this stanza
+tempts me to conclude with a principle which ought never to be lost
+sight of, and which has been my chief guide in all I have
+said,--namely, that in works of _imagination and sentiment_, for of
+these only have I been treating, in proportion as ideas and feelings
+are valuable, whether the composition be in prose or in verse, they
+require and exact one and the same language. Metre is but adventitious
+to composition, and the phraseology for which that passport is
+necessary, even where it may be graceful at all, will be little valued
+by the judicious.
+
+
+
+
+SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
+
+1772-1834
+
+WORDSWORTH’S THEORY OF DICTION
+
+[_Biographia Literaria_, chap. xvii, 1817]
+
+
+As far 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 connexion 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 pleasureable 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, yet as a rule it is 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_, &c., 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 hymnbook. To the latter cause, indeed, which is so far accidental,
+that it is the blessing of particular countries and a particular age,
+not the product of particular places or employments, the poet owes the
+show of probability, that his personages might really feel, think, and
+talk with any tolerable resemblance to his representation. It is an
+excellent remark of Dr. Henry More’s that ‘a man of confined
+education, but of good parts, by constant reading of the Bible will
+naturally form a more winning and commanding rhetoric than those that
+are learned: the intermixture of tongues and of artificial phrases
+debasing their style’.
+
+It is, moreover, to be considered that to the formation of healthy
+feelings, and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not
+less formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture. I am
+convinced, that for the human soul to prosper in rustic life a certain
+vantage-ground is pre-requisite. 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 beforehand 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_, 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, summon’d 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 liv’d he, until his eightieth year was pass’d.
+    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 chearful spirits he had breath’d
+    The common air; the hills, which he so oft
+    Had climb’d with vigorous steps; which had impress’d
+    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 sav’d,
+    Had fed or shelter’d, 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 pleasureable feeling of blind love.
+    The pleasure which there is in life itself.
+
+On the other hand, in the poems which are pitched at a lower note, as
+the _Harry Gill_, _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 a 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 judgement. 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 has 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 Shakespeare’s _Romeo and Juliet_ alone prevents me from
+extending the remark even to dramatic poetry, if indeed even the Nurse
+itself 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;[3] the seven
+last lines of the tenth;[4] 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.
+
+    [3]
+
+        I’ve measured it from side to side;
+        ’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.
+
+    [4]
+
+        Nay, rack your brain--’tis all in vain,
+        I’ll tell you every thing I know;
+        But to the Thorn, and to the Pond
+        Which is a little step beyond,
+        I wish that you would go:
+        Perhaps, when you are at the place,
+        You something of her tale may trace.
+
+        I’ll give you the best help I can:
+        Before you up the mountain go,
+        Up to the dreary mountain-top,
+        I’ll tell you all I know.
+        ’Tis now some two-and-twenty years
+        Since she (her name is Martha Ray)
+        Gave, with a maiden’s true good will,
+        Her company to Stephen Hill;
+        And she was blithe and gay,
+        And she was happy, happy still
+        Whene’er she thought of Stephen Hill.
+
+        And they had fix’d the wedding-day,
+        The morning that must wed them both;
+        But Stephen to another maid
+        Had sworn another oath;
+        And, with this other maid, to church
+        Unthinking Stephen went--
+        Poor Martha! on that woeful day
+        A pang of pitiless dismay
+        Into her soul was sent;
+        A fire was kindled in her breast,
+        Which might not burn itself to rest.
+
+        They say, full six months after this,
+        While yet the summer leaves were green,
+        She to the mountain-top would go,
+        And there was often seen.
+        ’Tis said a child was in her womb,
+        As now to any eye was plain;
+        She was with child, and she was mad;
+        Yet often she was sober sad
+        From her exceeding pain.
+        Oh me! ten thousand times I’d rather
+        That he had died, that cruel father!
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+           *       *       *       *       *
+           *       *       *       *       *
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+        Last Christmas when we talked of this,
+        Old farmer Simpson did maintain,
+        That in her womb the infant wrought
+        About its mother’s heart, and brought
+        Her senses back again:
+        And, when at last her time drew near,
+        Her looks were calm, her senses clear.
+
+        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:
+        And if a child was born or no,
+        There’s no one that could ever tell;
+        And if ’twas born alive or dead,
+        There’s no one knows, as I have said:
+        But some remember well,
+        That Martha Ray about this time
+        Would up the mountain often climb.
+
+If then I am compelled to doubt the theory, by which the choice of
+characters was to be directed, not only _à 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 is 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 connexions 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_’ (i. e.
+men in low and rustic life) ‘_I propose 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 from that, which every
+well-educated gentleman would wish to write, and (with due allowance
+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 so 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 exciseman, 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 everywhere in parts, and
+nowhere 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 connexions 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._
+
+
+METRICAL COMPOSITION
+
+[_Biographia Literaria_, chap. xviii, 1817]
+
+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 judgement? 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 seem’d, 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,’ &c.,
+&c. 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 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 any one 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 contradistinction 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’s, 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 (i. e. the formal construction, or architecture, of
+the words and phrases) is essentially different from that of prose.
+Now the burthen of the proof lies with the oppugner, not with the
+supporters of the common belief. Mr. Wordsworth, 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 newborn 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 judgement, 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 gilly-flowers, 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, ev’n 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 ruder 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 staircase, 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
+pleasureable 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 swallowed 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
+proportionately combined.
+
+The reference to _The Children in the Wood_ by no means satisfies my
+judgement. 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 _Piers Plowman_, 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 Θαὑματα θαυμαστὁτατα 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_, _The 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 judgement, 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),
+
+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 superadded
+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 readers’ 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 rekindled, 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
+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 _Faerie Queene_?
+
+    By this the northern wagoner had set
+    His sevenfold teme behind the steadfast 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 are:
+    And chearful chanticleer with his note shrill
+    Had warned once that Phoebus’ fiery carre
+    In haste was climbing up the easterne hill,
+    Full envious that night so long his roome did fill.
+
+                                 Book I, Can. 2, St. 2.
+
+    At last the golden orientall gate
+    Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,
+    And Phœbus 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.
+
+                                 Book I, Can. 5, St. 2.
+
+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 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 blamable
+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 show
+    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 intermixt 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.
+
+                                 Book I, St. vii, viii, and ix.
+
+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 these species of diction, may be seen in Lamb’s
+_Dramatic Specimens_, &c., 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[5] 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.
+
+    [5] 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 good morning, 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 in 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:
+    viz. 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 connexion 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.
+
+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 voluntary and
+uniform, and not, like that produced by (what is 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
+judgement 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 connexion. 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 called 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 μὁρφωσις, not
+ποἱησις. 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 ev’ry thing! Who, where we offspring took,
+    Our way 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 show my story in thy eternal book, &c.
+
+As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of
+unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudo-poesy,
+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 connexions 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-controling 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 produce
+neither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation
+consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxtaposition 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 contexture 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.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM BLAKE
+
+1757-1827
+
+THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS (1809)
+
+SIR GEFFREY CHAUCER AND THE NINE-AND-TWENTY PILGRIMS ON THEIR JOURNEY
+TO CANTERBURY[6]
+
+    [6] From _A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures_.
+
+
+The time chosen is early morning, before sunrise, when the jolly
+company are just quitting the Tabarde Inn. The Knight and Squire with
+the Squire’s Yeoman lead the Procession; next follow the youthful
+Abbess, her Nun, and three Priests; her greyhounds attend her:
+
+    Of small hounds had she that she fed
+    With roast flesh, milk, and wastel bread.
+
+Next follow the Friar and Monk; then the Tapiser, the Pardoner, and
+the Sompnour and Manciple. After these ‘Our Host’, who occupies the
+centre of the cavalcade, directs them to the Knight as the person who
+would be likely to commence their task of each telling a tale in their
+order. After the Host follow the Shipman, the Haberdasher, the Dyer,
+the Franklin, the Physician, the Ploughman, the Lawyer, the Poor
+Parson, the Merchant, the Wife of Bath, the Miller, the Cook, the
+Oxford Scholar, Chaucer himself; and the Reeve comes as Chaucer has
+described:
+
+    And ever he rode hinderest of the rout.
+
+These last are issuing from the gateway of the Inn the Cook and the
+Wife of Bath are both taking their morning’s draught of comfort.
+Spectators stand at the gateway of the Inn, and are composed of an old
+Man, a Woman, and Children.
+
+The Landscape is an eastward view of the country, from the Tabarde Inn
+in Southwark, as it may be supposed to have appeared in Chaucer’s
+time, interspersed with cottages and villages. The first beams of the
+Sun are seen above the horizon; some buildings and spires indicate the
+situation of the Great City. The Inn is a Gothic building, which
+Thynne in his Glossary says was the lodging of the Abbot of Hyde, by
+Winchester. On the Inn is inscribed its title, and a proper advantage
+is taken of this circumstance to describe the subject of the Picture.
+The words written over the gateway of the Inn are as follow: ‘The
+Tabarde Inn, by Henry Baillie, the lodgynge-house for Pilgrims who
+journey to Saint Thomas’s Shrine at Canterbury.’
+
+The characters of Chaucer’s Pilgrims are the characters which compose
+all ages and nations. As one age falls, another rises, different to
+mortal sight, but to immortals only the same; for we see the same
+characters repeated again and again, in animals, vegetables, minerals,
+and in men. Nothing new occurs in identical existence; Accident ever
+varies, Substance can never suffer change nor decay.
+
+Of Chaucer’s characters, as described in his _Canterbury Tales_, some
+of the names or titles are altered by time, but the characters
+themselves for ever remain unaltered; and consequently they are the
+physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which
+Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. I have known
+multitudes of those who would have been monks in the age of monkery,
+who in this deistical age are deists. As Newton numbered the stars,
+and as Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes
+of men.
+
+The Painter has consequently varied the heads and forms of his
+personages into all Nature’s varieties; the horses he has also varied
+to accord to their riders; the costume is correct according to
+authentic monuments.
+
+The Knight and Squire with the Squire’s Yeoman lead the Procession, as
+Chaucer has also placed them first in his Prologue. The Knight is a
+true Hero, a good, great and wise man; his whole-length portrait on
+horseback, as written by Chaucer, cannot be surpassed. He has spent
+his life in the field, has ever been a conqueror, and is that species
+of character which in every age stands as the guardian of man against
+the oppressor. His son is like him, with the germ of perhaps greater
+perfection still, as he blends literature and the arts with his
+warlike studies. Their dress and their horses are of the first rate,
+without ostentation, and with all the true grandeur that unaffected
+simplicity when in high rank always displays. The Squire’s Yeoman is
+also a great character, a man perfectly knowing in his profession:
+
+    And in his hand he bare a mighty bow.
+
+Chaucer describes here a mighty man, one who in war is the worthy
+attendant on noble heroes.
+
+The Prioress follows these with her female Chaplain:
+
+    Another Nonne also with her had she,
+    That was her Chaplaine, and Priests three.
+
+This Lady is described also as of the first rank, rich and honoured.
+She has certain peculiarities and little delicate affectations, not
+unbecoming in her, being accompanied with what is truly grand and
+really polite; her person and face Chaucer has described with
+minuteness; it is very elegant, and was the beauty of our ancestors
+till after Elizabeth’s time, when voluptuousness and folly began to be
+accounted beautiful.
+
+Her companion and her three Priests were no doubt all perfectly
+delineated in those parts of Chaucer’s work which are now lost; we
+ought to suppose them suitable attendants on rank and fashion.
+
+The Monk follows these with the Friar. The Painter has also grouped
+with these the Pardoner and the Sompnour and the Manciple, and has
+here also introduced one of the rich citizens of London--characters
+likely to ride in company, all being above the common rank in life, or
+attendants on those who were so.
+
+For the Monk is described by Chaucer, as a man of the first rank in
+society, noble, rich, and expensively attended; he is a leader of the
+age, with certain humorous accompaniments in his character, that do
+not degrade, but render him an object of dignified mirth, but also
+with other accompaniments not so respectable.
+
+The Friar is a character of a mixed kind:
+
+    A friar there was, a wanton and a merry;
+
+but in his office he is said to be a ‘full solemn man’; eloquent,
+amorous, witty and satirical; young, handsome and rich; he is a
+complete rogue, with constitutional gaiety enough to make him a
+master of all the pleasures of the world:
+
+    His neck was white as the flour de lis,
+    Thereto strong he was as a champioun.
+
+It is necessary here to speak of Chaucer’s own character, that I may
+set certain mistaken critics right in their conception of the humour
+and fun that occur on the journey. Chaucer is himself the great
+poetical observer of men, who in every age is born to record and
+eternize its acts. This he does as a master, as a father and superior,
+who looks down on their little follies from the Emperor to the Miller,
+sometimes with severity, oftener with joke and sport.
+
+Accordingly Chaucer has made his Monk a great tragedian, one who
+studied poetical art. So much so that the generous Knight is, in the
+compassionate dictates of his soul, compelled to cry out:
+
+    ‘Ho,’ quoth the Knyght, ‘good Sir, no more of this;
+    That ye have said is right ynough, I wis,
+    And mokell more; for little heaviness
+    Is right enough for much folk, as I guesse.
+    I say, for me, it is a great disease,
+    Whereas men have been in wealth and ease,
+    To heare of their sudden fall, alas!
+    And the contrary is joy and solas.’
+
+The Monk’s definition of tragedy in the proem to his tale is worth
+repeating:
+
+    Tragedie is to tell a certain story,
+    As old books us maken memory,
+    Of hem that stood in great prosperity,
+    And be fallen out of high degree,
+    Into miserie, and ended wretchedly.
+
+Though a man of luxury, pride and pleasure, he is a master of art and
+learning, though affecting to despise it. Those who can think that
+the proud huntsman and noble housekeeper, Chaucer’s Monk, is intended
+for a buffoon or burlesque character, know little of Chaucer.
+
+For the Host who follows this group, and holds the centre of the
+cavalcade, is a first-rate character, and his jokes are no trifles;
+they are always, though uttered with audacity, and equally free with
+the Lord and the Peasant--they are always substantially and weightily
+expressive of knowledge and experience; Henry Baillie, the keeper of
+the greatest Inn of the greatest City, for such was the Tabarde Inn in
+Southwark near London, our Host, was also a leader of the age.
+
+By way of illustration I instance Shakespeare’s Witches in _Macbeth_.
+Those who dress them for the stage, consider them as wretched old
+women, and not, as Shakespeare intended, the Goddesses of Destiny;
+this shows how Chaucer has been misunderstood in his sublime work.
+Shakespeare’s Fairies also are the rulers of the vegetable world, and
+so are Chaucer’s; let them be so considered, and then the poet will be
+understood, and not else.
+
+But I have omitted to speak of a very prominent character, the
+Pardoner, the Age’s Knave, who always commands and domineers over the
+high and low vulgar. This man is sent in every age for a rod and
+scourge, and for a blight, for a trial of men, to divide the classes
+of men; he is in the most holy sanctuary, and he is suffered by
+Providence for wise ends, and has also his great use, and his grand
+leading destiny.
+
+His companion the Sompnour is also a Devil of the first magnitude,
+grand, terrific, rich, and honoured in the rank of which he holds the
+destiny. The uses to society are perhaps equal of the Devil and of the
+Angel; their sublimity who can dispute?
+
+    In daunger had he at his own gise,
+    The young girls of his diocese,
+    And he knew well their counsel, &c.
+
+The principal figure in the next group is the Good Parson; an Apostle,
+a real Messenger of Heaven, sent in every age for its light and its
+warmth. This man is beloved and venerated by all, and neglected by
+all: he serves all, and is served by none. He is, according to
+Christ’s definition, the greatest of his age: yet he is a Poor Parson
+of a town. Read Chaucer’s description of the Good Parson, and bow the
+head and the knee to Him, Who in every age sends us such a burning and
+a shining light. Search, O ye rich and powerful, for these men and
+obey their counsel; then shall the golden age return. But alas! you
+will not easily distinguish him from the Friar or the Pardoner; they
+also are ‘full solemn men’, and their counsel you will continue to
+follow.
+
+I have placed by his side the Sergeant-at-Lawe, who appears delighted
+to ride in his company, and between him and his brother the Ploughman;
+as I wish men of law would always ride with them, and take their
+counsel, especially in all difficult points. Chaucer’s Lawyer is a
+character of great venerableness, a Judge and a real master of the
+jurisprudence of his age.
+
+The Doctor of Physic is in this group; and the Franklin, the
+voluptuous country gentleman, contrasted with the Physician, and, on
+his other hand, with two Citizens of London. Chaucer’s characters
+live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage; we all pass
+on, each sustaining one of these characters; nor can a child be born
+who is not one or other of these characters of Chaucer. The Doctor of
+Physic is described as the first of his profession, perfect, learned,
+completely Master and Doctor in his art. Thus the reader will observe
+that Chaucer makes every one of his characters perfect in his kind;
+every one is an Antique Statue, the image of a class and not of an
+imperfect individual.
+
+This group also would furnish substantial matter, on which volumes
+might be written. The Franklin is one who keeps open table, who is the
+genius of eating and drinking, the Bacchus; as the Doctor of Physic is
+the Aesculapius, the Host is the Silenus, the Squire is the Apollo,
+the Miller is the Hercules, &c. Chaucer’s characters are a description
+of the eternal Principles that exist in all ages. The Franklin is
+voluptuousness itself, most nobly portrayed:
+
+    It snewed in his house of meat and drink.
+
+The Ploughman is simplicity itself, with wisdom and strength for its
+stamina. Chaucer has divided the ancient character of Hercules between
+his Miller and his Ploughman. Benevolence is the Ploughman’s great
+characteristic; he is thin with excessive labour, and not with old age
+as some have supposed:
+
+    He would thresh, and thereto dike and delve,
+    For Christe’s sake, for every poore wight,
+    Withouten hire, if it lay in his might.
+
+Visions of these eternal principles or characters of human life appear
+to poets in all ages; the Grecian gods were the ancient Cherubim of
+Phoenicia; but the Greeks, and since them the Moderns, have neglected
+to subdue the gods of Priam. These gods are visions of the eternal
+attributes, or divine names, which, when erected into gods, become
+destructive to humanity. They ought to be the servants, and not the
+masters of man or of society. They ought to be made to sacrifice to
+man, and not man compelled to sacrifice to them; for, when separated
+from man or humanity, who is Jesus the Saviour, the Vine of Eternity?
+They are thieves and rebels, they are destroyers.
+
+The Ploughman of Chaucer is Hercules in his supreme Eternal State,
+divested of his Spectrous Shadow, which is the Miller, a terrible
+fellow, such as exists in all times and places for the trial of men,
+to astonish every neighbourhood with brutal strength and courage, to
+get rich and powerful, to curb the pride of Man.
+
+The Reeve and the Manciple are two characters of the most consummate
+worldly wisdom. The Shipman, or Sailor, is a similar genius of
+Ulyssean art, but with the highest courage superadded.
+
+The Citizens and their Cook are each leaders of a class. Chaucer has
+been somehow made to number four citizens, which would make his whole
+company, himself included, thirty-one. But he says there was but
+nine-and-twenty in his company:
+
+    Full nine and twenty in a company.
+
+The Webbe, or Weaver, and the Tapiser, or Tapestry Weaver, appear to
+me to be the same person; but this is only an opinion, for ‘full nine
+and twenty’ may signify one more or less. But I daresay that Chaucer
+wrote ‘A Webbe Dyer’, that is a Cloth Dyer:
+
+    A Webbe Dyer and a Tapiser.
+
+The Merchant cannot be one of the Three Citizens, as his dress is
+different, and his character is more marked, whereas Chaucer says of
+his rich citizens:
+
+    All were yclothed in o liverie.
+
+The characters of Women Chaucer has divided into two classes, the Lady
+Prioress and the Wife of Bath. Are not these leaders of the ages of
+men? The Lady Prioress in some ages predominates; and in some the Wife
+of Bath, in whose character Chaucer has been equally minute and exact;
+because she is also a scourge and a blight. I shall say no more of
+her, nor expose what Chaucer has left hidden; let the young reader
+study what he has said of her: it is useful as a scarecrow. There are
+of such characters born too many for the peace of the world.
+
+I come at length to the Clerk of Oxenford. This character varies from
+that of Chaucer, as the contemplative philosopher varies from the
+poetical genius. There are always these two classes of learned sages,
+the poetical and the philosophical. The Painter has put them side by
+side, as if the youthful clerk had put himself under the tuition of
+the mature poet. Let the Philosopher always be the servant and scholar
+of Inspiration, and all will be happy.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES LAMB
+
+1775-1834
+
+ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE,
+
+CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS FOR STAGE REPRESENTATION
+(1811)
+
+
+Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the
+affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen
+before, and which upon examination proved to be a whole-length of the
+celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would not go so far with some good
+Catholics abroad as to shut players altogether out of consecrated
+ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction
+of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of
+the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed under this
+harlequin figure the following lines:
+
+    To paint fair Nature, by divine command,
+    Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,
+    A Shakespeare rose: then, to expand his fame
+    Wide o’er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
+    Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,
+    The Actor’s genius bade them breathe anew;
+    Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,
+    Immortal Garrick call’d them back to day:
+    And till Eternity with power sublime
+    Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,
+    Shakespeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,
+    And earth irradiate with a beam divine.
+
+It would be an insult to my readers’ understandings to attempt
+anything like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and
+nonsense. But the reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder, how,
+from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own, it should have
+been the fashion to compliment every performer in his turn, that has
+had the luck to please the town in any of the great characters of
+Shakespeare, with the notion of possessing a _mind congenial with the
+poet’s_: how people should come thus unaccountably to confound the
+power of originating poetical images and conceptions with the faculty
+of being able to read or recite the same when put into words;[7] or
+what connexion that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man,
+which a great dramatic poet possesses, has with those low tricks upon
+the eye and ear, which a player by observing a few general effects,
+which some common passion, as grief, anger, &c. usually has upon the
+gestures and exterior, can so easily compass. To know the internal
+workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for
+instance, the _when_ and the _why_ and the _how far_ they should be
+moved; to what pitch a passion is becoming; to give the reins and to
+pull in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the
+slackening is most graceful; seems to demand a reach of intellect of a
+vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare
+imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or
+gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most lively and
+emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all
+but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief,
+generally; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it
+differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the
+actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye
+(without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible
+sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which
+we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow
+apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are
+apt not only to sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay
+to the actor, but even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner,
+the actor with the character which he represents. It is difficult for
+a frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person
+and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality
+thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion incidental alone to
+unlettered persons, who, not possessing the advantage of reading, are
+necessarily dependent upon the stage-player for all the pleasure which
+they can receive from the drama, and to whom the very idea of _what an
+author is_ cannot be made comprehensible without some pain and
+perplexity of mind: the error is one from which persons otherwise not
+meanly lettered, find it almost impossible to extricate themselves.
+
+    [7] It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in
+    _dramatic_ recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who
+    reads Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a
+    great poet and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davies,
+    the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the _Paradise
+    Lost_ better than any man in England in his day (though I
+    cannot help thinking there must be some mistake in this
+    tradition), was therefore, by his intimate friends, set upon
+    a level with Milton.
+
+Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of
+satisfaction which I received some years back from seeing for the
+first time a tragedy of Shakespeare performed, in which these two
+great performers sustained the principal parts. It seemed to embody
+and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape.
+But dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure,
+this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our
+cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and
+brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have
+let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.
+
+How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions
+thus crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing
+actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness
+with which we turn to those plays of Shakespeare which have escaped
+being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the same
+writer which have happily been left out in performance. How far the
+very custom of hearing anything _spouted_, withers and blows upon a
+fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from _Henry the Fifth_,
+&c. which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to
+be found in _Enfield Speakers_, and such kind of books. I confess
+myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in
+_Hamlet_, beginning ‘To be or not to be’, or to tell whether it be
+good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by
+declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place
+and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a
+perfect dead member.
+
+It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the
+plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage,
+than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished
+excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in
+them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye,
+and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.
+
+The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of
+passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more
+hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously
+possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons
+talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner
+talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular
+upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are
+here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this war
+of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed round
+such ‘intellectual prize-fighters’. Talking is the direct object of
+the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in Shakespeare
+above all, how obvious it is, that the form of _speaking_, whether it
+be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly
+artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of
+that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a
+character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at _in that
+form of composition_ by any gift short of intuition. We do here as we
+do with novels written in the _epistolary form_. How many
+improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with
+in _Clarissa_ and other books, for the sake of the delight which that
+form upon the whole gives us.
+
+But the practice of stage representation reduces everything to a
+controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous
+blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must
+play the orator. The love-dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those
+silver-sweet sounds of lovers’ tongues by night; the more intimate and
+sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus
+with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so delightful
+in the reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in
+Paradise
+
+                            As beseem’d
+    Fair couple link’d in happy nuptial league
+    Alone:
+
+by the inherent fault of stage representation, how are these things
+sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large
+assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come
+drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though
+nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed
+at the spectators, who are to judge of her endearments and her returns
+of love.
+
+The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of
+Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest
+ambition to distinguish themselves. The length of the part may be one
+of their reasons. But for the character itself, we find it in a play,
+and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic representation.
+The play itself abounds in maxims and reflections beyond any other,
+and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle for conveying moral
+instruction. But Hamlet himself--what does he suffer meanwhile by
+being dragged forth as a public schoolmaster, to give lectures to the
+crowd! Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are transactions
+between himself and his moral sense, they are the effusions of his
+solitary musings, which he retires to holes and corners and the most
+sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth; or rather, they are the
+silent meditations with which his bosom is bursting, reduced to
+_words_ for the sake of the reader, who must else remain ignorant of what
+is passing there. These profound sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring
+ruminations, which the tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and
+chambers, how can they be represented by a gesticulating actor, who
+comes and mouths them out before an audience, making four hundred
+people his confidants at once? I say not that it is the fault of the
+actor so to do; he must pronounce them _ore rotundo_, he must
+accompany them with his eye, he must insinuate them into his auditory
+by some trick of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails. _He must be
+thinking all the while of his appearance, because he knows that all
+the while the spectators are judging of it._ And this is the way to
+represent the shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet.
+
+It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity of
+thought and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who otherwise
+would never earn it for themselves by reading, and the intellectual
+acquisition gained this way may, for aught I know, be inestimable; but
+I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet
+is made another thing by being acted. I have heard much of the wonders
+which Garrick performed in this part; but as I never saw him, I must
+have leave to doubt whether the representation of such a character
+came within the province of his art. Those who tell me of him, speak
+of his eye, of the magic of his eye, and of his commanding voice:
+physical properties, vastly desirable in an actor, and without which
+he can never insinuate meaning into an auditory,--but what have they
+to do with Hamlet? what have they to do with intellect? In fact, the
+things aimed at in theatrical representation, are to arrest the
+spectator’s eye upon the form and the gesture, and so to gain a more
+favourable hearing to what is spoken: it is not what the character is,
+but how he looks; not what he says, but how he speaks it. I see no
+reason to think that if the play of _Hamlet_ were written over again
+by some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the
+story, but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine
+features of Shakespeare, his stupendous intellect; and only taking
+care to give us enough of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo
+were never at a loss to furnish; I see not how the effect could be
+much different upon an audience, nor how the actor has it in his power
+to represent Shakespeare to us differently from his representation of
+Banks or Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful accomplished prince,
+and must be gracefully personated; he might be puzzled in his mind,
+wavering in his conduct, seemingly-cruel to Ophelia, he might see a
+ghost, and start at it, and address it kindly when he found it to be
+his father; all this in the poorest and most homely language of the
+servilest creeper after nature that ever consulted the palate of an
+audience; without troubling Shakespeare for the matter: and I see not
+but there would be room for all the power which an actor has, to
+display itself. All the passions and changes of passion might remain:
+for those are much less difficult to write or act than is thought, it
+is a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising or falling a note or
+two in the voice, a whisper with a significant foreboding look to
+announce its approach, and so contagious the counterfeit appearance of
+any emotion is, that let the words be what they will, the look and
+tone shall carry it off and make it pass for deep skill in the
+passions.
+
+It is common for people to talk of Shakespeare’s plays being _so
+natural_; that everybody can understand him. They are natural indeed,
+they are grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies
+out of the reach of most of us. You shall hear the same persons say
+that George Barnwell is very natural, and Othello is very natural,
+that they are both very deep; and to them they are the same kind of
+thing. At the one they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of
+young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commit _a trifling
+peccadillo_, the murder of an uncle or so, that is all, and so comes
+to an untimely end, which is _so moving_; and at the other, because a
+blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white wife: and the
+odds are that ninety-nine out of a hundred would willingly behold the
+same catastrophe happen to both the heroes, and have thought the rope
+more due to Othello than to Barnwell. For of the texture of Othello’s
+mind, the inward construction marvellously laid open with all its
+strengths and weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human
+misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love,
+they see no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their
+pennies a-piece to look through the man’s telescope in
+Leicester-fields, see into the inward plot and topography of the moon.
+Some dim thing or other they see, they see an actor personating a
+passion, of grief, or anger, for instance, and they recognize it as a
+copy of the usual external effects of such passions; for at least as
+being true to _that symbol of the emotion which passes current at the
+theatre for it_, for it is often no more than that: but of the grounds
+of the passion, its correspondence to a great or heroic nature, which
+is the only worthy object of tragedy,--that common auditors know any
+thing of this, or can have any such notions dinned into them by the
+mere strength of an actor’s lungs,--that apprehensions foreign to them
+should be thus infused into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor
+understand how it can be possible.
+
+We talk of Shakespeare’s admirable observation of life, when we should
+feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day
+characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own
+mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson’s, the very ‘sphere
+of humanity’, he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of
+which every one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our
+natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he
+positively creates in us, for nothing more than indigenous faculties
+of our own minds which only waited the action of corresponding virtues
+in him to return a full and clear echo of the same.
+
+To return to Hamlet.--Among the distinguishing features of that
+wonderful character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) is that
+soreness of mind which makes him treat the intrusions of Polonius
+with harshness, and that asperity which he puts on in his interviews
+with Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind (if they be not mixed
+in the latter case with a profound artifice of love, to alienate
+Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind for the
+breaking off of that loving intercourse, which can no longer find a
+place amidst business so serious as that which he has to do) are parts
+of his character, which to reconcile with our admiration of Hamlet,
+the most patient consideration of his situation is no more than
+necessary; they are what we _forgive afterwards_, and explain by the
+whole of his character, but _at the time_ they are harsh and
+unpleasant. Yet such is the actor’s necessity of giving strong blows
+to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this character,
+who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous
+features,--these temporary deformities in the character. They make him
+express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his
+gentility, and which no explanation can render palatable; they make
+him show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia’s father,--contempt
+in its very grossest and most hateful form; but they get applause by
+it: it is natural, people say; that is, the words are scornful, and
+the actor expresses scorn, and that they can judge of: but why so much
+scorn, and of that sort, they never think of asking.
+
+So to Ophelia.--All the Hamlets that I have ever seen, rant and rave
+at her as if she had committed some great crime, and the audience are
+highly pleased, because the words of the part are satirical, and they
+are enforced by the strongest expression of satirical indignation of
+which the face and voice are capable. But then, whether Hamlet is
+likely to have put on such brutal appearances to a lady whom he loved
+so dearly, is never thought on. The truth is, that in all such deep
+affections as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia, there is a
+stock of _supererogatory love_, (if I may venture to use the
+expression) which in any great grief of heart, especially where that
+which preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, confers a kind of
+indulgence upon the grieved party to express itself, even to its
+heart’s dearest object, in the language of a temporary alienation; but
+it is not alienation, it is a distraction purely, and so it always
+makes itself to be felt by that object: it is not anger, but grief
+assuming the appearance of anger,--love awkwardly counterfeiting hate,
+as sweet countenances when they try to frown: but such sternness and
+fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to show, is no counterfeit, but the
+real face of absolute aversion,--of irreconcilable alienation. It may
+be said he puts on the madman; but then he should only so far put on
+this counterfeit lunacy as his own real distraction will give him
+leave; that is, incompletely, imperfectly; not in that confirmed
+practised way, like a master of his art, or, as Dame Quickly would
+say, ‘like one of those harlotry players.’
+
+I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure which
+Shakespeare’s plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to
+differ from that which the audience receive from those of other
+writers; and, _they being in themselves essentially so different from
+all others_, I must conclude that there is something in the nature of
+acting which levels all distinctions. And in fact, who does not speak
+indifferently of the _Gamester_ and of _Macbeth_ as fine stage
+performances, and praise the Mrs. Beverley in the same way as the Lady
+Macbeth of Mrs. S.? Belvidera, and Calista, and Isabella, and
+Euphrasia, are they less liked than Imogen, or than Juliet, or than
+Desdemona? Are they not spoken of and remembered in the same way? Is
+not the female performer as great (as they call it) in one as in the
+other? Did not Garrick shine, and was not he ambitious of shining in
+every drawling tragedy that his wretched day produced,--the
+productions of the Hills and the Murphys and the Browns,--and shall he
+have that honour to dwell in our minds for ever as an inseparable
+concomitant with Shakespeare? A kindred mind! O who can read that
+affecting sonnet of Shakespeare which alludes to his profession as a
+player:
+
+    Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
+    The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
+    That did not better for my life provide
+    Than public means which public custom breeds--
+    Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
+    And almost thence my nature is subdued
+    To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand--
+
+Or that other confession:
+
+    Alas! ’tis true, I have gone here and there,
+    And made myself a motley to thy view,
+    Gor’d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear--
+
+Who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness in our sweet
+Shakespeare, and dream of any congeniality between him and one that,
+by every tradition of him, appears to have been as mere a player as
+ever existed; to have had his mind tainted with the lowest players’
+vices,--envy and jealousy, and miserable cravings after applause; one
+who in the exercise of his profession was jealous even of the
+women-performers that stood in his way; a manager full of managerial
+tricks and stratagems and finesse: that any resemblance should be
+dreamed of between him and Shakespeare,--Shakespeare who, in the
+plenitude and consciousness of his own powers, could with that noble
+modesty, which we can neither imitate nor appreciate, express himself
+thus of his own sense of his own defects:
+
+    Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
+    Featur’d like him, like him with friends possest;
+    Desiring _this man’s art, and that man’s scope_.
+
+I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being an admirer
+of Shakespeare. A true lover of his excellences he certainly was not;
+for would any true lover of them have admitted into his matchless
+scenes such ribald trash as Tate and Cibber, and the rest of them,
+that
+
+    With their darkness durst affront his light,
+
+have foisted into the acting plays of Shakespeare? I believe it
+impossible that he could have had a proper reverence for Shakespeare,
+and have condescended to go through that interpolated scene in Richard
+the Third, in which Richard tries to break his wife’s heart by telling
+her he loves another woman, and says, ‘if she survives this she is
+immortal.’ Yet I doubt not he delivered this vulgar stuff with as much
+anxiety of emphasis as any of the genuine parts; and for acting, it is
+as well calculated as any. But we have seen the part of Richard lately
+produce great fame to an actor by his manner of playing it, and it
+lets us into the secret of acting, and of popular judgements of
+Shakespeare derived from acting. Not one of the spectators who have
+witnessed Mr. C.’s exertions in that part, but has come away with a
+proper conviction that Richard is a very wicked man, and kills little
+children in their beds, with something like the pleasure which the
+giants and ogres in children’s books are represented to have taken in
+that practice; moreover, that he is very close and shrewd and devilish
+cunning, for you could see that by his eye.
+
+But is in fact this the impression we have in reading the Richard of
+Shakespeare? Do we feel anything like disgust, as we do at that
+butcher-like representation of him that passes for him on the stage? A
+horror at his crimes blends with the effect which we feel, but how is
+it qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich intellect which he
+displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast
+knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry of his part,--not an
+atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.’s way of acting it.
+Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are prominent
+and staring; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty genius,
+the man of vast capacity,--the profound, the witty, accomplished
+Richard?
+
+The truth is, the Characters of Shakespeare are so much the objects of
+meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions,
+that while we are reading any of his great criminal characters,--Macbeth,
+Richard, even Iago,--we think not so much of the crimes which they
+commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual
+activity, which prompts them to overleap those moral fences. Barnwell
+is a wretched murderer; there is a certain fitness between his neck
+and the rope; he is the legitimate heir to the gallows; nobody who
+thinks at all can think of any alleviating circumstances in his case
+to make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an instance from the
+higher tragedy, what else but a mere assassin is Glenalvon! Do we
+think of anything but of the crime which he commits, and the rack
+which he deserves? That is all which we really think about him.
+Whereas in corresponding characters in Shakespeare so little do the
+actions comparatively affect us, that while the impulses, the inner
+mind in all its perverted greatness, solely seems real and is
+exclusively attended to, the crime is comparatively nothing. But when
+we see these things represented, the acts which they do are
+comparatively everything, their impulses nothing. The state of sublime
+emotion into which we are elevated by those images of night and horror
+which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with which he
+entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to
+murder Duncan,--when we no longer read it in a book, when we have
+given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses
+over seeing, and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes
+actually preparing to commit a murder, if the acting be true and
+impressive, as I have witnessed it in Mr. K.’s performance of that
+part, the painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to
+prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing
+semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally
+destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where the
+deed doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence:
+it rather seems to belong to history,--to something past and
+inevitable, if it has anything to do with time at all. The sublime
+images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to our minds in the
+reading.
+
+So to see Lear acted--to see an old man tottering about the stage with
+a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy
+night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want
+to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling
+which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of
+Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they
+mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to
+represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to
+represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan
+of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo’s terrible figures.
+The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in
+intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano:
+they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his
+mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare.
+This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on;
+even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but
+corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we
+read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,--we are in his mind, we are
+sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and
+storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty
+irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes
+of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth,
+at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks,
+or tones, to do with that sublime identification of his age with that
+of the _heavens themselves_, when in his reproaches to them for
+conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that ‘they
+themselves are old’. What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What
+has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is
+beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and
+stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough
+that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has
+put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his
+followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about
+more easily. A happy ending!--as if the living martyrdom that Lear had
+gone through,--the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair
+dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If
+he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world’s
+burden after, why all this pudder and preparation,--why torment us
+with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of
+getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over
+again his misused station,--as if at his years, and with his
+experience, anything was left but to die.
+
+Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how
+many dramatic personages are there in Shakespeare, which though more
+tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some
+circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be
+shown to our bodily eye. Othello for instance. Nothing can be more
+soothing, more flattering to the nobler parts of our natures, than to
+read of a young Venetian lady of highest extraction, through the force
+of love and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying aside
+every consideration of kindred, and country, and colour, and wedding
+with _a coal-black Moor_--(for such he is represented, in the
+imperfect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those
+days, compared with our own, or in compliance with popular notions,
+though the Moors are now well enough known to be by many shades less
+unworthy of a white woman’s fancy)--it is the perfect triumph of
+virtue over accidents, of the imagination over the senses. She sees
+Othello’s colour in his mind. But upon the stage, when the imagination
+is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor
+unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello played,
+whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello’s mind in his
+colour; whether he did not find something extremely revolting in the
+courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and whether
+the actual sight of the thing did not over-weigh all that beautiful
+compromise which we make in reading;--and the reason it should do so
+is obvious, because there is just so much reality presented to our
+senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with not enough of
+belief in the internal motives--all that which is unseen--to overpower
+and reconcile the first and obvious prejudices.[8] What we see upon a
+stage is body and bodily action; what we are conscious of in reading
+is almost exclusively the mind, and its movements: and this I think
+may sufficiently account for the very different sort of delight with
+which the same play so often affects us in the reading and the seeing.
+
+    [8] The error of supposing that because Othello’s colour does
+    not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in
+    the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam
+    and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do in the
+    poem. But in the poem we for a while have Paradisaical senses
+    given us, which vanish when we see a man and his wife without
+    clothes in the picture. The painters themselves feel this, as
+    is apparent by the awkward shifts they have recourse to, to
+    make them look not quite naked; by a sort of prophetic
+    anachronism, antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So in
+    the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona’s eyes; in the
+    seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own.
+
+It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters in
+Shakespeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet
+something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination, to
+admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering a
+change and a diminution,--that still stronger the objection must lie
+against representing another line of characters, which Shakespeare has
+introduced to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his
+scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to
+common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist.
+When we read the incantations of those terrible beings the Witches in
+_Macbeth_, though some of the ingredients of their hellish composition
+savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other than the most
+serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound
+as Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence? We
+might as well laugh under a consciousness of the principle of Evil
+himself being truly and really present with us. But attempt to bring
+these beings on to a stage, and you turn them instantly into so many
+old women, that men and children are to laugh at. Contrary to the old
+saying, that ‘seeing is believing’, the sight actually destroys the
+faith; and the mirth in which we indulge at their expense, when we see
+these creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of indemnification
+which we make to ourselves for the terror which they put us in when
+reading made them an object of belief,--when we surrendered up our
+reason to the poet, as children, to their nurses and their elders; and
+we laugh at our fears, as children who thought they saw something in
+the dark, triumph when the bringing in of a candle discovers the
+vanity of their fears. For this exposure of supernatural agents upon a
+stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose their own delusiveness.
+It is the solitary taper and the book that generates a faith in these
+terrors: a ghost by chandelier light, and in good company, deceives no
+spectators,--a ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his human
+dimensions made out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted house, and
+a well-dressed audience, shall arm the most nervous child against any
+apprehensions: as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles
+with his impenetrable armour over it, ‘Bully Dawson would have fought
+the devil with such advantages.’
+
+Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture
+which Dryden has thrown into the _Tempest_: doubtless without some
+such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have sate
+out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet
+courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the _Tempest_ of
+Shakespeare at all a subject for stage representation? It is one thing
+to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we are
+reading it; but to have a conjurer brought before us in his
+conjuring-gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself and
+some hundred of favoured spectators before the curtain are supposed to
+see, involves such a quantity of the _hateful incredible_, that all
+our reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such
+gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish
+and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they
+cannot even be painted,--they can only be believed. But the elaborate
+and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands,
+in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. That
+which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life
+of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties,
+positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A
+parlour or a drawing-room,--a library opening into a garden,--a garden
+with an alcove in it,--a street, or the piazza of Covent Garden, does
+well enough in a scene; we are content to give as much credit to it as
+it demands; or rather, we think little about it,--it is little more
+than reading at the top of a page, ‘Scene, a Garden;’ we do not
+imagine ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of
+familiar objects. But to think by the help of painted trees and
+caverns, which we know to be painted, to transport our minds to
+Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell;[9] or by the aid of a
+fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us
+believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the isle was
+full:--the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his
+musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind his apparatus,
+to make us believe that we do indeed hear the chrystal spheres ring
+out that chime, which if it were to inwrap our fancy long, Milton
+thinks,
+
+    Time would run back and fetch the age of gold,
+    And speckled vanity
+    Would sicken soon and die,
+    And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould;
+    Yea Hell itself would pass away,
+    And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day.
+
+The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more
+impossible to be shown on a stage, than the Enchanted Isle, with its
+no less interesting and innocent first settlers.
+
+    [9] It will be said these things are done in pictures. But
+    pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a
+    world of itself, but in scene-painting there is the attempt
+    to deceive; and there is the discordancy, never to be got
+    over, between painted scenes and real people.
+
+The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the Dresses,
+which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last
+time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of
+garment which he varied--the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish
+priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity
+of the public eye, require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish
+monarch was fairly a counterpart to that which our king wears when he
+goes to the Parliament-house,--just so full and cumbersome, and set
+out with ermine and pearls. And if things must be represented, I see
+not what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what robe are we
+conscious of? Some dim images of royalty--a crown and sceptre, may
+float before our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of it? Do we
+see in our mind’s eye what Webb or any other robe-maker could pattern?
+This is the inevitable consequence of imitating everything, to make
+all things natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine
+abstraction. It presents to the fancy just so much of external
+appearances as to make us feel that we are among flesh and blood,
+while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is
+employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character.
+But in acting, scenery, dress, the most contemptible things, call upon
+us to judge of their naturalness.
+
+Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure which we
+take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with that quiet
+delight which we find in the reading of it, to the different feelings
+with which a reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine
+poem. The accursed critical habit,--the being called upon to judge and
+pronounce, must make it quite a different thing to the former. In
+seeing these plays acted, we are affected just as judges. When Hamlet
+compares the two pictures of Gertrude’s first and second husband, who
+wants to see the pictures? But in the acting, a miniature must be
+lugged out; which we know not to be the picture, but only to show how
+finely a miniature may be represented. This showing of everything,
+levels all things: it makes tricks, bows, and curtesies, of
+importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than by the
+manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene in
+_Macbeth_: it is as much remembered as any of her thrilling tones or
+impressive looks. But does such a trifle as this enter into the
+imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful scene? Does not
+the mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can? Does it care about
+the gracefulness of the doing it? But by acting, and judging of
+acting, all these non-essentials are raised into an importance,
+injurious to the main interest of the play.
+
+I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakespeare. It
+would be no very difficult task to extend the inquiry to his comedies;
+and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest, are
+equally incompatible with stage representation. The length to which
+this essay has run, will make it, I am afraid, sufficiently
+distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without going any deeper
+into the subject at present.
+
+
+
+
+PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
+
+1792-1822
+
+A DEFENCE OF POETRY (1821)
+
+
+According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action,
+which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered
+as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another,
+however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts
+so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as
+from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the
+principle of its own integrity. The one is the τὸ ποιεῖν, or the
+principle of synthesis, and has for its objects those forms which are
+common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the τὸ
+λογίζειν, or principle of analysis, and its action regards the
+relations of things, simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in
+their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations which
+conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of
+quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value
+of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects
+the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is
+to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the
+spirit, as the shadow to the substance.
+
+Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of
+the imagination’: and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is
+an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions
+are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an
+Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody.
+But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within
+all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and
+produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of
+the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite
+them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions
+of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even
+as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A
+child at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and
+motions; and every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact
+relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions
+which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression;
+and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so
+the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration
+of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. In
+relation to the objects which delight a child, these expressions are,
+what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to
+ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in
+him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and
+gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the
+image of the combined effect of those objects, and of his apprehension
+of them. Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures,
+next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an
+additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of
+expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts, become at
+once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture,
+the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony. The social
+sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements, society
+results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human
+beings coexist; the future is contained within the present, as the
+plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast,
+mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable of affording
+the motives according to which the will of a social being is
+determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute
+pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in
+reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in the
+infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and
+actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions
+represented by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that
+from which it proceeds. But let us dismiss those more general
+considerations which might involve an inquiry into the principles of
+society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the
+imagination is expressed upon its forms.
+
+In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural
+objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain
+rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they observe
+not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the
+song, in the combinations of language, in the series of their
+imitations of natural objects. For there is a certain order or rhythm
+belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation, from
+which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer
+pleasure than from any other: the sense of an approximation to this
+order has been called taste by modern writers. Every man in the
+infancy of art observes an order which approximates more or less
+closely to that from which this highest delight results: but the
+diversity is not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be
+sensible, except in those instances where the predominance of this
+faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted
+to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its cause) is
+very great. Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most
+universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the
+manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon
+their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of
+reduplication from that community. Their language is vitally
+metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of
+things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which
+represent them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of
+thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new
+poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been
+thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of
+human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said by
+Lord Bacon to be ‘the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the
+various subjects of the world’;[10] and he considers the faculty
+which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all
+knowledge. In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a
+poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to
+apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists
+in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception,
+and secondly between perception and expression. Every original
+language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem:
+the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are
+the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of
+the creations of poetry.
+
+    [10] _De Augment. Scient._, cap. i, lib. iii.
+
+But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order,
+are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and
+architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of
+laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts
+of life, and the teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with the
+beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of
+the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original
+religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like
+Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the
+circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were
+called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets:
+a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he
+not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those
+laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he
+beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of
+the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to
+be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell
+the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the
+pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of
+prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet
+participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as
+relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The
+grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference
+of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect
+to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses
+of Aeschylus, and the book of _Job_, and Dante’s _Paradise_, would
+afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the
+limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of
+sculpture, painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive.
+
+Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are
+all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry
+by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of
+the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those
+arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are
+created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the
+invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of
+language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and
+passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and
+delicate combinations, than colour, form, or motion, and is more
+plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the
+creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and
+has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments,
+and conditions of art, have relations among each other, which limit
+and interpose between conception and expression. The former is as a
+mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the
+light of which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame of
+sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of
+the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of
+those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their
+thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of
+the term; as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal
+effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders
+of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to
+exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a
+question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of
+the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with
+that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets, any
+excess will remain.
+
+We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that
+art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the
+faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle still
+narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and
+unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is
+inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
+
+Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and
+towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of
+those relations has always been found connected with a perception of
+the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets
+has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of
+sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less
+indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words
+themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity
+of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that
+you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as
+seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a
+poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no
+flower--and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.
+
+An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the
+language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music,
+produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony
+and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should
+accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the
+harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed
+convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such
+composition as includes much action: but every great poet must
+inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact
+structure of his peculiar versification. The distinction between poets
+and prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction between
+philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was essentially a
+poet--the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the melody of his
+language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He
+rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because
+he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and
+action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which
+would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his
+style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his periods, but with
+little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.[11] His language has a sweet
+and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the
+almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it
+is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the
+reader’s mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the
+universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the
+authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as
+they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent
+analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth;
+but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in
+themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music.
+Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of
+rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less
+capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who
+have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine
+ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest
+power.
+
+    [11] See the _Filum Labyrinthi_, and the Essay on Death
+    particularly.
+
+A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There
+is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a
+catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion than time,
+place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of
+actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as
+existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all
+other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period
+of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again
+recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of
+a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible
+varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use
+of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should
+invest them, augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new and
+wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence
+epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the
+poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which
+obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a
+mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
+
+The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as
+a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be considered as a whole,
+though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated
+portions: a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable
+thought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy,
+were poets; and although the plan of these writers, especially that of
+Livy, restrained them from developing this faculty in its highest
+degree, they made copious and ample amends for their subjection, by
+filling all the interstices of their subjects with living images.
+
+Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed to
+estimate its effects upon society.
+
+Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it
+falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its
+delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor
+their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it
+acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above
+consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations to
+contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the
+strength and splendour of their union. Even in modern times, no living
+poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the jury which sits in
+judgement upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be
+composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the
+selectest of the wise of many generations. A poet is a nightingale,
+who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet
+sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen
+musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not
+whence or why. The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the
+delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that social system
+which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has
+reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human
+character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were
+awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and
+Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and
+persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in
+these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have
+been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely
+impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation
+they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor
+let it be objected, that these characters are remote from moral
+perfection, and that they can by no means be considered as edifying
+patterns for general imitation. Every epoch, under names more or less
+specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked idol
+of the worship of a semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit is the veiled
+image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate.
+But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as a temporary
+dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without
+concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or
+dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he
+may the ancient armour or the modern uniform around his body; whilst
+it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty
+of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental
+vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to
+the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in
+which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express
+themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets
+of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their
+conceptions in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful
+whether the alloy of costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper
+this planetary music for mortal ears.
+
+The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a
+misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral
+improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry
+has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and
+domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men
+hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one
+another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and
+enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand
+unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the
+hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they
+were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the
+impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the
+minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that
+gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and
+actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or
+a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with
+the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.
+A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;
+he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the
+pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great
+instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to
+the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference
+of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new
+delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their
+own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and
+interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens
+the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same
+manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill
+to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually
+those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which
+participate in neither. By this assumption of the inferior office of
+interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit
+himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory in a participation in
+the cause. There was little danger that Homer, or any of the eternal
+poets, should have so far misunderstood themselves as to have
+abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the
+poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan,
+Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect
+of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in
+which they compel us to advert to this purpose.
+
+Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the
+dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously
+with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the
+poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture,
+philosophy, and, we may add, the forms of civil life. For although the
+scheme of Athenian society was deformed by many imperfections which
+the poetry existing in chivalry and Christianity has erased from the
+habits and institutions of modern Europe; yet never at any other
+period has so much energy, beauty, and virtue, been developed; never
+was blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined and rendered
+subject to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the
+dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during the century which
+preceded the death of Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of
+our species have we records and fragments stamped so visibly with the
+image of the divinity in man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in
+action, or in language, which has rendered this epoch memorable above
+all others, and the storehouse of examples to everlasting time. For
+written poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other
+arts, and it is an idle inquiry to demand which gave and which
+received the light, which all, as from a common focus, have scattered
+over the darkest periods of succeeding time. We know no more of cause
+and effect than a constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found
+to co-exist with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and
+perfection of man. I appeal to what has already been established to
+distinguish between the cause and the effect.
+
+It was at the period here adverted to, that the drama had its birth;
+and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those
+few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved to
+us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was understood or
+practised according to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For
+the Athenians employed language, action, music, painting, the dance,
+and religious institutions, to produce a common effect in the
+representation of the highest idealisms of passion and of power; each
+division in the art was made perfect in its kind by artists of the
+most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful proportion
+and unity one towards the other. On the modern stage a few only of the
+elements capable of expressing the image of the poet’s conception are
+employed at once. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music
+and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the
+fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. Religious
+institution has indeed been usually banished from the stage. Our
+system of divesting the actor’s face of a mask, on which the many
+expressions appropriated to his dramatic character might be moulded
+into one permanent and unchanging expression, is favourable only to a
+partial and inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a
+monologue, where all the attention may be directed to some great
+master of ideal mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy with
+tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is
+undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should
+be as in _King Lear_, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the
+intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favour
+of _King Lear_ against the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ or the _Agamemnon_, or,
+if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unless the
+intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter,
+should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. _King Lear_, if it
+can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect
+specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world; in spite of the
+narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected by the ignorance of
+the philosophy of the drama which has prevailed in modern Europe.
+Calderon, in his religious _Autos_, has attempted to fulfil some of
+the high conditions of dramatic representation neglected by
+Shakespeare; such as the establishing a relation between the drama and
+religion, and the accommodating them to music and dancing; but he
+omits the observation of conditions still more important, and more is
+lost than gained by the substitution of the rigidly-defined and
+ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the living
+impersonations of the truth of human passion.
+
+But I digress.--The connexion of scenic exhibitions with the
+improvement or corruption of the manners of men, has been universally
+recognized: in other words, the presence or absence of poetry in its
+most perfect and universal form, has been found to be connected with
+good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has been
+imputed to the drama as an effect, begins, when the poetry employed in
+its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners whether the
+periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not
+corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and
+effect.
+
+The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its
+perfection, ever co-existed with the moral and intellectual greatness
+of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in
+which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of
+circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which
+every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires,
+and would become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains
+and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the
+capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are
+strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted
+calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into
+the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror
+and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence
+of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its
+wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their
+choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for
+censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
+Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon
+that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express
+poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the
+brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from
+the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with
+majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it
+with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.
+
+But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with
+that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great
+masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of
+the kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood, or a weak
+attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as
+moral truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries
+of some gross vice or weakness, with which the author, in common with
+his auditors, are infected. Hence what has been called the classical
+and domestic drama. Addison’s _Cato_ is a specimen of the one; and
+would it were not superfluous to cite examples of the other! To such
+purposes poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of
+lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would
+contain it. And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this
+nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment
+and passion, which, divested of imagination, are other names for
+caprice and appetite. The period in our own history of the grossest
+degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in
+which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the
+triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone
+illuminating an age unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating
+principle pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry
+ceases to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality:
+wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph,
+instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt, succeed to
+sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which
+is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the
+very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a
+monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth new
+food, which it devours in secret.
+
+The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of
+expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other,
+the connexion of poetry and social good is more observable in the
+drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable that the
+highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the
+highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction
+of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a
+corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain
+the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli says of political
+institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should
+arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. And this
+is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all
+language, institution and form, require not only to be produced but to
+be sustained: the office and character of a poet participates in the
+divine nature as regards providence, no less than as regards creation.
+
+Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of the
+Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols of the
+extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. The
+bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of
+Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most glorious
+reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious; like the odour of the
+tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of
+sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale
+of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field,
+and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own, which endows
+the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic
+and erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that
+softness in statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners
+and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer.
+Nor is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to
+which this want of harmony is to be imputed. An equal sensibility to
+the influence of the senses and the affections is to be found in the
+writings of Homer and Sophocles: the former, especially, has clothed
+sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. Their
+superiority over these succeeding writers consists in the presence of
+those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not
+in the absence of those which are connected with the external: their
+incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. It
+is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which
+their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets,
+but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with
+any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Had
+that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to
+pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an
+imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved. For
+the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to
+pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the
+imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself
+thence as a paralysing venom, through the affections into the very
+appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense
+survives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses
+itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its
+voice is heard, like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from the
+world. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable
+of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of
+whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil
+time. It will readily be confessed that those among the luxurious
+citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were delighted with the poems
+of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensual than the remnant of
+their tribe. But corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of
+human society before poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that
+chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through
+the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from
+a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once
+connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. It is the faculty
+which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of
+social renovation. And let us not circumscribe the effects of the
+bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of
+those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of
+those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated
+portions: those who are more finely organized, or born in a happier
+age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem, which all
+poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up
+since the beginning of the world.
+
+The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient
+Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have
+been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans appear
+to have considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the
+selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have abstained from
+creating in measured language, sculpture, music, or architecture,
+anything which might bear a particular relation to their own
+condition, whilst it should bear a general one to the universal
+constitution of the world. But we judge from partial evidence, and we
+judge perhaps partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all
+great poets, have been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil
+in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen delicacy of expressions of
+the latter, are as a mist of light which conceal from us the intense
+and exceeding truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct
+with poetry. Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great
+writers of the Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of
+Greece. The institutions also, and the religion of Rome were less
+poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the
+substance. Hence poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than
+accompany, the perfection of political and domestic society. The true
+poetry of Rome lived in its institutions; for whatever of beautiful,
+true, and majestic, they contained, could have sprung only from the
+faculty which creates the order in which they consist. The life of
+Camillus, the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in
+their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls: the refusal of the
+republic to make peace with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were
+not the consequences of a refined calculation of the probable personal
+advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life,
+to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal
+dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it
+out of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire,
+and the reward everliving fame. These things are not the less poetry
+_quia carent vate sacro_. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem
+written by Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired
+rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their
+harmony.
+
+At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the
+circle of its revolutions. And the world would have fallen into utter
+anarchy and darkness, but that, there were found poets among the
+authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and
+religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before
+conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, become as
+generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. It is foreign to
+the present purpose to touch upon the evil produced by these systems:
+except that we protest, on the ground of the principles already
+established, that no portion of it can be attributed to the poetry
+they contain.
+
+It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and
+Isaiah, had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his
+disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers
+of this extraordinary person, are all instinct with the most vivid
+poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a
+certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinions founded
+upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which Plato had
+distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis, and
+became the object of the worship of the civilized world. Here it is to
+be confessed that ‘Light seems to thicken’, and
+
+          The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
+    Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
+    And night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.
+
+But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of
+this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing
+itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its
+yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen to the music,
+unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind,
+nourishing its everlasting course with strength and swiftness.
+
+The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and
+institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived
+the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and
+victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and
+opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to
+the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations.
+Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the
+extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress of
+despotism and superstition. Men, from causes too intricate to be here
+discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will had
+become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of
+the will of others; lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud,
+characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of
+_creating_ in form, language, or institution. The moral anomalies of
+such a state of society are not justly to be charged upon any class of
+events immediately connected with them, and those events are most
+entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it most
+expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannot distinguish
+words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies have been
+incorporated into our popular religion.
+
+It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry
+of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest themselves.
+The principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in
+his _Republic_, as the theoretical rule of the mode in which the
+materials of pleasure and of power, produced by the common skill and
+labour of human beings, ought to be distributed among them. The
+limitations of this rule were asserted by him to be determined only by
+the sensibility of each, or the utility to result to all. Plato,
+following the doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral
+and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past,
+the present, and the future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged
+the sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and
+Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression
+of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The
+incorporation of the Celtic nations with the exhausted population of
+the south, impressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in
+their mythology and institutions. The result was a sum of the action
+and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed
+as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other without
+incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The
+abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of
+women from a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were
+among the consequences of these events.
+
+The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest
+political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. The
+freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a
+religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if
+the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and
+motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers; so that earth
+became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar
+appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and
+a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this
+creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language
+was the instrument of their art: ‘Galeotto fù il libro, e chi lo
+scrisse.’ The Provençal Trouveurs, or inventors, preceded Petrarch,
+whose verses are as spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted
+fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love. It is
+impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of that beauty
+which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explain how the
+gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these sacred
+emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and wise, and lift
+them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self. Dante
+understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. His
+_Vita Nuova_ is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and
+language: it is the idealized history of that period, and those
+intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis of
+Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her
+loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to
+the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination of
+modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed the judgement
+of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the ‘Divine Drama’,
+in the measure of the admiration which they accord to the Hell,
+Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting
+love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the
+ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of
+the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns of
+society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and
+superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare,
+Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age,
+have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in
+the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force.
+The true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which human
+kind is distributed, has become less misunderstood; and if the error
+which confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two
+sexes has been partially recognized in the opinions and institutions
+of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which
+chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets.
+
+The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the
+stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world. The
+distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton
+have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these
+great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a
+difficult question to determine how far they were conscious of the
+distinction which must have subsisted in their minds between their own
+creeds and that of the people. Dante at least appears to wish to mark
+the full extent of it by placing Riphaeus, whom Virgil calls
+_iustissimus unus_, in Paradise, and observing a most heretical
+caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton’s
+poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system,
+of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief
+popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the
+character of Satan as expressed in _Paradise Lost_. It is a mistake to
+suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular
+personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a
+sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an
+enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not
+to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles
+his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his
+conquest in the victor. Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far
+superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he
+has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to
+one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most
+horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of
+inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the
+alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has
+so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a
+violation) as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his
+God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is
+the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton’s genius. He
+mingled as it were the elements of human nature as colours upon a
+single pallet, and arranged them in the composition of his great
+picture according to the laws of epic truth; that is, according to the
+laws of that principle by which a series of actions of the external
+universe and of intelligent and ethical beings is calculated to excite
+the sympathy of succeeding generations of mankind. The _Divina
+Commedia_ and _Paradise Lost_ have conferred upon modern mythology a
+systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more
+superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon
+the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the
+religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it
+will have been stamped with the eternity of genius.
+
+Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the
+second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and
+intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of
+the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it:
+developing itself in correspondence with their development. For
+Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the
+sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his genius,
+had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all
+that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their
+notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan,
+Statius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single condition of
+epic truth. Milton was the third epic poet. For if the title of epic
+in its highest sense be refused to the _Aeneid_, still less can it be
+conceded to the _Orlando Furioso_, the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the
+_Lusiad_, or the _Faerie Queene_.
+
+Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient religion
+of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their poetry probably
+in the same proportion as its forms survived in the unreformed worship
+of modern Europe. The one preceded and the other followed the
+Reformation at almost equal intervals. Dante was the first religious
+reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather in the rudeness and
+acrimony, than in the boldness of his censures of papal usurpation.
+Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a
+language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of
+inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator of those great spirits
+who presided over the resurrection of learning; the Lucifer of that
+starry flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from
+republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted
+world. His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a
+burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in
+the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with a lightning which has yet
+found no conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first
+acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be
+undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A
+great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of
+wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all
+its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to
+share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever
+developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.
+
+The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and
+Boccaccio, was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture, and
+architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the
+superstructure of English literature is based upon the materials of
+Italian invention.
+
+But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of
+poetry and its influence on society. Be it enough to have pointed out
+the effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the word, upon
+their own and all succeeding times.
+
+But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners
+and mechanists, on another plea. It is admitted that the exercise of
+the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that that of
+reason is more useful. Let us examine as the grounds of this
+distinction, what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a
+general sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive and
+intelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it acquiesces.
+There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal and permanent;
+the other transitory and particular. Utility may either express the
+means of producing the former or the latter. In the former sense,
+whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the
+imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. But a narrower
+meaning may be assigned to the word utility, confining it to express
+that which banishes the importunity of the wants of our animal nature,
+the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing the grosser
+delusions of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of
+mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of
+personal advantage.
+
+Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have
+their appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of poets,
+and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life.
+They make space, and give time. Their exertions are of the highest
+value, so long as they confine their administration of the concerns of
+the inferior powers of our nature within the limits due to the
+superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions,
+let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced,
+the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. Whilst
+the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines labour,
+let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence
+with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not
+tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the
+extremes of luxury and want. They have exemplified the saying, ‘To him
+that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little
+that he hath shall be taken away.’ The rich have become richer, and
+the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven
+between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are
+the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the
+calculating faculty.
+
+It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the
+definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an
+inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature,
+the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of
+the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair
+itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the
+highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this
+principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure
+which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which
+is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in
+sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence the
+saying, ‘It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the
+house of mirth.’ Nor that this highest species of pleasure is
+necessarily linked with pain. The delight of love and friendship, the
+ecstasy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perception and
+still more of the creation of poetry, is often wholly unalloyed.
+
+The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true
+utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or
+poetical philosophers.
+
+The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau,[12] and
+their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are
+entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the
+degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would
+have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would
+have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men,
+women, and children, burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment
+have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the
+Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what
+would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante,
+Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor
+Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been
+born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of
+the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments
+of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of
+the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with
+its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of
+these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser
+sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the
+aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the
+direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.
+
+    [12] Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was
+    essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere
+    reasoners.
+
+We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how
+to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical
+knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the
+produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought,
+is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes.
+There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in
+morals, government, and political economy, or at least, what is wiser
+and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let ‘_I dare
+not_ wait upon _I would_, like the poor cat in the adage.’ We want the
+creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous
+impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our
+calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can
+digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the
+limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of
+the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the
+internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself
+a slave. To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree
+disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the
+basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention
+for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation of the
+inequality of mankind? From what other cause has it arisen that the
+discoveries which should have lightened, have added a weight to the
+curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which
+money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
+
+The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold; by one it creates
+new materials of knowledge and power and pleasure; by the other it
+engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according
+to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and
+the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than
+at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating
+principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed
+the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of
+human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which
+animates it.
+
+Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
+circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science,
+and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time
+the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from
+which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if
+blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren
+world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of
+life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all
+things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture
+of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded
+beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue,
+love, patriotism, friendship--what were the scenery of this beautiful
+universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of
+the grave--and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not
+ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the
+owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not
+like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination
+of the will. A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry.’ The greatest
+poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal,
+which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to
+transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour
+of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
+conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its
+approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its
+original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness
+of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on
+the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been
+communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original
+conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present
+day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of
+poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay
+recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than
+a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial
+connexion of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture
+of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the
+limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived the
+_Paradise Lost_ as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have
+his own authority also for the muse having ‘dictated’ to him the
+‘unpremeditated song’. And let this be an answer to those who would
+allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the
+_Orlando Furioso_. Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic
+is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is
+still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great
+statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in
+the mother’s womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in
+formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the
+gradations, or the media of the process.
+
+Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
+and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and
+feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding
+our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing
+unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that
+even in the desire and regret they leave, there cannot but be
+pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is
+as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own;
+but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the
+coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled
+sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are
+experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and
+the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them
+is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love,
+patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions;
+and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a
+universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits
+of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they
+combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a
+trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the
+enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced
+these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past.
+Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the
+world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the
+interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form,
+sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to
+those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is no portal
+of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into
+the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of
+the divinity in man.
+
+Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that
+which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most
+deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure,
+eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all
+irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every
+form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous
+sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret
+alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from
+death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world,
+and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of
+its forms.
+
+All things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation to the
+percipient. ‘The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a
+heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’ But poetry defeats the curse which
+binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions.
+And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life’s
+dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a
+being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to
+which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe
+of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our
+inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder
+of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to
+imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has
+been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted
+by reiteration. It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso: _Non
+merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta_.
+
+A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure,
+virtue and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best,
+the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, let time
+be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of
+human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest, the
+happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally
+incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most
+spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would
+look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men: and
+the exceptions, as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty
+in a high yet inferior degree, will be found on consideration to
+confine rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop to the
+arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in our own
+persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge, and
+executioner, let us decide without trial, testimony, or form, that
+certain motives of those who are ‘there sitting where we dare not
+soar’, are reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard,
+that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was
+a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a
+libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with
+this division of our subject to cite living poets, but posterity has
+done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors
+have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their
+sins ‘were as scarlet, they are now white as snow’: they have been
+washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time. Observe in
+what a ludicrous chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime
+have been confused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and
+poets; consider how little is, as it appears--or appears, as it is;
+look to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.
+
+Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that it
+is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and
+that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connexion with the
+consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine that these are
+the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when mental effects
+are experienced unsusceptible of being referred to them. The frequent
+recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may
+produce in the mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its
+own nature and with its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals
+of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet
+becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences
+under which others habitually live. But as he is more delicately
+organized than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure, both his
+own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the
+one and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned to this
+difference. And he renders himself obnoxious to calumny, when he
+neglects to observe the circumstances under which these objects of
+universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves in one
+another’s garments.
+
+But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus cruelty,
+envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil, have never
+formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of poets.
+
+I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down
+these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested to
+my mind, by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of
+observing the formality of a polemical reply; but if the view which
+they contain be just, they will be found to involve a refutation of
+the arguers against poetry, so far at least as regards the first
+division of the subject. I can readily conjecture what should have
+moved the gall of some learned and intelligent writers who quarrel
+with certain versifiers; I confess myself, like them, unwilling to be
+stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. Bavius and
+Maevius undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable persons. But
+it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than
+confound.
+
+The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its elements
+and principles; and it has been shown, as well as the narrow limits
+assigned them would permit, that what is called poetry, in a
+restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms of order
+and of beauty, according to which the materials of human life are
+susceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry in a universal
+sense.
+
+The second part[13] will have for its object an application of these
+principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, and a
+defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners and
+opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative and
+creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic
+development of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free
+development of the national will, has arisen as it were from a new
+birth. In spite of the low-thoughted envy which would undervalue
+contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual
+achievements, and we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass
+beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national
+struggle for civil and religious liberty. The most unfailing herald,
+companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a
+beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such
+periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and
+receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and
+nature. The persons in whom this power resides may often, as far as
+regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent
+correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the
+ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet
+compelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their
+own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most
+celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the
+electric life which burns within their words. They measure the
+circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a
+comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves
+perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is
+less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the
+hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the
+gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words
+which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to
+battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved
+not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
+world.
+
+    [13] This was never written.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM HAZLITT
+
+1778-1830
+
+MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH POETS (1823)
+
+
+My father was a Dissenting Minister at Wem in Shropshire; and in the
+year 1798 (the figures that compose the date are to me like the
+‘dreaded name of Demogorgon’) Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury, to
+succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a Unitarian congregation
+there. He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he
+was to preach; and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the coach in a
+state of anxiety and expectation to look for the arrival of his
+successor, could find no one at all answering the description but a
+round-faced man in a short black coat (like a shooting-jacket) which
+hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who seemed to be talking
+at a great rate to his fellow-passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarce returned
+to give an account of his disappointment, when the round-faced man in
+black entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject, by beginning
+to talk. He did not cease while he stayed; nor has he since, that I
+know of. He held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense
+for three weeks that he remained there, ‘fluttering the _proud
+Salopians_ like an eagle in a dove-cote’; and the Welsh mountains that
+skirt the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree to have
+heard no such mystic sounds since the days of
+
+    High-born Hoel’s harp or soft Llewelyn’s lay!
+
+As we passed along between Wem and Shrewsbury, and I eyed their blue
+tops seen through the wintry branches, or the red rustling leaves of
+the sturdy oak-trees by the road-side, a sound was in my ears as of a
+Siren’s song; I was stunned, startled with it, as from deep sleep; but
+I had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my
+admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the
+light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun’s rays glittering
+in the puddles of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate,
+helpless, like a worm by the way-side, crushed, bleeding, lifeless;
+but now, bursting from the deadly bands that ‘bound them,
+
+    With Styx nine times round them,’
+
+my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch
+the golden light of other years. My soul has indeed remained in its
+original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and
+unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay,
+has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that
+my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length
+found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge. But this is
+not to my purpose.
+
+My father lived ten miles from Shrewsbury, and was in the habit of
+exchanging visits with Mr. Rowe, and with Mr. Jenkins of Whitchurch
+(nine miles farther on) according to the custom of Dissenting
+Ministers in each other’s neighbourhood. A line of communication is
+thus established, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is
+kept alive, and nourishes its smouldering fire unquenchable, like the
+fires in the _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus, placed at different stations,
+that waited for ten long years to announce with their blazing pyramids
+the destruction of Troy. Coleridge had agreed to come over to see my
+father, according to the courtesy of the country, as Mr. Rowe’s
+probable successor; but in the meantime I had gone to hear him preach
+the Sunday after his arrival. A poet and a philosopher getting up into
+a Unitarian pulpit to preach the Gospel, was a romance in these
+degenerate days, a sort of revival of the primitive spirit of
+Christianity, which was not to be resisted.
+
+It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to
+walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach.
+Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk
+as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798.
+_Il y a des impressions que ni le temps ni les circonstances peuvent
+effacer. Dussé-je vivre des siècles entiers, le doux temps de ma
+jeunesse ne peut renaitre pour moi, ni s’effacer jamais dans ma
+mémoire._ When I got there, the organ was playing the 100th psalm,
+and, when it was done, Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text, ‘And
+he went up into the mountain to pray, HIMSELF, ALONE.’ As he gave out
+this text, his voice ‘rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,’
+and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud,
+deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the
+sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that
+prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The
+idea of St. John came into mind, ‘of one crying in the wilderness, who
+had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey.’
+The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying
+with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war; upon church and
+state--not their alliance, but their separation--on the spirit of the
+world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed
+to one another. He talked of those who had ‘inscribed the cross of
+Christ on banners dripping with human gore.’ He made a poetical and
+pastoral excursion,--and to show the fatal effects of war, drew a
+striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team
+afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, ‘as though
+he should never be old,’ and the same poor country-lad, crimped,
+kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned into a
+wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and
+pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the loathsome
+finery of the profession of blood.
+
+    Such were the notes our once-lov’d poet sung.
+
+And for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard
+the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together,
+Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of
+Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well
+satisfied. The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the
+sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the _good cause_;
+and the cold dank drops of dew that hung half-melted on the beard of
+the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them; for there
+was a spirit of hope and youth in all nature, that turned everything
+into good The face of nature had not then the brand of JUS DIVINUM on
+it:
+
+    Like to that sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe.
+
+On the Tuesday following, the half-inspired speaker came. I was called
+down into the room where he was, and went half-hoping, half-afraid. He
+received me very graciously, and I listened for a long time without
+uttering a word. I did not suffer in his opinion by my silence. ‘For
+those two hours,’ he afterwards was pleased to say, ‘he was conversing
+with W. H.’s forehead!’ His appearance was different from what I had
+anticipated from seeing him before. At a distance, and in the dim
+light of the chapel, there was to me a strange wildness in his aspect,
+a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the small-pox. His
+complexion was at that time clear, and even bright--
+
+    As are the children of yon azure sheen.
+
+His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with
+large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a
+sea with darkened lustre. ‘A certain tender bloom his face
+o’erspread,’ a purple tinge as we see it in the pale thoughtful
+complexions of the Spanish portrait-painters, Murillo and Velasquez.
+His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin
+good-humoured and round; but his nose, the rudder of the face, the
+index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing--like what he has done.
+It might seem that the genius of his face as from a height surveyed
+and projected him (with sufficient capacity and huge aspiration) into
+the world unknown of thought and imagination, with nothing to support
+or guide his veering purpose, as if Columbus had launched his
+adventurous course for the New World in a scallop, without oars or
+compass. So at least I comment on it after the event. Coleridge in his
+person was rather above the common size, inclining to the corpulent,
+or like Lord Hamlet, ‘somewhat fat and pursy.’ His hair (now, alas!
+grey) was then black and glossy as the raven’s, and fell in smooth
+masses over his forehead. This long pendulous hair is peculiar to
+enthusiasts, to those whose minds tend heavenward; and is
+traditionally inseparable (though of a different colour) from the
+pictures of Christ. It ought to belong, as a character to all who
+preach _Christ crucified_, and Coleridge was at that time one of
+those!
+
+It was curious to observe the contrast between him and my father, who
+was a veteran in the cause, and then declining into the vale of years.
+He had been a poor Irish lad, carefully brought up by his parents, and
+sent to the University of Glasgow (where he studied under Adam Smith)
+to prepare him for his future destination. It was his mother’s
+proudest wish to see her son a Dissenting Minister. So if we look back
+to past generations (as far as eye can reach) we see the same hopes,
+fears, wishes, followed by the same disappointments, throbbing in the
+human heart; and so we may see them (if we look forward) rising up for
+ever, and disappearing, like vapourish bubbles, in the human breast!
+After being tossed about from congregation to congregation in the
+heats of the Unitarian controversy, and squabbles about the American
+war, he had been relegated to an obscure village, where he was to
+spend the last thirty years of his life, far from the only converse
+that he loved, the talk about disputed texts of Scripture and the
+cause of civil and religious liberty. Here he passed his days,
+repining but resigned, in the study of the Bible, and the perusal of
+the Commentators--huge folios, not easily got through, one of which
+would outlast a winter! Why did he pore on these from morn to night
+(with the exception of a walk in the fields or a turn in the garden to
+gather broccoli-plants or kidney-beans of his own rearing, with no
+small degree of pride and pleasure)?--Here were ‘no figures nor no
+fantasies,’--neither poetry nor philosophy--nothing to dazzle, nothing
+to excite modern curiosity; but to his lack-lustre eyes there
+appeared, within the pages of the ponderous, unwieldy, neglected
+tomes, the sacred name of JEHOVAH in Hebrew capitals: pressed down by
+the weight of the style, worn to the last fading thinness of the
+understanding, there were glimpses, glimmering notions of the
+patriarchal wanderings, with palm-trees hovering in the horizon, and
+processions of camels at the distance of three thousand years; there
+was Moses with the Burning Bush, the number of the Twelve Tribes,
+types, shadows, glosses on the law and the prophets; there were
+discussions (dull enough) on the age of Methuselah, a mighty
+speculation! there were outlines, rude guesses at the shape of Noah’s
+Ark and at the riches of Solomon’s Temple; questions as to the date of
+the creation, predictions of the end of all things; the great lapses
+of time, the strange mutations of the globe were unfolded with the
+voluminous leaf, as it turned over; and though the soul might slumber
+with an hieroglyphic veil of inscrutable mysteries drawn over it, yet
+it was in a slumber ill-exchanged for all the sharpened realities of
+sense, wit, fancy, or reason. My father’s life was comparatively a
+dream; but it was a dream of infinity and eternity, of death, the
+resurrection, and a judgement to come!
+
+No two individuals were ever more unlike than were the host and his
+guest. A poet was to my father a sort of nondescript: yet whatever
+added grace to the Unitarian cause was to him welcome. He could hardly
+have been more surprised or pleased, if our visitor had worn wings.
+Indeed, his thoughts had wings; and as the silken sounds rustled round
+our little wainscoted parlour, my father threw back his spectacles
+over his forehead, his white hairs mixing with its sanguine hue; and a
+smile of delight beamed across his rugged cordial face, to think that
+Truth had found a new ally in Fancy![14] Besides, Coleridge seemed to
+take considerable notice of me, and that of itself was enough. He
+talked very familiarly, but agreeably, and glanced over a variety of
+subjects. At dinner-time he grew more animated, and dilated in a very
+edifying manner on Mary Wollstonecraft and Mackintosh. The last, he
+said, he considered (on my father’s speaking of his _Vindiciae
+Gallicae_ as a capital performance) as a clever scholastic man--a
+master of the topics,--or as the ready warehouseman of letters, who
+knew exactly where to lay his hand on what he wanted, though the goods
+were not his own. He thought him no match for Burke, either in style
+or matter. Burke was a metaphysician, Mackintosh a mere logician.
+Burke was an orator (almost a poet) who reasoned in figures, because
+he had an eye for nature: Mackintosh, on the other hand, was a
+rhetorician, who had only an eye to commonplaces. On this I ventured
+to say that I had always entertained a great opinion of Burke, and
+that (as far as I could find) the speaking of him with contempt might
+be made the test of a vulgar democratical mind. This was the first
+observation I ever made to Coleridge, and he said it was a very just
+and striking one. I remember the leg of Welsh mutton and the turnips
+on the table that day had the finest flavour imaginable. Coleridge
+added that Mackintosh and Tom Wedgwood (of whom, however, he spoke
+highly) had expressed a very indifferent opinion of his friend Mr.
+Wordsworth, on which he remarked to them--‘He strides on so far before
+you, that he dwindles in the distance!’ Godwin had once boasted to him
+of having carried on an argument with Mackintosh for three hours with
+dubious success; Coleridge told him--‘If there had been a man of
+genius in the room he would have settled the question in five
+minutes.’ He asked me if I had ever seen Mary Wollstonecraft, and I
+said, I had once for a few moments, and that she seemed to me to turn
+off Godwin’s objections to something she advanced with quite a
+playful, easy air. He replied, that ‘this was only one instance of the
+ascendancy which people of imagination exercised over those of mere
+intellect.’ He did not rate Godwin very high[15] (this was caprice or
+prejudice, real or affected) but he had a great idea of Mrs.
+Wollstonecraft’s powers of conversation, none at all of her talent for
+book-making. We talked a little about Holcroft. He had been asked if
+he was not much struck _with_ him, and he said, he thought himself in
+more danger of being struck _by_ him. I complained that he would not
+let me get on at all, for he required a definition of every the
+commonest word, exclaiming, ‘What do you mean by a _sensation_, Sir?
+What do you mean by an _idea_?’ This, Coleridge said, was barricadoing
+the road to truth:--it was setting up a turnpike-gate at every step we
+took. I forget a great number of things, many more than I remember;
+but the day passed off pleasantly, and the next morning Mr. Coleridge
+was to return to Shrewsbury. When I came down to breakfast, I found
+that he had just received a letter from his friend, T. Wedgwood,
+making him an offer of 150_l._ a year if he chose to waive his present
+pursuit, and devote himself entirely to the study of poetry and
+philosophy. Coleridge seemed to make up his mind to close with this
+proposal in the act of tying on one of his shoes. It threw an
+additional damp on his departure. It took the wayward enthusiast quite
+from us to cast him into Deva’s winding vales, or by the shores of old
+romance. Instead of living at ten miles’ distance, of being the pastor
+of a Dissenting congregation at Shrewsbury, he was henceforth to
+inhabit the Hill of Parnassus, to be a Shepherd on the Delectable
+Mountains. Alas! I knew not the way thither, and felt very little
+gratitude for Mr. Wedgwood’s bounty. I was presently relieved from
+this dilemma; for Mr. Coleridge, asking for a pen and ink, and going
+to a table to write something on a bit of card, advanced towards me
+with undulating step, and giving me the precious document, said that
+that was his address, _Mr. Coleridge, Nether-Stowey, Somersetshire_;
+and that he should be glad to see me there in a few weeks’ time, and,
+if I chose, would come half-way to meet me. I was not less surprised
+than the shepherd-boy (this simile is to be found in _Cassandra_) when
+he sees a thunderbolt fall close at his feet. I stammered out my
+acknowledgements and acceptance of this offer (I thought Mr.
+Wedgwood’s annuity a trifle to it) as well as I could; and this mighty
+business being settled, the poet-preacher took leave, and I
+accompanied him six miles on the road. It was a fine morning in the
+middle of winter, and he talked the whole way. The scholar in Chaucer
+is described as going
+
+    ----Sounding on his way.
+
+    [14] My father was one of those who mistook his talent after
+    all. He used to be very much dissatisfied that I preferred
+    his Letters to his Sermons. The last were forced and dry; the
+    first came naturally from him. For ease, half-plays on words,
+    and a supine, monkish, indolent pleasantry, I have never seen
+    them equalled.
+
+    [15] He complained in particular of the presumption of his
+    attempting to establish the future immortality of man,
+    ‘without’ (as he said) ‘knowing what Death was or what Life
+    was’--and the tone in which he pronounced these two words
+    seemed to convey a complete image of both.
+
+So Coleridge went on his. In digressing, in dilating, in passing from
+subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on
+ice. He told me in confidence (going along) that he should have
+preached two sermons before he accepted the situation at Shrewsbury,
+one on Infant Baptism, the other on the Lord’s Supper, showing that he
+could not administer either, which would have effectually disqualified
+him for the object in view. I observed that he continually crossed me
+on the way by shifting from one side of the footpath to the other.
+This struck me as an odd movement; but I did not at that time connect
+it with any instability of purpose or involuntary change of principle,
+as I have done since. He seemed unable to keep on in a straight line.
+He spoke slightingly of Hume (whose Essay on Miracles he said was
+stolen from an objection started in one of South’s Sermons--_Credat
+Judaeus Apella!_). I was not very much pleased at this account of
+Hume, for I had just been reading, with infinite relish, that
+completest of all metaphysical _choke-pears_, his _Treatise on Human
+Nature_, to which the _Essays_, in point of scholastic subtlety and
+close reasoning, are mere elegant trifling, light summer-reading.
+Coleridge even denied the excellence of Hume’s general style, which I
+think betrayed a want of taste or candour. He however made me amends
+by the manner in which he spoke of Berkeley. He dwelt particularly on
+his _Essay on Vision_ as a masterpiece of analytical reasoning. So it
+undoubtedly is. He was exceedingly angry with Dr. Johnson for striking
+the stone with his foot, in allusion to this author’s Theory of Matter
+and Spirit, and saying, ‘Thus I confute him, Sir.’ Coleridge drew a
+parallel (I don’t know how he brought about the connexion) between
+Bishop Berkeley and Tom Paine. He said the one was an instance of a
+subtle, the other of an acute mind, than which no two things could be
+more distinct. The one was a shop-boy’s quality, the other the
+characteristic of a philosopher. He considered Bishop Butler as a true
+philosopher, a profound and conscientious thinker, a genuine reader of
+nature and his own mind. He did not speak of his _Analogy_, but of his
+_Sermons at the Rolls’ Chapel_, of which I had never heard. Coleridge
+somehow always contrived to prefer the _unknown_ to the _known_. In
+this instance he was right. The _Analogy_ is a tissue of sophistry, of
+wire-drawn, theological special-pleading; the _Sermons_ (with the
+Preface to them) are in a fine vein of deep, matured reflection, a
+candid appeal to our observation of human nature, without pedantry and
+without bias. I told Coleridge I had written a few remarks, and was
+sometimes foolish enough to believe that I had made a discovery on the
+same subject (the _Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind_)--and
+I tried to explain my view of it to Coleridge, who listened with great
+willingness, but I did not succeed in making myself understood. I sat
+down to the task shortly afterwards for the twentieth time, got new
+pens and paper, determined to make clear work of it, wrote a few
+meagre sentences in the skeleton style of a mathematical
+demonstration, stopped half-way down the second page; and, after
+trying in vain to pump up any words, images, notions, apprehensions,
+facts, or observations, from that gulf of abstraction in which I had
+plunged myself for four or five years preceding, gave up the attempt
+as labour in vain, and shed tears of helpless despondency on the blank
+unfinished paper. I can write fast enough now. Am I better than I was
+then? Oh no! One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being
+able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in
+the world. Would that I could go back to what I then was! Why can we
+not revive past times as we can revisit old places? If I had the
+quaint Muse of Sir Philip Sidney to assist me, I would write a _Sonnet
+to the Road between Wem and Shrewsbury_, and immortalize every step
+of it by some fond enigmatical conceit. I would swear that the very
+milestones had ears, and that Harmer-hill stooped with all its pines,
+to listen to a poet, as he passed! I remember but one other topic of
+discourse in this walk. He mentioned Paley, praised the naturalness
+and clearness of his style, but condemned his sentiments, thought him
+a mere time-serving casuist, and said that ‘the fact of his work on
+Moral and Political Philosophy being made a text-book in our
+Universities was a disgrace to the national character.’ We parted at
+the six-mile stone; and I returned homeward pensive but much pleased.
+I had met with unexpected notice from a person whom I believed to have
+been prejudiced against me. ‘Kind and affable to me had been his
+condescension, and should be honoured ever with suitable regard.’ He
+was the first poet I had known, and he certainly answered to that
+inspired name. I had heard a great deal of his powers of conversation,
+and was not disappointed. In fact, I never met with any thing at all
+like them, either before or since. I could easily credit the accounts
+which were circulated of his holding forth to a large party of ladies
+and gentlemen, an evening or two before, on the Berkeleian Theory,
+when he made the whole material universe look like a transparency of
+fine words; and another story (which I believe he has somewhere told
+himself) of his being asked to a party at Birmingham, of his smoking
+tobacco and going to sleep after dinner on a sofa, where the company
+found him to their no small surprise, which was increased to wonder
+when he started up of a sudden, and rubbing his eyes, looked about
+him, and launched into a three hours’ description of the third
+heaven, of which he had had a dream, very different from Mr. Southey’s
+Vision of Judgement, and also from that other Vision of Judgement,
+which Mr. Murray, the Secretary of the Bridge Street Junto, has taken
+into his especial keeping.
+
+On my way back, I had a sound in my ears, it was the voice of Fancy: I
+had a light before me, it was the face of Poetry. The one still
+lingers there, the other has not quitted my side! Coleridge in truth
+met me half-way on the ground of philosophy, or I should not have been
+won over to his imaginative creed. I had an uneasy, pleasurable
+sensation all the time, till I was to visit him. During those months
+the chill breath of winter gave me a welcoming; the vernal air was
+balm and inspiration to me. The golden sunsets, the silver star of
+evening, lighted me on my way to new hopes and prospects. _I was to
+visit Coleridge in the Spring._ This circumstance was never absent
+from my thoughts, and mingled with all my feelings. I wrote to him at
+the time proposed, and received an answer postponing my intended visit
+for a week or two, but very cordially urging me to complete my promise
+then. This delay did not damp, but rather increase my ardour. In the
+meantime I went to Llangollen Vale, by way of initiating myself in the
+mysteries of natural scenery; and I must say I was enchanted with it.
+I had been reading Coleridge’s description of England, in his fine
+_Ode on the Departing Year_, and I applied it, _con amore_, to the
+objects before me. That valley was to me (in a manner) the cradle of a
+new existence: in the river that winds through it, my spirit was
+baptized in the waters of Helicon!
+
+I returned home, and soon after set out on my journey with unworn
+heart and untried feet. My way lay through Worcester and Gloucester,
+and by Upton, where I thought of Tom Jones and the adventure of the
+muff. I remember getting completely wet through one day, and stopping
+at an inn (I think it was at Tewkesbury) where I sat up all night to
+read _Paul and Virginia_. Sweet were the showers in early youth that
+drenched my body, and sweet the drops of pity that fell upon the books
+I read! I recollect a remark of Coleridge’s upon this very book, that
+nothing could show the gross indelicacy of French manners and the
+entire corruption of their imagination more strongly than the
+behaviour of the heroine in the last fatal scene, who turns away from
+a person on board the sinking vessel, that offers to save her life,
+because he has thrown off his clothes to assist him in swimming. Was
+this a time to think of such a circumstance? I once hinted to
+Wordsworth, as we were sailing in his boat on Grasmere lake, that I
+thought he had borrowed the idea of his _Poems on the Naming of
+Places_ from the local inscriptions of the same kind in _Paul and
+Virginia_. He did not own the obligation, and stated some distinction
+without a difference, in defence of his claim to originality. And the
+slightest variation would be sufficient for this purpose in his mind;
+for whatever _he_ added or omitted would inevitably be worth all that
+any one else had done, and contain the marrow of the sentiment.--I was
+still two days before the time fixed for my arrival, for I had taken
+care to set out early enough. I stopped these two days at Bridgewater,
+and when I was tired of sauntering on the banks of its muddy river,
+returned to the inn, and read _Camilla_. So have I loitered my life
+away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing,
+thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one
+thing to make me happy; but wanting that, have wanted everything!
+
+I arrived, and was well received. The country about Nether Stowey is
+beautiful, green and hilly, and near the sea-shore. I saw it but the
+other day, after an interval of twenty years, from a hill near
+Taunton. How was the map of my life spread out before me, as the map
+of the country lay at my feet! In the afternoon, Coleridge took me
+over to All-Foxden, a romantic old family mansion of the St. Aubins,
+where Wordsworth lived. It was then in the possession of a friend of
+the poet’s, who gave him the free use of it. Somehow that period (the
+time just after the French Revolution) was not a time when _nothing
+was given for nothing_. The mind opened, and a softness might be
+perceived coming over the heart of individuals, beneath ‘the scales
+that fence’ our self-interest. Wordsworth himself was from home, but
+his sister kept house, and set before us a frugal repast; and we had
+free access to her brother’s poems, the _Lyrical Ballads_, which were
+still in manuscript, or in the form of _Sibylline Leaves_. I dipped
+into a few of these with great satisfaction, and with the faith of a
+novice. I slept that night in an old room with blue hangings, and
+covered with the round-faced family-portraits of the age of George I
+and II, and from the wooded declivity of the adjoining park that
+overlooked my window, at the dawn of day, could
+
+    ----hear the loud stag speak.
+
+In the outset of life (and particularly at this time I felt it so) our
+imagination has a body to it. We are in a state between sleeping and
+waking, and have indistinct but glorious glimpses of strange shapes,
+and there is always something to come better than what we see. As in
+our dreams the fullness of the blood gives warmth and reality to the
+coinage of the brain, so in youth our ideas are clothed, and fed, and
+pampered with our good spirits; we breathe thick with thoughtless
+happiness, the weight of future years presses on the strong pulses of
+the heart, and we repose with undisturbed faith in truth and good. As
+we advance, we exhaust our fund of enjoyment and of hope. We are no
+longer wrapped in _lamb’s-wool_, lulled in Elysium. As we taste the
+pleasures of life, their spirit evaporates, the sense palls; and
+nothing is left but the phantoms, the lifeless shadows of what _has
+been_!
+
+That morning, as soon as breakfast was over, we strolled out into the
+park, and seating ourselves on the trunk of an old ash-tree that
+stretched along the ground, Coleridge read aloud with a sonorous and
+musical voice, the ballad of _Betty Foy_. I was not critically or
+sceptically inclined. I saw touches of truth and nature, and took the
+rest for granted. But in the _Thorn_, the _Mad Mother_, and the
+_Complaint of a Poor Indian Woman_, I felt that deeper power and
+pathos which have been since acknowledged,
+
+    In spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
+
+as the characteristics of this author; and the sense of a new style
+and a new spirit in poetry came over me. It had to me something of
+the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of
+the first welcome breath of Spring,
+
+    While yet the trembling year is unconfirmed.
+
+Coleridge and myself walked back to Stowey that evening, and his voice
+sounded high
+
+    Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
+    Fix’d fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,
+
+as we passed through echoing grove, by fairy stream or waterfall,
+gleaming in the summer moonlight! He lamented that Wordsworth was not
+prone enough to believe in the traditional superstitions of the place,
+and that there was a something corporeal, a _matter-of-fact-ness_, a
+clinging to the palpable, or often to the petty, in his poetry, in
+consequence. His genius was not a spirit that descended to him through
+the air; it sprung out of the ground like a flower, or unfolded itself
+from a green spray, on which the goldfinch sang. He said, however (if
+I remember right), that this objection must be confined to his
+descriptive pieces, that his philosophic poetry had a grand and
+comprehensive spirit in it, so that his soul seemed to inhabit the
+universe like a palace, and to discover truth by intuition, rather
+than by deduction. The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at
+Coleridge’s cottage. I think I see him now. He answered in some degree
+to his friend’s description of him, but was more gaunt and Don
+Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the _costume_ of
+that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped
+pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not
+unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe, worn pressure of
+thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw something
+in objects more than the outward appearance), an intense high narrow
+forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose and feeling,
+and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal
+at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of his
+face. Chantrey’s bust wants the marking traits; but he was teased into
+making it regular and heavy: Haydon’s head of him, introduced into the
+_Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem_, is the most like his drooping
+weight of thought and expression. He sat down and talked very
+naturally and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his
+voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the
+northern _burr_, like the crust on wine. He instantly began to make
+havoc of the half of a Cheshire cheese on the table, and said
+triumphantly that ‘his marriage with experience had not been so
+productive as Mr. Southey’s in teaching him a knowledge of the good
+things of this life.’ He had been to see the _Castle Spectre_ by Monk
+Lewis, while at Bristol, and described it very well. He said ‘it
+fitted the taste of the audience like a glove.’ This _ad captandum_
+merit was, however, by no means a recommendation of it, according to
+the severe principles of the new school, which reject rather than
+court popular effect. Wordsworth, looking out of the low, latticed
+window, said, ‘How beautifully the sun sets on that yellow bank!’ I
+thought within myself, ‘With what eyes these poets see nature!’ and
+ever after, when I saw the sunset stream upon the objects facing it,
+conceived I had made a discovery, or thanked Mr. Wordsworth for
+having made one for me! We went over to All-Foxden again the day
+following, and Wordsworth read us the story of Peter Bell in the open
+air; and the comment made upon it by his face and voice was very
+different from that of some later critics! Whatever might be thought
+of the poem, ‘his face was as a book where men might read strange
+matters,’ and he announced the fate of his hero in prophetic tones.
+There is a _chaunt_ in the recitation both of Coleridge and
+Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the
+judgement. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual
+use of this ambiguous accompaniment. Coleridge’s manner is more full,
+animated, and varied; Wordsworth’s more equable, sustained, and
+internal. The one might be termed more _dramatic_, the other more
+_lyrical_. Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in
+walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling
+branches of a copse wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he
+could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot
+where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption.
+Returning that same evening, I got into a metaphysical argument with
+Wordsworth, while Coleridge was explaining the different notes of the
+nightingale to his sister, in which we neither of us succeeded in
+making ourselves perfectly clear and intelligible. Thus I passed three
+weeks at Nether Stowey and in the neighbourhood, generally devoting
+the afternoons to a delightful chat in an arbour made of bark by the
+poet’s friend Tom Poole, sitting under two fine elm-trees, and
+listening to the bees humming round us, while we quaffed our _flip_.
+It was agreed, among other things, that we should make a jaunt down
+the Bristol Channel, as far as Lynton. We set off together on foot,
+Coleridge, John Chester, and I. This Chester was a native of Nether
+Stowey, one of those who were attracted to Coleridge’s discourse as
+flies are to honey, or bees in swarming-time to the sound of a brass
+pan. He ‘followed in the chace, like a dog who hunts, not like one
+that made up the cry.’ He had on a brown cloth coat, boots, and
+corduroy breeches, was low in stature, bow-legged, had a drag in his
+walk like a drover, which he assisted by a hazel switch, and kept on a
+sort of trot by the side of Coleridge, like a running footman by a
+state coach, that he might not lose a syllable or sound, that fell
+from Coleridge’s lips. He told me his private opinion, that Coleridge
+was a wonderful man. He scarcely opened his lips, much less offered an
+opinion the whole way: yet of the three, had I to choose during that
+journey, I would be John Chester. He afterwards followed Coleridge
+into Germany, where the Kantean philosophers were puzzled how to bring
+him under any of their categories. When he sat down at table with his
+idol, John’s felicity was complete; Sir Walter Scott’s, or Mr.
+Blackwood’s, when they sat down at the same table with the King, was
+not more so. We passed Dunster on our right, a small town between the
+brow of a hill and the sea. I remember eyeing it wistfully as it lay
+below us: contrasted with the woody scene around, it looked as clear,
+as pure, as _embrowned_ and ideal as any landscape I have seen since,
+of Gaspar Poussin’s or Domenichino’s. We had a long day’s march--(our
+feet kept time to the echoes of Coleridge’s tongue)--through Minehead
+and by the Blue Anchor, and on to Lynton, which we did not reach till
+near midnight, and where we had some difficulty in making a lodgement.
+We, however, knocked the people of the house up at last, and we were
+repaid for our apprehensions and fatigue by some excellent rashers of
+fried bacon and eggs. The view in coming along had been splendid. We
+walked for miles and miles on dark brown heaths overlooking the
+channel, with the Welsh hills beyond, and at times descended into
+little sheltered valleys close by the sea-side, with a smuggler’s face
+scowling by us, and then had to ascend conical hills with a path
+winding up through a coppice to a barren top, like a monk’s shaven
+crown, from one of which I pointed out to Coleridge’s notice the bare
+masts of a vessel on the very edge of the horizon, and within the
+red-orbed disk of the setting sun, like his own spectre-ship in the
+_Ancient Mariner_. At Lynton the character of the sea-coast becomes
+more marked and rugged. There is a place called the ‘Valley of Rocks’
+(I suspect this was only the poetical name for it) bedded among
+precipices overhanging the sea, with rocky caverns beneath, into which
+the waves dash, and where the sea-gull for ever wheels its screaming
+flight. On the tops of these are huge stones thrown transverse, as if
+an earthquake had tossed them there, and behind these is a fretwork of
+perpendicular rocks, something like the ‘Giant’s Causeway’. A
+thunder-storm came on while we were at the inn, and Coleridge was
+running out bareheaded to enjoy the commotion of the elements in the
+‘Valley of Rocks’, but as if in spite, the clouds only muttered a few
+angry sounds, and let fall a few refreshing drops. Coleridge told me
+that he and Wordsworth were to have made this place the scene of a
+prose-tale, which was to have been in the manner of, but far superior
+to, the _Death of Abel_, but they had relinquished the design. In the
+morning of the second day, we breakfasted luxuriously in an
+old-fashioned parlour on tea, toast, eggs, and honey, in the very
+sight of the bee-hives from which it had been taken, and a garden full
+of thyme and wild flowers that had produced it. On this occasion
+Coleridge spoke of Virgil’s _Georgics_, but not well. I do not think
+he had much feeling for the classical or elegant. It was in this room
+that we found a little worn-out copy of the _Seasons_, lying in a
+window-seat, on which Coleridge exclaimed, ‘_That_ is true fame!’ He
+said Thomson was a great poet, rather than a good one; his style was
+as meretricious as his thoughts were natural. He spoke of Cowper as
+the best modern poet. He said the _Lyrical Ballads_ were an experiment
+about to be tried by him and Wordsworth, to see how far the public
+taste would endure poetry written in a more natural and simple style
+than had hitherto been attempted; totally discarding the artifices of
+poetical diction, and making use only of such words as had probably
+been common in the most ordinary language since the days of Henry II.
+Some comparison was introduced between Shakespeare and Milton. He said
+‘he hardly knew which to prefer. Shakespeare appeared to him a mere
+stripling in the art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely
+more activity than Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man’s
+estate; or if he had, he would not have been a man, but a monster.’ He
+spoke with contempt of Gray, and with intolerance of Pope. He did not
+like the versification of the latter. He observed that ‘the ears of
+these couplet-writers might be charged with having short memories,
+that could not retain the harmony of whole passages.’ He thought
+little of Junius as a writer; he had a dislike of Dr. Johnson; and a
+much higher opinion of Burke as an orator and politician, than of Fox
+or Pitt. He however thought him very inferior in richness of style and
+imagery to some of our elder prose-writers, particularly Jeremy
+Taylor. He liked Richardson, but not Fielding; nor could I get him to
+enter into the merits of _Caleb Williams_.[16] In short, he was
+profound and discriminating with respect to those authors whom he
+liked, and where he gave his judgement fair play; capricious,
+perverse, and prejudiced in his antipathies and distastes. We loitered
+on the ‘ribbed sea-sands’, in such talk as this, a whole morning, and
+I recollect met with a curious sea-weed, of which John Chester told us
+the country name! A fisherman gave Coleridge an account of a boy that
+had been drowned the day before, and that they had tried to save him
+at the risk of their own lives. He said ‘he did not know how it was
+that they ventured, but, Sir, we have a _nature_ towards one another.’
+This expression, Coleridge remarked to me, was a fine illustration of
+that theory of disinterestedness which I (in common with Butler) had
+adopted. I broached to him an argument of mine to prove that
+_likeness_ was not mere association of ideas. I said that the mark in
+the sand put one in mind of a man’s foot, not because it was part of a
+former impression of a man’s foot (for it was quite new) but because
+it was like the shape of a man’s foot. He assented to the justness of
+this distinction (which I have explained at length elsewhere, for the
+benefit of the curious) and John Chester listened; not from any
+interest in the subject, but because he was astonished that I should
+be able to suggest anything to Coleridge that he did not already know.
+We returned on the third morning, and Coleridge remarked the silent
+cottage-smoke curling up the valleys where, a few evenings before, we
+had seen the lights gleaming through the dark.
+
+    [16] He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Raphael, and at
+    this time I had as little as he. He sometimes gives a
+    striking account at present of the Cartoons at Pisa by
+    Buffamalco and others; of one in particular, where Death is
+    seen in the air brandishing his scythe, and the great and
+    mighty of the earth shudder at his approach, while the
+    beggars and the wretched kneel to him as their deliverer. He
+    would, of course, understand so broad and fine a moral as
+    this at any time.
+
+In a day or two after we arrived at Stowey, we set out, I on my return
+home, and he for Germany. It was a Sunday morning, and he was to
+preach that day for Dr. Toulmin of Taunton. I asked him if he had
+prepared anything for the occasion? He said he had not even thought of
+the text, but should as soon as we parted. I did not go to hear
+him,--this was a fault,--but we met in the evening at Bridgewater. The
+next day we had a long day’s walk to Bristol, and sat down, I
+recollect, by a well-side on the road, to cool ourselves and satisfy
+our thirst, when Coleridge repeated to me some descriptive lines of
+his tragedy of _Remorse_; which I must say became his mouth and that
+occasion better than they, some years after, did Mr. Elliston’s and
+the Drury Lane boards,--
+
+    Oh memory! shield me from the world’s poor strife,
+    And give those scenes thine everlasting life.
+
+I saw no more of him for a year or two, during which period he had
+been wandering in the Hartz Forest in Germany; and his return was
+cometary, meteorous, unlike his setting out. It was not till some time
+after that I knew his friends Lamb and Southey. The last always
+appears to me (as I first saw him) with a commonplace book under his
+arm, and the first with a _bon-mot_ in his mouth. It was at Godwin’s
+that I met him with Holcroft and Coleridge, where they were disputing
+fiercely which was the best--_Man as he was, or man as he is to be_.
+‘Give me’, says Lamb, ‘man as he is _not_ to be.’ This saying was the
+beginning of a friendship between us, which I believe still
+continues.--Enough of this for the present.
+
+    But there is matter for another rhyme,
+    And I to this may add a second tale.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN KEBLE
+
+1792-1866
+
+SACRED POETRY (1825)
+
+_The Star in the East; with other Poems._ By Josiah Conder. London.
+1824.
+
+
+There are many circumstances about this little volume, which tend
+powerfully to disarm criticism. In the first place, it is, for the
+most part, of a _sacred_ character: taken up with those subjects which
+least of all admit, with propriety, either in the author or critic,
+the exercise of intellectual subtlety. For the _practical_ tendency,
+indeed, of such compositions, both are most deeply responsible; the
+author who publishes, and the critic who undertakes to recommend or to
+censure them. But if they appear to be written with any degree of
+sincerity and earnestness, we naturally shrink from treating them
+merely as literary efforts. To interrupt the current of a reader’s
+sympathy in such a case, by critical objections, is not merely to
+deprive him of a little harmless pleasure, it is to disturb him almost
+in a devotional exercise. The most considerate reviewer, therefore, of
+a volume of sacred poetry, will think it a subject on which it is
+easier to say too much than too little.
+
+In the present instance, this consideration is enforced by the
+unpretending tone of the volume, which bears internal evidence, for
+the most part, of not having been written to meet the eye of the
+world. It is in vain to say that this claim on the critic’s favour is
+nullified by publication. The author may give it up, and yet the work
+may retain it. We may still feel that we have no right to judge
+severely of what was not, at first, intended to come before our
+judgement at all. This of course applies only to those compositions,
+which indicate, by something within themselves, this freedom from the
+pretension of authorship. And such are most of those to which we are
+now bespeaking our readers’ attention.
+
+_Most_ of them, we say, because the first poem in the volume, _The
+Star in the East_, is of a more ambitious and less pleasing character.
+Although in blank verse, it is, in fact, a lyrical effusion; an ode on
+the rapid progress and final triumph of the Gospel. It looks like the
+composition of a young man: harsh and turgid in parts, but
+interspersed with some rather beautiful touches. The opening lines are
+a fair specimen.
+
+    O to have heard th’ unearthly symphonies,
+    Which o’er the starlight peace of Syrian skies
+    Came floating like a dream, that blessed night
+    When angel songs were heard by sinful men,
+    Hymning Messiah’s advent! O to have watch’d
+    The night with those poor shepherds, whom, when first
+    The glory of the Lord shed sudden day--
+    Day without dawn, starting from midnight, day
+    Brighter than morning--on those lonely hills
+    Strange fear surpris’d--fear lost in wondering joy,
+    When from th’ angelic multitude swell’d forth
+    The many-voicèd consonance of praise:--
+    Glory in th’ highest to God, and upon earth
+    Peace, towards men good will. But once before,
+    In such glad strains of joyous fellowship,
+    The silent earth was greeted by the heavens,
+    When at its first foundation they looked down
+    From their bright orbs, those heavenly ministries,
+    Hailing the new-born world with bursts of joy.
+
+Notwithstanding beauties scattered here and there, there is an effort
+and constrained stateliness in the poem, very different from the
+rapidity and simplicity of many of the shorter lyrics, which follow
+under the titles of Sacred and Domestic Poems. Such, for instance, as
+the Poor Man’s Hymn
+
+    As much have I of worldly good
+      As e’er my master had:
+    I diet on as dainty food,
+      And am as richly clad,
+    Tho’ plain my garb, though scant my board,
+    As Mary’s Son and Nature’s Lord.
+
+    The manger was his infant bed,
+      His home, the mountain-cave,
+    He had not where to lay his head,
+      He borrow’d even his grave.
+    Earth yielded him no resting spot,--
+    Her Maker, but she knew him not.
+
+    As much the world’s good will I bear,
+      Its favours and applause,
+    As He, whose blessed name I bear,--
+      Hated without a cause,
+    Despis’d, rejected, mock’d by pride,
+    Betray’d, forsaken, crucified.
+
+    Why should I court my Master’s foe?
+      Why should I fear its frown?
+    Why should I seek for rest below,
+      Or sigh for brief renown?--
+    A pilgrim to a better land,
+    An heir of joys at GOD’s right hand?
+
+Or the following sweet lines on Home, which occur among the Domestic
+poems:
+
+    That is not home, where day by day
+    I wear the busy hours away.
+    That is not home, where lonely night
+    Prepares me for the toils of light--
+    ’Tis hope, and joy, and memory, give
+    A home in which the heart can live--
+    These walls no lingering hopes endear,
+    No fond remembrance chains me here,
+    Cheerless I heave the lonely sigh--
+    Eliza, canst thou tell me why?
+    ’Tis where thou art is home to me,
+    And home without thee cannot be.
+
+    There are who strangely love to roam,
+    And find in wildest haunts their home;
+    And some in halls of lordly state,
+    Who yet are homeless, desolate.
+    The sailor’s home is on the main,
+    The warrior’s, on the tented plain,
+    The maiden’s, in her bower of rest,
+    The infant’s, on his mother’s breast--
+    But where thou art is home to me,
+    And home without thee cannot be.
+
+    There is no home in halls of pride,
+    They are too high, and cold, and wide.
+    No home is by the wanderer found:
+    ’Tis not in place: it hath no bound.
+    It is a circling atmosphere
+    Investing all the heart holds dear;--
+    A law of strange attractive force,
+    That holds the feelings in their course;
+
+    It is a presence undefin’d,
+    O’er-shadowing the conscious mind,
+    Where love and duty sweetly blend
+    To consecrate the name of friend;--
+    Where’er thou art is home to me,
+    And home without thee cannot be.
+
+    My love, forgive the anxious sigh--
+    I hear the moments rushing by,
+    And think that life is fleeting fast,
+    That youth with us will soon be past.
+    Oh! when will time, consenting, give
+    The home in which my heart can live?
+    There shall the past and future meet,
+    And o’er our couch, in union sweet,
+    Extend their cherub wings, and shower
+    Bright influence on the present hour,
+    Oh! when shall Israel’s mystic guide,
+    The pillar’d cloud, our steps decide,
+    Then, resting, spread its guardian shade,
+    To bless the home which love hath made?
+    Daily, my love, shall thence arise
+    Our hearts’ united sacrifice;
+    And home indeed a home will be,
+    Thus consecrate and shar’d with thee.
+
+We will add one more specimen of the same kind, which forms a natural
+and pleasing appendix to the preceding lines.
+
+    Louise! you wept, that morn of gladness
+      Which made your Brother blest;
+    And tears of half-reproachful sadness
+      Fell on the Bridegroom’s vest:
+    Yet, pearly tears were those, to gem
+    A Sister’s bridal diadem.
+
+    No words could half so well have spoken,
+      What thus was deeply shown
+    By Nature’s simplest, dearest token,
+      How much was then my own;
+    Endearing her for whom they fell,
+    And Thee, for having loved so well.
+
+    But now no more--nor let a Brother,
+      Louise, regretful see,
+    That still ’tis sorrow to another,
+      That he should happy be.
+    Those were, I trust, the only tears
+    That day shall cost through coming years.
+
+    Smile with us. Happy and light-hearted,
+      We three the time will while.
+    And, when sometimes a season parted,
+      Still think of us, and smile.
+    But come to us in gloomy weather;
+    We’ll weep, when we must weep, together.
+
+Now, what is the reason of the great difference between these extracts
+and that from the _Star in the East_?--a difference which the earlier
+date of the latter, so far from accounting for, only makes the more
+extraordinary. In some instances, the interval of time is very short,
+but at all events more effort and turgidness might have been expected
+in the earlier poems, more simplicity and care and a more subdued tone
+in the later. We suspect a reason, which both poets and poetical
+readers are too apt to leave out of sight. There is a want of _truth_
+in the _Star in the East_--not that the author is otherwise than quite
+in earnest--but his earnestness seems rather an artificial glow, to
+which he has been worked up by reading and conversation of a
+particular cast, than the overflowing warmth of his own natural
+feelings, kindled by circumstances in which he was himself placed. In
+a word, when he writes of the success of the Bible Society, and the
+supposed amelioration of the world in consequence, he writes from
+report and fancy only; but when he speaks of a happy home, of kindly
+affections, of the comforts which piety can administer in
+disappointment and sorrow; either we are greatly mistaken, or he
+speaks from real and present experience. The poetical result is what
+the reader has seen:
+
+        ----mens onus reponit, et peregrino
+    Labore fessi venimus Larem ad nostrum--
+
+We turn gladly from our fairy voyage round the world to refresh
+ourselves with a picture, which we feel to be drawn from the life, of
+a happy and innocent fireside. Nor is it, in the slightest degree,
+derogatory to an author’s talent to say that he has failed,
+comparatively, on that subject of which he must have known
+comparatively little.
+
+Let us here pause a moment to explain what is meant when we speak of
+such prospects as are above alluded to, being shadowy and unreal in
+respect of what is matter of experience. It is not that we doubt the
+tenor of the Scripture, regarding the final conversion of the whole
+world, or that we close our eyes to the wonderful arrangements, if the
+expression may be used, which Divine Providence seems everywhere
+making, with a view to that great consummation. One circumstance, in
+particular, arrests our attention, as pervading the whole of modern
+history, but gradually standing out in a stronger light as the view
+draws nearer our own times: we mean the rapid increase of colonization
+_from Christian nations only_. So that the larger half of the globe,
+and what in the nature of things will soon become the more populous,
+is already, in profession, Christian. The event, therefore, is
+unquestionable: but experience, we fear, will hardly warrant the
+exulting anticipations, which our author, in common with many of whose
+sincerity there is no reason to doubt, has raised upon it. It is but
+too conceivable that the whole world may become nominally Christian,
+yet the face of things may be very little changed for the better. And
+any view of the progress of the gospel, whether in verse or in prose,
+which leaves out this possibility, is so far wanting in truth, and in
+that depth of thought which is as necessary to the higher kinds of
+poetical beauty as to philosophy or theology itself.
+
+This, however, is too solemn and comprehensive a subject to be lightly
+or hastily spoken of. It is enough to have glanced at it, as
+accounting, in some measure, for the general failure of modern poets
+in their attempts to describe the predicted triumph of the gospel in
+the latter days.
+
+To return to the sacred and domestic poems, thus advantageously
+distinguished from that which gives name to the volume. Affection,
+whether heavenly or earthly, is the simplest idea that can be; and in
+the graceful and harmonious expression of it lies the principal beauty
+of these poems. In the descriptive parts, and in the development of
+abstract sentiment, there is more of effort, and occasionally
+something very like affectation: approaching, in one instance (the
+_Nightingale_,) far nearer than we could wish, to the most vicious of
+all styles, the style of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his miserable followers.
+
+Now, these are just the sort of merit and the sort of defect, which
+one might naturally expect to find united; the very simplicity of
+attachment, which qualifies the mind for sacred or domestic poetry,
+making its movements awkward and constrained, when scenes are to be
+described, or thoughts unravelled of more complication and less
+immediate interest. This is the rather to be observed, as many other
+sacred poets have become less generally pleasing and useful, than they
+otherwise would have been, from this very circumstance. The simple and
+touching devoutness of many of Bishop Ken’s lyrical effusions has been
+unregarded, because of the ungraceful contrivances, and heavy movement
+of his narrative. The same may be said, in our own times, of some
+parts of Montgomery’s writings. His bursts of sacred poetry, compared
+with his _Greenland_, remind us of a person singing enchantingly by
+ear, but becoming languid and powerless the moment he sits down to a
+note-book.
+
+Such writers, it is obvious, do not sufficiently trust to the command
+which the simple expression of their feelings would obtain over their
+readers. They think it must be relieved with something of more variety
+and imagery, to which they work themselves up with laborious, and
+therefore necessarily unsuccessful, efforts. The model for correcting
+their error is to be found in the inspired volume. We can, in general,
+be but incompetent judges of this, because we have been used to it
+from our boyhood. But let us suppose a person, whose ideas of poetry
+were entirely gathered from modern compositions, taking up the Psalms
+for the first time. Among many other remarkable differences, he would
+surely be impressed with the sacred writer’s total carelessness about
+originality, and what is technically called _effect_. He would say,
+‘This is something better than merely attractive poetry; it is
+absolute and divine truth.’ The same remark ought to be suggested by
+all sacred hymns; and it is, indeed, greatly to be lamented, that such
+writers as we have just mentioned should have ever lost sight of
+it--should have had so little confidence in the power of simplicity,
+and have condescended so largely to the laborious refinements of the
+profane Muse.
+
+To put the same truth in a light somewhat different; it is required,
+we apprehend, in all poets, but particularly in sacred poets, that
+they should seem to write with a view of unburthening their minds, and
+not for the sake of writing; for love of the subject, not of the
+employment. The distinction is very striking in descriptive poetry.
+Compare the landscapes of Cowper with those of Burns. There is, if we
+mistake not, the same sort of difference between them, as in the
+conversation of two persons on scenery, the one originally an
+enthusiast in his love of the works of nature, the other driven, by
+disappointment or weariness, to solace himself with them as he might.
+It is a contrast which every one must have observed, when such topics
+come under discussion in society; and those who think it worth while,
+may find abundant illustration of it in the writings of this
+unfortunate but illustrious pair. The one all overflowing with the
+love of nature, and indicating, at every turn, that whatever his lot
+in life, he could not have been happy without her. The other visibly
+and wisely soothing himself, but not without effort, by attending to
+rural objects, in default of some more congenial happiness, of which
+he had almost come to despair. The latter, in consequence, laboriously
+sketching every object that came in his way: the other, in one or two
+rapid lines, which operate, as it were, like a magician’s spell,
+presenting to the fancy just that picture, which was wanted to put the
+reader’s mind in unison with the writer’s. We would quote, as an
+instance, the description of Evening in the Fourth Book of the _Task_:
+
+    Come Ev’ning, once again, season of peace;
+    Return, sweet Ev’ning, and continue long!
+    Methinks I see thee in the streaking west
+    With matron-step slow-moving, while the night
+    Treads on thy sweeping train; one hand employ’d
+    In letting fall the curtain of repose
+    On bird and beast, the other charg’d for man
+    With sweet oblivion of the cares of day:
+    Not sumptuously adorn’d, nor needing aid,
+    Like homely-featur’d night, of clust’ring gems;
+    A star or two, just twinkling on thy brow,
+    Suffices thee; save that the moon is thine
+    No less than her’s, not worn indeed on high
+    With ostentatious pageantry, but set
+    With modest grandeur in thy purple zone,
+    Resplendent less, but of an ampler round.
+    Come then, and thou shalt find thy vot’ry calm,
+    Or make me so. Composure is thy gift.
+
+And we would set over against it that purely pastoral chant:
+
+    Now rosy May comes in wi’ flowers
+    To deck her gay, green spreading bowers;
+    And now comes in my happy hours,
+      To wander wi’ my Davie.
+        Meet me on the warlock knowe,
+          Dainty Davie, dainty Davie,
+        There I’ll spend the day wi’ you,
+          My ain dear dainty Davie.
+
+    The crystal waters round us fa’,
+    The merry birds are lovers a’,
+    The scented breezes round us blaw,
+      A wandering wi’ my Davie.
+        Meet me, &c.
+
+    When purple morning starts the hare
+    To steal upon her early fare,
+    Then thro’ the dews I will repair,
+      To meet my faithful Davie.
+        Meet me, &c.
+
+    When day, expiring in the west,
+    The curtain draws o’ nature’s rest,
+    I flee to his arms I lo’e best,
+      And that’s my ain dear Davie.
+        Meet me, &c.
+
+There is surely no need to explain how this instinctive attachment to
+his subject is especially requisite in the sacred poet. If even the
+description of material objects is found to languish without it, much
+more will it be looked for when the best and highest of all affections
+is to be expressed and communicated to others. The nobler and worthier
+the object, the greater our disappointment to find it approached with
+anything like languor or constraint.
+
+We must just mention one more quality, which may seem, upon
+consideration, essential to perfection in this kind: viz. that the
+feelings the writer expresses should appear to be specimens of his
+general tone of thought, not sudden bursts and mere flashes of
+goodness. Wordsworth’s beautiful description of the Stock-dove might
+not unaptly be applied to him. He should sing
+
+                   ‘of love with silence blending,
+    Slow to begin, yet never ending,
+    Of serious faith and inward glee’.
+
+Some may, perhaps, object to this, as a dull and languid strain of
+sentiment. But before we yield to their censures we would inquire of
+them what style they consider, themselves, as most appropriate to
+similar subjects in a kindred art. If grave, simple, sustained
+melodies--if tones of deep but subdued emotion are what our minds
+naturally suggest to us upon the mention of sacred _music_--why should
+there not be something analogous, a kind of plain chant, in sacred
+_poetry_ also? fervent, yet sober; awful, but engaging; neither wild
+and passionate, nor light and airy; but such as we may with submission
+presume to be the most acceptable offering in its kind, as being
+indeed the truest expression of the best state of the affections. To
+many, perhaps to most, men, a tone of more violent emotion may sound
+at first more attractive. But before we _indulge_ such a preference,
+we should do well to consider, whether it is quite agreeable to that
+spirit, which alone can make us worthy readers of sacred poetry.
+‘Ἔνθεον ἥ ποιήσις’, it is true; there must be rapture and inspiration,
+but these will naturally differ in their character as the powers do
+from whom they proceed. The worshippers of Baal may be rude and
+frantic in their cries and gestures; but the true Prophet, speaking to
+or of the true GOD, is all dignity and calmness.
+
+If then, in addition to the ordinary difficulties of poetry, all these
+things are essential to the success of the Christian lyrist--if what
+he sets before us must be true in substance, and in manner marked by a
+noble simplicity and confidence in that truth, by a sincere attachment
+to it, and entire familiarity with it--then we need not wonder that so
+few should have become eminent in this branch of their art, nor need
+we have recourse to the disheartening and unsatisfactory solutions
+which are sometimes given of that circumstance.
+
+     ‘Contemplative piety,’ says Dr. Johnson, ‘or the intercourse
+     between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man,
+     admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the
+     merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than
+     poetry can confer.’[17]
+
+    [17] _Life of Waller._
+
+The sentiment is not uncommon among serious, but somewhat fearful,
+believers; and though we believe it erroneous, we desire to treat it
+not only with tenderness, but with reverence. They start at the very
+mention of sacred poetry, as though poetry were in its essence a
+profane amusement. It is, unquestionably, by far the safer extreme to
+be too much afraid of venturing with the imagination upon sacred
+ground. Yet, if it be an error, and a practical error, it may be worth
+while cautiously to examine the grounds of it. In the generality,
+perhaps, it is not so much a deliberate opinion, as a prejudice
+against the use of the art, arising out of its abuse. But the great
+writer just referred to has endeavoured to establish it by direct
+reasoning. He argues the point, first, from the nature of poetry, and
+afterwards from that of devotion.
+
+     The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by
+     producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The
+     topics of devotion are few.
+
+It is to be hoped that many men’s experience will refute the latter
+part of this statement. How can the topics of devotion be few, when we
+are taught to make every part of life, every scene in nature, an
+occasion--in other words, a topic--of devotion? It might as well be
+said that connubial love is an unfit subject for poetry, as being
+incapable of novelty, because, after all, it is only ringing the
+changes upon one simple affection, which every one understands. The
+novelty there consists, not in the original topic, but in continually
+bringing ordinary things, by happy strokes of natural ingenuity, into
+new associations with the ruling passion.
+
+    There’s not a bonny flower that springs
+      By fountain, shaw, or green;
+    There’s not a bonnie bird that sings
+      But minds me of my Jean.
+
+Why need we fear to extend this most beautiful and natural sentiment
+to ‘the intercourse between the human soul and its Maker’, possessing,
+as we do, the very highest warrant for the analogy which subsists
+between conjugal and divine love?
+
+Novelty, therefore, sufficient for all the purposes of poetry, we may
+have on sacred subjects. Let us pass to the next objection.
+
+     Poetry pleases by exhibiting an idea more grateful to the
+     mind than things themselves afford. This effect proceeds
+     from the display of those parts of nature which attract,
+     and the concealment of those which repel, the imagination;
+     but religion must be shown as it is; suppression and
+     addition equally corrupt it; and, such as it is, it is known
+     already.
+
+A fallacy may be apprehended in both parts of this statement. There
+are, surely, real landscapes which delight the mind as sincerely and
+intensely as the most perfect description could; and there are family
+groups which give a more exquisite sensation of domestic happiness
+than anything in Milton, or even Shakespeare. It is partly by
+association with these, the treasures of the memory, and not
+altogether by mere excitement of the imagination, that Poetry does her
+work. By the same rule sacred pictures and sacred songs cannot fail to
+gratify the mind which is at all exercised in devotion; recalling, as
+they will, whatever of highest perfection in that way she can remember
+in herself, or has learned of others.
+
+Then again, it is not the religious doctrine itself, so much as the
+effect of it upon the human mind and heart, which the sacred poet has
+to describe. What is said of suppression and addition may be true
+enough with regard to the former, but is evidently incorrect when
+applied to the latter: it being an acknowledged difficulty in all
+devotional writings, and not in devotional verse only, to keep clear
+of the extreme of languor on the one hand, and debasing rapture on the
+other. This requires a delicacy in the perception and enunciation of
+truth, of which the most earnest believer may be altogether destitute.
+And since, probably, no man’s condition, in regard to eternal things,
+is exactly like that of any other man, and yet it is the business of
+the sacred poet to sympathize with all, his store of subjects is
+clearly inexhaustible, and his powers of discrimination--in other
+words, of suppression and addition--are kept in continual exercise.
+
+Nor is he, by any means, so straitly limited in the other and more
+difficult branch of his art, the exhibition of religious doctrine
+itself, as is supposed in the following statement:
+
+     Whatever is great, desirable, or tremendous, is comprised in
+     the name of the Supreme Being. Omnipotence cannot be
+     exalted; infinity cannot be amplified; perfection cannot be
+     improved.
+
+True: all perfection is implied in the name of GOD; and so all the
+beauties and luxuries of spring are comprised in that one word. But is
+it not the very office of poetry to develop and display the
+particulars of such complex ideas? in such a way, for example, as the
+idea of GOD’S omnipresence is developed in the 139th Psalm? and thus
+detaining the mind for a while, to force or help her to think steadily
+on truths which she would hurry unprofitably over, how strictly soever
+they may be implied in the language which she uses. It is really
+surprising that this great and acute critic did not perceive that the
+objection applies as strongly against any kind of composition of which
+the Divine Nature is the subject, as against devotional poems.
+
+We forbear to press the consideration that, even if the objection were
+allowed in respect of natural religion, it would not hold against the
+devotional compositions of a Christian; the object of whose worship
+has condescended also to become the object of description, affection,
+and sympathy, in the literal sense of these words. But this is,
+perhaps, too solemn and awful an argument for this place; and
+therefore we pass on to the concluding statement of the passage under
+consideration, in which the writer turns his view downwards, and
+argues against sacred poetry from the nature of man, as he had before
+from the nature of GOD.
+
+     The employments of pious meditation are faith, thanksgiving,
+     repentance and supplication. Faith, invariably uniform,
+     cannot be invested by fancy with decorations. Thanksgiving,
+     the most joyful of all holy effusions, yet addressed to a
+     Being without passions, is confined to a few modes, and is
+     to be felt rather than expressed.
+
+What we have said of the variation of the devout affections, as they
+exist in various persons, is sufficient, we apprehend, to answer this.
+But the rest of the paragraph requires some additional reflection:
+
+     Repentance, trembling in the presence of the Judge, is not
+     at leisure for cadences and epithets.
+
+This is rather invidiously put, and looks as if the author had not
+entire confidence in the truth of what he was saying. Indeed, it may
+very well be questioned; since many of the more refined passions, it
+is certain, naturally express themselves in poetical language. But
+repentance is not merely a passion, nor is its only office to tremble
+in the presence of the Judge. So far from it, that one great business
+of sacred poetry, as of sacred music, is to quiet and sober the
+feelings of the penitent--to make his compunction as much of ‘a
+reasonable service’ as possible.
+
+To proceed:
+
+     Supplication of man to man may diffuse itself through many
+     topics of persuasion: but supplication to God can only cry
+     for mercy.
+
+Certainly, this would be true, if the abstract nature of the Deity
+were alone considered. But if we turn to the sacred volume, which
+corrects so many of our erring anticipations, we there find that,
+whether in condescension to our infirmities, or for other wise
+purposes, we are furnished with inspired precedents for addressing
+ourselves to God in all the various tones, and by all the various
+topics, which we should use to a good and wise man standing in the
+highest and nearest relation to us. This is so palpably the case
+throughout the scriptures, that it is quite surprising how a person of
+so much serious thought as Dr. Johnson could have failed to recollect
+it when arguing on the subject of prayer. In fact, there is a simple
+test, by which, perhaps, the whole of his reasoning on Sacred Poetry
+might be fairly and decisively tried. Let the reader, as he goes over
+it, bear in mind the Psalms of David, and consider whether every one
+of his statements and arguments is not there practically refuted.
+
+It is not, then, because sacred subjects are peculiarly unapt for
+poetry, that so few sacred poets are popular. We have already glanced
+at some of the causes to which we attribute it--we ought to add
+another, which strikes us as important. Let us consider how the case
+stands with regard to books of devotion in _prose_.
+
+We may own it reluctantly, but must it not be owned? that if two new
+publications meet the eye at once, of which no more is known than that
+the one is what is familiarly called _a good book_, the other a work
+of mere literature, nine readers out of ten will take up the second
+rather than the first? If this be allowed, whatever accounts for it
+will contribute to account also for the comparative failure of
+devotional poetry. For this sort of coldness and languor in the reader
+must act upon the author in more ways than one. The large class who
+write for money or applause will of course be carried, by the tide of
+popularity, towards some other subject. Men of more sincere minds,
+either from true or false delicacy, will have little heart to expose
+their retired thoughts to the risk of mockery or neglect; and if they
+do venture, will be checked every moment, like an eager but bashful
+musician before a strange audience, not knowing how far the reader’s
+feelings will harmonize with their own. This leaves the field open, in
+a great measure, to harder or more enthusiastic spirits; who offending
+continually, in their several ways, against delicacy, the one by
+wildness, the other by coarseness, aggravate the evil which they
+wished to cure; till the sacred subject itself comes at last to bear
+the blame due to the indifference of the reader and the indiscretion
+of the writer.
+
+Such, we apprehend, would be a probable account of the condition of
+sacred poetry, in a country where religion was coldly acknowledged,
+and literature earnestly pursued. How far the description may apply to
+England and English literature, in their various changes since the
+Reformation--how far it may hold true of our own times--is an inquiry
+which would lead us too far at present; but it is surely worth
+considering. It goes deeper than any question of mere literary
+curiosity. It is a sort of test of the genuineness of those
+pretensions, which many of us are, perhaps, too forward to advance, to
+a higher state of morality and piety, as well as knowledge and
+refinement, than has been known elsewhere or in other times.
+
+Those who, in spite of such difficulties, desire in earnest to do good
+by the poetical talent, which they may happen to possess, have only,
+as it should seem, the following alternative. Either they must veil,
+as it were, the sacredness of the subject--not necessarily by
+allegory, for it may be done in a thousand other ways--and so deceive
+the world of taste into devotional reading--
+
+    Succhi amari intanto ei beve,
+    E dall’ inganno sua vita riceve--
+
+or else, directly avowing that their subject as well as purpose is
+devotion, they must be content with a smaller number of readers; a
+disadvantage, however, compensated by the fairer chance of doing good
+to each.
+
+It may be worth while to endeavour to trace this distinction, as
+exemplified in the most renowned of the sacred poets of England; and
+to glean from such a survey the best instruction we can, in the happy
+art of turning the most fascinating part of literature to the highest
+purposes of religion.
+
+We must premise that we limit the title of ‘sacred poet’ by excluding
+those who only devoted a small portion of their time and talent now
+and then, to sacred subjects. In all ages of our literary history it
+seems to have been considered almost as an essential part of a poet’s
+duty to give up some pages to scriptural story, or to the praise of
+his Maker, how remote so ever from anything like religion the general
+strain of his writings might be. Witness the Lamentation of Mary
+Magdalene in the works of Chaucer, and the beautiful legend of Hew of
+Lincoln, which he has inserted in his Canterbury Tales; witness also
+the hymns of Ben Jonson. But these fragments alone will not entitle
+their authors to be enrolled among sacred poets. They indicate the
+taste of their age, rather than their own; a fact which may be thought
+to stand rather in painful contrast with the literary history of later
+days.
+
+There is another class likewise, of whom little need be said in this
+place; we mean those who composed, strictly and only, for the sake of
+unburthening their own minds, without any thought of publication. But
+as Chaucer’s sacred effusions indicate chiefly the character of the
+times, so poems such as those we now allude to, mark only the turn of
+mind of the individual writers; and our present business is rather
+with that sort of poetry which combines both sorts of instruction;
+that, namely, which bears internal evidence of having been written by
+sincere men, with an intention of doing good, and with consideration
+of the taste of the age in which they lived.
+
+Recurring then to the distinction above laid down, between the direct
+and indirect modes of sacred poetry; at the head of the two classes,
+as the reader may perhaps have anticipated, we set the glorious names
+of Spenser and of Milton. The claim of Spenser to be considered as a
+sacred poet does by no means rest upon his hymns alone: although even
+those would be enough alone to embalm and consecrate the whole volume
+which contains them; as a splinter of the true cross is supposed by
+Catholic sailors to ensure the safety of the vessel. But whoever will
+attentively consider the _Faerie Queene_ itself, will find that it is,
+almost throughout, such as might have been expected from the author of
+those truly sacred hymns. It is a continual, deliberate endeavour to
+enlist the restless intellect and chivalrous feeling of an inquiring
+and romantic age, on the side of goodness and faith, of purity and
+justice.
+
+This position is to be made good, not solely or perhaps chiefly, yet
+with no small force, from the allegorical structure of the poem. Most
+of us, perhaps, are rather disposed to undervalue this contrivance;
+and even among the genuine admirers of Spenser, there are not a few
+who on purpose leave it out of their thoughts; finding, as they say,
+that it only embarrasses their enjoyment of the poetry. This is
+certainly far from reasonable: it is a relic of childish feeling, and
+mere love of amusement, which ill becomes any one who is old enough to
+appreciate the real beauties of Spenser. Yet it is so natural, so
+obviously to be expected, that we must suppose a scholar and
+philosopher (for such Spenser was, as well as a poet) to have been
+aware of it, and to have made up his mind to it, with all its
+disadvantages, for some strong reason or other. And what reason so
+likely as the hope of being seriously useful, both to himself and his
+readers?
+
+To _himself_, because the constant recurrence to his allegory would
+serve as a check upon a fancy otherwise too luxuriant, and would
+prevent him from indulging in such liberties as the Italian poets, in
+other respects his worthy masters, were too apt to take. The
+consequence is, that even in his freest passages, and those which one
+would most wish unwritten, Spenser is by no means a _seductive_ poet.
+Vice in him, however truly described, is always made contemptible or
+odious. The same may be said of Milton and Shakespeare; but Milton was
+of a cast of mind originally austere and rigorous. He looked on vice
+as a judge; Shakespeare, as a satirist. Spenser was far more indulgent
+than either, and acted therefore the more wisely in setting himself a
+rule, which should make it essential to the plan of his poem to be
+always recommending some virtue; and remind him, like a voice from
+heaven, that the place on which he was standing was holy ground.
+
+Then as to the benefit which the _readers_ of the _Faerie Queene_ may
+derive from its allegorical form; a good deal surely is to be gained
+from the mere habit of looking at things with a view to something
+beyond their qualities merely sensible; to their sacred and moral
+meaning, and to the high associations they were intended to create in
+us. Neither the works nor the word of God, neither poetry nor
+theology, can be duly comprehended without constant mental exercise of
+this kind. The comparison of the Old Testament with the New is nothing
+else from beginning to end. And without something of this sort,
+poetry, and all the other arts, would indeed be relaxing to the tone
+of the mind. The allegory obviates this ill effect, by serving as a
+frequent remembrancer of this higher application. Not that it is
+necessary to bend and strain everything into conformity with it; a
+little leaven, of the genuine kind, will go a good way towards
+leavening the whole lump. And so it is in the _Faerie Queene_; for one
+stanza of direct allegory there are perhaps fifty of poetical
+embellishment; and it is in these last, after all, that the chief
+moral excellency of the poem lies; as we are now about to show.
+
+But to be understood rightly, we would premise, that there is a
+disposition,--the very reverse of that which leads to parody and
+caricature,--which is common indeed to all generous minds, but is
+perhaps unrivalled in Spenser. As parody and caricature debase what is
+truly noble, by connecting it with low and ludicrous associations; so
+a mind, such as we are now speaking of, ennobles what of itself might
+seem trivial; its thoughts and language, on all occasions, taking a
+uniform and almost involuntary direction towards the best and highest
+things.
+
+This, however, is a subject which can be hardly comprehended without
+examples. The first which occurs to us is the passage which relates
+the origin of Belphœbe.
+
+    Her birth was of the womb of morning dew,
+    And her conception of the joyous prime,
+    And all her whole creation did her show
+    Pure and unspotted from all loathly crime
+    That is ingenerate in fleshly slime.
+    So was this Virgin born, so was she bred,
+    So was she trained up from time to time,
+    In all chaste virtue and true bounti-hed,
+    Till to her due perfection she was ripenèd.
+
+It is evident how high and sacred a subject was present to the poet’s
+mind in composing this stanza; and any person who is well read in the
+Bible, with a clue like this may satisfy himself that all Spenser’s
+writings are replete with similar tacit allusions to the language and
+the doctrines of sacred writ; allusions breathed, if we may so speak,
+rather than uttered, and much fitter to be silently considered, than
+to be dragged forward for quotation or minute criticism. Of course,
+the more numerous and natural such allusions are, the more entirely
+are we justified in the denomination we have ventured to bestow on
+their author, of a truly ‘sacred’ poet.
+
+It may be felt, as some derogation from this high character, what he
+has himself avowed--that much of his allegory has a turn designedly
+given it in honour of Queen Elizabeth; a turn which will be called
+courtly or adulatory according to the humour of the critic. But, in
+the first place, such was the custom of the times; it was adopted even
+in sermons by men whose sincerity it would be almost sacrilege to
+question. Then, the merits of Queen Elizabeth in respect of the
+Protestant cause were of that dazzling order, which might excuse a
+little poetical exuberance in her praise. And, what is very deserving
+of consideration, it is certain that the most gentle and generous
+spirits are commonly found laying themselves open to this charge of
+excessive compliment in addressing princes and patrons. Witness the
+high style adopted by the venerable Hooker, in speaking of this very
+Queen Elizabeth: ‘Whose sacred power, matched with incomparable
+goodness of nature, hath hitherto been God’s most happy instrument, by
+him miraculously kept for works of so miraculous preservation and
+safety unto others,’ &c. Another instance of the same kind may be seen
+in Jeremy Taylor’s dedication of his _Worthy Communicant_ to the
+Princess of Orange. Nor is it any wonder it should be so, since such
+men feel most ardently the blessing and benefit as well as the
+difficulty of whatever is right in persons of such exalted station;
+and are also most strongly tempted to bear their testimony against the
+illiberal and envious censures of the vulgar. All these things, duly
+weighed, may seem to leave little, if anything, in the panegyrical
+strains of this greatest of laureates, to be excused by the common
+infirmity of human nature; little to detract from our deliberate
+conviction that he was seriously guided, in the exercise of his art,
+by a sense of duty, and zeal for what is durably important.
+
+Spenser then was essentially a _sacred_ poet; but the delicacy and
+insinuating gentleness of his disposition were better fitted to the
+veiled than the direct mode of instruction. His was a mind which would
+have shrunk more from the chance of debasing a sacred subject by
+unhandsome treatment, than of incurring ridicule by what would be
+called unseasonable attempts to hallow things merely secular. It was
+natural therefore for him to choose not a scriptural story, but a tale
+of chivalry and romance; and the popular literature, and, in no small
+measure, the pageantry and manners of his time, would join to attract
+his efforts that way. In this way too he was enabled, with more
+propriety and grace, to introduce allusions, political or courtly, to
+subjects with which his readers were familiar; thus agreeably
+diversifying his allegory, and gratifying his affection for his
+friends and patrons, without the coarseness of direct compliment.
+
+In Milton, most evidently, a great difference was to be expected: both
+from his own character and from that of the times in which he lived.
+Religion was in those days the favourite topic of discussion; and it
+is indeed painful to reflect, how sadly it was polluted by
+intermixture with earthly passions: the most awful turns and most
+surprising miracles of the Jewish history being made to serve the base
+purposes of persons, of whom it is hard to say whether they were more
+successful in misleading others, or in deceiving themselves. It was an
+effort worthy of a manly and devout spirit to rescue religion from
+such degradation, by choosing a subject, which, being scriptural,
+would suit the habit of the times, yet, from its universal and eternal
+importance, would give least opportunity for debasing temporary
+application. Then it was the temper of the man always to speak out.
+He carried it to a faulty excess, as his prose works too amply
+demonstrate. The more unfashionable his moral was, the more he would
+have disdained to veil it: neither had he the shrinking delicacy of
+Spenser to keep him back, through fear of profaning things hallowed by
+an unworthy touch.
+
+Thus the great epic poem of our language came to be, avowedly, a
+sacred poem. One hardly dares to wish any thing other than it is in
+such a composition; yet it may be useful to point out in what respects
+the moral infirmity of the times, or of the author, has affected the
+work; so that we are occasionally tempted to regret even Milton’s
+choice. But as the leading error of his mind appears to have been
+_intellectual_ pride, and as the leading fault of the generation with
+which he acted was unquestionably _spiritual_ pride, so the main
+defects of his poetry may probably be attributed to the same causes.
+
+There is a studious undervaluing of the female character, which may be
+most distinctly perceived by comparing the character of Eve with that
+of the Lady in Comus: the latter conceived, as we imagine, before the
+mind of the poet had become so deeply tainted with the fault here
+imputed to him. A remarkable instance of it is his describing Eve as
+unwilling, or unworthy, to discourse herself with the angel.
+
+            Such pleasure she reserved,
+    Adam relating; she sole auditress.--
+
+The sentiment may be natural enough, since the primaeval curse upon
+women: but does it not argue rather too strong a sense of her original
+inferiority, to put it into her mind before the fall?
+
+What again can be said for the reproachful and insulting tone, in
+which, more than once, the good angels are made to address the bad
+ones? or of the too attractive colours, in which, perhaps
+unconsciously, the poet has clothed the Author of Evil himself? It is
+a well-known complaint among many of the readers of _Paradise Lost_,
+that they can hardly keep themselves from sympathizing, in some sort,
+with Satan, as the hero of the poem. The most probable account of
+which surely is, that the author himself partook largely of the
+haughty and vindictive republican spirit which he has assigned to the
+character, and consequently, though perhaps unconsciously, drew the
+portrait with a peculiar zest.
+
+These blemishes are in part attributable to the times in which he
+lived: but there is another now to be mentioned, which cannot be so
+accounted for: we mean a want of purity and spirituality in his
+conceptions of Heaven and heavenly joys. His Paradise is a vision not
+to be surpassed; but his attempts to soar higher are embarrassed with
+too much of earth still clinging as it were to his wings. Remarks of
+this kind are in general best understood by comparison, and we invite
+our readers to compare Milton with Dante, in their descriptions of
+Heaven. The one as simple as possible in his imagery, producing
+intense effect by little more than various combinations of _three_
+leading ideas--light, motion, and music--as if he feared to introduce
+anything more gross and earthly, and would rather be censured, as
+doubtless he often is, for coldness and poverty of invention. Whereas
+Milton, with very little selection or refinement, transfers to the
+immediate neighbourhood of God’s throne the imagery of Paradise and
+Earth. Indeed he seems himself to have been aware of something
+unsatisfactory in this, and has inserted into the mouth of an angel,
+a kind of apology for it:
+
+              Though what if earth
+    Be but the shadow of heav’n, and things therein
+    Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?
+
+These are blemishes, and sometimes almost tempt us to wish that even
+Milton had taken some subject not so immediately and avowedly
+connected with religion. But they do not affect his claim to be
+considered as the very lodestar and pattern of that class of sacred
+poets in England. As such we have here considered him next to Spenser;
+not that there were wanting others of the same order before him. In
+fact, most of the distinguished names in the poetical annals of
+Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I, might be included in the list. It
+may be enough just to recollect Drayton and Cowley, Herbert, Crashaw
+and Quarles.
+
+The mention of these latter names suggests the remark, how very
+desirable it is to encourage as indulgent and, if we may so term it,
+_catholic_ a spirit as may be, in poetical criticism. From having been
+over-praised in their own days, they are come now to be as much
+undervalued; yet their quaintness of manner and constrained imagery,
+adopted perhaps in compliance with the taste of their age, should
+hardly suffice to overbalance their sterling merits. We speak
+especially of Crashaw and Quarles: for Herbert is a name too venerable
+to be more than mentioned in our present discussion.
+
+After Milton, sacred poetry seems to have greatly declined, both in
+the number and merit of those who cultivated it. No other could be
+expected from the conflicting evils of those times: in which one party
+was used to brand everything sacred with the name of Puritanism, and
+the other to suspect every thing poetical of being contrary to
+morality and religion.
+
+Yet most of the great names of that age, especially among the
+Romanists, as Dryden, Pope, and before them Habington, continued to
+dedicate some of their poetry to religion. By their faith they were
+remote from the controversies which agitated the established church,
+and their devotion might indulge itself without incurring the
+suspicion of a fanatical spirit. Then the solemnity of their worship
+is fitted to inspire splendid and gorgeous strains, such as Dryden’s
+paraphrase of the Veni Creator; and their own fallen fortunes in
+England, no less naturally, would fill them with a sense of decay very
+favourable to the plaintive tenderness of Habington and Crashaw.
+
+A feeling of this kind, joined to the effect of distressing languor
+and sickness, may be discerned, occasionally, in the writings of
+Bishop Ken; though he was far indeed from being a Romanist. We shall
+hardly find, in all ecclesiastical history, a greener spot than the
+later years of this courageous and affectionate pastor; persecuted
+alternately by both parties, and driven from his station in his
+declining age; yet singing on, with unabated cheerfulness, to the
+last. His poems are not popular, nor probably ever will be, for
+reasons already touched upon; but whoever in earnest loves his three
+well-known hymns, and knows how to value such unaffected strains of
+poetical devotion, will find his account, in turning over his four
+volumes, half narrative and half lyric, and all avowedly on sacred
+subjects; the narrative often cumbrous, and the lyric verse not seldom
+languid and redundant: yet all breathing such an angelic spirit,
+interspersed with such pure and bright touches of poetry, that such a
+reader as we have supposed will scarcely find it in his heart to
+criticize them.
+
+Between that time and ours, the form of sacred poetry which has
+succeeded best in attracting public attention, is the didactic: of
+which Davies in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Sir Richard Blackmore in King
+William’s, Young in the middle, and Cowper in the close, of the last
+century, may fairly be taken as specimens, differing from each other
+according to the differences of their respective literary eras.
+Davies, with his Lucretian majesty (although he wants the moral pathos
+of the Roman poet), representing aptly enough the age of Elizabeth;
+Blackmore, with his easy paragraphs, the careless style of King
+Charles’s days; Young, with his pointed sentences, transferring to
+graver subjects a good deal of the manner of Pope; and Cowper, with
+his agreeable but too unsparing descriptions, coming nearer to the
+present day, which appears, both in manners and in scenery, to delight
+in Dutch painting, rather than in what is more delicately classical.
+
+With regard to the indirect, and, perhaps, more effective, species of
+sacred poetry, we fear it must be acknowledged, to the shame of the
+last century, that there is hardly a single specimen of it (excepting,
+perhaps, Gray’s Elegy, and possibly some of the most perfect of
+Collins’s poems) which has obtained any celebrity. We except the
+writers of our own times, who do not fall within the scope of this
+inquiry.
+
+To Spenser, therefore, upon the whole, the English reader must revert,
+as being, pre-eminently, the sacred poet of his country: as most
+likely, in every way, to answer the purposes of his art; especially in
+an age of excitation and refinement, in which the gentler and more
+homely beauties, both of character and of scenery, are too apt to be
+despised: with passion and interest enough to attract the most ardent,
+and grace enough to win the most polished; yet by a silent preference
+everywhere inculcating the love of better and more enduring things;
+and so most exactly fulfilling what he has himself declared to be ‘the
+general end of all his book’--‘to fashion a gentleman, or noble
+person, in virtuous and gentle discipline’: and going the straight way
+to the accomplishment of his own high-minded prayer:
+
+    That with the glory of so goodly sight,
+    The hearts of men, which fondly here admire
+    Fair-seeming shows, and feed on vain delight,
+    Transported with celestial desire
+    Of those fair forms, may lift themselves up higher,
+    And learn to love, with zealous humble duty,
+    Th’ eternal fountain of that heavenly beauty.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
+
+1801-1890
+
+POETRY
+
+WITH REFERENCE TO ARISTOTLE’S POETICS (1829).
+
+_The Theatre of the Greeks; or the History, Literature, and Criticism
+of the Grecian Drama. With an original Treatise on the Principal
+Tragic and Comic Metres._ Second Edition. Cambridge. 1827.
+
+
+This work is well adapted for the purpose it has in view--the
+illustration of the Greek drama. It has been usual for the young
+student to engage in a perusal of this difficult branch of classical
+literature, with none of that previous preparation or collateral
+assistance which it pre-eminently requires. Not to mention his
+ordinary want of information as regards the history of the drama,
+which, though necessary to the full understanding the nature of that
+kind of poetry, may still seem too remotely connected with the
+existing Greek plays to be an actual deficiency; nor, again, his
+ignorance of the dramatic dialect and metres, which, without external
+helps, may possibly be overcome by minds of superior talent while
+engaged upon them; at least without some clear ideas of the usages of
+the ancient stage, the Greek dramas are but partially intelligible.
+The circumstances under which the representation was conducted, the
+form and general arrangements of the theatre, the respective offices
+and disposition of the actors, the nature and duties of the chorus,
+the proprieties of the scene itself, are essential subjects of
+information, yet they are generally neglected. The publication before
+us is a compilation of the most useful works or parts of works on the
+criticism, history, and antiquities of the drama; among which will be
+found extracts from Bentley’s _Dissertation on the Epistles of
+Phalaris_ and from Schlegel’s work on Dramatic Literature; the more
+important parts of Twining’s Translation of Aristotle’s _Poetics_, and
+critical remarks, by Dawes, Porson, Elmsley, Tate, and the writers in
+the _Museum Criticum_.
+
+If we were disposed to find fault with a useful work, we should
+describe it as over-liberal of condensed critical information. Such
+ample assistance is given to the student, that little is left to
+exercise his own personal thought and judgement. This is a fault of
+not a few publications of the present day, written for our
+universities. From a false estimate of the advantages of accurate
+scholarship, the reader is provided with a multitude of minute facts,
+which are useful to his mind, not when barely remembered, but chiefly
+when he has acquired them for himself. It is of comparatively trifling
+importance, whether the scholar knows the force of οὐ μή or ἀλλα γάρ;
+but it may considerably improve his acumen or taste, to have gone
+through a process of observation, comparison, and induction, more or
+less original and independent of grammarians and critics. It is an
+officious aid which renders the acquisition of a language mechanical.
+Commentators are of service to stimulate the mind, and suggest
+thought; and though, when we view the wide field of criticism, it is
+impossible they should do more, yet, when that field is narrowed to
+the limit of academical success, there is a danger of their indulging
+indolence, or confirming the contracted views of dullness. These
+remarks are not so much directed against a valuable work like the
+present, the very perusal of which may be made an exercise for the
+mind, as against an especial fault of the age. The uses of knowledge
+in forming the intellectual and moral character, are too commonly
+overlooked; and the possession itself being viewed as a peculiar good,
+short ways are on all subjects excogitated for avoiding the labour of
+learning; whereas the very length and process of the journey is in
+many the chief, in all an important advantage.
+
+But, dismissing a train of thought which would soon lead us very far
+from the range of subjects which the _Theatre of the Greeks_
+introduces to our notice, we propose to offer some speculations of our
+own on Greek tragedy and poetry in general, founded on the doctrine of
+Aristotle as contained in the publication before us. A compilation of
+standard works, (and such in its general character is the _Greek
+Theatre_,) scarcely affords the occasion of lengthened criticism on
+itself; whereas it may be of use to the classical student to add some
+further illustrations of the subject which is the common basis of the
+works compiled.
+
+Aristotle considers the excellence of a tragedy to depend upon its
+_plot_--and, since a tragedy, as such, is obviously the exhibition of
+an _action_, no one can deny his statement to be abstractedly true.
+Accordingly he directs his principal attention to the economy of the
+fable; determines its range of subjects, delineates its proportions,
+traces its progress from a complication of incidents to their just
+and satisfactory arrangement, investigates the means of making a train
+of events striking or affecting, and shows how the exhibition of
+character may be made subservient to the purposes of the action. His
+treatise is throughout interesting and valuable. It is one thing,
+however, to form the beau idéal of a tragedy on scientific principles;
+another to point out the actual beauty of a particular school of
+dramatic composition. The Greek tragedians are not generally
+felicitous in the construction of their plots. Aristotle, then, rather
+tells us what tragedy should be, than what Greek tragedy really was.
+And this doubtless was the intention of the philosopher. Since,
+however, the Greek drama has obtained so extended and lasting a
+celebrity, and yet its excellence does not fall under the strict rules
+of the critical art, we should inquire in what it consists.
+
+That the charm of Greek tragedy does not ordinarily arise from
+scientific correctness of plot, is certain as a matter of fact. Seldom
+does any great interest arise from the action; which, instead of being
+progressive and sustained, is commonly either a mere necessary
+condition of the drama, or a convenience for the introduction of
+matter more important than itself. It is often stationary--often
+irregular--sometimes either wants or outlives the catastrophe. In the
+plays of Aeschylus it is always simple and inartificial--in four out
+of the seven there is hardly any plot at all;--and, though it is of
+more prominent importance in those of Sophocles, yet even here the
+_Oedipus at Colonus_ is a mere series of incidents, and the _Ajax_ a
+union of two separate tales; while in the _Philoctetes_, which is
+apparently busy, the circumstances of the action are but slightly
+connected with the _dénouement_. The carelessness of Euripides in the
+construction of his plots is well known. The action then will be more
+justly viewed as the vehicle for introducing the personages of the
+drama, than as the principal object of the poet’s art; it is not in
+the plot, but in the characters, sentiments, and diction, that the
+actual merit and poetry of the composition is placed. To show this to
+the satisfaction of the reader, would require a minuter investigation
+of details than our present purpose admits; yet a few instances in
+point may suggest others to the memory. E. g. in neither the _Oedipus
+Coloneus_ nor the _Philoctetes_, the two most beautiful plays of
+Sophocles, is the plot striking; but how exquisite is the delineation
+of the characters of Antigone and Oedipus, in the former tragedy,
+particularly in their interview with Polynices, and the various
+descriptions of the scene itself which the Chorus furnishes! In the
+_Philoctetes_, again, it is the contrast between the worldly wisdom of
+Ulysses, the inexperienced frankness of Neoptolemus, and the
+simplicity of the afflicted Philoctetes, which constitutes the
+principal charm of the drama. Or we may instance the spirit and nature
+displayed in the grouping of the characters in the _Prometheus_ which
+is almost without action;--the stubborn enemy of the new dynasty of
+gods; Oceanus trimming, as an accomplished politician, with the change
+of affairs; the single-hearted and generous Nereids; and Hermes the
+favourite and instrument of the usurping potentate. So again, the
+beauties of the _Thebae_ are almost independent of the plot;--it is
+the Chorus which imparts grace and interest to the actionless scene;
+and the speech of Antigone at the end, one of the most simply striking
+in any play, has, scientifically speaking, no place in the tragedy,
+which should already have been brought to its conclusion. Amid the
+multitude of the beauties of the irregular Euripides, it is obvious to
+notice the characters of Alcestis and the Clytemnestra of the
+_Electra_; the soliloquies of _Medea_; the picturesque situation of
+Ion, the minister of the Pythian temple; the opening scene of the
+_Orestes_; and the dialogues between Phaedra and her attendant in the
+_Hippolytus_, and the old man and Antigone in the _Phoenissae_;--passages
+which are either unconnected with the development of the plot, or of
+an importance superior to it. Thus the Greek drama, as a fact, was
+modelled on no scientific principle. It was a pure recreation of the
+imagination, revelling without object or meaning beyond its own
+exhibition. Gods, heroes, kings, and dames, enter and retire: they may
+have a good reason for appearing--they may have a very poor one;
+whatever it is, still we have no right to ask for it;--the question is
+impertinent. Let us listen to their harmonious and majestic
+language--to the voices of sorrow, joy, compassion, or religious
+emotion--to the animated odes of the chorus. Why interrupt so divine a
+display of poetical genius by inquiries degrading it to the level of
+every-day events, and implying incompleteness in the action till a
+catastrophe arrives? The very spirit of beauty breathes through every
+part of the composition. We may liken the Greek drama to the music of
+the Italian school; in which the wonder is, how so much richness of
+invention in detail can be accommodated to a style so simple and
+uniform. Each is the development of grace, fancy, pathos, and taste,
+in the respective media of representation and sound.
+
+However true then it may be, that one or two of the most celebrated
+dramas answer to the requisitions of Aristotle’s doctrine, still for
+the most part, Greek Tragedy has its own distinct and peculiar praise,
+which must not be lessened by a criticism conducted on principles,
+whether correct or not, still leading to excellence of another
+character. This being, as we hope, shown, we shall be still bolder,
+and proceed to question even the sufficiency of the rules of Aristotle
+for the production of dramas of the highest order. These rules, it
+would appear, require a plot not merely natural and unaffected, as a
+vehicle of more poetical matter, but one laboured and complicated as
+the sole legitimate channel of tragic effect; and thus tend to
+withdraw the mind of the poet from the spontaneous exhibition of
+pathos or imagination, to a minute diligence in the formation of a
+plan. To explain our views on the subject, we will institute a short
+comparison between three tragedies, the _Agamemnon_, the _Oedipus_,
+and the _Bacchae_, one of each of the tragic poets, where, by
+reference to Aristotle’s principles, we think it will be found that
+the most perfect in plot is not the most poetical.
+
+Of these the action of the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ is frequently instanced
+by the critic as a specimen of judgement and skill in the selection
+and combination of the incidents; and in this point of view it is
+truly a masterly composition. The clearness, precision, certainty,
+and vigour, with which the line of the action moves on to its
+termination, is admirable. The character of Oedipus too is finely
+drawn, and identified with the development of the action.
+
+The _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus presents us with the slow and difficult
+birth of a portentous secret--an event of old written in the resolves
+of destiny, a crime long meditated in the bosom of the human agents.
+The Chorus here has an importance altogether wanting in the Chorus of
+the _Oedipus_. They throw a pall of ancestral honour over the bier of
+the hereditary monarch, which would have been unbecoming in the case
+of the upstart king of Thebes. Till the arrival of Agamemnon, they
+occupy our attention, as the prophetic organ, not commissioned indeed
+but employed by heaven, to proclaim the impending horrors. Succeeding
+to the brief intimation of the watcher who opens the play, they seem
+oppressed with forebodings of woe and crime which they can neither
+justify nor analyse. The expression of their anxiety forms the stream
+in which the plot flows--every thing, even news of joy, takes a
+colouring from the depth of their gloom. On the arrival of the king,
+they retire before Cassandra, a more regularly commissioned
+prophetess; who, speaking first in figure, then in plain terms, only
+ceases that we may hear the voice of the betrayed monarch himself,
+informing us of the striking of the fatal blow. Here then the very
+simplicity of the fable constitutes its especial beauty. The death of
+Agamemnon is intimated at first--it is accomplished at last:
+throughout we find but the growing in volume and intensity of one and
+the same note--it is a working up of one musical ground, by fugue and
+imitation, into the richness of combined harmony. But we look in vain
+for the progressive and thickening incidents of the _Oedipus_.
+
+The action of the _Bacchae_ is also simple. It is the history of the
+reception of the worship of Bacchus in Thebes; who, first depriving
+Pentheus of his reason, and thereby drawing him on to his ruin,
+establishes his divinity. The interest of the scene arises from the
+gradual process by which the derangement of the Theban king is
+effected, which is powerfully and originally described. It would be
+comic, were it unconnected with religion. As it is, it exhibits the
+grave irony of a god triumphing over the impotent presumption of man,
+the sport and terrible mischievousness of an insulted deity. It is an
+exemplification of the adage, _quem deus vult perdere, prius
+dementat_. So delicately balanced is the action along the verge of the
+sublime and grotesque, that it is both solemn and humorous, without
+violence to the propriety of the composition: the mad and merry fire
+of the Chorus, the imbecile mirth of old Cadmus and Tiresias, and the
+infatuation of Pentheus, who is ultimately induced to dress himself in
+female garb to gain admittance among the Bacchae, are made to
+harmonize with the terrible catastrophe which concludes the life of
+the intruder. Perhaps the victim’s first discovery of the disguised
+deity is the finest conception in this splendid drama. His madness
+enables him to discern the emblematic horns on the head of Bacchus,
+which were hid from him when in his sound mind; yet this discovery,
+instead of leading him to an acknowledgement of the divinity,
+provides him only with matter for a stupid and perplexed
+astonishment.
+
+    καὶ ταῦρος ἡμῖν πρόσθεν ἡγεῖσθαι δοκεῖς,
+    καὶ σῶ κέρατε κρατὶ προσπεφυκέναι.
+    ἀλλ’ ἦ ποτ’ ἦσθα θήρ; τεταύρωσαι γὰρ οὖν.[18]
+
+This play is on the whole the most favourable specimen of the genius
+of Euripides--not breathing the sweet composure, the melodious
+fullness, the majesty and grace of Sophocles; nor rudely and
+overpoweringly tragic as Aeschylus; but brilliant, versatile,
+imaginative, as well as deeply pathetic.
+
+    [18]
+
+        A Bull, thou seem’st to lead us; on thy head
+        Horns have grown forth: wast heretofore a beast?
+        For such thy semblance now.
+
+Here then are two dramas of extreme poetical power, but deficient in
+skilfulness of plot. Are they on that account to be rated below the
+_Oedipus_, which, in spite of its many beauties, has not even a share
+of the richness and sublimity of either?
+
+Aristotle, then, it must be allowed, treats dramatic composition more
+as an exhibition of ingenious workmanship, than as a free and
+unfettered effusion of genius. The inferior poem may, on his
+principle, be the better tragedy. He may indeed have intended solely
+to delineate the outward framework most suitable to the reception of
+the spirit of poetry, not to discuss the nature of poetry itself. If
+so, it cannot be denied that, the poetry being given equal in the two
+cases, the more perfect plot will merit the greater share of praise.
+And it may seem to agree with this view of his meaning, that he
+pronounces Euripides, in spite of the irregularity of his plots, to
+be, after all, the most tragic of the Greek dramatists, inasmuch (i.
+e.) as he excels in his appeal to those passions which the outward
+form of the drama merely subserves. Still there is surely too much
+stress laid by the philosopher upon the artificial part; which, after
+all, leads to negative, more than to positive excellence; and should
+rather be the natural and (so to say) unintentional result of the
+poet’s feeling and imagination, than be separated from them as the
+direct object of his care. Perhaps it is hardly fair to judge of
+Aristotle’s sentiments by the fragment of his work which has come down
+to us. Yet as his natural taste led him to delight in the explication
+of systems, and in those large and connected views which his vigorous
+talent for thinking through subjects supplied, we may be allowed to
+suspect him of entertaining too cold and formal conceptions of the
+nature of poetical composition, as if its beauties were less subtle
+and delicate than they really are. A word has power to convey a world
+of information to the imagination, and to act as a spell upon the
+feelings: there is no need of sustained fiction--often no room for
+it.[19] Some confirmation of the judgement we have ventured to pass on
+the greatest of analytical philosophers, is the account he gives of
+the source of poetical pleasure; which he almost identifies with a
+gratification of the reasoning faculty, placing it in the satisfaction
+derived from recognizing in fiction a resemblance to the realities of
+life--συμβαίνει θεωροῦντας μανθάνειν καὶ συλλογίζεσθαι, τί ἕκαστον.[20]
+
+    [19] The sudden inspiration, e. g. of the blind Oedipus, in
+    the second play bearing his name, by which he is enabled,
+    ἄθικτος ἡγητῆρος [‘without a guide’], to lead the
+    way to his place of death, in our judgement, produces more
+    poetical effect than all the skilful intricacy of the plot of
+    the _Tyrannus_. The latter excites an interest which scarcely
+    lasts beyond the first reading--the former _decies repetita
+    placebit_.
+
+    [20] In seeing the picture one is at the same time
+    learning,--gathering the meaning of things.
+
+But as we have treated, rather unceremoniously, a deservedly high
+authority, we will try to compensate for our rudeness, by illustrating
+his general doctrine of the nature of poetry, which we hold to be most
+true and philosophical.
+
+Poetry, according to Aristotle, is a representation of the ideal.
+Biography and history represent individual characters and actual
+facts; poetry, on the contrary, generalizing from the phenomena of
+nature and life, supplies us with pictures drawn not after an existing
+pattern, but after a creation of the mind. _Fidelity_ is the primary
+merit of biography and history; the essence of poetry is _fiction_.
+_Poesis nihil aliud est_ (says Bacon) _quam historiae imitatio ad
+placitum_. It delineates that perfection which the imagination
+suggests, and to which as a limit the present system of divine
+Providence actually tends. Moreover, by confining the attention to one
+series of events and scene of action, it bounds and finishes off the
+confused luxuriance of real nature; while, by a skilful adjustment of
+circumstances, it brings into sight the connexion of cause and effect,
+completes the dependence of the parts one on another, and harmonizes
+the proportions of the whole. It is then but the type and model of
+history or biography, if we may be allowed the comparison, bearing
+some resemblance to the abstract mathematical formula of physics,
+before it is modified by the contingencies of gravity and friction.
+Hence, while it recreates the imagination by the superhuman loveliness
+of its views, it provides a solace for the mind broken by the
+disappointments and sufferings of actual life; and becomes, moreover,
+the utterance of the inward emotions of a right moral feeling, seeking
+a purity and a truth which this world will not give.
+
+It follows that the poetical mind is one full of the eternal forms of
+beauty and perfection; these are its material of thought, its
+instrument and medium of observation--these colour each object to
+which it directs its view. It is called imaginative or creative, from
+the originality and independence of its modes of thinking, compared
+with the common-place and matter-of-fact conceptions of ordinary
+minds, which are fettered down to the particular and individual. At
+the same time it feels a natural sympathy with everything great and
+splendid in the physical and moral world; and selecting such from the
+mass of common phenomena, incorporates them, as it were, into the
+substance of its own creations. From living thus in a world of its
+own, it speaks the language of dignity, emotion, and refinement.
+Figure is its necessary medium of communication with man; for in the
+feebleness of ordinary words to express its ideas, and in the absence
+of terms of abstract perfection, the adoption of metaphorical language
+is the only poor means allowed it for imparting to others its intense
+feelings. A metrical garb has, in all languages, been appropriated to
+poetry--it is but the outward development of the music and harmony
+within. The verse, far from being a restraint on the true poet, is the
+suitable index of his sense, and is adopted by his free and deliberate
+choice.
+
+We shall presently show the applicability of our doctrine to the
+various departments of poetical composition; first, however, it will
+be right to volunteer an explanation which may save it from much
+misconception and objection. Let not our notion be thought arbitrarily
+to limit the number of poets, generally considered such. It will be
+found to lower particular works, or parts of works, rather than the
+writers themselves; sometimes to condemn only the vehicle in which the
+poetry is conveyed. There is an ambiguity in the word poetry, which is
+taken to signify both the talent itself, and the written composition
+which is the result of it. Thus there is an apparent, but no real
+contradiction, in saying a poem may be but partially poetical; in some
+passages more so than in others; and sometimes not poetical at all. We
+only maintain--not that writers forfeit the name of poet who fail at
+times to answer to our requisitions, but--that they are poets only so
+far forth and inasmuch as they do answer to them. We may grant, for
+instance, that the vulgarities of old Phoenix in the ninth _Iliad_, or
+of the nurse of Orestes in the _Choephoroe_, or perhaps of the
+grave-diggers in _Hamlet_, are in themselves unworthy of their
+respective authors, and refer them to the wantonness of exuberant
+genius; and yet maintain that the scenes in question contain much
+_incidental_ poetry. Now and then the lustre of the true metal catches
+the eye, redeeming whatever is unseemly and worthless in the rude ore;
+still the ore is not the metal. Nay sometimes, and not unfrequently in
+Shakespeare, the introduction of unpoetical matter may be necessary
+for the sake of relief, or as a vivid expression of recondite
+conceptions, and (as it were) to make friends with the reader’s
+imagination. This necessity, however, cannot make the additions in
+themselves beautiful and pleasing. Sometimes, on the other hand, while
+we do not deny the incidental beauty of a poem, we are ashamed and
+indignant on witnessing the unworthy substance in which that beauty is
+imbedded. This remark applies strongly to the immoral compositions to
+which Lord Byron devoted his last years. Now to proceed with our
+proposed investigation.
+
+We will notice _descriptive poetry_ first. Empedocles wrote his
+physics in verse, and Oppian his history of animals. Neither were
+poets--the one was an historian of nature, the other a sort of
+biographer of brutes. Yet a poet may make natural history or
+philosophy the material of his composition. But under his hands they
+are no longer a bare collection of facts or principles, but are
+painted with a meaning, beauty, and harmonious order not their own.
+Thomson has sometimes been commended for the novelty and minuteness of
+his remarks upon nature. This is not the praise of a poet; whose
+office rather is to represent _known_ phenomena in a new connexion or
+medium. In _L’Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ the poetical magician
+invests the commonest scenes of a country life with the hues, first of
+a mirthful, then of a pensive mind.[21] Pastoral poetry is a
+description of rustics, agriculture, and cattle, softened off and
+corrected from the rude health of nature. Virgil, and much more Pope
+and others, have run into the fault of colouring too highly;--instead
+of drawing generalized and ideal forms of _shepherds_, they have given
+us pictures of _gentlemen_ and _beaux_. Their composition may be
+poetry, but it is not pastoral poetry.
+
+    [21] It is the charm of the descriptive poetry of a religious
+    mind, that nature is viewed in a moral connexion. Ordinary
+    writers (e. g.) compare aged men to trees in autumn--a gifted
+    poet will reverse the metaphor. Thus:--
+
+        ‘How quiet shows the woodland scene!
+          Each flower and tree, its duty done,
+        Reposing in decay serene,
+          _Like weary men when age is won_,’ &c.
+
+The difference between poetical and historical _narrative_ may be
+illustrated by the ‘Tales Founded on Facts’, generally of a religious
+character, so common in the present day, which we must not be thought
+to approve, because we use them for our purpose. The author finds in
+the circumstances of the case many particulars too trivial for public
+notice, or irrelevant to the main story, or partaking perhaps too much
+of the peculiarity of individual minds:--these he omits. He finds
+connected events separated from each other by time or place, or a
+course of action distributed among a multitude of agents; he limits
+the scene or duration of the tale, and dispenses with his host of
+characters by condensing the mass of incident and action in the
+history of a few. He compresses long controversies into a concise
+argument--and exhibits characters by dialogue--and (if such be his
+object) brings prominently forward the course of Divine Providence by
+a fit disposition of his materials. Thus he selects, combines,
+refines, colours--in fact, _poetizes_. His facts are no longer
+_actual_ but _ideal_--a tale _founded on_ facts is a tale _generalized
+from_ facts. The authors of _Peveril of the Peak_, and of _Brambletye
+House_, have given us their respective descriptions of the profligate
+times of Charles II. Both accounts are interesting, but for different
+reasons. That of the latter writer has the fidelity of history;
+Walter Scott’s picture is the hideous reality unintentionally softened
+and decorated by the poetry of his own mind. Miss Edgeworth sometimes
+apologizes for certain incidents in her tales, by stating they took
+place ‘by one of those strange chances which occur in life, but seem
+incredible when found in writing’. Such an excuse evinces a
+misconception of the principle of fiction, which, being the
+_perfection_ of the actual, prohibits the introduction of any such
+anomalies of experience. It is by a similar impropriety that painters
+sometimes introduce unusual sunsets, or other singular phenomena of
+lights and forms. Yet some of Miss Edgeworth’s works contain much
+poetry of narrative. _Manœuvring_ is perfect in its way--the plot and
+characters are natural, without being too real to be pleasing.
+
+_Character_ is made poetical by a like process. The writer draws
+indeed from experience; but unnatural peculiarities are laid aside,
+and harsh contrasts reconciled. If it be said, the fidelity of the
+imitation is often its greatest merit, we have only to reply, that in
+such cases the pleasure is not poetical, but consists in the mere
+recognition. All novels and tales which introduce real characters, are
+in the same degree unpoetical. Portrait-painting, to be poetical,
+should furnish an abstract representation of an individual; the
+abstraction being more rigid, inasmuch as the painting is confined to
+one point of time. The artist should draw independently of the
+accidents of attitude, dress, occasional feeling, and transient
+action. He should depict the general spirit of his subject--as if he
+were copying from memory, not from a few particular sittings. An
+ordinary painter will delineate with rigid fidelity, and will make a
+caricature. But the learned artist contrives so to temper his
+composition, as to sink all offensive peculiarities and hardnesses of
+individuality, without diminishing the striking effect of the
+likeness, or acquainting the casual spectator with the secret of his
+art. Miss Edgeworth’s representations of the Irish character are
+actual, and not poetical--nor were they intended to be so. They are
+interesting, because they are faithful. If there is poetry about them,
+it exists in the personages themselves, not in her representation of
+them. She is only the accurate reporter in word of what was poetical
+in fact. Hence, moreover, when a deed or incident is striking in
+itself, a judicious writer is led to describe it in the most simple
+and colourless terms, his own being unnecessary; e. g. if the
+greatness of the action itself excites the imagination, or the depth
+of the suffering interests the feelings. In the usual phrase, the
+circumstances are left to ‘speak for themselves’.
+
+Let it not be said that our doctrine is adverse to that individuality
+in the delineation of character, which is a principal charm of
+fiction. It is not necessary for the ideality of a composition to
+avoid those minuter shades of difference between man and man, which
+give to poetry its plausibility and life; but merely such violation of
+general nature, such improbabilities, wanderings, or coarsenesses, as
+interfere with the refined and delicate enjoyment of the imagination;
+which would have the elements of beauty extracted out of the confused
+multitude of ordinary actions and habits, and combined with
+consistency and ease. Nor does it exclude the introduction of
+imperfect or odious characters. The original conception of a weak or
+guilty mind may have its intrinsic beauty. And much more so, when it
+is connected with a tale which finally adjusts whatever is
+reprehensible in the personages themselves. Richard and Iago are
+subservient to the plot. Moral excellence of character may sometimes
+be even a fault. The Clytemnestra of Euripides is so interesting, that
+the divine vengeance, which is the main subject of the drama, seems
+almost unjust. Lady Macbeth, on the contrary, is the conception of one
+deeply learned in the poetical art. She is polluted with the most
+heinous crimes, and meets the fate she deserves. Yet there is nothing
+in the picture to offend the taste, and much to feed the imagination.
+Romeo and Juliet are too good for the termination to which the plot
+leads--so are Ophelia and the bride of Lammermoor. In these cases
+there is something inconsistent with correct beauty, and therefore
+unpoetical. We do not say the fault could be avoided without
+sacrificing more than would be gained; still it is a fault. It is
+scarcely possible for a poet satisfactorily to connect innocence with
+ultimate unhappiness, when the notion of a future life is excluded.
+Honours paid to the memory of the dead are some alleviation of the
+harshness. In his use of the doctrine of a future life, Southey is
+admirable. Other writers are content to conduct their heroes to
+temporal happiness--Southey refuses present comfort to his Ladurlad,
+Thalaba, and Roderick, but carries them on through suffering to
+another world. The death of his hero is the termination of the action;
+yet so little in two of them, at least, does this catastrophe excite
+sorrowful feelings, that some readers may be startled to be reminded
+of the fact. If a melancholy is thrown over the conclusion of the
+_Roderick_, it is from the peculiarities of the hero’s previous
+history.
+
+Opinions, feelings, manners, and customs, are made poetical by the
+delicacy or splendour with which they are expressed. This is seen in
+the _ode_, _elegy_, _sonnet_, and _ballad_; in which a single idea
+perhaps, or familiar occurrence, is invested by the poet with pathos
+or dignity. The ballad of _Old Robin Gray_ will serve, for an
+instance, out of a multitude; again, Lord Byron’s _Hebrew Melody_,
+beginning ‘Were my bosom as false’, &c.; or Cowper’s _Lines on his
+Mother’s Picture_; or Milman’s ‘Funeral Hymn’ in the _Martyr of
+Antioch_; or Milton’s _Sonnet on his Blindness_; or Bernard Barton’s
+_Dream_. As picturesque specimens, we may name Campbell’s _Battle of
+the Baltic_; or Joanna Baillie’s _Chough and Crow_; and for the more
+exalted and splendid style, Gray’s _Bard_; or Milton’s _Hymn on the
+Nativity_; in which facts, with which every one is familiar, are made
+new by the colouring of a poetical imagination. It must all along be
+observed, that we are not adducing instances for their own sake; but
+in order to illustrate our general doctrine, and to show its
+applicability to those compositions which are, by universal consent,
+acknowledged to be poetical.
+
+The department of poetry we are now speaking of, is of much wider
+extent than might at first sight appear. It will include such
+moralizing and philosophical poems as Young’s _Night Thoughts_, and
+Byron’s _Childe Harold_.[22] There is much bad taste, at present, in
+the judgement passed on compositions of this kind. It is the fault of
+the day to mistake mere eloquence for poetry; whereas, in direct
+opposition to the conciseness and simplicity of the poet, the talent
+of the orator consists in making much of a single idea. ‘_Sic dicet
+ille ut verset saepe multis modis eandem et unam rem, ut haereat in
+eadem commoreturque sententia._’ This is the great art of Cicero
+himself, who, whether he is engaged in statement, argument, or
+raillery, never ceases till he has exhausted the subject; going round
+about it, and placing it in every different light, yet without
+repetition to offend or weary the reader. This faculty seems to
+consist in the power of throwing off harmonious sentences, which,
+while they have a respectable proportion of meaning, yet are
+especially intended to charm the ear. In popular poems, common ideas
+are unfolded with copiousness, and set off in polished verse--and this
+is called poetry. In the _Pleasures of Hope_ we find this done with
+exquisite taste; but it is in his minor poems that the author’s
+powerful and free poetical genius rises to its natural elevation. In
+_Childe Harold_, too, the writer is carried through his Spenserian
+stanza with the unweariness and equable fullness of accomplished
+eloquence; opening, illustrating, and heightening one idea, before he
+passes on to another. His composition is an extended funeral oration
+over buried joys and pleasures. His laments over Greece, Rome, and the
+fallen in various engagements, have quite the character of panegyrical
+orations; while by the very attempt to describe the celebrated
+buildings and sculptures of antiquity, he seems to confess that _they_
+are the poetical text, his the rhetorical comment. Still it is a work
+of splendid talent, though, as a whole, not of the highest poetical
+excellence. Juvenal is, perhaps, the only ancient author who
+habitually substitutes declamation for poetry.[23]
+
+    [22] We would here mention Rogers’s _Italy_, if such a
+    cursory notice could convey our high opinion of its merit.
+
+    [23] The difference between oratory and poetry is well
+    illustrated by a passage in a recent tragedy.
+
+          _Col._ Joined! by what tie?
+
+          _Rien._ By hatred--
+        By danger--the two hands that tightest grasp
+        Each other--the two cords that soonest knit
+        A fast and stubborn tie; your true love knot
+        Is nothing to it. Faugh! the supple touch
+        Of pliant interest, or the dust of time,
+        Or the pin-point of temper, loose or rot
+        Or snap love’s silken band. Fear and old hate,
+        They are sure weavers--they work for the storm,
+        The whirlwind, and the rocking surge; their knot
+        Endures till death.
+
+    The idea is good, and if expressed in a line or two, might
+    have been poetry--spread out into nine or ten lines, it
+    yields but a languid and ostentatious declamation.
+
+The _philosophy of mind_ may equally be made subservient to poetry, as
+the philosophy of nature. It is a common fault to mistake a mere
+knowledge of the heart for poetical talent. Our greatest masters have
+known better;--they have subjected metaphysics to their art. In
+_Hamlet_, _Macbeth_, _Richard_, and _Othello_, the philosophy of mind
+is but the material of the poet. These personages are ideal; they are
+effects of the contact of a given internal character with given
+outward circumstances, the results of combined conditions determining
+(so to say) a moral curve of original and inimitable properties.
+Philosophy is exhibited in the same subserviency to poetry in many
+parts of Crabbe’s _Tales of the Hall_. In the writings of this author
+there is much to offend a refined taste; but at least in the work in
+question there is much of a highly poetical cast. It is a
+representation of the action and re-action of two minds upon each
+other and upon the world around them. Two brothers of different
+characters and fortunes, and strangers to each other, meet. Their
+habits of mind, the formation of those habits by external
+circumstances, their respective media of judgement, their points of
+mutual attraction and repulsion, the mental position of each in
+relation to a variety of trifling phenomena of every-day nature and
+life, are beautifully developed in a series of tales moulded into a
+connected narrative. We are tempted to single out the fourth book,
+which gives an account of the childhood and education of the younger
+brother, and which for variety of thought as well as fidelity of
+description is in our judgement beyond praise. The Waverley novels
+would afford us specimens of a similar excellence. One striking
+peculiarity of these tales is the author’s practice of describing a
+group of characters bearing the same general features of mind, and
+placed in the same general circumstances; yet so contrasted with each
+other in minute differences of mental constitution, that each diverges
+from the common starting-place into a path peculiar to himself. The
+brotherhood of villains in _Kenilworth_, of knights in _Ivanhoe_, and
+of enthusiasts in _Old Mortality_ are instances of this. This bearing
+of character and plot on each other is not often found in Byron’s
+poems. The Corsair is intended for a remarkable personage. We pass by
+the inconsistencies of his character, considered by itself. The grand
+fault is that, whether it be natural or not, we are obliged to accept
+the author’s word for the fidelity of his portrait. We are told, not
+shown, what the hero was. There is nothing in the plot which results
+from his peculiar formation of mind. An every-day bravo might equally
+well have satisfied the requirements of the action. Childe Harold,
+again, if he is any thing, is a being professedly isolated from the
+world, and uninfluenced by it. One might as well draw Tityrus’s stags
+grazing in the air, as a character of this kind; which yet, with more
+or less alteration, passes through successive editions in his other
+poems. Byron had very little versatility or elasticity of genius; he
+did not know how to make poetry out of existing materials. He declaims
+in his own way, and has the upper hand as long as he is allowed to go
+on; but, if interrogated on principles of nature and good sense, he is
+at once put out and brought to a stand. Yet his conception of
+Sardanapalus and Myrrha is fine and ideal, and in the style of
+excellence which we have just been admiring in Shakespeare and Scott.
+
+These illustrations of Aristotle’s doctrine may suffice.
+
+Now let us proceed to a fresh position; which, as before, shall first
+be broadly stated, then modified and explained. How does originality
+differ from the poetical talent? Without affecting the accuracy of a
+definition, we may call the latter the originality of right moral
+feeling.
+
+Originality may perhaps be defined as the power of abstracting for
+oneself, and is in thought what strength of mind is in action. Our
+opinions are commonly derived from education and society. Common minds
+transmit as they receive, good and bad, true and false; minds of
+original talent feel a continual propensity to investigate subjects
+and strike out views for themselves;--so that even old and established
+truths do not escape modification and accidental change when subjected
+to this process of mental digestion. Even the style of original
+writers is stamped with the peculiarities of their minds. When
+originality is found apart from good sense, which more or less is
+frequently the case, it shows itself in paradox and rashness of
+sentiment, and eccentricity of outward conduct. Poetry, on the other
+hand, cannot be separated from its good sense, or taste, as it is
+called; which is one of its elements. It is originality energizing in
+the world of beauty; the originality of grace, purity, refinement, and
+feeling. We do not hesitate to say, that poetry is ultimately founded
+on correct moral perception;--that where there is no sound principle
+in exercise there will be no poetry, and that on the whole
+(originality being granted) in proportion to the standard of a
+writer’s moral character, will his compositions vary in poetical
+excellence. This position, however, requires some explanation.[24]
+
+    [24] A living prelate, in his Academical Prelections, even
+    suggests the converse of our position--‘_Neque enim facile
+    crediderim de eo qui semel hac imbutus fuerit disciplina, qui
+    in id tota mentis acie assuefactus fuerit incumbere, ut quid
+    sit in rebus decens, quid pulchrum, quid congruum, penitus
+    intueretur, quin idem harum rerum perpetuum amorem foveat, et
+    cum ab his studiis discesserit, etiam ad reliqua vitae
+    officia earum imaginem quasi animo infixam transferat._’
+
+Of course, then, we do not mean to imply that a poet must necessarily
+_display_ virtuous and religious feeling;--we are not speaking of the
+actual _material_ of poetry, but of its _sources_. A right moral state
+of heart is the formal and scientific condition of a poetical mind.
+Nor does it follow from our position that every poet must in fact be a
+man of consistent and practical principle; except so far as good
+feeling commonly produces or results from good practice. Burns was a
+man of inconsistent practice--still, it is known, of much really sound
+principle at bottom. Thus his acknowledged poetical talent is in no
+wise inconsistent with the truth of our doctrine, which will refer the
+beauty which exists in his compositions to the remains of a virtuous
+and diviner nature within him. Nay, further than this, our theory
+holds good even though it be shown that a bad man may write a poem. As
+motives short of the purest lead to actions intrinsically good, so
+frames of mind short of virtuous will produce a partial and limited
+poetry. But even where it is exhibited, the poetry of a vicious mind
+will be inconsistent and debased; i. e. so far only such, as the
+traces and shadows of holy truth still remain upon it. On the other
+hand, a right moral feeling places the mind in the very centre of that
+circle from which all the rays have their origin and range; whereas
+minds otherwise placed command but a portion of the whole circuit of
+poetry. Allowing for human infirmity and the varieties of opinion,
+Milton, Spenser, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Southey, may be considered,
+as far as their writings go, to approximate to this moral centre. The
+following are added as further illustrations of our meaning. Walter
+Scott’s centre is chivalrous honour; Shakespeare exhibits the ἦθος,
+the physiognomy of an unlearned and undisciplined piety; Homer the
+religion of nature and the heart, at times debased by polytheism. All
+these poets are religious:--the occasional irreligion of Virgil’s
+poetry is painful to the admirers of his general taste and delicacy.
+Dryden’s _Alexander’s Feast_ is a magnificent composition, and has
+high poetical beauties; but to a delicate judgement there is something
+intrinsically unpoetical in the end to which it is devoted, the
+praises of revel and sensuality. It corresponds to a process of
+clever reasoning erected on an untrue foundation--the one is a
+fallacy, the other is out of taste. Lord Byron’s _Manfred_ is in parts
+intensely poetical; yet the refined mind naturally shrinks from the
+spirit which here and there reveals itself, and the basis on which the
+fable is built. From a perusal of it we should infer, according to the
+above theory, that there was right and fine feeling in the poet’s
+mind, but that the central and consistent character was wanting. From
+the history of his life we know this to be the fact. The connexion
+between want of the religious principle and want of poetical feeling,
+is seen in the instances of Hume and Gibbon; who had radically
+unpoetical minds. Rousseau is not an exception to our doctrine, for
+his heart was naturally religious. Lucretius too had much poetical
+talent; but his work evinces that his miserable philosophy was rather
+the result of a bewildered judgement than a corrupt heart.
+
+According to the above theory, revealed religion should be especially
+poetical--and it is so in fact. While its disclosures have an
+originality in them to engage the intellect, they have a beauty to
+satisfy the moral nature. It presents us with those ideal forms of
+excellence in which a poetical mind delights, and with which all grace
+and harmony are associated. It brings us into a new world--a world of
+overpowering interest, of the sublimest views, and the tenderest and
+purest feelings. The peculiar grace of mind of the New Testament
+writers is as striking as the actual effect produced upon the hearts
+of those who have imbibed their spirit. At present we are not
+concerned with the practical, but the poetical nature of revealed
+truth. With Christians a poetical view of things is a duty--we are bid
+to colour all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in
+every event, and a superhuman tendency. Even our friends around are
+invested with unearthly brightness--no longer imperfect men, but
+beings taken into divine favour, stamped with his seal, and in
+training for future happiness. It may be added that the virtues
+peculiarly Christian are especially poetical;--meekness, gentleness,
+compassion, contentment, modesty, not to mention the devotional
+virtues: whereas the ruder and more ordinary feelings are the
+instruments of rhetoric more justly than of poetry--anger,
+indignation, emulation, martial spirit, and love of independence.
+
+A few remarks on poetical composition, and we have done.--The art of
+composition is merely accessory to the poetical talent. But where that
+talent exists it necessarily gives its own character to the style, and
+renders it perfectly different from all others. As the poet’s habits
+of mind lead to contemplation rather than communication with others,
+he is more or less obscure, according to the particular style of
+poetry he has adopted; less so, in epic or narrative and dramatic
+representation--more so, in odes and choruses. He will be obscure,
+moreover, from the depth of his feelings, which require a congenial
+reader to enter into them--and from their acuteness, which shrinks
+from any formal accuracy in the expression of them. And he will be
+obscure, not only from the carelessness of genius and from the
+originality of his conceptions, but (it may be) from natural
+deficiency in the power of clear and eloquent expression, which, we
+must repeat, is a talent distinct from poetry, though often mistaken
+for it.
+
+Dexterity in composition, or _eloquence_ as it may be called in a
+contracted sense of the word, is however manifestly more or less
+necessary in every branch of literature, though its elements may be
+different in each. _Poetical_ eloquence consists, first in the power
+of illustration--which the poet uses, not as the orator, voluntarily,
+for the sake of clearness or ornament; but almost by constraint, as
+the sole outlet and expression of intense inward feeling. The
+spontaneous power of comparison is in some poetical minds entirely
+wanting; these of course cannot show to advantage as poets.--Another
+talent necessary to composition is the power of unfolding the meaning
+in an orderly manner. A poetical mind is often too impatient to
+explain itself justly; it is overpowered by a rush of emotions, which
+sometimes want of power, sometimes the indolence of inward enjoyment
+prevents it from describing. Nothing is more difficult than to analyse
+the feelings of our own minds; and the power of doing so, whether
+natural or acquired, is clearly distinct from experiencing them. Yet,
+though distinct from the poetical talent, it is obviously necessary to
+its exhibition. Hence it is a common praise bestowed upon writers,
+that they express what we have often felt but could never describe.
+The power of arrangement, which is necessary for an extended poem, is
+a modification of the same talent;--being to poetry what method is to
+logic. Besides these qualifications, poetical compositions requires
+that command of language which is the mere effect of practice. The
+poet is a compositor; words are his types; he must have them within
+reach, and in unlimited abundance. Hence the need of careful labour to
+the accomplished poet--not in order that his diction may attract, but
+that language may be subjected to him. He studies the art of
+composition as we might learn dancing or elocution; not that we may
+move or speak according to rule, but that by the very exercise our
+voice and carriage may become so unembarrassed as to allow of our
+doing what we will with them.
+
+A talent for composition then is no essential part of poetry, though
+indispensable to its exhibition. Hence it would seem that attention to
+the language _for its own sake_ evidences not the true poet but the
+mere artist. Pope is said to have tuned our tongue. We certainly owe
+much to him--his diction is rich, musical, and expressive. Still he is
+not on this account a poet; he elaborated his composition for its own
+sake. If we give him poetical praise on this account, we may as
+appropriately bestow it on a tasteful cabinet-maker. This does not
+forbid us to ascribe the grace of his verse to an inward principle of
+poetry, which supplied him with archetypes of the beautiful and
+splendid to work by. But a similar internal gift must direct the skill
+of every fancy-artist who subserves the luxuries and elegancies of
+life. On the other hand, though Virgil is celebrated as a master of
+composition, yet his style is so identified with his conceptions, as
+their outward development, as to preclude the possibility of our
+viewing the one apart from the other. In Milton, again, the harmony of
+the verse is but the echo of the inward music which the thoughts of
+the poet breathe. In Moore’s style the ornament continually outstrips
+the sense. Cowper and Walter Scott, on the other hand, are slovenly in
+their versification. Sophocles writes, on the whole, without studied
+attention to the style; but Euripides frequently affects a simplicity
+and prettiness which exposed him to the ridicule of the comic poets.
+Lastly, the style of Homer’s poems is perfect in their particular
+department. It is free, manly, simple, perspicuous, energetic, and
+varied. It is the style of one who rhapsodized without deference to
+hearer or judge, in an age prior to the temptations which more or less
+prevailed over succeeding writers--before the theatre had degraded
+poetry into an exhibition, and criticism narrowed it into an art.
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS CARLYLE
+
+1795-1881
+
+THE HERO AS POET. DANTE; SHAKESPEARE (1840)
+
+
+The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old
+ages; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain
+rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific
+knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world
+vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in their loving
+wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with
+the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past. We are now to see
+our Hero in the less ambitious, but also less questionable, character
+of Poet; a character which does not pass. The Poet is a heroic figure
+belonging to all ages; whom all ages possess, when once he is
+produced, whom the newest age as the oldest may produce;--and will
+produce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul; in
+no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a Poet.
+
+Hero, Prophet, Poet,--many different names, in different times and
+places, do we give to Great Men; according to varieties we note in
+them, according to the sphere in which they have displayed themselves!
+We might give many more names, on this same principle. I will remark
+again, however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that the
+different _sphere_ constitutes the grand origin of such distinction;
+that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will,
+according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess,
+I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be _all_ sorts of
+men. The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas,
+would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic
+warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. I fancy
+there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator,
+Philosopher;--in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is
+all these. So too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that great
+glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears
+that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and
+touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and education
+led him thitherward. The grand fundamental character is that of Great
+Man; that the man be great. Napoleon has words in him which are like
+Austerlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth’s Marshals are a kind of poetical
+men withal; the things Turenne says are full of sagacity and
+geniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The great heart, the clear
+deep-seeing eye: there it lies; no man whatever, in what province
+soever, can prosper at all without these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did
+diplomatic messages, it seems, quite well: one can easily believe it;
+they had done things a little harder than these! Burns, a gifted
+song-writer, might have made a still better Mirabeau. Shakespeare,--one
+knows not what _he_ could not have made, in the supreme degree.
+
+True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not make all
+great men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. Varieties
+of aptitude doubtless; but infinitely more of circumstance; and far
+oftenest it is the _latter_ only that are looked to. But it is as with
+common men in the learning of trades. You take any man, as yet a vague
+capability of a man, who could be any kind of craftsman; and make him
+into a smith, a carpenter, a mason: he is then and thenceforth that
+and nothing else. And if, as Addison complains, you sometimes see a
+street-porter staggering under his load on spindle-shanks, and near at
+hand a tailor with the frame of a Samson handling a bit of cloth and
+small Whitechapel needle,--it cannot be considered that aptitude of
+Nature alone has been consulted here either!--The Great Man also, to
+what shall he be bound apprentice? Given your Hero, is he to become
+Conqueror, King, Philosopher, Poet? It is an inexplicably complex
+controversial-calculation between the world and him! He will read the
+world and its laws; the world with its laws will be there to be read.
+What the world, on _this_ matter, shall permit and bid is, as we said,
+the most important fact about the world.--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them.
+In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; _Vates_ means
+both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well
+understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they
+are still the same; in this most important respect especially, That
+they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the
+Universe; what Goethe calls ‘the open secret’. ‘Which is the great
+secret?’ asks one.--‘The _open_ secret,’--open to all, seen by almost
+none! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, ‘the
+Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom of
+Appearance,’ as Fichte styles it; of which all Appearance, from the
+starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the Appearance of
+Man and his work, is but the _vesture_, the embodiment that renders it
+visible. This divine mystery _is_ in all times and in all places;
+veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked; and
+the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect, as the
+realized Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace
+matter,--as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some
+upholsterer had put together! It could do no good, at present, to
+_speak_ much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do
+not know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful
+pity;--a failure to live at all, if we live otherwise!
+
+But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the _Vates_,
+whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither
+to make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message;
+he is to reveal that to us,--that sacred mystery which he more than
+others lives ever present with. While others forget it, he knows
+it;--I might say, he has been driven to know it; without consent asked
+of _him_, he finds himself living in it, bound to live in it. Once
+more, here is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Belief; this man
+too could not help being a sincere man! Whosoever may live in the
+shows of things, it is for him a necessity of nature to live in the
+very fact of things. A man, once more, in earnest with the Universe,
+though all others were but toying with it. He is a _Vates_, first of
+all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet,
+participators in the ‘open secret,’ are one.
+
+With respect to their distinction again: The _Vates_ Prophet, we might
+say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good
+and Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the _Vates_ Poet on what the Germans
+call the æsthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may
+call a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are to
+love. But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot
+be disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye on what we are to love: how
+else shall he know what it is we are to do? The highest Voice ever
+heard on this Earth said withal, ‘Consider the lilies of the field;
+they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was
+not arrayed like one of these.’ A glance, that, into the deepest deep
+of Beauty. ‘The lilies of the field,’--dressed finer than earthly
+princes, springing up there in the humble furrow-field; a beautiful
+_eye_ looking out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty! How
+could the rude Earth make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks
+and is, were not inwardly Beauty?--In this point of view, too, a
+saying of Goethe’s, which has staggered several, may have meaning:
+‘The Beautiful’, he intimates, ‘is higher than the Good; the Beautiful
+includes in it the Good.’ The _true_ Beautiful; which however, I have
+said somewhere, ‘differs from the _false_, as Heaven does from
+Vauxhall!’ So much for the distinction and identity of Poet and
+Prophet.--
+
+In ancient and also in modern periods, we find a few Poets who are
+accounted perfect; whom it were a kind of treason to find fault with.
+This is noteworthy; this is right: yet in strictness it is only an
+illusion. At bottom, clearly enough, there is no perfect Poet! A vein
+of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether
+of Poetry. We are all poets when we _read_ a poem well. The
+‘imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante,’ is not that the same
+faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante’s own? No one but Shakespeare can
+embody, out of Saxo Grammaticus, the story of _Hamlet_ as Shakespeare
+did: but every one models some kind of story out of it; every one
+embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Where
+there is no specific difference, as between round and square, all
+definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has _so_ much
+more of the poetic element developed in him as to have become
+noticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbours. World-Poets too,
+those whom we are to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics in
+the same way. One who rises _so_ far above the general level of Poets
+will, to such and such critics, seem a Universal Poet; as he ought to
+do. And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction. All Poets,
+all men, have some touches of the Universal; no man is wholly made of
+that. Most Poets are very soon forgotten: but not the noblest
+Shakespeare or Homer of them can be remembered _for ever_;--a day
+comes when he too is not!
+
+Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a difference between true
+Poetry and true Speech not Poetical: what is the difference? On this
+point many things have been written, especially by late German
+Critics, some of which are not very intelligible at first. They say,
+for example, that the Poet has an _infinitude_ in him; communicates an
+_Unendlichkeit_, a certain character of ‘infinitude’, to whatsoever he
+delineates. This, though not very precise, yet on so vague a matter is
+worth remembering: if well meditated, some meaning will gradually be
+found in it. For my own part, I find considerable meaning in the old
+vulgar distinction of Poetry being _metrical_, having music in it,
+being a Song. Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one might say
+this as soon as anything else: If your delineation be authentically
+_musical_, musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in
+all the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it,
+then it will be poetical; if not, not.--Musical: how much lies in
+that! A _musical_ thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated
+into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it,
+namely the _melody_ that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of
+coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be,
+here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious;
+naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who
+is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on
+us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the
+edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!
+
+Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of song in
+it: not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent;--the rhythm
+or _tune_ to which the people there _sing_ what they have to say!
+Accent is a kind of chanting; all men have accent of their
+own,--though they only _notice_ that of others. Observe too how all
+passionate language does of itself become musical,--with a finer music
+than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger
+becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehow
+the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but
+wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all
+things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they
+had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices
+and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call
+_musical Thought_. The Poet is he who _thinks_ in that manner. At
+bottom, it turns still on power of intellect; it is a man’s sincerity
+and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you
+see musically; the heart of Nature _being_ everywhere music, if you
+can only reach it.
+
+The _Vates_ Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse of Nature, seems to
+hold a poor rank among us, in comparison with the _Vates_ Prophet; his
+function, and our esteem of him for his function, alike slight. The
+Hero taken as Divinity; the Hero taken as Prophet; then next the Hero
+taken only as Poet: does it not look as if our estimate of the Great
+Man, epoch after epoch, were continually diminishing? We take him
+first for a god, then for one god-inspired; and now in the next stage
+of it, his most miraculous word gains from us only the recognition
+that he is a Poet, beautiful verse-maker, man of genius, or
+such-like!--It looks so; but I persuade myself that intrinsically it
+is not so. If we consider well, it will perhaps appear that in man
+still there is the _same_ altogether peculiar admiration for the
+Heroic Gift, by what name soever called, that there at any time was.
+
+I should say, if we do not now reckon a Great Man literally divine, it
+is that our notions of God, of the supreme unattainable Fountain of
+Splendour, Wisdom and Heroism, are ever rising _higher_; not
+altogether that our reverence for these qualities, as manifested in
+our like, is getting lower. This is worth taking thought of. Sceptical
+Dilettantism, the curse of these ages, a curse which will not last for
+ever, does indeed in this the highest province of human things, as in
+all provinces, make sad work; and our reverence for great men, all
+crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is, comes out in poor plight,
+hardly recognizable. Men worship the shows of great men; the most
+disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship. The
+dreariest, fatallest faith; believing which, one would literally
+despair of human things. Nevertheless look, for example, at Napoleon!
+A Corsican lieutenant of artillery; that is the show of _him_: yet is
+he not obeyed, _worshipped_ after his sort, as all the Tiaraed and
+Diademed of the world put together could not be? High Duchesses, and
+ostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rustic, Burns;--a strange
+feeling dwelling in each that they never heard a man like this; that,
+on the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of these people it
+still dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited way of
+uttering it at present, that this rustic, with his black brows and
+flashing sun-eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears, is of
+a dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable with all others. Do
+not we feel it so? But now, were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triviality,
+and all that sorrowful brood, cast-out of us,--as, by God’s blessing,
+they shall one day be; were faith in the shows of things entirely
+swept out, replaced by clear faith in the _things_, so that a man
+acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the other non-extant;
+what a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it!
+
+Nay here in these ages, such as they are, have we not two mere Poets,
+if not deified, yet we may say beatified? Shakespeare and Dante are
+Saints of Poetry; really, if we will think of it, _canonized_, so that
+it is impiety to meddle with them. The unguided instinct of the world,
+working across all these perverse impediments, has arrived at such
+result. Dante and Shakespeare are a peculiar Two. They dwell apart, in
+a kind of royal solitude; none equal, none second to them: in the
+general feeling of the world, a certain transcendentalism, a glory as
+of complete perfection, invests these two. They _are_ canonized,
+though no Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing it! Such, in spite of
+every perverting influence, in the most unheroic times, is still our
+indestructible reverence for heroism.--We will look a little at these
+Two, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakespeare: what little it is
+permitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet will most fitly arrange
+itself in that fashion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and his
+Book; yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as it
+were, irrecoverably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering,
+sorrowstricken man, not much note was taken of him while he lived; and
+the most of that has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes.
+It is five centuries since he ceased writing and living here. After
+all commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The
+Book;--and one might add that Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto,
+which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine,
+whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all faces
+that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, with
+the simple laurel wound round it; the deathless sorrow and pain, the
+known victory which is also deathless;--significant of the whole
+history of Dante! I think it is the mournfullest face that ever was
+painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face.
+There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle
+affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into sharp
+contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain. A soft
+ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as
+from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too,
+a silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of god-like disdain
+of the thing that is eating-out his heart,--as if it were withal a
+mean insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and
+strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and
+lifelong unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection all
+converted into indignation: an implacable indignation; slow, equable,
+silent, like that of a god! The eye too, it looks out as in a kind of
+_surprise_, a kind of inquiry, Why the world was of such a sort? This
+is Dante: so he looks, this ‘voice of ten silent centuries’, and sings
+us ‘his mystic unfathomable song’.
+
+The little that we know of Dante’s Life corresponds well enough with
+this Portrait and this Book. He was born at Florence, in the upper
+class of society, in the year 1265. His education was the best then
+going; much school-divinity, Aristotelean logic, some Latin
+classics,--no inconsiderable insight into certain provinces of things:
+and Dante, with his earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt,
+learned better than most all that was learnable. He has a clear
+cultivated understanding, and of great subtlety; this best fruit of
+education he had contrived to realize from these scholastics. He knows
+accurately and well what lies close to him; but, in such a time,
+without printed books or free intercourse, he could not know well what
+was distant: the small clear light, most luminous for what is near,
+breaks itself into singular _chiaroscuro_ striking on what is far off.
+This was Dante’s learning from the schools. In life, he had gone
+through the usual destinies; been twice out campaigning as a soldier
+for the Florentine State, been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth
+year, by natural gradation of talent and service, become one of the
+Chief Magistrates of Florence. He had met in boyhood a certain
+Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl of his own age and rank,
+and grown-up thenceforth in partial sight of her, in some distant
+intercourse with her. All readers know his graceful affecting account
+of this; and then of their being parted; of her being wedded to
+another, and of her death soon after. She makes a great figure in
+Dante’s Poem; seems to have made a great figure in his life. Of all
+beings it might seem as if she, held apart from him, far apart at last
+in the dim Eternity, were the only one he had ever with his whole
+strength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself was wedded; but
+it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy, the rigorous earnest
+man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make
+happy.
+
+We will not complain of Dante’s miseries: had all gone right with him
+as he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podestà, or whatsoever they
+call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbours,--and the world
+had wanted one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence
+would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb
+centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries
+(for there will be ten of them and more) had no _Divina Commedia_ to
+hear! We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for
+this Dante; and he, struggling like a man led towards death and
+crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give _him_ the choice of
+his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really happy,
+what was really miserable.
+
+In Dante’s Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or some
+other confused disturbances rose to such a height, that Dante, whose
+party had seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedly
+forth into banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and
+wandering. His property was all confiscated and more; he had the
+fiercest feeling that it was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight
+of God and man. He tried what was in him to get reinstated; tried even
+by warlike surprisal, with arms in his hand: but it would not do; bad
+only had become worse. There is a record, I believe, still extant in
+the Florence Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever caught, to be
+burnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands, they say: a very curious
+civic document. Another curious document, some considerable number of
+years later, is a Letter of Dante’s to the Florentine Magistrates,
+written in answer to a milder proposal of theirs, that he should
+return on condition of apologizing and paying a fine. He answers, with
+fixed stern pride: ‘If I cannot return without calling myself guilty,
+I will never return, _nunquam revertar_.’
+
+For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from patron
+to patron, from place to place; proving, in his own bitter words, ‘How
+hard is the path, _Come è duro calle_.’ The wretched are not cheerful
+company. Dante, poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, with
+his moody humours, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reports
+of him that being at Can della Scala’s court, and blamed one day for
+his gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like way. Della
+Scala stood among his courtiers, with mimes and buffoons (_nebulones
+ac histriones_) making him heartily merry; when turning to Dante, he
+said: ‘Is it not strange, now, that this poor fool should make himself
+so entertaining; while you, a wise man, sit there day after day, and
+have nothing to amuse us with at all?’ Dante answered bitterly: ‘No,
+not strange; your Highness is to recollect the Proverb, _Like to
+Like_;’--given the amuser, the amusee must also be given! Such a man,
+with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was not
+made to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be evident to him
+that he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit, in this
+earth. The earthly world had cast him forth, to wander, wander; no
+living heart to love him now; for his sore miseries there was no
+solace here.
+
+The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him;
+that awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with its
+Florences and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence
+thou shalt never see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt
+surely see! What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life
+altogether? ETERNITY: thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, art thou
+and all things bound! The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made
+its home more and more in that awful other world. Naturally his
+thoughts brooded on that, as on the one fact important for him. Bodied
+or bodiless, it is the one fact important for all men:--but to Dante,
+in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape; he
+no more doubted of that _Malebolge_ Pool, that it all lay there with
+its gloomy circles, with its _alti guai_, and that he himself should
+see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went
+thither. Dante’s heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in
+speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into ‘mystic
+unfathomable song’; and this his _Divine Comedy_, the most remarkable
+of all modern Books, is the result.
+
+It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see,
+a proud thought for him at times, That he, here in exile, could do
+this work; that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him from
+doing it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that
+it was great; the greatest a man could do. ‘If thou follow thy star,
+_Se tu segui tua stella_,’--so could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in
+his extreme need, still say to himself: ‘Follow thou thy star, thou
+shalt not fail of a glorious heaven!’ The labour of writing, we find,
+and indeed could know otherwise, was great and painful for him; he
+says, This Book, ‘which has made me lean for many years.’ Ah yes, it
+was won, all of it, with pain and sore toil,--not in sport, but in
+grim earnest. His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has been
+written, in many senses, with his heart’s blood. It is his whole
+history, this Book. He died after finishing it; not yet very old, at
+the age of fifty-six;--broken-hearted rather, as is said. He lies
+buried in his death-city Ravenna: _Hic claudor Dantes patriis extorris
+ab oris_. The Florentines begged back his body, in a century after;
+the Ravenna people would not give it. ‘Here am I Dante laid, shut out
+from my native shores.’
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I said, Dante’s Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it ‘a mystic
+unfathomable Song’; and such is literally the character of it.
+Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a
+sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words,
+there is something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and
+soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song:
+we said before, it was the Heroic of Speech! All _old_ Poems, Homer’s
+and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness,
+that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not _sung_ is properly no
+Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,--to the great
+injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most
+part! What we want to get at is the _thought_ the man had, if he had
+any: why should he twist it into jingle, if he _could_ speak it out
+plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion
+of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge’s remark,
+become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, that
+we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, and
+listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,--whose speech _is_ Song.
+Pretenders to this are many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is
+for most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business,
+that of reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be
+rhymed;--it ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what it
+was aiming at. I would advise all men who _can_ speak their thought,
+not to sing it; to understand that, in a serious time, among serious
+men, there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as we love
+the true song, and are charmed by it as by something divine, so shall
+we hate the false song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing
+hollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere and offensive thing.
+
+I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his _Divine Comedy_ that
+it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there
+is a _canto fermo_; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his
+simple _terza rima_, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along
+naturally with a sort of _lilt_. But I add, that it could not be
+otherwise; for the essence and material of the work are themselves
+rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes it
+musical;--go _deep_ enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward
+symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it,
+proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the
+character of music. The three kingdoms, _Inferno_, _Purgatorio_,
+_Paradiso_, look out on one another like compartments of a great
+edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern,
+solemn, awful; Dante’s World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the
+_sincerest_ of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the
+measure of worth. It came deep out of the author’s heart of hearts;
+and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people
+of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, ‘_Eccovi l’
+uom ch’ è stato all’ Inferno_, See, there is the man that was in
+Hell!’ Ah, yes, he had been in Hell;--in Hell enough, in long severe
+sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been.
+Commedias that come-out _divine_ are not accomplished otherwise.
+Thought, true labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the
+daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;--true _effort_,
+in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought.
+In all ways we are ‘to become perfect through _suffering_.’--But, as I
+say, no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante’s. It has
+all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made
+him ‘lean’ for many years. Not the general whole only; every
+compartment of it is worked-out, with intense earnestness, into truth,
+into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each fits in its
+place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the
+soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the Middle Ages, rendered for
+ever rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense one:
+but a task which is _done_.
+
+Perhaps one would say, _intensity_, with the much that depends on it,
+is the prevailing character of Dante’s genius. Dante does not come
+before us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and even
+sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but
+partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses,
+concentered itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great
+not because he is world-wide, but because he is world-deep. Through
+all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know
+nothing so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with the
+outermost development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has
+a great power of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents
+that and nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the
+Hall of Dite: _red_ pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glowing through the
+dim immensity of gloom;--so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and
+for ever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante. There is a
+brevity, an abrupt precision in him: Tacitus is not briefer, more
+condensed; and then in Dante it seems a natural condensation,
+spontaneous to the man. One smiting word; and then there is silence,
+nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than words. It is
+strange with what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the true likeness
+of a matter: cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the
+blustering giant, collapses at Virgil’s rebuke; it is ‘as the sails
+sink, the mast being suddenly broken’. Or that poor Sordello, with the
+_cotto aspetto_, ‘face _baked_’, parched brown and lean; and the
+‘fiery snow’ that falls on them there, a ‘fiery snow without wind’,
+slow, deliberate, never-ending! Or the lids of those Tombs; square
+sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each with its Soul in
+torment; the lids laid open there; they are to be shut at the Day of
+Judgement, through Eternity. And how Farinata rises; and how
+Cavalcante falls--at hearing of his Son, and the past tense ‘_fue_!’
+The very movements in Dante have something brief; swift, decisive,
+almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius this sort
+of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent,
+passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent ‘pale rages’,
+speaks itself in these things.
+
+For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a
+man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is
+physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a
+likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of
+doing it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could
+not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it,
+unless he had, what we may call, _sympathized_ with it,--had sympathy
+in him to bestow on objects. He must have been _sincere_ about it too;
+sincere and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the
+likeness of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and
+trivial hearsay, about all objects. And indeed may we not say that
+intellect altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning what
+an object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man’s mind may have will come
+out here. Is it even of business, a matter to be done? The gifted man
+is he who _sees_ the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as
+surplusage: it is his faculty too, the man of business’s faculty, that
+he discern the true _likeness_, not the false superficial one, of the
+thing he has got to work in. And how much of _morality_ is in the kind
+of insight we get of anything; ‘the eye seeing in all things what it
+brought with it the faculty of seeing!’ To the mean eye all things are
+trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael,
+the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No
+most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the
+commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with
+him.
+
+Dante’s painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness
+as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is everyway
+noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what
+qualities in that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of
+eternal black. A small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into
+our very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too: _della bella
+persona, che mi fu tolta_; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a
+solace that _he_ will never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these
+_alti guai_. And the racking winds, in that _aer bruno_, whirl them
+away again, to wail for ever!--Strange to think: Dante was the friend
+of this poor Francesca’s father; Francesca herself may have sat upon
+the Poet’s knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet
+also infinite rigour of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante
+discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his
+_Divine Comedy’s_ being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel;
+putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth! I
+suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother’s, was in the heart of any
+man, it was in Dante’s. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity
+either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic,--sentimentality, or
+little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of
+Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like
+the wail of Aeolean harps, soft, soft; like a child’s young
+heart;--and then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of
+his towards his Beatrice; their meeting together in the _Paradiso_;
+his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes, her that had been purified
+by death so long, separated from him so far:--one likens it to the
+gong of angels; it is among the purest utterances of affection,
+perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human soul.
+
+For the _intense_ Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the
+essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too
+as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity.
+Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of
+all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;--as indeed,
+what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love? ‘_A Dio
+spiacenti, ed a’ nemici sui_, Hateful to God and to the enemies of
+God:’ lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; ‘_Non
+ragionam di lor_, We will not speak of _them_, look only and pass.’ Or
+think of this: ‘They have not the _hope_ to die, _Non han speranza di
+morte_.’ One day, it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of
+Dante, that he, wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full
+surely _die_; ‘that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die.’
+Such words are in this man. For rigour, earnestness and depth, he is
+not to be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his parallel we must
+go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets there.
+
+I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the
+_Inferno_ to the two other parts of the Divine _Commedia_. Such
+preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and
+is like to be a transient feeling. The _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_,
+especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellent
+than it. It is a noble thing that _Purgatorio_, ‘Mountain of
+Purification’; an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If Sin
+is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in
+Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act.
+It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The _tremolar dell’ onde_,
+that ‘trembling’ of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of
+morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an
+altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company
+still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of daemons and reprobate
+is under foot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher,
+to the Throne of Mercy itself. ‘Pray for me,’ the denizens of that
+Mount of Pain all say to him. ‘Tell my Giovanna to pray for me,’ my
+daughter Giovanna; ‘I think her mother loves me no more!’ They toil
+painfully up by that winding steep, ‘bent-down like corbels of a
+building,’ some of them,--crushed together so ‘for the sin of pride’;
+yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons, they shall have reached
+the top, which is Heaven’s gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted
+in. The joy too of all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain
+shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises, when one soul has
+perfected repentance, and got its sin and misery left behind! I call
+all this a noble embodiment of a true noble thought.
+
+But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are
+indispensable to one another. The _Paradiso_, a kind of inarticulate
+music to me, is the redeeming side of the _Inferno_; the _Inferno_
+without it were untrue. All three make up the true Unseen World, as
+figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing for ever
+memorable, for ever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was
+perhaps delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as in
+this of Dante’s; a man _sent_ to sing it, to keep it long memorable.
+Very notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of the every-day
+reality, into the Invisible one; and in the second or third stanza, we
+find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among
+things palpable, indubitable! To Dante they _were_ so; the real world,
+as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely
+higher Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as _preter_natural as
+the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit, but
+is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes
+it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say
+again, is the saving merit, now as always.
+
+Dante’s Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic
+representation of his Belief about this Universe:--some Critic in a
+future age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased
+altogether to think as Dante did, may find this too all an ‘Allegory’,
+perhaps an idle Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of
+the soul of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge world-wide
+architectural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to
+be the two polar elements of this Creation, on which it all turns;
+that these two differ not by _preferability_ of one to the other, but
+by incompatibility absolute and infinite; that the one is excellent
+and high as light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehenna and
+the Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence, with
+everlasting Pity,--all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle Ages had
+it, is emblemed there. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged the other day,
+with what entire truth of purpose; how unconscious of any embleming!
+Hell, Purgatory, Paradise: these things were not fashioned as emblems;
+was there, in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of their
+being emblems! Were they not indubitable awful facts; the whole heart
+of man taking them for practically true, all Nature everywhere
+confirming them? So is it always in these things. Men do not believe
+an Allegory. The future Critic, whatever his new thought may be, who
+considers this of Dante to have been all got-up as an Allegory, will
+commit one sore mistake!--Paganism we recognized as a veracious
+expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards the
+Universe; veracious, true once, and still not without worth for us.
+But mark here the difference of Paganism and Christianism; one great
+difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the
+destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in
+this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law
+of Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a rude helpless utterance of
+the _first_ Thought of men,--the chief recognized virtue, Courage,
+Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, but
+for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect only!--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in a very
+strange way, found a voice. The _Divina Commedia_ is of Dante’s
+writing; yet in truth _it_ belongs to ten Christian centuries, only
+the finishing of it is Dante’s. So always. The craftsman there, the
+smith with that metal of his, with these tools, with these cunning
+methods,--how little of all he does is properly _his_ work! All past
+inventive men work there with him;--as indeed with all of us, in all
+things. Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the Thought they
+lived by stands here, in everlasting music. These sublime ideas of
+his, terrible and beautiful, are the fruit of the Christian Meditation
+of all the good men who had gone before him. Precious they; but also
+is not he precious? Much, had not he spoken, would have been dumb; not
+dead, yet living voiceless.
+
+On the whole, is it not an utterance, this mystic Song, at once of one
+of the greatest human souls, and of the highest thing that Europe had
+hitherto realized for itself? Christianism, as Dante sings it, is
+another than Paganism in the rude Norse mind; another than ‘Bastard
+Christianism’ half articulately spoken in the Arab desert, seven
+hundred years before!--The noblest _idea_ made _real_ hitherto among
+men, is sung, and emblemed forth abidingly, by one of the noblest men.
+In the one sense and in the other, are we not right glad to possess
+it? As I calculate, it may last yet for long thousands of years. For
+the thing that is uttered from the inmost parts of a man’s soul,
+differs altogether from what is uttered by the outer part. The outer
+is of the day, under the empire of mode; the outer passes away, in
+swift endless changes; the inmost is the same yesterday, to-day, and
+for ever. True souls, in all generations of the world, who look on
+this Dante, will find a brotherhood in him; the deep sincerity of his
+thoughts, his woes and hopes, will speak likewise to their sincerity;
+they will feel that this Dante too was a brother. Napoleon in
+Saint-Helena is charmed with the genial veracity of old Homer. The
+oldest Hebrew Prophet, under a vesture the most diverse from ours,
+does yet, because he speaks from the heart of man, speak to all men’s
+hearts. It is the one sole secret of continuing long memorable. Dante,
+for depth of sincerity, is like an antique Prophet too; his words,
+like theirs, come from his very heart. One need not wonder if it were
+predicted that his Poem might be the most enduring thing our Europe
+has yet made; for nothing so endures as a truly spoken word. All
+cathedrals, pontificalities, brass and stone, and outer arrangement
+never so lasting, are brief in comparison to an unfathomable
+heart-song like this: one feels as if it might survive, still of
+importance to men, when these had all sunk into new irrecognizable
+combinations, and had ceased individually to be. Europe has made much;
+great cities, great empires, encyclopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion
+and practice: but it has made little of the class of Dante’s Thought.
+Homer yet _is_, veritably present face to face with every open soul of
+us; and Greece, where is _it_? Desolate for thousands of years; away,
+vanished; a bewildered heap of stones and rubbish, the life and
+existence of it all gone. Like a dream; like the dust of King
+Agamemnon! Greece was; Greece, except in the _words_ it spoke, is not.
+
+The uses of this Dante? We will not say much about his ‘uses’. A human
+soul who has once got into that primal element of _Song_, and sung
+forth fitly somewhat therefrom, has worked in the _depths_ of our
+existence; feeding through long times the life-_roots_ of all
+excellent human things whatsoever,--in a way that ‘utilities’ will not
+succeed well in calculating! We will not estimate the Sun by the
+quantity of gas-light it saves us; Dante shall be invaluable, or of no
+value. One remark I may make: the contrast in this respect between the
+Hero-Poet and the Hero-Prophet. In a hundred years, Mahomet, as we
+saw, had his Arabians at Grenada and at Delhi; Dante’s Italians seem
+to be yet very much where they were. Shall we say, then, Dante’s
+effect on the world was small in comparison? Not so: his arena is far
+more restricted; but also it is far nobler, clearer;--perhaps not less
+but more important. Mahomet speaks to great masses of men, in the
+coarse dialect adapted to such; a dialect filled with inconsistencies,
+crudities, follies: on the great masses alone can he act, and there
+with good and with evil strangely blended. Dante speaks to the noble,
+the pure and great, in all times and places. Neither does he grow
+obsolete, as the other does. Dante burns as a pure star, fixed there
+in the firmament, at which the great and the high of all ages kindle
+themselves: he is the possession of all the chosen of the world for
+uncounted time. Dante, one calculates, may long survive Mahomet. In
+this way the balance may be made straight again.
+
+But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on the
+world by what _we_ can judge of their effect there, that a man and his
+work are measured. Effect? Influence? Utility? Let a man _do_ his
+work; the fruit of it is the care of Another than he. It will grow its
+own fruit; and whether embodied in Caliph Thrones and Arabian
+Conquests, so that it ‘fills all Morning and Evening Newspapers’, and
+all Histories, which are a kind of distilled Newspapers; or not
+embodied so at all;--what matters that? That is not the real fruit of
+it! The Arabian Caliph, in so far only as he did something, was
+something. If the great Cause of Man, and Man’s work in God’s Earth,
+got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph, then no matter how many
+scimitars he drew, how many gold piastres pocketed, and what uproar
+and blaring he made in this world,--_he_ was but a loud-sounding
+inanity and futility; at bottom, he _was_ not at all. Let us honour
+the great empire of _Silence_, once more! The boundless treasury which
+we do _not_ jingle in our pockets, or count up and present before men!
+It is perhaps, of all things, the usefulest for each of us to do, in
+these loud times.-- --
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically
+the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe,
+its Inner Life; so Shakespeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer
+Life of our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies,
+humours, ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at
+the world, men then had. As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece;
+so in Shakespeare and Dante, after thousands of years, what our Modern
+Europe was, in Faith and in Practice, will still be legible. Dante has
+given us the Faith or soul; Shakespeare, in a not less noble way, has
+given us the Practice or body. This latter also we were to have; a man
+was sent for it, the man Shakespeare. Just when that chivalry way of
+life had reached its last finish, and was on the point of breaking
+down into slow or swift dissolution, as we now see it everywhere, this
+other sovereign Poet, with his seeing eye, with his perennial singing
+voice, was sent to take note of it, to give long-enduring record of
+it. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce as the central fire of the world;
+Shakespeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as the Sun, the upper light of
+the world. Italy produced the one world-voice; we English had the
+honour of producing the other.
+
+Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man came to us.
+I think always, so great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is this
+Shakespeare, had the Warwickshire Squire not prosecuted him for
+deer-stealing, we had perhaps never heard of him as a Poet! The woods
+and skies, the rustic Life of Man in Stratford there, had been enough
+for this man! But indeed that strange outbudding of our whole English
+Existence, which we call the Elizabethan Era, did not it too come as
+of its own accord? The ‘Tree Igdrasil’ buds and withers by its own
+laws,--too deep for our scanning. Yet it does bud and wither, and
+every bough and leaf of it is there, by fixed eternal laws; not a Sir
+Thomas Lucy but comes at the hour fit for him. Curious, I say, and not
+sufficiently considered: how everything does co-operate with all; not
+a leaf rotting on the highway but is indissoluble portion of solar and
+stellar systems; no thought, word or act of man but has sprung withal
+out of all men, and works sooner or later, recognizably or
+irrecognizably, on all men! It is all a Tree: circulation of sap and
+influences, mutual communication of every minutest leaf with the
+lowest talon of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portion
+of the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the
+Kingdoms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread the highest
+Heaven!--
+
+In some sense it may be said that this glorious Elizabethan Era with
+its Shakespeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had
+preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle
+Ages. The Christian Faith, which was the theme of Dante’s Song, had
+produced this Practical Life which Shakespeare was to sing. For
+Religion then, as it now and always is, was the soul of Practice; the
+primary vital fact in men’s life. And remark here, as rather curious,
+that Middle-Age Catholicism was abolished, so far as Acts of
+Parliament could abolish it, before Shakespeare, the noblest product
+of it, made his appearance. He did make his appearance nevertheless.
+Nature at her own time, with Catholicism or what else might be
+necessary, sent him forth; taking small thought of Acts of Parliament.
+King-Henrys, Queen-Elizabeths go their way; and Nature too goes hers.
+Acts of Parliament, on the whole, are small, notwithstanding the noise
+they make. What Act of Parliament, debate at St. Stephens, on the
+hustings or elsewhere, was it that brought this Shakespeare into
+being? No dining at Freemasons’ Tavern, opening subscription-lists,
+selling of shares, and infinite other jangling and true or false
+endeavouring! This Elizabethan Era, and all its nobleness and
+blessedness, came without proclamation, preparation of ours. Priceless
+Shakespeare was the free gift of Nature; given altogether
+silently;--received altogether silently, as if it had been a thing of
+little account. And yet, very literally, it is a priceless thing. One
+should look at that side of matters too.
+
+Of this Shakespeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a
+little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the
+best judgement not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is
+slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakespeare is the chief of
+all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world,
+has left record of himself in the way of literature. On the whole, I
+know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take
+all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth;
+placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so
+true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea! It has been said,
+that in the constructing of Shakespeare’s Dramas there is, apart from
+all other ‘faculties’ as they are called, an understanding manifested,
+equal to that in Bacon’s _Novum Organum_. That is true; and it is not
+a truth that strikes every one. It would become more apparent if we
+tried, any of us for himself, how, out of Shakespeare’s dramatic
+materials, _we_ could fashion such a result! The built house seems all
+so fit,--everyway as it should be, as if it came there by its own law
+and the nature of things,--we forget the rude disorderly quarry it was
+shaped from. The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself
+had made it, hides the builder’s merit. Perfect, more perfect than any
+other man, we may call Shakespeare in this: he discerns, knows as by
+instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are, what
+his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory
+glance of insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illumination of
+the whole matter; it is a calmly _seeing_ eye; a great intellect, in
+short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will
+construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will
+give of it,--is the best measure you could get of what intellect is
+in the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent;
+which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true
+_beginning_, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task
+the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must _understand_
+the thing; according to the depth of his understanding, will the
+fitness of his answer be. You will try him so. Does like join itself
+to like; does the spirit of method stir in that confusion, so that its
+embroilment becomes order? Can the man say, _Fiat lux_, Let there be
+light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there, is _light_
+in himself, will he accomplish this.
+
+Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting,
+delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is
+great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is
+unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare.
+The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its
+inmost heart and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light
+before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative,
+we said: poetic creation, what is this too but _seeing_ the thing
+sufficiently? The _word_ that will describe the thing, follows of
+itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not
+Shakespeare’s _morality_, his valour, candour, tolerance,
+truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can
+triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world!
+No _twisted_, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with
+its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly _level_ mirror;--that
+is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related to
+all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how
+this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an
+Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their
+round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. _Novum
+Organum_, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite
+secondary order; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. Among
+modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank.
+Goethe alone, since the days of Shakespeare, reminds me of it. Of him
+too you say that he _saw_ the object; you may say what he himself says
+of Shakespeare: ‘His characters are like watches with dial-plates of
+transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the
+inward mechanism also is all visible.’
+
+The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things;
+what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in these
+often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye
+that something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? You
+can laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way or
+other genially relate yourself to them;--you can, at lowest, hold your
+peace about them, turn away your own and others’ face from them, till
+the hour come for practically exterminating and extinguishing them! At
+bottom, it is the Poet’s first gift, as it is all men’s, that he have
+intellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word; or
+failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write at
+all; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on
+accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents,--perhaps on
+his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his
+boyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart
+of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for what soever exists
+has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and
+exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of
+Nature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort
+soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, _See_. If
+you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together,
+jingling sensibilities against each other, and _name_ yourself a Poet;
+there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in
+action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old
+Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, ‘But are
+ye sure he’s _not a dunce_?’ Why, really one might ask the same thing,
+in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider
+it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he’s not a dunce? There is,
+in this world, no other entirely fatal person.
+
+For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a
+correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakespeare’s faculty,
+I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all
+under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they
+were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect,
+imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a
+capital error. Then again, we hear of a man’s ‘intellectual nature’,
+and of his ‘moral nature’, as if these again were divisible, and
+existed apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms
+of utterance; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to
+speak at all. But words ought not to harden into things for us. It
+seems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part,
+radically falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep for
+ever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but _names_; that
+man’s spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is
+essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy,
+understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same
+Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other,
+physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know
+all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man,
+what is this but another _side_ of the one vital Force whereby he is
+and works? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see
+how a man would fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or
+want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he
+has formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes. He is _one_; and
+preaches the same Self abroad in all these ways.
+
+Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but,
+consider it,--without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a
+thoroughly immoral _man_ could not know anything at all! To know a
+thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first _love_ the thing,
+sympathize with it: that is, be _virtuously_ related to it. If he have
+not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the
+courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he
+know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge.
+Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the
+pusillanimous for ever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is
+mean, superficial, small; for the uses of the day merely.--But does
+not the very Fox know something of Nature? Exactly so: it knows where
+the geese lodge! The human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in the
+world, what more does he know but this and the like of this? Nay, it
+should be considered too, that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine
+_morality_, he could not even know where the geese were, or get at the
+geese! If he spent his time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his
+own misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so
+forth; and had not courage, promptitude, practicality, and other
+suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he would catch no geese. We may say
+of the Fox too, that his morality and insight are of the same
+dimensions; different faces of the same internal unity of vulpine
+life!--These things are worth stating; for the contrary of them acts
+with manifold very baleful perversion, in this time: what limitations,
+modifications they require, your own candour will supply.
+
+If I say, therefore, that Shakespeare is the greatest of Intellects, I
+have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare’s
+intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious
+intellect; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of.
+Novalis beautifully remarks of him, that those Dramas of his are
+Products of Nature too, deep as Nature herself. I find a great truth
+in this saying. Shakespeare’s Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth
+of it is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows up from the
+deeps of Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of
+Nature. The latest generations of men will find new meanings in
+Shakespeare, new elucidations of their own human being; ‘new harmonies
+with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later
+ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man.’ This
+well deserves meditating. It is Nature’s highest award to a true
+simple great soul, that he get thus to be _a part of herself_. Such a
+man’s works, whatsoever he with utmost conscious exertion and
+forethought shall accomplish, grow up withal _un_consciously, from the
+unknown deeps in him;--as the oak-tree grows from the Earth’s bosom,
+as the mountains and waters shape themselves; with a symmetry grounded
+on Nature’s own laws, conformable to all Truth whatsoever. How much in
+Shakespeare lies hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles known to
+himself; much that was not known at all, not speakable at all: like
+_roots_, like sap and forces working underground! Speech is great; but
+Silence is greater.
+
+Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I will not
+blame Dante for his misery: it is as battle without victory; but true
+battle,--the first, indispensable thing. Yet I call Shakespeare
+greater than Dante, in that he fought truly, and did conquer. Doubt it
+not, he had his own sorrows: those _Sonnets_ of his will even testify
+expressly in what deep waters he had waded, and swum struggling for
+his life;--as what man like him ever failed to have to do? It seems to
+me a heedless notion, our common one, that he sat like a bird on the
+bough; and sang forth, free and offhand, never knowing the troubles of
+other men. Not so; with no man is it so. How could a man travel
+forward from rustic deer-poaching to such tragedy-writing, and not
+fall in with sorrows by the way? Or, still better, how could a man
+delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth, so many suffering heroic
+hearts, if his own heroic heart had never suffered?--And now, in
+contrast with all this, observe his mirthfulness, his genuine
+overflowing love of laughter! You would say, in no point does he
+_exaggerate_ but only in laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that
+pierce and burn, are to be found in Shakespeare; yet he is always in
+measure here; never what Johnson would remark as a specially ‘good
+hater’. But his laughter seems to pour from him in floods; he heaps
+all manner of ridiculous nicknames on the butt he is bantering,
+tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of horse-play; you would say,
+roars and laughs. And then, if not always the finest, it is always a
+genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No
+man who _can_ laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these
+things. It is some poor character only _desiring_ to laugh, and have
+the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy; good
+laughter is not ‘the crackling of thorns under the pot’. Even at
+stupidity and pretension this Shakespeare does not laugh otherwise
+than genially. Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts; and we
+dismiss them covered with explosions of laughter: but we like the poor
+fellows only the better for our laughing; and hope they will get on
+well there, and continue Presidents of the City-watch.--Such laughter,
+like sunshine on the deep sea, is very beautiful to me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have no room to speak of Shakespeare’s individual works; though
+perhaps there is much still waiting to be said on that head. Had we,
+for instance, all his plays reviewed as _Hamlet_, in _Wilhelm
+Meister_, is! A thing which might, one day, be done. August Wilhelm
+Schlegel has a remark on his Historical Plays, _Henry Fifth_ and the
+others, which is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of National
+Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, said, he knew no English History but
+what he had learned from Shakespeare. There are really, if we look to
+it, few as memorable Histories. The great salient points are admirably
+seized; all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence; it
+is, as Schlegel says, _epic_;--as indeed all delineation by a great
+thinker will be. There are right beautiful things in those Pieces,
+which indeed together form one beautiful thing. That battle of
+Agincourt strikes me as one of the most perfect things, in its sort,
+we anywhere have of Shakespeare’s. The description of the two hosts:
+the worn-out, jaded English; the dread hour, big with destiny, when
+the battle shall begin; and then that deathless valour: ‘Ye good
+yeomen, whose limbs were made in England!’ There is a noble Patriotism
+in it,--far other than the ‘indifference’ you sometimes hear ascribed
+to Shakespeare. A true English heart breathes, calm and strong,
+through the whole business; not boisterous, protrusive; all the better
+for that. There is a sound in it like the ring of steel. This man too
+had a right stroke in him, had it come to that!
+
+But I will say, of Shakespeare’s works generally, that we have no full
+impress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His works
+are so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that
+was in him. All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory,
+imperfect, written under cramping circumstances; giving only here and
+there a note of the full utterance of the man. Passages there are that
+come upon you like splendour out of Heaven; bursts of radiance,
+illuminating the very heart of the thing: you say, ‘That is _true_,
+spoken once and forever; wheresoever and whensoever there is an open
+human soul, that will be recognized as true!’ Such bursts, however,
+make us feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant; that it is,
+in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakespeare had to write for
+the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could,
+into that and no other mould. It was with him, then, as it is with us
+all. No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his
+own free Thought before us; but his Thought as he could translate it
+into the stone that was given, with the tools that were given.
+_Disjecta membra_ are all that we find of any Poet, or of any man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakespeare may recognize that he
+too was a _Prophet_, in his way; of an insight analogous to the
+Prophetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to
+this man also divine; _un_speakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven:
+‘We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!’ That scroll in Westminster
+Abbey, which few read with understanding, is of the depth of any Seer.
+But the man sang; did not preach, except musically. We called Dante
+the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism. May we not call
+Shakespeare the still more melodious Priest of a _true_ Catholicism,
+the ‘Universal Church’ of the Future and of all times? No narrow
+superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or
+perversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousandfold
+hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let all men
+worship as they can! We may say without offence, that there rises a
+kind of universal Psalm out of this Shakespeare too; not unfit to make
+itself heard among the still more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony
+with these, if we understood them, but in unison!--I cannot call this
+Shakespeare a ‘Sceptic’, as some do; his indifference to the creeds
+and theological quarrels of his time misleading them. No: neither
+unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism; no sceptic,
+though he says little about his Faith. Such ‘indifference’ was the
+fruit of his greatness withal: his whole heart was in his own grand
+sphere of worship (we may call it such); these other controversies,
+vitally important to other men, were not vital to him.
+
+But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right glorious
+thing and set of things, this that Shakespeare has brought us? For
+myself, I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the fact
+of such a man being sent into this Earth. Is he not an eye to us all;
+a blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light?--And, at bottom, was it not
+perhaps far better that this Shakespeare, everyway an unconscious man,
+was _conscious_ of no Heavenly message? He did not feel, like Mahomet,
+because he saw into those internal Splendours, that he specially was
+the ‘Prophet of God’: and was he not greater than Mahomet in that?
+Greater; and also, if we compute strictly, as we did in Dante’s case,
+more successful. It was intrinsically an error that notion of
+Mahomet’s, of his supreme Prophethood; and has come down to us
+inextricably involved in error to this day; dragging along with it
+such a coil of fables, impurities, intolerances, as makes it a
+questionable step for me here and now to say, as I have done, that
+Mahomet was a true Speaker at all, and not rather an ambitious
+charlatan, perversity, and simulacrum, no Speaker, but a Babbler! Even
+in Arabia, as I compute, Mahomet will have exhausted himself and
+become obsolete, while this Shakespeare, this Dante may still be
+young;--while this Shakespeare may still pretend to be a Priest of
+Mankind, of Arabia as of other places, for unlimited periods to come!
+Compared with any speaker or singer one knows, even with Aeschylus or
+Homer, why should he not, for veracity and universality, last like
+them? He is _sincere_ as they; reaches deep down like them, to the
+universal and perennial. But as for Mahomet, I think it had been
+better for him _not_ to be so conscious! Alas, poor Mahomet; all that
+he was _conscious_ of was a mere error; a futility and triviality,--as
+indeed such ever is. The truly great in him too was the unconscious:
+that he was a wild Arab lion of the desert, and did speak out with
+that great thunder-voice of his, not by words which he _thought_ to be
+great, but by actions, by feelings, by a history which _were_ great!
+His Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity; we do not
+believe, like him, that God wrote that! The Great Man here too, as
+always, is a Force of Nature: whatsoever is truly great in him springs
+up from the _in_articulate deeps.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of
+a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of
+Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many
+thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account
+him a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;--on which point there
+were much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite of
+the sad state Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this Shakespeare
+has actually become among us. Which Englishman we ever made, in this
+land of ours, which million of Englishmen, would we not give up rather
+than the Stratford Peasant? There is no regiment of highest
+Dignitaries that we would sell him for. He is the grandest thing we
+have yet done. For our honour among foreign nations, as an ornament to
+our English Household, what item is there that we would not surrender
+rather than him? Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give up your
+Indian Empire or your Shakespeare, you English; never have had any
+Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakespeare? Really it were a
+grave question. Official persons would answer doubtless in official
+language; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer:
+Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakespeare!
+Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare
+does not go, he lasts for ever with us; we cannot give up our
+Shakespeare!
+
+Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely as a real,
+marketable, tangibly-useful possession. England, before long, this
+Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in
+America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there
+will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what
+is it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so
+that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike
+intercourse, helping one another? This is justly regarded as the
+greatest practical problem, the thing all manner of sovereignties and
+governments are here to accomplish: what is it that will accomplish
+this? Acts of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot.
+America is parted from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call it
+not fantastic, for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is an
+English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of
+Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakespeare, does not he shine,
+in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet
+strongest of rallying-signs; _in_destructible; really more valuable in
+that point of view, than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We
+can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a
+thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever,
+under what sort of Parish-Constable soever, English men and women are,
+they will say to one another: ‘Yes, this Shakespeare is ours: we
+produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind
+with him.’ The most common-sense politician, too, if he pleases, may
+think of that.
+
+Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate
+voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the
+heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered,
+scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity
+at all; yet the noble Italy is actually _one_: Italy produced its
+Dante: Italy can speak! The Czar of all the Russias, he is strong,
+with so many bayonets, Cossacks, and cannons: and does a great feat in
+keeping such a tract of Earth politically together; but he cannot yet
+speak. Something great in him, but it is a dumb greatness. He has had
+no voice of genius, to be heard of all men and times. He must learn to
+speak. He is a great dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and Cossacks
+will all have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante’s voice is still
+audible. The Nation that has a Dante is bound together as no dumb
+Russia can be.--We must here end what we had to say of the
+_Hero-Poet_.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT
+
+1784-1859
+
+AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION
+
+WHAT IS POETRY? (1844)
+
+
+Poetry, strictly and artistically so called, that is to say,
+considered not merely as poetic feeling, which is more or less shared
+by all the world, but as the operation of that feeling, such as we see
+it in the poet’s book, is the utterance of a passion for truth,
+beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by
+imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of
+variety in uniformity. Its means are whatever the universe contains;
+and its ends, pleasure and exaltation. Poetry stands between nature
+and convention, keeping alive among us the enjoyment of the external
+and the spiritual world: it has constituted the most enduring fame of
+nations; and, next to Love and Beauty, which are its parents, is the
+greatest proof to man of the pleasure to be found in all things, and
+of the probable riches of infinitude.
+
+Poetry is a passion,[25] because it seeks the deepest impressions; and
+because it must undergo, in order to convey, them.
+
+    [25] _Passio_, suffering in a good sense,--ardent subjection
+    of one’s-self to emotion.
+
+It is a passion for truth, because without truth the impression would
+be false or defective.
+
+It is a passion for beauty, because its office is to exalt and refine
+by means of pleasure, and because beauty is nothing but the loveliest
+form of pleasure.
+
+It is a passion for power, because power is impression triumphant,
+whether over the poet, as desired by himself, or over the reader, as
+affected by the poet.
+
+It embodies and illustrates its impressions by imagination, or images
+of the objects of which it treats, and other images brought in to
+throw light on those objects, in order that it may enjoy and impart
+the feeling of their truth in its utmost conviction and affluence.
+
+It illustrates them by fancy, which is a lighter play of imagination,
+or the feeling of analogy coming short of seriousness, in order that
+it may laugh with what it loves, and show how it can decorate it with
+fairy ornament.
+
+It modulates what it utters, because in running the whole round of
+beauty it must needs include beauty of sound; and because, in the
+height of its enjoyment, it must show the perfection of its triumph,
+and make difficulty itself become part of its facility and joy.
+
+And lastly, Poetry shapes this modulation into uniformity for its
+outline, and variety for its parts, because it thus realizes the last
+idea of beauty itself, which includes the charm of diversity within
+the flowing round of habit and ease.
+
+Poetry is imaginative passion. The quickest and subtlest test of the
+possession of its essence is in expression; the variety of things to
+be expressed shows the amount of its resources; and the continuity of
+the song completes the evidence of its strength and greatness. He who
+has thought, feeling, expression, imagination, action, character, and
+continuity, all in the largest amount and highest degree, is the
+greatest poet.
+
+Poetry includes whatsoever of painting can be made visible to the
+mind’s eye, and whatsoever of music can be conveyed by sound and
+proportion without singing or instrumentation. But it far surpasses
+those divine arts in suggestiveness, range, and intellectual
+wealth;--the first, in expression of thought, combination of images,
+and the triumph over space and time; the second, in all that can be
+done by speech, apart from the tones and modulations of pure sound.
+Painting and music, however, include all those portions of the gift of
+poetry that can be expressed and heightened by the visible and
+melodious. Painting, in a certain apparent manner, is things
+themselves; music, in a certain audible manner, is their very emotion
+and grace. Music and painting are proud to be related to poetry, and
+poetry loves and is proud of them.
+
+Poetry begins where matter of fact or of science ceases to be merely
+such, and to exhibit a further truth; that is to say, the connexion it
+has with the world of emotion, and its power to produce imaginative
+pleasure. Inquiring of a gardener, for instance, what flower it is we
+see yonder, he answers, ‘a lily’. This is matter of fact. The botanist
+pronounces it to be of the order of ‘Hexandria Monogynia’. This is
+matter of science. It is the ‘lady’ of the garden, says Spenser; and
+here we begin to have a poetical sense of its fairness and grace. It
+is
+
+    The plant and flower of _light_,
+
+says Ben Jonson; and poetry then shows us the beauty of the flower in
+all its mystery and splendour.
+
+If it be asked, how we know perceptions like these to be true, the
+answer is, by the fact of their existence--by the consent and delight
+of poetic readers. And as feeling is the earliest teacher, and
+perception the only final proof, of things the most demonstrable by
+science, so the remotest imaginations of the poets may often be found
+to have the closest connexion with matter of fact; perhaps might
+always be so, if the subtlety of our perceptions were a match for the
+causes of them. Consider this image of Ben Jonson’s--of a lily being
+the flower of light. Light, undecomposed, is white; and as the lily is
+white, and light is white, and whiteness itself is nothing _but_
+light, the two things, so far, are not merely similar, but identical.
+A poet might add, by an analogy drawn from the connexion of light and
+colour, that there is a ‘golden dawn’ issuing out of the white lily,
+in the rich yellow of the stamens. I have no desire to push this
+similarity farther than it may be worth. Enough has been stated to
+show that, in poetical as in other analogies, ‘the same feet of
+Nature’, as Bacon says, may be seen ‘treading in different paths’; and
+that the most scornful, that is to say, dullest disciple of fact,
+should be cautious how he betrays the shallowness of his philosophy by
+discerning no poetry in its depths.
+
+But the poet is far from dealing only with these subtle and analogical
+truths. Truth of every kind belongs to him, provided it can bud into
+any kind of beauty, or is capable of being illustrated and impressed
+by the poetic faculty. Nay, the simplest truth is often so beautiful
+and impressive of itself, that one of the greatest proofs of his
+genius consists in his leaving it to stand alone, illustrated by
+nothing but the light of its own tears or smiles, its own wonder,
+might, or playfulness. Hence the complete effect of many a simple
+passage in our old English ballads and romances, and of the passionate
+sincerity in general of the greatest early poets, such as Homer and
+Chaucer, who flourished before the existence of a ‘literary world’,
+and were not perplexed by a heap of notions and opinions, or by doubts
+how emotion ought to be expressed. The greatest of their successors
+never write equally to the purpose, except when they can dismiss
+everything from their minds but the like simple truth. In the
+beautiful poem of _Sir Eger, Sir Graham and Sir Gray-Steel_ (see it in
+Ellis’s _Specimens_, or Laing’s _Early Metrical Tales_), a knight
+thinks himself disgraced in the eyes of his mistress:--
+
+    Sir Eger said, ‘If it be so,
+    Then wot I well I must forgo
+    Love-liking, and manhood, all clean!’
+    _The water rush’d out of his een!_
+
+Sir Gray-Steel is killed:
+
+    Gray-Steel into his death thus thraws[26]
+    He _walters[27] and the grass up draws;_
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    _A little while then lay he still
+    (Friends that him saw, liked full ill)
+    And bled into his armour bright._
+
+    [26] throes?
+
+    [27] welters,--throws himself about.
+
+The abode of Chaucer’s _Reeve_, or Steward, in the _Canterbury Tales_,
+is painted in two lines, which nobody ever wished longer:
+
+    His wonning[28] was full fair upon an heath,
+    With greeny trees yshadowed was his place.
+
+    [28] dwelling.
+
+Every one knows the words of Lear, ‘most _matter-of-fact_, most
+melancholy.’
+
+            Pray, do not mock me;
+    I am a very foolish fond old man,
+    Fourscore and upwards:
+    Not an hour more, nor less; and, to deal plainly
+    I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
+
+It is thus, by exquisite pertinence, melody, and the implied power of
+writing with exuberance, if need be, that beauty and truth become
+identical in poetry, and that pleasure, or at the very worst, a balm
+in our tears, is drawn out of pain.
+
+It is a great and rare thing, and shows a lovely imagination, when the
+poet can write a commentary, as it were, of his own, on such sufficing
+passages of nature, and be thanked for the addition. There is an
+instance of this kind in Warner, an old Elizabethan poet, than which I
+know nothing sweeter in the world. He is speaking of Fair Rosamond,
+and of a blow given her by Queen Eleanor.
+
+    With that she dash’d her on the lips,
+      _So dyèd double red:
+    Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
+      Soft were those lips that bled._
+
+There are different kinds and degrees of imagination, some of them
+necessary to the formation of every true poet, and all of them
+possessed by the greatest. Perhaps they may be enumerated as
+follows:--First, that which presents to the mind any object or
+circumstance in every-day life; as when we imagine a man holding a
+sword, or looking out of a window;--Second, that which presents real,
+but not every-day circumstances; as King Alfred tending the loaves,
+or Sir Philip Sidney giving up the water to the dying soldier;--Third,
+that which combines character and events directly imitated from real
+life, with imitative realities of its own invention; as the probable
+parts of the histories of Priam and _Macbeth_, or what may be called
+natural fiction as distinguished from supernatural;--Fourth, that
+which conjures up things and events not to be found in nature; as
+Homer’s gods, and Shakespeare’s witches, enchanted horses and spears,
+Ariosto’s hippogriff, &c.;--Fifth, that which, in order to illustrate
+or aggravate one image, introduces another; sometimes in simile, as
+when Homer compares Apollo descending in his wrath at noon-day to the
+coming of night-time: sometimes in metaphor, or simile comprised in a
+word, as in Milton’s ‘motes that _people_ the sunbeams’; sometimes in
+concentrating into a word the main history of any person or thing,
+past or even future, as in the ‘starry Galileo’ of Byron, and that
+ghastly foregone conclusion of the epithet ‘murdered’ applied to the
+yet living victim in Keats’s story from Boccaccio,--
+
+    So the two brothers and their _murder’d_ man
+    Rode towards fair Florence;--
+
+sometimes in the attribution of a certain representative quality which
+makes one circumstance stand for others; as in Milton’s grey-fly
+winding its ‘_sultry_ horn’, which epithet contains the heat of a
+summer’s day;--Sixth, that which reverses this process, and makes a
+variety of circumstances take colour from one, like nature seen with
+jaundiced or glad eyes, or under the influence of storm or sunshine;
+as when in _Lycidas_, or the Greek pastoral poets, the flowers and
+the flocks are made to sympathize with a man’s death; or, in the
+Italian poet, the river flowing by the sleeping Angelica seems talking
+of love--
+
+    Parea che l’erba le fiorisse intorno,
+    _E d’amor ragionasse quella riva!_
+
+                    _Orlando Innamorato_, Canto iii.
+
+or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping Imogen by the very
+light in the chamber, and the reaction of her own beauty upon itself;
+or in the ‘witch element’ of the tragedy of _Macbeth_ and the May-day
+night of _Faust_;--Seventh, and last, that which by a single
+expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but
+surpasses in its effect the extremest force of the most particular
+description; as in that exquisite passage of Coleridge’s _Christabel_,
+where the unsuspecting object of the witch’s malignity is bidden to go
+to bed:
+
+    Quoth Christabel, So let it be!
+    And as the lady bade, did she.
+    Her gentle limbs did she undress,
+    _And lay down in her loveliness;--_
+
+a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music. The very
+smoothness and gentleness of the limbs is in the series of the letter
+_l’s_.
+
+I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing that most lovely
+inclusion of physical beauty in moral, neither can I call to mind any
+instances of the imagination that turns accompaniments into
+accessories, superior to those I have alluded to. Of the class of
+comparison, one of the most touching (many a tear must it have drawn
+from parents and lovers) is in a stanza which has been copied into
+the _Friar of Orders Grey_, out of Beaumont and Fletcher:
+
+    Weep no more, lady, weep no more,
+      Thy sorrow is in vain;
+    _For violets pluck’d the sweetest showers
+      Will ne’er make grow again._
+
+And Shakespeare and Milton abound in the very grandest; such as
+Antony’s likening his changing fortunes to the cloud-rack; Lear’s
+appeal to the old age of the heavens; Satan’s appearance in the
+horizon, like a fleet ‘hanging in the clouds’; and the comparisons of
+him with the comet and the eclipse. Nor unworthy of this glorious
+company, for its extraordinary combination of delicacy and vastness,
+is that enchanting one of Shelley’s in the _Adonais_:
+
+    Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
+    Stains the white radiance of eternity.
+
+I multiply these particulars in order to impress upon the reader’s
+mind the great importance of imagination in all its phases, as a
+constituent part of the highest poetic faculty.
+
+The happiest instance I remember of imaginative metaphor, is
+Shakespeare’s moonlight ‘sleeping’ on a bank; but half his poetry may
+be said to be made up of it, metaphor indeed being the common coin of
+discourse. Of imaginary creatures, none out of the pale of mythology
+and the East are equal, perhaps, in point of invention, to
+Shakespeare’s Ariel and Caliban; though poetry may grudge to prose the
+discovery of a Winged Woman, especially such as she has been described
+by her inventor in the story of _Peter Wilkins_; and in point of
+treatment, the Mammon and Jealousy of Spenser, some of the monsters
+in Dante, particularly his Nimrod, his interchangements of creatures
+into one another, and (if I am not presumptuous in anticipating what I
+think will be the verdict of posterity) the Witch in Coleridge’s
+_Christabel_, may rank even with the creations of Shakespeare. It may
+be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare had bile and nightmare enough
+in him to have thought of such detestable horrors as those of the
+interchanging adversaries (now serpent, now man), or even of the huge,
+half-blockish enormity of Nimrod,--in Scripture, the ‘mighty hunter’
+and builder of the tower of Babel,--in Dante, a tower of a man in his
+own person, standing with some of his brother giants up to the middle
+in a pit in hell, blowing a horn to which a thunderclap is a whisper,
+and hallooing after Dante and his guide in the jargon of a lost
+tongue! The transformations are too odious to quote: but of the
+towering giant we cannot refuse ourselves the ‘fearful joy’ of a
+specimen. It was twilight, Dante tells us, and he and his guide Virgil
+were silently pacing through one of the dreariest regions of hell,
+when the sound of a tremendous horn made him turn all his attention to
+the spot from which it came. He there discovered through the dusk,
+what seemed to be the towers of a city. Those are no towers, said his
+guide; they are giants, standing up to the middle in one of these
+circular pits.
+
+    I look’d again; and as the eye makes out,
+    By little and little, what the mist conceal’d
+    In which, till clearing up, the sky was steep’d;
+    So, looming through the gross and darksome air,
+    As we drew nigh, those mighty bulks grew plain,
+    And error quitted me, and terror join’d:
+    For in like manner as all round its height
+    Montereggione crowns itself with towers,
+    So tower’d above the circuit of that pit,
+    Though but half out of it, and half within,
+    The horrible giants that fought Jove, and still
+    Are threaten’d when he thunders. As we near’d
+    The foremost, I discern’d his mighty face,
+    His shoulders, breast, and more than half his trunk,
+    With both the arms down hanging by the sides.
+    His face appear’d to me, in length and breadth,
+    Huge as St. Peter’s pinnacle at Rome,
+    And of a like proportion all his bones.
+    He open’d, as we went, his dreadful mouth,
+    Fit for no sweeter psalmody; and shouted
+    After us, in the words of some strange tongue,
+    Ràfel ma-èe amech zabèe almee!--
+    ‘Dull wretch!’ my leader cried, ‘keep to thine horn,
+    And so vent better whatsoever rage
+    Or other passion stuff thee. Feel thy throat
+    And find the chain upon thee, thou confusion!
+    Lo! what a hoop is clench’d about thy gorge.’
+    Then turning to myself, he said, ‘His howl
+    Is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he
+    Through whose ill thought it was that humankind
+    Were tongue-confounded. Pass him, and say nought:
+    For as he speaketh language known of none,
+    So none can speak save jargon to himself.’
+
+                       _Inferno_, Canto xxxi, ver. 34.
+
+Assuredly it could not have been easy to find a fiction so uncouthly
+terrible as this in the hypochondria of Hamlet. Even his father had
+evidently seen no such ghost in the other world. All his phantoms were
+in the world he had left. Timon, Lear, Richard, Brutus, Prospero,
+Macbeth himself, none of Shakespeare’s men had, in fact, any thought
+but of the earth they lived on, whatever supernatural fancy crossed
+them. The thing fancied was still a thing of this world, ‘in its habit
+as it lived,’ or no remoter acquaintance than a witch or a fairy. Its
+lowest depths (unless Dante suggested them) were the cellars under the
+stage. Caliban himself is a cross-breed between a witch and a clown.
+No offence to Shakespeare; who was not bound to be the greatest of
+healthy poets, and to have every morbid inspiration besides. What he
+might have done, had he set his wits to compete with Dante, I know
+not: all I know is, that in the infernal line he did nothing like him;
+and it is not to be wished he had. It is far better that, as a higher,
+more universal, and more beneficent variety of the genus Poet, he
+should have been the happier man he was, and left us the plump cheeks
+on his monument, instead of the carking visage of the great, but
+over-serious, and comparatively one-sided Florentine. Even the
+imagination of Spenser, whom we take to have been a ‘nervous
+gentleman’ compared with Shakespeare, was visited with no such dreams
+as Dante. Or, if it was, he did not choose to make himself thinner (as
+Dante says _he_ did) with dwelling upon them. He had twenty visions of
+nymphs and bowers, to one of the mud of Tartarus. Chaucer, for all he
+was ‘a man of this world’ as well as the poets’ world, and as great,
+perhaps a greater enemy of oppression than Dante, besides being one of
+the profoundest masters of pathos that ever lived, had not the heart
+to conclude the story of the famished father and his children, as
+finished by the inexorable anti-Pisan. But enough of Dante in this
+place. Hobbes, in order to daunt the reader from objecting to his
+friend Davenant’s want of invention, says of these fabulous creations
+in general, in his letter prefixed to the poem of _Gondibert_, that
+‘impenetrable armours, enchanted castles, invulnerable bodies, iron
+men, flying horses, and a thousand other such things, are easily
+feigned by them that dare’. These are girds at Spenser and Ariosto.
+But, with leave of Hobbes (who translated Homer as if on purpose to
+show what execrable verses could be written by a philosopher),
+enchanted castles and flying horses are not easily feigned as Ariosto
+and Spenser feigned them; and that just makes all the difference. For
+proof, see the accounts of Spenser’s enchanted castle in Book the
+Third, Canto Twelfth, of the _Faerie Queene_; and let the reader of
+Italian open the _Orlando Furioso_ at its first introduction of the
+Hippogriff (Canto iii, st. 4), where Bradamante, coming to an inn,
+hears a great noise, and sees all the people looking up at something
+in the air; upon which, looking up herself, she sees a knight in
+shining armour riding towards the sunset upon a creature with
+variegated wings, and then dipping and disappearing among the hills.
+Chaucer’s steed of brass, that was
+
+    So horsly and so quick of eye,
+
+is copied from the life. You might pat him and feel his brazen
+muscles. Hobbes, in objecting to what he thought childish, made a
+childish mistake. His criticism is just such as a boy might pique
+himself upon, who was educated on mechanical principles, and thought
+he had outgrown his Goody Two-shoes. With a wonderful dimness of
+discernment in poetic matters, considering his acuteness in others, he
+fancies he has settled the question by pronouncing such creations
+‘impossible’! To the brazier they are impossible, no doubt; but not to
+the poet. Their possibility, if the poet wills it, is to be conceded;
+the problem is, the creature being given, how to square its actions
+with probability, according to the nature assumed of it. Hobbes did
+not see, that the skill and beauty of these fictions lay in bringing
+them within those very regions of truth and likelihood in which he
+thought they could not exist. Hence the serpent Python of Chaucer,
+
+    _Sleeping against the sun upon a day,_
+
+when Apollo slew him. Hence the chariot-drawing dolphins of Spenser,
+softly swimming along the shore lest they should hurt themselves
+against the stones and gravel. Hence Shakespeare’s Ariel, living under
+blossoms, and riding at evening on the bat; and his domestic namesake
+in the _Rape of the Lock_ (the imagination of the drawing-room) saving
+a lady’s petticoat from the coffee with his plumes, and directing
+atoms of snuff into a coxcomb’s nose. In the _Orlando Furioso_ (Canto
+xv, st. 65) is a wild story of a cannibal necromancer, who laughs at
+being cut to pieces, coming together again like quicksilver, and
+picking up his head when it is cut off, sometimes by the hair,
+sometimes by the nose! This, which would be purely childish and
+ridiculous in the hands of an inferior poet, becomes interesting, nay
+grand, in Ariosto’s, from the beauties of his style, and its
+conditional truth to nature. The monster has a fated hair on his
+head,--a single hair,--which must be taken from it before he can be
+killed. Decapitation itself is of no consequence, without that
+proviso. The Paladin Astolfo, who has fought this phenomenon on
+horseback, and succeeded in getting the head and galloping off with
+it, is therefore still at a loss what to be at. How is he to discover
+such a needle in such a bottle of hay? The trunk is spurring after him
+to recover it, and he seeks for some evidence of the hair in vain. At
+length he bethinks him of scalping the head. He does so; and the
+moment the operation arrives at the place of the hair, _the face of
+the head becomes pale, the eyes turn in their sockets_, and the
+lifeless pursuer tumbles from his horse.
+
+    Then grew the visage pale, and deadly wet;
+    The eyes turn’d in their sockets, drearily;
+    And all things show’d the villain’s sun was set.
+    His trunk that was in chase, fell from its horse,
+    And giving the last shudder, was a corse.
+
+It is thus, and thus only, by making Nature his companion wherever he
+goes, even in the most supernatural region, that the poet, in the
+words of a very instructive phrase, takes the world along with him. It
+is true, he must not (as the Platonists would say) humanize weakly or
+mistakenly in that region; otherwise he runs the chance of forgetting
+to be true to the supernatural itself, and so betraying a want of
+imagination from that quarter. His nymphs will have no taste of their
+woods and waters; his gods and goddesses be only so many fair or
+frowning ladies and gentlemen, such as we see in ordinary paintings;
+he will be in no danger of having his angels likened to a sort of
+wild-fowl, as Rembrandt has made them in his Jacob’s Dream. His
+Bacchuses will never remind us, like Titian’s, of the force and fury,
+as well as of the graces, of wine. His Jupiter will reduce no females
+to ashes; his fairies be nothing fantastical; his gnomes not ‘of the
+earth, earthy’. And this again will be wanting to Nature; for it will
+be wanting to the supernatural, as Nature would have made it, working
+in a supernatural direction. Nevertheless, the poet, even for
+imagination’s sake, must not become a bigot to imaginative truth,
+dragging it down into the region of the mechanical and the limited,
+and losing sight of its paramount privilege, which is to make beauty,
+in a human sense, the lady and queen of the universe. He would gain
+nothing by making his ocean-nymphs mere fishy creatures, upon the plea
+that such only could live in the water: his wood-nymphs with faces of
+knotted oak; his angels without breath and song, because no lungs
+could exist between the earth’s atmosphere and the empyrean. The
+Grecian tendency in this respect is safer than the Gothic; nay, more
+imaginative; for it enables us to imagine _beyond_ imagination, and to
+bring all things healthily round to their only present final ground of
+sympathy,--the human. When we go to heaven, we may idealize in a
+superhuman mode, and have altogether different notions of the
+beautiful; but till then we must be content with the loveliest
+capabilities of earth. The sea-nymphs of Greece were still beautiful
+women, though they lived in the water. The gills and fins of the
+ocean’s natural inhabitants were confined to their lowest semi-human
+attendants; or if Triton himself was not quite human, it was because
+be represented the fiercer part of the vitality of the seas, as they
+did the fairer.
+
+To conclude this part of my subject, I will quote from the greatest of
+all narrative writers two passages;--one exemplifying the imagination
+which brings supernatural things to bear on earthly, without
+confounding them; the other, that which paints events and
+circumstances after real life. The first is where Achilles, who has
+long absented himself from the conflict between his countrymen and the
+Trojans, has had a message from heaven bidding him reappear in the
+enemy’s sight, standing outside the camp-wall upon the trench, but
+doing nothing more; that is to say, taking no part in the fight. He is
+simply to be seen. The two armies down by the sea-side are contending
+which shall possess the body of Patroclus; and the mere sight of the
+dreadful Grecian chief--supernaturally indeed impressed upon them, in
+order that nothing may be wanting to the full effect of his courage
+and conduct upon courageous men--is to determine the question. We are
+to imagine a slope of ground towards the sea, in order to elevate the
+trench; the camp is solitary; the battle (‘a dreadful roar of men,’ as
+Homer calls it) is raging on the sea-shore; and the goddess Iris has
+just delivered her message, and disappeared.
+
+    But up Achilles rose, the lov’d of heaven;
+    And Pallas on his mighty shoulders cast
+    The shield of Jove; and round about his head
+    She put the glory of a golden mist,
+    From which there burnt a fiery-flaming light.
+    And as, when smoke goes heavenward from a town,
+    In some far island which its foes besiege,
+    Who all day long with dreadful martialness
+    Have pour’d from their own town; soon as the sun
+    Has set, thick lifted fires are visible,
+    Which, rushing upward, make a light in the sky,
+    And let the neighbours know, who may perhaps
+    Bring help across the sea; so from the head
+    Of great Achilles went up an effulgence.
+
+    Upon the trench he stood, without the wall,
+    But mix’d not with the Greeks, for he rever’d
+    His mother’s word; and so, thus standing there,
+    He shouted; and Minerva, to his shout,
+    Added a dreadful cry; and there arose
+    Among the Trojans an unspeakable tumult.
+    And as the clear voice of a trumpet, blown
+    Against a town by spirit-withering foes,
+    So sprang the clear voice of Aeacides.
+    And when they heard the brazen cry, their hearts
+    All leap’d within them; and the proud-maned horses
+    Ran with the chariots round, for they foresaw
+    Calamity; and the charioteers were smitten,
+    When they beheld the ever-active fire
+    Upon the dreadful head of the great-minded one
+    Burning; for bright-eyed Pallas made it burn.
+    Thrice o’er the trench divine Achilles shouted;
+    And thrice the Trojans and their great allies
+    Roll’d back; and twelve of all their noblest men
+    Then perish’d, crush’d by their own arms and chariots.
+
+                                 _Iliad_, xviii. 203.
+
+Of course there is no further question about the body of Patroclus. It
+is drawn out of the press, and received by the awful hero with tears.
+
+The other passage is where Priam, kneeling before Achilles, and
+imploring him to give up the dead body of Hector, reminds him of his
+own father; who, whatever (says the poor old king) may be his troubles
+with his enemies, has the blessing of knowing that his son is still
+alive, and may daily hope to see him return. Achilles, in accordance
+with the strength and noble honesty of the passions in those times,
+weeps aloud himself at this appeal, feeling, says Homer, ‘desire’ for
+his father in his very ‘limbs’. He joins in grief with the venerable
+sufferer, and can no longer withstand the look of ‘his grey head and
+his grey _chin_’. Observe the exquisite introduction of this last
+word. It paints the touching fact of the chin’s being imploringly
+thrown upward by the kneeling old man, and the very motion of his
+beard as he speaks.
+
+    So saying, Mercury vanished up to heaven:
+    And Priam then alighted from his chariot,
+    Leaving Idaeus with it, who remain’d
+    Holding the mules and horses; and the old man
+    Went straight indoors, where the belov’d of Jove
+    Achilles sat, and found him. In the room
+    Were others, but apart; and two alone,
+    The hero Automedon, and Alcimus,
+    A branch of Mars, stood by him. They had been
+    At meals, and had not yet remov’d the board.
+    Great Priam came, without their seeing him,
+    And kneeling down, he clasp’d Achilles’ knees,
+    And kiss’d those terrible, homicidal hands,
+    Which had deprived him of so many sons.
+    And as a man who is press’d heavily
+    For having slain another, flies away
+    To foreign lands, and comes into the house
+    Of some great man, and is beheld with wonder,
+    So did Achilles wonder to see Priam;
+    And the rest wonder’d, looking at each other.
+    But Priam, praying to him, spoke these words:--
+    ‘God-like Achilles, think of thine own father!
+    To the same age have we both come, the same
+    Weak pass; and though the neighbouring chiefs may vex
+    Him also, and his borders find no help,
+    Yet when he hears that thou art still alive,
+    He gladdens inwardly, and daily hopes
+    To see his dear son coming back from Troy.
+    But I, bereav’d old Priam! I had once
+    Brave sons in Troy, and now I cannot say
+    That one is left me. Fifty children had I,
+    When the Greeks came; nineteen were of one womb;
+    The rest my women bore me in my house.
+    The knees of many of these fierce Mars has loosen’d;
+    And he who had no peer, Troy’s prop and theirs,
+    Him hast thou kill’d now, fighting for his country,
+    Hector; and for his sake am I come here
+    To ransom him, bringing a countless ransom.
+    But thou, Achilles, fear the gods, and think
+    Of thine own father, and have mercy on me:
+    For I am much more wretched, and have borne
+    What never mortal bore, I think on earth,
+    To lift unto my lips the hand of him
+    Who slew my boys.’
+
+                He ceased; and there arose
+    Sharp longing in Achilles for his father;
+    And taking Priam by the hand, he gently
+    Put him away; for both shed tears to think
+    Of other times; the one most bitter ones
+    For Hector, and with wilful wretchedness
+    Lay right before Achilles: and the other,
+    For his own father now, and now his friend;
+    And the whole house might hear them as they moan’d.
+    But when divine Achilles had refresh’d
+    His soul with tears, and sharp desire had left
+    His heart and limbs, he got up from his throne,
+    And rais’d the old man by the hand, and took
+    Pity on his grey head and his grey chin.
+
+                                 _Iliad_, xxiv. 468.
+
+O lovely and immortal privilege of genius! that can stretch its hand
+out of the wastes of time, thousands of years back, and touch our
+eyelids with tears. In these passages there is not a word which a man
+of the most matter-of-fact understanding might not have written, _if
+he had thought of it_. But in poetry, feeling and imagination are
+necessary to the perception and presentation even of matters of fact.
+They, and they only, see what is proper to be told, and what to be
+kept back; what is pertinent, affecting, and essential. Without
+feeling, there is a want of delicacy and distinction; without
+imagination, there is no true embodiment. In poets, even good of their
+kind, but without a genius for narration, the action would have been
+encumbered or diverted with ingenious mistakes. The over-contemplative
+would have given us too many remarks; the over-lyrical, a style too
+much carried away; the over-fanciful, conceits and too many similes;
+the unimaginative, the facts without the feeling, and not even those.
+We should have been told nothing of the ‘grey chin’, of the house
+hearing them as they moaned, or of Achilles gently putting the old man
+aside; much less of that yearning for his father, which made the hero
+tremble in every limb. Writers without the greatest passion and power
+do not feel in this way, nor are capable of expressing the feeling;
+though there is enough sensibility and imagination all over the world
+to enable mankind to be moved by it, when the poet strikes his truth
+into their hearts.
+
+The reverse of imagination is exhibited in pure absence of ideas, in
+commonplaces, and, above all, in conventional metaphor, or such images
+and their phraseology as have become the common property of discourse
+and writing. Addison’s _Cato_ is full of them.
+
+    Passion unpitied and successless love
+    _Plant daggers in my breast._
+
+    I’ve sounded my Numidians, man by man,
+    And find them _ripe for a revolt_.
+
+    The virtuous Marcia _towers above her sex_.
+
+Of the same kind is his ‘courting the yoke’--‘distracting my very
+heart’--‘calling up all’ one’s ‘father’ in one’s soul--‘working every
+nerve’--‘copying a bright example’; in short, the whole play, relieved
+now and then with a smart sentence or turn of words. The following is
+a pregnant example of plagiarism and weak writing. It is from another
+tragedy of Addison’s time--the _Mariamne_ of Fenton:
+
+            Mariamne, _with superior charms_,
+    _Triumphs o’er reason_: in her look she _bears_
+    A paradise of ever-blooming sweets;
+    Fair as the first idea beauty _prints_
+    In the young lover’s soul; a winning grace
+    Guides every gesture, and obsequious love
+    _Attends_ on all her steps.
+
+‘Triumphing o’er reason’ is an old acquaintance of everybody’s.
+‘Paradise in her look’ is from the Italian poets through Dryden. ‘Fair
+as the first idea’, &c., is from Milton, spoilt;--‘winning grace’ and
+‘steps’ from Milton and Tibullus, both spoilt. Whenever beauties are
+stolen by such a writer, they are sure to be spoilt: just as when a
+great writer borrows, he improves.
+
+To come now to Fancy,--she is a younger sister of Imagination, without
+the other’s weight of thought and feeling. Imagination indeed, purely
+so called, is all feeling; the feeling of the subtlest and most
+affecting analogies; the perception of sympathies in the natures of
+things, or in their popular attributes. Fancy is a sporting with their
+resemblance, real or supposed, and with airy and fantastical
+creations.
+
+    --Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid
+    Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
+    _And, like a dew-drop from the lion’s mane,
+    Be shook to air._
+
+                      _Troilus and Cressida_, Act iii, sc. 3.
+
+That is imagination;--the strong mind sympathizing with the strong
+beast, and the weak love identified with the weak dew-drop.
+
+                  Oh!--and I forsooth
+    In love! I that have been love’s whip I
+    _A very beadle to a humorous sigh!--_
+    A domineering pedant o’er the boy,--
+    This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,
+    This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid,
+    _Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,
+    The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans_, &c.
+
+                      _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act iii, sc. 1.
+
+That is fancy;--a combination of images not in their nature connected,
+or brought together by the feeling, but by the will and pleasure; and
+having just enough hold of analogy to betray it into the hands of its
+smiling subjector.
+
+                        Silent icicles
+    _Quietly shining to the quiet moon._
+
+                      Coleridge’s _Frost at Midnight_.
+
+That, again, is imagination;--analogical sympathy; and exquisite of
+its kind it is.
+
+     ‘You are now sailed _into the north of my lady’s opinion_;
+     where you will hang _like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard_,
+     unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt.’
+
+                       _Twelfth Night_, Act iii, sc. 2.
+
+And that is fancy;--one image capriciously suggested by another, and
+but half connected with the subject of discourse; nay, half opposed to
+it; for in the gaiety of the speaker’s animal spirits, the ‘Dutchman’s
+beard’ is made to represent the lady!
+
+Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy to the
+comic. _Macbeth_, _Lear_, _Paradise Lost_, the poem of Dante, are full
+of imagination: the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ and the _Rape of the
+Lock_, of fancy: _Romeo and Juliet_, the _Tempest_, the _Faerie
+Queene_, and the _Orlando Furioso_, of both. The terms were formerly
+identical, or used as such; and neither is the best that might be
+found. The term Imagination is too confined: often too material. It
+presents too invariably the idea of a solid body;--of ‘images’ in the
+sense of the plaster-cast cry about the streets. Fancy, on the other
+hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual image or apparition
+(Φαντασμα, appearance, _phantom_), has rarely that freedom from
+visibility which is one of the highest privileges of imagination.
+Viola, in _Twelfth Night_, speaking of some beautiful music, says:
+
+    It gives a very echo to the seat
+    Where Love is throned.
+
+In this charming thought, fancy and imagination are combined; yet the
+fancy, the assumption of Love’s sitting on a throne, is the image of a
+solid body; while the imagination, the sense of sympathy between the
+passion of love and impassioned music, presents us no image at all.
+Some new term is wanting to express the more spiritual sympathies of
+what is called Imagination.
+
+One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy; and like Melancholy,
+as Albert Durer has painted her, she looks out among the stars, and is
+busied with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the universe.
+Fancy turns her sister’s wizard instruments into toys. She takes a
+telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and
+sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the
+child-like and sportive. She chases butterflies, while her sister
+takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of
+gallantries, of fashions; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and
+capricious; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings
+to the images of wit; and delights as much to people nature with
+smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies together,
+and make them strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not
+incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her
+company; always, in the case of the greatest poets; often in that of
+less, though with them she is the greater favourite. Spenser has great
+imagination and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton both also,
+the very greatest, but with imagination predominant; Chaucer, the
+strongest imagination of real life, beyond any writers but Homer,
+Dante, and Shakespeare, and in comic painting inferior to none; Pope
+has hardly any imagination, but he has a great deal of fancy;
+Coleridge little fancy, but imagination exquisite. Shakespeare alone,
+of all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal
+perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing [the Oberon-Titania
+scenes from the _Midsummer-Night’s Dream_] will be found in the
+present volume.[29] See also his famous description of Queen Mab and
+her equipage, in _Romeo and Juliet_:
+
+    Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs;
+    The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers:
+    Her traces of the smallest spider’s web;
+    Her collars of the moonshine’s watery beams, &c.
+
+    [29] Leigh Hunt’s _Imagination and Fancy, or Selections from
+    the English Poets_, 1844.
+
+That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As a small but pretty
+rival specimen, less known, take the description of a fairy palace
+from Drayton’s _Nymphidia_:
+
+    This palace standeth in the air,
+    By necromancy placèd there,
+    That it no tempest needs to fear,
+      Which way soe’er it blow it:
+    And somewhat southward tow’rd the noon,
+    Whence lies a way up to the moon,
+    And thence the fairy can as soon
+      Pass to the earth below it.
+    The walls of spiders’ legs are made,
+    Well morticèd and finely laid:
+    He was the master of his trade
+      It curiously that builded:
+    _The windows of the eyes of cats:_
+
+(because they see best at night)
+
+    And for the roof instead of slats
+    Is cover’d with the skins of bats,
+      _With moonshine that are gilded._
+
+Here also is a fairy bed, very delicate, from the same poet’s _Muse’s
+Elysium_:
+
+    Of leaves of roses, _white and red_,
+    Shall be the covering of the bed;
+    The curtains, vallens, tester all,
+    Shall be the flower imperial;
+    And for the fringe it all along
+    _With azure hare-bells shall be hung.
+    Of lilies shall the pillows be,
+    With down stuft of the butterfly._
+
+Of fancy, so full of gusto as to border on imagination, Sir John
+Suckling, in his _Ballad on a Wedding_, has given some of the most
+playful and charming specimens in the language. They glance like
+twinkles of the eye, or cherries bedewed:
+
+    _Her feet beneath her petticoat,
+    Like little mice stole in and out,
+      As if they fear’d the light:_
+    But oh! she dances such a way!
+    _No sun upon an Easter day_
+      Is half so fine a sight.
+
+It is very daring, and has a sort of playful grandeur, to compare a
+lady’s dancing with the sun. But as the sun has it all to himself in
+the heavens, so she, in the blaze of her beauty, on earth. This is
+imagination fairly displacing fancy. The following has enchanted
+everybody:
+
+    Her lips were red, _and one was thin_
+    _Compared with that was next her chin,
+      Some bee had stung it newly._
+
+Every reader has stolen a kiss at that lip, gay or grave.
+
+With regard to the principle of Variety in Uniformity by which verse
+ought to be modulated, and oneness of impression diversely produced,
+it has been contended by some, that Poetry need not be written in
+verse at all; that prose is as good a medium, provided poetry be
+conveyed through it; and that to think otherwise is to confound letter
+with spirit, or form with essence. But the opinion is a prosaical
+mistake. Fitness and unfitness for _song_, or metrical excitement,
+just make all the difference between a poetical and prosaical subject;
+and the reason why verse is necessary to the form of poetry, is, that
+the perfection of poetical spirit demands it;--that the circle of its
+enthusiasm, beauty and power, is incomplete without it. I do not mean
+to say that a poet can never show himself a poet in prose; but that,
+being one, his desire and necessity will be to write in verse; and
+that, if he were unable to do so, he would not, and could not, deserve
+his title. Verse to the true poet is no clog. It is idly called a
+trammel and a difficulty. It is a help. It springs from the same
+enthusiasm as the rest of his impulses, and is necessary to their
+satisfaction and effect. Verse is no more a clog than the condition of
+rushing upward is a clog to fire, or than the roundness and order of
+the globe we live on is a clog to the freedom and variety that abound
+within its sphere. Verse is no dominator over the poet, except
+inasmuch as the bond is reciprocal, and the poet dominates over the
+verse. They are lovers, playfully challenging each other’s rule, and
+delighted equally to rule and to obey. Verse is the final proof to the
+poet that his mastery over his art is complete. It is the shutting up
+of his powers in ‘_measureful_ content’; the answer of form to his
+spirit; of strength and ease to his guidance. It is the willing
+action, the proud and fiery happiness, of the winged steed on whose
+back he has vaulted,
+
+    To witch the world with wondrous horsemanship.
+
+Verse, in short, is that finishing, and rounding, and ‘tuneful
+planetting’ of the poet’s creations, which is produced of necessity by
+the smooth tendencies of their energy or inward working, and the
+harmonious dance into which they are attracted round the orb of the
+beautiful. Poetry, in its complete sympathy with beauty, must, of
+necessity, leave no sense of the beautiful, and no power over its
+forms, unmanifested; and verse flows as inevitably from this condition
+of its integrity, as other laws of proportion do from any other kind
+of embodiment of beauty (say that of the human figure), however free
+and various the movements may be that play within their limits. What
+great poet ever wrote his poems in prose? or where is a good prose
+poem, of any length, to be found? The poetry of the Bible is
+understood to be in verse, in the original. Mr. Hazlitt has said a
+good word for those prose enlargements of some fine old song, which
+are known by the name of Ossian; and in passages they deserve what he
+said; but he judiciously abstained from saying anything about the
+form. Is Gesner’s _Death of Abel_ a poem? or Hervey’s _Meditations_?
+The _Pilgrim’s Progress_ has been called one; and, undoubtedly, Bunyan
+had a genius which tended to make him a poet, and one of no mean
+order: and yet it was of as ungenerous and low a sort as was
+compatible with so lofty an affinity; and this is the reason why it
+stopped where it did. He had a craving after the beautiful, but not
+enough of it in himself to echo to its music. On the other hand, the
+possession of the beautiful will not be sufficient without force to
+utter it. The author of _Telemachus_ had a soul full of beauty and
+tenderness. He was not a man who, if he had had a wife and children,
+would have run away from them, as Bunyan’s hero did, to get a place by
+himself in heaven. He was ‘a little lower than the angels’, like our
+own Bishop Jewells and Berkeleys; and yet he was no poet. He was too
+delicately, not to say feebly, absorbed in his devotions, to join in
+the energies of the seraphic choir.
+
+Every poet, then, is a versifier; every fine poet an excellent one;
+and he is the best whose verse exhibits the greatest amount of
+strength, sweetness, straightforwardness, unsuperfluousness,
+_variety_, and _oneness_;--oneness, that is to say, consistency, in
+the general impression, metrical and moral; and variety, or every
+pertinent diversity of tone and rhythm, in the process. _Strength_ is
+the muscle of verse, and shows itself in the number and force of the
+marked syllables; as,
+
+    Sonòrous mètal blòwing màrtial sòunds.
+
+                                 _Paradise Lost._
+
+    Behèmoth, bìggest born of eàrth, ùphèav’d
+    His vàstness.
+
+                                  _Id._
+
+    Blòw wìnds and cràck your chèeks! ràge! blòw!
+    You càtărăcts and hurricànoes, spòut,
+    Till you have drènch’d our stèeples, dròwn’d the còcks!
+    You sùlphurous and thoùght-èxecuting fìres,
+    Vaùnt coùriers of òak-clèaving thùnderbòlts,
+    Sìnge my whìte hèad! and thòu, àll-shàking thùnder,
+    Strìke flàt the thìck rotùndity o’ the wòrld!
+
+                                 _Lear._
+
+Unexpected locations of the accent double this force, and render it
+characteristic of passion and abruptness. And here comes into play the
+reader’s corresponding fineness of ear, and his retardations and
+accelerations in accordance with those of the poet:
+
+                  Then in the keyhole turns
+    The ìntrĭcăte wards, and every bolt and bar
+    Unfastens.--On ă sŭddĕn òpen fly
+    Wĭth ĭmpètuous recoil and jarring sound
+    The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
+    Harsh thunder.
+
+                                 _Paradise Lost_, Book II.
+
+    Abòmĭnăblĕ--unùttĕrăblĕ--and worse
+    Than fables yet have feigned.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+    Wàllŏwĭng ŭnwìĕldy--ĕnòrmous in their gait.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+Of unusual passionate accent, there is an exquisite specimen in the
+_Faerie Queene_, where Una is lamenting her desertion by the Red-Cross
+Knight:
+
+      But he, my lion, and my noble lord,
+      How does he find in cruel heart to hate
+      Her that him lov’d, and ever most ador’d
+    _As the gòd of my lìfe?_[30] Why hath he me abhorr’d?
+
+    [30] Pray let not the reader consent to read this first half
+    of the line in any manner less marked and peremptory. It is a
+    striking instance of the beauty of that ‘acceleration and
+    retardation of true verse’ which Coleridge speaks of. There
+    is to be a hurry on the words _as the_, and a passionate
+    emphasis and passing stop on the word _god_; and so of the
+    next three words.
+
+The abuse of strength is harshness and heaviness; the reverse of it is
+weakness. There is a noble sentiment--it appears both in Daniel’s and
+Sir John Beaumont’s works, but is most probably the latter’s,--which
+is a perfect outrage of strength in the sound of the words:
+
+    Only the firmest and the _constant’st_ hearts
+    God sets to act the _stout’st_ and hardest parts.
+
+_Stout’st_ and _constant’st_ for ‘stoutest’ and ‘most constant’! It is
+as bad as the intentional crabbedness of the line in _Hudibras_:
+
+    He that hangs or _beats out’s_ brains,
+    The devil’s in him if _he_ feigns.
+
+_Beats out’s brains_, for ‘beats out his brains’. Of heaviness,
+Davenant’s _Gondibert_ is a formidable specimen, almost throughout:
+
+    With sìlence (òrder’s help, and màrk of càre)
+      They chìde thàt nòise which hèedless yòuth affèct;
+    Stìll coùrse for ùse, for heàlth thèy clèanness wèar,
+      And sàve in wèll-fìx’d àrms, all nìceness chèck’d.
+    Thèy thoùght, thòse that, unàrm’d, expòs’d fràil lìfe,
+      But nàked nàture vàliantly betrày’d;
+    Whò wàs, thoùgh nàked, sàfe, till prìde màde strìfe,
+      But màde defènce must ùse, nòw dànger’s màde.
+
+And so he goes digging and lumbering on, like a heavy preacher
+thumping the pulpit in italics, and spoiling many ingenious
+reflections.
+
+Weakness in versification is want of accent and emphasis. It generally
+accompanies prosaicalness, and is the consequence of weak thoughts,
+and of the affectation of a certain well-bred enthusiasm. The writings
+of the late Mr. Hayley were remarkable for it; and it abounds among
+the lyrical imitators of Cowley, and the whole of what is called our
+French school of poetry, when it aspired above its wit and ‘sense’. It
+sometimes breaks down in a horrible, hopeless manner, as if giving way
+at the first step. The following ludicrous passage in Congreve,
+intended to be particularly fine, contains an instance:
+
+      And lo! Silence himself is here;
+    Methinks I see the midnight god appear.
+      In all his downy pomp array’d,
+        Behold the reverend shade.
+      _An ancient sigh he sits upon!!!_
+    Whose memory of sound is long since gone,
+    _And purposely annihilated for his throne!!!_
+
+                      _Ode on the singing of Mrs. Arabella Hunt._
+
+See also the would-be enthusiasm of Addison about music:
+
+        For ever consecrate the _day_
+        To music and _Cecilia_;
+    Music, the greatest good that mortals know,
+        And all of heaven we have below,
+        Music can noble HINTS _impart!!!_
+
+It is observable that the unpoetic masters of ridicule are apt to make
+the most ridiculous mistakes, when they come to affect a strain higher
+than the one they are accustomed to. But no wonder. Their habits
+neutralize the enthusiasm it requires.
+
+_Sweetness_, though not identical with smoothness, any more than
+feeling is with sound, always includes it; and smoothness is a thing
+so little to be regarded for its own sake, and indeed so worthless in
+poetry but for some taste of sweetness, that I have not thought
+necessary to mention it by itself; though such an all-in-all in
+versification was it regarded not a hundred years back, that Thomas
+Warton himself, an idolater of Spenser, ventured to wish the following
+line in the _Faerie Queene_,
+
+    And was admirèd much of fools, _wòmen_, and boys--
+
+altered to
+
+    And was admirèd much of women, fools, and boys--
+
+thus destroying the fine scornful emphasis on the first syllable of
+‘women’! (an ungallant intimation, by the way, against the fair sex,
+very startling in this no less woman-loving than great poet). Any
+poetaster can be smooth. Smoothness abounds in all small poets, as
+sweetness does in the greater. Sweetness is the smoothness of grace
+and delicacy,--of the sympathy with the pleasing and lovely. Spenser
+is full of it,--Shakespeare--Beaumont and Fletcher--Coleridge. Of
+Spenser’s and Coleridge’s versification it is the prevailing
+characteristic. Its main secrets are a smooth progression between
+variety and sameness, and a voluptuous sense of the continuous,--‘linked
+sweetness long drawn out’. Observe the first and last lines of the
+stanza in the _Faerie Queene_, describing a shepherd brushing away the
+gnats;--the open and the close _e’s_ in the one,
+
+    As gèntle shèpherd in swēēt ēventide--
+
+and the repetition of the word _oft_, and the fall from the vowel _a_,
+into the two _u’s_ in the other,--
+
+    She brusheth _oft_, and _oft_ doth màr their mūrmŭrings.
+
+So in his description of two substances in the handling, both equally
+smooth:
+
+    _Each smoother seems than each, and each than each seems smoother._
+
+An abundance of examples from his poetry will be found in the volume
+before us. His beauty revolves on itself with conscious loveliness.
+And Coleridge is worthy to be named with him, as the reader will see
+also, and has seen already. Let him take a sample meanwhile from the
+poem called the _Day Dream_! Observe both the variety and sameness of
+the vowels, and the repetition of the soft consonants:
+
+    My eyes make pictures when they’re shut:--
+      I see a fountain, large and fair,
+    A willow and a ruin’d hut,
+      And _thee_ and _me_ and Mary there.
+    _O Mary! make thy gentle lap our pillow;
+    Bend o’er us, like a bower, my beautiful green willow._
+
+By _Straightforwardness_ is meant the flow of words, in their natural
+order, free alike from mere prose, and from those inversions to which
+bad poets recur in order to escape the charge of prose, but chiefly to
+accommodate their rhymes. In Shadwell’s play of _Psyche_, Venus gives
+the sisters of the heroine an answer, of which the following is the
+_entire_ substance, literally, in so many words. The author had
+nothing better for her to say:
+
+     I receive your prayers with kindness, and will give success
+     to your hopes. I have seen, with anger, mankind adore your
+     sister’s beauty and deplore her scorn: which they shall do
+     no more. For I’ll so resent their idolatry, as shall content
+     your wishes to the full.
+
+Now in default of all imagination, fancy, and expression, how was the
+writer to turn these words into poetry or rhyme? Simply by diverting
+them from their natural order, and twisting the halves of the
+sentences each before the other.
+
+      With kindness I your prayers receive,
+      And to your hopes success will give.
+    I have, with anger, seen mankind adore
+    Your sister’s beauty and her scorn deplore;
+      Which they shall do no more.
+    For their idolatry I’ll so resent,
+    As shall your wishes to the full content!!
+
+This is just as if a man were to allow that there was no poetry in the
+words, ‘How do you find yourself?’ ‘Very well, I thank you’; but to
+hold them inspired, if altered into
+
+    Yourself how do you find?
+    Very well, you I thank.
+
+It is true, the best writers in Shadwell’s age were addicted to these
+inversions, partly for their own reasons, as far as rhyme was
+concerned, and partly because they held it to be writing in the
+classical and Virgilian manner. What has since been called Artificial
+Poetry was then flourishing, in contradistinction to Natural; or
+Poetry seen chiefly through art and books, and not in its first
+sources. But when the artificial poet partook of the natural, or, in
+other words, was a true poet after his kind, his best was always
+written in his most natural and straightforward manner. Hear
+Shadwell’s antagonist Dryden. Not a particle of inversion, beyond what
+is used for the sake of emphasis in common discourse, and this only in
+one line (the last but three), is to be found in his immortal
+character of the Duke of Buckingham:
+
+    A man so various, that he seemed to be
+    Not one, but all mankind’s epitome:
+    Stiff in opinions, _always in the wrong_,
+    _Was everything by starts, and nothing long;_
+    But in the course of one revolving moon
+    Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:
+    Then all for women, rhyming, dancing, drinking,
+    _Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking._
+    _Blest madman!_ who could every hour employ
+    _With something new to wish or to enjoy!_
+    Railing and praising were his usual themes;
+    And both, to show his judgement, in extremes:
+    So over violent, or over civil,
+    _That every man with him was god or devil._
+    In squandering wealth was his peculiar art;
+    _Nothing went unrewarded, but desert._
+    Beggar’d by fools, whom still he found too late,
+    _He had his jest, and they had his estate._
+
+Inversion itself was often turned into a grace in these poets, and may
+be in others, by the power of being superior to it; using it only with
+a classical air, and as a help lying next to them, instead of a
+salvation which they are obliged to seek. In jesting passages also it
+sometimes gave the rhyme a turn agreeably wilful, or an appearance of
+choosing what lay in its way; as if a man should pick up a stone to
+throw at another’s head, where a less confident foot would have
+stumbled over it. Such is Dryden’s use of the word _might_--the mere
+sign of a tense--in his pretended ridicule of the monkish practice of
+rising to sing psalms in the night.
+
+    And much they griev’d to see so nigh their hall
+    The bird that warn’d St. Peter of his fall;
+    That he should raise his mitred crest on high,
+    And clap his wings and call his family
+    To sacred rites; and vex th’ ethereal powers
+    With midnight matins at uncivil hours;
+    Nay more, his quiet neighbours should molest
+    _Just in the sweetness of their morning rest._
+
+(What a line full of ‘another doze’ is that!)
+
+    _Beast of a bird!_ supinely, when he _might_
+    Lie snug and sleep, to rise before the light!
+    What if his dull forefathers used that cry?
+    Could he not let a bad example die?
+
+I the more gladly quote instances like those of Dryden, to illustrate
+the points in question, because they are specimens of the very highest
+kind of writing in the heroic couplet upon subjects not heroical. As
+to prosaicalness in general, it is sometimes indulged in by young
+writers on the plea of its being natural; but this is a mere
+confusion of triviality with propriety, and is usually the result of
+indolence.
+
+_Unsuperfluousness_ is rather a matter of style in general, than of
+the sound and order of words: and yet versification is so much
+strengthened by it, and so much weakened by its opposite, that it
+could not but come within the category of its requisites. When
+superfluousness of words is not occasioned by overflowing animal
+spirits, as in Beaumont and Fletcher, or by the very genius of luxury,
+as in Spenser (in which cases it is enrichment as well as overflow),
+there is no worse sign for a poet altogether, except pure barrenness.
+Every word that could be taken away from a poem, unreferable to either
+of the above reasons for it, is a damage; and many such are death; for
+there is nothing that posterity seems so determined to resent as this
+want of respect for its time and trouble. The world is too rich in
+books to endure it. Even true poets have died of this Writer’s Evil.
+Trifling ones have survived, with scarcely any pretensions but the
+terseness of their trifles. What hope can remain for wordy mediocrity?
+Let the discerning reader take up any poem, pen in hand, for the
+purpose of discovering how many words he can strike out of it that
+give him no requisite ideas, no relevant ones that he cares for, and
+no reasons for the rhyme beyond its necessity, and he will see what
+blot and havoc he will make in many an admired production of its
+day,--what marks of its inevitable fate. Bulky authors in particular,
+however safe they may think themselves, would do well to consider what
+parts of their cargo they might dispense with in their proposed voyage
+down the gulfs of time; for many a gallant vessel, thought
+indestructible in its age, has perished;--many a load of words,
+expected to be in eternal demand, gone to join the wrecks of
+self-love, or rotted in the warehouses of change and vicissitude. I
+have said the more on this point, because in an age when the true
+inspiration has undoubtedly been reawakened by Coleridge and his
+fellows, and we have so many new poets coming forward, it may be as
+well to give a general warning against that tendency to an
+accumulation and ostentation of _thoughts_, which is meant to be a
+refutation in full of the pretensions of all poetry less cogitabund,
+whatever may be the requirements of its class. Young writers should
+bear in mind, that even some of the very best materials for poetry are
+not poetry built; and that the smallest marble shrine, of exquisite
+workmanship, outvalues all that architect ever chipped away. Whatever
+can be so dispensed with is rubbish.
+
+_Variety_ in versification consists in whatsoever can be done for the
+prevention of monotony, by diversity of stops and cadences,
+distribution of emphasis, and retardation and acceleration of time;
+for the whole real secret of versification is a musical secret, and is
+not attainable to any vital effect, save by the ear of genius. All the
+mere knowledge of feet and numbers, of accent and quantity, will no
+more impart it, than a knowledge of the ‘Guide to Music’ will make a
+Beethoven or a Paisiello. It is a matter of sensibility and
+imagination; of the beautiful in poetical passion, accompanied by
+musical; of the imperative necessity for a pause here, and a cadence
+there, and a quicker or slower utterance in this or that place,
+created by analogies of sound with sense, by the fluctuations of
+feeling, by the demands of the gods and graces that visit the poet’s
+harp, as the winds visit that of Aeolus. The same time and quantity
+which are occasioned by the spiritual part of this secret, thus become
+its formal ones,--not feet and syllables, long and short, iambics or
+trochees; which are the reduction of it to its _less_ than dry bones.
+You might get, for instance, not only ten and eleven, but thirteen or
+fourteen syllables into a rhyming, as well as blank, heroical verse,
+if time and the feeling permitted; and in irregular measure this is
+often done; just as musicians put twenty notes in a bar instead of
+two, quavers instead of minims, according as the feeling they are
+expressing impels them to fill up the time with short and hurried
+notes, or with long; or as the choristers in a cathedral retard or
+precipitate the words of the chant, according as the quantity of its
+notes, and the colon which divides the verse of the psalm, conspire to
+demand it. Had the moderns borne this principle in mind when they
+settled the prevailing systems of verse, instead of learning them, as
+they appear to have done, from the first drawling and one-syllabled
+notation of the church hymns, we should have retained all the
+advantages of the more numerous versification of the ancients, without
+being compelled to fancy that there was no alternative for us between
+our syllabical uniformity and the hexameters or other special forms
+unsuited to our tongues. But to leave this question alone, we will
+present the reader with a few sufficing specimens of the difference
+between monotony and variety in versification, first from Pope,
+Dryden, and Milton, and next from Gay and Coleridge. The following is
+the boasted melody of the nevertheless exquisite poet of the _Rape of
+the Lock_,--exquisite in his wit and fancy, though not in his numbers.
+The reader will observe that it is literally _see-saw_, like the
+rising and falling of a plank, with a light person at one end who is
+jerked up in the briefer time, and a heavier one who is set down more
+leisurely at the other. It is in the otherwise charming description of
+the heroine of that poem:
+
+    On her white breast--a sparkling cross she wore,
+    Which Jews might kiss--and infidels adore;
+    Her lively looks--a sprightly mind disclose,
+    Quick as her eyes--and as unfix’d as those;
+    Favours to none--to all she smiles extends,
+    Oft she rejects--but never once offends;
+    Bright as the sun--her eyes the gazers strike,
+    And like the sun--they shine on all alike;
+    Yet graceful ease--and sweetness void of pride,
+    Might hide her faults--if belles had faults to hide;
+    If to her share--some female errors fall,
+    Look on her face--and you’ll forget them all.
+
+Compare with this the description of Iphigenia in one of Dryden’s
+stories from Boccaccio:
+
+    It happen’d--on a summer’s holiday,                        }
+    That to the greenwood shade--he took his way,              }
+    For Cymon shunn’d the church--and used not much to pray.   }
+    His quarter-staff--which he could ne’er forsake,
+    Hung half before--and half behind his back;
+    He trudg’d along--not knowing what he sought,
+    And whistled as he went--for want of thought.
+
+    By chance conducted--or by thirst constrain’d,
+    The deep recesses of a grove he gain’d:--
+    Where--in a plain defended by a wood,              }
+    Crept through the matted grass--a crystal flood,   }
+    By which--an alabaster fountain stood;             }
+    And on the margent of the fount was laid--
+    Attended by her slaves--a sleeping maid;
+    Like Dian and her nymphs--when, tir’d with sport,
+    To rest by cool Eurotas they resort.--
+    The dame herself--the goddess well express’d,
+    Not more distinguished by her purple vest--
+    Than by the charming features of the face--
+    And e’en in slumber--a superior grace:
+    Her comely limbs--compos’d with decent care,    }
+    Her body shaded--by a light cymar,              }
+    Her bosom to the view--was only bare;           }
+    Where two beginning paps were scarcely spied--
+    For yet their places were but signified.--
+    The fanning wind upon her bosom blows--                      }
+    To meet the fanning wind--the bosom rose;                    }
+    The fanning wind--and purling stream--continue her repose.   }
+
+For a further variety take, from the same author’s _Theodore and
+Honoria_, a passage in which the couplets are run one into the other,
+and all of it modulated, like the former, according to the feeling
+demanded by the occasion:
+
+    Whilst listening to the murmuring leaves he stood--
+    More than a mile immers’d within the wood--
+    At once the wind was laid.|--The whispering sound
+    Was dumb.|--A rising earthquake rock’d the ground.
+    With deeper brown the grove was overspread--         }
+    A sudden horror seiz’d his giddy head--              }
+    And his ears tinkled--and his colour fled.           }
+
+    Nature was in alarm.--Some danger nigh
+    Seem’d threaten’d--though unseen to mortal eye.
+    Unus’d to fear--he summon’d all his soul,
+    And stood collected in himself--and whole:
+    Not long.--
+
+But for a crowning specimen of variety of pause and accent, apart from
+emotion, nothing can surpass the account, in _Paradise Lost_, of the
+Devil’s search for an accomplice:
+
+                             There was a plàce,
+    Nòw nòt--though Sìn--not Tìme--fìrst wroùght the chànge,
+    Where Tìgris--at the foot of Pàradise,
+    Into a gùlf--shòt under ground--till pàrt
+    Ròse up a foùntain by the Trèe of Lìfe.
+    _In_ with the river sunk--and _wìth_ it _ròse_
+    Sàtan--invòlv’d in rìsing mìst--then soùght
+    Whère to lie hìd.--Sèa he had search’d--and lànd
+    From Eden over Pòntus--and the pòol
+    Maeòtis--_ùp_ beyond the river _Ob_;
+    Dòwnward as fàr antàrctic;--and in lèngth
+    Wèst from Oròntes--to the òcean bàrr’d
+    At Dàriën--thènce to the lànd whère flòws
+    Gànges and Indus.--Thùs the òrb he ròam’d
+    With nàrrow sèarch;--and with inspèction dèep
+    Consìder’d èvery crèature--whìch of àll
+    Mòst opportùne mìght sèrve his wìles--and foùnd
+    The sèrpent--sùbtlest bèast of all the fièld.
+
+If the reader cast his eye again over this passage, he will not find a
+verse in it which is not varied and harmonized in the most remarkable
+manner. Let him notice in particular that curious balancing of the
+lines in the sixth and tenth verses:
+
+    _In_ with the river sunk, &c.
+
+and
+
+    _Up_ beyond the river _Ob_.
+
+It might, indeed, be objected to the versification of Milton, that it
+exhibits too constant a perfection of this kind. It sometimes forces
+upon us too great a sense of consciousness on the part of the
+composer. We miss the first sprightly runnings of verse,--the ease and
+sweetness of spontaneity. Milton, I think, also too often condenses
+weight into heaviness.
+
+Thus much concerning the chief of our two most popular measures. The
+other, called octo-syllabic, or the measure of eight syllables,
+offered such facilities for _namby-pamby_, that it had become a jest
+as early as the time of Shakespeare, who makes Touchstone call it the
+‘butterwoman’s rate to market’, and the ‘very false gallop of verses’.
+It has been advocated, in opposition to the heroic measure, upon the
+ground that ten syllables lead a man into epithets and other
+superfluities, while eight syllables compress him into a sensible and
+pithy gentleman. But the heroic measure laughs at it. So far from
+compressing, it converts one line into two, and sacrifices everything
+to the quick and importunate return of the rhyme. With Dryden, compare
+Gay, even in the strength of Gay,--
+
+    The wind was high, the window shakes;
+    With sudden start the miser wakes;
+    Along the silent room he stalks,
+
+(A miser never ‘stalks’; but a rhyme was desired for ‘walks’)
+
+    Looks back, and trembles as he walks:
+    Each lock and every bolt he tries,
+    In every creek and corner pries;
+    Then opes the chest with treasure stor’d,
+    And stands in rapture o’er his hoard;
+
+(‘Hoard’ and ‘treasure stor’d’ are just made for one another)
+
+    But now, with sudden qualms possess’d,
+    He wrings his hands, he beats his breast;
+    By conscience stung, he wildly stares,
+    And thus his guilty soul declares.
+
+And so he denounces his gold, as miser never denounced it; and sighs,
+because
+
+    Virtue resides on earth no more!
+
+Coleridge saw the mistake which had been made with regard to this
+measure, and restored it to the beautiful freedom of which it was
+capable, by calling to mind the liberties allowed its old musical
+professors the minstrels, and dividing it by _time_ instead of
+_syllables_;--by the _beat of four_ into which you might get as many
+syllables as you could, instead of allotting eight syllables to the
+poor time, whatever it might have to say. He varied it further with
+alternate rhymes and stanzas, with rests and omissions precisely
+analogous to those in music, and rendered it altogether worthy to
+utter the manifold thoughts and feelings of himself and his lady
+Christabel. He even ventures, with an exquisite sense of solemn
+strangeness and licence (for there is witchcraft going forward), to
+introduce a couplet of blank verse, itself as mystically and
+beautifully modulated as anything in the music of Gluck or Weber.
+
+    ’Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
+    And the owls have awaken’d the crowing cock;
+    Tu-whit!--Tu-whoo!
+    And hark, again! the crowing cock,
+    _How drowsily he crew._
+    Sir Leoline, the baron rich,
+    Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
+    From her kennel beneath the rock
+    She maketh answer to the clock,
+    _Fòur fŏr thĕ qùartĕrs ănd twèlve fŏr thĕ hoùr,_
+    Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
+    Sixteen short howls, not over loud:
+    Some say, she sees my lady’s shroud.
+
+    _Is the nìght chìlly and dàrk?
+    The nìght is chìlly, but nòt dàrk._
+    The thin grey cloud is spread on high,
+    It covers, but not hides, the sky.
+    The moon is behind, and at the full,
+    And yet she looks both small and dull.
+    The night is chilly, the cloud is grey;
+
+(These are not superfluities, but mysterious returns of importunate
+feeling)
+
+    _’Tis a month before the month of May,
+    And the spring comes slowly up this way._
+    The lovely lady, Christabel,
+    Whom her father loves so well,
+    What makes her in the wood so late,
+    A furlong from the castle-gate?
+
+    She had dreams all yesternight
+    Of her own betrothèd knight;
+    And shè ĭn thĕ midnight wood will pray
+    For the wèal ŏf hĕr lover that’s far away.
+
+    She stole along, she nothing spoke,
+    The sighs she heav’d were soft and low,
+    And nought was green upon the oak,
+    But moss and rarest mistletoe;
+    She kneels beneath the huge oak tree,
+    And in silence prayeth she.
+
+    The lady sprang up suddenly,
+    The lovely lady, Christabel!
+    It moan’d as near as near can be,
+    But what it is, she cannot tell.
+    On the other side it seems to be
+    Of thĕ hùge, broàd-breàsted, òld oàk trèe.
+
+    The night is chill, the forest bare;
+    Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?
+
+(This ‘bleak moaning’ is a witch’s)
+
+    There is not wind enough in the air
+    To move away the ringlet curl
+    From the lovely lady’s cheek--
+    There is not wind enough to twirl
+    _The òne rèd lèaf, the làst ŏf ĭts clan,
+    That dàncĕs ăs òftĕn ăs dànce it càn,
+    Hàngĭng sŏ lìght and hàngĭng sŏ hìgh,
+    On thĕ tòpmost twìg thăt loŏks ùp ăt thĕ sky._
+
+    Hush, beating heart of Christabel!
+    Jesu Maria, shield her well!
+    She folded her arms beneath her cloak,
+    And stole to the other side of the oak.
+          What sees she there?
+
+    There she sees a damsel bright,
+    Drest in a robe of silken white,
+    That shadowy in the moonlight shone:
+    The neck that made that white robe wan,
+    Her stately neck and arms were bare:
+    Her blue-vein’d feet unsandall’d were;
+    And wildly glitter’d, here and there,
+    The gems entangled in her hair.
+    I guess ’twas _frightful_ there to see
+    _A lady so richly clad as she--
+    Beautiful exceedingly._
+
+The principle of Variety in Uniformity is here worked out in a style
+‘beyond the reach of art’. Everything is diversified according to the
+demand of the moment, of the sounds, the sights, the emotions; the
+very uniformity of the outline is gently varied; and yet we feel that
+_the whole is one and of the same character_, the single and sweet
+unconsciousness of the heroine making all the rest seem more
+conscious, and ghastly, and expectant. It is thus that _versification
+itself becomes part of the sentiment of a poem_, and vindicates the
+pains that have been taken to show its importance. I know of no very
+fine versification unaccompanied with fine poetry; no poetry of a mean
+order accompanied with verse of the highest.
+
+As to Rhyme, which might be thought too insignificant to mention, it
+is not at all so. The universal consent of modern Europe, and of the
+East in all ages, has made it one of the musical beauties of verse for
+all poetry but epic and dramatic, and even for the former with
+Southern Europe,--a sustainment for the enthusiasm, and a demand to
+enjoy. The mastery of it consists in never writing it for its own
+sake, or at least never appearing to do so; in knowing how to vary
+it, to give it novelty, to render it more or less strong, to divide
+it (when not in couplets) at the proper intervals, to repeat it many
+times where luxury or animal spirits demand it (see an instance in
+Titania’s speech to the Fairies), to impress an affecting or startling
+remark with it, and to make it, in comic poetry, a new and surprising
+addition to the jest.
+
+    Large was his bounty and his soul sincere,
+      Heav’n did a recompense as largely send;
+    He gave to misery all he had, _a tear_;
+      He gain’d from heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) _a friend_.
+
+                                 Gray’s _Elegy_.
+
+    The fops are proud of scandal; for they cry
+    At every lewd, low character, ‘That’s _I_’.
+
+                                 Dryden’s _Prologue to the Pilgrim_.
+
+    What makes all doctrines plain and clear?
+    _About two hundred pounds a-year._
+    And that which was proved true before,
+    Prove false again? _Two hundred more._
+
+                                 _Hudibras._
+
+    Compound for sins they are _inclin’d to_,
+    By damning those they have _no mind to_.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+    ----Stor’d with deletery _med’cines_,
+    Which whosoever took is _dead since_.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+Sometimes it is a grace in a master like Butler to force his rhyme,
+thus showing a laughing wilful power over the most stubborn materials:
+
+                                  Win
+    The women, and make them draw in
+    The men, as Indians with a _fèmale_
+    Tame elephant inveigle _the_ male.
+
+                                 _Hudibras._
+
+    He made an instrument to know
+    If the moon shines at full or no;
+    That would, as soon as e’er she _shone, straight_
+    Whether ’twere day or night _demonstrate_;
+    Tell what her diameter to an _inch is_,
+    And prove that she’s not made of _green cheese_.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+Pronounce it, by all means, _grinches_, to make the joke more wilful.
+The happiest triple rhyme, perhaps, that ever was written, is in _Don
+Juan_:
+
+    But oh! ye lords of ladies _intellectual_,
+    Inform us truly,--haven’t they _hen-peck’d you all_?
+
+The sweepingness of the assumption completes the flowing breadth of
+effect.
+
+Dryden confessed that a rhyme often gave him a thought. Probably the
+happy word ‘sprung’ in the following passage from Ben Jonson was
+suggested by it; but then the poet must have had the feeling in him.
+
+      --Let our trumpets sound,
+    And cleave both air and ground
+      With beating of our drums.
+    Let every lyre be strung,
+    Harp, lute, theorbo, _sprung_
+      _With touch of dainty thumbs_.
+
+Boileau’s trick for appearing to rhyme naturally was to compose the
+second line of his couplet first! which gives one the crowning idea of
+the ‘artificial school of poetry’. Perhaps the most perfect master of
+rhyme, the easiest and most abundant, was the greatest writer of
+comedy that the world has seen,--Molière.
+
+If a young reader should ask, after all, What is the quickest way of
+knowing bad poets from good, the best poets from the next best, and so
+on? the answer is, the only and twofold way: first, the perusal of the
+best poets with the greatest attention; and, second, the cultivation
+of that love of truth and beauty which made them what they are. Every
+true reader of poetry partakes a more than ordinary portion of the
+poetic nature; and no one can be completely such, who does not love,
+or take an interest in, everything that interests the poet, from the
+firmament to the daisy,--from the highest heart of man to the most
+pitiable of the low. It is a good practice to read with pen in hand,
+marking what is liked or doubted. It rivets the attention, realizes
+the greatest amount of enjoyment, and facilitates reference. It
+enables the reader also, from time to time, to see what progress he
+makes with his own mind, and how it grows up towards the stature of
+its exalter.
+
+If the same person should ask, What class of poetry is the highest? I
+should say, undoubtedly, the Epic; for it includes the drama, with
+narration besides; or the speaking and action of the characters, with
+the speaking of the poet himself, whose utmost address is taxed to
+relate all well for so long a time, particularly in the passages least
+sustained by enthusiasm. Whether this class has included the greatest
+poet, is another question still under trial; for Shakespeare perplexes
+all such verdicts, even when the claimant is Homer; though, if a
+judgement may be drawn from his early narratives (_Venus and Adonis_,
+and the _Rape of Lucrece_), it is to be doubted whether even
+Shakespeare could have told a story like Homer, owing to that
+incessant activity and superfoetation of thought, a little less of
+which might be occasionally desired even in his plays;--if it were
+possible, once possessing anything of his, to wish it away. Next to
+Homer and Shakespeare come such narrators as the less universal, but
+still intenser Dante; Milton, with his dignified imagination; the
+universal, profoundly simple Chaucer; and luxuriant, remote
+Spenser--immortal child in poetry’s most poetic solitudes: then the
+great second-rate dramatists; unless those who are better acquainted
+with Greek tragedy than I am, demand a place for them before Chaucer:
+then the airy yet robust universality of Ariosto; the hearty,
+out-of-door nature of Theocritus, also a universalist; the finest
+lyrical poets (who only take short flights, compared with the
+narrators); the purely contemplative poets who have more thought than
+feeling; the descriptive, satirical, didactic, epigrammatic. It is to
+be borne in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior class
+may be superior to followers in the train of a higher one, though the
+superiority is by no means to be taken for granted; otherwise Pope
+would be superior to Fletcher, and Butler to Pope. Imagination,
+teeming with action and character, makes the greatest poets; feeling
+and thought the next; fancy (by itself) the next; wit the last.
+Thought by itself makes no poet at all; for the mere conclusions of
+the understanding can at best be only so many intellectual matters of
+fact. Feeling, even destitute of conscious thought, stands a far
+better poetical chance; feeling being a sort of thought without the
+process of thinking,--a grasper of the truth without seeing it. And
+what is very remarkable, feeling seldom makes the blunders that
+thought does. An idle distinction has been made between taste and
+judgement. Taste is the very maker of judgement. Put an artificial
+fruit in your mouth, or only handle it, and you will soon perceive the
+difference between judging from taste or tact, and judging from the
+abstract figment called judgement. The latter does but throw you into
+guesses and doubts. Hence the conceits that astonish us in the
+gravest, and even subtlest, thinkers, whose taste is not proportionate
+to their mental perceptions; men like Donne, for instance; who, apart
+from accidental personal impressions, seem to look at nothing as it
+really is, but only as to what may be thought of it. Hence, on the
+other hand, the delightfulness of those poets who never violate truth
+of feeling, whether in things real or imaginary; who are always
+consistent with their object and its requirements; and who run the
+great round of nature, not to perplex and be perplexed, but to make
+themselves and us happy. And luckily, delightfulness is not
+incompatible with greatness, willing soever as men may be in their
+present imperfect state to set the power to subjugate above the power
+to please. Truth, of any great kind whatsoever, makes great writing.
+This is the reason why such poets as Ariosto, though not writing with
+a constant detail of thought and feeling like Dante, are justly
+considered great as well as delightful. Their greatness proves itself
+by the same truth of nature, and sustained power, though in a
+different way. Their action is not so crowded and weighty; their
+sphere has more territories less fertile; but it has enchantments of
+its own, which excess of thought would spoil,--luxuries, laughing
+graces, animal spirits; and not to recognize the beauty and greatness
+of these, treated as they treat them, is simply to be defective in
+sympathy. Every planet is not Mars or Saturn. There is also Venus and
+Mercury. There is one genius of the south, and another of the north,
+and others uniting both. The reader who is too thoughtless or too
+sensitive to like intensity of any sort, and he who is too thoughtful
+or too dull to like anything but the greatest possible stimulus of
+reflection or passion, are equally wanting in complexional fitness
+for a thorough enjoyment of books. Ariosto occasionally says as fine
+things as Dante, and Spenser as Shakespeare; but the business of both
+is to enjoy; and in order to partake their enjoyment to its full
+extent, you must feel what poetry is in the general as well as the
+particular, must be aware that there are different songs of the
+spheres, some fuller of notes, and others of a sustained delight; and
+as the former keep you perpetually alive to thought or passion, so
+from the latter you receive a constant harmonious sense of truth and
+beauty, more agreeable perhaps on the whole, though less exciting.
+Ariosto, for instance, does not _tell a story_ with the brevity and
+concentrated passion of Dante; every sentence is not so full of
+matter, nor the style so removed from the indifference of prose; yet
+you are charmed with a truth of another sort, equally characteristic
+of the writer, equally drawn from nature and substituting a healthy
+sense of enjoyment for intenser emotion. Exclusiveness of liking for
+this or that mode of truth, only shows, either that a reader’s
+perceptions are limited, or that he would sacrifice truth itself to
+his favourite form of it. Sir Walter Raleigh, who was as trenchant
+with his pen as his sword, hailed the _Faerie Queene_ of his friend
+Spenser in verses in which he said that ‘Petrarch’ was thenceforward
+to be no more heard of; and that in all English poetry, there was
+nothing he counted ‘of any price’ but the effusions of the new author.
+Yet Petrarch is still living; Chaucer was not abolished by Sir Walter;
+and Shakespeare is thought somewhat valuable. A botanist might as well
+have said, that myrtles and oaks were to disappear, because acacias
+had come up. It is with the poet’s creations, as with nature’s, great
+or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their amount, can be
+worthily shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our
+hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether in productions grand and
+beautiful as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no
+bigger and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets;
+whether in Homer’s epic or Gray’s _Elegy_, in the enchanted gardens of
+Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the _Schoolmistress_ of
+Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and
+feel this, is to be deficient in the universality of Nature herself,
+who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who
+calls upon us to admire all her productions; not indeed with the same
+degree of admiration, but with no refusal of it, except to defect.
+
+I cannot draw this essay towards its conclusion better than with three
+memorable words of Milton; who has said, that poetry, in comparison
+with science, is ‘simple, sensuous, and passionate’. By simple, he
+means unperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of
+imagery; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware that
+different constructions have been put on some of these words; but the
+context seems to me to necessitate those before us. I quote, however,
+not from the original, but from an extract in the _Remarks on Paradise
+Lost_ by Richardson.
+
+What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and
+truth;--what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the
+false. He will get no good by proposing to be ‘in earnest at the
+moment’. His earnestness must be innate and habitual; born with him,
+and felt to be his most precious inheritance. ‘I expect neither
+profit nor general fame by my writings,’ says Coleridge, in the
+Preface to his Poems; ‘and I consider myself as having been amply
+repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its “_own exceeding great
+reward_”; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined
+my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit
+of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets
+and surrounds me.’
+
+‘Poetry’, says Shelley, ‘lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the
+world, _and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar_.
+It reproduces all that it represents; and the impersonations clothed
+in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who
+have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted
+content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which
+it co-exists. The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of
+our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
+which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be
+greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put
+himself in the place of another, and of many others: the pains and
+pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of
+moral good is imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by
+acting upon the cause.’
+
+I would not willingly say anything after perorations like these; but
+as treatises on poetry may chance to have auditors who think
+themselves called upon to vindicate the superiority of what is termed
+useful knowledge, it may be as well to add, that if the poet may be
+allowed to pique himself on any one thing more than another, compared
+with those who undervalue him, it is on that power of undervaluing
+nobody, and no attainments different from his own, which is given him
+by the very faculty of imagination they despise. The greater includes
+the less. They do not see that their inability to comprehend him
+argues the smaller capacity. No man recognizes the worth of utility
+more than the poet: he only desires that the meaning of the term may
+not come short of its greatness, and exclude the noblest necessities
+of his fellow-creatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance,
+with the facilities for rapid conveyance afforded him by the railroad,
+as the dullest confiner of its advantages to that single idea, or as
+the greatest two-idea’d man who varies that single idea with hugging
+himself on his ‘buttons’ or his good dinner. But he sees also the
+beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the
+heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming along like
+a magic horse, of the affections that are carrying, perhaps, half the
+passengers on their journey, nay, of those of the great two-idea’d
+man; and, beyond all this, he discerns the incalculable amount of
+good, and knowledge, and refinement, and mutual consideration, which
+this wonderful invention is fitted to circulate over the globe,
+perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and certainly to the
+diffusion of millions of enjoyments.
+
+‘And a button-maker, after all, invented it!’ cries our friend.
+
+Pardon me--it was a nobleman. A button-maker may be a very excellent,
+and a very poetical man too, and yet not have been the first man
+visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the combination of water
+and fire. It was a nobleman who first thought of this most poetical
+bit of science. It was a nobleman who first thought of it--a captain
+who first tried it--and a button-maker who perfected it. And he who
+put the nobleman on such thoughts was the great philosopher, Bacon,
+who said that poetry had ‘something divine in it’, and was necessary
+to the satisfaction of the human mind.
+
+
+
+
+MATTHEW ARNOLD
+
+1822-1888
+
+THE CHOICE OF SUBJECTS IN POETRY
+
+[Preface to ‘Poems’, 1853]
+
+
+In two small volumes of Poems, published anonymously, one in 1849, the
+other in 1852, many of the Poems which compose the present volume have
+already appeared. The rest are now published for the first time.
+
+I have, in the present collection, omitted the Poem from which the
+volume published in 1852 took its title. I have done so, not because
+the subject of it was a Sicilian Greek born between two and three
+thousand years ago, although many persons would think this a
+sufficient reason. Neither have I done so because I had, in my own
+opinion, failed in the delineation which I intended to effect. I
+intended to delineate the feelings of one of the last of the Greek
+religious philosophers, one of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus,
+having survived his fellows, living on into a time when the habits of
+Greek thought and feeling had begun fast to change, character to
+dwindle, the influence of the Sophists to prevail. Into the feelings
+of a man so situated there entered much that we are accustomed to
+consider as exclusively modern; how much, the fragments of Empedocles
+himself which remain to us are sufficient at least to indicate. What
+those who are familiar only with the great monuments of early Greek
+genius suppose to be its exclusive characteristics, have disappeared;
+the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have
+disappeared: the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced;
+modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts,
+we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.
+
+The representation of such a man’s feelings must be interesting, if
+consistently drawn. We all naturally take pleasure, says Aristotle, in
+any imitation or representation whatever: this is the basis of our
+love of Poetry: and we take pleasure in them, he adds, because all
+knowledge is naturally agreeable to us; not to the philosopher only,
+but to mankind at large. Every representation therefore which is
+consistently drawn may be supposed to be interesting, inasmuch as it
+gratifies this natural interest in knowledge of all kinds. What is
+_not_ interesting, is that which does not add to our knowledge of any
+kind; that which is vaguely conceived and loosely drawn; a
+representation which is general, indeterminate, and faint, instead of
+being particular, precise, and firm.
+
+Any accurate representation may therefore be expected to be
+interesting; but, if the representation be a poetical one, more than
+this is demanded. It is demanded, not only that it shall interest, but
+also that it shall inspirit and rejoice the reader: that it shall
+convey a charm, and infuse delight. For the Muses, as Hesiod says,
+were born that they might be ‘a forgetfulness of evils, and a truce
+from cares’; and it is not enough that the Poet should add to the
+knowledge of men, it is required of him also that he should add to
+their happiness. ‘All Art’, says Schiller, ‘is dedicated to Joy, and
+there is no higher and no more serious problem, than how to make men
+happy. The right Art is that alone, which creates the highest
+enjoyment.’
+
+A poetical work, therefore, is not yet justified when it has been
+shown to be an accurate, and therefore interesting, representation; it
+has to be shown also that it is a representation from which men can
+derive enjoyment. In presence of the most tragic circumstances,
+represented in a work of Art, the feeling of enjoyment, as is well
+known, may still subsist: the representation of the most utter
+calamity, of the liveliest anguish, is not sufficient to destroy it:
+the more tragic the situation, the deeper becomes the enjoyment; and
+the situation is more tragic in proportion as it becomes more
+terrible.
+
+What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though
+accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in
+which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous
+state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope,
+or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to
+be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in
+the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in
+actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them
+in poetry is painful also.
+
+To this class of situations, poetically faulty as it appears to me,
+that of Empedocles, as I have endeavoured to represent him, belongs;
+and I have therefore excluded the Poem from the present collection.
+
+And why, it may be asked, have I entered into this explanation
+respecting a matter so unimportant as the admission or exclusion of
+the Poem in question? I have done so, because I was anxious to avow
+that the sole reason for its exclusion was that which has been stated
+above; and that it has not been excluded in deference to the opinion
+which many critics of the present day appear to entertain against
+subjects chosen from distant times and countries: against the choice,
+in short, of any subjects but modern ones.
+
+‘The Poet,’ it is said, and by an intelligent critic, ‘the Poet who
+would really fix the public attention must leave the exhausted past,
+and draw his subjects from matters of present import, and _therefore_
+both of interest and novelty.’
+
+Now this view I believe to be completely false. It is worth examining,
+inasmuch as it is a fair sample of a class of critical dicta
+everywhere current at the present day, having a philosophical form and
+air, but no real basis in fact; and which are calculated to vitiate
+the judgement of readers of poetry, while they exert, so far as they
+are adopted, a misleading influence on the practice of those who write
+it.
+
+What are the eternal objects of Poetry, among all nations and at all
+times? They are actions; human actions; possessing an inherent
+interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an
+interesting manner by the art of the Poet. Vainly will the latter
+imagine that he has everything in his own power; that he can make an
+intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent
+one by his treatment of it: he may indeed compel us to admire his
+skill, but his work will possess, within itself, an incurable defect.
+
+The Poet, then, has in the first place to select an excellent action;
+and what actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most
+powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those
+elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which
+are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same;
+that which interests them is permanent and the same also. The
+modernness or antiquity of an action, therefore, has nothing to do
+with its fitness for poetical representation; this depends upon its
+inherent qualities. To the elementary part of our nature, to our
+passions, that which is great and passionate is eternally interesting;
+and interesting solely in proportion to its greatness and to its
+passion. A great human action of a thousand years ago is more
+interesting to it than a smaller human action of to-day, even though
+upon the representation of this last the most consummate skill may
+have been expended, and though it has the advantage of appealing by
+its modern language, familiar manners, and contemporary allusions, to
+all our transient feelings and interests. These, however, have no
+right to demand of a poetical work that it shall satisfy them; their
+claims are to be directed elsewhere. Poetical works belong to the
+domain of our permanent passions: let them interest these, and the
+voice of all subordinate claims upon them is at once silenced.
+
+Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido--what modern poem presents
+personages as interesting, even to us moderns, as these personages of
+an ‘exhausted past’? We have the domestic epic dealing with the
+details of modern life which pass daily under our eyes; we have poems
+representing modern personages in contact with the problems of modern
+life, moral, intellectual, and social; these works have been produced
+by poets the most distinguished of their nation and time; yet I
+fearlessly assert that _Hermann and Dorothea_, _Childe Harold_,
+_Jocelyn_, _The Excursion_, leave the reader cold in comparison with
+the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the
+_Orestea_, or by the episode of Dido. And why is this? Simply because
+in the three latter cases the action is greater, the personages
+nobler, the situations more intense: and this is the true basis of the
+interest in a poetical work, and this alone.
+
+It may be urged, however, that past actions may be interesting in
+themselves, but that they are not to be adopted by the modern Poet,
+because it is impossible for him to have them clearly present to his
+own mind, and he cannot therefore feel them deeply, nor represent them
+forcibly. But this is not necessarily the case. The externals of a
+past action, indeed, he cannot know with the precision of a
+contemporary; but his business is with its essentials. The outward man
+of Oedipus or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the
+ceremonies of their courts, he cannot accurately figure to himself;
+but neither do they essentially concern him. His business is with
+their inward man; with their feelings and behaviour in certain tragic
+situations, which engage their passions as men; these have in them
+nothing local and casual; they are as accessible to the modern Poet as
+to a contemporary.
+
+The date of an action, then, signifies nothing: the action itself, its
+selection and construction, this is what is all-important. This the
+Greeks understood far more clearly than we do. The radical difference
+between their poetical theory and ours consists, as it appears to me,
+in this: that, with them, the poetical character of the action in
+itself, and the conduct of it, was the first consideration; with us,
+attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts and
+images which occur in the treatment of an action. They regarded the
+whole; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over
+the expression of it; with us, the expression predominates over the
+action. Not that they failed in expression, or were inattentive to it;
+on the contrary, they are the highest models of expression, the
+unapproached masters of the _grand style_: but their expression is so
+excellent because it is so admirably kept in its right degree of
+prominence; because it is so simple and so well subordinated; because
+it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it
+conveys. For what reason was the Greek tragic poet confined to so
+limited a range of subjects? Because there are so few actions which
+unite in themselves, in the highest degree, the conditions of
+excellence: and it was not thought that on any but an excellent
+subject could an excellent Poem be constructed. A few actions,
+therefore, eminently adapted for tragedy, maintained almost exclusive
+possession of the Greek tragic stage; their significance appeared
+inexhaustible; they were as permanent problems, perpetually offered to
+the genius of every fresh poet. This too is the reason of what appears
+to us moderns a certain baldness of expression in Greek tragedy; of
+the triviality with which we often reproach the remarks of the
+Chorus, where it takes part in the dialogue: that the action itself,
+the situation of Orestes, or Merope, or Alcmaeon, was to stand the
+central point of interest, unforgotten, absorbing, principal; that no
+accessories were for a moment to distract the spectator’s attention
+from this; that the tone of the parts was to be perpetually kept down,
+in order not to impair the grandiose effect of the whole. The terrible
+old mythic story on which the drama was founded stood, before he
+entered the theatre, traced in its bare outlines upon the spectator’s
+mind; it stood in his memory, as a group of statuary, faintly seen, at
+the end of a long and dark vista: then came the Poet, embodying
+outlines, developing situations, not a word wasted, not a sentiment
+capriciously thrown in; stroke upon stroke, the drama proceeded: the
+light deepened upon the group; more and more it revealed itself to the
+riveted gaze of the spectator: until at last, when the final words
+were spoken, it stood before him in broad sunlight, a model of
+immortal beauty.
+
+This was what a Greek critic demanded; this was what a Greek poet
+endeavoured to effect. It signified nothing to what time an action
+belonged; we do not find that the _Persae_ occupied a particularly
+high rank among the dramas of Aeschylus, because it represented a
+matter of contemporary interest: this was not what a cultivated
+Athenian required; he required that the permanent elements of his
+nature should be moved; and dramas of which the action, though taken
+from a long-distant mythic time, yet was calculated to accomplish this
+in a higher degree than that of the _Persae_, stood higher in his
+estimation accordingly. The Greeks felt, no doubt, with their
+exquisite sagacity of taste, that an action of present times was too
+near them, too much mixed up with what was accidental and passing, to
+form a sufficiently grand, detached, and self-subsistent object for a
+tragic poem: such objects belonged to the domain of the comic poet,
+and of the lighter kinds of poetry. For the more serious kinds, for
+_pragmatic_ poetry, to use an excellent expression of Polybius, they
+were more difficult and severe in the range of subjects which they
+permitted. Their theory and practice alike, the admirable treatise of
+Aristotle, and the unrivalled works of their poets, exclaim with a
+thousand tongues--‘All depends upon the subject; choose a fitting
+action, penetrate yourself with the feeling of its situations; this
+done, everything else will follow.’
+
+But for all kinds of poetry alike there was one point on which they
+were rigidly exacting; the adaptability of the subject to the kind of
+poetry selected, and the careful construction of the poem.
+
+How different a way of thinking from this is ours! We can hardly at
+the present day understand what Menander meant, when he told a man who
+inquired as to the progress of his comedy that he had finished it, not
+having yet written a single line, because he had constructed the
+action of it in his mind. A modern critic would have assured him that
+the merit of his piece depended on the brilliant things which arose
+under his pen as he went along. We have poems which seem to exist
+merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of
+producing any total impression. We have critics who seem to direct
+their attention merely to detached expressions, to the language about
+the action, not to the action itself. I verily think that the
+majority of them do not in their hearts believe that there is such a
+thing as a total-impression to be derived from a poem at all, or to be
+demanded from a poet; they think the term a commonplace of
+metaphysical criticism. They will permit the Poet to select any action
+he pleases, and to suffer that action to go as it will, provided he
+gratifies them with occasional bursts of fine writing, and with a
+shower of isolated thoughts and images. That is, they permit him to
+leave their poetical sense ungratified, provided that he gratifies
+their rhetorical sense and their curiosity. Of his neglecting to
+gratify these, there is little danger; he needs rather to be warned
+against the danger of attempting to gratify these alone; he needs
+rather to be perpetually reminded to prefer his action to everything
+else; so to treat this, as to permit its inherent excellences to
+develop themselves, without interruption from the intrusion of his
+personal peculiarities: most fortunate when he most entirely succeeds
+in effacing himself, and in enabling a noble action to subsist as it
+did in nature.
+
+But the modern critic not only permits a false practice; he absolutely
+prescribes false aims.--‘A true allegory of the state of one’s own
+mind in a representative history,’ the Poet is told, ‘is perhaps the
+highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry.’--And
+accordingly he attempts it. An allegory of the state of one’s own
+mind, the highest problem of an art which imitates actions! No
+assuredly, it is not, it never can be so: no great poetical work has
+ever been produced with such an aim. _Faust_ itself, in which
+something of the kind is attempted, wonderful passages as it contains,
+and in spite of the unsurpassed beauty of the scenes which relate to
+Margaret, _Faust_ itself, judged as a whole, and judged strictly as a
+poetical work, is defective: its illustrious author, the greatest poet
+of modern times, the greatest critic of all times, would have been the
+first to acknowledge it; he only defended his work, indeed, by
+asserting it to be ‘something incommensurable’.
+
+The confusion of the present times is great, the multitude of voices
+counselling different things bewildering, the number of existing works
+capable of attracting a young writer’s attention and of becoming his
+models, immense: what he wants is a hand to guide him through the
+confusion, a voice to prescribe to him the aim which he should keep in
+view, and to explain to him that the value of the literary works which
+offer themselves to his attention is relative to their power of
+helping him forward on his road towards this aim. Such a guide the
+English writer at the present day will nowhere find. Failing this, all
+that can be looked for, all indeed that can be desired, is, that his
+attention should be fixed on excellent models; that he may reproduce,
+at any rate, something of their excellence, by penetrating himself
+with their works and by catching their spirit, if he cannot be taught
+to produce what is excellent independently.
+
+Foremost among these models for the English writer stands Shakespeare:
+a name the greatest perhaps of all poetical names; a name never to be
+mentioned without reverence. I will venture, however, to express a
+doubt, whether the influence of his works, excellent and fruitful for
+the readers of poetry, for the great majority, has been of unmixed
+advantage to the writers of it. Shakespeare indeed chose excellent
+subjects; the world could afford no better than Macbeth, or Romeo and
+Juliet, or Othello: he had no theory respecting the necessity of
+choosing subjects of present import, or the paramount interest
+attaching to allegories of the state of one’s own mind; like all great
+poets, he knew well what constituted a poetical action; like them,
+wherever he found such an action, he took it; like them, too, he found
+his best in past times. But to these general characteristics of all
+great poets, he added a special one of his own; a gift, namely, of
+happy, abundant, and ingenious expression, eminent and unrivalled: so
+eminent as irresistibly to strike the attention first in him, and even
+to throw into comparative shade his other excellences as a poet. Here
+has been the mischief. These other excellences were his fundamental
+excellences _as a poet_; what distinguishes the artist from the mere
+amateur, says Goethe, is _Architectonicè_ in the highest sense; that
+power of execution, which creates, forms, and constitutes: not the
+profoundness of single thoughts, not the richness of imagery, not the
+abundance of illustration. But these attractive accessories of a
+poetical work being more easily seized than the spirit of the whole,
+and these accessories being possessed by Shakespeare in an unequalled
+degree, a young writer having recourse to Shakespeare as his model
+runs great risk of being vanquished and absorbed by them, and, in
+consequence, of reproducing, according to the measure of his power,
+these, and these alone. Of this preponderating quality of
+Shakespeare’s genius, accordingly, almost the whole of modern English
+poetry has, it appears to me, felt the influence. To the exclusive
+attention on the part of his imitators to this it is in a great degree
+owing, that of the majority of modern poetical works the details
+alone are valuable, the composition worthless. In reading them one is
+perpetually reminded of that terrible sentence on a modern French
+poet--_il dit tout ce qu’il veut, mais malheureusement il n’a rien à
+dire_.
+
+Let me give an instance of what I mean. I will take it from the works
+of the very chief among those who seem to have been formed in the
+school of Shakespeare: of one whose exquisite genius and pathetic
+death render him for ever interesting. I will take the poem of
+_Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, by Keats. I choose this rather than
+the _Endymion_, because the latter work (which a modern critic has
+classed with the _Faerie Queene_!), although undoubtedly there blows
+through it the breath of genius, is yet as a whole so utterly
+incoherent, as not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all. The
+poem of _Isabella_, then, is a perfect treasure-house of graceful and
+felicitous words and images: almost in every stanza there occurs one
+of those vivid and picturesque turns of expression, by which the
+object is made to flash upon the eye of the mind, and which thrill the
+reader with a sudden delight. This one short poem contains, perhaps, a
+greater number of happy single expressions which one could quote than
+all the extant tragedies of Sophocles. But the action, the story? The
+action in itself is an excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by
+the Poet, so loosely constructed, that the effect produced by it, in
+and for itself, is absolutely null. Let the reader, after he has
+finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story in the _Decameron_:
+he will then feel how pregnant and interesting the same action has
+become in the hands of a great artist, who above all things
+delineates his object; who subordinates expression to that which it is
+designed to express.
+
+I have said that the imitators of Shakespeare, fixing their attention
+on his wonderful gift of expression, have directed their imitation to
+this, neglecting his other excellences. These excellences, the
+fundamental excellences of poetical art, Shakespeare no doubt
+possessed them--possessed many of them in a splendid degree; but it
+may perhaps be doubted whether even he himself did not sometimes give
+scope to his faculty of expression to the prejudice of a higher
+poetical duty. For we must never forget that Shakespeare is the great
+poet he is from his skill in discerning and firmly conceiving an
+excellent action, from his power of intensely feeling a situation, of
+intimately associating himself with a character; not from his gift of
+expression, which rather even leads him astray, degenerating sometimes
+into a fondness for curiosity of expression, into an irritability of
+fancy, which seems to make it impossible for him to say a thing
+plainly, even when the press of the action demands the very directest
+language, or its level character the very simplest. Mr. Hallam, than
+whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has
+had the courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark,
+how extremely and faultily difficult Shakespeare’s language often is.
+It is so: you may find main scenes in some of his greatest tragedies,
+_King Lear_ for instance, where the language is so artificial, so
+curiously tortured, and so difficult, that every speech has to be read
+two or three times before its meaning can be comprehended. This
+overcuriousness of expression is indeed but the excessive employment
+of a wonderful gift--of the power of saying a thing in a happier way
+than any other man; nevertheless, it is carried so far that one
+understands what M. Guizot meant, when he said that Shakespeare
+appears in his language to have tried all styles except that of
+simplicity. He has not the severe and scrupulous self-restraint of the
+ancients, partly, no doubt, because he had a far less cultivated and
+exacting audience: he has indeed a far wider range than they had, a
+far richer fertility of thought; in this respect he rises above them:
+in his strong conception of his subject, in the genuine way in which
+he is penetrated with it, he resembles them, and is unlike the
+moderns: but in the accurate limitation of it, the conscientious
+rejection of superfluities, the simple and rigorous development of it
+from the first line of his work to the last, he falls below them, and
+comes nearer to the moderns. In his chief works, besides what he has
+of his own, he has the elementary soundness of the ancients; he has
+their important action and their large and broad manner: but he has
+not their purity of method. He is therefore a less safe model; for
+what he has of his own is personal, and inseparable from his own rich
+nature; it may be imitated and exaggerated, it cannot be learned or
+applied as an art; he is above all suggestive; more valuable,
+therefore, to young writers as men than as artists. But clearness of
+arrangement, rigour of development, simplicity of style--these may to
+a certain extent be learned: and these may, I am convinced, be learned
+best from the ancients, who, although infinitely less suggestive than
+Shakespeare, are thus, to the artist, more instructive.
+
+What then, it will be asked, are the ancients to be our sole models?
+the ancients with their comparatively narrow range of experience, and
+their widely different circumstances? Not, certainly, that which is
+narrow in the ancients, nor that in which we can no longer sympathize.
+An action like the action of the _Antigone_ of Sophocles, which turns
+upon the conflict between the heroine’s duty to her brother’s corpse
+and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is
+possible that we should feel a deep interest. I am speaking too, it
+will be remembered, not of the best sources of intellectual stimulus
+for the general reader, but of the best models of instruction for the
+individual writer. This last may certainly learn of the ancients,
+better than anywhere else, three things which it is vitally important
+for him to know:--the all-importance of the choice of a subject; the
+necessity of accurate construction; and the subordinate character of
+expression. He will learn from them how unspeakably superior is the
+effect of the one moral impression left by a great action treated as a
+whole, to the effect produced by the most striking single thought or
+by the happiest image. As he penetrates into the spirit of the great
+classical works, as he becomes gradually aware of their intense
+significance, their noble simplicity, and their calm pathos, he will
+be convinced that it is this effect, unity and profoundness of moral
+impression, at which the ancient Poets aimed; that it is this which
+constitutes the grandeur of their works, and which makes them
+immortal. He will desire to direct his own efforts towards producing
+the same effect. Above all, he will deliver himself from the jargon of
+modern criticism, and escape the danger of producing poetical works
+conceived in the spirit of the passing time, and which partake of its
+transitoriness.
+
+The present age makes great claims upon us: we owe it service, it will
+not be satisfied without our admiration. I know not how it is, but
+their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those
+who constantly practise it, a steadying and composing effect upon
+their judgement, not of literary works only, but of men and events in
+general. They are like persons who have had a very weighty and
+impressive experience; they are more truly than others under the
+empire of facts, and more independent of the language current among
+those with whom they live. They wish neither to applaud nor to revile
+their age: they wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and
+whether this is what they want. What they want, they know very well;
+they want to educe and cultivate what is best and noblest in
+themselves: they know, too, that this is no easy task--χαλεπὸν, as
+Pittacus said, χαλεπὸν ἔσθλὸν ἔμμεναι--and they ask themselves sincerely
+whether their age and its literature can assist them in the attempt.
+If they are endeavouring to practise any art, they remember the plain
+and simple proceedings of the old artists, who attained their grand
+results by penetrating themselves with some noble and significant
+action, not by inflating themselves with a belief in the pre-eminent
+importance and greatness of their own times. They do not talk of their
+mission, nor of interpreting their age, nor of the coming Poet; all
+this, they know, is the mere delirium of vanity; their business is not
+to praise their age, but to afford to the men who live in it the
+highest pleasure which they are capable of feeling. If asked to afford
+this by means of subjects drawn from the age itself, they ask what
+special fitness the present age has for supplying them: they are told
+that it is an era of progress, an age commissioned to carry out the
+great ideas of industrial development and social amelioration. They
+reply that with all this they can do nothing; that the elements they
+need for the exercise of their art are great actions, calculated
+powerfully and delightfully to affect what is permanent in the human
+soul; that so far as the present age can supply such actions, they
+will gladly make use of them; but that an age wanting in moral
+grandeur can with difficulty supply such, and an age of spiritual
+discomfort with difficulty be powerfully and delightfully affected by
+them.
+
+A host of voices will indignantly rejoin that the present age is
+inferior to the past neither in moral grandeur nor in spiritual
+health. He who possesses the discipline I speak of will content
+himself with remembering the judgements passed upon the present age,
+in this respect, by the two men, the one of strongest head, the other
+of widest culture, whom it has produced; by Goethe and by Niebuhr. It
+will be sufficient for him that he knows the opinions held by these
+two great men respecting the present age and its literature; and that
+he feels assured in his own mind that their aims and demands upon life
+were such as he would wish, at any rate, his own to be; and their
+judgement as to what is impeding and disabling such as he may safely
+follow. He will not, however, maintain a hostile attitude towards the
+false pretensions of his age; he will content himself with not being
+overwhelmed by them. He will esteem himself fortunate if he can
+succeed in banishing from his mind all feelings of contradiction, and
+irritation, and impatience; in order to delight himself with the
+contemplation of some noble action of a heroic time, and to enable
+others, through his representation of it, to delight in it also.
+
+I am far indeed from making any claim, for myself, that I possess this
+discipline; or for the following Poems, that they breathe its spirit.
+But I say, that in the sincere endeavour to learn and practise, amid
+the bewildering confusion of our times, what is sound and true in
+poetical art, I seemed to myself to find the only sure guidance, the
+only solid footing, among the ancients. They, at any rate, knew what
+they wanted in Art, and we do not. It is this uncertainty which is
+disheartening, and not hostile criticism. How often have I felt this
+when reading words of disparagement or of cavil: that it is the
+uncertainty as to what is really to be aimed at which makes our
+difficulty, not the dissatisfaction of the critic, who himself suffers
+from the same uncertainty. _Non me tua fervida terrent Dicta; Dii me
+terrent, et Jupiter hostis._
+
+Two kinds of _dilettanti_, says Goethe, there are in poetry: he who
+neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and thinks he has done
+enough if he shows spirituality and feeling; and he who seeks to
+arrive at poetry merely by mechanism, in which he can acquire an
+artisan’s readiness, and is without soul and matter. And he adds, that
+the first does most harm to Art, and the last to himself. If we must
+be _dilettanti_: if it is impossible for us, under the circumstances
+amidst which we live, to think clearly, to feel nobly, and to
+delineate firmly: if we cannot attain to the mastery of the great
+artists--let us, at least, have so much respect for our Art as to
+prefer it to ourselves: let us not bewilder our successors: let us
+transmit to them the practice of Poetry, with its boundaries and
+wholesome regulative laws, under which excellent works may again,
+perhaps, at some future time, be produced, not yet fallen into
+oblivion through our neglect, not yet condemned and cancelled by the
+influence of their eternal enemy, Caprice.
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION
+
+(1854)
+
+I have allowed the Preface to the former edition of these Poems to
+stand almost without change, because I still believe it to be, in the
+main, true. I must not, however, be supposed insensible to the force
+of much that has been alleged against portions of it, or unaware that
+it contains many things incompletely stated, many things which need
+limitation. It leaves, too, untouched the question, how far, and in
+what manner, the opinions there expressed respecting the choice of
+subjects apply to lyric poetry; that region of the poetical field
+which is chiefly cultivated at present. But neither have I time now to
+supply these deficiencies, nor is this the proper place for attempting
+it: on one or two points alone I wish to offer, in the briefest
+possible way, some explanation.
+
+An objection has been ably urged to the classing together, as subjects
+equally belonging to a past time, Oedipus and Macbeth. And it is no
+doubt true that to Shakespeare, standing on the verge of the Middle
+Ages, the epoch of Macbeth was more familiar than that of Oedipus. But
+I was speaking of actions as they presented themselves to us moderns:
+and it will hardly be said that the European mind, since Voltaire, has
+much more affinity with the times of Macbeth than with those of
+Oedipus. As moderns, it seems to me, we have no longer any direct
+affinity with the circumstances and feelings of either; as
+individuals, we are attracted towards this or that personage, we have
+a capacity for imagining him, irrespective of his times, solely
+according to a law of personal sympathy; and those subjects for which
+we feel this personal attraction most strongly, we may hope to treat
+successfully. Alcestis or Joan of Arc, Charlemagne or Agamemnon--one
+of these is not really nearer to us now than another; each can be made
+present only by an act of poetic imagination: but this man’s
+imagination has an affinity for one of them, and that man’s for
+another.
+
+It has been said that I wish to limit the Poet, in his choice of
+subjects to the period of Greek and Roman antiquity: but it is not so:
+I only counsel him to choose for his subjects great actions, without
+regarding to what time they belong. Nor do I deny that the poetic
+faculty can and does manifest itself in treating the most trifling
+action, the most hopeless subject. But it is a pity that power should
+be wasted; and that the Poet should be compelled to impart interest
+and force to his subject, instead of receiving them from it, and
+thereby doubling his impressiveness. There is, it has been excellently
+said, an immortal strength in the stories of great actions: the most
+gifted poet, then, may well be glad to supplement with it that mortal
+weakness, which, in presence of the vast spectacle of life and the
+world, he must for ever feel to be his individual portion.
+
+Again, with respect to the study of the classical writers of
+antiquity: it has been said that we should emulate rather than imitate
+them. I make no objection: all I say is, let us study them. They can
+help to cure us of what is, it seems to me, the great vice of our
+intellect, manifesting itself in our incredible vagaries in
+literature, in art, in religion, in morals; namely, that it is
+_fantastic_, and wants _sanity_. Sanity--that is the great virtue of
+the ancient literature: the want of that is the great defect of the
+modern, in spite of all its variety and power. It is impossible to
+read carefully the great ancients, without losing something of our
+caprice and eccentricity; and to emulate them we must at least read
+them.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN RUSKIN
+
+1819-1900
+
+OF THE PATHETIC FALLACY
+
+[_Modern Painters_, vol. iii, pt. 4, 1856]
+
+
+§ 1. German dulness, and English affectation, have of late much
+multiplied among us the use of two of the most objectionable words
+that were ever coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysicians--namely,
+‘Objective’ and ‘Subjective’.
+
+No words can be more exquisitely, and in all points, useless; and I
+merely speak of them that I may, at once and for ever, get them out of
+my way, and out of my reader’s. But to get that done, they must be
+explained.
+
+The word ‘Blue’, say certain philosophers, means the sensation of
+colour which the human eye receives in looking at the open sky, or at
+a bell gentian.
+
+Now, say they farther, as this sensation can only be felt when the eye
+is turned to the object, and as, therefore, no such sensation is
+produced by the object when nobody looks at it, therefore the thing,
+when it is not looked at, is not blue; and thus (say they) there are
+many qualities of things which depend as much on something else as on
+themselves. To be sweet, a thing must have a taster; it is only sweet
+while it is being tasted, and if the tongue had not the capacity of
+taste, then the sugar would not have the quality of sweetness.
+
+And then they agree that the qualities of things which thus depend
+upon our perception of them, and upon our human nature as affected by
+them, shall be called Subjective; and the qualities of things which
+they always have, irrespective of any other nature, as roundness or
+squareness, shall be called Objective.
+
+From these ingenious views the step is very easy to a farther opinion,
+that it does not much matter what things are in themselves, but only
+what they are to us; and that the only real truth of them is their
+appearance to, or effect upon, us. From which position, with a hearty
+desire for mystification, and much egotism, selfishness, shallowness,
+and impertinence, a philosopher may easily go so far as to believe,
+and say, that everything in the world depends upon his seeing or
+thinking of it, and that nothing, therefore, exists, but what he sees
+or thinks of.
+
+§ 2. Now, to get rid of all these ambiguities and troublesome words at
+once, be it observed that the word ‘Blue’ does _not_ mean the
+_sensation_ caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the
+_power_ of producing that sensation; and this power is always there,
+in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would
+remain there though there were not left a man on the face of the
+earth. Precisely in the same way gunpowder has a power of exploding.
+It will not explode if you put no match to it. But it has always the
+power of so exploding, and is therefore called an explosive compound,
+which it very positively and assuredly is, whatever philosophy may say
+to the contrary.
+
+In like manner, a gentian does not produce the sensation of blueness
+if you don’t look at it. But it has always the power of doing so; its
+particles being everlastingly so arranged by its Maker. And,
+therefore, the gentian and the sky are always verily blue, whatever
+philosophy may say to the contrary; and if you do not see them blue
+when you look at them, it is not their fault but yours.
+
+§ 3. Hence I would say to these philosophers: If, instead of using the
+sonorous phrase, ‘It is objectively so,’ you will use the plain old
+phrase, ‘It _is_ so;’ and if instead of the sonorous phrase, ‘It is
+subjectively so,’ you will say, in plain old English, ‘It does so,’ or
+‘It seems so to me;’ you will, on the whole, be more intelligible to
+your fellow-creatures: and besides, if you find that a thing which
+generally ‘does so’ to other people (as a gentian looks blue to most
+men), does _not_ so to you, on any particular occasion, you will not
+fall into the impertinence of saying, that the thing is not so, or did
+not so, but you will say simply (what you will be all the better for
+speedily finding out), that something is the matter with you. If you
+find that you cannot explode the gunpowder, you will not declare that
+all gunpowder is subjective, and all explosion imaginary, but you will
+simply suspect and declare yourself to be an ill-made match. Which, on
+the whole, though there may be a distant chance of a mistake about it,
+is, nevertheless, the wisest conclusion you can come to until farther
+experiment.
+
+§ 4. Now, therefore, putting these tiresome and absurd words quite out
+of our way, we may go on at our ease to examine the point in
+question--namely, the difference between the ordinary, proper, and
+true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false
+appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or
+contemplative fancy; false appearances, I say, as being entirely
+unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only
+imputed to it by us.
+
+For instance--
+
+    The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould
+    Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.
+
+This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a
+spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron.
+How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that
+it is anything else than a plain crocus?
+
+It is an important question. For, throughout our past reasonings about
+art, we have always found that nothing could be good, or useful, or
+ultimately pleasurable, which was untrue. But here is something
+pleasurable in written poetry which is nevertheless _un_true. And what
+is more, if we think over our favourite poetry, we shall find it full
+of this kind of fallacy, and that we like it all the more for being
+so.
+
+§ 5. It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this
+fallacy is of two principal kinds. Either, as in this case of the
+crocus, it is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real
+expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused
+by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or
+less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we shall have to speak
+presently; but, in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the
+other error, that which the mind admits when affected strongly by
+emotion. Thus, for instance, in Alton Locke--
+
+    They rowed her in across the rolling foam--
+    The cruel, crawling foam.
+
+The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which
+attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which
+the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same
+effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of
+external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘Pathetic
+Fallacy’.
+
+§ 6. Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as eminently
+a character of poetical description, and the temper of mind in which
+we allow it as one eminently poetical, because passionate. But, I
+believe, if we look well into the matter, that we shall find the
+greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness--that it is
+only the second order of poets who much delight in it.[31]
+
+    [31] I admit two orders of poets, but no third; and by these
+    two orders I mean the Creative (Shakespeare, Homer, Dante),
+    and Reflective or Perceptive (Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson).
+    But both of these must be _first_-rate in their range, though
+    their range is different; and with poetry second-rate in
+    _quality_ no one ought to be allowed to trouble mankind.
+    There is quite enough of the best,--much more than we can
+    ever read or enjoy in the length of a life; and it is a
+    literal wrong or sin in any person to encumber us with
+    inferior work. I have no patience with apologies made by
+    young pseudo-poets, ‘that they believe there is _some_ good
+    in what they have written: that they hope to do better in
+    time,’ &c. _Some_ good! If there is not _all_ good, there is
+    no good. If they ever hope to do better, why do they trouble
+    us now? Let them rather courageously burn all they have done,
+    and wait for the better days. There are few men, ordinarily
+    educated, who in moments of strong feeling could not strike
+    out a poetical thought, and afterwards polish it so as to be
+    presentable. But men of sense know better than so to waste
+    their time; and those who sincerely love poetry, know the
+    touch of the master’s hand on the chords too well to fumble
+    among them after him. Nay, more than this; all inferior
+    poetry is an injury to the good, inasmuch as it takes away
+    the freshness of rhymes, blunders upon and gives a wretched
+    commonalty to good thoughts; and, in general, adds to the
+    weight of human weariness in a most woful and culpable
+    manner. There are few thoughts likely to come across ordinary
+    men, which have not already been expressed by greater men in
+    the best possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, more
+    noble thing to remember and point out the perfect words, than
+    to invent poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily the
+    world.
+
+Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of
+Acheron ‘as dead leaves flutter from a bough’, he gives the most
+perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness,
+passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an
+instant losing his own clear perception that _these_ are souls, and
+_those_ are leaves; he makes no confusion of one with the other. But
+when Coleridge speaks of
+
+    The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
+    That dances as often as dance it can,
+
+he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea about the leaf:
+he fancies a life in it, and will, which there are not; confuses its
+powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merriment, and the
+wind that shakes it with music. Here, however, there is some beauty,
+even in the morbid passage; but take an instance in Homer and Pope.
+Without the knowledge of Ulysses, Elpenor, his youngest follower, has
+fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace, and has been left
+dead, unmissed by his leader, or companions, in the haste of their
+departure. They cross the sea to the Cimmerian land; and Ulysses
+summons the shades from Tartarus. The first which appears is that of
+the lost Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the spirit of bitter
+and terrified lightness which is seen in Hamlet,[32] addresses the
+spirit with the simple, startled words:--
+
+     Elpenor! How camest thou under the shadowy darkness? Hast
+     thou come faster on foot than I in my black ship?
+
+    [32] ‘Well said, old mole! can’st work i’ the ground so
+    fast?’
+
+Which Pope renders thus:--
+
+    O, say, what angry power Elpenor led
+    To glide in shades, and wander with the dead?
+    How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,
+    Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind?
+
+I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the
+nimbleness of the sail, or the laziness of the wind! And yet how is it
+that these conceits are so painful now, when they have been pleasant
+to us in the other instances?
+
+§ 7. For a very simple reason. They are not a _pathetic_ fallacy at
+all, for they are put into the mouth of the wrong passion--a passion
+which never could possibly have spoken them--agonized curiosity.
+Ulysses wants to know the facts of the matter; and the very last thing
+his mind could do at the moment would be to pause, or suggest in
+anywise what was _not_ a fact. The delay in the first three lines, and
+conceit in the last, jar upon us instantly, like the most frightful
+discord in music. No poet of true imaginative power could possibly
+have written the passage.[33]
+
+    [33] It is worth while comparing the way a similar question
+    is put by the exquisite sincerity of Keats:--
+
+              He wept, and his bright tears
+        Went trickling down the golden bow he held.
+        Thus, with half-shut, suffused eyes, he stood;
+        While from beneath some cumb’rous boughs hard by,
+        With solemn step, an awful goddess came.
+        And there was purport in her looks for him,
+        Which he with eager guess began to read:
+        Perplexed the while, melodiously he said,
+        ‘_How cam’st thou over the unfooted sea?_’
+
+Therefore, we see that the spirit of truth must guide us in some
+sort, even in our enjoyment of fallacy. Coleridge’s fallacy has no
+discord in it, but Pope’s has set our teeth on edge. Without farther
+questioning, I will endeavour to state the main bearings of this
+matter.
+
+§ 8. The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is, as I said
+above, that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully
+with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or overclouded, or
+over-dazzled by emotion; and it is a more or less noble state,
+according to the force of the emotion which has induced it. For it is
+no credit to a man that he is not morbid or inaccurate in his
+perceptions, when he has no strength of feeling to warp them; and it
+is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of
+being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly,
+the intellect, and make it believe what they choose. But it is still a
+grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong
+enough to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost
+efforts of the passions; and the whole man stands in an iron glow,
+white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating; even
+if he melts, losing none of his weight.
+
+So, then, we have the three ranks: the man who perceives rightly,
+because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately
+the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who
+perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is
+anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield,
+or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives
+rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for
+ever nothing else than itself--a little flower, apprehended in the
+very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the
+associations and passions may be, that crowd around it. And, in
+general, these three classes may be rated in comparative order, as the
+men who are not poets at all, and the poets of the second order, and
+the poets of the first; only however great a man may be, there are
+always some subjects which _ought_ to throw him off his balance; some,
+by which his poor human capacity of thought should be conquered, and
+brought into the inaccurate and vague state of perception, so that the
+language of the highest inspiration becomes broken, obscure, and wild
+in metaphor, resembling that of the weaker man, overborne by weaker
+things.
+
+§ 9. And thus, in full, there are four classes: the men who feel
+nothing, and therefore see truly; the men who feel strongly, think
+weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets); the men who feel
+strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order of poets); and
+the men who, strong as human creatures can be, are yet submitted to
+influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, because what
+they see is inconceivably above them. This last is the usual condition
+of prophetic inspiration.
+
+§ 10. I separate these classes, in order that their character may be
+clearly understood; but of course they are united each to the other by
+imperceptible transitions, and the same mind, according to the
+influences to which it is subjected, passes at different times into
+the various states. Still, the difference between the great and less
+man is, on the whole, chiefly in this point of _alterability_. That is
+to say, the one knows too much, and perceives and feels too much of
+the past and future, and of all things beside and around that which
+immediately affects him, to be in anywise shaken by it. His mind is
+made up; his thoughts have an accustomed current; his ways are
+steadfast; it is not this or that new sight which will at once
+unbalance him. He is tender to impression at the surface, like a rock
+with deep moss upon it; but there is too much mass of him to be moved.
+The smaller man, with the same degree of sensibility, is at once
+carried off his feet; he wants to do something he did not want to do
+before; he views all the universe in a new light through his tears; he
+is gay or enthusiastic, melancholy or passionate, as things come and
+go to him. Therefore the high creative poet might even be thought, to
+a great extent, impassive (as shallow people think Dante stern),
+receiving indeed all feelings to the full, but having a great centre
+of reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene, and watches the
+feeling, as it were, from far off.
+
+Dante, in his most intense moods, has entire command of himself, and
+can look around calmly, at all moments, for the image or the word that
+will best tell what he sees to the upper or lower world. But Keats and
+Tennyson, and the poets of the second order, are generally themselves
+subdued by the feelings under which they write, or, at least, write as
+choosing to be so, and therefore admit certain expressions and modes
+of thought which are in some sort diseased or false.
+
+§ 11. Now so long as we see that the _feeling_ is true, we pardon, or
+are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces:
+we are pleased, for instance, with those lines of Kingsley’s, above
+quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they
+faithfully describe sorrow. But the moment the mind of the speaker
+becomes cold, that moment every such expression becomes untrue, as
+being for ever untrue in the external facts. And there is no greater
+baseness in literature than the habit of using these metaphorical
+expressions in cold blood. An inspired writer, in full impetuosity of
+passion, may speak wisely and truly of ‘raging waves of the sea,
+foaming out their own shame’; but it is only the basest writer who
+cannot speak of the sea without talking of ‘raging waves’,
+‘remorseless floods’, ‘ravenous billows’, &c.; and it is one of the
+signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of
+thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the _pure fact_, out of
+which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a
+true one.
+
+To keep to the waves, I forget who it is who represents a man in
+despair, desiring that his body may be cast into the sea,
+
+    _Whose changing mound, and foam that passed away,_
+    Might mock the eye that questioned where I lay.
+
+Observe, there is not a single false, or even overcharged, expression.
+‘Mound’ of the sea wave is perfectly simple and true; ‘changing’ is as
+familiar as may be; ‘foam that passed away’, strictly literal; and the
+whole line descriptive of the reality with a degree of accuracy which
+I know not any other verse, in the range of poetry, that altogether
+equals. For most people have not a distinct idea of the clumsiness and
+massiveness of a large wave. The word ‘wave’ is used too generally of
+ripples and breakers, and bendings in light drapery or grass: it does
+not by itself convey a perfect image. But the word ‘mound’ is heavy,
+large, dark, definite; there is no mistaking the kind of wave meant,
+nor missing the sight of it. Then the term ‘changing’ has a peculiar
+force also. Most people think of waves as rising and falling. But if
+they look at the sea carefully, they will perceive that the waves do
+not rise and fall. They change. Change both place and form, but they
+do not fall; one wave goes on, and on, and still on; now lower, now
+higher, now tossing its mane like a horse, now building itself
+together like a wall, now shaking, now steady, but still the same
+wave, till at last it seems struck by something, and changes, one
+knows not how,--becomes another wave.
+
+The close of the line insists on this image, and paints it still more
+perfectly,--‘foam that passed away’. Not merely melting, disappearing,
+but passing on, out of sight, on the career of the wave. Then, having
+put the absolute ocean fact as far as he may before our eyes, the poet
+leaves us to feel about it as we may, and to trace for ourselves the
+opposite fact,--the image of the green mounds that do not change, and
+the white and written stones that do not pass away; and thence to
+follow out also the associated images of the calm life with the quiet
+grave, and the despairing life with the fading foam:
+
+    Let no man move his bones.
+
+    As for Samaria, her king is out off like the foam upon the water.
+
+But nothing of this is actually told or pointed out, and the
+expressions, as they stand, are perfectly severe and accurate, utterly
+uninfluenced by the firmly governed emotion of the writer. Even the
+word ‘mock’ is hardly an exception, as it may stand merely for
+‘deceive’ or ‘defeat’, without implying any impersonation of the
+waves.
+
+§ 12. It may be well, perhaps, to give one or two more instances to
+show the peculiar dignity possessed by all passages which thus limit
+their expression to the pure fact, and leave the hearer to gather what
+he can from it. Here is a notable one from the Iliad. Helen, looking
+from the Scaean gate of Troy over the Grecian host, and telling Priam
+the names of its captains, says at last:
+
+     I see all the other dark-eyed Greeks; but two I cannot
+     see,--Castor and Pollux,--whom one mother bore with me. Have
+     they not followed from fair Lacedaemon, or have they indeed
+     come in their sea-wandering ships, but now will not enter
+     into the battle of men, fearing the shame and the scorn that
+     is in Me?
+
+Then Homer:
+
+     So she spoke. But them, already, the life-giving earth
+     possessed, there in Lacedaemon, in the dear fatherland.
+
+Note, here, the high poetical truth carried to the extreme. The poet
+has to speak of the earth in sadness, but he will not let that sadness
+affect or change his thoughts of it. No; though Castor and Pollux be
+dead, yet the earth is our mother still, fruitful, life-giving. These
+are the facts of the thing. I see nothing else than these. Make what
+you will of them.
+
+§ 13. Take another very notable instance from Casimir de la Vigne’s
+terrible ballad, _La Toilette de Constance_. I must quote a few lines
+out of it here and there, to enable the reader who has not the book by
+him, to understand its close.
+
+        Vite, Anna, vite; au miroir
+          Plus vite, Anna. L’heure s’avance,
+        Et je vais au bal ce soir
+          Chez l’ambassadeur de France.
+
+    Y pensez-vous, ils sont fanés, ces nœuds,
+      Ils sont d’hier, mon Dieu, comme tout passe!
+    Que du réseau qui retient mes cheveux
+      Les glands d’azur retombent avec grâce.
+    Plus haut! Plus bas! Vous ne comprenez rien!
+      Que sur mon front ce saphir étincelle:
+    Vous me piquez, maladroite. Ah, c’est bien,
+      Bien,--chère Anna! Je t’aime, je suis belle.
+
+    Celui qu’en vain je voudrais oublier
+      (Anna, ma robe) il y sera, j’espere.
+    (Ah, fi! profane, est-ce là mon collier?
+      Quoi! ces grains d’or bénits par le Saint-Père!)
+    Il y sera; Dieu, s’il pressait ma main,
+      En y pensant, à peine je respire;
+    Père Anselmo doit m’entendre demain,
+      Comment ferai-je, Anna, pour tout lui dire?
+
+        Vite un coup d’œil au miroir,
+          Le dernier. ----J’ai l’assurance
+        Qu’on va m’adorer ce soir
+          Chez l’ambassadeur de France.
+
+    Près du foyer, Constance s’admirait.
+      Dieu! sur sa robe il vole une étincelle!
+    Au feu! Courez! Quand l’espoir l’enivrait,
+      Tout perdre ainsi! Quoi! Mourir,--et si belle!
+    L’horrible feu ronge avec volupté
+      Ses bras, son sein, et l’entoure, et s’élève,
+    Et sans pitié dévore sa beauté,
+      Ses dix-huit ans, hélas, et son doux rêve!
+
+        Adieu, bal, plaisir, amour!
+          On disait, Pauvre Constance!
+        Et on dansait, jusqu’au jour,
+          Chez l’ambassadeur de France.
+
+Yes, that is the fact of it. Right or wrong, the poet does not say.
+What you may think about it, he does not know. He has nothing to do
+with that. There lie the ashes of the dead girl in her chamber. There
+they danced, till the morning, at the Ambassador’s of France. Make
+what you will of it.
+
+If the reader will look through the ballad, of which I have quoted
+only about the third part, he will find that there is not, from
+beginning to end of it, a single poetical (so called) expression,
+except in one stanza. The girl speaks as simple prose as may be; there
+is not a word she would not have actually used as she was dressing.
+The poet stands by, impassive as a statue, recording her words just as
+they come. At last the doom seizes her, and in the very presence of
+death, for an instant, his own emotions conquer him. He records no
+longer the facts only, but the facts as they seem to him. The fire
+gnaws with _voluptuousness--without pity_. It is soon past. The fate
+is fixed for ever; and he retires into his pale and crystalline
+atmosphere of truth. He closes all with the calm veracity,
+
+    They said, ‘Poor Constance!’
+
+§ 14. Now in this there is the exact type of the consummate poetical
+temperament. For, be it clearly and constantly remembered, that the
+greatness of a poet depends upon the two faculties, acuteness of
+feeling, and command of it. A poet is great, first in proportion to
+the strength of his passion, and then, that strength being granted, in
+proportion to his government of it; there being, however, always a
+point beyond which it would be inhuman and monstrous if he pushed this
+government, and, therefore, a point at which all feverish and wild
+fancy becomes just and true. Thus the destruction of the kingdom of
+Assyria cannot be contemplated firmly by a prophet of Israel. The fact
+is too great, too wonderful. It overthrows him, dashes him into a
+confused element of dreams. All the world is, to his stunned thought,
+full of strange voices. ‘Yea, the fir-trees rejoice at thee, and the
+cedars of Lebanon, saying, “Since thou art gone down to the grave, no
+feller is come up against us.”’ So, still more, the thought of the
+presence of Deity cannot be borne without this great astonishment.
+‘The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into
+singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.’
+
+§ 15. But by how much this feeling is noble when it is justified by
+the strength of its cause, by so much it is ignoble when there is not
+cause enough for it; and beyond all other ignobleness is the mere
+affectation of it, in hardness of heart. Simply bad writing may almost
+always, as above noticed, be known by its adoption of these fanciful
+metaphorical expressions, as a sort of current coin; yet there is even
+a worse, at least a more harmful, condition of writing than this, in
+which such expressions are not ignorantly and feelinglessly caught up,
+but, by some master, skilful in handling, yet insincere, deliberately
+wrought out with chill and studied fancy; as if we should try to make
+an old lava stream look red-hot again, by covering it with dead
+leaves, or white-hot, with hoar-frost.
+
+When Young is lost in veneration, as he dwells on the character of a
+truly good and holy man, he permits himself for a moment to be
+overborne by the feeling so far as to exclaim:
+
+    Where shall I find him? angels, tell me where.
+    You know him; he is near you; point him out.
+    Shall I see glories beaming from his brow,
+    Or trace his footsteps by the rising flowers?
+
+This emotion has a worthy cause, and is thus true and right. But now
+hear the cold-hearted Pope say to a shepherd girl:
+
+    Where’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;
+    Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade;
+    Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove,
+    And winds shall waft it to the powers above.
+    But would you sing, and rival Orpheus’ strain,
+    The wondering forests soon should dance again;
+    The moving mountains hear the powerful call,
+    And headlong streams hang, listening, in their fall.
+
+This is not, nor could it for a moment be mistaken for, the language
+of passion. It is simple falsehood, uttered by hypocrisy; definite
+absurdity, rooted in affectation, and coldly asserted in the teeth of
+nature and fact. Passion will indeed go far in deceiving itself; but
+it must be a strong passion, not the simple wish of a lover to tempt
+his mistress to sing. Compare a very closely parallel passage in
+Wordsworth, in which the lover has lost his mistress:
+
+    Three years had Barbara in her grave been laid,
+    When thus his moan he made:--
+
+    ‘Oh move, thou cottage, from behind yon oak,
+      Or let the ancient tree uprooted lie,
+    That in some other way yon smoke
+      May mount into the sky.
+    If still behind yon pine-tree’s ragged bough,
+      Headlong, the waterfall must come,
+      Oh, let it, then, be dumb--
+    Be anything, sweet stream, but that which thou art now.’
+
+Here is a cottage to be moved, if not a mountain, and a waterfall to
+be silent, if it is not to hang listening: but with what different
+relation to the mind that contemplates them! Here, in the extremity of
+its agony, the soul cries out wildly for relief, which at the same
+moment it partly knows to be impossible, but partly believes possible,
+in a vague impression that a miracle _might_ be wrought to give relief
+even to a less sore distress,--that nature is kind, and God is kind,
+and that grief is strong: it knows not well what _is_ possible to such
+grief. To silence a stream, to move a cottage wall,--one might think
+it could do as much as that!
+
+§ 16. I believe these instances are enough to illustrate the main
+point I insist upon respecting the pathetic fallacy,--that so far as
+it _is_ a fallacy, it is always the sign of a morbid state of mind,
+and comparatively of a weak one. Even in the most inspired prophet it
+is a sign of the incapacity of his human sight or thought to bear what
+has been revealed to it. In ordinary poetry, if it is found in the
+thoughts of the poet himself, it is at once a sign of his belonging to
+the inferior school; if in the thoughts of the characters imagined by
+him, it is right or wrong according to the genuineness of the emotion
+from which it springs; always, however, implying necessarily _some_
+degree of weakness in the character.
+
+Take two most exquisite instances from master hands. The Jessy of
+Shenstone, and the Ellen of Wordsworth, have both been betrayed and
+deserted. Jessy, in the course of her most touching complaint, says:
+
+    If through the garden’s flowery tribes I stray,
+      Where bloom the jasmines that could once allure,
+    ‘Hope not to find delight in us,’ they say,
+      ‘For we are spotless, Jessy; we are pure.’
+
+Compare with this some of the words of Ellen:
+
+    ‘Ah, why,’ said Ellen, sighing to herself,
+    ‘Why do not words, and kiss, and solemn pledge,
+    And nature, that is kind in woman’s breast,
+    And reason, that in man is wise and good,
+    And fear of Him who is a righteous Judge,--
+    Why do not these prevail for human life,
+    To keep two hearts together, that began
+    Their springtime with one love, and that have need
+    Of mutual pity and forgiveness, sweet
+    To grant, or be received; while that poor bird--
+    O, come and hear him! Thou who hast to me
+    Been faithless, hear him;--though a lowly creature,
+    One of God’s simple children, that yet know not
+    The Universal Parent, _how_ he sings!
+    As if he wished the firmament of heaven
+    Should listen, and give back to him the voice
+    Of his triumphant constancy and love.
+    The proclamation that he makes, how far
+    His darkness doth transcend our fickle light.’
+
+The perfection of both these passages, as far as regards truth and
+tenderness of imagination in the two poets, is quite insuperable. But,
+of the two characters imagined, Jessy is weaker than Ellen, exactly in
+so far as something appears to her to be in nature which is not. The
+flowers do not really reproach her. God meant them to comfort her, not
+to taunt her; they would do so if she saw them rightly.
+
+Ellen, on the other hand, is quite above the slightest erring emotion.
+There is not the barest film of fallacy in all her thoughts. She
+reasons as calmly as if she did not feel. And, although the singing of
+the bird suggests to her the idea of its desiring to be heard in
+heaven, she does not for an instant admit any veracity in the thought.
+‘As if,’ she says,--‘I know he means nothing of the kind; but it does
+verily seem as if.’ The reader will find, by examining the rest of the
+poem, that Ellen’s character is throughout consistent in this clear
+though passionate strength.[34]
+
+    [34] I cannot quit this subject without giving two more
+    instances, both exquisite, of the pathetic fallacy, which I
+    have just come upon, in _Maud_:
+
+                     For a great speculation had fail’d;
+          And ever he mutter’d and madden’d, and ever wann’d with despair;
+        And out he walk’d, when the wind like a broken worldling wail’d,
+          And the _flying gold of the ruin’d woodlands drove, thro’
+              the air_.
+
+          There has fallen a splendid tear
+            From the passion-flower at the gate.
+          _The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near!’
+            And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late.’
+          The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear!’
+            And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’_
+
+It is, I hope, now made clear to the reader in all respects that the
+pathetic fallacy is powerful only so far as it is pathetic, feeble so
+far as it is fallacious, and, therefore, that the dominion of Truth is
+entire, over this, as over every other natural and just state of the
+human mind.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN STUART MILL
+
+1806-1873
+
+THOUGHTS ON POETRY AND ITS VARIETIES (1859)
+
+
+I
+
+It has often been asked, What is Poetry? And many and various are the
+answers which have been returned. The vulgarest of all--one with which
+no person possessed of the faculties to which Poetry addresses itself
+can ever have been satisfied--is that which confounds poetry with
+metrical composition: yet to this wretched mockery of a definition,
+many have been led back, by the failure of all their attempts to find
+any other that would distinguish what they have been accustomed to
+call poetry, from much which they have known only under other names.
+
+That, however, the word ‘poetry’ imports something quite peculiar in
+its nature, something which may exist in what is called prose as well
+as in verse, something which does not even require the instrument of
+words, but can speak through the other audible symbols called musical
+sounds, and even through the visible ones which are the language of
+sculpture, painting, and architecture; all this, we believe, is and
+must be felt, though perhaps indistinctly, by all upon whom poetry in
+any of its shapes produces any impression beyond that of tickling the
+ear. The distinction between poetry and what is not poetry, whether
+explained or not, is felt to be fundamental: and where every one feels
+a difference, a difference there must be. All other appearances may be
+fallacious, but the appearance of a difference is a real difference.
+Appearances too, like other things, must have a cause, and that which
+can cause anything, even an illusion, must be a reality. And hence,
+while a half-philosophy disdains the classifications and distinctions
+indicated by popular language, philosophy carried to its highest point
+frames new ones, but rarely sets aside the old, content with
+correcting and regularizing them. It cuts fresh channels for thought,
+but does not fill up such as it finds ready-made; it traces, on the
+contrary, more deeply, broadly, and distinctly, those into which the
+current has spontaneously flowed.
+
+Let us then attempt, in the way of modest inquiry, not to coerce and
+confine nature within the bounds of an arbitrary definition, but
+rather to find the boundaries which she herself has set, and erect a
+barrier round them; not calling mankind to account for having
+misapplied the word ‘poetry’, but attempting to clear up the
+conception which they already attach to it, and to bring forward as a
+distinct principle that which, as a vague feeling, has really guided
+them in their employment of the term.
+
+The object of poetry is confessedly to act upon the emotions; and
+therein is poetry sufficiently distinguished from what Wordsworth
+affirms to be its logical opposite, namely, not prose, but matter of
+fact or science. The one addresses itself to the belief, the other to
+the feelings. The one does its work by convincing or persuading, the
+other by moving. The one acts by presenting a proposition to the
+understanding, the other by offering interesting objects of
+contemplation to the sensibilities.
+
+This, however, leaves us very far from a definition of poetry. This
+distinguishes it from one thing, but we are bound to distinguish it
+from everything. To bring thoughts or images before the mind for the
+purpose of acting upon the emotions, does not belong to poetry alone.
+It is equally the province (for example) of the novelist: and yet the
+faculty of the poet and that of the novelist are as distinct as any
+other two faculties; as the faculties of the novelist and of the
+orator, or of the poet and the metaphysician. The two characters may
+be united, as characters the most disparate may; but they have no
+natural connexion.
+
+Many of the greatest poems are in the form of fictitious narratives,
+and in almost all good serious fictions there is true poetry. But
+there is a radical distinction between the interest felt in a story as
+such, and the interest excited by poetry; for the one is derived from
+incident, the other from the representation of feeling. In one, the
+source of the emotion excited is the exhibition of a state or states
+of human sensibility; in the other, of a series of states of mere
+outward circumstances. Now, all minds are capable of being affected
+more or less by representations of the latter kind, and all, or almost
+all, by those of the former; yet the two sources of interest
+correspond to two distinct, and (as respects their greatest
+development) mutually exclusive, characters of mind.
+
+At what age is the passion for a story, for almost any kind of story,
+merely as a story, the most intense? In childhood. But that also is
+the age at which poetry, even of the simplest description, is least
+relished and least understood; because the feelings with which it is
+especially conversant are yet undeveloped, and not having been even in
+the slightest degree experienced, cannot be sympathized with. In what
+stage of the progress of society, again, is story-telling most valued,
+and the story-teller in greatest request and honour?--In a rude state
+like that of the Tartars and Arabs at this day, and of almost all
+nations in the earliest ages. But in this state of society there is
+little poetry except ballads, which are mostly narrative, that is,
+essentially stories, and derive their principal interest from the
+incidents. Considered as poetry, they are of the lowest and most
+elementary kind: the feelings depicted, or rather indicated, are the
+simplest our nature has; such joys and griefs as the immediate
+pressure of some outward event excites in rude minds, which live
+wholly immersed in outward things, and have never, either from choice
+or a force they could not resist, turned themselves to the
+contemplation of the world within. Passing now from childhood, and
+from the childhood of society, to the grown-up men and women of this
+most grown-up and unchildlike age--the minds and hearts of greatest
+depth and elevation are commonly those which take greatest delight in
+poetry; the shallowest and emptiest, on the contrary, are, at all
+events, not those least addicted to novel-reading. This accords, too,
+with all analogous experience of human nature. The sort of persons
+whom not merely in books but in their lives, we find perpetually
+engaged in hunting for excitement from without, are invariably those
+who do not possess, either in the vigour of their intellectual powers
+or in the depth of their sensibilities, that which would enable them
+to find ample excitement nearer home. The most idle and frivolous
+persons take a natural delight in fictitious narrative; the excitement
+it affords is of the kind which comes from without. Such persons are
+rarely lovers of poetry, though they may fancy themselves so, because
+they relish novels in verse. But poetry, which is the delineation of
+the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion, is interesting
+only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt, or whose
+imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they
+might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been
+different.
+
+Poetry, when it is really such, is truth; and fiction also, if it is
+good for anything, is truth: but they are different truths. The truth
+of poetry is to paint the human soul truly: the truth of fiction is to
+give a true picture of life. The two kinds of knowledge are different,
+and come by different ways, come mostly to different persons. Great
+poets are often proverbially ignorant of life. What they know has come
+by observation of themselves; they have found within them one highly
+delicate and sensitive specimen of human nature, on which the laws of
+emotion are written in large characters, such as can be read off
+without much study. Other knowledge of mankind, such as comes to men
+of the world by outward experience, is not indispensable to them as
+poets: but to the novelist such knowledge is all in all; he has to
+describe outward things, not the inward man; actions and events, not
+feelings; and it will not do for him to be numbered among those who,
+as Madame Roland said of Brissot, know man but not _men_.
+
+All this is no bar to the possibility of combining both elements,
+poetry and narrative or incident, in the same work, and calling it
+either a novel or a poem; but so may red and white combine on the same
+human features, or on the same canvas. There is one order of
+composition which requires the union of poetry and incident, each in
+its highest kind--the dramatic. Even there the two elements are
+perfectly distinguishable, and may exist of unequal quality, and in
+the most various proportion. The incidents of a dramatic poem may be
+scanty and ineffective, though the delineation of passion and
+character may be of the highest order; as in Goethe’s admirable
+_Torquato Tasso_; or again, the story as a mere story may be well got
+up for effect, as is the case with some of the most trashy productions
+of the Minerva press: it may even be, what those are not, a coherent
+and probable series of events, though there be scarcely a feeling
+exhibited which is not represented falsely, or in a manner absolutely
+commonplace. The combination of the two excellences is what renders
+Shakespeare so generally acceptable, each sort of readers finding in
+him what is suitable to their faculties. To the many he is great as a
+story-teller, to the few as a poet.
+
+In limiting poetry to the delineation of states of feeling, and
+denying the name where nothing is delineated but outward objects, we
+may be thought to have done what we promised to avoid--to have not
+found, but made a definition, in opposition to the usage of language,
+since it is established by common consent that there is a poetry
+called descriptive. We deny the charge. Description is not poetry
+because there is descriptive poetry, no more than science is poetry
+because there is such a thing as a didactic poem. But an object which
+admits of being described, or a truth which may fill a place in a
+scientific treatise, may also furnish an occasion for the generation
+of poetry, which we thereupon choose to call descriptive or didactic.
+The poetry is not in the object itself, nor in the scientific truth
+itself, but in the state of mind in which the one and the other may be
+contemplated. The mere delineation of the dimensions and colours of
+external objects is not poetry, no more than a geometrical ground-plan
+of St. Peter’s or Westminster Abbey is painting. Descriptive poetry
+consists, no doubt, in description, but in description of things as
+they appear, not as they are; and it paints them not in their bare and
+natural lineaments, but seen through the medium and arrayed in the
+colours of the imagination set in action by the feelings. If a poet
+describes a lion, he does not describe him as a naturalist would, nor
+even as a traveller would, who was intent upon stating the truth, the
+whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He describes him by imagery,
+that is, by suggesting the most striking likenesses and contrasts
+which might occur to a mind contemplating the lion, in the state of
+awe, wonder, or terror, which the spectacle naturally excites, or is,
+on the occasion, supposed to excite. Now this is describing the lion
+professedly, but the state of excitement of the spectator really. The
+lion may be described falsely or with exaggeration, and the poetry be
+all the better; but if the human emotion be not painted with
+scrupulous truth, the poetry is bad poetry, i. e. is not poetry at
+all, but a failure.
+
+Thus far our progress towards a clear view of the essentials of
+poetry has brought us very close to the last two attempts at a
+definition of poetry which we happen to have seen in print, both of
+them by poets and men of genius. The one is by Ebenezer Elliott, the
+author of _Corn-Law Rhymes_, and other poems of still greater merit.
+‘Poetry’, says he, ‘is impassioned truth.’ The other is by a writer in
+_Blackwood’s Magazine_, and comes, we think, still nearer the mark. He
+defines poetry, ‘man’s thoughts tinged by his feelings’. There is in
+either definition a near approximation to what we are in search of.
+Every truth which a human being can enunciate, every thought, even
+every outward impression, which can enter into his consciousness, may
+become poetry when shown through any impassioned medium, when invested
+with the colouring of joy, or grief, or pity, or affection, or
+admiration, or reverence, or awe, or even hatred or terror: and,
+unless so coloured, nothing, be it as interesting as it may, is
+poetry. But both these definitions fail to discriminate between poetry
+and eloquence. Eloquence, as well as poetry, is impassioned truth;
+eloquence, as well as poetry, is thoughts coloured by the feelings.
+Yet common apprehension and philosophic criticism alike recognize a
+distinction between the two: there is much that every one would call
+eloquence, which no one would think of classing as poetry. A question
+will sometimes arise, whether some particular author is a poet; and
+those who maintain the negative commonly allow that, though not a
+poet, he is a highly eloquent writer. The distinction between poetry
+and eloquence appears to us to be equally fundamental with the
+distinction between poetry and narrative, or between poetry and
+description, while it is still farther from having been satisfactorily
+cleared up than either of the others.
+
+Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of
+feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that
+eloquence is _heard_, poetry is _over_heard. Eloquence supposes an
+audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s
+utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing
+itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in
+symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling
+in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind. Eloquence is
+feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or
+endeavouring to influence their belief or move them to passion or to
+action.
+
+All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy. It may be said that poetry
+which is printed on hot-pressed paper and sold at a bookseller’s shop,
+is a soliloquy in full dress, and on the stage. It is so; but there is
+nothing absurd in the idea of such a mode of soliloquizing. What we
+have said to ourselves, we may tell to others afterwards; what we have
+said or done in solitude, we may voluntarily reproduce when we know
+that other eyes are upon us. But no trace of consciousness that any
+eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself. The actor knows
+that there is an audience present; but if he act as though he knew it,
+he acts ill. A poet may write poetry not only with the intention of
+printing it, but for the express purpose of being paid for it; that it
+should _be_ poetry, being written under such influences, is less
+probable; not, however, impossible; but no otherwise possible than if
+he can succeed in excluding from his work every vestige of such
+lookings-forth into the outward and every-day world, and can express
+his emotions exactly as he has felt them in solitude, or as he is
+conscious that he should feel them though they were to remain for ever
+unuttered, or (at the lowest) as he knows that others feel them in
+similar circumstances of solitude. But when he turns round and
+addresses himself to another person; when the act of utterance is not
+itself the end, but a means to an end,--viz. by the feelings he
+himself expresses, to work upon the feelings, or upon the belief, or
+the will, of another,--when the expression of his emotions, or of his
+thoughts tinged by his emotions, is tinged also by that purpose, by
+that desire of making an impression upon another mind, then it ceases
+to be poetry, and becomes eloquence.
+
+Poetry, accordingly, is the natural fruit of solitude and meditation;
+eloquence, of intercourse with the world. The persons who have most
+feeling of their own, if intellectual culture has given them a
+language in which to express it, have the highest faculty of poetry;
+those who best understand the feelings of others, are the most
+eloquent. The persons, and the nations, who commonly excel in poetry,
+are those whose character and tastes render them least dependent upon
+the applause, or sympathy, or concurrence of the world in general.
+Those to whom that applause, that sympathy, that concurrence are most
+necessary, generally excel most in eloquence. And hence, perhaps, the
+French, who are the least poetical of all great and intellectual
+nations, are among the most eloquent: the French, also, being the most
+sociable, the vainest, and the least self-dependent.
+
+If the above be, as we believe, the true theory of the distinction
+commonly admitted between eloquence and poetry; or even though it be
+not so, yet if, as we cannot doubt, the distinction above stated be a
+real bona fide distinction, it will be found to hold, not merely in
+the language of words, but in all other language, and to intersect the
+whole domain of art.
+
+Take, for example, music: we shall find in that art, so peculiarly the
+expression of passion, two perfectly distinct styles; one of which may
+be called the poetry, the other the oratory of music. This difference,
+being seized, would put an end to much musical sectarianism. There has
+been much contention whether the music of the modern Italian school,
+that of Rossini and his successors, be impassioned or not. Without
+doubt, the passion it expresses is not the musing, meditative
+tenderness, or pathos, or grief of Mozart or Beethoven. Yet it is
+passion, but garrulous passion--the passion which pours itself into
+other ears; and therein the better calculated for dramatic effect,
+having a natural adaptation for dialogue. Mozart also is great in
+musical oratory; but his most touching compositions are in the
+opposite style--that of soliloquy. Who can imagine ‘Dove sono’
+_heard_? We imagine it _over_heard.
+
+Purely pathetic music commonly partakes of soliloquy. The soul is
+absorbed in its distress, and though there may be bystanders, it is
+not thinking of them. When the mind is looking within, and not
+without, its state does not often or rapidly vary; and hence the even,
+uninterrupted flow, approaching almost to monotony, which a good
+reader, or a good singer, will give to words or music of a pensive or
+melancholy cast. But grief taking the form of a prayer, or of a
+complaint, becomes oratorical; no longer low, and even, and subdued,
+it assumes a more emphatic rhythm, a more rapidly returning accent;
+instead of a few slow equal notes, following one after another at
+regular intervals, it crowds note upon note, and often assumes a hurry
+and bustle like joy. Those who are familiar with some of the best of
+Rossini’s serious compositions, such as the air ‘Tu che i miseri
+conforti’, in the opera of _Tancredi_, or the duet ‘Ebben per mia
+memoria’, in _La Gazza Ladra_, will at once understand and feel our
+meaning. Both are highly tragic and passionate; the passion of both is
+that of oratory, not poetry. The like may be said of that most moving
+invocation in Beethoven’s _Fidelio_--
+
+    Komm, Hoffnung, lass das letzte Stern
+      Der Müde nicht erbleichen;
+
+in which Madame Schröder Devrient exhibited such consummate powers of
+pathetic expression. How different from Winter’s beautiful ‘Paga fui’,
+the very soul of melancholy exhaling itself in solitude; fuller of
+meaning, and, therefore, more profoundly poetical than the words for
+which it was composed--for it seems to express not simple melancholy,
+but the melancholy of remorse.
+
+If, from vocal music, we now pass to instrumental, we may have a
+specimen of musical oratory in any fine military symphony or march:
+while the poetry of music seems to have attained its consummation in
+Beethoven’s Overture to Egmont, so wonderful in its mixed expression
+of grandeur and melancholy.
+
+In the arts which speak to the eye, the same distinctions will be
+found to hold, not only between poetry and oratory, but between
+poetry, oratory, narrative, and simple imitation or description.
+
+Pure description is exemplified in a mere portrait or a mere
+landscape--productions of art, it is true, but of the mechanical
+rather than of the fine arts, being works of simple imitation, not
+creation. We say, a mere portrait, or a mere landscape, because it is
+possible for a portrait or a landscape, without ceasing to be such, to
+be also a picture; like Turner’s landscapes, and the great portraits
+by Titian or Vandyke.
+
+Whatever in painting or sculpture expresses human feeling--or
+character, which is only a certain state of feeling grown
+habitual--may be called, according to circumstances, the poetry, or
+the eloquence, of the painter’s or the sculptor’s art: the poetry, if
+the feeling declares itself by such signs as escape from us when we
+are unconscious of being seen; the oratory, if the signs are those we
+use for the purpose of voluntary communication.
+
+The narrative style answers to what is called historical painting,
+which it is the fashion among connoisseurs to treat as the climax of
+the pictorial art. That it is the most difficult branch of the art we
+do not doubt, because, in its perfection, it includes the perfection
+of all the other branches: as in like manner an epic poem, though in
+so far as it is epic (i. e. narrative) it is not poetry at all, is yet
+esteemed the greatest effort of poetic genius, because there is no
+kind whatever of poetry which may not appropriately find a place in
+it. But an historical picture as such, that is, as the representation
+of an incident, must necessarily, as it seems to us, be poor and
+ineffective. The narrative powers of painting are extremely limited.
+Scarcely any picture, scarcely even any series of pictures, tells its
+own story without the aid of an interpreter. But it is the single
+figures which, to us, are the great charm even of an historical
+picture. It is in these that the power of the art is really seen. In
+the attempt to narrate, visible and permanent signs are too far behind
+the fugitive audible ones, which follow so fast one after another,
+while the faces and figures in a narrative picture, even though they
+be Titian’s, stand still. Who would not prefer one Virgin and Child of
+Raphael, to all the pictures which Rubens, with his fat, frouzy Dutch
+Venuses, ever painted? Though Rubens, besides excelling almost every
+one in his mastery over the mechanical parts of his art, often shows
+real genius in _grouping_ his figures, the peculiar problem of
+historical painting. But then, who, except a mere student of drawing
+and colouring, ever cared to look twice at any of the figures
+themselves? The power of painting lies in poetry, of which Rubens had
+not the slightest tincture--not in narrative, wherein he might have
+excelled.
+
+The single figures, however, in an historical picture, are rather the
+eloquence of painting than the poetry: they mostly (unless they are
+quite out of place in the picture) express the feelings of one person
+as modified by the presence of others. Accordingly the minds whose
+bent leads them rather to eloquence than to poetry, rush to historical
+painting. The French painters, for instance, seldom attempt, because
+they could make nothing of, single heads, like those glorious ones of
+the Italian masters, with which they might feed themselves day after
+day in their own Louvre. They must all be historical; and they are,
+almost to a man, attitudinizers. If we wished to give any young
+artist the most impressive warning our imagination could devise
+against that kind of vice in the pictorial, which corresponds to rant
+in the histrionic art, we would advise him to walk once up and once
+down the gallery of the Luxembourg. Every figure in French painting or
+statuary seems to be showing itself off before spectators; they are
+not poetical, but in the worst style of corrupted eloquence.
+
+
+II
+
+_Nascitur Poeta_ is a maxim of classical antiquity, which has passed
+to these latter days with less questioning than most of the doctrines
+of that early age. When it originated, the human faculties were
+occupied, fortunately for posterity, less in examining how the works
+of genius are created, than in creating them: and the adage, probably,
+had no higher source than the tendency common among mankind to
+consider all power which is not visibly the effect of practice, all
+skill which is not capable of being reduced to mechanical rules, as
+the result of a peculiar gift. Yet this aphorism, born in the infancy
+of psychology, will perhaps be found, now when that science is in its
+adolescence, to be as true as an epigram ever is, that is, to contain
+some truth: truth, however, which has been so compressed and bent out
+of shape, in order to tie it up into so small a knot of only two words
+that it requires an almost infinite amount of unrolling and laying
+straight, before it will resume its just proportions.
+
+We are not now intending to remark upon the grosser misapplications of
+this ancient maxim, which have engendered so many races of
+poetasters. The days are gone by when every raw youth whose borrowed
+phantasies have set themselves to a borrowed tune, mistaking, as
+Coleridge says, an ardent desire of poetic reputation for poetic
+genius, while unable to disguise from himself that he had taken no
+means whereby he might _become_ a poet, could fancy himself a born
+one. Those who would reap without sowing, and gain the victory without
+fighting the battle, are ambitious now of another sort of distinction,
+and are born novelists, or public speakers, not poets. And the wiser
+thinkers understand and acknowledge that poetic excellence is subject
+to the same necessary conditions with any other mental endowment; and
+that to no one of the spiritual benefactors of mankind is a higher or
+a more assiduous intellectual culture needful than to the poet. It is
+true, he possesses this advantage over others who use the ‘instrument
+of words’, that, of the truths which he utters, a larger proportion
+are derived from personal consciousness, and a smaller from
+philosophic investigation. But the power itself of discriminating
+between what really is consciousness, and what is only a process of
+inference completed in a single instant--and the capacity of
+distinguishing whether that of which the mind is conscious be an
+eternal truth, or but a dream--are among the last results of the most
+matured and perfect intellect. Not to mention, that the poet, no more
+than any other person who writes, confines himself altogether to
+intuitive truths, nor has any means of communicating even these but by
+words, every one of which derives all its power of conveying a
+meaning, from a whole host of acquired notions, and facts learnt by
+study and experience.
+
+Nevertheless, it seems undeniable in point of fact, and consistent
+with the principles of a sound metaphysics, that there are poetic
+_natures_. There is a mental and physical constitution or temperament,
+peculiarly fitted for poetry. This temperament will not of itself make
+a poet, no more than the soil will the fruit; and as good fruit may be
+raised by culture from indifferent soils, so may good poetry from
+naturally unpoetical minds. But the poetry of one who is a poet by
+nature, will be clearly and broadly distinguishable from the poetry of
+mere culture. It may not be truer; it may not be more useful; but it
+will be different: fewer will appreciate it, even though many should
+affect to do so; but in those few it will find a keener sympathy, and
+will yield them a deeper enjoyment.
+
+One may write genuine poetry, and not be a poet; for whosoever writes
+out truly any human feeling, writes poetry. All persons, even the most
+unimaginative, in moments of strong emotion, speak poetry; and hence
+the drama is poetry, which else were always prose, except when a poet
+is one of the characters. What _is_ poetry, but the thoughts and words
+in which emotion spontaneously embodies itself? As there are few who
+are not, at least for some moments and in some situations, capable of
+some strong feeling, poetry is natural to most persons at some period
+of their lives. And any one whose feelings are genuine, though but of
+the average strength,--if he be not diverted by uncongenial thoughts
+or occupations from the indulgence of them, and if he acquire by
+culture, as all persons may, the faculty of delineating them
+correctly,--has it in his power to be a poet, so far as a life passed
+in writing unquestionable poetry may be considered to confer that
+title. But _ought_ it to do so? Yes, perhaps, in a collection of
+‘British Poets’. But ‘poet’ is the name also of a variety of man, not
+solely of the author of a particular variety of book: now, to have
+written whole volumes of real poetry is possible to almost all kinds
+of characters, and implies no greater peculiarity of mental
+construction, than to be the author of a history, or a novel.
+
+Whom, then, shall we call poets? Those who are so constituted, that
+emotions are the links of association by which their ideas, both
+sensuous and spiritual, are connected together. This constitution
+belongs (within certain limits) to all in whom poetry is a pervading
+principle. In all others, poetry is something extraneous and
+superinduced: something out of themselves, foreign to the habitual
+course of their every-day lives and characters; a world to which they
+may make occasional visits, but where they are sojourners, not
+dwellers, and which, when out of it, or even when in it, they think
+of, peradventure, but as a phantom-world, a place of _ignes fatui_ and
+spectral illusions. Those only who have the peculiarity of association
+which we have mentioned, and which is a natural though not a universal
+consequence of intense sensibility, instead of seeming not themselves
+when they are uttering poetry, scarcely seem themselves when uttering
+anything to which poetry is foreign. Whatever be the thing which they
+are contemplating, if it be capable of connecting itself with their
+emotions, the aspect under which it first and most naturally paints
+itself to them, is its poetic aspect. The poet of culture sees his
+object in prose, and describes it in poetry; the poet of nature
+actually sees it in poetry.
+
+This point is perhaps worth some little illustration; the rather, as
+metaphysicians (the ultimate arbiters of all philosophical criticism),
+while they have busied themselves for two thousand years, more or
+less, about the few _universal_ laws of human nature, have strangely
+neglected the analysis of its _diversities_. Of these, none lie deeper
+or reach further than the varieties which difference of nature and of
+education makes in what may be termed the habitual bond of
+association. In a mind entirely uncultivated, which is also without
+any strong feelings, objects whether of sense or of intellect arrange
+themselves in the mere casual order in which they have been seen,
+heard, or otherwise perceived. Persons of this sort may be said to
+think chronologically. If they remember a fact, it is by reason of a
+fortuitous coincidence with some trifling incident or circumstance
+which took place at the very time. If they have a story to tell, or
+testimony to deliver in a witness-box, their narrative must follow the
+exact order in which the events took place: _dodge_ them, and the
+thread of association is broken; they cannot go on. Their
+associations, to use the language of philosophers, are chiefly of the
+successive, not the synchronous kind, and whether successive or
+synchronous, are mostly casual.
+
+To the man of science, again, or of business, objects group themselves
+according to the artificial classifications which the understanding
+has voluntarily made for the convenience of thought or of practice.
+But where any of the impressions are vivid and intense, the
+associations into which these enter are the ruling ones: it being a
+well-known law of association, that the stronger a feeling is, the
+more quickly and strongly it associates itself with any other object
+or feeling. Where, therefore, nature has given strong feelings, and
+education has not created factitious tendencies stronger than the
+natural ones, the prevailing associations will be those which connect
+objects and ideas with emotions, and with each other through the
+intervention of emotions. Thoughts and images will be linked together,
+according to the similarity of the feelings which cling to them. A
+thought will introduce a thought by first introducing a feeling which
+is allied with it. At the centre of each group of thoughts or images
+will be found a feeling; and the thoughts or images will be there only
+because the feeling was there. The combinations which the mind puts
+together, the pictures which it paints, the wholes which Imagination
+constructs out of the materials supplied by Fancy, will be indebted to
+some dominant _feeling_, not as in other natures to a dominant
+_thought_, for their unity and consistency of character, for what
+distinguishes them from incoherencies.
+
+The difference, then, between the poetry of a poet, and the poetry of
+a cultivated but not naturally poetic mind, is, that in the latter,
+with however bright a halo of feeling the thought may be surrounded
+and glorified, the thought itself is always the conspicuous object;
+while the poetry of a poet is Feeling itself, employing Thought only
+as the medium of its expression. In the one, feeling waits upon
+thought; in the other, thought upon feeling. The one writer has a
+distinct aim, common to him with any other didactic author; he desires
+to convey the thought, and he conveys it clothed in the feelings which
+it excites in himself, or which he deems most appropriate to it. The
+other merely pours forth the overflowing of his feelings; and all the
+thoughts which those feelings suggest are floated promiscuously along
+the stream.
+
+It may assist in rendering our meaning intelligible, if we illustrate
+it by a parallel between the two English authors of our own day who
+have produced the greatest quantity of true and enduring poetry,
+Wordsworth and Shelley. Apter instances could not be wished for; the
+one might be cited as the type, the _exemplar_, of what the poetry of
+culture may accomplish: the other as perhaps the most striking example
+ever known of the poetic temperament. How different, accordingly, is
+the poetry of these two great writers! In Wordsworth, the poetry is
+almost always the mere setting of a thought. The thought may be more
+valuable than the setting, or it may be less valuable, but there can
+be no question as to which was first in his mind: what he is impressed
+with, and what he is anxious to impress, is some proposition, more or
+less distinctly conceived; some truth, or something which he deems
+such. He lets the thought dwell in his mind, till it excites, as is
+the nature of thought, other thoughts, and also such feelings as the
+measure of his sensibility is adequate to supply. Among these thoughts
+and feelings, had he chosen a different walk of authorship (and there
+are many in which he might equally have excelled), he would probably
+have made a different selection of media for enforcing the parent
+thought: his habits, however, being those of poetic composition, he
+selects in preference the strongest feelings, and the thoughts with
+which most of feeling is naturally or habitually connected. His
+poetry, therefore, may be defined to be, his thoughts, coloured by,
+and impressing themselves by means of, emotions. Such poetry,
+Wordsworth has occupied a long life in producing. And well and wisely
+has he so done. Criticisms, no doubt, may be made occasionally both
+upon the thoughts themselves, and upon the skill he has demonstrated
+in the choice of his media: for an affair of skill and study, in the
+most rigorous sense, it evidently was. But he has not laboured in
+vain; he has exercised, and continues to exercise, a powerful, and
+mostly a highly beneficial influence over the formation and growth of
+not a few of the most cultivated and vigorous of the youthful minds of
+our time, over whose heads poetry of the opposite description would
+have flown, for want of an original organization, physical or mental,
+in sympathy with it.
+
+On the other hand, Wordsworth’s poetry is never bounding, never
+ebullient; has little even of the appearance of spontaneousness: the
+well is never so full that it overflows. There is an air of calm
+deliberateness about all he writes, which is not characteristic of the
+poetic temperament: his poetry seems one thing, himself another; he
+seems to be poetical because he wills to be so, not because he cannot
+help it: did he will to dismiss poetry, he need never again, it might
+almost seem, have a poetical thought. He never seems _possessed_ by
+any feeling; no emotion seems ever so strong as to have entire sway,
+for the time being, over the current of his thoughts. He never, even
+for the space of a few stanzas, appears entirely given up to
+exultation, or grief, or pity, or love, or admiration, or devotion, or
+even animal spirits. He now and then, though seldom, attempts to write
+as if he were: and never, we think, without leaving an impression of
+poverty: as the brook which on nearly level ground quite fills its
+banks, appears but a thread when running rapidly down a precipitous
+declivity. He has feeling enough to form a decent, graceful, even
+beautiful decoration to a thought which is in itself interesting and
+moving; but not so much as suffices to stir up the soul by mere
+sympathy with itself in its simplest manifestation, nor enough to
+summon up that array of ‘thoughts of power’ which in a richly stored
+mind always attends the call of really intense feeling. It is for this
+reason, doubtless, that the genius of Wordsworth is essentially
+unlyrical. Lyric poetry, as it was the earliest kind, is also, if the
+view we are now taking of poetry be correct, more eminently and
+peculiarly poetry than any other: it is the poetry most natural to a
+really poetic temperament, and least capable of being successfully
+imitated by one not so endowed by nature.
+
+Shelley is the very reverse of all this. Where Wordsworth is strong,
+he is weak; where Wordsworth is weak, he is strong. Culture, that
+culture by which Wordsworth has reared from his own inward nature the
+richest harvest ever brought forth by a soil of so little depth, is
+precisely what was wanting to Shelley: or let us rather say, he had
+not, at the period of his deplorably early death, reached sufficiently
+far in that intellectual progression of which he was capable, and
+which, if it has done so much for greatly inferior natures, might have
+made of him the most perfect, as he was already the most gifted of our
+poets. For him, voluntary mental discipline had done little: the
+vividness of his emotions and of his sensations had done all. He
+seldom follows up an idea; it starts into life, summons from the
+fairy-land of his inexhaustible fancy some three or four bold images,
+then vanishes, and straight he is off on the wings of some casual
+association into quite another sphere. He had scarcely yet acquired
+the consecutiveness of thought necessary for a long poem; his more
+ambitious compositions too often resemble the scattered fragments of a
+mirror; colours brilliant as life, single images without end, but no
+picture. It is only when under the overruling influence of some one
+state of feeling, either actually experienced, or summoned up in the
+vividness of reality by a fervid imagination, that he writes as a
+great poet; unity of feeling being to him the harmonizing principle
+which a central idea is to minds of another class, and supplying the
+coherency and consistency which would else have been wanting. Thus it
+is in many of his smaller, and especially his lyrical poems. They are
+obviously written to exhale, perhaps to relieve, a state of feeling,
+or of conception of feeling, almost oppressive from its vividness. The
+thoughts and imagery are suggested by the feeling, and are such as it
+finds unsought. The state of feeling may be either of soul or of
+sense, or oftener (might we not say invariably?) of both: for the
+poetic temperament is usually, perhaps always, accompanied by
+exquisite senses. The exciting cause may be either an object or an
+idea. But whatever of sensation enters into the feeling, must not be
+local, or consciously organic; it is a condition of the whole frame,
+not of a part only. Like the state of sensation produced by a fine
+climate, or indeed like all strongly pleasurable or painful sensations
+in an impassioned nature, it pervades the entire nervous system.
+States of feeling, whether sensuous or spiritual, which thus possess
+the whole being, are the fountains of that which we have called the
+poetry of poets; and which is little else than a pouring forth of the
+thoughts and images that pass across the mind while some permanent
+state of feeling is occupying it.
+
+To the same original fineness of organization, Shelley was doubtless
+indebted for another of his rarest gifts, that exuberance of imagery,
+which when unrepressed, as in many of his poems it is, amounts to a
+fault. The susceptibility of his nervous system, which made his
+emotions intense, made also the impressions of his external senses
+deep and clear; and agreeably to the law of association by which, as
+already remarked, the strongest impressions are those which associate
+themselves the most easily and strongly, these vivid sensations were
+readily recalled to mind by all objects or thoughts which had
+co-existed with them, and by all feelings which in any degree
+resembled them. Never did a fancy so teem with sensuous imagery as
+Shelley’s. Wordsworth economizes an image, and detains it until he has
+distilled all the poetry out of it, and it will not yield a drop more:
+Shelley lavishes his with a profusion which is unconscious because it
+is inexhaustible.
+
+If, then, the maxim _Nascitur poeta_ mean, either that the power of
+producing poetical compositions is a peculiar faculty which the poet
+brings into the world with him, which grows with his growth like any
+of his bodily powers, and is as independent of culture as his height,
+and his complexion; or that any natural peculiarity whatever is
+implied in producing poetry, real poetry, and in any quantity--such
+poetry too, as, to the majority of educated and intelligent readers,
+shall appear quite as good as, or even better than, any other; in
+either sense the doctrine is false. And nevertheless, there _is_
+poetry which could not emanate but from a mental and physical
+constitution peculiar, not in the kind, but in the degree of its
+susceptibility: a constitution which makes its possessor capable of
+greater happiness than mankind in general, and also of greater
+unhappiness; and because greater, so also more various. And such
+poetry, to all who know enough of nature to own it as being in nature,
+is much more poetry, is poetry in a far higher sense, than any other;
+since the common element of all poetry, that which constitutes poetry,
+human feeling, enters far more largely into this than into the poetry
+of culture. Not only because the natures which we have called
+poetical, really feel more, and consequently have more feeling to
+express; but because, the capacity of feeling being so great, feeling,
+when excited and not voluntarily resisted, seizes the helm of their
+thoughts, and the succession of ideas and images becomes the mere
+utterance of an emotion; not, as in other natures, the emotion a mere
+ornamental colouring of the thought.
+
+Ordinary education and the ordinary course of life are constantly at
+work counteracting this quality of mind, and substituting habits more
+suitable to their own ends: if instead of substituting they were
+content to superadd, there would be nothing to complain of. But when
+will education consist, not in repressing any mental faculty or power,
+from the uncontrolled action of which danger is apprehended, but in
+training up to its proper strength the corrective and antagonist
+power?
+
+In whomsoever the quality which we have described exists, and is not
+stifled, that person is a poet. Doubtless he is a greater poet in
+proportion as the fineness of his perceptions, whether of sense or of
+internal consciousness, furnishes him with an ampler supply of lovely
+images--the vigour and richness of his intellect, with a greater
+abundance of moving thoughts. For it is through these thoughts and
+images that the feeling speaks, and through their impressiveness that
+it impresses itself, and finds response in other hearts; and from
+these media of transmitting it (contrary to the laws of physical
+nature) increase of intensity is reflected back upon the feeling
+itself. But all these it is possible to have, and not be a poet; they
+are mere materials, which the poet shares in common with other people.
+What constitutes the poet is not the imagery nor the thoughts, nor
+even the feelings, but the law according to which they are called up.
+He is a poet, not because he has ideas of any particular kind, but
+because the succession of big ideas is subordinate to the course of
+his emotions.
+
+Many who have never acknowledged this in theory, bear testimony to it
+in their particular judgements. In listening to an oration, or reading
+a written discourse not professedly poetical, when do we begin to feel
+that the speaker or author is putting off the character of the orator
+or the prose writer, and is passing into the poet? Not when he begins
+to show strong feeling; _then_ we merely say, he is in earnest, he
+feels what he says; still less when he expresses himself in imagery;
+then, unless illustration be manifestly his sole object, we are apt to
+say, this is affectation. It is when the feeling (instead of passing
+away, or, if it continue, letting the train of thoughts run on
+exactly as they would have done if there were no influence at work but
+the mere intellect) becomes itself the originator of another train of
+association, which expels or blends with the former; when (for
+example) either his words, or the mode of their arrangement, are such
+as we spontaneously use only when in a state of excitement, proving
+that the mind is at least as much occupied by a passive state of its
+own feelings, as by the desire of attaining the premeditated end which
+the discourse has in view.[35]
+
+    [35] And this, we may remark by the way, seems to point to
+    the true theory of poetic diction; and to suggest the true
+    answer to as much as is erroneous of Wordsworth’s celebrated
+    doctrine on that subject. For on the one hand, _all_ language
+    which is the natural expression of feeling, is really
+    poetical, and will be felt as such, apart from conventional
+    associations; but on the other, whenever intellectual culture
+    has afforded a choice between several modes of expressing the
+    same emotion, the stronger the feeling is, the more naturally
+    and certainly will it prefer the language which is most
+    peculiarly appropriated to itself, and kept sacred from the
+    contact of more vulgar objects of contemplation.
+
+Our judgements of authors who lay actual claim to the title of poets,
+follow the same principle. Whenever, after a writer’s meaning is fully
+understood, it is still matter of reasoning and discussion whether he
+is a poet or not, he will be found to be wanting in the characteristic
+peculiarity of association so often adverted to. When, on the
+contrary, after reading or hearing one or two passages, we
+instinctively and without hesitation cry out, ‘This is a poet’, the
+probability is, that the passages are strongly marked with this
+peculiar quality. And we may add that in such case, a critic who, not
+having sufficient feeling to respond to the poetry, is also without
+sufficient philosophy to understand it though he feel it not, will be
+apt to pronounce, not ‘this is prose’, but ‘this is exaggeration’,
+‘this is mysticism’, or, ‘this is nonsense’.
+
+Although a philosopher cannot, by culture, make himself, in the
+peculiar sense in which we now use the term, a poet, unless at least
+he have that peculiarity of nature which would probably have made
+poetry his earliest pursuit; a poet may always, by culture, make
+himself a philosopher. The poetic laws of association are by no means
+incompatible with the more ordinary laws; are by no means such as
+_must_ have their course, even though a deliberate purpose require
+their suspension. If the peculiarities of the poetic temperament were
+uncontrollable in any poet, they might be supposed so in Shelley; yet
+how powerfully, in the _Cenci_, does he coerce and restrain all the
+characteristic qualities of his genius; what severe simplicity, in
+place of his usual barbaric splendour; how rigidly does he keep the
+feelings and the imagery in subordination to the thought.
+
+The investigation of nature requires no habits or qualities of mind,
+but such as may always be acquired by industry and mental activity.
+Because at one time the mind may be so given up to a state of feeling,
+that the succession of its ideas is determined by the present
+enjoyment or suffering which pervades it, this is no reason but that
+in the calm retirement of study, when under no peculiar excitement
+either of the outward or of the inward sense, it may form any
+combinations, or pursue any trains of ideas, which are most conducive
+to the purposes of philosophic inquiry; and may, while in that state,
+form deliberate convictions, from which no excitement will afterwards
+make it swerve. Might we not go even further than this? We shall not
+pause to ask whether it be not a misunderstanding of the nature of
+passionate feeling to imagine that it is inconsistent with calmness;
+whether they who so deem of it, do not mistake passion in the militant
+or antagonistic state, for the type of passion universally; do not
+confound passion struggling towards an outward object, with passion
+brooding over itself. But without entering into this deeper
+investigation; that capacity of strong feeling, which is supposed
+necessarily to disturb the judgement, is also the material out of
+which all _motives_ are made; the motives, consequently, which lead
+human beings to the pursuit of truth. The greater the individual’s
+capability of happiness and of misery, the stronger interest has that
+individual in arriving at truth; and when once that interest is felt,
+an impassioned nature is sure to pursue this, as to pursue any other
+object, with greater ardour; for energy of character is commonly the
+offspring of strong feeling. If, therefore, the most impassioned
+natures do not ripen into the most powerful intellects, it is always
+from defect of culture, or something wrong in the circumstances by
+which the being has originally or successively been surrounded.
+Undoubtedly strong feelings require a strong intellect to carry them,
+as more sail requires more ballast: and when, from neglect, or bad
+education, that strength is wanting, no wonder if the grandest and
+swiftest vessels make the most utter wreck.
+
+Where, as in some of our older poets, a poetic nature has been united
+with logical and scientific culture, the peculiarity of association
+arising from the finer nature so perpetually alternates with the
+associations attainable by commoner natures trained to high
+perfection, that its own particular law is not so conspicuously
+characteristic of the result produced, as in a poet like Shelley, to
+whom systematic intellectual culture, in a measure proportioned to the
+intensity of his own nature, has been wanting. Whether the superiority
+will naturally be on the side of the philosopher-poet or of the mere
+poet--whether the writings of the one ought, as a whole, to be truer,
+and their influence more beneficent, than those of the other--is too
+obvious in principle to need statement: it would be absurd to doubt
+whether two endowments are better than one; whether truth is more
+certainly arrived at by two processes, verifying and correcting each
+other, than by one alone. Unfortunately, in practice the matter is not
+quite so simple; there the question often is, which is least
+prejudicial to the intellect, uncultivation or malcultivation. For, as
+long as education consists chiefly of the mere inculcation of
+traditional opinions, many of which, from the mere fact that the human
+intellect has not yet reached perfection, must necessarily be false;
+so long as even those who are best taught, are rather taught to know
+the thoughts of others than to think, it is not always clear that the
+poet of acquired ideas has the advantage over him whose feeling has
+been his sole teacher. For the depth and durability of wrong as well
+as of right impressions is proportional to the fineness of the
+material; and they who have the greatest capacity of natural feeling
+are generally those whose artificial feelings are the strongest.
+Hence, doubtless, among other reasons, it is, that in an age of
+revolutions in opinion, the co-temporary poets, those at least who
+deserve the name, those who have any individuality of character, if
+they are not before their age, are almost sure to be behind it. An
+observation curiously verified all over Europe in the present century.
+Nor let it be thought disparaging. However urgent may be the necessity
+for a breaking up of old modes of belief, the most strong-minded and
+discerning, next to those who head the movement, are generally those
+who bring up the rear of it.
+
+
+
+
+WALTER BAGEHOT
+
+1826-1877
+
+WORDSWORTH, TENNYSON, AND BROWNING
+
+OR
+
+PURE, ORNATE, AND GROTESQUE ART IN ENGLISH POETRY (1864)
+
+_Enoch Arden, &c._ By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate.
+
+_Dramatis Personae._ By Robert Browning.
+
+
+We couple these two books together, not because of their likeness, for
+they are as dissimilar as books can be, nor on account of the eminence
+of their authors, for in general two great authors are too much for
+one essay, but because they are the best possible illustration of
+something we have to say upon poetical art--because they may give to
+it life and freshness. The accident of contemporaneous publication has
+here brought together two books, very characteristic of modern art,
+and we want to show how they are characteristic.
+
+Neither English poetry nor English criticism have ever recovered the
+_eruption_ which they both made at the beginning of this century into
+the fashionable world. The poems of Lord Byron were received with an
+avidity that resembles our present avidity for sensation novels, and
+were read by a class which at present reads little but such novels.
+Old men who remember those days may be heard to say, ‘We hear nothing
+of poetry nowadays; it seems quite down.’ And ‘down’ it certainly is,
+if for poetry it be a descent to be no longer the favourite excitement
+of the more frivolous part of the ‘upper’ world. That stimulating
+poetry is now little read. A stray schoolboy may still be detected in
+a wild admiration for the _Giaour_ or the _Corsair_ (and it is
+suitable to his age, and he should not be reproached for it), but the
+_real_ posterity--the quiet students of a past literature--never read
+them or think of them. A line or two linger in the memory; a few
+telling strokes of occasional and felicitous energy are quoted, but
+this is all. As wholes, these exaggerated stories were worthless; they
+taught nothing, and, therefore, they are forgotten. If nowadays a
+dismal poet were, like Byron, to lament the fact of his birth, and to
+hint that he was too good for the world, the _Saturday Review_ would
+say that ‘they doubted if he _was_ too good; that a sulky poet was a
+questionable addition to a tolerable world; that he need not have been
+born, as far as they were concerned.’ Doubtless, there is much in
+Byron besides his dismal exaggeration, but it was that exaggeration
+which made ‘the sensation’, which gave him a wild moment of dangerous
+fame. As so often happens, the cause of his momentary fashion is the
+cause also of his lasting oblivion. Moore’s former reputation was less
+excessive, yet it has not been more permanent. The prettiness of a few
+songs preserves the memory of his name, but as a poet to _read_ he is
+forgotten. There is nothing to read in him; no exquisite thought, no
+sublime feeling, no consummate description of true character. Almost
+the sole result of the poetry of that time is the harm which it has
+done. It degraded for a time the whole character of the art. It said
+by practice, by a most efficient and successful practice, that it was
+the aim, the _duty_ of poets, to catch the attention of the passing,
+the fashionable, the busy world. If a poem ‘fell dead’, it was
+nothing; it was composed to please the ‘London’ of the year, and if
+that London did not like it, why, it had failed. It fixed upon the
+minds of a whole generation, it engraved in popular memory and
+tradition, a vague conviction that poetry is but one of the many
+_amusements_ for the light classes, for the lighter hours of all
+classes. The mere notion, the bare idea, that poetry is a deep thing,
+a teaching thing, the most surely and wisely elevating of human
+things, is even now to the coarse public mind nearly unknown.
+
+As was the fate of poetry, so inevitably was that of criticism. The
+science that expounds which poetry is good and which is bad is
+dependent for its popular reputation on the popular estimate of poetry
+itself. The critics of that day had _a_ day, which is more than can be
+said for some since; they professed to tell the fashionable world in
+what books it would find new pleasure, and therefore they were read by
+the fashionable world. Byron counted the critic and poet equal. The
+_Edinburgh Review_ penetrated among the young, and into places of
+female resort where it does not go now. As people ask, ‘Have you read
+_Henry Dunbar_? and what do you think of it?’ so they then asked,
+‘Have you read the _Giaour_? and what do you think of it?’ Lord
+Jeffrey, a shrewd judge of the world, employed himself in telling it
+what to think; not so much what it ought to think, as what at bottom
+it did think, and so by dexterous sympathy with current society he
+gained contemporary fame and power. Such fame no critic must hope for
+now. His articles will not penetrate where the poems themselves do not
+penetrate. When poetry was noisy, criticism was loud; now poetry is a
+still small voice, and criticism must be smaller and stiller. As the
+function of such criticism was limited so was its subject. For the
+great and (as time now proves) the _permanent_ part of the poetry of
+his time--for Shelley and for Wordsworth--Lord Jeffrey had but one
+word. He said[36] ‘It won’t do’. And it will not do to amuse a
+drawing-room.
+
+    [36] The first words in Lord Jeffrey’s celebrated review of
+    the _Excursion_ were, ‘This will never do.’
+
+The doctrine that poetry is a light amusement for idle hours, a
+metrical species of sensational novel, has not indeed been without
+gainsayers wildly popular. Thirty years ago, Mr. Carlyle most rudely
+contradicted it. But perhaps this is about all that he has done. He
+has denied, but he has not disproved. He has contradicted the floating
+paganism, but he has not founded the deep religion. All about and
+around us a _faith_ in poetry struggles to be extricated, but it is
+not extricated. Some day, at the touch of the true word, the whole
+confusion will by magic cease; the broken and shapeless notions cohere
+and crystallize into a bright and true theory. But this cannot be yet.
+
+But though no complete theory of the poetic art as yet be possible for
+us, though perhaps only our children’s children will be able to speak
+on this subject with the assured confidence which belongs to accepted
+truth, yet something of some certainty may be stated on the easier
+elements, and something that will throw light on these two new books.
+But it will be necessary to assign reasons, and the assigning of
+reasons is a dry task. Years ago, when criticism only tried to show
+how poetry could be made a good amusement, it was not impossible that
+criticism itself should be amusing. But now it must at least be
+serious, for we believe that poetry is a serious and a deep thing.
+
+There should be a word in the language of literary art to express what
+the word ‘picturesque’ expresses for the fine arts. _Picturesque_
+means fit to be put into a picture; we want a word _literatesque_,
+‘fit to be put into a book.’ An artist goes through a hundred
+different country scenes, rich with beauties, charms, and merits, but
+he does not paint any of them. He leaves them alone; he idles on till
+he finds the hundred-and-first--a scene which many observers would not
+think much of, but which _he_ knows by virtue of his art will look
+well on canvas, and this he paints and preserves. Susceptible
+observers, though not artists, feel this quality too; they say of a
+scene, ‘How picturesque!’ meaning by this a quality distinct from that
+of beauty, or sublimity, or grandeur--meaning to speak not only of the
+scene as it is in itself, but also of its fitness for imitation by
+art; meaning not only that it is good, but that its goodness is such
+as ought to be transferred to paper; meaning not simply that it
+fascinates, but also that its fascination is such as ought to be
+copied by man. A fine and insensible instinct has put language to this
+subtle use; it expresses an idea without which fine art criticism
+could not go on, and it is very natural that the language of pictorial
+should be better supplied with words than that of literary criticism,
+for the eye was used before the mind, and language embodies primitive
+sensuous ideas, long ere it expresses, or need express, abstract and
+literary ones.
+
+The reason why a landscape is ‘picturesque’ is often said to be that
+such landscape represents an ‘idea’. But this explanation, though in
+the minds of some who use it it is near akin to the truth, fails to
+explain that truth to those who did not know it before; the Word
+‘idea,’ is so often used in these subjects when people do not know
+anything else to say; it represents so often a kind of intellectual
+insolvency, when philosophers are at their wits’ end, that shrewd
+people will never readily on any occasion give it credit for meaning
+anything. A wise explainer must, therefore, look out for other words
+to convey what he has to say. _Landscapes_, like everything else in
+nature, divide themselves as we look at them into a sort of rude
+classification. We go down a river, for example, and we see a hundred
+landscapes on both sides of it, resembling one another in much, yet
+differing in something; with trees here, and a farmhouse there, and
+shadows on one side, and a deep pool far on; a collection of
+circumstances most familiar in themselves, but making a perpetual
+novelty by the magic of their various combinations. We travel so for
+miles and hours, and then we come to a scene which also has these
+various circumstances and adjuncts, but which combines them best,
+which makes the best whole of them, which shows them in their best
+proportion at a single glance before the eye. Then we say, ‘This is
+the place to paint the river; this is the picturesque point!’ Or, if
+not artists or critics of art, we feel without analysis or examination
+that somehow this bend or sweep of the river, shall, in future, _be
+the river to us_: that it is the image of it which we will retain in
+our mind’s eye, by which we will remember it, which we will call up
+when we want to describe or think of it. Some fine countries, some
+beautiful rivers, have not this picturesque quality: they give us
+elements of beauty, but they do not combine them together; we go on
+for a time delighted, but _after_ a time somehow we get wearied; we
+feel that we are taking in nothing and learning nothing; we get no
+collected image before our mind; we see the accidents and
+circumstances of that sort of scenery, but the summary scene we do not
+see; we find _disjecta membra_, but no form; various and many and
+faulty approximations are displayed in succession; but the absolute
+perfection in that country or river’s scenery--its _type_--is
+withheld: We go away from such places in part delighted, but in part
+baffled; we have been puzzled by pretty things; we have beheld a
+hundred different inconsistent specimens of the same sort of beauty;
+but the rememberable idea, the full development, the characteristic
+individuality of it, we have not seen.
+
+We find the same sort of quality in all parts of painting. We see a
+portrait of a person we know, and we say, ‘It is like--yes, like, of
+course, but it is not _the man_;’ we feel it could not be any one
+else, but still, somehow it fails to bring home to us the individual
+as we know him to be. _He_ is not there. An accumulation of features
+like his are painted, but his essence is not painted; an
+approximation more or less excellent is given, but the characteristic
+expression, the _typical_ form, of the man is withheld.
+
+Literature--the painting of words--has the same quality but wants the
+analogous word. The word ‘_literatesque_,’ would mean, if we possessed
+it, that perfect combination in the _subject-matter_ of literature,
+which suits the _art_ of literature. We often meet people, and say of
+them, sometimes meaning well and sometimes ill, ‘How well so-and-so
+would do in a book!’ Such people are by no means the best people; but
+they are the most effective people--the most rememberable people.
+Frequently when we first know them, we like them because they explain
+to us so much of our experience; we have known many people ‘like
+that,’ in one way or another, but we did not seem to understand them;
+they were nothing to us, for their traits were indistinct; we forgot
+them, for they _hitched_ on to nothing, and we could not classify
+them; but when we see the _type_ of the genus, at once we seem to
+comprehend its character; the inferior specimens are explained by the
+perfect embodiment; the approximations are definable when we know the
+ideal to which they draw near. There are an infinite number of classes
+of human beings, but in each of these classes there is a distinctive
+type which, if we could expand it out in words, would define the
+class. We cannot expand it in formal terms any more than a landscape
+or a species of landscapes; but we have an art, an art of words, which
+can draw it. Travellers and others often bring home, in addition to
+their long journals--which though so living to them, are so dead, so
+inanimate, so undescriptive to all else--a pen-and-ink sketch, rudely
+done very likely, but which, perhaps, even the more for the blots and
+strokes, gives a distinct notion, an emphatic image, to all who see
+it. They say at once, ‘_Now_ we know the sort of thing’. The sketch
+has _hit_ the mind. True literature does the same. It describes sorts,
+varieties, and permutations, by delineating the type of each sort, the
+ideal of each variety, the central, the marking trait of each
+permutation.
+
+On this account, the greatest artists of the world have ever shown an
+enthusiasm for reality. To care for notions and abstractions; to
+philosophize; to reason out conclusions; to care for schemes of
+thought, are signs in the artistic mind of secondary excellence. A
+Schiller, a Euripides, a Ben Jonson, cares for _ideas_--for the
+parings of the intellect, and the distillation of the mind; a
+Shakespeare, a Homer, a Goethe, finds his mental occupation, the true
+home of his natural thoughts, in the real world--‘which is the world
+of all of us’--where the face of nature, the moving masses of men and
+women, are ever changing, ever multiplying, ever mixing one with the
+other. The reason is plain--the business of the poet, of the artist,
+is with _types_; and those types are mirrored in reality. As a painter
+must not only have a hand to execute, but an eye to distinguish--as he
+must go here and then there through the real world to catch the
+picturesque man, the picturesque scene, which is to live on his
+canvas--so the poet must find in that reality, the _literatesque_ man,
+the _literatesque_ scene which nature intends for him, and which will
+live in his page. Even in reality he will not find this type complete,
+or the characteristics perfect; but there, at least, he will find
+_something_, some hint, some intimation, some suggestion; whereas, in
+the stagnant home of his own thoughts he will find nothing pure,
+nothing _as it is_, nothing which does not bear his own mark, which is
+not somehow altered by a mixture with himself.
+
+The first conversation of Goethe and Schiller illustrates this
+conception of the poet’s art. Goethe was at that time prejudiced
+against Schiller, we must remember, partly from what he considered the
+_outrages_ of the _Robbers_, partly because of the philosophy of Kant.
+Schiller’s ‘Essay on _Grace and Dignity_’, he tells us, ‘was yet less
+of a kind to reconcile me. The philosophy of Kant, which exalts the
+dignity of mind so highly, while appearing to restrict it, Schiller
+had joyfully embraced: it unfolded the extraordinary qualities which
+Nature had implanted in him; and in the lively feeling of freedom and
+self-direction, he showed himself unthankful to the Great Mother, who
+surely had not acted like a step-dame towards him. Instead of viewing
+her as self-subsisting, as producing with a living force, and
+according to appointed laws, alike the highest and the lowest of her
+works, he took her up under the aspect of some empirical native
+qualities of the human mind. Certain harsh passages I could even
+directly apply to myself: they exhibited my confession of faith in a
+false light; and I felt that if written without particular attention
+to me they were still worse; for in that case, the vast chasm which
+lay between us, gaped but so much the more distinctly.’ After a casual
+meeting at a Society for Natural History, they walked home and Goethe
+proceeds:
+
+‘We reached his house; the talk induced me to go in. I then expounded
+to him, with as much vivacity as possible, the _Metamorphosis of
+Plants_, drawing out on paper, with many characteristic strokes, a
+symbolic Plant for him, as I proceeded. He heard and saw all this,
+with much interest and distinct comprehension; but when I had done, he
+shook his head and said: ‘This is no experiment, this is an idea.’ I
+stopped with some degree of irritation; for the point which separated
+us was most luminously marked by this expression. The opinions in
+_Dignity and Grace_, again occurred to me; the old grudge was just
+awakening; but I smothered it, and merely said: “I was happy to find
+that I had got ideas without knowing it, nay that I saw them before my
+eyes.”
+
+‘Schiller had much more prudence and dexterity of management than I;
+he was also thinking of his periodical the _Horen_, about this time,
+and of course rather wished to attract than repel me. Accordingly he
+answered me like an accomplished Kantite; and as my stiff-necked
+Realism gave occasion to many contradictions, much battling took place
+between us, and at last a truce, in which neither party would consent
+to yield the victory, but each held himself invincible. Positions like
+the following grieved me to the very soul: _How can there ever be an
+experiment, that shall correspond with an idea? The specific quality
+of an idea is, that no experiment can reach it or agree with it._ Yet
+if he held as an idea, the same thing which I looked upon as an
+experiment; there must certainly, I thought, be some community between
+us, some ground whereon both of us might meet!’
+
+With Goethe’s natural history, or with Kant’s philosophy, we have
+here no concern, but we can combine the expressions of the two great
+poets into a nearly complete description of poetry. The ‘symbolic
+plant’ is the _type_ of which we speak, the ideal at which inferior
+specimens aim, the class-characteristic in which they all share, but
+which none shows forth fully: Goethe was right in searching for this
+in reality and nature; Schiller was right in saying that it was an
+‘idea’, a transcending notion to which approximations could be found
+in experience, but only approximations--which could not be found there
+itself. Goethe, as a poet, rightly felt the primary necessity of
+outward suggestion and experience; Schiller as a philosopher, rightly
+felt its imperfection.
+
+But in these delicate matters, it is easy to misapprehend. There is,
+undoubtedly, a sort of poetry which is produced as it were out of the
+author’s mind. The description of the poet’s own moods and feelings is
+a common sort of poetry--perhaps the commonest sort. But the
+peculiarity of such cases is, that the poet does not describe himself
+_as_ himself: autobiography is not his object; he takes himself as a
+specimen of human nature; he describes, not himself, but a
+distillation of himself: he takes such of his moods as are most
+characteristic, as most typify certain moods of certain men, or
+certain moods of all men; he chooses preponderant feelings of special
+sorts of men, or occasional feelings of men of all sorts; but with
+whatever other difference and diversity, the essence is that such
+self-describing poets describe what is _in_ them, but not _peculiar_
+to them,--what is generic, not what is special and individual. Gray’s
+_Elegy_ describes a mood which Gray felt more than other men, but
+which most others, perhaps all others, feel too. It is more popular,
+perhaps, than any English poem, because that sort of feeling is the
+most diffused of high feelings, and because Gray added to a singular
+nicety of fancy an habitual proneness to a _contemplative_--a
+discerning but unbiassed--meditation on death and on life. Other poets
+cannot hope for such success: a subject, so popular, so grave, so
+wise, and yet so suitable to the writer’s nature is hardly to be
+found. But the same ideal, the same unautobiographical character is to
+be found in the writings of meaner men. Take sonnets of Hartley
+Coleridge, for example:
+
+
+I
+
+TO A FRIEND
+
+    When we were idlers with the loitering rills,
+    The need of human love we little noted:
+    Our love was nature; and the peace that floated
+    On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills,
+    To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills:
+    One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,
+    That, wisely doating, ask’d not why it doated,
+    And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.
+    But now I find, how dear thou wert to me;
+    That man is more than half of nature’s treasure,
+    Of that fair Beauty which no eye can see,
+    Of that sweet music which no ear can measure;
+    And now the streams may sing for others’ pleasure,
+    The hills sleep on in their eternity.
+
+
+II
+
+TO THE SAME
+
+    In the great city we are met again,
+    Where many souls there are, that breathe and die,
+    Scarce knowing more of nature’s potency,
+    Than what they learn from heat, or cold, or rain;
+    The sad vicissitude of weary pain;--
+    For busy man is lord of ear and eye,
+    And what hath nature, but the vast, void sky,
+    And the thronged river toiling to the main?
+    Oh! say not so, for she shall have her part
+    In every smile, in every tear that falls,
+    And she shall hide her in the secret heart,
+    Where love persuades, and sterner duty calls:
+    But worse it were than death, or sorrow’s smart,
+    To live without a friend within these walls.
+
+
+III
+
+TO THE SAME
+
+    We parted on the mountains, as two streams
+    From one clear spring pursue their several ways;
+    And thy fleet course hath been through many a maze,
+    In foreign lands, where silvery Padus gleams
+    To that delicious sky, whose glowing beams
+    Brightened the tresses that old Poets praise;
+    Where Petrarch’s patient love, and artful lays,
+    And Ariosto’s song of many themes,
+    Moved the soft air. But I, a lazy brook,
+    As close pent up within my native dell,
+    Have crept along from nook to shady nook,
+    Where flowrets blow, and whispering Naiads dwell.
+    Yet now we meet, that parted were so wide,
+    O’er rough and smooth to travel side by side.
+
+The contrast of instructive and enviable locomotion with refining but
+instructive meditation is not special and peculiar to these two, but
+general and universal. It was set down by Hartley Coleridge because he
+was the most meditative and refining of men.
+
+What sort of literatesque types are fit to be described in the sort of
+literature called poetry, is a matter on which much might be written.
+Mr. Arnold, some years since, put forth a theory that the art of
+poetry could only delineate _great actions_. But though, rightly
+interpreted and understood--using the word action so as to include
+high and sound activity in contemplation--this definition may suit the
+highest poetry, it certainly cannot be stretched to include many
+inferior sorts and even many good sorts. Nobody in their senses would
+describe Gray’s _Elegy_ as the delineation of a ‘great action’; some
+kinds of mental contemplation may be energetic enough to deserve this
+name, but Gray would have been frightened at the very word. He loved
+scholar-like calm and quiet inaction; his very greatness depended on
+his _not_ acting, on his ‘wise passiveness,’ on his indulging the
+grave idleness which so well appreciates so much of human life. But
+the best answer--the _reductio ad absurdum_--of Mr. Arnold’s doctrine,
+is the mutilation which it has caused him to make of his own writings.
+It has forbidden him, he tells us, to reprint _Empedocles_--a poem
+undoubtedly containing defects and even excesses, but containing also
+these lines:
+
+    And yet what days were those, Parmenides!
+    When we were young, when we could number friends
+    In all the Italian cities like ourselves,
+    When with elated hearts we join’d your train,
+    Ye Sun-born virgins! on the road of Truth.
+    Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought
+    Nor outward things were clos’d and dead to us,
+    But we receiv’d the shock of mighty thoughts
+    On simple minds with a pure natural joy;
+    And if the sacred load oppress’d our brain,
+    We had the power to feel the pressure eas’d.
+    The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,
+    In the delightful commerce of the world.
+    We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
+    Thought’s slaves and dead to every natural joy.
+    The smallest thing could give us pleasure then--
+    The sports of the country people;
+    A flute note from the woods;
+    Sunset over the sea:
+    Seed-time and harvest;
+    The reapers in the corn;
+    The vinedresser in his vineyard;
+    The village-girl at her wheel.
+    Fullness of life and power of feeling, ye
+    Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,
+    Who dwell on a firm basis of content.
+    But he who has outliv’d his prosperous days,
+    But he, whose youth fell on a different world
+    From that on which his exil’d age is thrown;
+    Whose mind was fed on other food, was train’d
+    By other rules than are in vogue to-day;
+    Whose habit of thought is fix’d, who will not change,
+    But in a world he loves not must subsist
+    In ceaseless opposition, be the guard
+    Of his own breast, fetter’d to what he guards,
+    That the world win no mastery over him;
+    Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;
+    Who has no minute’s breathing space allow’d
+    To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy:--
+    Joy and the outward world must die to him
+    As they are dead to me.
+
+What freak of criticism can induce a man who has written such poetry
+as this, to discard it, and say it is not poetry? Mr. Arnold is
+privileged to speak of his own poems, but no other critic could speak
+so and not be laughed at.
+
+We are disposed to believe that no very sharp definition can be
+given--at least in the present state of the critical art--of the
+boundary line between poetry and other sorts of imaginative
+delineation. Between the undoubted dominions of the two kinds there is
+a debateable land; everybody is agreed that the _Oedipus at Colonus_
+_is_ poetry: every one is agreed that the wonderful appearance of Mrs.
+Veal is _not_ poetry. But the exact line which separates grave novels
+in verse like _Aylmer’s Field_ or _Enoch Arden_, from grave novels not
+in verse like _Silas Marner_ or _Adam Bede_, we own we cannot draw
+with any confidence. Nor, perhaps, is it very important; whether a
+narrative is thrown into verse or not certainly depends in part on the
+taste of the age, and in part on its mechanical helps. Verse is the
+only mechanical help to the memory in rude times, and there is little
+writing till a cheap something is found to write upon, and a cheap
+something to write with. Poetry--verse at least--is the literature of
+_all work_ in early ages; it is only later ages which write in what
+_they_ think a natural and simple prose. There are other casual
+influences in the matter too; but they are not material now. We need
+only say here that poetry, because it has a more marked rhythm than
+prose, must be more intense in meaning and more concise in style than
+prose. People expect a ‘marked rhythm’ to imply something worth
+marking; if it fails to do so they are disappointed. They are
+displeased at the visible waste of a powerful instrument; they call it
+‘doggerel,’ and rightly call it, for the metrical expression of full
+thought and eager feeling--the burst of metre--incident to high
+imagination, should not be wasted on petty matters which prose does as
+well,--which it does better--which it suits by its very limpness and
+weakness, whose small changes it follows more easily, and to whose
+lowest details it can fully and without effort degrade itself. Verse,
+too, should be _more concise_, for long-continued rhythm tends to jade
+the mind, just as brief rhythm tends to attract the attention. Poetry
+should be memorable and emphatic, intense, and _soon over_.
+
+The great divisions of poetry, and of all other literary art, arise
+from the different modes in which these _types_--these characteristic
+men, these characteristic feelings--may be variously described. There
+are three principal modes which we shall attempt to describe--the
+_pure_, which is sometimes, but not very wisely, called the classical;
+the _ornate_, which is also unwisely called romantic; and the
+_grotesque_, which might be called the mediaeval. We will describe the
+nature of these a little. Criticism we know must be brief--not, like
+poetry, because its charm is too intense to be sustained--but on the
+contrary, because its interest is too weak to be prolonged; but
+elementary criticism, if an evil, is a necessary evil; a little while
+spent among the simple principles of art is the first condition, the
+absolute pre-requisite, for surely apprehending and wisely judging the
+complete embodiments and miscellaneous forms of actual literature.
+
+The definition of _pure_ literature is that it describes the type in
+its simplicity, we mean, with the exact amount of accessory
+circumstance which is necessary to bring it before the mind in
+finished perfection, and _no more_ than that amount. The _type_ needs
+some accessories from its nature--a picturesque landscape does not
+consist wholly of picturesque features. There is a setting of
+surroundings--as the Americans would say, of _fixings_--without which
+the reality is not itself. By a traditional mode of speech, as soon as
+we see a picture in which a complete effect is produced by detail so
+rare and so harmonized as to escape us, we say ‘how classical’. The
+whole which is to be seen appears at once and through the detail, but
+the detail itself is not seen: we do not think of that which gives us
+the idea; we are absorbed in the idea itself. Just so in literature
+the pure art is that which works with the fewest strokes; the fewest,
+that is, for its purpose, for its aim is to call up and bring home to
+men an idea, a form, a character, and if that idea be twisted, that
+form be involved, that character perplexed, many strokes of literary
+art will be needful. Pure art does not mutilate its object: it
+represents it as fully as is possible with the slightest effort which
+is possible: it shrinks from no needful circumstances, as little as it
+inserts any which are needless. The precise peculiarity is not merely
+that no incidental circumstance is inserted which does not tell on the
+main design: no art is fit to be called _art_ which permits a stroke
+to be put in without an object; but that only the minimum of such
+circumstance is inserted at all. The form is sometimes said to be
+bare, the accessories are sometimes said to be invisible, because the
+appendages are so choice that the shape only is perceived.
+
+The English literature undoubtedly contains much impure literature;
+impure in its style if not in its meaning: but it also contains one
+great, one nearly perfect, model of the pure style in the literary
+expression of typical _sentiment_; and one not perfect, but gigantic
+and close approximation to perfection in the pure delineation of
+objective character. Wordsworth, perhaps, comes as near to choice
+purity of style in sentiment as is possible; Milton, with exceptions
+and conditions to be explained, approaches perfection by the
+strenuous purity with which he depicts character.
+
+A wit once said, that ‘_pretty_ women had more features than
+_beautiful_ women’, and though the expression may be criticized, the
+meaning is correct. Pretty women seem to have a great number of
+attractive points, each of which attracts your attention, and each one
+of which you remember afterwards; yet these points have not _grown
+together_, their features have not linked themselves into a single
+inseparable whole. But a beautiful woman is a whole as she is; you no
+more take her to pieces than a Greek statue; she is not an aggregate
+of divisible charms, she is a charm in herself. Such ever is the
+dividing test of pure art; if you catch yourself admiring its details,
+it is defective; you ought to think of it as a single whole which you
+must remember, which you must admire, which somehow subdues you while
+you admire it, which is a ‘possession’ to you ‘for ever’.
+
+Of course no individual poem embodies this ideal perfectly; of course
+every human word and phrase has its imperfections, and if we choose an
+instance to illustrate that ideal, the instance has scarcely a fair
+chance. By contrasting it with the ideal we suggest its imperfections;
+by protruding it as an example, we turn on its defectiveness the
+microscope of criticism. Yet these two sonnets of Wordsworth may be
+fitly read in this place, not because they are quite without faults,
+or because they are the very best examples of their kind of style; but
+because they are _luminous_ examples; the compactness of the sonnet
+and the gravity of the sentiment, hedging in the thoughts,
+restraining the fancy, and helping to maintain a singleness of
+expression:
+
+
+THE TROSACHS.
+
+    There’s not a nook within this solemn Pass,
+    But were an apt Confessional for one
+    Taught by his summer spent; his autumn gone,
+    That Life is but a tale of morning grass
+    Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase
+    That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes
+    Feed it ’mid Nature’s old felicities,
+    Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass
+    Untouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy guest,
+    If from a golden perch of aspen spray
+    (October’s workmanship to rival May)
+    The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast
+    That moral teaches by a heaven-taught lay,
+    Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest!
+
+
+COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPT. 3, 1802
+
+    Earth has not anything to show more fair:
+    Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
+    A sight so touching in its majesty:
+    This city now doth, like a garment, wear
+    The beauty of the morning; silent, bare.
+    Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
+    Open unto the fields and to the sky;
+    All bright and open in the smokeless air.
+    Never did sun more beautifully steep
+    In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
+    Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
+    The river glideth at his own sweet will:
+    Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
+    And all that mighty heart is lying still!
+
+Instances of barer style than this may easily be found, instances of
+colder style--few better instances of purer style. Not a single
+expression (the invocation in the concluding couplet of the second
+sonnet perhaps excepted) can be spared, yet not a single expression
+rivets the attention. If, indeed, we take out the phrase--
+
+    The city now doth like a garment wear
+    The beauty of the morning,
+
+and the description of the brilliant yellow of autumn--
+
+    October’s workmanship to rival May,
+
+they have independent value, but they are not noticed in the sonnet
+when we read it through; they fall into place there, and being in
+their place are not seen. The great subjects of the two sonnets, the
+religious aspect of beautiful but grave nature--the religious aspect
+of a city about to awaken and be alive, are the only ideas left in our
+mind. To Wordsworth has been vouchsafed the last grace of the
+self-denying artist; you think neither of him nor his style, but you
+cannot help thinking of--you _must_ recall--the exact phrase, the
+_very_ sentiment he wished.
+
+Milton’s purity is more eager. In the most exciting parts of
+Wordsworth--and these sonnets are not very exciting--you always feel,
+you never forget, that what you have before you is the excitement of a
+recluse. There is nothing of the stir of life; nothing of the _brawl_
+of the world. But Milton though always a scholar by trade, though
+solitary in old age, was through life intent on great affairs, lived
+close to great scenes, watched a revolution, and if not an actor in
+it, was at least secretary to the actors. He was familiar--by daily
+experience and habitual sympathy--with the earnest debate of arduous
+questions, on which the life and death of the speakers certainly
+depended, on which the weal or woe of the country perhaps depended.
+He knew how profoundly the individual character of the speakers--their
+inner and real nature--modifies their opinion on such questions; he
+knew how surely that nature will appear in the expression of them.
+This great experience, fashioned by a fine imagination, gives to the
+debate of Satanic Council in Pandaemonium its reality and its life. It
+is a debate in the Long Parliament, and though the _theme_ of
+_Paradise Lost_ obliged Milton to side with the monarchical element in
+the universe, his old habits are often too much for him; and his real
+sympathy--the impetus and energy of his nature--side with the
+rebellious element. For the purposes of art this is much better--of a
+court, a poet can make but little; of a heaven he can make very
+little, but of a courtly heaven, such as Milton conceived, he can make
+nothing at all. The idea of a court and the idea of a heaven are so
+radically different, that a distinct combination of them is always
+grotesque and often ludicrous. _Paradise Lost_, as a whole, is
+radically tainted by a vicious principle. It professes to justify the
+ways of God to man, to account for sin and death, and it tells you
+that the whole originated in a political event; in a court squabble as
+to a particular act of patronage and the due or undue promotion of an
+eldest son. Satan may have been wrong, but on Milton’s theory he had
+an _arguable_ case at least. There was something arbitrary in the
+promotion; there were little symptoms of a job; in _Paradise Lost_ it
+is always clear that the devils are the weaker, but it is never clear
+that the angels are the better. Milton’s sympathy and his imagination
+slip back to the Puritan rebels whom he loved, and desert the courtly
+angels whom he could not love although he praised. There is no wonder
+that Milton’s hell is better than his heaven, for he hated officials
+and he loved rebels, for he employs his genius below, and accumulates
+his pedantry above. On the great debate in Pandaemonium all his genius
+is concentrated. The question is very practical; it is, ‘What are we
+devils to do, now we have lost heaven?’ Satan who presides over and
+manipulates the assembly; Moloch
+
+                              the fiercest spirit
+    That fought in Heaven, now fiercer by despair,
+
+who wants to fight again; Belial, ‘the man of the world’, who does not
+want to fight any more; Mammon, who is for commencing an industrial
+career; Beelzebub, the official statesman,
+
+                      deep on his front engraven
+    Deliberation sat and Public care,
+
+who, at Satan’s instance, proposes the invasion of earth--are as
+distinct as so many statues. Even Belial, ‘the man of the world’, the
+sort of man with whom Milton had least sympathy, is perfectly painted.
+An inferior artist would have made the actor who ‘counselled ignoble
+ease and peaceful sloth’, a degraded and ugly creature; but Milton
+knew better. He knew that low notions require a better garb than high
+notions. Human nature is not a high thing, but at least it has a high
+idea of itself; it will not accept mean maxims, unless they are gilded
+and made beautiful. A prophet in goatskin may cry, ‘Repent, repent’,
+but it takes ‘purple and fine linen’ to be able to say, ‘Continue in
+your sins’. The world vanquishes with its speciousness and its show,
+and the orator who is to persuade men to worldliness must have a share
+in them. Milton well knew this; after the warlike speech of the fierce
+Moloch he introduces a brighter and a more graceful spirit:
+
+    He ended frowning, and his look denounced
+    Desp’rate revenge, and battle dangerous
+    To less than Gods. On th’ other side up rose
+    Belial, in act more graceful and humane:
+    A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seem’d
+    For dignity composed and high exploit:
+    But all was false and hollow, though his tongue
+    Dropt manna, and could make the worse appear
+    The better reason, to perplex and dash
+    Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low;
+    To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds
+    Tim’rous and slothful: yet he pleased the ear,
+    And with persuasive accent thus began:
+
+He does not begin like a man with a strong case, but like a man with a
+weak case; he knows that the pride of human nature is irritated by
+mean advice, and though he may probably persuade men to _take_ it, he
+must carefully apologise for _giving_ it. Here, as elsewhere, though
+the formal address is to devils, the real address is to men: to the
+human nature which we know, not to the fictitious demonic nature we do
+not know:
+
+    I should be much for open war, O Peers!
+    As not behind in hate, if what was urged
+    Main reason to persuade immediate war,
+    Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast
+    Ominous conjecture on the whole success:
+    When he who most excels in fact of arms,
+    In what he counsels and in what excels
+    Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair,
+    And utter dissolution, as the scope
+    Of all his aim, after some dire revenge.
+    First, what revenge? The tow’rs of Heav’n are fill’d
+    With armed watch, that render all access
+    Impregnable; oft on the bord’ring deep
+    Encamp their legions, or with obscure wing
+    Scout far and wide into the realm of night,
+    Scorning surprise. Or could we break our way
+    By force, and at our heels all hell should rise
+    With blackest insurrection, to confound
+    Heav’n’s purest light, yet our great Enemy,
+    All incorruptible, would on his throne
+    Sit unpolluted, and th’ ethereal mould
+    Incapable of stain would soon expel
+    Her mischief, and purge oft the baser fire
+    Victorious. Thus repulsed, our final hope
+    Is flat despair. We must exasperate
+    Th’ Almighty Victor to spend all his rage,
+    And that must end us: that must be our cure,
+    To be no more? Sad cure; for who would lose,
+    Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
+    Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
+    To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost
+    In the wide womb of uncreated night,
+    Devoid of sense and motion? And who knows,
+    Let this be good, whether our angry Foe
+    Can give it, or will ever? How he can
+    Is doubtful; that he never will is sure.
+    Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire
+    Belike through impotence, or unaware,
+    To give his enemies their wish, and end
+    Them in his anger, whom his anger saves
+    To punish endless? Wherefore cease we then?
+    Say they who counsel war, we are decreed,
+    Reserved, and destined, to eternal woe;
+    Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,
+    What can we suffer worse? Is this then worst,
+    Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so on.
+
+Mr. Pitt knew this speech by heart, and Lord Macaulay has called it
+incomparable; and these judges of the oratorical art have well
+decided. A mean foreign policy cannot be better defended. Its
+sensibleness is effectually explained, and its tameness as much as
+possible disguised.
+
+But we have not here to do with the excellence of Belial’s policy, but
+with the excellence of his speech; and with that speech in a peculiar
+manner. This speech, taken with the few lines of description with
+which Milton introduces them, embody, in as short a space as possible,
+with as much perfection as possible, the delineation of the type of
+character common at all times, dangerous in many times, sure to come
+to the surface in moments of difficulty, and never more dangerous than
+then. As Milton describes, it is one among several _typical_
+characters which will ever have their place in great councils, which
+will ever be heard at important decisions, which are part of the
+characteristic and inalienable whole of this statesmanlike world. The
+debate in Pandaemonium is a debate among these typical characters at
+the greatest conceivable crisis, and with adjuncts of solemnity which
+no other situation could rival. It is the greatest _classical_
+triumph, the highest achievement of the pure _style_ in English
+literature; it is the greatest description of the highest and most
+typical characters with the most choice circumstances and in the
+fewest words.
+
+It is not unremarkable that we should find in Milton and in _Paradise
+Lost_ the best specimen of pure style. He was schoolmaster in a
+pedantic age, and there is nothing so unclassical--nothing so impure
+in style--as pedantry. The out-of-door conversational life of Athens
+was as opposed to bookish scholasticism as a life can be. The most
+perfect books have been written not by those who thought much of
+books, but by those who thought little, by those who were under the
+restraint of a sensitive talking world, to which books had contributed
+something, and a various eager life the rest. Milton is generally
+unclassical in spirit where he is learned, and naturally, because the
+purest poets do not overlay their conceptions with book knowledge, and
+the classical poets, having in comparison no books, were under little
+temptation to impair the purity of their style by the accumulation of
+their research. Over and above this, there is in Milton, and a little
+in Wordsworth also, one defect which is in the highest degree faulty
+and unclassical, which mars the effect and impairs the perfection of
+the pure style. There is a want of _spontaneity_, and a sense of
+effort. It has been happily said that Plato’s words must have _grown_
+into their places. No one would say so of Milton or even of
+Wordsworth. About both of them there is a taint of duty; a vicious
+sense of the good man’s task. Things seem right where they are, but
+they seem to be put where they are. _Flexibility_ is essential to the
+consummate perfection of the pure style because the sensation of the
+poet’s efforts carries away our thoughts from his achievements. We are
+admiring his labours when we should be enjoying his words. But this is
+a defect in those two writers, not a defect in pure art. Of course it
+is more difficult to write in few words than to write in many; to take
+the best adjuncts, and those only, for what you have to say, instead
+of using all which comes to hand; it _is_ an additional labour if you
+write verses in a morning, to spend the rest of the day in _choosing_,
+or making those verses fewer. But a perfect artist in the pure style
+is as effortless and as natural as in any style, perhaps is more so.
+Take the well-known lines:
+
+    There was a little lawny islet
+    By anemone and violet,
+        Like mosaic, paven:
+    And its roof was flowers and leaves
+    Which the summer’s breath enweaves,
+    Where nor sun, nor showers, nor breeze,
+    Pierce the pines and tallest trees,
+        Each a gem engraven;--
+    Girt by many an azure wave
+    With which the clouds and mountains pave
+        A lake’s blue chasm.
+
+Shelley had many merits and many defects. This is not the place for a
+complete or indeed for _any_ estimate of him. But one excellence is
+most evident. His words are as flexible as any words; the rhythm of
+some modulating air seems to move them into their place without a
+struggle by the poet and almost without his knowledge. This is the
+perfection of pure art, to embody typical conceptions in the choicest,
+the fewest accidents, to embody them so that each of these accidents
+may produce its full effect, and so to embody them without effort.
+
+The extreme opposite to this pure art is what may be called ornate
+art. This species of art aims also at giving a delineation of the
+typical idea in its perfection and its fullness, but it aims at so
+doing in a manner most different. It wishes to surround the type with
+the greatest number of circumstances which it will _bear_. It works
+not by choice and selection, but by accumulation and aggregation. The
+idea is not, as in the pure style, presented with the least clothing
+which it will endure, but with the richest and most involved clothing
+that it will admit.
+
+We are fortunate in not having to hunt out of past literature an
+illustrative specimen of the ornate style. Mr. Tennyson has just given
+one admirable in itself, and most characteristic of the defects and
+the merits of this style. The story of Enoch Arden, as he has enhanced
+and presented it, is a rich and splendid composite of imagery and
+illustration. Yet how simple that story is in itself. A sailor who
+sells fish, breaks his leg, gets dismal, gives up selling fish, goes
+to sea, is wrecked on a desert island, stays there some years, on his
+return finds his wife married to a miller, speaks to a landlady on the
+subject, and dies. Told in the pure and simple, the unadorned and
+classical style, this story would not have taken three pages, but Mr.
+Tennyson has been able to make it the principal--the largest tale in
+his new volume. He has done so only by giving to every event and
+incident in the volume an accompanying commentary. He tells a great
+deal about the torrid zone which a rough sailor like Enoch Arden
+certainly would not have perceived; and he gives to the fishing
+village, to which all the characters belong, a softness and a
+fascination which such villages scarcely possess in reality.
+
+The description of the tropical island on which the sailor is thrown,
+is an absolute model of adorned art:
+
+    The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
+    And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
+    The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes,
+    The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
+    The lustre of the long convolvuluses
+    That coil’d around the stately stems, and ran
+    Ev’n to the limit of the land, the glows
+    And glories of the broad belt of the world,
+    All these he saw; but what he fain had seen
+    He could not see, the kindly human face,
+    Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard
+    The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
+    The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
+    The moving whisper of huge trees that branch’d
+    And blossom’d in the zenith, or the sweep
+    Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
+    As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
+    Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
+    A shipwreck’d sailor, waiting for a sail:
+    No sail from day to day, but every day
+    The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
+    Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
+    The blaze upon the waters to the east;
+    The blaze upon his island overhead;
+    The blaze upon the waters to the west;
+    Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
+    The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
+    The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail.
+
+No expressive circumstance can be added to this description, no
+enhancing detail suggested. A much less happy instance is the
+description of Enoch’s life before he sailed:
+
+    While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas,
+    Or often journeying landward; for in truth
+    Enoch’s white horse, and Enoch’s ocean spoil
+    In ocean-smelling osier, and his face,
+    Rough-redden’d with a thousand winter gales,
+    Not only to the market-cross were known,
+    But in the leafy lanes behind the down,
+    Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp,
+    And peacock yew-tree of the lonely Hall,
+    Whose Friday fare was Enoch’s ministering.
+
+So much has not often been made of selling fish.
+
+The essence of ornate art is in this manner to accumulate round the
+typical object, everything which can be said about it, every
+associated thought that can be connected with it without impairing the
+essence of the delineation.
+
+The first defect which strikes a student of ornate art--the first
+which arrests the mere reader of it--is what is called a want of
+simplicity. Nothing is described as it is, everything has about it an
+atmosphere of _something else_. The combined and associated thoughts,
+though they set off and heighten particular ideas and aspects of the
+central conception, yet complicate it: a simple thing--‘a daisy by the
+river’s brim’--is never left by itself, something else is put with it;
+something not more connected with it than ‘lion-whelp’ and the
+‘peacock yew-tree’ are with the ‘fresh fish for sale’ that Enoch
+carries past them. Even in the highest cases ornate art leaves upon a
+cultured and delicate taste, the conviction that it is not the highest
+art, that it is somehow excessive and over-rich, that it is not chaste
+in itself or chastening to the mind that sees it--that it is in an
+unexplained manner unsatisfactory, ‘a thing in which we feel there is
+some hidden want!’
+
+That want is a want of ‘definition’. We must all know landscapes,
+river landscapes especially, which are in the highest sense beautiful,
+which when we first see them give us a delicate pleasure; which in
+some--and these the best cases--give even a gentle sense of surprise
+that such things should be so beautiful, and yet when we come to live
+in them, to spend even a few hours in them, we seem stifled and
+oppressed. On the other hand there are people to whom the sea-shore is
+a companion, an exhilaration; and not so much for the brawl of the
+shore as for the _limited_ vastness, the finite infinite of the ocean
+as they see it. Such people often come home braced and nerved, and if
+they spoke out the truth, would have only to say, ‘We have seen the
+horizon line’; if they were let alone indeed, they would gaze on it
+hour after hour, so great to them is the fascination, so full the
+sustaining calm, which they gain from that union of form and
+greatness. To a very inferior extent, but still, perhaps, to an extent
+which most people understand better, a common arch will have the same
+effect. A bridge completes a river landscape; if of the old and
+many-arched sort it regulates by a long series of defined forms the
+vague outline of wood and river which before had nothing to measure
+it; if of the new scientific sort it introduces still more strictly a
+geometrical element; it stiffens the scenery which was before too
+soft, too delicate, too vegetable. Just such is the effect of pure
+style in literary art. It calms by conciseness; while the ornate style
+leaves on the mind a mist of beauty, an excess of fascination, a
+complication of charm, the pure style leaves behind it the simple,
+defined, measured idea, as it is, and by itself. That which is chaste
+chastens; there is a poised energy--a state half thrill, and half
+tranquillity--which pure art gives, which no other can give; a
+pleasure justified as well as felt; an ennobled satisfaction at what
+ought to satisfy us, and must ennoble us.
+
+Ornate art is to pure art what a painted statue is to an unpainted. It
+is impossible to deny that a touch of colour _does_ bring out certain
+parts, does convey certain expressions, does heighten certain
+features, but it leaves on the work as a whole, a want, as we say,
+‘of something’; a want of that inseparable chasteness which clings to
+simple sculpture, an impairing predominance of alluring details which
+impairs our satisfaction with our own satisfaction; which makes us
+doubt whether a higher being than ourselves will be satisfied even
+though we are so. In the very same manner, though the _rouge_ of
+ornate literature excites our eye, it also impairs our confidence.
+
+Mr. Arnold has justly observed that this self-justifying,
+self-_proving_ purity of style, is commoner in ancient literature than
+in modern literature, and also that Shakespeare is not a great or an
+unmixed example of it. No one can say that he is. His works are full
+of undergrowth, are full of complexity, are not models of style;
+except by a miracle nothing in the Elizabethan age could be a model of
+style; the restraining taste of that age was feebler and more mistaken
+than that of any other equally great age. Shakespeare’s mind so teemed
+with creation that he required the most just, most forcible, most
+constant restraint from without. He most needed to be guided of poets,
+and he was the least and worst guided. As a whole no one can call his
+works finished models of the pure style, or of any style. But he has
+many passages of the most pure style, passages which could be easily
+cited if space served. And we must remember that the task which
+Shakespeare undertook was the most difficult which any poet has ever
+attempted, and that it is a task in which after a million efforts
+every other poet has failed. The Elizabethan drama--as Shakespeare has
+immortalized it--undertakes to delineate in five acts, under stage
+restrictions, and in mere dialogue, a whole list of dramatis
+personae, a set of characters enough for a modern novel, and with the
+distinctness of a modern novel. Shakespeare is not content to give two
+or three great characters in solitude and in dignity, like the
+classical dramatists; he wishes to give a whole _party_ of characters
+in the play of life, and according to the nature of each. He would
+‘hold the mirror up to nature’, not to catch a monarch in a tragic
+posture, but a whole group of characters engaged in many actions,
+intent on many purposes, thinking many thoughts. There is life enough,
+there is action enough, in single plays of Shakespeare to set up an
+ancient dramatist for a long career. And Shakespeare succeeded. His
+characters, taken _en masse_, and as a whole, are as well-known as any
+novelist’s characters; cultivated men know all about them, as young
+ladies know all about Mr. Trollope’s novels. But no other dramatist
+has succeeded in such an aim. No one else’s characters are staple
+people in English literature, hereditary people whom every one knows
+all about in every generation. The contemporary dramatists, Beaumont
+and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, &c., had many merits, some of them
+were great men. But a critic must say of them the worst thing he has
+to say; ‘they were men who failed in their characteristic aim;’ they
+attempted to describe numerous sets of complicated characters, and
+they failed. No one of such characters, or hardly one, lives in common
+memory; the Faustus of Marlowe, a really great idea, is not
+remembered. They undertook to write what they could not write, five
+acts full of real characters, and in consequence, the fine individual
+things they conceived are forgotten by the mixed multitude, and known
+only to a few of the few. Of the Spanish theatre we cannot speak; but
+there are no such characters in any French tragedy: the whole aim of
+that tragedy forbade it. Goethe has added to literature a few great
+characters; he may be said almost to have added to literature the idea
+of ‘intellectual creation’,--the idea of describing great characters
+through the intellect; but he has not added to the common stock what
+Shakespeare added, a new _multitude_ of men and women; and these not
+in simple attitudes, but amid the most complex parts of life, with all
+their various natures roused, mixed, and strained. The severest art
+must have allowed many details, much overflowing circumstance to a
+poet who undertook to describe what almost defies description. Pure
+art would have _commanded_ him to use details lavishly, for only by a
+multiplicity of such could the required effect have been at all
+produced. Shakespeare could accomplish it, for his mind was a
+_spring_, an inexhaustible fountain of human nature, and it is no
+wonder that being compelled by the task of his time to let the
+fullness of his nature overflow, he sometimes let it overflow too
+much, and covered with erroneous conceits and superfluous images
+characters and conceptions which would have been far more justly, far
+more effectually, delineated with conciseness and simplicity. But
+there is an infinity of pure art _in_ Shakespeare, although there is a
+great deal else also.
+
+It will be said, if ornate art be as you say, an inferior species or
+art, why should it ever be used? If pure art be the best sort of art,
+why should it not always be used?
+
+The reason is this: literary art, as we just now explained, is
+concerned with literatesque characters in literatesque situations; and
+the _best_ art is concerned with the _most_ literatesque characters in
+the _most_ literatesque situations. Such are the subjects of pure art;
+it embodies with the fewest touches, and under the most select and
+choice circumstances, the highest conceptions; but it does not follow
+that only the best subjects are to be treated by art, and then only in
+the very best way. Human nature could not endure such a critical
+commandment as that, and it would be an erroneous criticism which gave
+it. _Any_ literatesque character may be described in literature under
+_any_ circumstances which exhibit its literatesqueness.
+
+The essence of pure art consists in its describing what is as it is,
+and this is very well for what can bear it, but there are many
+inferior things which will not bear it, and which nevertheless ought
+to be described in books. A certain kind of literature deals with
+illusions, and this kind of literature has given a colouring to the
+name romantic. A man of rare genius, and even of poetical genius, has
+gone so far as to make these illusions the true subject of
+poetry--almost the sole subject. ‘Without,’ says Father Newman, of one
+of his characters, ‘being himself a poet, he was in the season of
+poetry, in the sweet spring-time, when the year is most beautiful
+because it is new. Novelty was beauty to a heart so open and cheerful
+as his; not only because it was novelty, and had its proper charm as
+such, but because when we first see things, we see them in a gay
+confusion, which is a principal element of the poetical. As time goes
+on, and we number and sort and measure things,--as we gain views,--we
+advance towards philosophy and truth, but we recede from poetry.
+
+‘When we ourselves were young, we once on a time walked on a hot
+summer-day from Oxford to Newington--a dull road, as any one who has
+gone it knows; yet it was new to us; and we protest to you, reader,
+believe it or not, laugh or not, as you will, to us it seemed on that
+occasion quite touchingly beautiful; and a soft melancholy came over
+us, of which the shadows fall even now, when we look back upon that
+dusty, weary journey. And why? because every object which met us was
+unknown and full of mystery. A tree or two in the distance seemed the
+beginning of a great wood, or park, stretching endlessly; a hill
+implied a vale beyond, with that vale’s history; the bye-lanes, with
+their green hedges, wound on and vanished, yet were not lost to the
+imagination. Such was our first journey; but when we had gone it
+several times, the mind refused to act, the scene ceased to enchant,
+stern reality alone remained; and we thought it one of the most
+tiresome, odious roads we ever had occasion to traverse.’
+
+That is to say, that the function of the poet is to introduce a ‘gay
+confusion’, a rich medley which does not exist in the actual
+world--which perhaps could not exist in any world--but which would
+seem pretty if it did exist. Everyone who reads _Enoch Arden_ will
+perceive that this notion of all poetry is exactly applicable to this
+one poem. Whatever be made of Enoch’s ‘Ocean spoil in ocean-smelling
+osier,’ of the ‘portal-warding lion-whelp, and peacock yew-tree’,
+every one knows that in himself Enoch could not have been charming.
+People who sell fish about the country (and that is what he did,
+though Mr. Tennyson won’t speak out, and wraps it up) never are
+beautiful. As Enoch was and must be coarse, in itself the poem must
+depend for its charm on a ‘gay confusion’--on a splendid accumulation
+of impossible accessories.
+
+Mr. Tennyson knows this better than many of us--he knows the country
+world; he has proved it that no one living knows it better; he has
+painted with pure art--with art which describes what is a race perhaps
+more refined, more delicate, more conscientious, than the sailor--the
+‘Northern Farmer’, and we all know what a splendid, what a living
+thing, he has made of it. He could, if he only would, have given us
+the ideal sailor in like manner--the ideal of the natural sailor we
+mean--the characteristic present man as he lives and is. But this he
+has not chosen. He has endeavoured to describe an exceptional sailor,
+at an exceptionally refined port, performing a graceful act, an act of
+relinquishment. And with this task before him, his profound taste
+taught him that ornate art was a necessary medium--was the sole
+effectual instrument--for his purpose. It was necessary for him if
+possible to abstract the mind from reality, to induce us _not_ to
+conceive or think of sailors as they are while we are reading of his
+sailors, but to think of what a person who did not know might fancy
+sailors to be. A casual traveller on the sea-shore, with the sensitive
+mood and the romantic imagination Mr. Newman has described, might
+fancy, would fancy, a seafaring village to be like that. Accordingly,
+Mr. Tennyson has made it his aim to call off the stress of fancy from
+real life, to occupy it otherwise, to bury it with pretty accessories;
+to engage it on the ‘peacock yew-tree’, and the ‘portal-warding
+lion-whelp’. Nothing, too, can be more splendid than the description
+of the tropics as Mr. Tennyson delineates them, but a sailor would not
+have felt the tropics in that manner. The beauties of nature would not
+have so much occupied him. He would have known little of the scarlet
+shafts of sunrise and nothing of the long convolvuluses. As in
+_Robinson Crusoe_, his own petty contrivances and his small ailments
+would have been the principal subject to him. ‘For three years’, he
+might have said, ‘my back was bad, and then I put two pegs into a
+piece of drift wood and so made a chair, and after that it pleased God
+to send me a chill.’ In real life his piety would scarcely have gone
+beyond that.
+
+It will indeed be said, that though the sailor had no words for, and
+even no explicit consciousness of the splendid details of the torrid
+zone, yet that he had, notwithstanding, a dim latent inexpressible
+conception of them: though he could not speak of them or describe
+them, yet they were much to him. And doubtless such is the case. Rude
+people are impressed by what is beautiful--deeply impressed--though
+they could not describe what they see, or what they feel. But what is
+absurd in Mr. Tennyson’s description--absurd when we abstract it from
+the gorgeous additions and ornaments with which Mr. Tennyson distracts
+us--is, that his hero feels nothing else but these great splendours.
+We hear nothing of the physical ailments, the rough devices, the low
+superstitions, which really would have been the _first_ things, the
+favourite and principal occupations of his mind. Just so when he gets
+home he _may_ have had such fine sentiments, though it is odd, and he
+_may_ have spoken of them to his landlady, though that is odder
+still--but it is incredible that his whole mind should be made up of
+fine sentiments. Beside those sweet feelings, if he had them, there
+must have been many more obvious, more prosaic, and some perhaps more
+healthy. Mr. Tennyson has shown a profound judgement in distracting us
+as he does. He has given us a classic delineation of the ‘Northern
+Farmer’ with no ornament at all--as bare a thing as can be--because he
+then wanted to describe a true type of real men: he has given us a
+sailor crowded all over with ornament and illustration, because he
+then wanted to describe an unreal type of fancied men, not sailors as
+they are, but sailors as they might be wished.
+
+Another prominent element in _Enoch Arden_ is yet more suitable to,
+yet more requires the aid of, ornate art. Mr. Tennyson undertook to
+deal with _half belief_. The presentiments which Annie feels are
+exactly of that sort which everybody has felt, and which every one has
+half believed--which hardly any one has more than half believed.
+Almost every one, it has been said, would be angry if any one else
+reported that he believed in ghosts; yet hardly any one, when thinking
+by himself, wholly disbelieves them. Just so such presentiments as Mr.
+Tennyson depicts, impress the inner mind so much that the outer
+mind--the rational understanding--hardly likes to consider them nicely
+or to discuss them sceptically. For these dubious themes an ornate or
+complex style is needful. Classical art speaks out what it has to say
+plainly and simply. Pure style cannot hesitate; it describes in
+concisest outline what is, as it is. If a poet really believes in
+presentiments he can speak out in pure style. One who could have been
+a poet--one of the few in any age of whom one can say certainly that
+they could have been, and have not been--has spoken thus:
+
+    When Heaven sends sorrow,
+      Warnings go first,
+      Lest it should burst
+      With stunning might
+      On souls too bright
+        To fear the morrow.
+
+    Can science bear us
+      To the hid springs
+      Of human things?
+      Why may not dream,
+      Or thought’s day-gleam,
+        Startle, yet cheer us?
+
+    Are such thoughts fetters,
+      While faith disowns
+      Dread of earth’s tones,
+      Recks but Heaven’s call,
+      And on the wall,
+        Reads but Heaven’s letters?
+
+But if a poet is not sure whether presentiments are true or not true;
+if he wishes to leave his readers in doubt; if he wishes an atmosphere
+of indistinct illusion and of moving shadow, he must use the romantic
+style, the style of miscellaneous adjunct, the style ‘which shirks,
+not meets’ your intellect, the style which as you are scrutinizing
+disappears.
+
+Nor is this all, or even the principal lesson, which _Enoch Arden_ may
+suggest to us, of the use of ornate art. That art is the appropriate
+art for an _unpleasing type_. Many of the characters of real life, if
+brought distinctly, prominently, and plainly before the mind, as they
+really are, if shown in their inner nature, their actual essence, are
+doubtless very unpleasant. They would be horrid to meet and horrid to
+think of. We fear it must be owned that Enoch Arden is this kind of
+person. A dirty sailor who did _not_ go home to his wife is not an
+agreeable being: a varnish must be put on him to make him shine. It is
+true that he acts rightly; that he is very good. But such is human
+nature that it finds a little tameness in mere morality. Mere virtue
+belongs to a charity school-girl, and has a taint of the catechism.
+All of us feel this, though most of us are too timid, too scrupulous,
+too anxious about the virtue of others, to speak out. We are ashamed
+of our nature in this respect, but it is not the less our nature. And
+if we look deeper into the matter there are many reasons why we should
+not be ashamed of it. The soul of man, and as we necessarily believe
+of beings greater than man, has many parts beside its moral part. It
+has an intellectual part, an artistic part, even a religious part, in
+which mere morals have no share. In Shakespeare or Goethe, even in
+Newton or Archimedes, there is much which will not be cut down to the
+shape of the commandments. They have thoughts, feelings,
+hopes--immortal thoughts and hopes--which have influenced the life of
+men, and the souls of men, ever since their age, but which the ‘whole
+duty of man’, the ethical compendium, does not recognize. Nothing is
+more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind. A highly
+developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature,
+an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature,
+is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature--a good
+bit, of course, but a bit only--in disproportionate, unnatural, and
+revolting prominence; and, therefore, unless an artist use delicate
+care, we are offended. The dismal act of a squalid man needed many
+condiments to make it pleasant, and therefore Mr. Tennyson was right
+to mix them subtly and to use them freely.
+
+A mere act of self-denial can indeed scarcely be pleasant upon paper.
+An heroic struggle with an external adversary, even though it end in a
+defeat, may easily be made attractive. Human nature likes to see
+itself look grand, and it looks grand when it is making a brave
+struggle with foreign foes. But it does not look grand when it is
+divided against itself. An excellent person striving with temptation
+is a very admirable being in reality, but he is not a pleasant being
+in description. We hope he will win and overcome his temptation, but
+we feel that he would be a more interesting being, a higher being, if
+he had not felt that temptation so much. The poet must make the
+struggle great in order to make the self-denial virtuous, and if the
+struggle be too great, we are apt to feel some mixture of contempt.
+The internal metaphysics of a divided nature are but an inferior
+subject for art, and if they are to be made attractive, much else must
+be combined with them. If the excellence of _Hamlet_ had depended on
+the ethical qualities of Hamlet, it would not have been the
+masterpiece of our literature. He acts virtuously of course, and kills
+the people he ought to kill, but Shakespeare knew that such goodness
+would not much interest the pit. He made him a handsome prince, and a
+puzzling meditative character; these secular qualities relieve his
+moral excellence, and so he becomes ‘nice’. In proportion as an artist
+has to deal with types essentially imperfect, he must disguise their
+imperfections; he must accumulate around them as many first-rate
+accessories as may make his readers forget that they are themselves
+second-rate. The sudden _millionaires_ of the present day hope to
+disguise their social defects by buying old places, and hiding among
+aristocratic furniture; just so a great artist who has to deal with
+characters artistically imperfect will use an ornate style, will fit
+them into a scene where there is much else to look at.
+
+For these reasons ornate art is within the limits as legitimate as
+pure art. It does what pure art could not do. The very excellence of
+pure art confines its employment. Precisely because it gives the best
+things by themselves and exactly as they are, it fails when it is
+necessary to describe inferior things among other things, with a list
+of enhancements and a crowd of accompaniments that in reality do not
+belong to it. Illusion, half belief, unpleasant types, imperfect
+types, are as much the proper sphere of ornate art, as an inferior
+landscape is the proper sphere for the true efficacy of moonlight. A
+really great landscape needs sunlight and bears sunlight; but
+moonlight is an equalizer of beauties; it gives a romantic unreality
+to what will not stand the bare truth. And just so does romantic art.
+
+There is, however, a third kind of art which differs from these on the
+point in which they most resemble one another. Ornate art and pure art
+have this in common, that they paint the types of literature in as
+good perfection as they can. Ornate art, indeed, uses undue disguises
+and unreal enhancements; it does not confine itself to the best types;
+on the contrary it is its office to make the best of imperfect types
+and lame approximations; but ornate art, as much as pure art, catches
+its subject in the best light it can, takes the most developed aspect
+of it which it can find, and throws upon it the most congruous colours
+it can use. But grotesque art does just the contrary. It takes the
+type, so to say, _in difficulties_. It gives a representation of it in
+its minimum development, amid the circumstances least favourable to
+it, just while it is struggling with obstacles, just where it is
+encumbered with incongruities. It deals, to use the language of
+science, not with normal types but with abnormal specimens; to use the
+language of old philosophy, not with what nature is striving to be,
+but with what by some lapse she has happened to become.
+
+This art works by contrast. It enables you to see, it makes you see,
+the perfect type by painting the opposite deviation. It shows you what
+ought to be by what ought not to be, when complete it reminds you of
+the perfect image, by showing you the distorted and imperfect image.
+Of this art we possess in the present generation one prolific master.
+Mr. Browning is an artist working by incongruity. Possibly hardly one
+of his most considerable efforts can be found which is not great
+because of its odd mixture. He puts together things which no one else
+would have put together, and produces on our minds a result which no
+one else would have produced, or tried to produce. His admirers may
+not like all we may have to say of him. But in our way we too are
+among his admirers. No one ever read him without seeing not only his
+great ability but his great _mind_. He not only possesses superficial
+useable talents, but the strong something, the inner secret something
+which uses them and controls them; he is great, not in mere
+accomplishments, but in himself. He has applied a hard strong
+intellect to real life; he has applied the same intellect to the
+problems of his age. He has striven to know what _is_: he has
+endeavoured not to be cheated by counterfeits, not to be infatuated
+with illusions. His heart is in what he says. He has battered his
+brain against his creed till he believes it. He has accomplishments
+too, the more effective because they are mixed. He is at once a
+student of mysticism, and a citizen of the world. He brings to the
+club sofa distinct visions of old creeds, intense images of strange
+thoughts: he takes to the bookish student tidings of wild Bohemia, and
+little traces of the _demi-monde_. He puts down what is good for the
+naughty and what is naughty for the good. Over women his easier
+writings exercise that imperious power which belongs to the writings
+of a great man of the world upon such matters. He knows women, and
+therefore they wish to know him. If we blame many of Browning’s
+efforts, it is in the interest of art, and not from a wish to hurt or
+degrade him.
+
+If we wanted to illustrate the nature of grotesque art by an
+exaggerated instance we should have selected a poem which the chance
+of late publication brings us in this new volume. Mr. Browning has
+undertaken to describe what may be called _mind in difficulties_--mind
+set to make out the universe under the worst and hardest
+circumstances. He takes ‘Caliban’, not perhaps exactly Shakespeare’s
+Caliban, but an analogous and worse creature; a strong thinking power,
+but a nasty creature--a gross animal, uncontrolled and unelevated by
+any feeling of religion or duty. The delineation of him will show that
+Mr. Browning does not wish to take undue advantage of his readers by a
+choice of nice subjects.
+
+    ’Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
+    Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,
+    With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin;
+    And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
+    And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
+    Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh;
+    And while above his head a pompion-plant,
+    Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
+    Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
+    And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
+    And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch:
+
+This pleasant creature proceeds to give his idea of the origin of the
+Universe, and it is as follows. Caliban speaks in the third person,
+and is of opinion that the maker of the Universe took to making it on
+account of his personal discomfort:
+
+    Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
+    ‘Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.
+
+    ‘Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
+    But not the stars: the stars came otherwise;
+    Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
+    Also this isle, what lives, and grows thereon,
+    And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.
+
+    ‘Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:
+    He hated that He cannot change His cold,
+    Nor cure its ache. ’Hath spied an icy fish
+    That longed to ’scape the rock-stream where she lived,
+    And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
+    O’ the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
+    A crystal spike ’twixt two warm walls of wave;
+    Only she ever sickened, found repulse
+    At the other kind of water, not her life,
+    (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o’ the sun)
+    Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,
+    And in her old bounds buried her despair,
+    Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.
+
+    ‘Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,
+    Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
+    Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
+    Yon auk, one fire-eye, in a ball of foam,
+    That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
+    He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
+    By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
+    That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
+    And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
+    But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
+    That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
+    About their hole--He made all these and more,
+    Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?
+
+It may seem perhaps to most readers that these lines are very
+difficult, and that they are unpleasant. And so they are. We quote
+them to illustrate, not the _success_ of grotesque art, but the
+_nature_ of grotesque art. It shows the end at which this species of
+art aims, and if it fails, it is from over-boldness in the choice of a
+subject by the artist, or from the defects of its execution. A
+thinking faculty more in difficulties--a great type,--an inquisitive,
+searching intellect under more disagreeable conditions, with worse
+helps, more likely to find falsehood, less likely to find truth, can
+scarcely be imagined. Nor is the mere description of the thought at
+all bad: on the contrary, if we closely examine it, it is very clever.
+Hardly any one could have amassed so many ideas at once nasty and
+suitable. But scarcely any readers--any casual readers--who are not of
+the sect of Mr. Browning’s admirers will be able to examine it enough
+to appreciate it. From a defect, partly of subject, and partly of
+style, many of Mr. Browning’s works make a demand upon the reader’s
+zeal and sense of duty to which the nature of most readers is unequal.
+They have on the turf the convenient expression ‘staying power’: some
+horses can hold on and others cannot. But hardly any reader not of
+especial and peculiar nature can hold on through such composition.
+There is not enough of ‘staying power’ in human nature. One of his
+greatest admirers once owned to us that he seldom or never began a new
+poem without looking on in advance, and foreseeing with caution what
+length of intellectual adventure he was about to commence. Whoever
+will work hard at such poems will find much mind in them: they are a
+sort of quarry of ideas, but whoever goes there will find these ideas
+in such a jagged, ugly, useless shape that he can hardly bear them.
+
+We are not judging Mr. Browning simply from a hasty recent production.
+All poets are liable to misconceptions, and if such a piece as
+_Caliban upon Setebos_ were an isolated error, a venial and particular
+exception, we should have given it no prominence. We have put it
+forward because it just elucidates both our subject and the
+characteristics of Mr. Browning. But many other of his best known
+pieces do so almost equally; what several of his devotees think his
+best piece is quite enough illustrative for anything we want. It
+appears that on Holy Cross day at Rome the Jews were obliged to listen
+to a Christian sermon in the hope of their conversion, though this is,
+according to Mr. Browning, what they really said when they came away:
+
+    Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
+    Blessedest Thursday’s the fat of the week,
+    Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough,
+    Stinking and savoury, smug and gruff,
+    Take the church-road, for the bell’s due chime
+    Gives us the summons--’t is sermon-time.
+
+    Boh, here’s Barnabas! Job, that’s you?
+    Up stumps Solomon--bustling too?
+    Shame, man! greedy beyond your years
+    To handsel the bishop’s shaving-shears?
+    Fair play’s a jewel! leave friends in the lurch?
+    Stand on a line ere you start for the church.
+
+    Higgledy, piggledy, packed we lie,
+    Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,
+    Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,
+    Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.
+    Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs
+    And buzz for the bishop--here he comes.
+
+And after similar nice remarks for a church, the edified congregation
+concludes:
+
+    But now, while the scapegoats leave our flock,
+    And the rest sit silent and count the clock,
+    Since forced to muse the appointed time
+    On these precious facts and truths sublime,--
+    Let us fitly employ it, under our breath,
+    In saying Ben Ezra’s Song of Death.
+
+    For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died,
+    Called sons and sons’ sons to his side,
+    And spoke, ‘This world has been harsh and strange;
+    Something is wrong: there needeth a change.
+    But what, or where? at the last, or first?
+    In one point only we sinned, at worst.
+
+    ‘The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,
+    And again in his border see Israel set.
+    When Judah beholds Jerusalem,
+    The stranger-seed shall be joined to them:
+    To Jacob’s House shall the Gentiles cleave,
+    So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.
+
+    ‘Ay, the children of the chosen race
+    Shall carry and bring them to their place:
+    In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,
+    Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blame
+    When the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o’er
+    The oppressor triumph for evermore?
+
+    ‘God spoke, and gave us the word to keep,
+    Bade never fold the hands nor sleep
+    ’Mid a faithless world,--at watch and ward,
+    Till Christ at the end relieve our guard.
+    By His servant Moses the watch was set:
+    Though near upon cock-crow, we keep it yet.
+
+    ‘Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid-watch came,
+    By the starlight, naming a dubious Name!
+    And if, too heavy with sleep--too rash
+    With fear--O Thou, if that martyr-gash
+    Fell on Thee coming to take Thine own,
+    And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne--
+
+    ‘Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.
+    But, the judgement over, join sides with us!
+    Thine too is the cause! and not more Thine
+    Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,
+    Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,
+    Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!
+
+    ‘We withstood Christ then? be mindful how
+    At least we withstand Barabbas now!
+    Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,
+    To have called these--Christians, had we dared!
+    Let defiance to them pay mistrust of Thee,
+    And Rome make amends for Calvary!
+
+    ‘By the torture, prolonged from age to age,
+    By the infamy, Israel’s heritage,
+    By the Ghetto’s plague, by the garb’s disgrace,
+    By the badge of shame, by the felon’s place,
+    By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,
+    And the summons to Christian fellowship,--
+
+    ‘We boast our proof that at least the Jew
+    Would wrest Christ’s name from the Devil’s crew.
+    Thy face took never so deep a shade
+    But we fought them in it, God our aid!
+    A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band,
+    South, East, and on to the Pleasant Land!’
+
+It is very natural that a poet whose wishes incline, or whose genius
+conducts him to a grotesque art, should be attracted towards mediaeval
+subjects. There is no age whose legends are so full of grotesque
+subjects, and no age where real life was so fit to suggest them. Then,
+more than at any other time, good principles have been under great
+hardships. The vestiges of ancient civilization, the germs of modern
+civilization, the little remains of what had been, the small
+beginnings of what is, were buried under a cumbrous mass of barbarism
+and cruelty. Good elements hidden in horrid accompaniments are the
+special theme of grotesque art, and these mediaeval life and legends
+afford more copiously than could have been furnished before
+Christianity gave its new elements of good, or since modern
+civilization has removed some few at least of the old elements of
+destruction. A _buried_ life like the spiritual mediaeval was Mr.
+Browning’s natural element, and he was right to be attracted by it.
+His mistake has been, that he has not made it pleasant; that he has
+forced his art to topics on which no one could charm, or on which he,
+at any rate, could not; that on these occasions and in these poems he
+has failed in fascinating men and women of sane taste.
+
+We say ‘sane’ because there is a most formidable and estimable
+_insane_ taste. The will has great though indirect power over the
+taste, just as it has over the belief. There are some horrid beliefs
+from which human nature revolts, from which at first it shrinks, to
+which, at first, no effort can force it. But if we fix the mind upon
+them they have a power over us just because of their natural
+offensiveness. They are like the sight of human blood: experienced
+soldiers tell us that at first men are sickened by the smell and
+newness of blood almost to death and fainting, but that as soon as
+they harden their hearts and stiffen their minds, as soon as they
+_will_ bear it, then comes an appetite for slaughter, a tendency to
+gloat on carnage, to love blood, at least for the moment, with a deep
+eager love. It is a principle that if we put down a healthy
+instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy
+insane attraction. For this reason the most earnest truth-seeking men
+fall into the worst delusions; they will not let their mind alone;
+they force it towards some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a
+conceit of intellect recommends, and nature punishes their disregard
+of her warning by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so
+the most industrious critics get the most admiration. They think it
+unjust to rest in their instinctive natural horror: they overcome it,
+and angry nature gives them over to ugly poems and marries them to
+detestable stanzas.
+
+Mr. Browning possibly, and some of the worst of Mr. Browning’s
+admirers certainly, will say that these grotesque objects exist in
+real life, and therefore they ought to be, at least may be, described
+in art. But though pleasure is not the end of poetry, pleasing is a
+condition of poetry. An exceptional monstrosity of horrid ugliness
+cannot be made pleasing, except it be made to suggest--to recall--the
+perfection, the beauty, from which it is a deviation. Perhaps in
+extreme cases no art is equal to this; but then such self-imposed
+problems should not be worked by the artist; these out-of-the-way and
+detestable subjects should be let alone by him. It is rather
+characteristic of Mr. Browning to neglect this rule. He is the most of
+a realist, and the least of an idealist of any poet we know. He
+evidently sympathizes with some part at least of Bishop Blougram’s
+apology. Anyhow this world exists. ‘There _is_ good wine--there _are_
+pretty women--there _are_ comfortable benefices--there _is_ money, and
+it is pleasant to spend it. Accept the creed of your age and you get
+these, reject that creed and you lose them. And for what do you lose
+them? For a fancy creed of your own, which no one else will accept,
+which hardly any one will call a “creed”, which most people will
+consider a sort of unbelief.’ Again, Mr. Browning evidently loves what
+we may call the realism, the grotesque realism, of orthodox
+christianity. Many parts of it in which great divines have felt keen
+difficulties are quite pleasant to him. He must _see_ his religion, he
+must nave an ‘object-lesson’ in believing. He must have a creed that
+will _take_, which wins and holds the miscellaneous world, which stout
+men will heed, which nice women will adore. The spare moments of
+solitary religion--the ‘obdurate questionings’, the high ‘instincts’,
+the ‘first affections’, the ‘shadowy recollections’,
+
+          Which, do they what they may,
+    Are yet the fountain-light of all our day--
+    Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
+
+the great but vague faith--the unutterable tenets seem to him
+worthless, visionary; they are not enough immersed in matter; they
+move about ‘in worlds not realized’. We wish he could be tried like
+the prophet once; he would have found God in the earthquake and the
+storm; he could have deciphered from them a bracing and a rough
+religion: he would have known that crude men and ignorant women felt
+them too, and he would accordingly have trusted them; but he would
+have distrusted and disregarded the ‘still small voice’; he would have
+said it was ‘fancy’--a thing you thought you heard to-day, but were
+not sure you had heard to-morrow: he would call it a nice illusion, an
+immaterial prettiness; he would ask triumphantly ‘How are you to get
+the mass of men to heed this little thing?’ he would have persevered
+and insisted ‘_My wife_ does not hear it’.
+
+But although a suspicion of beauty, and a taste for ugly reality, have
+led Mr. Browning to exaggerate the functions, and to caricature the
+nature of grotesque art, we own or rather we maintain that he has
+given many excellent specimens of that art within its proper
+boundaries and limits. Take an example, his picture of what we may
+call the _bourgeois_ nature in _difficulties_; in the utmost
+difficulty, in contact with magic and the supernatural. He has made of
+it something homely, comic, true; reminding us of what _bourgeois_
+nature really is. By showing us the type under abnormal conditions,
+he reminds us of the type under its best and most satisfactory
+conditions--
+
+    Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick,
+      By famous Hanover city;
+    The river Weser, deep and wide,
+    Washes its walls on the southern side;
+    A pleasanter spot you never spied;
+      But, when begins my ditty,
+    Almost five hundred years ago,
+    To see the townsfolk suffer so
+      From vermin was a pity.
+
+      Rats!
+    They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
+    And bit the babies in the cradles,
+    And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
+      And licked the soup from the cook’s own ladles,
+    Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
+    Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
+    And even spoiled the women’s chats
+      By drowning their speaking
+      With shrieking and squeaking
+    In fifty different sharps and flats.
+
+    At last the people in a body
+      To the Town Hall came flocking:
+    ‘’Tis clear’, cried they, ‘our Mayor’s a noddy;
+      And as for our Corporation--shocking
+    To think we buy gowns lined with ermine
+    For dolts that can’t or won’t determine
+    What’s best to rid us of our vermin!
+    You hope, because you’re old and obese,
+    To find in the furry civic robe ease?
+    Rouse up, Sirs! Give your brains a racking
+    To find the remedy we’re lacking,
+    Or, sure as fate, we’ll send you packing!’
+    At this the Mayor and Corporation
+    Quaked with a mighty consternation.
+
+A person of musical abilities proposes to extricate the civic
+dignitaries from the difficulty, and they promise him a thousand
+guilders if he does.
+
+    Into the street the Piper stept,
+      Smiling first a little smile,
+    As if he knew what magic slept
+      In his quiet pipe the while;
+    Then, like a musical adept,
+    To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
+    And green and blue his sharp eye twinkled
+    Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled;
+    And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered
+    You heard as if an army muttered;
+    And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
+    And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
+    And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
+    Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
+    Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
+    Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
+      Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
+    Cooking tails and pricking whiskers,
+      Families by tens and dozens,
+    Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives--
+    Followed the Piper for their lives.
+    From street to street he piped advancing,
+    And step for step they followed dancing,
+    Until they came to the river Weser,
+    Wherein all plunged and perished!
+    --Save one who, stout as Julius Cæsar,
+    Swam across and lived to carry
+    (As he, the manuscript he cherished)
+    To Rat-land home his commentary:
+    Which was, ‘At the first shrill notes of the pipe,
+    I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
+    And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
+    Into a cider-press’s gripe:
+    And a moving away of pickle-tub boards,
+    And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,
+    And a drawing the corks of train-oil flasks,
+    And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks:
+    And it seemed as if a voice
+    (Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
+    Is breathed) called out, “Oh rats, rejoice!
+    The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!
+    So, munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
+    Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!”
+    And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,
+    All ready staved, like a great sun shone
+    Glorious scarce an inch before me,
+    Just as methought it said, “Come, bore me!”
+    --I found the Weser rolling o’er me.’
+    You should have heard the Hamelin people
+    Ringing the bells till they rocked the steeple.
+    ‘Go’, cried the Mayor, ‘and get long poles,
+    Poke out the nests and block up the holes!
+    Consult with carpenters and builders,
+    And leave in our town not even a trace
+    Of the rats!’--when suddenly, up the face
+    Of the Piper perked in the market-place,
+    With a ‘First, if you please, my thousand guilders!’
+    A thousand guilders! The Mayor looked blue;
+    So did the Corporation too.
+    For council dinners made rare havoc
+    With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock;
+    And half the money would replenish
+    Their cellar’s biggest butt with Rhenish.
+    To pay this sum to a wandering fellow
+    With a gipsy coat of red and yellow!
+    ‘Beside,’ quoth the Mayor with a knowing wink,
+    ‘Our business was done at the river’s brink;
+    We saw with our eyes the vermin sink,
+    And what’s dead can’t come to life, I think.
+    So, friend, we’re not the folks to shrink
+    From the duty of giving you something for drink,
+    And a matter of money to put in your poke;
+    But as for the guilders, what we spoke
+    Of them, as you very well know, was in joke.
+    Besides, our losses have made us thrifty.
+    A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!’
+
+    The piper’s face fell, and he cried,
+    ‘No trifling! I can’t wait, beside!
+    I’ve promised to visit by dinner time
+    Bagdat, and accept the prime
+    Of the Head-Cook’s pottage, all he’s rich in,
+    For having left, in the Caliph’s kitchen,
+    Of a nest of scorpions no survivor--
+    With him I proved no bargain-driver,
+    With you, don’t think I’ll bate a stiver!
+    And folks who put me in a passion
+    May find me pipe to another fashion.’
+
+    ‘How?’ cried the Mayor, ‘d’ye think I’ll brook
+    Being worse treated than a Cook?
+    Insulted by a lazy ribald
+    With idle pipe and vesture piebald?
+    You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,
+    Blow your pipe there till you burst!’
+
+    Once more he stept into the street
+      And to his lips again
+    Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;
+      And ere he blew three notes (such sweet
+    Soft notes as yet musician’s cunning
+      Never gave the enraptured air)
+    There was a rustling, that seemed like a bustling
+    Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling.
+    Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,
+    Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering,
+    And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,
+    Out came the children running.
+
+    All the little boys and girls,
+    With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
+    And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls.
+    Tripping and skipping ran merrily after
+    The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    And I must not omit to say
+    That in Transylvania there’s a tribe
+    Of alien people that ascribe
+    The outlandish ways and dress
+    On which their neighbours lay such stress,
+    To their fathers and mothers having risen
+    Out of some subterraneous prison
+    Into which they were trepanned
+    Long time ago in a mighty band
+    Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
+    But how or why, they don’t understand.
+
+Something more we had to say of Mr. Browning, but we must stop. It is
+singularly characteristic of this age that the poems which rise to the
+surface should be examples of ornate art, and grotesque art, not of
+pure art. We live in the realm of the _half_ educated. The number of
+readers grows daily, but the quality of readers does not improve
+rapidly. The middle class is scattered, headless; it is well-meaning
+but aimless; wishing to be wise, but ignorant how to be wise. The
+aristocracy of England never was a literary aristocracy, never even in
+the days of its full power, of its unquestioned predominance, did it
+guide--did it even seriously try to guide--the taste of England.
+Without guidance young men and tired men are thrown amongst a mass of
+books; they have to choose which they like; many of them would much
+like to improve their culture, to chasten their taste, if they knew
+how. But left to themselves they take, not pure art, but showy art;
+not that which permanently relieves the eye and makes it happy
+whenever it looks, and as long as it looks, but _glaring_ art which
+catches and arrests the eye for a moment, but which in the end
+fatigues it. But before the wholesome remedy of nature--the
+fatigue--arrives, the hasty reader has passed on to some new
+excitement, which in its turn stimulates for an instant, and then is
+passed by for ever. These conditions are not favourable to the due
+appreciation of pure art--of that art which must be known before it is
+admired--which must have fastened irrevocably on the brain before you
+appreciate it--which you must love ere it will seem worthy of your
+love. Women too, whose voice in literature counts as well as that of
+men--and in a light literature counts for more than that of
+men--women, such as we know them, such as they are likely to be, ever
+prefer a delicate unreality to a true or firm art. A dressy
+literature, an exaggerated literature seem to be fated to us. These
+are our curses, as other times had theirs.
+
+                                   And yet
+    Think not the living times forget,
+    Ages of heroes fought and fell,
+    That Homer in the end might tell;
+    O’er grovelling generations past
+    Upstood the Gothic fane at last;
+    And countless hearts in countless years
+    Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,
+    Rude laughter and unmeaning tears;
+    Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome
+    The pure perfection of her dome.
+    Others I doubt not, if not we,
+    The issue of our toils shall see;
+    And (they forgotten and unknown)
+    Young children gather as their own
+    The harvest that the dead had sown.
+
+
+
+
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+1839-1894
+
+COLERIDGE’S WRITINGS (1866)
+
+_Conversations, Letters, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge._ Edited
+by THOMAS ALLSOP. London. 1864.
+
+
+Forms of intellectual and spiritual culture often exercise their
+subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing from them.
+Searching and irresistible as are the changes of the human spirit on
+its way to perfection, there is yet so much elasticity of temper that
+what must pass away sooner or later is not disengaged all at once even
+from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by one law of
+development evolves ideas, moralities, modes of inward life, and
+represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier
+growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the
+whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the
+spectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined
+by the antagonism of the new. That current of new life chastens them
+as they contend against it. Weaker minds do not perceive the change;
+clearer minds abandon themselves to it. To feel the change everywhere,
+yet not to abandon oneself to it, is a situation of difficulty and
+contention. Communicating in this way to the passing stage of culture
+the charm of what is chastened, high-strung, athletic, they yet
+detach the highest minds from the past by pressing home its
+difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such is the charm of
+Julian, of St. Louis, perhaps of Luther; in the narrower compass of
+modern times, of Dr. Newman and Lacordaire; it is also the peculiar
+charm of Coleridge.
+
+Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the
+‘relative’ spirit in place of the ‘absolute’. Ancient philosophy
+sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in
+a necessary formula, and types of life in a classification by ‘kinds’
+or _genera_. To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known
+except relatively under conditions. An ancient philosopher indeed
+started a philosophy of the relative, but only as an enigma. So the
+germs of almost all philosophical ideas were enfolded in the mind of
+antiquity, and fecundated one by one in after ages by the external
+influences of art, religion, culture in the natural sciences,
+belonging to a particular generation, which suddenly becomes
+preoccupied by a formula or theory, not so much new as penetrated by a
+new meaning and expressiveness. So the idea of ‘the relative’ has been
+fecundated in modern times by the influence of the sciences of
+observation. These sciences reveal types of life evanescing into each
+other by inexpressible refinements of change. Things pass into their
+opposites by accumulation of undefinable quantities. The growth of
+those sciences consists in a continual analysis of facts of rough and
+general observation into groups of facts more precise and minute. A
+faculty for truth is a power of distinguishing and fixing delicate and
+fugitive details. The moral world is ever in contact with the
+physical; the relative spirit has invaded moral philosophy from the
+ground of the inductive science. There it has started a new analysis
+of the relations of body and mind, good and evil, freedom and
+necessity. Hard and abstract moralities are yielding to a more exact
+estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life. Always, as an
+organism increases in perfection the conditions of its life become
+more complex. Man is the most complex of the products of nature.
+Character merges into temperament; the nervous system refines itself
+into intellect. His physical organism is played upon not only by the
+physical conditions about it, but by remote laws of inheritance, the
+vibrations of long past acts reaching him in the midst of the new
+order of things in which he lives. When we have estimated these
+conditions he is not yet simple and isolated; for the mind of the
+race, the character of the age, sway him this way or that through the
+medium of language and ideas. It seems as if the most opposite
+statements about him were alike true; he is so receptive, all the
+influences of the world and of society ceaselessly playing upon him,
+so that every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a
+stray word, or glance, or touch. The truth of these relations
+experience gives us; not the truth of eternal outlines effected once
+for all, but a world of fine gradations and subtly linked conditions,
+shifting intricately as we ourselves change; and bids us by constant
+clearing of the organs of observation and perfecting of analysis to
+make what we can of these. To the intellect, to the critical spirit,
+these subtleties of effect are more precious than anything else. What
+is lost in precision of form is gained in intricacy of expression. To
+suppose that what is called ‘ontology’ is what the speculative instinct
+seeks, is the misconception of a backward school of logicians. Who would
+change the colour or curve of a roseleaf for that οὐσία ἀχρώματος,
+ἀσχημάτιστος, ἀναφής. A transcendentalism that makes what is abstract
+more excellent than what is concrete has nothing akin to the leading
+philosophies of the world. The true illustration of the speculative
+temper is not the Hindoo, lost to sense, understanding, individuality;
+but such an one as Goethe, to whom every moment of life brought its
+share of experimental, individual knowledge, by whom no touch of the
+world of form, colour, and passion was disregarded.
+
+The literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle against
+the application of the relative spirit to moral and religious
+questions. Everywhere he is restlessly scheming to apprehend the
+absolute; to affirm it effectively; to get it acknowledged. Coleridge
+failed in that attempt, happily even for him, for it was a struggle
+against the increasing life of the mind itself. The real loss was,
+that this controversial interest betrayed him into a direction which
+was not for him the path of the highest intellectual success; a
+direction in which his artistic talent could never find the conditions
+of its perfection. Still, there is so much witchery about his poems,
+that it is as a poet that he will most probably be permanently
+remembered. How did his choice of a controversial interest, his
+determination to affirm the absolute, weaken or modify his poetical
+gift?
+
+In 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the composition of a volume of
+poems--the _Lyrical Ballads_. What Wordsworth then wrote is already
+vibrant with that blithe _élan_ which carried him to final happiness
+and self-possession. In Coleridge we feel already that faintness and
+obscure dejection which cling like some contagious damp to all his
+writings. Wordsworth was to be distinguished by a joyful and
+penetrative conviction of the existence of certain latent affinities
+between nature and the human mind, which reciprocally gild the mind
+and nature with a kind of ‘heavenly alchemy’:
+
+                 ... My voice proclaims
+    How exquisitely the individual mind
+    (And the progressive powers perhaps no less
+    Of the whole species) to the external world
+    Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too,
+    The external world is fitted to the mind:
+    And the creation, by no lower name
+    Can it be called, which they with blended might
+    Accomplish.[37]
+
+    [37] Preface to the _Excursion_.
+
+In Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken dreaming over the
+aspects and transitions of nature, a reflective, but altogether
+unformulated, analysis of them.
+
+There are in Coleridge’s poems expressions of this conviction as deep
+as Wordsworth’s. But Coleridge could never have abandoned himself to
+the dream as Wordsworth did, because the first condition of such
+abandonment is an unvexed quietness of heart. No one can read the
+_Lines composed above Tintern_ without feeling how potent the physical
+element was among the conditions of Wordsworth’s genius:--‘felt in the
+blood and felt along the heart,’--‘My whole life I have lived in
+quiet thought.’ The stimulus which most artists require from nature he
+can renounce. He leaves the ready-made glory of the Swiss mountains to
+reflect a glory on a mouldering leaf. He loves best to watch the
+floating thistledown, because of its hint at an unseen life in the
+air. Coleridge’s temperament, ἀεὶ ἐν σφοδρᾷ ὀρέξει, with its faintness,
+its grieved dejection, could never have been like that.
+
+          My genial spirits fail
+          And what can these avail
+    To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
+          It were a vain endeavour,
+          Though I should gaze for ever
+    On that green light that lingers in the west:
+    I may not hope from outward forms to win
+    The passion and the life whose fountains are within.
+
+It is that flawless temperament in Wordsworth which keeps his
+conviction of a latent intelligence in nature within the limits of
+sentiment or instinct, and confines it, to those delicate and subdued
+shades of expression which perfect art allows. In sadder dispositions,
+that is in the majority of cases, where such a conviction has existed,
+it has stiffened into a formula, it has frozen into a scientific or
+pseudo-scientific theory. For the perception of those affinities
+brings one so near the absorbing speculative problems of
+life--optimism, the proportion of man to his place in nature, his
+prospects in relation to it--that it ever tends to become theory
+through their contagion. Even in Goethe, who has brilliantly handled
+the subject in his lyrics entitled _Gott und Welt_, it becomes
+something stiffer than poetry; it is tempered by the ‘pale cast’ of
+his technical knowledge of the nature of colours, of anatomy, of the
+metamorphosis of plants.
+
+That, however, which had only a limited power over Coleridge as
+sentiment, entirely possessed him as a philosophical idea. We shall
+see in what follows how deep its power was, how it pursued him
+everywhere, and seemed to him to interpret every question.
+Wordsworth’s poetry is an optimism; it says man’s relation to the
+world is, and may be seen by man to be, a perfect relation; but it is
+an optimism that begins and ends in an abiding instinct. Coleridge
+accepts the same optimism as a philosophical idea, but an idea is
+relative to an intellectual assent; sometimes it seems a better
+expression of facts, sometimes a worse, as the understanding weighs it
+in the logical balances. And so it is not a permanent consolation. It
+is only in the rarer moments of intellectual warmth and sunlight that
+it is entirely credible. In less exhilarating moments that perfect
+relation of man and nature seems to shift and fail; that is, the
+philosophical idea ceases to be realizable; and with Coleridge its
+place is not supplied, as with Wordsworth, by the corresponding
+sentiment or instinct.
+
+What in Wordsworth is a sentiment or instinct, is in Coleridge a
+philosophical idea. In other words, Coleridge’s talent is a more
+intellectual one than Wordsworth’s, more dramatic, more
+self-conscious. Wordsworth’s talent, deeply reflective as it is,
+because its base is an instinct, is deficient in self-knowledge.
+Possessed by the rumours and voices of the haunted country, the
+borders of which he has passed alone, he never thinks of withdrawing
+from it to look down upon it from one of the central heights of human
+life. His power absorbs him, not he it; he cannot turn it round or get
+without it; he does not estimate its general relation to life. But
+Coleridge, just because the essence of his talent is the intuition of
+an idea, commands his talent. He not only feels with Wordsworth the
+expression of mind in nature, but he can project that feeling outside
+him, reduce it to a psychological law, define its relation to other
+elements of culture, place it in a complete view of life.
+
+And in some such activity as that, varied as his wide learning, in a
+many-sided dramatic kind of poetry, assigning its place and value to
+every mode of the inward life, seems to have been for Coleridge the
+original path of artistic success. But in order to follow that path
+one must hold ideas loosely in the relative spirit, not seek to
+stereotype any one of the many modes of that life; one must acknowledge
+that the mind is ever greater than its own products, devote ideas to
+the service of art rather than of γνῶσις, not disquiet oneself about
+the absolute. Perhaps Coleridge is more interesting because he did not
+follow this path. Repressing his artistic interest and voluntarily
+discolouring his own work, he turned to console and strengthen the
+human mind, vulgarized or dejected, as he believed, by the acquisition
+of new knowledge about itself in the _éclaircissement_ of the
+eighteenth century.
+
+What the reader of our own generation will least find in Coleridge’s
+prose writings is the excitement of the literary sense. And yet in
+those grey volumes we have the production of one who made way ever by
+a charm, the charm of voice, of aspect, of language, above all, by
+the intellectual charm of new, moving, luminous ideas. Perhaps the
+chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of seriousness, a seriousness
+that arises not from any moral principle, but from a misconception of
+the perfect manner. There is a certain shade of levity and unconcern,
+the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which marks complete
+culture in the handling of abstract questions. The humanist, he who
+possesses that complete culture, does not ‘weep’ over the failure of
+‘a theory of the quantification of the predicate’, nor ‘shriek’ over
+the fall of a philosophical formula. A kind of humour is one of the
+conditions of the true mental attitude in the criticism of past stages
+of thought. Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them, any
+more than a man of good sense can afford to be too serious in looking
+back upon his own childhood. Plato, whom Coleridge claims as the first
+of his spiritual ancestors, Plato, as we remember him, a true
+humanist, with Petrarch and Goethe and M. Renan, holds his theories
+lightly, glances with a blithe and naïve inconsequence from one view
+to another, not anticipating the burden of meaning ‘views’ will one
+day have for humanity. In reading him one feels how lately it was that
+Croesus thought it a paradox to say that external prosperity was not
+necessarily happiness. But on Coleridge lies the whole weight of the
+sad reflection that has since come into the world, with which for us
+the air is full, which the children in the market-place repeat to each
+other. Even his language is forced and broken, lest some saving
+formula should be lost--‘distinctities’, ‘enucleation’, ‘pentad of
+operative Christianity’--he has a whole vocabulary of such phrases,
+and expects to turn the tide of human thought by fixing the sense of
+such expressions as ‘reason’, ‘understanding’, ‘idea’.
+
+Again, he has not the jealousy of the true artist in excluding all
+associations that have no charm or colour or gladness in them;
+everywhere he allows the impress of an inferior theological
+literature; he is often prolix and importunate about most indifferent
+heroes--Sir Alexander Ball, Dr. Bell, even Dr. Bowyer, the coarse
+pedant of the Blue-coat School. And the source of all this is closely
+connected with the source of his literary activity. For Coleridge had
+chosen as the mark of his literary egotism a kind of intellectual
+_tour de force_--to found a religious philosophy, to do something with
+the ‘idea’ in spite of the essential nature of the ‘idea’. And
+therefore all is fictitious from the beginning. He had determined,
+that which is humdrum, insipid, which the human spirit has done with,
+shall yet stimulate and inspire. What he produced symbolizes this
+purpose--the mass of it _ennuyant_, depressing: the _Aids to
+Reflection_, for instance, with Archbishop Leighton’s vague pieties
+all twisted into the jargon of a spiritualistic philosophy. But
+sometimes ‘the pulse of the God’s blood’ does transmute it, kindling
+here and there a spot that begins to live; as in that beautiful
+fragment at the end of the _Church and State_, or in the distilled and
+concentrated beauty of such a passage as this:
+
+     The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of
+     human life, is the horizon for the majority of its
+     inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and
+     departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they
+     vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and
+     bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher
+     ascents are too often hidden by mists and clouds from
+     uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to
+     penetrate. To the multitude below these vapours appear now
+     as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may
+     intrude with impunity; and now all a-glow, with colours not
+     their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of
+     happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few
+     who, measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the
+     feet of their furthest inaccessible falls, have learned that
+     the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few who,
+     even in the level streams, have detected elements which
+     neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains
+     contained or could supply.
+
+                                 _Biographia Literaria._
+
+‘I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation.’
+So Coleridge sums up his childhood with its delicacy, its
+sensitiveness, and passion. From his tenth to his eighteenth year he
+was at a rough school in London. Speaking of this time, he says:
+
+     When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my
+     birthplace and family, Providence, it has often occurred to
+     me, gave me the first intimation that it was my lot, and
+     that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a
+     detached individual, a _terrae filius_, who was to ask love
+     or service of no one on any more specific relation than that
+     of being a man, and as such to take my chance for the free
+     charities of humanity.[38]
+
+    [38] Biographical Supplement to _Biographia Literaria_, chap.
+    ii.
+
+Even his fine external nature was for years repressed, wronged, driven
+inward--‘at fourteen I was in a continual state of low fever.’ He
+becomes a dreamer, an eager student, but without ambition.
+
+This depressed boy is nevertheless, on the spiritual side, the child
+of a noble house. At twenty-five he is exercising a wonderful charm,
+and has defined for himself a peculiar line of intellectual activity.
+He had left Cambridge without a degree, a Unitarian. Unable to take
+orders, he determined through Southey’s influence to devote himself to
+literature. When he left Cambridge there was a prejudice against him
+which has given occasion to certain suspicions. Those who knew him
+best discredit these suspicions. What is certain is that he was
+subject to fits of violent, sometimes fantastic, despondency. He
+retired to Stowey, in Somersetshire, to study poetry and philosophy.
+In 1797 his poetical gift was in full flower; he wrote _Kubla Khan_,
+the first part of _Christabel_, and _The Ancient Mariner_. His
+literary success grew in spite of opposition. He had a strange
+attractive gift of conversation, or rather of monologue, as De Stael
+said, full of _bizarrerie_, with the rapid alternations of a dream,
+and here and there a sudden summons into a world strange to the
+hearer, abounding with images drawn from a sort of divided, imperfect
+life, as of one to whom the external world penetrated only in part,
+and, blended with all this, passages of the deepest obscurity,
+precious only for their musical cadence, the echo in Coleridge of the
+eloquence of the older English writers, of whom he was so ardent a
+lover. All through this brilliant course we may discern the power of
+the Asiatic temperament, of that voluptuousness which is perhaps
+connected with his appreciation of the intimacy, the almost mystical
+_rapport_, between man and nature. ‘I am much better’, he writes, ‘and
+my new and tender health is all over me like a voluptuous feeling.’
+
+And whatever fame, or charm, or life-inspiring gift he has had is the
+vibration of the interest he excited then, the propulsion into years
+that clouded his early promise of that first buoyant, irresistible
+self-assertion: so great is even the indirect power of a sincere
+effort towards the ideal life, of even a temporary escape of the
+spirit from routine. Perhaps the surest sign of his election--that he
+was indeed, on the spiritual side, the child of a noble house--is that
+story of the Pantisocratic scheme, which at this distance looks so
+grotesque. In his enthusiasm for the French Revolution, the old
+communistic dream with its appeal to nature (perhaps a little
+theatrical), touched him, as it had touched Rousseau, Saint-Pierre,
+and Chateaubriand. He had married one, his affection for whom seems to
+have been only a passing feeling; with her and a few friends he was to
+found a communistic settlement on the banks of the Susquehannah--‘the
+name was pretty and metrical.’ It was one of Coleridge’s lightest
+dreams; but also one which could only have passed through the liberal
+air of his earlier life. The later years of the French Revolution,
+which for us have discredited all such dreams, deprived him of that
+youthfulness which is the preservative element in a literary talent.
+
+In 1798, he visited Germany. A beautiful fragment of this period
+remains, describing a spring excursion to the Brocken. His excitement
+still vibrates in it. Love, all joyful states of mind, are
+self-expressive; they loosen the tongue, they fill the thoughts with
+sensuous images, they harmonize one with the world of sight. We hear
+of the ‘rich graciousness and courtesy’ of Coleridge’s manner, of the
+white and delicate skin, the abundant black hair, the full, almost
+animal lips, that whole physiognomy of the dreamer already touched
+with fanaticism. One says of the text of one of his Unitarian sermons,
+‘his voice rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes’; another,
+‘he talks like an angel, and does--nothing.’
+
+Meantime, he had designed an intellectual novelty in the shape of a
+religious philosophy. Socinian theology and the philosophy of Hartley
+had become distasteful. ‘Whatever is against right reason, that no
+faith can oblige us to believe.’ Coleridge quotes these words from
+Jeremy Taylor. And yet ever since the dawn of the Renaissance, had
+subsisted a conflict between reason and faith. From the first, indeed,
+the Christian religion had affirmed the existence of such a conflict,
+and had even based its plea upon its own weakness in it. In face of
+the classical culture, with its deep wide-struck roots in the world as
+it permanently exists, St. Paul asserted the claims of that which
+could not appeal with success to any genuinely human principle.
+Paradox as it was, that was the strength of the new spirit; for how
+much is there at all times in humanity which cannot appeal with
+success for encouragement or tolerance to any genuinely human
+principle. In the Middle Ages it might seem that faith had reconciled
+itself to philosophy; the Catholic church was the leader of the
+world’s life as well as of the spirit’s. Looking closer we see that
+the conflict is still latent there; the supremacy of faith is only a
+part of the worship of sorrow and weakness which marks the age. The
+weak are no longer merely a majority, they are all Europe. It is not
+that faith has become one with reason; but a strange winter, a strange
+suspension of life, has passed over the classical culture which is
+only the human reason in its most trenchant form. Glimpse after
+glimpse, as that pagan culture awoke to life, the conflict was felt
+once more. It is at the court of Frederick II that the Renaissance
+first becomes discernible as an actual power in European society. How
+definite and unmistakable is the attitude of faith towards that! Ever
+since the Reformation all phases of theology had been imperfect
+philosophies--that is, in which there was a religious _arrière
+pensée_; philosophies which could never be in the ascendant in a
+sincerely scientific sphere. The two elements had never really mixed.
+Writers so different as Locke and Taylor have each his liberal
+philosophy, and each has his defence of the orthodox belief; but,
+also, each has a divided mind; we wonder how the two elements could
+have existed side by side; brought together in a single mind, but
+unable to fuse in it, they reveal their radical contrariety. The
+Catholic church and humanity are two powers that divide the intellect
+and spirit of man. On the Catholic side is faith, rigidly logical as
+Ultramontanism, with a proportion of the facts of life, that is, all
+that is despairing in life coming naturally under its formula. On the
+side of humanity is all that is desirable in the world, all that is
+sympathetic with its laws, and succeeds through that sympathy.
+Doubtless, for the individual, there are a thousand intermediate
+shades of opinion, a thousand resting-places for the religious spirit;
+still, τὸ διορίζειν οὐκ ἔστι τῶν πολλῶν, fine distinctions are not for
+the majority; and this makes time eventually a dogmatist, working out
+the opposition in its most trenchant form, and fixing the horns of the
+dilemma; until, in the present day, we have on one side Pius IX, the
+true descendant of the fisherman, issuing the Encyclical, pleading the
+old promise against the world with a special kind of justice; and on
+the other side, the irresistible modern culture, which, as religious
+men often remind us, is only Christian accidentally.
+
+The peculiar temper of Coleridge’s intellect made the idea of
+reconciling this conflict very seductive. With a true speculative
+talent he united a false kind of subtlety and the full share of
+vanity. A dexterous intellectual _tour de force_ has always an
+independent charm; and therefore it is well for the cause of truth
+that the directness, sincerity, and naturalness of things are beyond a
+certain limit sacrificed in vain to a factitious interest. A method so
+forced as that of Coleridge’s religious philosophy is from the first
+doomed to be insipid, so soon as the temporary interest or taste or
+curiosity it was designed to meet has passed away. Then, as to the
+manner of such books as the _Aids to Reflection_, or _The
+Friend_:--These books came from one whose vocation was in the world of
+art; and yet, perhaps, of all books that have been influential in
+modern times, they are farthest from the classical form--bundles of
+notes--the original matter inseparably mixed up with that borrowed
+from others--the whole, just that mere preparation for an artistic
+effect which the finished artist would be careful one day to destroy.
+Here, again, we have a trait profoundly characteristic of Coleridge.
+He often attempts to reduce a phase of thought, subtle and exquisite,
+to conditions too rough for it. He uses a purely speculative gift in
+direct moral edification. Scientific truth is something fugitive,
+relative, full of fine gradations; he tries to fix it in absolute
+formulas. The _Aids to Reflection_, or _The Friend_, is an effort to
+propagate the volatile spirit of conversation into the less ethereal
+fabric of a written book; and it is only here and there that the
+poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really lifted by the spirit.
+
+At forty-two, we find Coleridge saying in a letter:
+
+     I feel with an intensity unfathomable by words my utter
+     nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness in and for myself.
+     I have learned what a sin is against an infinite,
+     imperishable being such as is the soul of man. The
+     consolations, at least the sensible sweetness of hope, I do
+     not possess. On the contrary, the temptation which I have
+     constantly to fight up against is a fear that, if
+     annihilation and the possibility of heaven were offered to
+     my choice, I should choose the former.
+
+What was the cause of this change? That is precisely the point on
+which, after all the gossip there has been, we are still ignorant. At
+times Coleridge’s opium excesses were great; but what led to those
+excesses must not be left out of account. From boyhood he had a
+tendency to low fever, betrayed by his constant appetite for bathing
+and swimming, which he indulged even when a physician had opposed it.
+In 1803, he went to Malta as secretary to the English Governor. His
+daughter suspects that the source of the evil was there, that for one
+of his constitution the climate of Malta was deadly. At all events,
+when he returned, the charm of those five wonderful years had failed
+at the source.
+
+De Quincey said of him, ‘he wanted better bread than can be made with
+wheat.’ Lamb said of him that from boyhood he had ‘hungered for
+eternity’. Henceforth those are the two notes of his life. From this
+time we must look for no more true literary talent in him. His style
+becomes greyer and greyer, his thoughts _outré_, exaggerated, a kind
+of credulity or superstition exercised upon abstract words. Like
+Clifford, in Hawthorne’s beautiful romance--the born Epicurean, who by
+some strange wrong has passed the best of his days in a prison--he is
+the victim of a division of the will, often showing itself in trivial
+things: he could never choose on which side of the garden path he
+would walk. In 1803, he wrote a poem on ‘The Pains of Sleep’. That
+unrest increased. Mr. Gillman tells us ‘he had long been greatly
+afflicted with nightmare, and when residing with us was frequently
+aroused from this painful sleep by any one of the family who might
+hear him’.
+
+That faintness and continual dissolution had its own consumptive
+refinements, and even brought, as to the ‘Beautiful Soul’ in _Wilhelm
+Meister_, a faint religious ecstasy--that ‘singing in the sails’ which
+is not of the breeze. Here, again, is a note of Coleridge’s:
+
+     ‘In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at
+     yonder moon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem
+     rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical
+     language for something within me that already and for ever
+     exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter
+     is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling, as
+     if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten
+     or hidden truth of my inner nature.’ Then, ‘while I was
+     preparing the pen to write this remark, I lost the train of
+     thought which had led me to it.’
+
+What a distemper of the eye of the mind! What an almost bodily
+distemper there is in that!
+
+Coleridge’s intellectual sorrows were many; but he had one singular
+intellectual happiness. With an inborn taste for transcendental
+philosophy he lived just at the time when that philosophy took an
+immense spring in Germany, and connected itself with a brilliant
+literary movement. He had the luck to light upon it in its freshness,
+and introduce it to his countrymen. What an opportunity for one reared
+on the colourless English philosophies, but who feels an irresistible
+attraction towards metaphysical synthesis! How rare are such occasions
+of intellectual contentment! This transcendental philosophy, chiefly
+as systematized by Schelling, Coleridge applies, with an eager,
+unwearied subtlety, to the questions of theology and art-criticism. It
+is in his theory of art-criticism that he comes nearest to true and
+important principles; that is the least fugitive part of his work. Let
+us take this first; here we shall most clearly apprehend his main
+principle.
+
+What, then, is the essence of this criticism? On the whole it may be
+described as an attempt to reclaim the world of art as a world of
+fixed laws--to show that the creative activity of genius and the
+simplest act of thought are but higher and lower products of the laws
+of a universal logic. Criticism, feeling its own unsuccess in dealing
+with the greater works of art, has sometimes made too much of those
+dark and capricious suggestions of genius which even the intellect
+possessed by them is unable to track or recall. It has seemed due to
+their half-sacred character to look for no link between the process by
+which they were produced and the slighter processes of the mind.
+Coleridge assumes that the highest phases of thought must be more, not
+less, than the lower, subjects of law.
+
+With this interest, in the _Biographia Literaria_, he refines
+Schelling’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ into a theory of art. ‘Es giebt
+kein Plagiat in der Philosophie’ says Heine, alluding to the charge
+brought against Schelling of unacknowledged borrowing from Bruno, and
+certainly that which is common to Coleridge and Schelling is of far
+earlier origin than the Renaissance. Schellingism, the ‘Philosophy of
+Nature’, is indeed a constant tradition in the history of thought; it
+embodies a permanent type of the speculative temper. That mode of
+conceiving nature as a mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man may
+be traced up to the first beginnings of Greek speculation. There are
+two ways of envisaging those aspects of nature which appear to bear
+the impress of reason or intelligence. There is the deist’s way, which
+regards them merely as marks of design, which separates the informing
+mind from nature, as the mechanist from the machine; and there is the
+pantheistic way, which identifies the two, which regards nature itself
+as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as, but
+vaster than, the human. Greek philosophy, finding indications of mind
+everywhere, dwelling exclusively in its observations on that which is
+general or formal, on that which modern criticism regards as the
+modification of things by the mind of the observer, adopts the latter,
+or pantheistic way, through the influence of the previous mythological
+period. Mythology begins in the early necessities of language, of
+which it is a kind of accident. But at a later period its essence
+changes; it becomes what it was not at its birth, the servant of a
+genuine poetic interest, a kind of _vivification_ of nature. Played
+upon by those accidents of language, the Greek mind becomes possessed
+by the conception of nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to
+the mind of man. This unfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an
+abstract form, petrified into an idea, is the conception which gives a
+unity of aim to Greek philosophy. Step by step it works out the
+substance of the Hegelian formula: ‘Was ist, das ist vernünftig; was
+vernünftig ist, das ist’--‘Whatever is, is according to reason;
+whatever is according to reason, that is.’ A science of which that
+could be the formula is still but an intellectual aspiration; the
+formula of true science is different. Experience, which has gradually
+saddened the earth’s colour, stiffened its motions, withdrawn from it
+some blithe and debonair presence, has moderated our demands upon
+science. The positive method makes very little account of marks of
+intelligence in nature; in its wider view of phenomena it sees that
+those incidents are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences; it
+absorbs them in the simpler conception of law. But the suspicion of a
+mind latent in nature, struggling for release and intercourse with the
+intellect of man through true ideas, has never ceased to haunt a
+certain class of minds. Started again and again in successive periods
+by enthusiasts on the antique pattern, in each case the thought has
+seemed paler and more evanescent amidst the growing consistency and
+sharpness of outline of other and more positive forms of knowledge.
+Still, wherever a speculative instinct has been united with extreme
+inwardness of temperament, as in Jakob Böhme, there the old Greek
+conception, like some seed floating in the air, has taken root and
+sprung up anew. Coleridge, thrust inward upon himself, driven from
+‘life in thought and sensation’ to life in thought only, feels in that
+dark London school a thread of the Greek mind vibrating strangely in
+him. At fifteen he is discoursing on Plotinus, and has translated the
+hymns of Synesius. So in later years he reflects from Schelling the
+flitting tradition. He conceives a subtle co-ordination between the
+ideas of the mind and the laws of the natural world. Science is to be
+attained, not by observation, analysis, generalization, but by the
+evolution or recovery of those ideas from within, by a sort of
+ἀνάμνησις, every group of observed facts remaining an enigma until the
+appropriate idea is struck upon them from the mind of Newton or
+Cuvier, the genius in whom sympathy with the universal reason is
+entire. Next he supposes that this reason or intelligence in nature
+gradually becomes reflective--self-conscious. He fancies he can track
+through all the simpler orders of life fragments of an eloquent
+prophecy about the human mind. He regards the whole of nature as a
+development of higher forms out of the lower, through shade after
+shade of systematic change. The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the
+axes of a crystal form, the trance-like life of plants, the animal
+troubled by strange irritabilities, are stages which anticipate
+consciousness. All through that increasing stir of life this was
+forming itself; each stage in its unsatisfied susceptibilities seeming
+to be drawn out of its own limits by the more pronounced current of
+life on its confines, the ‘shadow of approaching humanity’ gradually
+deepening, the latent intelligence working to the surface. At this
+point the law of development does not lose itself in caprice; rather
+it becomes more constraining and incisive. From the lowest to the
+highest acts of intelligence, there is another range of refining
+shades. Gradually the mind concentrates itself, frees itself from the
+limits of the particular, the individual, attains a strange power of
+modifying and centralizing what it receives from without according to
+an inward ideal. At last, in imaginative genius, ideas become
+effective; the intelligence of nature, with all its elements connected
+and justified, is clearly reflected; and the interpretation of its
+latent purposes is fixed in works of art.
+
+In this fanciful and bizarre attempt to rationalize art, to range it
+under the dominion of law, there is still a gap to be filled up. What
+is that common law of the mind, of which a work of art and the
+slighter acts of thought are alike products? Here Coleridge weaves in
+Kant’s fine-spun theory of the transformation of sense into
+perception. What every theory of perception has to explain is that
+associative power which gathers isolated sensible qualities into the
+objects of the world about us. Sense, without an associative power,
+would be only a threadlike stream of colours, sounds, odours--each
+struck upon one for a moment, and then withdrawn. The basis of this
+association may be represented as a material one, a kind of
+many-coloured ‘etching’ on the brain. Hartley has dexterously handled
+this hypothesis. The charm of his ‘theory of vibrations’ is the vivid
+image it presents to the fancy. How large an element in a speculative
+talent is the command of these happy images! Coleridge, by a finer
+effort of the same kind, a greater delicacy of fancy, detects all
+sorts of slips, transitions, breaks of continuity in Hartley’s
+glancing cobweb. Coleridge, with Kant, regards all association as
+effected by a power within, to which he gives a fanciful Greek
+name.[39] In an act of perception there is the matter which sense
+presents, colour, tone, feeling; but also a form or mould, such as
+space, unity, causation, suggested from within. In these forms we
+arrest and frame the many attributes of sense. It is like that simple
+chemical phenomenon where two colourless fluids uniting reflect a full
+colour. Neither matter nor form can be perceived asunder; they unite
+into the many-coloured image of life. This theory has not been able to
+bear a loyal induction. Even if it were true, how little it would tell
+us; how it attenuates fact! There, again, the charm is all in the
+clear image; the image of the artist combining a few elementary
+colours, curves, sounds into a new whole. Well, this power of
+association, of concentrating many elements of sense in an object of
+perception, is refined and deepened into the creative acts of
+imagination.
+
+    [39] Esemplastic.
+
+We of the modern ages have become so familiarized with the greater
+works of art that we are little sensitive of the act of creation in
+them; they do not impress us as a new presence in the world. Only
+sometimes in productions which realize immediately a profound emotion
+and enforce a change in taste, such as _Werther_ or _Emile_, we are
+actual witnesses of the moulding of an unforeseen type by some new
+principle of association. By imagination, the distinction between
+which and fancy is so thrust upon his readers, Coleridge means a
+vigorous act of association, which, by simplifying and restraining
+their natural expression to an artificial order, refines and perfects
+the types of human passion. It represents the excitements of the
+human kind, but reflected in a new manner, ‘excitement itself
+imitating order.’ ‘Originally the offspring of passion,’ he somewhere
+says, ‘but now the adopted children of power.’ So far there is nothing
+new or distinctive; every one who can receive from a poem or picture a
+total impression will admit so much. What makes the view distinctive
+in Coleridge are the Schellingistic associations with which he colours
+it, that faint glamour of the philosophy of nature which was ever
+influencing his thoughts. That suggested the idea of a subtly winding
+parallel, a ‘rapport’ in every detail, between the human mind and the
+world without it, laws of nature being so many transformed ideas.
+Conversely, the ideas of the human mind would be only transformed
+laws. Genius would be in a literal sense an exquisitely purged
+sympathy with nature. Those associative conceptions of the
+imagination, those unforeseen types of passion, would come, not so
+much of the artifice and invention of the understanding, as from
+self-surrender to the suggestions of nature; they would be evolved by
+the stir of nature itself realizing the highest reach of its latent
+intelligence; they would have a kind of antecedent necessity to rise
+at some time to the surface of the human mind.
+
+It is natural that Shakespeare should be the idol of all such
+criticism, whether in England or Germany. The first effect in
+Shakespeare is that of capricious detail, of the waywardness that
+plays with the parts careless of the impression of the whole. But
+beyond there is the constraining unity of effect, the uneffaceable
+impression, of _Hamlet_ or _Macbeth_. His hand moving freely is
+curved round by some law of gravitation from within; that is, there is
+the most constraining unity in the most abundant variety. Coleridge
+exaggerates this unity into something like the unity of a natural
+organism, the associative act that effected it into something closely
+akin to the primitive power of nature itself. ‘In the Shakespearian
+drama’, he says, ‘there is a vitality which grows and evolves itself
+from within.’ Again:
+
+     He, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the
+     germ from within by the imaginative power according to the
+     idea. For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea
+     in mind to a law in nature. They are correlatives which
+     suppose each other.
+
+Again:
+
+     The organic form is innate; it shapes, as it develops,
+     itself from within, and the fulness of its development is
+     one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.
+     Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime
+     genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally
+     inexhaustible in forms; each exterior is the physiognomy of
+     the being within, and even such is the appropriate
+     excellence of Shakespeare, himself a nature humanized, a
+     genial understanding, directing self-consciously a power and
+     an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.
+
+There ‘the absolute’ has been affirmed in the sphere of art; and
+thought begins to congeal. Coleridge has not only overstrained the
+elasticity of his hypothesis, but has also obscured the true interest
+of art. For, after all, the artist has become something almost
+mechanical; instead of being the most luminous and self-possessed
+phase of consciousness, the associative act itself looks like some
+organic process of assimilation. The work of art is sometimes likened
+to the living organism. That expresses the impression of a
+self-delighting, independent life which a finished work of art gives
+us; it does not express the process by which that work was produced.
+Here there is no blind ferment of lifeless elements to realize a type.
+By exquisite analysis the artist attains clearness of idea, then, by
+many stages of refining, clearness of expression. He moves slowly over
+his work, calculating the tenderest tone, and restraining the subtlest
+curve, never letting his hand or fancy move at large, gradually
+refining flaccid spaces to the higher degree of expressiveness.
+Culture, at least, values even in transcendent works of art the power
+of the understanding in them, their logical process of construction,
+the spectacle of supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.
+
+Coleridge’s criticism may well be remembered as part of the long
+pleading of German culture for the things ‘behind the veil’. It
+recalls us from the work of art to the mind of the artist; and, after
+all, this is what is infinitely precious, and the work of art only as
+the index of it. Still, that is only the narrower side of a complete
+criticism. Perhaps it is true, as some one says in Lessing’s _Emilie
+Galotti_, that, if Michael Angelo had been born without hands, he
+would still have been the greatest of artists. But we must admit the
+truth also of an opposite view: ‘In morals as in art’, says M. Renan,
+‘the word is nothing--the fact is everything. The idea which lurks
+under a picture of Raphael is a slight matter; it is the picture
+itself only that counts.’
+
+What constitutes an artistic gift is, first of all, a natural
+susceptibility to moments of strange excitement, in which the colours
+freshen upon our thread bare world, and the routine of things about
+us is broken by a novel and happier synthesis. These are moments into
+which other minds may be made to enter, but which they cannot
+originate. This susceptibility is the element of genius in an artistic
+gift. Secondly, there is what may be called the talent of projection,
+of throwing these happy moments into an external concrete form--a
+statue, or play, or picture. That projection is of all degrees of
+completeness; its facility and transparence are modified by the
+circumstances of the individual, his culture, and his age. When it is
+perfectly transparent, the work is classical. Compare the power of
+projection in Mr. Browning’s _Sordello_, with that power in the
+_Sorrows of Werther_. These two elements determine the two chief aims
+of criticism. First, it has to classify those initiative moments
+according to the amount of interest excited in them, to estimate their
+comparative acceptability, their comparative power of giving joy to
+those who undergo them. Secondly, it has to test, by a study of the
+artistic product itself, in connexion with the intellectual and
+spiritual condition of its age, the completeness of the projection.
+These two aims form the positive, or concrete, side of criticism;
+their direction is not towards a metaphysical definition of the
+universal element in an artistic effort, but towards a subtle
+gradation of the shades of difference between one artistic gift and
+another. This side of criticism is infinitely varied; and it is what
+French culture more often achieves than the German.
+
+Coleridge has not achieved this side in an equal degree with the
+other; and this want is not supplied by the _Literary Remains_, which
+contain his studies on Shakespeare. There we have a repetition, not
+an application, of the absolute formula. Coleridge is like one who
+sees in a picture only the rules of perspective, and is always trying
+to simplify even those. Thus: ‘Where there is no humour, but only wit,
+or the like, there is no growth from within.’ ‘What is beauty’? he
+asks. ‘It is the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the
+diverse.’ So of Dante: ‘There is a total impression of infinity; the
+wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in an inner feeling of
+totality and absolute being.’ Again, of the _Paradise Lost_: ‘It has
+the totality of the poem as distinguished from the _ab ovo_ birth and
+parentage or straight line of history.’
+
+That exaggerated inwardness is barren. Here, too, Coleridge’s thoughts
+require to be thawed, to be set in motion. He is admirable in the
+detection, the analysis, and statement of a few of the highest general
+laws of art-production. But he withdraws us too far from what we can
+see, hear, and feel. Doubtless, the idea, the intellectual element, is
+the spirit and life of art. Still, art is the triumph of the senses
+and the emotions; and the senses and the emotions must not be cheated
+of their triumph after all. That strange and beautiful psychology
+which he employs, with its evanescent delicacies, has not sufficient
+corporeity. Again, one feels that the discussion about Hartley,
+meeting us in the way, throws a tone of insecurity over the critical
+theory which it introduces. Its only effect is to win for the terms in
+which that criticism is expressed, the associations of one side in a
+metaphysical controversy.
+
+The vagueness and fluidity of Coleridge’s theological opinions have
+been exaggerated through an illusion, which has arisen from the
+occasional form in which they have reached us. Criticism, then, has to
+methodize and focus them. They may be arranged under three heads; the
+general principles of supernaturalism, orthodox dogmas, the
+interpretation of Scripture. With regard to the first and second,
+Coleridge ranks as a Conservative thinker; but his principles of
+Scriptural interpretation resemble Lessing’s; they entitle him to be
+regarded as the founder of the modern liberal school of English
+theology. By supernaturalism is meant the theory of a divine person in
+immediate communication with the human mind, dealing with it out of
+that order of nature which includes man’s body and his ordinary trains
+of thought, according to fixed laws, which the theologian sums up in
+the doctrines of ‘grace’ and ‘sin’. Of this supernaturalism, the _Aids
+to Reflection_ attempts to give a metaphysical proof. The first
+necessity of the argument is to prove that religion, with its supposed
+experiences of grace and sin, and the realities of a world above the
+world of sense, is the fulfilment of the constitution of every man,
+or, in the language of the ‘philosophy of nature’, is part of the
+‘idea’ of man; so that, when those experiences are absent, all the
+rest of his nature is unexplained, like some enigmatical fragment, the
+construction and working of which we cannot surmise. According to
+Schelling’s principle, the explanation of every phase of life is to be
+sought in that next above it. This axiom is applied to three supposed
+stages of man’s reflective life: Prudence, Morality, Religion.
+Prudence, by which Coleridge means something like Bentham’s
+‘enlightened principle of self-preservation’, is, he says, an
+inexplicable instinct, a blind motion in the dark, until it is
+expanded into morality. Morality, again, is but a groundless
+prepossession until transformed into a religious recognition of a
+spiritual world, until, as Coleridge says in his rich figurative
+language, ‘like the main feeder into some majestic lake, rich with
+hidden springs of its own, it flows into, and becomes one with, the
+spiritual life.’ A spiritual life, then, being the fulfilment of human
+nature, implied, if we see clearly, in those instincts which enable
+one to live on from day to day, is part of the ‘idea’ of man.
+
+The second necessity of the argument is to prove that ‘the idea’,
+according to the principle of the ‘philosophy of nature’, is an
+infallible index of the actual condition of the world without us. Here
+Coleridge introduces an analogy:
+
+     In the world, we see everywhere evidences of a unity, which
+     the component parts are so far from explaining, that they
+     necessarily presuppose it as the cause and condition of
+     their existing as those parts, or even of their existing at
+     all. This antecedent unity, or cause and principle of each
+     union, it has, since the time of Bacon and Kepler, been
+     customary to call a law. This crocus for instance; or any
+     other flower the reader may have before his sight, or choose
+     to bring before his fancy; that the root, stem, leaves,
+     petals, &c., cohere to one plant is owing to an antecedent
+     power or principle in the seed which existed before a single
+     particle of the matters that constitute the size and
+     visibility of the crocus had been attracted from the
+     surrounding soil, air, and moisture. Shall we turn to the
+     seed? there, too, the same necessity meets us: an antecedent
+     unity must here, too, be supposed. Analyse the seeds with
+     the finest tools, and let the solar microscope come in aid
+     of your senses, what do you find?--means and instruments; a
+     wondrous fairy tale of nature, magazines of food, stores of
+     various sorts, pipes, spiracles, defences; a house of many
+     chambers, and the owner and inhabitant invisible.
+
+                                 _Aids to Reflection._
+
+Nature, that is, works by what we may call ‘intact ideas’. It
+co-ordinates every part of the crocus to all the other parts; one
+stage of its growth to the whole process; and having framed its
+organism to assimilate certain external elements, it does not cheat it
+of those elements, soil, air, moisture. Well, if the ‘idea’ of man is
+to be intact, he must be enveloped in a supernatural world; and nature
+always works by intact ideas. The spiritual life is the highest
+development of the idea of man; there must be a supernatural world
+corresponding to it.
+
+One finds, it is hard to say how many, difficulties in drawing
+Coleridge’s conclusion. To mention only one of them--the argument
+looks too like the exploded doctrine of final causes. Of course the
+crocus would not live unless the conditions of its life were supplied.
+The flower is made for soil, air, moisture, and it has them; just as
+man’s senses are made for a sensible world, and we have the sensible
+world. But give the flower the power of dreaming, nourish it on its
+own reveries, put man’s wild hunger of heart and susceptibility to
+_ennui_ in it, and what indication of the laws of the world without
+it, would be afforded by its longing to break its bonds?
+
+In theology people are content with analogies, probabilities, with the
+empty schemes of arguments for which the data are still lacking;
+arguments, the rejection of which Coleridge tells us implies ‘an evil
+heart of unbelief’, but of which we might as truly say that they
+derive all their consistency from the peculiar atmosphere of the mind
+which receives them. Such arguments are received in theology because
+what chains men to a religion is not its claim on their reason, their
+hopes or fears, but the glow it affords to the world, its ‘beau
+ideal’. Coleridge thinks that if we reject the supernatural, the
+spiritual element in life will evaporate also, that we shall have to
+accept a life with narrow horizons, without disinterestedness, harshly
+cut off from the springs of life in the past. But what is this
+spiritual element? It is the passion for inward perfection, with its
+sorrows, its aspirations, its joy. These mental states are the
+delicacies of the higher morality of the few, of Augustine, of the
+author of the ‘Imitation’, of Francis de Sales; in their essence they
+are only the permanent characteristics of the higher life. Augustine,
+or the author of the ‘Imitation’, agreeably to the culture of their
+age, had expressed them in the terms of a metaphysical theory, and
+expanded them into what theologians call the doctrines of grace and
+sin, the fluctuations of the union of the soul with its unseen friend.
+The life of those who are capable of a passion for perfection still
+produces the same mental states; but that religious expression of them
+is no longer congruous with the culture of the age. Still, all inward
+life works itself out in a few simple forms, and culture cannot go
+very far before the religious graces reappear in it in a subtilized
+intellectual shape. There are aspects of the religious character which
+have an artistic worth distinct from their religious import. Longing,
+a chastened temper, spiritual joy, are precious states of mind, not
+because they are part of man’s duty or because God has commanded them,
+still less because they are means of obtaining a reward, but because
+like culture itself they are remote, refined, intense, existing only
+by the triumph of a few over a dead world of routine in which there
+is no lifting of the soul at all. If there is no other world, art in
+its own interest must cherish such characteristics as beautiful
+spectacles. Stephen’s face, ‘like the face of an angel,’ has a worth
+of its own, even if the opened heaven is but a dream.
+
+Our culture, then, is not supreme, our intellectual life is
+incomplete, we fail of the intellectual throne, if we have no inward
+longing, inward chastening, inward joy. Religious belief, the craving
+for objects of belief, may be refined out of our hearts, but they must
+leave their sacred perfume, their spiritual sweetness behind. This law
+of the highest intellectual life has sometimes seemed hard to
+understand. Those who maintain the claims of the older and narrower
+forms of religious life against the claims of culture are often
+embarrassed at finding the intellectual life heated through with the
+very graces to which they would sacrifice it. How often in the higher
+class of theological writings--writings which really spring from an
+original religious genius, such as those of Dr. Newman--does the
+modern aspirant to perfect culture seem to find the expression of the
+inmost delicacies of his own life, the same yet different! The
+spiritualities of the Christian life have often drawn men on, little
+by little, into the broader spiritualities of systems opposed to
+it--pantheism, or positivism, or a philosophy of indifference. Many in
+our own generation, through religion, have become dead to religion.
+How often do we have to look for some feature of the ancient religious
+life, not in a modern saint, but in a modern artist or philosopher!
+For those who have passed out of Christianity, perhaps its most
+precious souvenir is the ideal of a transcendental disinterestedness.
+Where shall we look for this ideal? In Spinoza; or perhaps in Bentham
+or in Austin.
+
+Some of those who have wished to save supernaturalism--as, for
+instance, Theodore Parker--have rejected more or less entirely the
+dogmas of the Church. Coleridge’s instinct is truer than theirs; the
+two classes of principles are logically connected. It was in defence
+of the dogmas of the Church that Coleridge elaborated his unhappy
+crotchet of the diversity of the reason from the understanding. The
+weakness of these dogmas had ever been, not so much a failure of the
+authority of Scripture or tradition in their favour, as their conflict
+with the reason that they were words rather than conceptions. That
+analysis of words and conceptions which in modern philosophy has been
+a principle of continual rejuvenescence with Descartes and Berkeley,
+as well as with Bacon and Locke, had desolated the field of scholastic
+theology. It is the rationality of the dogmas of that theology that
+Coleridge had a taste for proving.
+
+Of course they conflicted with the understanding, with the common
+daylight of the mind, but then might there not be some mental faculty
+higher than the understanding? The history of philosophy supplied many
+authorities for this opinion. Then, according to the ‘philosophy of
+nature’, science and art are both grounded upon the ‘ideas’ of genius,
+which are a kind of intuition, which are their own evidence. Again,
+this philosophy was always saying the ideas of the mind must be true,
+must correspond to reality; and what an aid to faith is that, if one
+is not too nice in distinguishing between ideas and mere convictions,
+or prejudices, or habitual views, or safe opinions! Kant also had
+made a distinction between the reason and the understanding. True,
+this harsh division of mental faculties is exactly what is most
+sterile in Kant, the essential tendency of the German school of
+thought being to show that the mind always acts _en masse_. Kant had
+defined two senses of reason as opposed to the understanding. First,
+there was the ‘speculative reason’, with its ‘three categories of
+totality’, God, the soul, and the universe--three mental forms which
+might give a sort of unity to science, but to which no actual
+intuition corresponded. The tendency of this part of Kant’s critique
+is to destroy the rational groundwork of theism. Then there was the
+‘practical reason’, on the relation of which to the ‘speculative’, we
+may listen to Heinrich Heine:
+
+     ‘After the tragedy comes the farce. [The tragedy is Kant’s
+     destructive criticism of the speculative reason.] So far
+     Immanuel Kant has been playing the relentless philosopher;
+     he has laid siege to heaven.’ Heine goes on with some
+     violence to describe the havoc Kant has made of the orthodox
+     belief: ‘Old Lampe,[40] with the umbrella under his arm,
+     stands looking on much disturbed, perspiration and tears of
+     sorrow running down his cheeks. Then Immanuel Kant grows
+     pitiful, and shows that he is not only a great philosopher
+     but also a good man. He considers a little; and then, half
+     in good nature, half in irony, he says, “Old Lampe must have
+     a god, otherwise the poor man will not be happy; but man
+     ought to be happy in this life, the practical reason says
+     that; let the practical reason stand surety for the
+     existence of a god; it is all the same to me.” Following
+     this argument, Kant distinguishes between the theoretical
+     and the practical reason, and, with the practical reason for
+     a magic wand, he brings to life the dead body of deism,
+     which the theoretical reason had slain.’
+
+    [40] The servant who attended Kant in his walks.
+
+Coleridge first confused the speculative reason with the practical,
+and then exaggerated the variety and the sphere of their combined
+functions. Then he has given no consistent definition of the reason.
+It is ‘the power of universal and necessary convictions’; it is ‘the
+knowledge of the laws of the whole considered as one’; it is ‘the
+science of all as a whole’. Again, the understanding is ‘the faculty
+judging according to sense’, or ‘the faculty of means to mediate
+ends’; and so on. The conception floating in his mind seems to have
+been a really valuable one; that, namely, of a distinction between an
+organ of adequate and an organ of inadequate ideas. But when we find
+him casting about for a definition, not precisely determining the
+functions of the reason, making long preparations for the ‘deduction’
+of the faculty, as in the third column of _The Friend_, but never
+actually starting, we suspect that the reason is a discovery in
+psychology which Coleridge has a good will to make, and that is all;
+that he has got no farther than the old vague desire to escape from
+the limitations of thought by some extraordinary mystical faculty.
+Some of the clergy eagerly welcomed the supposed discovery. In their
+difficulties they had often appealed in the old simple way to
+sentiment and emotion as of higher authority than the understanding,
+and on the whole had had to get on with very little philosophy. Like
+M. Jourdain, they were amazed to find that they had been all the time
+appealing to the reason; now they might actually go out to meet the
+enemy. Orthodoxy might be cured by a hair of the dog that had bitten
+it.
+
+Theology is a great house, scored all over with hieroglyphics by
+perished hands. When we decipher one of these hieroglyphics, we find
+in it the statement of a mistaken opinion; but knowledge has crept
+onward since the hand dropped from the wall; we no longer entertain
+the opinion, and we can trace the origin of the mistake. Dogmas are
+precious as memorials of a class of sincere and beautiful spirits, who
+in a past age of humanity struggled with many tears, if not for true
+knowledge, yet for a noble and elevated happiness. That struggle is
+the substance, the dogma only its shadowy expression; received
+traditionally in an altered age, it is the shadow of a shadow, a mere
+τρίτον εἴδωλον, twice removed from substance and reality. The true
+method then in the treatment of dogmatic theology must be historical.
+Englishmen are gradually finding out how much that method has done
+since the beginning of modern criticism by the hands of such writers
+as Baur. Coleridge had many of the elements of this method: learning,
+inwardness, a subtle psychology, a dramatic power of sympathy with
+modes of thought other than his own. Often in carrying out his own
+method he gives the true historical origin of a dogma, but, with a
+strange dullness of the historical sense, he regards this as a reason
+for the existence of the dogma now, not merely as reason for its
+having existed in the past. Those historical elements he could not
+envisage in the historical method, because this method is only one of
+the applications, the most fruitful of them all, of the relative
+spirit.
+
+After Coleridge’s death, seven letters of his on the inspiration of
+Scripture were published, under the title of _Confessions of an
+Inquiring Spirit_. This little book has done more than any other of
+Coleridge’s writings to discredit his name with the orthodox. The
+frequent occurrence in it of the word ‘bibliolatry’, borrowed from
+Lessing, would sufficiently account for this pious hatred. From
+bibliolatry Coleridge was saved by the spiritualism, which, in
+questions less simple than that of the infallibility of Scripture, was
+so retarding to his culture. Bibliolators may remember that one who
+committed a kind of intellectual suicide by catching at any appearance
+of a fixed and absolute authority, never dreamed of resting on the
+authority of a book. His Schellingistic notion of the possibility of
+absolute knowledge, of knowing God, of a light within every man which
+might discover to him the doctrines of Christianity, tended to
+depreciate historical testimony, perhaps historical realism
+altogether. Scripture is a legitimate sphere for the understanding. He
+says, indeed, that there is more in the Bible that ‘finds’ him than he
+has experienced in all other books put together. But still, ‘There is
+a Light higher than all, even the Word that was in the beginning. If
+between this Word and the written letter I shall anywhere seem to
+myself to find a discrepance, I will not conclude that such there
+actually is; nor on the other hand will I fall under the condemnation
+of them that would lie for God, but seek as I may, be thankful for
+what I have--and wait.’ Coleridge is the inaugurator of that _via
+media_ of Scriptural criticism which makes much of saving the word
+‘inspiration’, while it attenuates its meaning; which supposes a sort
+of modified inspiration residing in the whole, not in the several
+parts. ‘The Scriptures were not dictated by an infallible
+intelligence;’ nor ‘the writers each and all divinely informed as
+well as inspired’. ‘They refer to other documents, and in all points
+express themselves as sober-minded and veracious writers under
+ordinary circumstances are known to do.’ To make the Bible itself ‘the
+subject of a special article of faith, is an unnecessary and useless
+abstraction’.
+
+His judgement on the popular view of inspiration is severe. It is
+borrowed from the Cabbalists; it ‘petrifies at once the whole body of
+Holy Writ, with all its harmonies and symmetrical gradations;--turns
+it at once into a colossal Memnon’s head, a hollow passage for a
+voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many men, and speaks in their
+names, and yet is but one voice and the same;--and no man uttered it
+and never in a human heart was it conceived’. He presses very hard on
+the tricks of the ‘routiniers of desk and pulpit’; forced and
+fantastic interpretations; ‘the strange--in all other writings
+unexampled--practice of bringing together into logical dependency
+detached sentences from books composed at the distance of centuries,
+nay, sometimes a millennium, from each other, under different
+dispensations, and for different objects.’
+
+Certainly he is much farther from bibliolatry than from the perfect
+freedom of the humanist interpreters. Still he has not freed himself
+from the notion of a sacred canon; he cannot regard the books of
+Scripture simply as fruits of the human spirit; his criticism is not
+entirely disinterested. The difficulties he finds are chiefly the
+supposed immoralities of Scripture; just those difficulties which fade
+away before the modern or relative spirit, which in the moral world,
+as in the physical traces everywhere change, growth, development. Of
+historical difficulties, of those deeper moral difficulties which
+arise, for instance, from a consideration of the constitutional
+unveracity of the Oriental mind, he has no suspicion. He thinks that
+no book of the New Testament was composed so late as A.D. 120.
+
+Coleridge’s undeveloped opinions would be hardly worth stating except
+for the warning they afford against retarding compromises. In reading
+these letters one never doubts what Coleridge tells us of himself:
+‘that he loved truth with an indescribable awe,’ or, as he beautifully
+says, ‘that he would creep towards the light, even if the light had
+made its way through a rent in the wall of the temple.’ And yet there
+is something sad in reading them by the light which twenty-five years
+have thrown back upon them. Taken as a whole, they contain a fallacy
+which a very ardent lover of truth might have detected.
+
+The Bible is not to judge the spirit, but the spirit the Bible. The
+Bible is to be treated as a literary product. Well, but that is a
+conditional, not an absolute principle--that is not, if we regard it
+sincerely, a delivery of judgement, but only a suspension of it. If we
+are true to the spirit of that, we must wait patiently the complete
+result of modern criticism. Coleridge states that the authority of
+Scripture is on its trial--that at present it is not known to be an
+absolute resting-place; and then, instead of leaving that to aid in
+the formation of a fearless spirit, the spirit which, for instance,
+would accept the results of M. Renan’s investigations, he turns it
+into a false security by anticipating the judgement of an undeveloped
+criticism. Twenty-five years of that criticism have gone by, and have
+hardly verified the anticipation.
+
+The man of science asks, Are absolute principles attainable? What are
+the limits of knowledge? The answer he receives from science itself is
+not ambiguous. What the moralist asks is, Shall we gain or lose by
+surrendering human life to the relative spirit? Experience answers,
+that the dominant tendency of life is to turn ascertained truth into a
+dead letter--to make us all the phlegmatic servants of routine. The
+relative spirit, by dwelling constantly on the more fugitive
+conditions or circumstances of things, breaking through a thousand
+rough and brutal classifications, and giving elasticity to inflexible
+principles, begets an intellectual finesse, of which the ethical
+result is a delicate and tender justness in the criticism of human
+life. Who would gain more than Coleridge by criticism in such a
+spirit? We know how his life has appeared when judged by absolute
+standards. We see him trying to apprehend the absolute, to stereotype
+one form of faith, to attain, as he says, ‘fixed principles’ in
+politics, morals, and religion; to fix one mode of life as the essence
+of life, refusing to see the parts as parts only; and all the time his
+own pathetic history pleads for a more elastic moral philosophy than
+his, and cries out against every formula less living and flexible than
+life itself.
+
+‘From his childhood he hungered for eternity.’ After all, that is the
+incontestable claim of Coleridge. The perfect flower of any elementary
+type of life must always be precious to humanity, and Coleridge is the
+perfect flower of the romantic type. More than Childe Harold, more
+than Werther, more than René, Coleridge, by what he did, what he was,
+and what he failed to do, represents that inexhaustible discontent,
+languor, and home-sickness, the chords of which ring all through our
+modern literature. Criticism may still discuss the claims of classical
+and romantic art, or literature, or sentiment; and perhaps one day we
+may come to forget the horizon, with full knowledge to be content with
+what is here and now; and that is the essence of classical feeling.
+But by us of the present moment, by us for whom the Greek spirit, with
+its engaging naturalness, simple, chastened, debonair, τρυφῆς, ἁβρότητος,
+χλιδῆς, χαρίτων, ἱμέρου πόθου πατήρ, is itself the Sangraal of an endless
+pilgrimage, Coleridge, with his passion for the absolute, for
+something fixed where all is moving, his faintness, his broken memory,
+his intellectual disquiet, may still be ranked among the interpreters
+of one of the constituent elements of our life.
+
+
+
+
+RALPH WALDO EMERSON
+
+1803-1882
+
+SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET. 1850.
+
+
+Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
+originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,
+like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and
+making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor
+does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
+is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what
+men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of
+sight and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is
+the most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes
+uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something
+good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is
+nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad
+earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with
+the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.
+
+The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have
+any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice
+to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say,
+‘I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent:
+to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a
+new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a
+new mechanic power:’ no, but he finds himself in the river of the
+thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his
+contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and
+their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The
+church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the
+advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her
+chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by
+trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
+counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of
+production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.
+Every master has found his material collected, and his power lay in
+his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he
+wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
+shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him
+thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the
+hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations,
+poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into
+their labours. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency,
+out of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do
+for himself; his powers would be expended in the first preparations.
+Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being
+original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world
+do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed
+through the mind.
+
+Shakespeare’s youth fell in a time when the English people were
+importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily
+at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans,
+a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican
+church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,
+houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs,
+were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted
+this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers
+now,--no, not by the strongest party,--neither then could king,
+prelate, or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ, which was
+ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, punch, and library, at the
+same time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all found their own
+account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national interest,--by
+no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of
+treating it in an English history,--but not a whit less considerable,
+because it was cheap, and of no account, like a baker’s shop. The best
+proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke
+into this field: Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker,
+Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and
+Fletcher.
+
+The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the
+first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
+idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
+case of Shakespeare, there is much more. At the time when he left
+Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all
+dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced
+on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear
+hearing some part of every week; the Death of Julius Cæsar, and other
+stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of
+English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the
+royal Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful
+tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the
+London prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or
+less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and
+tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote
+them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so long, and so
+many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a
+speech, or a whole Scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer
+claim copyright in this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to.
+They are not yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many
+spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.
+
+Shakespeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
+plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had
+the _prestige_ which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing
+could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England
+circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he
+wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in
+popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain
+his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people,
+supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much
+work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for
+the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his
+legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in
+Greece, grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the ornament
+of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then
+the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the
+wall, the groups being still arranged with reference to the building,
+which serves also as a frame to hold the figures; and when, at last,
+the greatest freedom of style and treatment was reached, the
+prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness
+and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for
+itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began
+to decline; freak, extravagance, and exhibition, took the place of the
+old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in
+architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the
+accumulated dramatic materials to which the people were already
+wonted, and which had a certain excellence which no single genius,
+however extraordinary, could hope to create.
+
+In point of fact, it appears that Shakespeare did owe debts in all
+directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
+indebtedness may be inferred from Malone’s laborious computations in
+regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of _Henry VI_, in which,
+‘out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
+Shakespeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;
+and 1899 were entirely his own.’ And the proceeding investigation
+hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone’s
+sentence is an important piece of external history. In _Henry VIII_, I
+think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his
+own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior,
+thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know
+well their cadence. See Wolsey’s soliloquy, and the following scene
+with Cromwell, where,--instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose
+secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for
+the sense will best bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are
+constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit
+eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable
+traits of Shakespeare’s hand, and some passages, as the account of the
+coronation, are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen
+Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm.
+
+Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any
+invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his
+resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was
+not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The
+universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who
+appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light
+which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of
+sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes
+to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore little
+solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through
+translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant
+countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are
+equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near
+home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good
+many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He
+knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place,
+wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps; of
+Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are
+librarians and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was
+heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world,--
+
+    Presenting Thebes’ and Pelops’ line,
+    And the tale of Troy divine.
+
+The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;
+and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to
+him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large
+unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence
+which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.
+Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from
+Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a
+compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch,
+Boccaccio, and the Provençal poets are his benefactors: the _Romaunt
+of the Rose_ is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and
+John of Meun: _Troilus and Creseide_, from Lollius of Urbino: _The
+Cock and the Fox_, from the _Lais_ of Marie: _The House of Fame_, from
+the French or Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a
+brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build his house. He
+steals by this apology; that what he takes has no worth where he finds
+it, and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically
+a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself
+capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the
+writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who
+can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain
+awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we
+have learned what to do with them, they become our own.
+
+Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The
+learned member of the legislature at Westminster or at Washington,
+speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now
+invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes,
+the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or
+conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates,
+and it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of something of
+their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so
+Locke and Rousseau think for thousands; and so there were fountains
+all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew;
+friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all perished,--which,
+if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with
+authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion? The
+appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his
+breast a Delphi whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing,
+whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely
+on that? All the debts which such a man could contract to other wit,
+would never disturb his consciousness of originality: for the
+ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a whiff of smoke to
+that most private reality with which he has conversed.
+
+It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the
+world, was no man’s work, but came by wide social labour, when a
+thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible
+is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English
+language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but
+centuries and churches brought it to perfection; There never was a
+time when there was not some translation existing. The Liturgy,
+admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of
+ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the
+Catholic church,--these collected, too, in long periods, from the
+prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer, all over the
+world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect to the Lord’s Prayer,
+that the single clauses of which it is composed were already in use,
+in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms. He picked out the
+grains of gold. The nervous language of the Common Law, the impressive
+forms of our courts, and the precision and substantial truth of the
+legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the sharp-sighted,
+strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws
+govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being
+translation on translation. There never was a time when there was
+none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and all
+others successively picked out, and thrown away. Something like the
+same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these
+books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, Æsop’s
+Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish
+Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of such
+works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter,
+the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book
+supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every
+trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic genius who is
+not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of
+all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his
+own.
+
+We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakespeare
+Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the
+Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final
+detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from
+_Ferrex and Porrex_, and _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_, down to the
+possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakespeare altered,
+remodelled, and finally made his own. Elated with success, and piqued
+by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no bookstall
+unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow
+accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to
+discover whether the boy Shakespeare poached or not, whether he held
+horses at the theatre door, whether he kept school, and why he left in
+his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.
+
+There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age
+mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are
+turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen
+Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and
+Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the founder
+of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be
+remembered,--the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the
+inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people
+of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to
+receive this and not another bias. A popular player,--nobody suspected
+he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as
+faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and
+frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human
+understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson,
+though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no
+suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was
+attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him
+generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet
+of the two.
+
+If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakespeare’s
+time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born
+four years after Shakespeare, and died twenty-three years after him;
+and I find, among his correspondents and acquaintances, the following
+persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of
+Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane,
+Izaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton,
+John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi,
+Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having
+communicated, without enumerating many others, whom doubtless he
+saw,--Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts,
+Marlowe, Chapman, and the rest. Since the constellation of great men
+who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any
+such society; yet their genius failed them to find out the best head
+in the universe. Our poet’s mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the
+mountain near. It took a century to make it suspected; and not until
+two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we
+think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the
+history of Shakespeare till now; for he is the father of German
+literature: it was on the introduction of Shakespeare into German, by
+Lessing, and the translation of his works by Wieland and Schlegel,
+that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately
+connected. It was not until the nineteenth century, whose speculative
+genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could
+find such wondering readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought
+are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present,
+we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge
+and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our convictions
+with any adequate fidelity; but there is in all cultivated minds a
+silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like
+Christianity, qualifies the period.
+
+The Shakespeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised
+the missing facts, offered money for any information that will lead
+to proof; and with what result? Beside some important illustration of
+the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted, they have
+gleaned a few facts touching the property, and dealings in regard to
+property, of the poet. It appears that, from year to year, he owned a
+larger share in the Blackfriars Theatre: its wardrobe and other
+appurtenances were his; that he bought an estate in his native
+village, with his earnings, as writer and shareholder; that he lived
+in the best house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbours with
+their commissions in London, as of borrowing money, and the like; that
+he was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was writing
+_Macbeth_, he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford,
+for thirty-five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at
+different times; and, in all respects, appears as a good husband, with
+no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good-natured sort
+of man, an actor and shareholder in the theatre, not in any striking
+manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit the
+importance of this information. It was well worth the pains that have
+been taken to procure it.
+
+But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these
+researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite
+invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We
+are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of
+parentage, birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of
+money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we
+have come to an end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears
+between it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at
+random into the _Modern Plutarch_ and read any other life there, it
+would have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to
+spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to
+abolish the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and
+Collier have wasted their oil. The famed theatres, Covent Garden,
+Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton,
+Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready dedicate their lives to this
+genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows
+them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal
+from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with
+invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once to
+see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of the English stage;
+and all I then heard, and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was
+that in which the tragedian had no part; simply, Hamlet’s question to
+the ghost:
+
+                    What may this mean,
+    That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
+    Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon?
+
+That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world’s
+dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces
+the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his
+magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any biography
+shed light on the localities into which the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_
+admits me? Did Shakespeare confide to any notary or parish recorder,
+sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate
+creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the
+moonlight of Portia’s villa, ‘the antres vast and desarts idle’ of
+Othello’s captivity,--where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the
+chancellor’s file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one
+word of those transcendent secrets? In fine, in this drama, as in all
+great works of art,--in the Cyclopean architecture of Egypt and India;
+in the Phidian sculpture; the Gothic minsters; the Italian painting;
+the Ballads of Spain and Scotland;--the Genius draws up the ladder
+after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a
+new age, which sees the works, and asks in vain for a history.
+
+Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can
+tell nothing, except to the Shakespeare in us; that is, to our most
+apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod,
+and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents
+extricated, analysed, and compared by the assiduous Dyce and Collier;
+and now read one of those skyey sentences,--aerolites,--which seem to
+have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but the man
+within the breast, has accepted as words of fate; and tell me if they
+match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or which
+gives the most historical insight into the man.
+
+Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet with Shakespeare
+for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the
+information which is material, that which describes character and
+fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with
+him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions on
+those questions which knock for answer at every heart,--on life and
+death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and the
+ways whereby we come at them; on the characters of men, and the
+influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes; and on those
+mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science, and which yet
+interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who
+ever read the volume of the Sonnets, without finding that the poet had
+there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the
+lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the
+most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men?
+What trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can
+discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, what
+forms and humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of friends, in
+large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let
+Antonio the merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from
+Shakespeare’s being the least known, he is the one person, in all
+modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of
+economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life,
+has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge
+of? What office, or function, or district of man’s work, has he not
+remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught
+Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What
+lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What
+gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behaviour?
+
+Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare
+valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is
+falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these
+critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a
+full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images,
+which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less,
+we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good
+a dramatist he was, and he is the best in the world. But it turns out,
+that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw some
+attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is
+to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs
+and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which
+gave the saint’s meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer,
+or of a code of laws, is immaterial, compared with the universality of
+its application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of
+life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text of
+modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and
+Europe; the father of the man in America: he drew the man, and
+described the day, and what is done in it; he read the hearts of men
+and women, their probity, and their second thought, and wiles; the
+wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices
+slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother’s part from
+the father’s part in the face of the child, or draw the fine
+demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression
+which make the police of nature; and all the sweets and all the
+terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the
+landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life
+sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. ’Tis like making a
+question concerning the paper on which a king’s message is written.
+
+Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he
+is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others,
+conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato’s brain,
+and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare’s. We are still out of
+doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No
+man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety
+compatible with an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and
+only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of
+life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He
+clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if
+they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have
+left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in
+language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him
+into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent
+humanity co-ordinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story
+to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain
+observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence,
+and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves
+that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his
+fitness and strength. But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no
+importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities:
+no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no
+discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small,
+subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong,
+as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without
+effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and
+likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of
+power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so
+incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other
+readers.
+
+This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of
+things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has
+added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into
+natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing
+new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without
+loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with
+compass; the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any
+distortion or favour. He carried his powerful execution into minute
+details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as
+he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature’s, will bear the
+scrutiny of the solar microscope.
+
+In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of
+production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the
+power to make one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch
+its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to etch
+a million. There are always objects; but there was never
+representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let
+the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given
+for the making of a Shakespeare; but the possibility of the
+translation of things into song is demonstrated.
+
+His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though
+their excellence is lost in the splendour of the dramas, are as
+inimitable as they; and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit
+of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so
+is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now
+as a whole poem.
+
+Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty
+which tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism, yet the
+sentence is so loaded with meaning, and so linked with its foregoers
+and followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as
+admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps
+himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is
+not reduced to dismount and walk, because his horses are running off
+with him in some distant direction: he always rides.
+
+The finest poetry was first experience: but the thought has suffered a
+transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men often attain
+a good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy to read,
+through their poems, their personal history: any one acquainted with
+parties can name every figure: this is Andrew, and that is Rachel. The
+sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and not
+yet a butterfly. In the poet’s mind, the fact has gone quite over into
+the new element of thought, and has lost all that is exuvial. This
+generosity abides with Shakespeare. We say, from the truth and
+closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart. Yet
+there is not a trace of egotism.
+
+One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his
+cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his
+aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace: he
+delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that
+sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds
+over the universe. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such charms that
+a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the true
+bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies
+in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, ‘It was
+rumoured abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with
+repentance?’ Not less sovereign and cheerful,--much more sovereign and
+cheerful, is the tone of Shakespeare. His name suggests joy and
+emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any company
+of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing
+that does not borrow health and longevity from his festal style.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and benefactor,
+when in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame,
+we seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere lessons; it can
+teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs Shakespeare
+also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection of
+humanity.
+
+Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendour of meaning that
+plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than
+for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the
+earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and
+finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and
+conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on
+human life. Shakespeare employed them as colours to compose his
+picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the step which
+seemed inevitable to such genius, namely, to explore the virtue which
+resides in these symbols, and imparts this power,--What is that which
+they themselves say? He converted the elements, which waited on his
+command, into entertainments. He was master of the revels to mankind.
+Is it not as if one should have, through majestic powers of science,
+the comets given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, and
+should draw them from their orbits to glare with the municipal
+fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all towns, ‘very
+superior pyrotechny this evening!’ Are the agents of nature, and the
+power to understand them, worth no more than a street serenade, or the
+breath of a cigar? One remembers again the trumpet-text in the
+Koran,--‘The heavens and the earth, and all that is between them,
+think ye we have created them in jest?’ As long as the question is of
+talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show.
+But when the question is to life, and its materials, and its
+auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it signify? It is but a
+Twelfth Night, or Midsummer Night’s Dream, or a Winter Evening’s Tale:
+what signifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of
+the Shakespeare Societies comes to mind, that he was a jovial actor
+and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable
+men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but
+this man, in wide contrast. Had he been less, had he reached only the
+common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes,
+we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but, that this
+man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger
+subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity
+some furlongs forward into Chaos,--that he should not be wise for
+himself,--it must even go into the world’s history, that the best poet
+led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public
+amusement.
+
+Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German, and Swede,
+beheld the same objects: they also saw through them that which was
+contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished; they
+read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a
+sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly,
+joyless, a pilgrim’s progress, a probation, beleaguered round with
+doleful histories of Adam’s fall and curse, behind us; with doomsdays
+and purgatorial and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer
+and the heart of the listener sank in them.
+
+It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The world
+still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle with
+Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the
+mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration.
+For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than
+private affection; and love is compatible with universal wisdom.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
+
+1819-1891
+
+WORDSWORTH (1875)
+
+
+A generation has now passed away since Wordsworth was laid with the
+family in the churchyard at Grasmere. Perhaps it is hardly yet time to
+take a perfectly impartial measure of his value as a poet. To do this
+is especially hard for those who are old enough to remember the last
+shot which the foe was sullenly firing in that long war of critics
+which began when he published his manifesto as Pretender, and which
+came to a pause rather than end when they flung up their caps with the
+rest at his final coronation. Something of the intensity of the _odium
+theologicum_ (if indeed the _aestheticum_ be not in these days the
+more bitter of the two) entered into the conflict. The Wordsworthians
+were a sect, who, if they had the enthusiasm, had also not a little of
+the exclusiveness and partiality to which sects are liable. The verses
+of the master had for them the virtue of religious canticles stimulant
+of zeal and not amenable to the ordinary tests of cold-blooded
+criticism. Like the hymns of the Huguenots and Covenanters, they were
+songs of battle no less than of worship, and the combined ardours of
+conviction and conflict lent them a fire that was not naturally their
+own. As we read them now, that virtue of the moment is gone out of
+them, and whatever of Dr. Wattsiness there is gives us a slight shock
+of disenchantment. It is something like the difference between the
+_Marseillaise_ sung by armed propagandists on the edge of battle, or
+by Brissotins in the tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in the
+closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy of Thérèse. It was
+natural in the early days of Wordsworth’s career to dwell most fondly
+on those profounder qualities to appreciate which settled in some sort
+the measure of a man’s right to judge of poetry at all. But now we
+must admit the shortcomings, the failures, the defects, as no less
+essential elements in forming a sound judgement as to whether the seer
+and artist were so united in him as to justify the claim first put in
+by himself and afterwards maintained by his sect to a place beside the
+few great poets who exalt men’s minds, and give a right direction and
+safe outlet to their passions through the imagination, while
+insensibly helping them toward balance of character and serenity of
+judgement by stimulating their sense of proportion, form, and the nice
+adjustment of means to ends. In none of our poets has the constant
+propulsion of an unbending will, and the concentration of exclusive,
+if I must not say somewhat narrow, sympathies done so much to make the
+original endowment of nature effective, and in none accordingly does
+the biography throw so much light on the works, or enter so largely
+into their composition as an element whether of power or of weakness.
+Wordsworth never saw, and I think never wished to see, beyond the
+limits of his own consciousness and experience. He early conceived
+himself to be, and through life was confirmed by circumstances in the
+faith that he was, a ‘dedicated spirit’,[41] a state of mind likely
+to further an intense but at the same time one-sided development of
+the intellectual powers. The solitude in which the greater part of his
+mature life was passed, while it doubtless ministered to the
+passionate intensity of his musings upon man and nature, was, it may
+be suspected, harmful to him as an artist, by depriving him of any
+standard of proportion outside himself by which to test the
+comparative value of his thoughts, and by rendering him more and more
+incapable of that urbanity of mind which could be gained only by
+commerce with men more nearly on his own level, and which gives tone
+without lessening individuality. Wordsworth never quite saw the
+distinction between the eccentric and the original. For what we call
+originality seems not so much anything peculiar, much less anything
+odd, but that quality in a man which touches human nature at most
+points of its circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of
+our own powers by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations
+and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings,
+and adequate utterance to our own stammering conceptions or emotions.
+The poet’s office is to be a Voice, not of one crying in the
+wilderness to a knot of already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid
+the throng of men, and lifting their common aspirations and
+sympathies (so first clearly revealed to themselves) on the wings of
+his song to a purer ether and a wider reach of view. We cannot, if we
+would, read the poetry of Wordsworth as mere poetry; at every other
+page we find ourselves entangled in a problem of aesthetics. The
+world-old question of matter and form, of whether nectar _is_ of
+precisely the same flavour when served to us from a Grecian chalice or
+from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up for decision anew. The
+Teutonic nature has always shown a sturdy preference of the solid bone
+with a marrow of nutritious moral to any shadow of the same on the
+flowing mirror of sense. Wordsworth never lets us long forget the
+deeply rooted stock from which he sprang,--_vien ben dà lui_.
+
+    [41] In the _Prelude_ he attributes this consecration to a
+    sunrise seen (during a college vacation) as he walked
+    homeward from some village festival where he had danced all
+    night:
+
+        My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
+        Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
+        Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly.
+        A dedicated Spirit.--Book IV.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland on the 7th of
+April, 1770, the second of five children. His father was John
+Wordsworth, an attorney-at-law, and agent of Sir James Lowther,
+afterwards first Earl of Lonsdale. His mother was Anne Cookson, the
+daughter of a mercer in Penrith. His paternal ancestors had been
+settled immemorially at Penistone in Yorkshire, whence his grandfather
+had emigrated to Westmorland. His mother, a woman of piety and wisdom,
+died in March 1778, being then in her thirty-second year. His father,
+who never entirely cast off the depression occasioned by her death,
+survived her but five years, dying in December 1783, when William was
+not quite fourteen years old.
+
+The poet’s early childhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, and
+partly with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher
+appears to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone’s
+Schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her pupils, teaching them
+chiefly by rote, and not endeavouring to cultivate their reasoning
+faculties, a process by which children are apt to be converted from
+natural logicians into impertinent sophists. Among his schoolmates
+here was Mary Hutchinson, who afterwards became his wife.
+
+In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of
+York, in the year 1585, at Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawkshead is a
+small market-town in the vale of Esthwaite, about a third of a mile
+north-west of the lake. Here Wordsworth passed nine years, among a
+people of simple habits and scenery of a sweet and pastoral dignity.
+His earliest intimacies were with the mountains, lakes, and streams of
+his native district, and the associations with which his mind was
+stored during its most impressible period were noble and pure. The
+boys were boarded among the dames of the village, thus enjoying a
+freedom from scholastic restraints, which could be nothing but
+beneficial in a place where the temptations were only to sports that
+hardened the body, while they fostered a love of nature in the spirit
+and habits of observation in the mind. Wordsworth’s ordinary
+amusements here were hunting and fishing, rowing, skating, and long
+walks around the lake and among the hills, with an occasional scamper
+on horseback.[42] His life as a schoolboy was favourable also to his
+poetic development, in being identified with that of the people among
+whom he lived. Among men of simple habits, and where there are small
+diversities of condition, the feelings and passions are displayed with
+less restraint, and the young poet grew acquainted with that primal
+human basis of character where the Muse finds firm foothold, and to
+which he ever afterward cleared his way through all the overlying
+drift of conventionalism. The dalesmen were a primitive and hardy race
+who kept alive the traditions and often the habits of a more
+picturesque time. A common level of interests and social standing
+fostered unconventional ways of thought and speech, and friendly human
+sympathies. Solitude induced reflection, a reliance of the mind on its
+own resources, and individuality of character. Where everybody knew
+everybody, and everybody’s father had known everybody’s father, the
+interest of man in man was not likely to become a matter of cold
+hearsay and distant report. When death knocked at any door in the
+hamlet, there was an echo from every fireside, and a wedding dropped
+its white flowers at every threshold. There was not a grave in the
+churchyard but had its story; not a crag or glen or aged tree
+untouched with some ideal hue of legend. It was here that Wordsworth
+learned that homely humanity which gives such depth and sincerity to
+his poems. Travel, society, culture, nothing could obliterate the deep
+trace of that early training which enables him to speak directly to
+the primitive instincts of man. He was apprenticed early to the
+difficult art of being himself.
+
+    [42] _Prelude_, Book II.
+
+At school he wrote some task-verses on subjects imposed by the master,
+and also some voluntaries of his own, equally undistinguished by any
+peculiar merit. But he seems to have made up his mind as early as in
+his fourteenth year to become a poet.[43] ‘It is recorded’, says his
+biographer vaguely, ‘that the poet’s father set him very early to
+learn portions of the best English poets by heart, so that at an early
+age he could repeat large portions of Shakespeare, Milton, and
+Spenser.’
+
+    [43]
+
+        I to the muses have been bound,
+        These fourteen years, by strong indentures.
+
+                                 _Idiot Boy_ (1798).]
+
+The great event of Wordsworth’s schooldays was the death of his
+father, who left what may be called a hypothetical estate, consisting
+chiefly of claims upon the first Earl of Lonsdale, the payment of
+which, though their justice was acknowledged, that nobleman contrived
+in some unexplained way to elude so long as he lived. In October 1787
+he left school for St. John’s College, Cambridge. He was already, we
+are told, a fair Latin scholar, and had made some progress in
+mathematics. The earliest books we hear of his reading were _Don
+Quixote_, _Gil Blas_, _Gulliver’s Travels_, and the _Tale of a Tub_;
+but at school he had also become familiar with the works of some
+English poets, particularly Goldsmith and Gray, of whose poems he had
+learned many by heart. What is more to the purpose, he had become,
+without knowing it, a lover of Nature in all her moods, and the same
+mental necessities of a solitary life which compel men to an interest
+in the transitory phenomena of scenery, had made him also studious of
+the movements of his own mind, and the mutual interaction and
+dependence of the external and internal universe.
+
+Doubtless his early orphanage was not without its effect in confirming
+a character naturally impatient of control, and his mind, left to
+itself, clothed itself with an indigenous growth, which grew fairly
+and freely, unstinted by the shadow of exotic plantations. It has
+become a truism, that remarkable persons have remarkable mothers; but
+perhaps this is chiefly true of such as have made themselves
+distinguished by their industry, and by the assiduous cultivation of
+faculties in themselves of only an average quality. It is rather to be
+noted how little is known of the parentage of men of the first
+magnitude, how often they seem in some sort foundlings, and how early
+an apparently adverse destiny begins the culture of those who are to
+encounter and master great intellectual or spiritual experiences.
+
+Of his disposition as a child little is known, but that little is
+characteristic. He himself tells us that he was ‘stiff, moody, and of
+violent temper’. His mother said of him that he was the only one of
+her children about whom she felt any anxiety,--for she was sure that
+he would be remarkable for good or evil. Once, in resentment at some
+fancied injury, he resolved to kill himself, but his heart failed him.
+I suspect that few boys of passionate temperament have escaped these
+momentary suggestions of despairing helplessness. ‘On another
+occasion,’ he says, ‘while I was at my grandfather’s house at Penrith,
+along with my eldest brother Richard, we were whipping tops together
+in the long drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid down on
+particular occasions. The walls were hung round with family pictures,
+and I said to my brother, “Dare you strike your whip through that old
+lady’s petticoat?” He replied, “No, I won’t.” “Then,” said I, “here
+goes,” and I struck my lash through her hooped petticoat, for which,
+no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was properly punished. But,
+possibly from some want of judgement in punishments inflicted, I had
+become perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather
+proud of it than otherwise.’ This last anecdote is as happily typical
+as a bit of Greek mythology which always prefigured the lives of
+heroes in the stories of their childhood. Just so do we find him
+afterward striking his defiant lash through the hooped petticoat of
+the artificial style of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the
+punishment of the Reviewers.
+
+Of his college life the chief record is to be found in _The Prelude_.
+He did not distinguish himself as a scholar, and if his life had any
+incidents, they were of that interior kind which rarely appear in
+biography, though they may be of controlling influence upon the life.
+He speaks of reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton while at
+Cambridge,[44] but no reflection from them is visible in his earliest
+published poems. The greater part of his vacations was spent in his
+native Lake-country, where his only sister, Dorothy, was the companion
+of his rambles. She was a woman of large natural endowments, chiefly
+of the receptive kind, and had much to do with the formation and
+tendency of the poet’s mind. It was she who called forth the shyer
+sensibilities of his nature, and taught an originally harsh and
+austere imagination to surround itself with fancy and feeling, as the
+rock fringes itself with a sun-spray of ferns. She was his first
+public, and belonged to that class of prophetically appreciative
+temperaments whose apparent office it is to cheer the early solitude
+of original minds with messages from the future. Through the greater
+part of his life she continued to be a kind of poetical conscience to
+him.
+
+    [44] _Prelude_, Book III.
+
+Wordsworth’s last college vacation was spent in a foot journey upon
+the Continent (1790). In January 1791 he took his degree of B.A., and
+left Cambridge. During the summer of this year he visited Wales, and,
+after declining to enter upon holy orders under the plea that he was
+not of age for ordination, went over to France in November, and
+remained during the winter at Orleans. Here he became intimate with
+the republican General Beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations he
+ardently sympathized. In the spring of 1792 he was at Blois, and
+returned thence to Orleans, which he finally quitted in October for
+Paris. He remained here as long as he could with safety, and at the
+close of the year went back to England, thus, perhaps, escaping the
+fate which soon after overtook his friends the Brissotins.
+
+As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be called a fortunate one, not
+less so in the training and expansion of his faculties was this period
+of his stay in France. Born and reared in a country where the homely
+and familiar nestles confidingly amid the most savage and sublime
+forms of nature, he had experienced whatever impulses the creative
+faculty can receive from mountain and cloud and the voices of winds
+and waters, but he had known man only as an actor in fireside
+histories and tragedies, for which the hamlet supplied an ample stage.
+In France he first felt the authentic beat of a nation’s heart; he was
+a spectator at one of those dramas where the terrible footfall of the
+Eumenides is heard nearer and nearer in the pauses of the action; and
+he saw man such as he can only be when he is vibrated by the orgasm of
+a national emotion. He sympathized with the hopes of France and of
+mankind deeply, as was fitting in a young man and a poet; and if his
+faith in the gregarious advancement of men was afterward shaken, he
+only held the more firmly by his belief in the individual, and his
+reverence for the human as something quite apart from the popular and
+above it. Wordsworth has been unwisely blamed, as if he had been
+recreant to the liberal instincts of his youth. But it was inevitable
+that a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind which always
+compensated itself for its artistic radicalism by an involuntary
+leaning toward external respectability, should recoil from whatever
+was convulsionary and destructive in politics, and above all in
+religion. He reads the poems of Wordsworth without understanding, who
+does not find in them the noblest incentives to faith in man and the
+grandeur of his destiny, founded always upon that personal dignity and
+virtue, the capacity for whose attainment alone makes universal
+liberty possible and assures its permanence. He was to make men better
+by opening to them the sources of an inalterable well-being; to make
+them free, in a sense higher than political, by showing them that
+these sources are within them, and that no contrivance of man can
+permanently emancipate narrow natures and depraved minds. His politics
+were always those of a poet, circling in the larger orbit of causes
+and principles, careless of the transitory oscillation of events.
+
+The change in his point of view (if change there was) certainly was
+complete soon after his return from France, and was perhaps due in
+part to the influence of Burke.
+
+    While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
+    Against all systems built on abstract rights,
+    Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
+    Of institutes and laws hallowed by time;
+    Declares the vital power of social ties
+    Endeared by custom; and with high disdain,
+    Exploding upstart theory, insists
+    Upon the allegiance to which men are born.
+              ... Could a youth, and one
+    In ancient story versed, whose breast had heaved
+    Under the weight of classic eloquence,
+    Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired?[45]
+
+    [45] _Prelude_, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring
+    to a still earlier date.
+
+He had seen the French for a dozen years eagerly busy in tearing up
+whatever had roots in the past, replacing the venerable trunks of
+tradition and orderly growth with liberty-poles, then striving vainly
+to piece together the fibres they had broken, and to reproduce
+artificially that sense of permanence and continuity which is the main
+safeguard of vigorous self-consciousness in a nation. He became a Tory
+through intellectual conviction, retaining, I suspect, to the last, a
+certain radicalism of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells us that
+in 1809 Sir George Beaumont said to him and Wilkie, ‘Wordsworth may
+perhaps walk in; if he do, I caution you both against his terrific
+democratic notions’; and it must have been many years later that
+Wordsworth himself told Crabb Robinson, ‘I have no respect whatever
+for Whigs, but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me’. In 1802,
+during his tour in Scotland, he travelled on Sundays as on the other
+days of the week. He afterwards became a theoretical churchgoer.
+‘Wordsworth defended earnestly the Church establishment. He even said
+he would shed his blood for it. Nor was he disconcerted by a laugh
+raised against him on account of his having confessed that he knew not
+when he had been in a church in his own country. “All our ministers
+are so vile,” said he. The mischief of allowing the clergy to depend
+on the caprice of the multitude he thought more than outweighed all
+the evils of an establishment.’
+
+In December 1792 Wordsworth had returned to England, and in the
+following year published _Descriptive Sketches_ and the _Evening
+Walk_. He did this, as he says in one of his letters, to show that,
+although he had gained no honours at the University, he _could_ do
+something. They met with no great success, and he afterward corrected
+them so much as to destroy all their interest as juvenile productions,
+without communicating to them any of the merits of maturity. In
+commenting, sixty years afterward, on a couplet in one of these
+poems,--
+
+    And, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines
+    Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines,--
+
+he says: ‘This is feebly and imperfectly expressed, but I recollect
+distinctly the very spot where this first struck me.... The moment was
+important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness
+of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been
+unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was
+acquainted with them, and I made a resolution to supply in some degree
+the deficiency.’
+
+It is plain that Wordsworth’s memory was playing him a trick here,
+misled by that instinct (it may almost be called) of consistency which
+leads men first to desire that their lives should have been without
+break or seam, and then to believe that they have been such. The more
+distant ranges of perspective are apt to run together in
+retrospection. How far could Wordsworth at fourteen have been
+acquainted with the poets of all ages and countries,--he who to his
+dying day could not endure to read Goethe and knew nothing of
+Calderon? It seems to me rather that the earliest influence traceable
+in him is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and it is, perhaps,
+some slight indication of its having already begun that his first
+volume of _Descriptive Sketches_ (1793) was put forth by Johnson, who
+was Cowper’s publisher. By and by the powerful impress of Burns is
+seen both in the topics of his verse and the form of his expression.
+But whatever their ultimate effect upon his style, certain it is that
+his juvenile poems were clothed in the conventional habit of the
+eighteenth century. ‘The first verses from which he remembered to have
+received great pleasure were Miss Carter’s _Poem on Spring_, a poem in
+the six-line stanza which he was particularly fond of and had composed
+much in,--for example, _Ruth_.’ This is noteworthy, for Wordsworth’s
+lyric range, especially so far as tune is concerned, was always
+narrow. His sense of melody was painfully dull, and some of his
+lighter effusions, as he would have called them, are almost
+ludicrously wanting in grace of movement. We cannot expect in a modern
+poet the thrush-like improvisation, the impulsively bewitching
+cadences, that charm us in our Elizabethan drama and whose last
+warble died with Herrick; but Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have
+shown that the simple pathos of their music was not irrecoverable,
+even if the artless poignancy of their phrase be gone beyond recall.
+We feel this lack in Wordsworth all the more keenly if we compare such
+verses as
+
+    Like an army defeated
+    The snow hath retreated
+    And now doth fare ill
+    On the top of the bare hill,
+
+with Goethe’s exquisite _Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh_, in which the
+lines (as if shaken down by a momentary breeze of emotion) drop
+lingeringly one after another like blossoms upon turf.
+
+_The Evening Walk_ and _Descriptive Sketches_ show plainly the
+prevailing influence of Goldsmith, both in the turn of thought and the
+mechanism of the verse. They lack altogether the temperance of tone
+and judgement in selection which have made the _Traveller_ and the
+_Deserted Village_ perhaps the most truly classical poems in the
+language. They bear here and there, however, the unmistakable stamp of
+the maturer Wordsworth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in
+the intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. Of this realism, from
+which Wordsworth never wholly freed himself, the following verses may
+suffice as a specimen. After describing the fate of a chamois-hunter
+killed by falling from a crag, his fancy goes back to the bereaved
+wife and son:
+
+    Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze,
+    Passing his father’s bones in future days,
+    Start at the reliques of that very thigh
+    On which so oft he prattled when a boy.
+
+In these poems there is plenty of that ‘poetic diction’ against which
+Wordsworth was to lead the revolt nine years later.
+
+    To wet the peak’s impracticable sides
+    He opens of his feet the sanguine tides,
+    Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes
+    Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies.
+
+Both of these passages have disappeared from the revised edition, as
+well as some curious outbursts of that motiveless despair which Byron
+made fashionable not long after. Nor are there wanting touches of
+fleshliness which strike us oddly as coming from Wordsworth.
+
+    Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade
+    Rest near their little plots of oaten glade,
+    Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire
+    To throw the ‘sultry ray’ of young Desire;
+    Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go
+    Accordant to the cheek’s unquiet glow;
+    Those shadowy breasts in love’s soft light arrayed,
+    And rising by the moon of passion swayed.
+
+The political tone is also mildened in the revision, as where he
+changes ‘despotcourts’ into ‘tyranny’. One of the alterations is
+interesting. In the _Evening Walk_ he had originally written
+
+    And bids her soldier come her wars to share
+    Asleep on Minden’s charnel hill afar.
+
+An erratum at the end directs us to correct the second verse, thus:
+
+    Asleep on Bunker’s charnel hill afar.
+
+Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for making the owl a bodeful
+bird. He had himself done so in the _Evening Walk_, and corrects his
+epithets to suit his later judgement, putting ‘gladsome’ for ‘boding’,
+and replacing
+
+    The tremulous sob of the complaining owl
+
+by
+
+    The sportive outcry of the mocking owl.
+
+Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much changed in the
+revision as to make the dates appended to them a misleading
+anachronism. But there is one truly Wordsworthian passage which
+already gives us a glimpse of that passion with which he was the first
+to irradiate descriptive poetry and which sets him on a level with
+Turner.
+
+    ’Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour
+    All day the floods a deepening murmur pour:
+    The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight;
+    Dark is the region as with coming night;
+    But what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
+    Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
+    Glances the fire-clad eagle’s wheeling form;
+    Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine
+    The wood-crowned cliffs that o’er the lake recline;
+    Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
+    At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
+    Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun
+    The West that burns like one dilated sun,
+    Where in a mighty crucible expire
+    The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire.
+
+Wordsworth has made only one change in these verses, and that for the
+worse, by substituting ‘glorious’ (which was already implied in
+‘glances’ and ‘fire-clad’) for ‘wheeling’. In later life he would have
+found it hard to forgive the man who should have made cliffs recline
+over a lake. On the whole, what strikes us as most prophetic in these
+poems is their want of continuity, and the purple patches of true
+poetry on a texture of unmistakable prose; perhaps we might add the
+incongruous clothing of prose thoughts in the ceremonial robes of
+poesy.
+
+During the same year (1793) he wrote, but did not publish, a political
+tract, in which he avowed himself opposed to monarchy and to the
+hereditary principle, and desirous of a republic, if it could be had
+without a revolution. He probably continued to be all his life in
+favour of that ideal republic ‘which never was on land or sea’, but
+fortunately he gave up politics that he might devote himself to his
+own nobler calling, to which politics are subordinate, and for which
+he found freedom enough in England as it was. Dr. Wordsworth admits
+that his uncle’s opinions were democratical so late as 1802. I suspect
+that they remained so in an esoteric way to the end of his days. He
+had himself suffered by the arbitrary selfishness of a great
+landholder, and he was born and bred in a part of England where there
+is a greater social equality than elsewhere. The look and manner of
+the Cumberland people especially are such as recall very vividly to a
+New-Englander the associations of fifty years ago, ere the change from
+New England to New Ireland had begun. But meanwhile, Want, which makes
+no distinctions of Monarchist or Republican, was pressing upon him.
+The debt due to his father’s estate had not been paid, and Wordsworth
+was one of those rare idealists who esteem it the first duty of a
+friend of humanity to live for, and not on, his neighbour. He at first
+proposed establishing a periodical journal to be called _The
+Philanthropist_, but luckily went no further with it, for the receipts
+from an organ of opinion which professed republicanism, and at the
+same time discountenanced the plans of all existing or defunct
+republicans, would have been necessarily scanty. There being no
+appearance of any demand, present or prospective, for philanthropists,
+he tried to get employment as correspondent of a newspaper. Here also
+it was impossible that he should succeed; he was too great to be
+merged in the editorial We, and had too well defined a private opinion
+on all subjects to be able to express that average of public opinion
+which constitutes able editorials. But so it is that to the prophet in
+the wilderness the birds of ill omen are already on the wing with food
+from heaven; and while Wordsworth’s relatives were getting impatient
+at what they considered his waste of time, while one thought he had
+gifts enough to make a good parson, and another lamented the rare
+attorney that was lost in him, the prescient muse guided the hand of
+Raisley Calvert while he wrote the poet’s name in his will for a
+legacy of £900. By the death of Calvert, in 1795, this timely help
+came to Wordsworth at the turning-point of his life, and made it
+honest for him to write poems that will never die, instead of
+theatrical critiques as ephemeral as play-bills, or leaders that led
+only to oblivion.
+
+In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sister took up their abode at
+Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. Here nearly two years
+were passed, chiefly in the study of poetry, and Wordsworth to some
+extent recovered from the fierce disappointment of his political
+dreams, and regained that equable tenor of mind which alone is
+consistent with a healthy productiveness. Here Coleridge, who had
+contrived to see something more in the _Descriptive Sketches_ than
+the public had discovered there, first made his acquaintance. The
+sympathy and appreciation of an intellect like Coleridge’s supplied
+him with that external motive to activity which is the chief use of
+popularity, and justified to him his opinion of his own powers. It was
+now that the tragedy of _The Borderers_ was for the most part written,
+and that plan of the _Lyrical Ballads_ suggested which gave Wordsworth
+a clue to lead him out of the metaphysical labyrinth in which he was
+entangled. It was agreed between the two young friends, that
+Wordsworth was to be a philosophic poet, and, by a good fortune
+uncommon to such conspiracies, Nature had already consented to the
+arrangement. In July 1797, the two Wordsworths removed to Allfoxden in
+Somersetshire, that they might be near Coleridge, who in the meanwhile
+had married and settled himself at Nether Stowey. In November _The
+Borderers_ was finished, and Wordsworth went up to London with his
+sister to offer it for the stage. The good Genius of the poet again
+interposing, the play was decisively rejected, and Wordsworth went
+back to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first tragi-comedy so
+common to young authors.
+
+The play has fine passages, but is as unreal as _Jane Eyre_. It shares
+with many of Wordsworth’s narrative poems the defect of being written
+to illustrate an abstract moral theory, so that the overbearing thesis
+is continually thrusting the poetry to the wall. Applied to the drama,
+such predestination makes all the personages puppets and disenables
+them for being characters. Wordsworth seems to have felt this when he
+published _The Borderers_ in 1842, and says in a note that it was ‘at
+first written ... without any view to its exhibition upon the stage’.
+But he was mistaken. The contemporaneous letters of Coleridge to
+Cottle show that he was long in giving up the hope of getting it
+accepted by some theatrical manager.
+
+He now applied himself to the preparation of the first volume of the
+_Lyrical Ballads_ for the press, and it was published toward the close
+of 1798. The book, which contained also _The Ancient Mariner_ of
+Coleridge, attracted little notice, and that in great part
+contemptuous. When Mr. Cottle, the publisher, shortly after sold his
+copyrights to Mr. Longman, that of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was reckoned
+at _zero_, and it was at last given up to the authors. A few persons
+were not wanting, however, who discovered the dawn-streaks of a new
+day in that light which the critical fire-brigade thought to
+extinguish with a few contemptuous spurts of cold water.
+
+Lord Byron describes himself as waking one morning and finding himself
+famous, and it is quite an ordinary fact, that a blaze may be made
+with a little saltpetre that will be stared at by thousands who would
+have thought the sunrise tedious. If we may believe his biographer,
+Wordsworth might have said that he awoke and found himself infamous,
+for the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ undoubtedly raised him to
+the distinction of being the least popular poet in England. Parnassus
+has two peaks; the one where improvising poets cluster; the other
+where the singer of deep secrets sits alone,--a peak veiled sometimes
+from the whole morning of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke
+of kitchen fires, only to glow the more consciously at sunset, and
+after nightfall to crown itself with imperishable stars. Wordsworth
+had that self-trust which in the man of genius is sublime, and in the
+man of talent insufferable. It mattered not to him though all the
+reviewers had been in a chorus of laughter or conspiracy of silence
+behind him. He went quietly over to Germany to write more Lyrical
+Ballads, and to begin a poem on the growth of his own mind, at a time
+when there were only two men in the world (himself and Coleridge) who
+were aware that he had one, or at least one anywise differing from
+those mechanically uniform ones which are stuck drearily, side by
+side, in the great pin-paper of society.
+
+In Germany Wordsworth dined in company with Klopstock, and after
+dinner they had a conversation, of which Wordsworth took notes. The
+respectable old poet, who was passing the evening of his days by the
+chimney-corner, Darby and Joan like, with his respectable Muse, seems
+to have been rather bewildered by the apparition of a living genius.
+The record is of value now chiefly for the insight it gives us into
+Wordsworth’s mind. Among other things he said, ‘that it was the
+province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to
+descend to theirs’,--memorable words, the more memorable that a
+literary life of sixty years was in keeping with them.
+
+It would be instructive to know what were Wordsworth’s studies during
+his winter in Goslar. De Quincey’s statement is mere conjecture. It
+may be guessed fairly enough that he would seek an entrance to the
+German language by the easy path of the ballad, a course likely to
+confirm him in his theories as to the language of poetry. The
+Spinozism with which he has been not unjustly charged was certainly
+not due to any German influence, for it appears unmistakably in the
+_Lines composed at Tintern Abbey_ in July 1798. It is more likely to
+have been derived from his talks with Coleridge in 1797. When Emerson
+visited him in 1833, he spoke with loathing of _Wilhelm Meister_, a
+part of which he had read in Carlyle’s translation apparently. There
+was some affectation in this, it should seem, for he had read
+Smollett. On the whole, it may be fairly concluded that the help of
+Germany in the development of his genius may be reckoned as very
+small, though there is certainly a marked resemblance both in form and
+sentiment between some of his earlier lyrics and those of Goethe. His
+poem of the _Thorn_, though vastly more imaginative, may have been
+suggested by Bürger’s _Pfarrer’s Tochter von Taubenhain_. The little
+grave _drei Spannen lang_, in its conscientious measurement, certainly
+recalls a famous couplet in the English poem.
+
+After spending the winter at Goslar, Wordsworth and his sister
+returned to England in the spring of 1799, and settled at Grasmere in
+Westmorland. In 1800, the first edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ being
+exhausted, it was republished with the addition of another volume, Mr.
+Longman paying £100 for the copyright of two editions. The book passed
+to a second edition in 1802, and to a third in 1805. Wordsworth sent a
+copy of it, with a manly letter, to Mr. Fox, particularly recommending
+to his attention the poems _Michael_ and _The Brothers_, as displaying
+the strength and permanence among a simple and rural population of
+those domestic affections which were certain to decay gradually under
+the influence of manufactories and poor-houses. Mr. Fox wrote a civil
+acknowledgement, saying that his favourites among the poems were
+_Harry Gill_, _We are Seven_, _The Mad Mother_, and _The Idiot_, but
+that he was prepossessed against the use of blank verse for simple
+subjects. Any political significance in the poems he was apparently
+unable to see. To this second edition Wordsworth prefixed an
+argumentative Preface, in which he nailed to the door of the cathedral
+of English song the critical theses which he was to maintain against
+all comers in his poetry and his life. It was a new thing for an
+author to undertake to show the goodness of his verses by the logic
+and learning of his prose; but Wordsworth carried to the reform of
+poetry all that fervour and faith which had lost their political
+object, and it is another proof of the sincerity and greatness of his
+mind, and of that heroic simplicity which is their concomitant, that
+he could do so calmly what was sure to seem ludicrous to the greater
+number of his readers. Fifty years have since demonstrated that the
+true judgement of one man outweighs any counterpoise of false
+judgement, and that the faith of mankind is guided to a man only by a
+well-founded faith in himself. To this _Defensio_ Wordsworth afterward
+added a supplement, and the two form a treatise of permanent value for
+philosophic statement and decorous English. Their only ill effect has
+been, that they have encouraged many otherwise deserving young men to
+set a Sibylline value on their verses in proportion as they were
+unsaleable. The strength of an argument for self-reliance drawn from
+the example of a great man depends wholly on the greatness of him who
+uses it; such arguments being like coats of mail, which, though they
+serve the strong against arrow-flights and lance-thrusts, may only
+suffocate the weak or sink him the sooner in the waters of oblivion.
+
+An advertisement prefixed to the _Lyrical Ballads_, as originally
+published in one volume, warned the reader that ‘they were written
+chiefly with a view to ascertain how far _the language of conversation
+in the middle and lower classes_ of society is adapted to the purposes
+of poetic pleasure’. In his preface to the second edition, in two
+volumes, Wordsworth already found himself forced to shift his ground a
+little (perhaps in deference to the wider view and finer sense of
+Coleridge), and now says of the former volume that ‘it was published
+as an experiment which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain how
+far, by fitting to metrical arrangement, _a selection of the real
+language of men in a state of vivid sensation_, that sort of pleasure
+and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted which a poet may
+_rationally endeavour_ to impart’. Here is evidence of a retreat
+towards a safer position, though Wordsworth seems to have remained
+unconvinced at heart, and for many years longer clung obstinately to
+the passages of bald prose into which his original theory had betrayed
+him. In 1815 his opinions had undergone a still further change, and an
+assiduous study of the qualities of his own mind and of his own poetic
+method (the two subjects in which alone he was ever a thorough
+scholar) had convinced him that poetry was in no sense that appeal to
+the understanding which is implied by the words ‘rationally endeavour
+to impart’. In the preface of that year he says, ‘The observations
+prefixed to that portion of these volumes which was published many
+years ago under the title of _Lyrical Ballads_ have so little of
+special application to the greater part of the present enlarged and
+diversified collection, that they could not with propriety stand as an
+introduction to it.’ It is a pity that he could not have become an
+earlier convert to Coleridge’s pithy definition, that ‘prose was words
+in their best order, and poetry the _best_ words in the best order’.
+But idealization was something that Wordsworth was obliged to learn
+painfully. It did not come to him naturally as to Spenser and Shelley
+and to Coleridge in his higher moods. Moreover, it was in the too
+frequent choice of subjects incapable of being idealized without a
+manifest jar between theme and treatment that Wordsworth’s great
+mistake lay. For example, in _The Blind Highland Boy_ he had
+originally the following stanzas:
+
+    Strong is the current, but be mild,
+    Ye waves, and spare the helpless child!
+    If ye in anger fret or chafe,
+    A bee-hive would be ship as safe
+      As that in which he sails.
+
+    But say, what was it? Thought of fear!
+    Well may ye tremble when ye hear!
+    --A household tub like one of those
+    Which women use to wash their clothes,
+      This carried the blind boy.
+
+In endeavouring to get rid of the downright vulgarity of phrase in the
+last stanza, Wordsworth invents an impossible tortoise-shell, and thus
+robs his story of the reality which alone gave it a living interest.
+Any extemporized raft would have floated the boy down to immortality.
+But Wordsworth never quite learned the distinction between Fact, which
+suffocates the Muse, and Truth, which is the very breath of her
+nostrils. Study and self-culture did much for him, but they never
+quite satisfied him that he was capable of making a mistake. He
+yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on certain points, and gave
+up, for example, the ludicrous exactness of
+
+    I’ve measured it from side to side,
+    ’Tis three feet long and two feet wide.
+
+But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to his dying day he
+could never quite shake off that habit of over-minute detail which
+renders the narratives of uncultivated people so tedious, and
+sometimes so distasteful. _Simon Lee_, after his latest revision,
+still contains verses like these:
+
+    And he is lean and he is sick;
+    His body, dwindled and awry,
+    Rests upon ankles swollen and thick;
+    His legs are thin and dry;
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Few months of life he has in store,
+    As he to you will tell,
+    For still, the more he works, the more
+    Do his weak ankles swell,--
+
+which are not only prose, but _bad_ prose, and moreover guilty of the
+same fault for which Wordsworth condemned Dr. Johnson’s famous parody
+on the ballad-style,--that their ‘_matter_ is contemptible’. The
+sonorousness of conviction with which Wordsworth sometimes gives
+utterance to commonplaces of thought and trivialities of sentiment has
+a ludicrous effect on the profane and even on the faithful in
+unguarded moments. We are reminded of a passage in _The Excursion_:
+
+             List! I heard
+    From yon huge breast of rock _a solemn bleat_,
+    _Sent forth as if it were the mountain’s voice_.
+
+In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with Lamb began, and was
+thenceforward never interrupted. He continued to live at Grasmere,
+conscientiously diligent in the composition of poems, secure of
+finding the materials of glory within and around him; for his genius
+taught him that inspiration is no product of a foreign shore, and that
+no adventurer ever found it, though he wandered as long as Ulysses.
+Meanwhile the appreciation of the best minds and the gratitude of the
+purest hearts gradually centred more and more towards him. In 1802 he
+made a short visit to France, in company with Miss Wordsworth, and
+soon after his return to England was married to Mary Hutchinson, on
+the 4th of October of the same year. Of the good fortune of this
+marriage no other proof is needed than the purity and serenity of his
+poems, and its record is to be sought nowhere else.
+
+On the 18th of June, 1803, his first child, John, was born, and on the
+14th of August of the same year he set out with his sister on a foot
+journey into Scotland. Coleridge was their companion during a part of
+this excursion, of which Miss Wordsworth kept a full diary. In
+Scotland he made the acquaintance of Scott, who recited to him a part
+of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, then in manuscript. The travellers
+returned to Grasmere on the 25th of September. It was during this
+year that Wordsworth’s intimacy with the excellent Sir George
+Beaumont began. Sir George was an amateur painter of considerable
+merit, and his friendship was undoubtedly of service to Wordsworth in
+making him familiar with the laws of a sister art and thus
+contributing to enlarge the sympathies of his criticism, the tendency
+of which was toward too great exclusiveness. Sir George Beaumont,
+dying in 1827, did not forgo his regard for the poet, but contrived to
+hold his affection in mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of £100, to
+defray the charges of a yearly journey.
+
+In March 1805, the poet’s brother, John, lost his life by the
+shipwreck of the _Abergavenny_ East-Indiaman, of which he was captain.
+He was a man of great purity and integrity, and sacrificed himself to
+his sense of duty by refusing to leave the ship till it was impossible
+to save him. Wordsworth was deeply attached to him, and felt such
+grief at his death as only solitary natures like his are capable of,
+though mitigated by a sense of the heroism which was the cause of it.
+The need of mental activity as affording an outlet to intense emotion
+may account for the great productiveness of this and the following
+year. He now completed _The Prelude_, wrote _The Waggoner_, and
+increased the number of his smaller poems enough to fill two volumes,
+which were published in 1807.
+
+This collection, which contained some of the most beautiful of his
+shorter pieces, and among others the incomparable _Odes_ to Duty and
+on Immortality, did not reach a second edition till 1815. The
+reviewers had another laugh, and rival poets pillaged while they
+scoffed, particularly Byron, among whose verses a bit of Wordsworth
+showed as incongruously as a sacred vestment on the back of some
+buccaneering plunderer of an abbey. There was a general combination to
+put him down, but on the other hand there was a powerful party in his
+favour, consisting of William Wordsworth. He not only continued in
+good heart himself, but, reversing the order usual on such occasions,
+kept up the spirits of his friends.
+
+Wordsworth passed the winter of 1806-7 in a house of Sir George
+Beaumont’s, at Coleorton in Leicestershire, the cottage at Grasmere
+having become too small for his increased family. On his return to the
+Vale of Grasmere he rented the house at Allan Bank, where he lived
+three years. During this period he appears to have written very little
+poetry, for which his biographer assigns as a primary reason the
+smokiness of the Allan Bank chimneys. This will hardly account for the
+failure of the summer crop, especially as Wordsworth composed chiefly
+in the open air. It did not prevent him from writing a pamphlet upon
+the Convention of Cintra, which was published too late to attract much
+attention, though Lamb says that its effect upon him was like that
+which one of Milton’s tracts might have had upon a contemporary. It
+was at Allan Bank that Coleridge dictated _The Friend_, and Wordsworth
+contributed to it two essays, one in answer to a letter of Mathetes
+(Professor Wilson), and the other on Epitaphs, republished in the
+Notes to _The Excursion_. Here also he wrote his _Description of the
+Scenery of the Lakes_. Perhaps a truer explanation of the comparative
+silence of Wordsworth’s Muse during these years is to be found in the
+intense interest which he took in current events, whose variety,
+picturesqueness, and historical significance were enough to absorb all
+the energies of his imagination.
+
+In the spring of 1811 Wordsworth removed to the Parsonage at Grasmere.
+Here he remained two years, and here he had his second intimate
+experience of sorrow in the loss of two of his children, Catharine and
+Thomas, one of whom died 4th June, and the other 1st December, 1812.
+Early in 1813 he bought Rydal Mount, and, having removed thither,
+changed his abode no more during the rest of his life. In March of
+this year he was appointed Distributor of Stamps for the county of
+Westmorland, an office whose receipts rendered him independent, and
+whose business he was able to do by deputy, thus leaving him ample
+leisure for nobler duties. De Quincey speaks of this appointment as an
+instance of the remarkable good luck which waited upon Wordsworth
+through his whole life. In our view it is only another illustration of
+that scripture which describes the righteous as never forsaken. Good
+luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and
+conscientious observance of duty. Wordsworth owed his nomination to
+the friendly exertions of the Earl of Lonsdale, who desired to atone
+as far as might be for the injustice of the first Earl, and who
+respected the honesty of the man more than he appreciated the
+originality of the poet. The Collectorship at Whitehaven (a more
+lucrative office) was afterwards offered to Wordsworth, and declined.
+He had enough for independence, and wished nothing more. Still later,
+on the death of the Stamp-Distributor for Cumberland, a part of that
+district was annexed to Westmorland, and Wordsworth’s income was
+raised to something more than £1,000 a year.
+
+In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland, visiting Yarrow in
+company with the Ettrick Shepherd. During this year _The Excursion_
+was published, in an edition of five hundred copies, which supplied
+the demand for six years. Another edition of the same number of copies
+was published in 1827, and not exhausted till 1834. In 1815 _The White
+Doe of Rylstone_ appeared, and in 1816 _A Letter to a Friend of
+Burns_, in which Wordsworth gives his opinion upon the limits to be
+observed by the biographers of literary men. It contains many valuable
+suggestions, but allows hardly scope enough for personal details, to
+which he was constitutionally indifferent. Nearly the same date may be
+ascribed to a rhymed translation of the first three books of the
+_Aeneid_, a specimen of which was printed in the Cambridge
+_Philological Museum_ (1832). In 1819 _Peter Bell_, written twenty
+years before, was published, and, perhaps in consequence of the
+ridicule of the reviewers, found a more rapid sale than any of his
+previous volumes. _The Waggoner_, printed in the same year, was less
+successful. His next publication was the volume of _Sonnets on the
+river Duddon_, with some miscellaneous poems, 1820. A tour on the
+Continent in 1820 furnished the subjects for another collection,
+published in 1822. This was followed in the same year by the volume of
+_Ecclesiastical Sketches_. His subsequent publications were _Yarrow
+Revisited_, 1835, and the tragedy of _The Borderers_, 1842.
+
+During all these years his fame was increasing slowly but steadily,
+and his age gathered to itself the reverence and the troops of
+friends which his poems and the nobly simple life reflected in them
+deserved. Public honours followed private appreciation. In 1838 the
+University of Dublin conferred upon him the degree of D.C.L. In 1839
+Oxford did the same, and the reception of the poet (now in his
+seventieth year) at the University was enthusiastic. In 1842 he
+resigned his office of Stamp-Distributor, and Sir Robert Peel had the
+honour of putting him upon the civil list for a pension of £300. In
+1843 he was appointed Laureate, with the express understanding that it
+was a tribute of respect, involving no duties except such as might be
+self-imposed. His only official production was an Ode for the
+installation of Prince Albert as Chancellor of the University of
+Cambridge. His life was prolonged yet seven years, almost, it should
+seem, that he might receive that honour which he had truly conquered
+for himself by the unflinching bravery of a literary life of half a
+century, unparalleled for the scorn with which its labours were
+received, and the victorious acknowledgement which at last crowned
+them. Surviving nearly all his contemporaries, he had, if ever any man
+had, a foretaste of immortality, enjoying in a sort his own posthumous
+renown, for the hardy slowness of its growth gave a safe pledge of its
+durability. He died on the 23rd of April, 1850, the anniversary of the
+death of Shakespeare.
+
+We have thus briefly sketched the life of Wordsworth,--a life
+uneventful even for a man of letters; a life like that of an oak, of
+quiet self-development, throwing out stronger roots toward the side
+whence the prevailing storm-blasts blow, and of tougher fibre in
+proportion to the rocky nature of the soil in which it grows. The
+life and growth of his mind, and the influences which shaped it, are
+to be looked for, even more than is the case with most poets, in his
+works, for he deliberately recorded them there.
+
+Of his personal characteristics little is related. He was somewhat
+above the middle height, but, according to De Quincey, of indifferent
+figure, the shoulders being narrow and drooping. His finest feature
+was the eye, which was grey and full of spiritual light. Leigh Hunt
+says: ‘I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired, so supernatural.
+They were like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of
+acrid fixture of regard. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have
+had such eyes.’ Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and
+Haydon that he had none of form. The best likeness of him, in De
+Quincey’s judgement, is the portrait of Milton prefixed to
+Richardson’s notes on _Paradise Lost_. He was active in his habits,
+composing in the open air, and generally dictating his poems. His
+daily life was regular, simple, and frugal; his manners were dignified
+and kindly; and in his letters and recorded conversations it is
+remarkable how little that was personal entered into his judgement of
+contemporaries.
+
+The true rank of Wordsworth among poets is, perhaps, not even yet to
+be fairly estimated, so hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of
+judgement uninflamed by the tumult of partisanship which besets the
+doors.
+
+Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great poet, at a time when
+the artificial school of poetry was enthroned with all the authority
+of long succession and undisputed legitimacy, it was almost
+inevitable that Wordsworth, who, both by nature and judgement was a
+rebel against the existing order, should become a partisan.
+Unfortunately, he became not only the partisan of a system, but of
+William Wordsworth as its representative. Right in general principle,
+he thus necessarily became wrong in particulars. Justly convinced that
+greatness only achieves its ends by implicitly obeying its own
+instincts, he perhaps reduced the following his instincts too much to
+a system, mistook his own resentments for the promptings of his
+natural genius, and, compelling principle to the measure of his own
+temperament or even of the controversial exigency of the moment, fell
+sometimes into the error of making naturalness itself artificial. If a
+poet resolve to be original, it will end commonly in his being merely
+peculiar.
+
+Wordsworth himself departed more and more in practice, as he grew
+older, from the theories which he had laid down in his prefaces;[46]
+but those theories undoubtedly had a great effect in retarding the
+growth of his fame. He had carefully constructed a pair of spectacles
+through which his earlier poems were to be studied, and the public
+insisted on looking through them at his mature works, and were
+consequently unable to see fairly what required a different focus. He
+forced his readers to come to his poetry with a certain amount of
+conscious preparation, and thus gave them beforehand the impression of
+something like mechanical artifice, and deprived them of the contented
+repose of implicit faith. To the child a watch seems to be a living
+creature; but Wordsworth would not let his readers be children, and
+did injustice to himself by giving them an uneasy doubt whether
+creations which really throbbed with the very heart’s-blood of genius,
+and were alive with nature’s life of life, were not contrivances of
+wheels and springs. A naturalness which we are told to expect has lost
+the crowning grace of nature. The men who walked in Cornelius
+Agrippa’s visionary gardens had probably no more pleasurable emotion
+than that of a shallow wonder, or an equally shallow self-satisfaction
+in thinking they had hit upon the secret of the thaumaturgy; but to a
+tree that has grown as God willed we come without a theory and with
+no botanical predilections, enjoying it simply and thankfully; or the
+Imagination recreates for us its past summers and winters, the birds
+that have nested and sung in it, the sheep that have clustered in its
+shade, the winds that have visited it, the cloud-bergs that have
+drifted over it, and the snows that have ermined it in winter. The
+Imagination is a faculty that flouts at foreordination, and Wordsworth
+seemed to do all he could to cheat his readers of her company by
+laying out paths with a peremptory _Do not step off the gravel!_ at
+the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every conceivable
+emotion, with guide-boards to tell each when and where it must be
+caught.
+
+    [46] How far he swung backward toward the school under whose
+    influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he
+    had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The
+    advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his
+    _Thanksgiving Ode_ which, if one met with it by itself, he
+    would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope:
+
+        While the _tubed engine_ [the organ] feels the inspiring blast.
+
+    And in _The Italian Itinerant_ and _The Swiss Goatherd_ we
+    find a thermometer or barometer called
+
+                      The well-wrought scale
+        Whose sentient tube instructs to time
+        A purpose to a fickle clime.
+
+    Still worse in the _Eclipse of the Sun_, 1821:
+
+        High on her speculative tower
+        Stood Science, waiting for the hour
+        When Sol was destined to endure
+          That darkening.
+
+    So in _The Excursion_,
+
+        The cold March wind raised in her tender throat
+        Viewless obstructions.
+
+But if these things stood in the way of immediate appreciation, he had
+another theory which interferes more seriously with the total and
+permanent effect of his poems. He was theoretically determined not
+only to be a philosophic poet, but to be a _great_ philosophic poet,
+and to this end he must produce an epic. Leaving aside the question
+whether the epic be obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether the
+history of a single man’s mind is universal enough in its interest to
+furnish all the requirements of the epic machinery, and it may be more
+than doubted whether a poet’s philosophy be ordinary metaphysics,
+divisible into chapter and section. It is rather something which is
+more energetic in a word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts
+unclose themselves instinctively at its simple _Open sesame!_ while
+they would stand firm against the reading of the whole body of
+philosophy. In point of fact, the one element of greatness which _The
+Excursion_ possesses indisputably is heaviness. It is only the
+episodes that are universally read, and the effect of these is diluted
+by the connecting and accompanying lectures on metaphysics. Wordsworth
+had his epic mould to fill, and, like Benvenuto Cellini in casting his
+Perseus, was forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal, lest
+it should run short. Separated from the rest, the episodes are perfect
+poems in their kind, and without example in the language.
+
+Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong minds, was a good critic
+of the substance of poetry, but somewhat niggardly in the allowance he
+made for those subsidiary qualities which make it the charmer of
+leisure and the employment of minds without definite object. It may be
+doubted, indeed, whether he set much store by any contemporary writing
+but his own, and whether he did not look upon poetry too exclusively
+as an exercise rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the
+imagination. He says of himself, speaking of his youth:
+
+                                     In fine,
+    I was a better judge of thoughts than words,
+    Misled in estimating words, not only
+    By common inexperience of youth,
+    But by the trade in classic niceties,
+    The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase
+    From languages that want the living voice
+    To carry meaning to the natural heart;
+    To tell us what is passion, what is truth,
+    What reason, what simplicity and sense.[47]
+
+    [47] _Prelude_, Book VI.
+
+Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this was always true of
+him, and his thought seems often to lean upon a word too weak to bear
+its weight. No reader of adequate insight can help regretting that he
+did not earlier give himself to ‘the trade of classic niceties’. It
+was precisely this which gives to the blank-verse of Landor the severe
+dignity and reserved force which alone among later poets recall the
+tune of Milton, and to which Wordsworth never attained. Indeed,
+Wordsworth’s blank-verse (though the passion be profounder) is always
+essentially that of Cowper. They were alike also in their love of
+outward nature and of simple things. The main difference between them
+is one of scenery rather than of sentiment, between the lifelong
+familiar of the mountains and the dweller on the plain.
+
+It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest powers of the
+poetic mind were associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and
+commonplace. It is in the understanding (always prosaic) that the
+great golden veins of his imagination are imbedded. He wrote too much
+to write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes-army of words, but
+a compact Greek ten thousand, that march safely down to posterity. He
+set tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to
+make Jove’s eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout _The
+Prelude_ and _The Excursion_ he seems striving to bind the wizard
+Imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have
+forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the particles cohere.
+There is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress
+wearisome. Yet with what splendours as of mountain-sunsets are we
+rewarded! what golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching
+heavenward with angels ascending and descending! what haunting
+harmonies hover around us deep and eternal like the undying baritone
+of the sea! and if we are compelled to fare through sands and desert
+wildernesses, how often do we not hear airy shapes that syllable our
+names with a startling personal appeal to our highest consciousness
+and our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for in vain in any other
+poet!
+
+Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot but allow,
+and what is left will show how truly great he was. He had no humour,
+no dramatic power, and his temperament was of that dry and juiceless
+quality, that in all his published correspondence you shall not find a
+letter, but only essays. If we consider carefully where he was most
+successful, we shall find that it was not so much in description of
+natural scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid expression
+of the effect produced by external objects and events upon his own
+mind, and of the shape and hue (perhaps momentary) which they in turn
+took from his mood or temperament. His finest passages are always
+monologues. He had a fondness for particulars, and there are parts of
+his poems which remind us of local histories in the undue relative
+importance given to trivial matters. He was the historian of
+Wordsworthshire. This power of particularization (for it is as truly a
+power as generalization) is what gives such vigour and greatness to
+single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a
+single thought or sentiment. It was this that made him so fond of the
+sonnet. That sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his
+fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was never self-denying
+enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary and meditative
+temper, and it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of what was
+permanent in literature) liked him best. Its narrow bounds, but
+fourteen paces from end to end, turn into a virtue his too common
+fault of giving undue prominence to every passing emotion. He excels
+in monologue, and the law of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy.
+In _The Excursion_ we are driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict
+of extenuating circumstances. His mind had not that reach and
+elemental movement of Milton’s, which, like the trade-wind, gathered
+to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter;
+some deep with silks and spicery, some brooding over the silent
+thunders of their battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their
+destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of
+canvas strained by the unifying breath of their common epic impulse.
+It was an organ that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable
+equally of the trumpet’s ardours or the slim delicacy of the flute,
+and sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his prose, as
+if he touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. If
+Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it
+aside soon and willingly for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral
+reed. And it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream, but that which
+Apollo breathed through, tending the flocks of Admetus,--that which
+Pan endowed with every melody of the visible universe,--the same in
+which the soul of the despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her
+dual nature,--so that ever and anon, amid the notes of human joy or
+sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone,
+thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity.
+
+Wordsworth’s absolute want of humour, while it no doubt confirmed his
+self-confidence by making him insensible both to the comical
+incongruity into which he was often led by his earlier theory
+concerning the language of poetry and to the not unnatural ridicule
+called forth by it, seems to have been indicative of a certain
+dullness of perception in other directions.[48] We cannot help
+feeling that the material of his nature was essentially prose, which,
+in his inspired moments, he had the power of transmuting, but which,
+whenever the inspiration failed or was factitious, remained
+obstinately leaden. The normal condition of many poets would seem to
+approach that temperature to which Wordsworth’s mind could be raised
+only by the white heat of profoundly inward passion. And in proportion
+to the intensity needful to make his nature thoroughly aglow is the
+very high quality of his best verses. They seem rather the productions
+of nature than of man, and have the lastingness of such, delighting
+our age with the same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our
+youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of
+diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of
+fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed for ever in immutable
+grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very
+ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of
+mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of
+prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavouring it, falls more below
+himself, and is, more even than many poets his inferiors in
+imaginative quality, a poet of passages. Indeed, one cannot help
+having the feeling sometimes that the poem is there for the sake of
+these passages, rather than that these are the natural jets and
+elations of a mind energized by the rapidity of its own motion. In
+other words, the happy couplet or gracious image seems not to spring
+from the inspiration of the poem conceived as a whole, but rather to
+have dropped of itself into the mind of the poet in one of his
+rambles, who then, in a less rapt mood, has patiently built up around
+it a setting of verse too often ungraceful in form and of a material
+whose cheapness may cast a doubt on the priceless quality of the gem
+it encumbers.[49] During the most happily productive period of his
+life, Wordsworth was impatient of what may be called the mechanical
+portion of his art. His wife and sister seem from the first to have
+been his scribes. In later years, he had learned and often insisted
+on the truth that poetry was an art no less than a gift, and corrected
+his poems in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment. But he
+certainly had more of the vision than of the faculty divine, and was
+always a little numb on the side of form and proportion. Perhaps his
+best poem in these respects is the _Laodamia_, and it is not
+uninstructive to learn from his own lips that ‘it cost him more
+trouble than almost anything of equal length he had ever written’. His
+longer poems (miscalled epical) have no more intimate bond of union
+than their more or less immediate relation to his own personality. Of
+character other than his own he had but a faint conception, and all
+the personages of _The Excursion_ that are not Wordsworth are the
+merest shadows of himself upon mist, for his self-concentrated nature
+was incapable of projecting itself into the consciousness of other men
+and seeing the springs of action at their source in the recesses of
+individual character. The best parts of these longer poems are bursts
+of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers were always clumsy at the
+_callida junctura_. The stream of narration is sluggish, if varied by
+times with pleasing reflections (_viridesque placido aequore sylvas_);
+we are forced to do our own rowing, and only when the current is
+hemmed in by some narrow gorge of the poet’s personal consciousness do
+we feel ourselves snatched along on the smooth but impetuous rush of
+unmistakable inspiration. The fact that what is precious in
+Wordsworth’s poetry was (more truly even than with some greater poets
+than he) a gift rather than an achievement should always be borne in
+mind in taking the measure of his power. I know not whether to call
+it height or depth, this peculiarity of his, but it certainly endows
+those parts of his work which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian
+with an unexpectedness and impressiveness of originality such as we
+feel in the presence of Nature herself. He seems to have been half
+conscious of this, and recited his own poems to all comers with an
+enthusiasm of wondering admiration that would have been profoundly
+comic but for its simple sincerity and for the fact that William
+Wordsworth, Esquire, of Rydal Mount, was one person, and the William
+Wordsworth whom he so heartily reverenced quite another. We recognize
+two voices in him, as Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah and
+his scribe Baruch. If the prophet cease from dictating, the
+amanuensis, rather than be idle, employs his pen in jotting down some
+anecdotes of his master, how he one day went out and saw an old woman,
+and the next day did _not_, and so came home and dictated some verses
+on this ominous phenomenon, and how another day he saw a cow. These
+marginal annotations have been carelessly taken up into the text, have
+been religiously held by the pious to be orthodox scripture, and by
+dexterous exegesis have been made to yield deeply oracular meanings.
+Presently the real prophet takes up the word again and speaks as one
+divinely inspired, the Voice of a higher and invisible power.
+Wordsworth’s better utterances have the bare sincerity, the absolute
+abstraction from time and place, the immunity from decay, that belong
+to the grand simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more his own
+than ours and every man’s, the word of the inalterable Mind. This gift
+of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament, and
+accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product belongs to
+the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the
+pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.[50] He did not
+grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant. One
+of the most delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is
+the poet Albert, who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly
+idealizing hand, does his best afterwards to look like it. Many of
+Wordsworth’s later poems seem like rather unsuccessful efforts to
+resemble his former self. They would never, as Sir John Harington says
+of poetry, ‘keep a child from play and an old man from the
+chimney-corner’.[51]
+
+    [48] Nowhere is this displayed with more comic
+    self-complacency than when he thought it needful to rewrite
+    the ballad of Helen of Kirconnel,--a poem hardly to be
+    matched in any language for swiftness of movement and savage
+    sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly.
+    Compare:
+
+        Curst be the heart that thought the thought,
+        And curst the hand that fired the shot,
+        When in my arms burd Helen dropt,
+          That died to succour me!
+        O, think ye not my heart was sair
+        When my love dropt down and spake na mair?
+
+    Compare this with,--
+
+        Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts
+          That through his brain are travelling,
+        And, starting up, to Bruce’s heart
+          He launched a deadly javelin:
+        Fair Ellen saw it when it came,
+        And, _stepping forth to meet the same_,
+        Did with her body cover
+        The Youth, her chosen lover.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+        And Bruce (_as soon as he had slain_
+        _The Gordon_) sailed away to Spain,
+        And fought with rage incessant
+        Against the Moorish Crescent.
+
+    These are surely the versos of an attorney’s clerk ‘penning a
+    stanza when he should engross’. It will be noticed that
+    Wordsworth here also departs from his earlier theory of the
+    language of poetry by substituting a javelin for a bullet as
+    less modern and familiar. Had he written
+
+        And Gordon never gave a hint,
+        But, having somewhat picked his flint,
+        Let fly the fatal bullet
+        That killed that lovely pullet,
+
+    it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest.
+    He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the _Ancient
+    Mariner_ in the second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_: ‘The
+    poem of my friend has indeed great defects; first, that the
+    principal person has no distinct character, either in his
+    profession of mariner, or as a human being who, having been
+    long under the control of supernatural impressions, might be
+    supposed himself to partake of something supernatural;
+    secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted
+    upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary
+    connexion, do not produce each other; and lastly, that the
+    imagery is somewhat laboriously accumulated.’ Here is an
+    indictment, to be sure, and drawn, plainly enough, by the
+    attorney’s clerk aforenamed. One would think that the strange
+    charm of Coleridge’s most truly original poems lay in this
+    very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect.
+
+    [49]
+
+        A hundred times when, roving high and low,
+        I have been harassed with the toil of verse,
+        Much pains and little progress, and at once
+        Some lovely Image in the song rose up,
+        Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea.
+
+                                 _Prelude_, Book IV.
+
+    [50] His best poetry was written when he was under the
+    immediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have
+    felt this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes
+    when he speaks of ‘those who have been so well pleased that I
+    should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills
+    into _their_ main stream’ (_Letters, Conversations, and
+    Recollections of S. T. C._, vol. i, pp. 5-6). Wordsworth
+    found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of
+    the participles in Shakespeare’s line about bees:
+
+        The singing masons building roofs of gold.
+
+    This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have
+    written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the
+    repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the
+    singers’ (Leigh Hunt’s _Autobiography_). Wordsworth writes to
+    Crabb Robinson in 1837, ‘My ear is susceptible to the
+    clashing of sounds almost to disease.’ One cannot help
+    thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by
+    Coleridge.
+
+    [51] In the Preface to his translation of the _Orlando
+    Furioso_.
+
+Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted a junior counsel who
+was arguing certain obvious points of law at needless length, by
+saying, ‘Brother Jones, there are _some_ things which a Supreme Court
+of the United States sitting in equity may be presumed to know.’
+Wordsworth has this fault of enforcing and restating obvious points
+till the reader feels as if his own intelligence were somewhat
+underrated. He is over-conscientious in giving us full measure, and
+once profoundly absorbed in the sound of his own voice, he knows not
+when to stop. If he feel himself flagging, he has a droll way of
+keeping the floor, as it were, by asking himself a series of questions
+sometimes not needing, and often incapable of answer. There are three
+stanzas of such near the close of the First Part of _Peter Bell_,
+where Peter first catches a glimpse of the dead body in the water, all
+happily incongruous, and ending with one which reaches the height of
+comicality:
+
+    Is it a fiend that to a stake
+    Of fire his desperate self is tethering?
+    Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell,
+    In solitary ward or cell,
+    Ten thousand miles from all his brethren?
+
+The same want of humour which made him insensible to incongruity may
+perhaps account also for the singular unconsciousness of disproportion
+which so often strikes us in his poetry. For example, a little farther
+on in _Peter Bell_ we find:
+
+    _Now_--like a tempest-shattered bark
+    That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,
+    And in a moment to the verge
+    Is lifted of a foaming surge--
+    Full suddenly the Ass doth rise!
+
+And one cannot help thinking that the similes of the huge stone, the
+sea-beast, and the cloud, noble as they are in themselves, are
+somewhat too lofty for the service to which they are put.[52]
+
+    [52] In _Resolution and Independence_.
+
+The movement of Wordsworth’s mind was too slow and his mood too
+meditative for narrative poetry. He values his own thoughts and
+reflections too much to sacrifice the least of them to the interests
+of his story. Moreover, it is never action that interests him, but the
+subtle motives that lead to or hinder it. _The Waggoner_ involuntarily
+suggests a comparison with _Tam O’Shanter_, infinitely to its own
+disadvantage. _Peter Bell_, full though it be of profound touches and
+subtle analysis, is lumbering and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced to
+confess that he did not like it. _The White Doe_, the most
+Wordsworthian of them all in the best meaning of the epithet, is also
+only the more truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What charms in
+Wordsworth and will charm for ever is the
+
+                    Happy tone
+    Of meditation slipping in between
+    The beauty coming and the beauty gone.
+
+A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their words to the tune of
+our own feelings and fancies, in the charm of their manner,
+indefinable as the sympathetic grace of woman, _are_ everything to us
+without our being able to say that they are much in themselves. They
+rather narcotize than fortify. Wordsworth must subject our mood to his
+own before he admits us to his intimacy; but, once admitted, it is for
+life, and we find ourselves in his debt, not for what he has been to
+us in our hours of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a
+reinforcement of faltering purpose and personal independence of
+character. His system of a Nature-cure, first professed by Dr. Jean
+Jacques and continued by Cowper, certainly breaks down as a whole. The
+Solitary of _The Excursion_, who has not been cured of his scepticism
+by living among the medicinal mountains, is, so far as we can see,
+equally proof against the lectures of Pedlar and Parson. Wordsworth
+apparently felt that this would be so, and accordingly never saw his
+way clear to finishing the poem. But the treatment, whether a panacea
+or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as it inculcates abstinence,
+exercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure, indeed, that the
+Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in constitutions less
+vigorous than Wordsworth’s what Milton would call a fugitive and
+cloistered virtue at a dear expense of manlier qualities. The ancients
+and our own Elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become
+fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by taking a frank delight
+in its action and passion and by grappling with the facts of this
+world, rather than muddling themselves over the insoluble problems of
+another. If they had not discovered the picturesque, as we understand
+it, they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his destiny, and
+would have seen something ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the
+spectacle of a grown man running to hide his head in the apron of the
+Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in
+the tussle for existence.
+
+But when, as I have said, our impartiality has made all those
+qualifications and deductions against which even the greatest poet may
+not plead his privilege, what is left to Wordsworth is enough to
+justify his fame. Even where his genius is wrapped in clouds, the
+unconquerable lightning of imagination struggles through, flashing out
+unexpected vistas, and illuminating the humdrum pathway of our daily
+thought with a radiance of momentary consciousness that seems like a
+revelation. If it be the most delightful function of the poet to set
+our lives to music, yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our
+maturer gratitude if he do his part also as moralist and philosopher
+to purify and enlighten; if he define and encourage our vacillating
+perceptions of duty; if he piece together our fragmentary
+apprehensions of our own life and that larger life whose unconscious
+instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected map of
+experience a coherent chart. In the great poets there is an exquisite
+sensibility both of soul and sense that sympathizes like gossamer
+sea-moss with every movement of the element in which it floats, but
+which is rooted on the solid rock of our common sympathies. Wordsworth
+shows less of this finer feminine fibre of organization than one or
+two of his contemporaries, notably than Coleridge or Shelley; but he
+was a masculine thinker, and in his more characteristic poems there is
+always a kernel of firm conclusion from far-reaching principles that
+stimulates thought and challenges meditation. Groping in the dark
+passages of life, we come upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall
+that gives us our bearings and enables us to find an outlet. Compared
+with Goethe we feel that he lacks that serene impartiality of mind
+which results from breadth of culture; nay, he seems narrow, insular,
+almost provincial. He reminds us of those saints of Dante who gather
+brightness by revolving on their own axis. But through this very
+limitation of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the
+impressiveness which results from eagerness of personal conviction. If
+we read Wordsworth through, as I have just done, we find ourselves
+changing our mind about him at every other page, so uneven is he. If
+we read our favourite poems or passages only, he will seem uniformly
+great. And even as regards _The Excursion_ we should remember how few
+long poems will bear consecutive reading. For my part I know of but
+one,--the _Odyssey_.
+
+None of our great poets can be called popular in any exact sense of
+the word, for the highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions
+which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that
+shore between our abiding divine and our fluctuating human nature,
+rooted in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid bare, and
+otherwise visible only at exceptional moments of entire calm and
+clearness. Of no other poet except Shakespeare have so many phrases
+become household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more
+epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of
+having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those
+faint and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentle
+ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely
+ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won for himself a secure
+immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds at
+their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and
+by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest
+heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and
+abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us
+to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own
+instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs not to bid
+
+    Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh
+    To rare Beaumont, and learned Beaumont lie
+    A little nearer Spenser;
+
+for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with whom he
+is now enrolled as fifth in the succession of the great English Poets.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of English Critical Essays, by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH CRITICAL ESSAYS ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of English Critical Essays, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: English Critical Essays
+       Nineteenth Century
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Edmund D. Jones
+
+Release Date: February 15, 2010 [EBook #31283]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH CRITICAL ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Irma Spehar and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                         The World's Classics
+
+
+                                 CCVI
+
+                        ENGLISH CRITICAL ESSAYS
+                          NINETEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+                                OXFORD
+                           UNIVERSITY PRESS
+                      LONDON: AMEN HOUSE, E.C. 4
+                       EDINBURGH GLASGOW LEIPZIG
+                      COPENHAGEN NEW YORK TORONTO
+                       MELBOURNE CAPETOWN BOMBAY
+                       CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI
+                           HUMPHREY MILFORD
+                           PUBLISHER TO THE
+                              UNIVERSITY
+
+
+
+
+                        ENGLISH CRITICAL ESSAYS
+                          NINETEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+                        SELECTED AND EDITED BY
+                            EDMUND D. JONES
+
+
+                        OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+                       LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
+
+
+_The present selection of English Critical Essays (Nineteenth Century)
+was first published in 'The World's Classics' in 1916 and reprinted in
+                   1919, 1920, 1921, 1924 and 1928._
+
+
+   PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD
+               BY JOHN JOHNSON PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+
+Legend for reading accented characters:
+
+  [)a]--a with a breve above
+  [)e]--e with a breve above
+  [)i]--i with a breve above
+  [)o]--o with a breve above
+  [)u]--u with a breve above
+  [=e]--e with a macron above
+  [=u]--u with a macron above
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The essays here brought together are meant to illustrate English
+literary criticism during the nineteenth century. A companion volume
+representative of Renaissance and Neo-classic criticism will, it is
+hoped, be issued at a future date. Meanwhile this volume may well go
+forth alone. For the nineteenth century forms an epoch in English
+literature whose beginnings are more clearly defined than those of
+most literary epochs. The publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ in
+1798, and of Wordsworth's Preface to the second edition in 1800, show
+the Romantic Movement grown conscious and deliberate, with results
+that have coloured the whole stream of English poetry and criticism
+ever since.
+
+The greater part of the present collection deals with general
+principles rather than with criticisms of individual books or authors.
+The nineteenth century, having discarded the dogmas and 'rules' of
+Neo-classicism, had perforce to investigate afresh the Theory of
+Poetry, and though no systematic treatment of the subject in all its
+bearings appeared, some valuable contributions were made, the most
+notable of which came from the poets themselves.
+
+The extracts from the _Biographia Literaria_ are placed next to the
+Wordsworthian doctrines which they criticize; otherwise the
+arrangement of the essays is chronological.
+
+American criticism is represented--inadequately, but, it is hoped, not
+unworthily--by the last two essays.
+
+In the preparation of this volume I have received much valuable help
+from Mr. J. C. Smith, which I now gratefully acknowledge.
+
+                                              EDMUND D. JONES.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                 PAGE
+WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850
+  Poetry and Poetic Diction. (1800)                                1
+
+SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1772-1834
+  Wordsworth's Theory of Diction. (1817)                          40
+  Metrical Composition. (1817)                                    57
+
+WILLIAM BLAKE, 1757-1827
+  The Canterbury Pilgrims. (1809)                                 85
+
+CHARLES LAMB, 1775-1834
+  On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference
+  to their Fitness for Stage Representation. (1811)               95
+
+PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1792-1822
+  A Defence of Poetry. (1821)                                    120
+
+WILLIAM HAZLITT, 1778-1830
+  My First Acquaintance with Poets. (1823)                       164
+
+JOHN KEBLE, 1792-1866
+  Sacred Poetry. (1825)                                          191
+
+JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, 1801-1890
+  Poetry with reference to Aristotle's Poetics. (1829)           223
+
+THOMAS CARLYLE, 1795-1881
+  The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakespeare. (1840)                   254
+
+JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT, 1784-1859
+  An Answer to the Question: What is Poetry? (1844)              300
+
+MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1822-1888
+  The Choice of Subjects in Poetry. (1853)                       356
+
+JOHN RUSKIN, 1819-1900
+  Of the Pathetic Fallacy. (1856)                                378
+
+JOHN STUART MILL, 1806-1873
+  Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties. (1833, revised 1859)     398
+
+WALTER BAGEHOT, 1826-1877
+  Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate and
+  Grotesque Art in English Poetry. (1864)                        430
+
+WALTER HORATIO PATER, 1839-1894
+  Coleridge's Writings. (1866)                                   492
+
+RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1803-1882
+  Shakespeare; or, the Poet. (1850)                              535
+
+JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 1819-1891
+  Wordsworth. (1875)                                             558
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
+
+1770-1850
+
+POETRY AND POETIC DICTION
+
+[Preface to the Second Edition of _Lyrical Ballads_, 1800]
+
+
+The first Volume of these Poems has already been submitted to general
+perusal. It was published, as an experiment, which, I hoped, might be
+of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement
+a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation,
+that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted,
+which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart.
+
+I had formed no very inaccurate estimate of the probable effect of
+those Poems: I flattered myself that they who should be pleased with
+them would read them with more than common pleasure: and, on the other
+hand, I was well aware, that by those who should dislike them, they
+would be read with more than common dislike. The result has differed
+from my expectation in this only, that a greater number have been
+pleased than I ventured to hope I should please.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Several of my Friends are anxious for the success of these Poems, from
+a belief, that, if the views with which they were composed were
+indeed realized, a class of Poetry would be produced, well adapted to
+interest mankind permanently, and not unimportant in the quality, and
+in the multiplicity of its moral relations: and on this account they
+have advised me to prefix a systematic defence of the theory upon
+which the Poems were written. But I was unwilling to undertake the
+task, knowing that on this occasion the Reader would look coldly upon
+my arguments, since I might be suspected of having been principally
+influenced by the selfish and foolish hope of _reasoning_ him into an
+approbation of these particular Poems: and I was still more unwilling
+to undertake the task, because, adequately to display the opinions,
+and fully to enforce the arguments, would require a space wholly
+disproportionate to a preface. For, to treat the subject with the
+clearness and coherence of which it is susceptible, it would be
+necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public
+taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy
+or depraved; which, again, could not be determined, without pointing
+out in what manner language and the human mind act and re-act on each
+other, and without retracing the revolutions, not of literature alone,
+but likewise of society itself. I have therefore altogether declined
+to enter regularly upon this defence; yet I am sensible, that there
+would be something like impropriety in abruptly obtruding upon the
+Public, without a few words of introduction, Poems so materially
+different from those upon which general approbation is at present
+bestowed.
+
+It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a
+formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of
+association; that he not only thus apprises the Reader that certain
+classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that
+others will be carefully excluded. This exponent or symbol held forth
+by metrical language must in different eras of literature have excited
+very different expectations: for example, in the age of Catullus,
+Terence, and Lucretius, and that of Statius or Claudian; and in our
+own country, in the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, and
+that of Donne and Cowley, or Dryden, or Pope. I will not take upon me
+to determine the exact import of the promise which, by the act of
+writing in verse, an Author in the present day makes to his reader:
+but it will undoubtedly appear to many persons that I have not
+fulfilled the terms of an engagement thus voluntarily contracted. They
+who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of
+many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its
+conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings
+of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and
+will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts
+can be permitted to assume that title. I hope therefore the reader
+will not censure me for attempting to state what I have proposed to
+myself to perform; and also (as far as the limits of a preface will
+permit) to explain some of the chief reasons which have determined me
+in the choice of my purpose: that at least he may be spared any
+unpleasant feeling of disappointment, and that I myself may be
+protected from one of the most dishonourable accusations which can be
+brought against an Author; namely, that of an indolence which
+prevents him from endeavouring to ascertain what is his duty, or, when
+his duty is ascertained, prevents him from performing it.
+
+The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose
+incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe
+them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language
+really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a
+certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be
+presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above
+all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in
+them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature:
+chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a
+state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen,
+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. 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 influence of social vanity, they convey their
+feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions.
+Accordingly, such a language, 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 separate themselves from the sympathies of
+men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in
+order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of
+their own creation.[1]
+
+    [1] It is worth while here to observe, that the affecting
+    parts of Chaucer are almost always expressed in language pure
+    and universally intelligible even to this day.
+
+I cannot, however, be insensible to the present outcry against the
+triviality and meanness, both of thought and language, which some of
+my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical
+compositions; and I acknowledge that this defect, where it exists, is
+more dishonourable to the Writer's own character than false refinement
+or arbitrary innovation, though I should contend at the same time,
+that it is far less pernicious in the sum of its consequences. From
+such verses the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at
+least by one mark of difference, that each of them has a worthy
+_purpose_. Not that I always began to write with a distinct purpose
+formally conceived; but habits of meditation have, I trust, so
+prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descriptions of such
+objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry
+along with them a _purpose_. If this opinion be erroneous, I can have
+little right to the name of a Poet. For all good poetry is the
+spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true,
+Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any
+variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than
+usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. For our
+continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our
+thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past
+feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general
+representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to
+men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings
+will be connected with important subjects, till at length, if we be
+originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind will be
+produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of
+those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such
+a nature, and in such connexion with each other, that the
+understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree
+enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified.
+
+It has been said that each of these poems has a purpose. Another
+circumstance must be mentioned which distinguishes these Poems from
+the popular Poetry of the day; it is this, that the feeling therein
+developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the
+action and situation to the feeling.
+
+A sense of false modesty shall not prevent me from asserting, that the
+Reader's attention is pointed to this mark of distinction, far less
+for the sake of these particular Poems than from the general
+importance of the subject. The subject is indeed important! For the
+human mind is capable of being excited without the application of
+gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception
+of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not
+further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion
+as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that
+to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best
+services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this
+service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day.
+For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting
+with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind,
+and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state
+of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the
+great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing
+accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their
+occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the
+rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency
+of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the
+country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder
+writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are
+driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German
+Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.--When
+I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am
+almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble endeavour made in these
+volumes to counteract it; and, reflecting upon the magnitude of the
+general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy,
+had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible
+qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the
+great and permanent objects that act upon it, which are equally
+inherent and indestructible; and were there not added to this
+impression a belief, that the time is approaching when the evil will
+be systematically opposed, by men of greater powers, and with far more
+distinguished success.
+
+Having dwelt thus long on the subjects and aim of these Poems, I shall
+request the Reader's permission to apprise him of a few circumstances
+relating to their _style_, in order, among other reasons, that he may
+not censure me for not having performed what I never attempted. The
+Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur
+in these volumes; and are utterly rejected, as an ordinary device to
+elevate the style, and raise it above prose. My purpose was to
+imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt the very language of men;
+and assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular
+part of that language. They are, indeed, a figure of speech
+occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such;
+but have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechanical device of
+style, or as a family language which Writers in metre seem to lay
+claim to by prescription. I have wished to keep the Reader in the
+company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall
+interest him. Others who pursue a different track will interest him
+likewise; I do not interfere with their claim, but wish to prefer a
+claim of my own. There will also be found in these volumes little of
+what is usually called poetic diction; as much pains has been taken to
+avoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it; this has been done for
+the reason already alleged, to bring my language near to the language
+of men; and further, because the pleasure which I have proposed to
+myself to impart, is of a kind very different from that which is
+supposed by many persons to be the proper object of poetry. Without
+being culpably particular, I do not know how to give my Reader a more
+exact notion of the style in which it was my wish and intention to
+write, than by informing him that I have at all times endeavoured to
+look steadily at my subject; consequently, there is I hope in these
+Poems little falsehood of description, and my ideas are expressed in
+language fitted to their respective importance. Something must have
+been gained by this practice, as it is friendly to one property of all
+good poetry, namely, good sense: but it has necessarily cut me off
+from a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from
+father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of
+Poets. I have also thought it expedient to restrict myself still
+further, having abstained from the use of many expressions, in
+themselves proper and beautiful, but which have been foolishly
+repeated by bad Poets, till such feelings of disgust are connected
+with them as it is scarcely possible by any art of association to
+overpower.
+
+If in a poem there should be found a series of lines, or even a single
+line, in which the language, though naturally arranged, and according
+to the strict laws of metre, does not differ from that of prose, there
+is a numerous class of critics, who, when they stumble upon these
+prosaisms, as they call them, imagine that they have made a notable
+discovery, and exult over the Poet as over a man ignorant of his own
+profession. Now these men would establish a canon of criticism which
+the Reader will conclude he must utterly reject, if he wishes to be
+pleased with these volumes. And it would be a most easy task to prove
+to him, 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. To illustrate the subject in a
+general manner, I will here adduce a short composition of Gray, who
+was at the head of those who, by their reasonings, have attempted to
+widen the space of separation betwixt Prose and Metrical composition,
+and was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure
+of his own poetic diction.
+
+    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_.
+
+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.
+
+By the foregoing quotation it has been shown that the language of
+Prose may yet be well adapted to Poetry; and it was previously
+asserted, that a large portion of the language of every good poem can
+in no respect differ from that of good Prose. We will go further. It
+may be safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any
+_essential_ difference between the language of prose and metrical
+composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and
+Painting, and, accordingly, we call them Sisters: but where shall we
+find bonds of connexion sufficiently strict to typify the affinity
+betwixt metrical and prose composition? They both speak by and to the
+same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said
+to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and almost
+identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry[2] sheds
+no tears 'such as Angels weep', but natural and human tears; she can
+boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from
+those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of
+them both.
+
+    [2] I here use the word 'Poetry' (though against my own
+    judgement) as opposed to the word Prose, and synonymous with
+    metrical composition. But much confusion has been introduced
+    into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose,
+    instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of
+    Fact, or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is
+    Metre; nor is this, in truth, a _strict_ antithesis, because
+    lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing
+    prose, that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them, even
+    were it desirable.
+
+If it be affirmed that rhyme and metrical arrangement of themselves
+constitute a distinction which overturns what has just been said on
+the strict affinity of metrical language with that of prose, and paves
+the way for other artificial distinctions which the mind voluntarily
+admits, I answer that the language of such Poetry as is here
+recommended is, as far as is possible, a selection of the language
+really spoken by men; that this selection, wherever it is made with
+true taste and feeling, will of itself form a distinction far greater
+than would at first be imagined, and will entirely separate the
+composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life; and, if
+metre be superadded thereto, I believe that a dissimilitude will be
+produced altogether sufficient for the gratification of a rational
+mind. What other distinction would we have? Whence is it to come? And
+where is it to exist? Not, surely, where the Poet speaks through the
+mouths of his characters: it cannot be necessary here, either for
+elevation of style, or any of its supposed ornaments: for, if the
+Poet's subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit
+occasion, lead him to passions the language of which, if selected
+truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated,
+and alive with metaphors and figures. I forbear to speak of an
+incongruity which would shock the intelligent Reader, should the Poet
+interweave any foreign splendour of his own with that which the
+passion naturally suggests: it is sufficient to say that such addition
+is unnecessary. And, surely, it is more probable that those passages,
+which with propriety abound with metaphors and figures, will have
+their due effect, if, upon other occasions where the passions are of a
+milder character, the style also be subdued and temperate.
+
+But, as the pleasure which I hope to give by the Poems now presented
+to the Reader must depend entirely on just notions upon this subject,
+and, as it is in itself of high importance to our taste and moral
+feelings, I cannot content myself with these detached remarks. And if,
+in what I am about to say, it shall appear to some that my labour is
+unnecessary, and that I am like a man fighting a battle without
+enemies, such persons may be reminded, that, whatever be the language
+outwardly holden by men, a practical faith in the opinions which I am
+wishing to establish is almost unknown. If my conclusions are
+admitted, and carried as far as they must be carried if admitted at
+all, our judgements concerning the works of the greatest Poets both
+ancient and modern will be far different from what they are at
+present, both when we praise, and when we censure: and our moral
+feelings influencing and influenced by these judgements will, I
+believe, be corrected and purified.
+
+Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, let me ask, what is
+meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address
+himself? And what language is to be expected from him?--He is a man
+speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively
+sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater
+knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are
+supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own
+passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the
+spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar
+volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe,
+and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To
+these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than
+other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of
+conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the
+same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts
+of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more
+nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything
+which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are
+accustomed to feel in themselves:--whence, and from practice, he has
+acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks
+and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his
+own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him
+without immediate external excitement.
+
+But whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest
+Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt that the language which it
+will suggest to him, must often, in liveliness and truth, fall short
+of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual
+pressure of those passions, certain shadows of which the Poet thus
+produces, or feels to be produced, in himself.
+
+However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of
+a Poet, it is obvious, that while he describes and imitates passions,
+his employment is in some degree mechanical, compared with the freedom
+and power of real and substantial action and suffering. So that it
+will be the wish of the Poet to bring his feelings near to those of
+the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of
+time, perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even
+confound and identify his own feelings with theirs; modifying only the
+language which is thus suggested to him by a consideration that he
+describes for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure. Here,
+then, he will apply the principle of selection which has been already
+insisted upon. He will depend upon this for removing what would
+otherwise be painful or disgusting in the passion; he will feel that
+there is no necessity to trick out or to elevate nature: and, the more
+industriously he applies this principle, the deeper will be his faith
+that no words, which _his_ fancy or imagination can suggest, will be
+to be compared with those which are the emanations of reality and
+truth.
+
+But it may be said by those who do not object to the general spirit
+of these remarks, that, as it is impossible for the Poet to produce
+upon all occasions language as exquisitely fitted for the passion as
+that which the real passion itself suggests, it is proper that he
+should consider himself as in the situation of a translator, who does
+not scruple to substitute excellencies of another kind for those which
+are unattainable by him; and endeavours occasionally to surpass his
+original, in order to make some amends for the general inferiority to
+which he feels that he must submit. But this would be to encourage
+idleness and unmanly despair. Further, it is the language of men who
+speak of what they do not understand; who talk of Poetry as of a
+matter of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse with us as
+gravely about a _taste_ for Poetry, as they express it, as if it were
+a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or
+Sherry. Aristotle, I have been told, has said, that Poetry is the most
+philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not
+individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon
+external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth
+which is its own testimony, which gives competence and confidence to
+the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same
+tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature. The obstacles which
+stand in the way of the fidelity of the Biographer and Historian, and
+of their consequent utility, are incalculably greater than those which
+are to be encountered by the Poet who comprehends the dignity of his
+art. The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, the necessity
+of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that
+information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a
+physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as
+a Man. Except this one restriction, there is no object standing
+between the Poet and the image of things; between this, and the
+Biographer and Historian, there are a thousand.
+
+Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered
+as a degradation of the Poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an
+acknowledgement of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgement the
+more sincere, because not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and
+easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it
+is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand
+elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and
+lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but what is propagated by
+pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathize
+with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried
+on by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that
+is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular
+facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by
+pleasure alone. The Man of science, the Chemist and Mathematician,
+whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with,
+know and feel this. However painful may be the objects with which the
+Anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels that his knowledge is
+pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge. What then
+does the Poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as
+acting and re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite
+complexity of pain and pleasure; he considers man in his own nature
+and in his ordinary life as contemplating this with a certain quantity
+of immediate knowledge, with certain convictions, intuitions, and
+deductions, which from habit acquire the quality of intuitions; he
+considers him as looking upon this complex scene of ideas and
+sensations, and finding everywhere objects that immediately excite in
+him sympathies which, from the necessities of his nature, are
+accompanied by an overbalance of enjoyment.
+
+To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these
+sympathies in which, without any other discipline than that of our
+daily life, we are fitted to take delight, the Poet principally
+directs his attention. He considers man and nature as essentially
+adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of
+the fairest and most interesting properties of nature. And thus the
+Poet, prompted by this feeling of pleasure, which accompanies him
+through the whole course of his studies, converses with general
+nature, with affections akin to those, which, through labour and
+length of time, the Man of science has raised up in himself, by
+conversing with those particular parts of nature which are the objects
+of his studies. The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of science
+is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary
+part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the
+other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us,
+and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our
+fellow-beings. The Man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown
+benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet,
+singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in
+the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion.
+Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the
+impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.
+Emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of
+man, 'that he looks before and after.' He is the rock of defence for
+human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him
+relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of
+language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently
+gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds
+together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as
+it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of
+the Poet's thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man
+are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever
+he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings.
+Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge--it is as immortal as
+the heart of man. If the labours of Men of science should ever create
+any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in
+the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then
+no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the
+Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he
+will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects
+of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the
+Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art
+as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come
+when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under
+which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective
+sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying
+and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now
+called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as
+it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine
+spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus
+produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.--It is
+not, then, to be supposed that any one, who holds that sublime notion
+of Poetry which I have attempted to convey, will break in upon the
+sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and accidental
+ornaments, and endeavour to excite admiration of himself by arts, the
+necessity of which must manifestly depend upon the assumed meanness of
+his subject.
+
+What has been thus far said applies to Poetry in general; but
+especially to those parts of composition where the Poet speaks through
+the mouths of his characters; and upon this point it appears to
+authorize the conclusion that there are few persons of good sense, who
+would not allow that the dramatic parts of composition are defective,
+in proportion as they deviate from the real language of nature, and
+are coloured by a diction of the Poet's own, either peculiar to him as
+an individual Poet or belonging simply to Poets in general; to a body
+of men who, from the circumstance of their compositions being in
+metre, it is expected will employ a particular language.
+
+It is not, then, in the dramatic parts of composition that we look
+for this distinction of language; but still it may be proper and
+necessary where the Poet speaks to us in his own person and character.
+To this I answer by referring the Reader to the description before
+given of a Poet. Among the qualities there enumerated as principally
+conducing to form a Poet, is implied nothing differing in kind from
+other men, but only in degree. The sum of what was said is, that the
+Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness
+to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater
+power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him
+in that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the
+general passions and thoughts and feelings of men. And with what are
+they connected? Undoubtedly with our moral sentiments and animal
+sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the
+operations of the elements, and the appearances of the visible
+universe; with storm and sunshine, with the revolutions of the
+seasons, with cold and heat, with loss of friends and kindred, with
+injuries and resentments, gratitude and hope, with fear and sorrow.
+These, and the like, are the sensations and objects which the Poet
+describes, as they are the sensations of other men, and the objects
+which interest them. The Poet thinks and feels in the spirit of human
+passions. How, then, can his language differ in any material degree
+from that of all other men who feel vividly and see clearly? It might
+be _proved_ that it is impossible. But supposing that this were not
+the case, the Poet might then be allowed to use a peculiar language
+when expressing his feelings for his own gratification, or that of
+men like himself. But Poets do not write for Poets alone, but for men.
+Unless therefore we are advocates for that admiration which subsists
+upon ignorance, and that pleasure which arises from hearing what we do
+not understand, the Poet must descend from this supposed height; and,
+in order to excite rational sympathy, he must express himself as other
+men express themselves. To this it may be added, that while he is only
+selecting from the real language of men, or, which amounts to the same
+thing, composing accurately in the spirit of such selection, he is
+treading upon safe ground, and we know what we are to expect from him.
+Our feelings are the same with respect to metre; for, as it may be
+proper to remind the Reader, the distinction of metre is regular and
+uniform, and not, like that which is 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; whereas, in the
+other, the metre obeys certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader both
+willingly submit because they are certain, and because no interference
+is made by them with the passion, but such as the concurring testimony
+of ages has shown to heighten and improve the pleasure which co-exists
+with it.
+
+It will now be proper to answer an obvious question, namely, Why,
+professing these opinions, have I written in verse? To this, in
+addition to such answer as is included in what has been already said,
+I reply, in the first place, Because, however I may have restricted
+myself, there is still left open to me what confessedly constitutes
+the most valuable object of all writing, whether in prose or verse;
+the great and universal passions of men, the most general and
+interesting of their occupations, and the entire world of nature
+before me--to supply endless combinations of forms and imagery. Now,
+supposing for a moment that whatever is interesting in these objects
+may be as vividly described in prose, why should I be condemned for
+attempting to superadd to such description the charm which, by the
+consent of all nations, is acknowledged to exist in metrical language?
+To this, by such as are yet unconvinced, it may be answered that a
+very small part of the pleasure given by Poetry depends upon the
+metre, and that it is injudicious to write in metre, unless it be
+accompanied with the other artificial distinctions of style with which
+metre is usually accompanied, and that, by such deviation, more will
+be lost from the shock which will thereby be given to the Reader's
+associations than will be counterbalanced by any pleasure which he can
+derive from the general power of numbers. In answer to those who still
+contend for the necessity of accompanying metre with certain
+appropriate colours of style in order to the accomplishment of its
+appropriate end, and who also, in my opinion, greatly underrate the
+power of metre in itself, it might, perhaps, as far as relates to
+these Volumes, have been almost sufficient to observe, that poems are
+extant, written upon more humble subjects, and in a still more naked
+and simple style, which have continued to give pleasure from
+generation to generation. Now, if nakedness and simplicity be a
+defect, the fact here mentioned affords a strong presumption that
+poems somewhat less naked and simple are capable of affording pleasure
+at the present day; and, what I wished _chiefly_ to attempt, at
+present, was to justify myself for having written under the impression
+of this belief.
+
+But various causes might be pointed out why, when the style is manly,
+and the subject of some importance, words metrically arranged will
+long continue to impart such a pleasure to mankind as he who proves
+the extent of that pleasure will be desirous to impart. The end of
+Poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of
+pleasure; but, by the supposition, excitement is an unusual and
+irregular state of the mind; ideas and feelings do not, in that state,
+succeed each other in accustomed order. If the words, however, by
+which this excitement is produced be in themselves powerful, or the
+images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with
+them, there is some danger that the excitement may be carried beyond
+its proper bounds. Now the co-presence of something regular, something
+to which the mind has been accustomed in various moods and in a less
+excited state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and
+restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling, and of
+feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with the passion. This
+is unquestionably true; and hence, though the opinion will at first
+appear paradoxical, from the tendency of metre to divest language, in
+a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of
+half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole
+composition, there can be little doubt but that more pathetic
+situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater
+proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical
+composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose. The metre of the old
+ballads is very artless; yet they contain many passages which would
+illustrate this opinion; and, I hope, if the following Poems be
+attentively perused, similar instances will be found in them. This
+opinion may be further illustrated by appealing to the Reader's own
+experience of the reluctance with which he comes to the re-perusal of
+the distressful parts of _Clarissa Harlowe_, or the _Gamester_; while
+Shakespeare's writings, in the most pathetic scenes, never act upon
+us, as pathetic, beyond the bounds of pleasure--an effect which, in a
+much greater degree than might at first be imagined, is to be ascribed
+to small, but continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise
+from the metrical arrangement.--On the other hand (what it must be
+allowed will much more frequently happen) if the Poet's words should
+be incommensurate with the passion, and inadequate to raise the Reader
+to a height of desirable excitement, then (unless the Poet's choice of
+his metre has been grossly injudicious), in the feelings of pleasure
+which the Reader has been accustomed to connect with metre in general,
+and in the feeling, whether cheerful or melancholy, which he has been
+accustomed to connect with that particular movement of metre, there
+will be found something which will greatly contribute to impart
+passion to the words, and to effect the complex end which the Poet
+proposes to himself.
+
+If I had undertaken a SYSTEMATIC defence of the theory here
+maintained, it would have been my duty to develop the various causes
+upon which the pleasure received from metrical language depends. Among
+the chief of these causes is to be reckoned a principle which must be
+well known to those who have made any of the Arts the object of
+accurate reflection; namely, the pleasure which the mind derives from
+the perception of similitude in dissimilitude. This principle is the
+great spring of the activity of our minds, and their chief feeder.
+From this principle the direction of the sexual appetite, and all the
+passions connected with it, take their origin: it is the life of our
+ordinary conversation; and upon the accuracy with which similitude in
+dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude are perceived, depend
+our taste and our moral feelings. It would not be a useless employment
+to apply this principle to the consideration of metre, and to show
+that metre is hence enabled to afford much pleasure, and to point out
+in what manner that pleasure is produced. But my limits will not
+permit me to enter upon this subject, and I must content myself with a
+general summary.
+
+I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
+feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
+tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of
+reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion,
+kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is
+gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In
+this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood
+similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind,
+and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by various
+pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are
+voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of
+enjoyment. If Nature be thus cautious to preserve in a state of
+enjoyment a being so employed, the Poet ought to profit by the lesson
+held forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that, whatever
+passions he communicates to his Reader, those passions, if his
+Reader's mind be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied with
+an overbalance of pleasure. Now the music of harmonious metrical
+language, the sense of difficulty overcome, and the blind association
+of pleasure which has been previously received from works of rhyme or
+metre of the same or similar construction, an indistinct perception
+perpetually renewed of language closely resembling that of real life,
+and yet, in the circumstance of metre, differing from it so
+widely--all these imperceptibly make up a complex feeling of delight,
+which is of the most important use in tempering the painful feeling
+always found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper
+passions. This effect is always produced in pathetic and impassioned
+poetry; while, in lighter compositions, the ease and gracefulness with
+which the Poet manages his numbers are themselves confessedly a
+principal source of the gratification of the Reader. All that it is
+_necessary_ to say, however, upon this subject, may be effected by
+affirming, what few persons will deny, that, of two descriptions,
+either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well
+executed, the one in prose and the other in verse, the verse will be
+read a hundred times where the prose is read once.
+
+Having thus explained a few of my reasons for writing in verse, and
+why I have chosen subjects from common life, and endeavoured to bring
+my language near to the real language of men, if I have been too
+minute in pleading my own cause, I have at the same time been treating
+a subject of general interest; and for this reason a few words shall
+be added with reference solely to these particular poems, and to some
+defects which will probably be found in them. I am sensible that my
+associations must have sometimes been particular instead of general,
+and that, consequently, giving to things a false importance, I may
+have sometimes written upon unworthy subjects; but I am less
+apprehensive on this account, than that my language may frequently
+have suffered from those arbitrary connexions of feelings and ideas
+with particular words and phrases, from which no man can altogether
+protect himself. Hence I have no doubt, that, in some instances,
+feelings, even of the ludicrous, may be given to my Readers by
+expressions which appeared to me tender and pathetic. Such faulty
+expressions, were I convinced they were faulty at present, and that
+they must necessarily continue to be so, I would willingly take all
+reasonable pains to correct. But it is dangerous to make these
+alterations on the simple authority of a few individuals, or even of
+certain classes of men; for where the understanding of an Author is
+not convinced, or his feelings altered, this cannot be done without
+great injury to himself: for his own feelings are his stay and
+support; and, if he set them aside in one instance, he may be induced
+to repeat this act till his mind shall lose all confidence in itself,
+and become utterly debilitated. To this it may be added, that the
+critic ought never to forget that he is himself exposed to the same
+errors as the Poet, and, perhaps, in a much greater degree: for there
+can be no presumption in saying of most readers, that it is not
+probable they will be so well acquainted with the various stages of
+meaning through which words have passed, or with the fickleness or
+stability of the relations of particular ideas to each other; and,
+above all, since they are so much less interested in the subject, they
+may decide lightly and carelessly.
+
+Long as the Reader has been detained, I hope he will permit me to
+caution him against a mode of false criticism which has been applied
+to Poetry, in which the language closely resembles that of life and
+nature. Such verses have been triumphed over in parodies, of which Dr.
+Johnson's stanza is a fair specimen:--
+
+    I put my hat upon my head
+    And walked into the Strand,
+    And there I met another man
+    Whose hat was in his hand.
+
+Immediately under these lines let us place one of the most
+justly-admired stanzas of the 'Babes in the Wood.'
+
+    These pretty Babes with hand in hand
+    Went wandering up and down;
+    But never more they saw the Man
+    Approaching from the Town.
+
+In both these stanzas the words, and the order of the words, in no
+respect differ from the most unimpassioned conversation. There are
+words in both, for example, 'the Strand', and 'the Town', connected
+with none but the most familiar ideas; yet the one stanza we admit as
+admirable, and the other as a fair example of the superlatively
+contemptible. Whence arises this difference? Not from the metre, not
+from the language, not from the order of the words; but the _matter_
+expressed in Dr. Johnson's stanza is contemptible. The proper method
+of treating trivial and simple verses, to which Dr. Johnson's stanza
+would be a fair parallelism, is not to say, this is a bad kind of
+poetry, or, this is not poetry; but, this wants sense; it is neither
+interesting in itself, nor can _lead_ to anything interesting; the
+images neither originate in that sane state of feeling, which arises
+out of thought, nor can excite thought or feeling in the Reader. This
+is the only sensible manner of dealing with such verses. Why trouble
+yourself about the species till you have previously decided upon the
+genus? Why take pains to prove that an ape is not a Newton, when it is
+self-evident that he is not a man?
+
+One request I must make of my reader, which is, that in judging these
+Poems he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by
+reflection upon what will probably be the judgement of others. How
+common is it to hear a person say, I myself do not object to this
+style of composition, or this or that expression, but, to such and
+such classes of people it will appear mean or ludicrous! This mode of
+criticism, so destructive of all sound unadulterated judgement, is
+almost universal: let the Reader then abide, independently, by his own
+feelings, and, if he finds himself affected, let him not suffer such
+conjectures to interfere with his pleasure.
+
+If an Author, by any single composition, has impressed us with respect
+for his talents, it is useful to consider this as affording a
+presumption, that on other occasions where we have been displeased,
+he, nevertheless, may not have written ill or absurdly; and further,
+to give him so much credit for this one composition as may induce us
+to review what has displeased us, with more care than we should
+otherwise have bestowed upon it. This is not only an act of justice,
+but, in our decisions upon poetry especially, may conduce, in a high
+degree, to the improvement of our own taste; for an _accurate_ taste
+in poetry, and in all the other arts, as Sir Joshua Reynolds has
+observed, is an _acquired_ talent, which can only be produced by
+thought and a long-continued intercourse with the best models of
+composition. This is mentioned, not with so ridiculous a purpose as to
+prevent the most inexperienced Reader from judging for himself, (I
+have already said that I wish him to judge for himself;) but merely to
+temper the rashness of decision, and to suggest, that, if Poetry be a
+subject on which much time has not been bestowed, the judgement may be
+erroneous; and that, in many cases, it necessarily will be so.
+
+Nothing would, I know, have so effectually contributed to further the
+end which I have in view, as to have shown of what kind the pleasure
+is, and how that pleasure is produced, which is confessedly produced
+by metrical composition essentially different from that which I have
+here endeavoured to recommend: for the Reader will say that he has
+been pleased by such composition; and what more can be done for him?
+The power of any art is limited; and he will suspect, that, if it be
+proposed to furnish him with new friends, that can be only upon
+condition of his abandoning his old friends. Besides, as I have said,
+the Reader is himself conscious of the pleasure which he has received
+from such composition, composition to which he has peculiarly attached
+the endearing name of Poetry; and all men feel an habitual gratitude,
+and something of an honourable bigotry, for the objects which have
+long continued to please them: we not only wish to be pleased, but to
+be pleased in that particular way in which we have Been accustomed to
+be pleased. There is in these feelings enough to resist a host of
+arguments; and I should be the less able to combat them successfully,
+as I am willing to allow, that, in order entirely to enjoy the Poetry
+which I am recommending, it would be necessary to give up much of what
+is ordinarily enjoyed. But, would my limits have permitted me to point
+out how this pleasure is produced, many obstacles might have been
+removed, and the Reader assisted in perceiving that the powers of
+language are not so limited as he may suppose; and that it is possible
+for poetry to give other enjoyments, of a purer, more lasting, and
+more exquisite nature. This part of the subject has not been
+altogether neglected, but it has not been so much my present aim to
+prove, that the interest excited by some other kinds of poetry is less
+vivid, and less worthy of the nobler powers of the mind, as to offer
+reasons for presuming, that if my purpose were fulfilled, a species of
+poetry would be produced, which is genuine poetry; in its nature well
+adapted to interest mankind permanently, and likewise important in
+the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations.
+
+From what has been said, and from a perusal of the Poems, the Reader
+will be able clearly to perceive the object which I had in view: he
+will determine how far it has been attained; and, what is a much more
+important question, whether it be worth attaining: and upon the
+decision of these two questions will rest my claim to the approbation
+of the Public.
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+ON POETIC DICTION
+
+Perhaps, as I have no right to expect that attentive perusal, without
+which, confined, as I have been, to the narrow limits of a preface, my
+meaning cannot be thoroughly understood, I am anxious to give an exact
+notion of the sense in which the phrase poetic diction has been used;
+and for this purpose, a few words shall here be added, concerning the
+origin and characteristics of the phraseology, which I have condemned
+under that name.
+
+The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited
+by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully
+as they did, their language was daring, and figurative. In succeeding
+times, Poets, and Men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the
+influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect
+without being animated by the same passion, set themselves to a
+mechanical adoption of these figures of speech, and made use of them,
+sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them to
+feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connexion
+whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differing
+materially from the real language of men in _any situation_. The
+Reader or Hearer of this distorted language found himself in a
+perturbed and unusual state of mind: when affected by the genuine
+language of passion he had been in a perturbed and unusual state of
+mind also: in both cases he was willing that his common judgement and
+understanding should be laid asleep, and he had no instinctive and
+infallible perception of the true to make him reject the false; the
+one served as a passport for the other. The emotion was in both cases
+delightful, and no wonder if he confounded the one with the other, and
+believed them both to be produced by the same, or similar causes.
+Besides, the Poet spake to him in the character of a man to be looked
+up to, a man of genius and authority. Thus, and from a variety of
+other causes, this distorted language was received with admiration;
+and Poets, it is probable, who had before contented themselves for the
+most part with misapplying only expressions which at first had been
+dictated by real passion, carried the abuse still further, and
+introduced phrases composed apparently in the spirit of the original
+figurative language of passion, yet altogether of their own invention,
+and characterized by various degrees of wanton deviation from good
+sense and nature.
+
+It is indeed true, that the language of the earliest Poets was felt to
+differ materially from ordinary language, because it was the language
+of extraordinary occasions; but it was really spoken by men, language
+which the Poet himself had uttered when he had been affected by the
+events which he described, or which he had heard uttered by those
+around him. To this language it is probable that metre of some sort or
+other was early superadded. This separated the genuine language of
+Poetry still further from common life, so that whoever read or heard
+the poems of these earliest Poets felt himself moved in a way in which
+he had not been accustomed to be moved in real life, and by causes
+manifestly different from those which acted upon him in real life.
+This was the great temptation to all the corruptions which have
+followed: under the protection of this feeling succeeding Poets
+constructed a phraseology which had one thing, it is true, in common
+with the genuine language of poetry, namely, that it was not heard in
+ordinary conversation; that it was unusual. But the first Poets, as I
+have said, spake a language which, though unusual, was still the
+language of men. This circumstance, however, was disregarded by their
+successors; they found that they could please by easier means: they
+became proud of modes of expression which they themselves had
+invented, and which were uttered only by themselves. In process of
+time metre became a symbol or promise of this unusual language, and
+whoever took upon him to write in metre, according as he possessed
+more or less of true poetic genius, introduced less or more of this
+adulterated phraseology into his compositions, and the true and the
+false were inseparably interwoven until, the taste of men becoming
+gradually perverted, this language was received as a natural language:
+and at length, by the influence of books upon men, did to a certain
+degree really become so. Abuses of this kind were imported from one
+nation to another, and with the progress of refinement this diction
+became daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight the plain
+humanities of nature by a motley masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses,
+hieroglyphics, and enigmas.
+
+It would not be uninteresting to point out the causes of the pleasure
+given by this extravagant and absurd diction. It depends upon a great
+variety of causes, but upon none, perhaps, more than its influence in
+impressing a notion of the peculiarity and exaltation of the Poet's
+character, and in flattering the Reader's self-love by bringing him
+nearer to a sympathy with that character; an effect which is
+accomplished by unsettling ordinary habits of thinking, and thus
+assisting the Reader to approach to that perturbed and dizzy state of
+mind in which if he does not find himself, he imagines that he is
+_balked_ of a peculiar enjoyment which poetry can and ought to bestow.
+
+The sonnet quoted from Gray, in the Preface, except the lines printed
+in Italics, consists of little else but this diction, though not of
+the worst kind; and indeed, if one may be permitted to say so, it is
+far too common in the best writers both ancient and modern. Perhaps in
+no way, by positive example, could more easily be given a notion of
+what I mean by the phrase _poetic diction_ than by referring to a
+comparison between the metrical paraphrase which we have of passages
+in the Old and New Testament, and those passages as they exist in our
+common Translation. See Pope's 'Messiah' throughout; Prior's 'Did
+sweeter sounds adorn my flowing tongue,' &c. &c. 'Though I speak with
+the tongues of men and of angels,' &c. &c. 1 Corinthians, chap. xiii.
+By way of immediate example take the following of Dr. Johnson:--
+
+    Turn on the prudent Ant thy heedless eyes,
+    Observe her labours, Sluggard, and be wise;
+    No stern command, no monitory voice,
+    Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice;
+    Yet, timely provident, she hastes away
+    To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day;
+    When fruitful Summer loads the teeming plain,
+    She crops the harvest, and she stores the grain.
+    How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours,
+    Unnerve thy vigour, and enchain thy powers?
+    While artful shades thy downy couch enclose,
+    And soft solicitation courts repose,
+    Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight,
+    Year chases year with unremitted flight,
+    Till Want now following, fraudulent and slow,
+    Shall spring to seize thee, like an ambush'd foe.
+
+From this hubbub of words pass to the original. 'Go to the Ant, thou
+Sluggard, consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide,
+overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth
+her food in the harvest. How long wilt thou sleep, O Sluggard? when
+wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little
+slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. So shall thy poverty
+come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.' Proverbs,
+chap. vi.
+
+One more quotation, and I have done. It is from Cowper's _Verses
+supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk_:
+
+    Religion! what treasure untold
+    Resides in that heavenly word!
+    More precious than silver and gold,
+    Or all that this earth can afford.
+    But the sound of the church-going bell
+    These valleys and rocks never heard,
+    Ne'er sighed at the sound of a knell,
+    Or smiled when a sabbath appeared.
+    Ye winds, that have made me your sport,
+    Convey to this desolate shore
+    Some cordial endearing report
+    Of a land I must visit no more.
+    My Friends, do they now and then send
+    A wish or a thought after me?
+    O tell me I yet have a friend,
+    Though a friend I am never to see.
+
+This passage is quoted as an instance of three different styles of
+composition. The first four lines are poorly expressed; some Critics
+would call the language prosaic; the fact is, it would be bad prose,
+so bad, that it is scarcely worse in metre. The epithet 'church-going'
+applied to a bell, and that by so chaste a writer as Cowper, is an
+instance of the strange abuses which Poets have introduced into their
+language, till they and their Readers take them as matters of course,
+if they do not single them out expressly as objects of admiration. The
+two lines 'Ne'er sighed at the sound', &c., are, in my opinion, an
+instance of the language of passion wrested from its proper use, and,
+from the mere circumstance of the composition being in metre, applied
+upon an occasion that does not justify such violent expressions; and I
+should condemn the passage, though perhaps few Readers will agree with
+me, as vicious poetic diction. The last stanza is throughout admirably
+expressed: it would be equally good whether in prose or verse, except
+that the Reader has an exquisite pleasure in seeing such natural
+language so naturally connected with metre. The beauty of this stanza
+tempts me to conclude with a principle which ought never to be lost
+sight of, and which has been my chief guide in all I have
+said,--namely, that in works of _imagination and sentiment_, for of
+these only have I been treating, in proportion as ideas and feelings
+are valuable, whether the composition be in prose or in verse, they
+require and exact one and the same language. Metre is but adventitious
+to composition, and the phraseology for which that passport is
+necessary, even where it may be graceful at all, will be little valued
+by the judicious.
+
+
+
+
+SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
+
+1772-1834
+
+WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF DICTION
+
+[_Biographia Literaria_, chap. xvii, 1817]
+
+
+As far 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 connexion 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 pleasureable 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, yet as a rule it is 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_, &c., 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 hymnbook. To the latter cause, indeed, which is so far accidental,
+that it is the blessing of particular countries and a particular age,
+not the product of particular places or employments, the poet owes the
+show of probability, that his personages might really feel, think, and
+talk with any tolerable resemblance to his representation. It is an
+excellent remark of Dr. Henry More's that 'a man of confined
+education, but of good parts, by constant reading of the Bible will
+naturally form a more winning and commanding rhetoric than those that
+are learned: the intermixture of tongues and of artificial phrases
+debasing their style'.
+
+It is, moreover, to be considered that to the formation of healthy
+feelings, and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not
+less formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture. I am
+convinced, that for the human soul to prosper in rustic life a certain
+vantage-ground is pre-requisite. 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 beforehand 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_, 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, summon'd 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 liv'd he, until his eightieth year was pass'd.
+    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 chearful spirits he had breath'd
+    The common air; the hills, which he so oft
+    Had climb'd with vigorous steps; which had impress'd
+    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 sav'd,
+    Had fed or shelter'd, 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 pleasureable feeling of blind love.
+    The pleasure which there is in life itself.
+
+On the other hand, in the poems which are pitched at a lower note, as
+the _Harry Gill_, _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 a 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 judgement. 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 has 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 Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_ alone prevents me from
+extending the remark even to dramatic poetry, if indeed even the Nurse
+itself 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;[3] the seven
+last lines of the tenth;[4] 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.
+
+    [3]
+
+        I've measured it from side to side;
+        'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.
+
+    [4]
+
+        Nay, rack your brain--'tis all in vain,
+        I'll tell you every thing I know;
+        But to the Thorn, and to the Pond
+        Which is a little step beyond,
+        I wish that you would go:
+        Perhaps, when you are at the place,
+        You something of her tale may trace.
+
+        I'll give you the best help I can:
+        Before you up the mountain go,
+        Up to the dreary mountain-top,
+        I'll tell you all I know.
+        'Tis now some two-and-twenty years
+        Since she (her name is Martha Ray)
+        Gave, with a maiden's true good will,
+        Her company to Stephen Hill;
+        And she was blithe and gay,
+        And she was happy, happy still
+        Whene'er she thought of Stephen Hill.
+
+        And they had fix'd the wedding-day,
+        The morning that must wed them both;
+        But Stephen to another maid
+        Had sworn another oath;
+        And, with this other maid, to church
+        Unthinking Stephen went--
+        Poor Martha! on that woeful day
+        A pang of pitiless dismay
+        Into her soul was sent;
+        A fire was kindled in her breast,
+        Which might not burn itself to rest.
+
+        They say, full six months after this,
+        While yet the summer leaves were green,
+        She to the mountain-top would go,
+        And there was often seen.
+        'Tis said a child was in her womb,
+        As now to any eye was plain;
+        She was with child, and she was mad;
+        Yet often she was sober sad
+        From her exceeding pain.
+        Oh me! ten thousand times I'd rather
+        That he had died, that cruel father!
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+           *       *       *       *       *
+           *       *       *       *       *
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+        Last Christmas when we talked of this,
+        Old farmer Simpson did maintain,
+        That in her womb the infant wrought
+        About its mother's heart, and brought
+        Her senses back again:
+        And, when at last her time drew near,
+        Her looks were calm, her senses clear.
+
+        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:
+        And if a child was born or no,
+        There's no one that could ever tell;
+        And if 'twas born alive or dead,
+        There's no one knows, as I have said:
+        But some remember well,
+        That Martha Ray about this time
+        Would up the mountain often climb.
+
+If then I am compelled to doubt the theory, by which the choice of
+characters was to be directed, not only _� 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 is 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 connexions 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_' (i. e.
+men in low and rustic life) '_I propose 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 from that, which every
+well-educated gentleman would wish to write, and (with due allowance
+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 so 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 exciseman, 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 everywhere in parts, and
+nowhere 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 connexions 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._
+
+
+METRICAL COMPOSITION
+
+[_Biographia Literaria_, chap. xviii, 1817]
+
+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 judgement? 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 seem'd, 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,' &c.,
+&c. 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 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 any one 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 contradistinction 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's, 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 (i. e. the formal construction, or architecture, of
+the words and phrases) is essentially different from that of prose.
+Now the burthen of the proof lies with the oppugner, not with the
+supporters of the common belief. Mr. Wordsworth, 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 newborn 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 judgement, 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 gilly-flowers, 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, ev'n 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 ruder 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 staircase, 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
+pleasureable 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 swallowed 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
+proportionately combined.
+
+The reference to _The Children in the Wood_ by no means satisfies my
+judgement. 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 _Piers Plowman_, 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 [Greek: 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_, _The 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 judgement, 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),
+
+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 superadded
+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 readers' 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 rekindled, 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
+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 _Faerie Queene_?
+
+    By this the northern wagoner had set
+    His sevenfold teme behind the steadfast 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 are:
+    And chearful chanticleer with his note shrill
+    Had warned once that Phoebus' fiery carre
+    In haste was climbing up the easterne hill,
+    Full envious that night so long his roome did fill.
+
+                                 Book I, Can. 2, St. 2.
+
+    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.
+
+                                 Book I, Can. 5, St. 2.
+
+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 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 blamable
+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 show
+    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 intermixt 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.
+
+                                 Book I, St. vii, viii, and ix.
+
+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 these species of diction, may be seen in Lamb's
+_Dramatic Specimens_, &c., 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[5] 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.
+
+    [5] 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 good morning, 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 in 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:
+    viz. 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 connexion 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.
+
+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 voluntary and
+uniform, and not, like that produced by (what is 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
+judgement 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 connexion. 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 called 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 [Greek:
+morph�sis], not [Greek: poi�sis]. 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 ev'ry thing! Who, where we offspring took,
+    Our way 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 show my story in thy eternal book, &c.
+
+As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of
+unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudo-poesy,
+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 connexions 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-controling 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 produce
+neither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation
+consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxtaposition 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 contexture 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.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM BLAKE
+
+1757-1827
+
+THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS (1809)
+
+SIR GEFFREY CHAUCER AND THE NINE-AND-TWENTY PILGRIMS ON THEIR JOURNEY
+TO CANTERBURY[6]
+
+    [6] From _A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures_.
+
+
+The time chosen is early morning, before sunrise, when the jolly
+company are just quitting the Tabarde Inn. The Knight and Squire with
+the Squire's Yeoman lead the Procession; next follow the youthful
+Abbess, her Nun, and three Priests; her greyhounds attend her:
+
+    Of small hounds had she that she fed
+    With roast flesh, milk, and wastel bread.
+
+Next follow the Friar and Monk; then the Tapiser, the Pardoner, and
+the Sompnour and Manciple. After these 'Our Host', who occupies the
+centre of the cavalcade, directs them to the Knight as the person who
+would be likely to commence their task of each telling a tale in their
+order. After the Host follow the Shipman, the Haberdasher, the Dyer,
+the Franklin, the Physician, the Ploughman, the Lawyer, the Poor
+Parson, the Merchant, the Wife of Bath, the Miller, the Cook, the
+Oxford Scholar, Chaucer himself; and the Reeve comes as Chaucer has
+described:
+
+    And ever he rode hinderest of the rout.
+
+These last are issuing from the gateway of the Inn the Cook and the
+Wife of Bath are both taking their morning's draught of comfort.
+Spectators stand at the gateway of the Inn, and are composed of an old
+Man, a Woman, and Children.
+
+The Landscape is an eastward view of the country, from the Tabarde Inn
+in Southwark, as it may be supposed to have appeared in Chaucer's
+time, interspersed with cottages and villages. The first beams of the
+Sun are seen above the horizon; some buildings and spires indicate the
+situation of the Great City. The Inn is a Gothic building, which
+Thynne in his Glossary says was the lodging of the Abbot of Hyde, by
+Winchester. On the Inn is inscribed its title, and a proper advantage
+is taken of this circumstance to describe the subject of the Picture.
+The words written over the gateway of the Inn are as follow: 'The
+Tabarde Inn, by Henry Baillie, the lodgynge-house for Pilgrims who
+journey to Saint Thomas's Shrine at Canterbury.'
+
+The characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims are the characters which compose
+all ages and nations. As one age falls, another rises, different to
+mortal sight, but to immortals only the same; for we see the same
+characters repeated again and again, in animals, vegetables, minerals,
+and in men. Nothing new occurs in identical existence; Accident ever
+varies, Substance can never suffer change nor decay.
+
+Of Chaucer's characters, as described in his _Canterbury Tales_, some
+of the names or titles are altered by time, but the characters
+themselves for ever remain unaltered; and consequently they are the
+physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which
+Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. I have known
+multitudes of those who would have been monks in the age of monkery,
+who in this deistical age are deists. As Newton numbered the stars,
+and as Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes
+of men.
+
+The Painter has consequently varied the heads and forms of his
+personages into all Nature's varieties; the horses he has also varied
+to accord to their riders; the costume is correct according to
+authentic monuments.
+
+The Knight and Squire with the Squire's Yeoman lead the Procession, as
+Chaucer has also placed them first in his Prologue. The Knight is a
+true Hero, a good, great and wise man; his whole-length portrait on
+horseback, as written by Chaucer, cannot be surpassed. He has spent
+his life in the field, has ever been a conqueror, and is that species
+of character which in every age stands as the guardian of man against
+the oppressor. His son is like him, with the germ of perhaps greater
+perfection still, as he blends literature and the arts with his
+warlike studies. Their dress and their horses are of the first rate,
+without ostentation, and with all the true grandeur that unaffected
+simplicity when in high rank always displays. The Squire's Yeoman is
+also a great character, a man perfectly knowing in his profession:
+
+    And in his hand he bare a mighty bow.
+
+Chaucer describes here a mighty man, one who in war is the worthy
+attendant on noble heroes.
+
+The Prioress follows these with her female Chaplain:
+
+    Another Nonne also with her had she,
+    That was her Chaplaine, and Priests three.
+
+This Lady is described also as of the first rank, rich and honoured.
+She has certain peculiarities and little delicate affectations, not
+unbecoming in her, being accompanied with what is truly grand and
+really polite; her person and face Chaucer has described with
+minuteness; it is very elegant, and was the beauty of our ancestors
+till after Elizabeth's time, when voluptuousness and folly began to be
+accounted beautiful.
+
+Her companion and her three Priests were no doubt all perfectly
+delineated in those parts of Chaucer's work which are now lost; we
+ought to suppose them suitable attendants on rank and fashion.
+
+The Monk follows these with the Friar. The Painter has also grouped
+with these the Pardoner and the Sompnour and the Manciple, and has
+here also introduced one of the rich citizens of London--characters
+likely to ride in company, all being above the common rank in life, or
+attendants on those who were so.
+
+For the Monk is described by Chaucer, as a man of the first rank in
+society, noble, rich, and expensively attended; he is a leader of the
+age, with certain humorous accompaniments in his character, that do
+not degrade, but render him an object of dignified mirth, but also
+with other accompaniments not so respectable.
+
+The Friar is a character of a mixed kind:
+
+    A friar there was, a wanton and a merry;
+
+but in his office he is said to be a 'full solemn man'; eloquent,
+amorous, witty and satirical; young, handsome and rich; he is a
+complete rogue, with constitutional gaiety enough to make him a
+master of all the pleasures of the world:
+
+    His neck was white as the flour de lis,
+    Thereto strong he was as a champioun.
+
+It is necessary here to speak of Chaucer's own character, that I may
+set certain mistaken critics right in their conception of the humour
+and fun that occur on the journey. Chaucer is himself the great
+poetical observer of men, who in every age is born to record and
+eternize its acts. This he does as a master, as a father and superior,
+who looks down on their little follies from the Emperor to the Miller,
+sometimes with severity, oftener with joke and sport.
+
+Accordingly Chaucer has made his Monk a great tragedian, one who
+studied poetical art. So much so that the generous Knight is, in the
+compassionate dictates of his soul, compelled to cry out:
+
+    'Ho,' quoth the Knyght, 'good Sir, no more of this;
+    That ye have said is right ynough, I wis,
+    And mokell more; for little heaviness
+    Is right enough for much folk, as I guesse.
+    I say, for me, it is a great disease,
+    Whereas men have been in wealth and ease,
+    To heare of their sudden fall, alas!
+    And the contrary is joy and solas.'
+
+The Monk's definition of tragedy in the proem to his tale is worth
+repeating:
+
+    Tragedie is to tell a certain story,
+    As old books us maken memory,
+    Of hem that stood in great prosperity,
+    And be fallen out of high degree,
+    Into miserie, and ended wretchedly.
+
+Though a man of luxury, pride and pleasure, he is a master of art and
+learning, though affecting to despise it. Those who can think that
+the proud huntsman and noble housekeeper, Chaucer's Monk, is intended
+for a buffoon or burlesque character, know little of Chaucer.
+
+For the Host who follows this group, and holds the centre of the
+cavalcade, is a first-rate character, and his jokes are no trifles;
+they are always, though uttered with audacity, and equally free with
+the Lord and the Peasant--they are always substantially and weightily
+expressive of knowledge and experience; Henry Baillie, the keeper of
+the greatest Inn of the greatest City, for such was the Tabarde Inn in
+Southwark near London, our Host, was also a leader of the age.
+
+By way of illustration I instance Shakespeare's Witches in _Macbeth_.
+Those who dress them for the stage, consider them as wretched old
+women, and not, as Shakespeare intended, the Goddesses of Destiny;
+this shows how Chaucer has been misunderstood in his sublime work.
+Shakespeare's Fairies also are the rulers of the vegetable world, and
+so are Chaucer's; let them be so considered, and then the poet will be
+understood, and not else.
+
+But I have omitted to speak of a very prominent character, the
+Pardoner, the Age's Knave, who always commands and domineers over the
+high and low vulgar. This man is sent in every age for a rod and
+scourge, and for a blight, for a trial of men, to divide the classes
+of men; he is in the most holy sanctuary, and he is suffered by
+Providence for wise ends, and has also his great use, and his grand
+leading destiny.
+
+His companion the Sompnour is also a Devil of the first magnitude,
+grand, terrific, rich, and honoured in the rank of which he holds the
+destiny. The uses to society are perhaps equal of the Devil and of the
+Angel; their sublimity who can dispute?
+
+    In daunger had he at his own gise,
+    The young girls of his diocese,
+    And he knew well their counsel, &c.
+
+The principal figure in the next group is the Good Parson; an Apostle,
+a real Messenger of Heaven, sent in every age for its light and its
+warmth. This man is beloved and venerated by all, and neglected by
+all: he serves all, and is served by none. He is, according to
+Christ's definition, the greatest of his age: yet he is a Poor Parson
+of a town. Read Chaucer's description of the Good Parson, and bow the
+head and the knee to Him, Who in every age sends us such a burning and
+a shining light. Search, O ye rich and powerful, for these men and
+obey their counsel; then shall the golden age return. But alas! you
+will not easily distinguish him from the Friar or the Pardoner; they
+also are 'full solemn men', and their counsel you will continue to
+follow.
+
+I have placed by his side the Sergeant-at-Lawe, who appears delighted
+to ride in his company, and between him and his brother the Ploughman;
+as I wish men of law would always ride with them, and take their
+counsel, especially in all difficult points. Chaucer's Lawyer is a
+character of great venerableness, a Judge and a real master of the
+jurisprudence of his age.
+
+The Doctor of Physic is in this group; and the Franklin, the
+voluptuous country gentleman, contrasted with the Physician, and, on
+his other hand, with two Citizens of London. Chaucer's characters
+live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage; we all pass
+on, each sustaining one of these characters; nor can a child be born
+who is not one or other of these characters of Chaucer. The Doctor of
+Physic is described as the first of his profession, perfect, learned,
+completely Master and Doctor in his art. Thus the reader will observe
+that Chaucer makes every one of his characters perfect in his kind;
+every one is an Antique Statue, the image of a class and not of an
+imperfect individual.
+
+This group also would furnish substantial matter, on which volumes
+might be written. The Franklin is one who keeps open table, who is the
+genius of eating and drinking, the Bacchus; as the Doctor of Physic is
+the Aesculapius, the Host is the Silenus, the Squire is the Apollo,
+the Miller is the Hercules, &c. Chaucer's characters are a description
+of the eternal Principles that exist in all ages. The Franklin is
+voluptuousness itself, most nobly portrayed:
+
+    It snewed in his house of meat and drink.
+
+The Ploughman is simplicity itself, with wisdom and strength for its
+stamina. Chaucer has divided the ancient character of Hercules between
+his Miller and his Ploughman. Benevolence is the Ploughman's great
+characteristic; he is thin with excessive labour, and not with old age
+as some have supposed:
+
+    He would thresh, and thereto dike and delve,
+    For Christe's sake, for every poore wight,
+    Withouten hire, if it lay in his might.
+
+Visions of these eternal principles or characters of human life appear
+to poets in all ages; the Grecian gods were the ancient Cherubim of
+Phoenicia; but the Greeks, and since them the Moderns, have neglected
+to subdue the gods of Priam. These gods are visions of the eternal
+attributes, or divine names, which, when erected into gods, become
+destructive to humanity. They ought to be the servants, and not the
+masters of man or of society. They ought to be made to sacrifice to
+man, and not man compelled to sacrifice to them; for, when separated
+from man or humanity, who is Jesus the Saviour, the Vine of Eternity?
+They are thieves and rebels, they are destroyers.
+
+The Ploughman of Chaucer is Hercules in his supreme Eternal State,
+divested of his Spectrous Shadow, which is the Miller, a terrible
+fellow, such as exists in all times and places for the trial of men,
+to astonish every neighbourhood with brutal strength and courage, to
+get rich and powerful, to curb the pride of Man.
+
+The Reeve and the Manciple are two characters of the most consummate
+worldly wisdom. The Shipman, or Sailor, is a similar genius of
+Ulyssean art, but with the highest courage superadded.
+
+The Citizens and their Cook are each leaders of a class. Chaucer has
+been somehow made to number four citizens, which would make his whole
+company, himself included, thirty-one. But he says there was but
+nine-and-twenty in his company:
+
+    Full nine and twenty in a company.
+
+The Webbe, or Weaver, and the Tapiser, or Tapestry Weaver, appear to
+me to be the same person; but this is only an opinion, for 'full nine
+and twenty' may signify one more or less. But I daresay that Chaucer
+wrote 'A Webbe Dyer', that is a Cloth Dyer:
+
+    A Webbe Dyer and a Tapiser.
+
+The Merchant cannot be one of the Three Citizens, as his dress is
+different, and his character is more marked, whereas Chaucer says of
+his rich citizens:
+
+    All were yclothed in o liverie.
+
+The characters of Women Chaucer has divided into two classes, the Lady
+Prioress and the Wife of Bath. Are not these leaders of the ages of
+men? The Lady Prioress in some ages predominates; and in some the Wife
+of Bath, in whose character Chaucer has been equally minute and exact;
+because she is also a scourge and a blight. I shall say no more of
+her, nor expose what Chaucer has left hidden; let the young reader
+study what he has said of her: it is useful as a scarecrow. There are
+of such characters born too many for the peace of the world.
+
+I come at length to the Clerk of Oxenford. This character varies from
+that of Chaucer, as the contemplative philosopher varies from the
+poetical genius. There are always these two classes of learned sages,
+the poetical and the philosophical. The Painter has put them side by
+side, as if the youthful clerk had put himself under the tuition of
+the mature poet. Let the Philosopher always be the servant and scholar
+of Inspiration, and all will be happy.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES LAMB
+
+1775-1834
+
+ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE,
+
+CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS FOR STAGE REPRESENTATION
+(1811)
+
+
+Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the
+affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen
+before, and which upon examination proved to be a whole-length of the
+celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would not go so far with some good
+Catholics abroad as to shut players altogether out of consecrated
+ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction
+of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of
+the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed under this
+harlequin figure the following lines:
+
+    To paint fair Nature, by divine command,
+    Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,
+    A Shakespeare rose: then, to expand his fame
+    Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
+    Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,
+    The Actor's genius bade them breathe anew;
+    Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,
+    Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day:
+    And till Eternity with power sublime
+    Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,
+    Shakespeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,
+    And earth irradiate with a beam divine.
+
+It would be an insult to my readers' understandings to attempt
+anything like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and
+nonsense. But the reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder, how,
+from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own, it should have
+been the fashion to compliment every performer in his turn, that has
+had the luck to please the town in any of the great characters of
+Shakespeare, with the notion of possessing a _mind congenial with the
+poet's_: how people should come thus unaccountably to confound the
+power of originating poetical images and conceptions with the faculty
+of being able to read or recite the same when put into words;[7] or
+what connexion that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man,
+which a great dramatic poet possesses, has with those low tricks upon
+the eye and ear, which a player by observing a few general effects,
+which some common passion, as grief, anger, &c. usually has upon the
+gestures and exterior, can so easily compass. To know the internal
+workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for
+instance, the _when_ and the _why_ and the _how far_ they should be
+moved; to what pitch a passion is becoming; to give the reins and to
+pull in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the
+slackening is most graceful; seems to demand a reach of intellect of a
+vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare
+imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or
+gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most lively and
+emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all
+but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief,
+generally; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it
+differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the
+actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye
+(without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible
+sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which
+we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow
+apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are
+apt not only to sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay
+to the actor, but even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner,
+the actor with the character which he represents. It is difficult for
+a frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person
+and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality
+thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion incidental alone to
+unlettered persons, who, not possessing the advantage of reading, are
+necessarily dependent upon the stage-player for all the pleasure which
+they can receive from the drama, and to whom the very idea of _what an
+author is_ cannot be made comprehensible without some pain and
+perplexity of mind: the error is one from which persons otherwise not
+meanly lettered, find it almost impossible to extricate themselves.
+
+    [7] It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in
+    _dramatic_ recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who
+    reads Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a
+    great poet and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davies,
+    the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the _Paradise
+    Lost_ better than any man in England in his day (though I
+    cannot help thinking there must be some mistake in this
+    tradition), was therefore, by his intimate friends, set upon
+    a level with Milton.
+
+Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of
+satisfaction which I received some years back from seeing for the
+first time a tragedy of Shakespeare performed, in which these two
+great performers sustained the principal parts. It seemed to embody
+and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape.
+But dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure,
+this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our
+cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and
+brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have
+let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.
+
+How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions
+thus crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing
+actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness
+with which we turn to those plays of Shakespeare which have escaped
+being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the same
+writer which have happily been left out in performance. How far the
+very custom of hearing anything _spouted_, withers and blows upon a
+fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from _Henry the Fifth_,
+&c. which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to
+be found in _Enfield Speakers_, and such kind of books. I confess
+myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in
+_Hamlet_, beginning 'To be or not to be', or to tell whether it be
+good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by
+declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place
+and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a
+perfect dead member.
+
+It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the
+plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage,
+than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished
+excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in
+them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye,
+and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.
+
+The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of
+passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more
+hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously
+possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons
+talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner
+talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular
+upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are
+here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this war
+of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed round
+such 'intellectual prize-fighters'. Talking is the direct object of
+the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in Shakespeare
+above all, how obvious it is, that the form of _speaking_, whether it
+be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly
+artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of
+that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a
+character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at _in that
+form of composition_ by any gift short of intuition. We do here as we
+do with novels written in the _epistolary form_. How many
+improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with
+in _Clarissa_ and other books, for the sake of the delight which that
+form upon the whole gives us.
+
+But the practice of stage representation reduces everything to a
+controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous
+blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must
+play the orator. The love-dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those
+silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night; the more intimate and
+sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus
+with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so delightful
+in the reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in
+Paradise
+
+                            As beseem'd
+    Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league
+    Alone:
+
+by the inherent fault of stage representation, how are these things
+sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large
+assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come
+drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though
+nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed
+at the spectators, who are to judge of her endearments and her returns
+of love.
+
+The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of
+Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest
+ambition to distinguish themselves. The length of the part may be one
+of their reasons. But for the character itself, we find it in a play,
+and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic representation.
+The play itself abounds in maxims and reflections beyond any other,
+and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle for conveying moral
+instruction. But Hamlet himself--what does he suffer meanwhile by
+being dragged forth as a public schoolmaster, to give lectures to the
+crowd! Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are transactions
+between himself and his moral sense, they are the effusions of his
+solitary musings, which he retires to holes and corners and the most
+sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth; or rather, they are the
+silent meditations with which his bosom is bursting, reduced to _words_
+for the sake of the reader, who must else remain ignorant of what is
+passing there. These profound sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring
+ruminations, which the tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and
+chambers, how can they be represented by a gesticulating actor, who
+comes and mouths them out before an audience, making four hundred
+people his confidants at once? I say not that it is the fault of the
+actor so to do; he must pronounce them _ore rotundo_, he must
+accompany them with his eye, he must insinuate them into his auditory
+by some trick of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails. _He must be
+thinking all the while of his appearance, because he knows that all
+the while the spectators are judging of it._ And this is the way to
+represent the shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet.
+
+It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity of
+thought and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who otherwise
+would never earn it for themselves by reading, and the intellectual
+acquisition gained this way may, for aught I know, be inestimable; but
+I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet
+is made another thing by being acted. I have heard much of the wonders
+which Garrick performed in this part; but as I never saw him, I must
+have leave to doubt whether the representation of such a character
+came within the province of his art. Those who tell me of him, speak
+of his eye, of the magic of his eye, and of his commanding voice:
+physical properties, vastly desirable in an actor, and without which
+he can never insinuate meaning into an auditory,--but what have they
+to do with Hamlet? what have they to do with intellect? In fact, the
+things aimed at in theatrical representation, are to arrest the
+spectator's eye upon the form and the gesture, and so to gain a more
+favourable hearing to what is spoken: it is not what the character is,
+but how he looks; not what he says, but how he speaks it. I see no
+reason to think that if the play of _Hamlet_ were written over again
+by some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the
+story, but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine
+features of Shakespeare, his stupendous intellect; and only taking
+care to give us enough of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo
+were never at a loss to furnish; I see not how the effect could be
+much different upon an audience, nor how the actor has it in his power
+to represent Shakespeare to us differently from his representation of
+Banks or Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful accomplished prince,
+and must be gracefully personated; he might be puzzled in his mind,
+wavering in his conduct, seemingly-cruel to Ophelia, he might see a
+ghost, and start at it, and address it kindly when he found it to be
+his father; all this in the poorest and most homely language of the
+servilest creeper after nature that ever consulted the palate of an
+audience; without troubling Shakespeare for the matter: and I see not
+but there would be room for all the power which an actor has, to
+display itself. All the passions and changes of passion might remain:
+for those are much less difficult to write or act than is thought, it
+is a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising or falling a note or
+two in the voice, a whisper with a significant foreboding look to
+announce its approach, and so contagious the counterfeit appearance of
+any emotion is, that let the words be what they will, the look and
+tone shall carry it off and make it pass for deep skill in the
+passions.
+
+It is common for people to talk of Shakespeare's plays being _so
+natural_; that everybody can understand him. They are natural indeed,
+they are grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies
+out of the reach of most of us. You shall hear the same persons say
+that George Barnwell is very natural, and Othello is very natural,
+that they are both very deep; and to them they are the same kind of
+thing. At the one they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of
+young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commit _a trifling
+peccadillo_, the murder of an uncle or so, that is all, and so comes
+to an untimely end, which is _so moving_; and at the other, because a
+blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white wife: and the
+odds are that ninety-nine out of a hundred would willingly behold the
+same catastrophe happen to both the heroes, and have thought the rope
+more due to Othello than to Barnwell. For of the texture of Othello's
+mind, the inward construction marvellously laid open with all its
+strengths and weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human
+misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love,
+they see no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their
+pennies a-piece to look through the man's telescope in Leicester-fields,
+see into the inward plot and topography of the moon. Some dim thing or
+other they see, they see an actor personating a passion, of grief, or
+anger, for instance, and they recognize it as a copy of the usual
+external effects of such passions; for at least as being true to _that
+symbol of the emotion which passes current at the theatre for it_, for
+it is often no more than that: but of the grounds of the passion, its
+correspondence to a great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy
+object of tragedy,--that common auditors know any thing of this, or
+can have any such notions dinned into them by the mere strength of an
+actor's lungs,--that apprehensions foreign to them should be thus
+infused into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand how
+it can be possible.
+
+We talk of Shakespeare's admirable observation of life, when we should
+feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day
+characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own
+mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very 'sphere
+of humanity', he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of
+which every one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our
+natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he
+positively creates in us, for nothing more than indigenous faculties
+of our own minds which only waited the action of corresponding virtues
+in him to return a full and clear echo of the same.
+
+To return to Hamlet.--Among the distinguishing features of that
+wonderful character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) is that
+soreness of mind which makes him treat the intrusions of Polonius
+with harshness, and that asperity which he puts on in his interviews
+with Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind (if they be not mixed
+in the latter case with a profound artifice of love, to alienate
+Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind for the
+breaking off of that loving intercourse, which can no longer find a
+place amidst business so serious as that which he has to do) are parts
+of his character, which to reconcile with our admiration of Hamlet,
+the most patient consideration of his situation is no more than
+necessary; they are what we _forgive afterwards_, and explain by the
+whole of his character, but _at the time_ they are harsh and
+unpleasant. Yet such is the actor's necessity of giving strong blows
+to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this character,
+who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous
+features,--these temporary deformities in the character. They make him
+express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his
+gentility, and which no explanation can render palatable; they make
+him show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia's father,--contempt
+in its very grossest and most hateful form; but they get applause by
+it: it is natural, people say; that is, the words are scornful, and
+the actor expresses scorn, and that they can judge of: but why so much
+scorn, and of that sort, they never think of asking.
+
+So to Ophelia.--All the Hamlets that I have ever seen, rant and rave
+at her as if she had committed some great crime, and the audience are
+highly pleased, because the words of the part are satirical, and they
+are enforced by the strongest expression of satirical indignation of
+which the face and voice are capable. But then, whether Hamlet is
+likely to have put on such brutal appearances to a lady whom he loved
+so dearly, is never thought on. The truth is, that in all such deep
+affections as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia, there is a
+stock of _supererogatory love_, (if I may venture to use the
+expression) which in any great grief of heart, especially where that
+which preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, confers a kind of
+indulgence upon the grieved party to express itself, even to its
+heart's dearest object, in the language of a temporary alienation; but
+it is not alienation, it is a distraction purely, and so it always
+makes itself to be felt by that object: it is not anger, but grief
+assuming the appearance of anger,--love awkwardly counterfeiting hate,
+as sweet countenances when they try to frown: but such sternness and
+fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to show, is no counterfeit, but the
+real face of absolute aversion,--of irreconcilable alienation. It may
+be said he puts on the madman; but then he should only so far put on
+this counterfeit lunacy as his own real distraction will give him
+leave; that is, incompletely, imperfectly; not in that confirmed
+practised way, like a master of his art, or, as Dame Quickly would
+say, 'like one of those harlotry players.'
+
+I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure which
+Shakespeare's plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to
+differ from that which the audience receive from those of other
+writers; and, _they being in themselves essentially so different from
+all others_, I must conclude that there is something in the nature of
+acting which levels all distinctions. And in fact, who does not speak
+indifferently of the _Gamester_ and of _Macbeth_ as fine stage
+performances, and praise the Mrs. Beverley in the same way as the Lady
+Macbeth of Mrs. S.? Belvidera, and Calista, and Isabella, and
+Euphrasia, are they less liked than Imogen, or than Juliet, or than
+Desdemona? Are they not spoken of and remembered in the same way? Is
+not the female performer as great (as they call it) in one as in the
+other? Did not Garrick shine, and was not he ambitious of shining in
+every drawling tragedy that his wretched day produced,--the
+productions of the Hills and the Murphys and the Browns,--and shall he
+have that honour to dwell in our minds for ever as an inseparable
+concomitant with Shakespeare? A kindred mind! O who can read that
+affecting sonnet of Shakespeare which alludes to his profession as a
+player:
+
+    Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
+    The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
+    That did not better for my life provide
+    Than public means which public custom breeds--
+    Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
+    And almost thence my nature is subdued
+    To what it works in, like the dyer's hand--
+
+Or that other confession:
+
+    Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
+    And made myself a motley to thy view,
+    Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear--
+
+Who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness in our sweet
+Shakespeare, and dream of any congeniality between him and one that,
+by every tradition of him, appears to have been as mere a player as
+ever existed; to have had his mind tainted with the lowest players'
+vices,--envy and jealousy, and miserable cravings after applause; one
+who in the exercise of his profession was jealous even of the
+women-performers that stood in his way; a manager full of managerial
+tricks and stratagems and finesse: that any resemblance should be
+dreamed of between him and Shakespeare,--Shakespeare who, in the
+plenitude and consciousness of his own powers, could with that noble
+modesty, which we can neither imitate nor appreciate, express himself
+thus of his own sense of his own defects:
+
+    Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
+    Featur'd like him, like him with friends possest;
+    Desiring _this man's art, and that man's scope_.
+
+I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being an admirer
+of Shakespeare. A true lover of his excellences he certainly was not;
+for would any true lover of them have admitted into his matchless
+scenes such ribald trash as Tate and Cibber, and the rest of them,
+that
+
+    With their darkness durst affront his light,
+
+have foisted into the acting plays of Shakespeare? I believe it
+impossible that he could have had a proper reverence for Shakespeare,
+and have condescended to go through that interpolated scene in Richard
+the Third, in which Richard tries to break his wife's heart by telling
+her he loves another woman, and says, 'if she survives this she is
+immortal.' Yet I doubt not he delivered this vulgar stuff with as much
+anxiety of emphasis as any of the genuine parts; and for acting, it is
+as well calculated as any. But we have seen the part of Richard lately
+produce great fame to an actor by his manner of playing it, and it
+lets us into the secret of acting, and of popular judgements of
+Shakespeare derived from acting. Not one of the spectators who have
+witnessed Mr. C.'s exertions in that part, but has come away with a
+proper conviction that Richard is a very wicked man, and kills little
+children in their beds, with something like the pleasure which the
+giants and ogres in children's books are represented to have taken in
+that practice; moreover, that he is very close and shrewd and devilish
+cunning, for you could see that by his eye.
+
+But is in fact this the impression we have in reading the Richard of
+Shakespeare? Do we feel anything like disgust, as we do at that
+butcher-like representation of him that passes for him on the stage? A
+horror at his crimes blends with the effect which we feel, but how is
+it qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich intellect which he
+displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast
+knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry of his part,--not an
+atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of acting it.
+Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are prominent
+and staring; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty genius,
+the man of vast capacity,--the profound, the witty, accomplished
+Richard?
+
+The truth is, the Characters of Shakespeare are so much the objects of
+meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions,
+that while we are reading any of his great criminal characters,--Macbeth,
+Richard, even Iago,--we think not so much of the crimes which they
+commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual
+activity, which prompts them to overleap those moral fences. Barnwell
+is a wretched murderer; there is a certain fitness between his neck
+and the rope; he is the legitimate heir to the gallows; nobody who
+thinks at all can think of any alleviating circumstances in his case
+to make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an instance from the
+higher tragedy, what else but a mere assassin is Glenalvon! Do we
+think of anything but of the crime which he commits, and the rack
+which he deserves? That is all which we really think about him.
+Whereas in corresponding characters in Shakespeare so little do the
+actions comparatively affect us, that while the impulses, the inner
+mind in all its perverted greatness, solely seems real and is
+exclusively attended to, the crime is comparatively nothing. But when
+we see these things represented, the acts which they do are
+comparatively everything, their impulses nothing. The state of sublime
+emotion into which we are elevated by those images of night and horror
+which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with which he
+entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to
+murder Duncan,--when we no longer read it in a book, when we have
+given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses
+over seeing, and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes
+actually preparing to commit a murder, if the acting be true and
+impressive, as I have witnessed it in Mr. K.'s performance of that
+part, the painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to
+prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing
+semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally
+destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where the
+deed doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence:
+it rather seems to belong to history,--to something past and
+inevitable, if it has anything to do with time at all. The sublime
+images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to our minds in the
+reading.
+
+So to see Lear acted--to see an old man tottering about the stage with
+a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy
+night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want
+to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling
+which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of
+Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they
+mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to
+represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to
+represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan
+of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures.
+The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in
+intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano:
+they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his
+mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare.
+This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on;
+even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but
+corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we
+read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,--we are in his mind, we are
+sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and
+storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty
+irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes
+of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth,
+at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks,
+or tones, to do with that sublime identification of his age with that
+of the _heavens themselves_, when in his reproaches to them for
+conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that 'they
+themselves are old'. What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What
+has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is
+beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and
+stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough
+that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has
+put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his
+followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about
+more easily. A happy ending!--as if the living martyrdom that Lear had
+gone through,--the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair
+dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If
+he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's
+burden after, why all this pudder and preparation,--why torment us
+with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of
+getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over
+again his misused station,--as if at his years, and with his
+experience, anything was left but to die.
+
+Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how
+many dramatic personages are there in Shakespeare, which though more
+tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some
+circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be
+shown to our bodily eye. Othello for instance. Nothing can be more
+soothing, more flattering to the nobler parts of our natures, than to
+read of a young Venetian lady of highest extraction, through the force
+of love and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying aside
+every consideration of kindred, and country, and colour, and wedding
+with _a coal-black Moor_--(for such he is represented, in the
+imperfect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those
+days, compared with our own, or in compliance with popular notions,
+though the Moors are now well enough known to be by many shades less
+unworthy of a white woman's fancy)--it is the perfect triumph of
+virtue over accidents, of the imagination over the senses. She sees
+Othello's colour in his mind. But upon the stage, when the imagination
+is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor
+unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello played,
+whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in his
+colour; whether he did not find something extremely revolting in the
+courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and whether
+the actual sight of the thing did not over-weigh all that beautiful
+compromise which we make in reading;--and the reason it should do so
+is obvious, because there is just so much reality presented to our
+senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with not enough of
+belief in the internal motives--all that which is unseen--to overpower
+and reconcile the first and obvious prejudices.[8] What we see upon a
+stage is body and bodily action; what we are conscious of in reading
+is almost exclusively the mind, and its movements: and this I think
+may sufficiently account for the very different sort of delight with
+which the same play so often affects us in the reading and the seeing.
+
+    [8] The error of supposing that because Othello's colour does
+    not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in
+    the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam
+    and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do in the
+    poem. But in the poem we for a while have Paradisaical senses
+    given us, which vanish when we see a man and his wife without
+    clothes in the picture. The painters themselves feel this, as
+    is apparent by the awkward shifts they have recourse to, to
+    make them look not quite naked; by a sort of prophetic
+    anachronism, antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So in
+    the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes; in the
+    seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own.
+
+It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters in
+Shakespeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet
+something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination, to
+admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering a
+change and a diminution,--that still stronger the objection must lie
+against representing another line of characters, which Shakespeare has
+introduced to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his
+scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to
+common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist.
+When we read the incantations of those terrible beings the Witches in
+_Macbeth_, though some of the ingredients of their hellish composition
+savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other than the most
+serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound
+as Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence? We
+might as well laugh under a consciousness of the principle of Evil
+himself being truly and really present with us. But attempt to bring
+these beings on to a stage, and you turn them instantly into so many
+old women, that men and children are to laugh at. Contrary to the old
+saying, that 'seeing is believing', the sight actually destroys the
+faith; and the mirth in which we indulge at their expense, when we see
+these creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of indemnification
+which we make to ourselves for the terror which they put us in when
+reading made them an object of belief,--when we surrendered up our
+reason to the poet, as children, to their nurses and their elders; and
+we laugh at our fears, as children who thought they saw something in
+the dark, triumph when the bringing in of a candle discovers the
+vanity of their fears. For this exposure of supernatural agents upon a
+stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose their own delusiveness.
+It is the solitary taper and the book that generates a faith in these
+terrors: a ghost by chandelier light, and in good company, deceives no
+spectators,--a ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his human
+dimensions made out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted house, and
+a well-dressed audience, shall arm the most nervous child against any
+apprehensions: as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles
+with his impenetrable armour over it, 'Bully Dawson would have fought
+the devil with such advantages.'
+
+Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture
+which Dryden has thrown into the _Tempest_: doubtless without some
+such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have sate
+out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet
+courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the _Tempest_ of
+Shakespeare at all a subject for stage representation? It is one thing
+to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we are
+reading it; but to have a conjurer brought before us in his
+conjuring-gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself and
+some hundred of favoured spectators before the curtain are supposed to
+see, involves such a quantity of the _hateful incredible_, that all
+our reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such
+gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish
+and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they
+cannot even be painted,--they can only be believed. But the elaborate
+and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands,
+in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. That
+which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life
+of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties,
+positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A
+parlour or a drawing-room,--a library opening into a garden,--a garden
+with an alcove in it,--a street, or the piazza of Covent Garden, does
+well enough in a scene; we are content to give as much credit to it as
+it demands; or rather, we think little about it,--it is little more
+than reading at the top of a page, 'Scene, a Garden;' we do not
+imagine ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of
+familiar objects. But to think by the help of painted trees and
+caverns, which we know to be painted, to transport our minds to
+Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell;[9] or by the aid of a
+fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us
+believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the isle was
+full:--the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his
+musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind his apparatus,
+to make us believe that we do indeed hear the chrystal spheres ring
+out that chime, which if it were to inwrap our fancy long, Milton
+thinks,
+
+    Time would run back and fetch the age of gold,
+    And speckled vanity
+    Would sicken soon and die,
+    And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould;
+    Yea Hell itself would pass away,
+    And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day.
+
+The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more
+impossible to be shown on a stage, than the Enchanted Isle, with its
+no less interesting and innocent first settlers.
+
+    [9] It will be said these things are done in pictures. But
+    pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a
+    world of itself, but in scene-painting there is the attempt
+    to deceive; and there is the discordancy, never to be got
+    over, between painted scenes and real people.
+
+The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the Dresses,
+which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last
+time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of
+garment which he varied--the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish
+priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity
+of the public eye, require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish
+monarch was fairly a counterpart to that which our king wears when he
+goes to the Parliament-house,--just so full and cumbersome, and set
+out with ermine and pearls. And if things must be represented, I see
+not what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what robe are we
+conscious of? Some dim images of royalty--a crown and sceptre, may
+float before our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of it? Do we
+see in our mind's eye what Webb or any other robe-maker could pattern?
+This is the inevitable consequence of imitating everything, to make
+all things natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine
+abstraction. It presents to the fancy just so much of external
+appearances as to make us feel that we are among flesh and blood,
+while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is
+employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character.
+But in acting, scenery, dress, the most contemptible things, call upon
+us to judge of their naturalness.
+
+Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure which we
+take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with that quiet
+delight which we find in the reading of it, to the different feelings
+with which a reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine
+poem. The accursed critical habit,--the being called upon to judge and
+pronounce, must make it quite a different thing to the former. In
+seeing these plays acted, we are affected just as judges. When Hamlet
+compares the two pictures of Gertrude's first and second husband, who
+wants to see the pictures? But in the acting, a miniature must be
+lugged out; which we know not to be the picture, but only to show how
+finely a miniature may be represented. This showing of everything,
+levels all things: it makes tricks, bows, and curtesies, of
+importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than by the
+manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene in
+_Macbeth_: it is as much remembered as any of her thrilling tones or
+impressive looks. But does such a trifle as this enter into the
+imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful scene? Does not
+the mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can? Does it care about
+the gracefulness of the doing it? But by acting, and judging of
+acting, all these non-essentials are raised into an importance,
+injurious to the main interest of the play.
+
+I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakespeare. It
+would be no very difficult task to extend the inquiry to his comedies;
+and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest, are
+equally incompatible with stage representation. The length to which
+this essay has run, will make it, I am afraid, sufficiently
+distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without going any deeper
+into the subject at present.
+
+
+
+
+PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
+
+1792-1822
+
+A DEFENCE OF POETRY (1821)
+
+
+According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action,
+which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered
+as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another,
+however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts
+so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as
+from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the
+principle of its own integrity. The one is the [Greek: to poiein], or
+the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects those forms which
+are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the
+[Greek: to logizein], or principle of analysis, and its action regards
+the relations of things, simply as relations; considering thoughts,
+not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations
+which conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of
+quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value
+of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects
+the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is
+to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the
+spirit, as the shadow to the substance.
+
+Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of
+the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is
+an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions
+are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an
+Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody.
+But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within
+all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and
+produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of
+the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite
+them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions
+of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even
+as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A
+child at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and
+motions; and every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact
+relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions
+which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression;
+and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so
+the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration
+of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. In
+relation to the objects which delight a child, these expressions are,
+what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to
+ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in
+him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and
+gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the
+image of the combined effect of those objects, and of his apprehension
+of them. Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures,
+next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an
+additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of
+expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts, become at
+once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture,
+the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony. The social
+sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements, society
+results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human
+beings coexist; the future is contained within the present, as the
+plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast,
+mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable of affording
+the motives according to which the will of a social being is
+determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute
+pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in
+reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in the
+infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and
+actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions
+represented by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that
+from which it proceeds. But let us dismiss those more general
+considerations which might involve an inquiry into the principles of
+society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the
+imagination is expressed upon its forms.
+
+In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural
+objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain
+rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they observe
+not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the
+song, in the combinations of language, in the series of their
+imitations of natural objects. For there is a certain order or rhythm
+belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation, from
+which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer
+pleasure than from any other: the sense of an approximation to this
+order has been called taste by modern writers. Every man in the
+infancy of art observes an order which approximates more or less
+closely to that from which this highest delight results: but the
+diversity is not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be
+sensible, except in those instances where the predominance of this
+faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted
+to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its cause) is
+very great. Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most
+universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the
+manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon
+their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of
+reduplication from that community. Their language is vitally
+metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of
+things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which
+represent them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of
+thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new
+poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been
+thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of
+human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said by
+Lord Bacon to be 'the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the
+various subjects of the world';[10] and he considers the faculty
+which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all
+knowledge. In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a
+poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to
+apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists
+in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception,
+and secondly between perception and expression. Every original
+language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem:
+the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are
+the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of
+the creations of poetry.
+
+    [10] _De Augment. Scient._, cap. i, lib. iii.
+
+But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order,
+are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and
+architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of
+laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts
+of life, and the teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with the
+beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of
+the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original
+religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like
+Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the
+circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were
+called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets:
+a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he
+not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those
+laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he
+beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of
+the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to
+be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell
+the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the
+pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of
+prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet
+participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as
+relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The
+grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference
+of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect
+to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses
+of Aeschylus, and the book of _Job_, and Dante's _Paradise_, would
+afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the
+limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of
+sculpture, painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive.
+
+Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are
+all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry
+by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of
+the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those
+arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are
+created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the
+invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of
+language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and
+passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and
+delicate combinations, than colour, form, or motion, and is more
+plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the
+creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and
+has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments,
+and conditions of art, have relations among each other, which limit
+and interpose between conception and expression. The former is as a
+mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the
+light of which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame of
+sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of
+the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of
+those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their
+thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of
+the term; as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal
+effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders
+of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to
+exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a
+question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of
+the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with
+that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets, any
+excess will remain.
+
+We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that
+art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the
+faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle still
+narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and
+unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is
+inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
+
+Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and
+towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of
+those relations has always been found connected with a perception of
+the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets
+has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of
+sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less
+indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words
+themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity
+of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that
+you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as
+seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a
+poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no
+flower--and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.
+
+An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the
+language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music,
+produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony
+and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should
+accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the
+harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed
+convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such
+composition as includes much action: but every great poet must
+inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact
+structure of his peculiar versification. The distinction between poets
+and prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction between
+philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was essentially a
+poet--the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the melody of his
+language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He
+rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because
+he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and
+action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which
+would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his
+style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his periods, but with
+little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.[11] His language has a sweet
+and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the
+almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it
+is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the
+reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the
+universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the
+authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as
+they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent
+analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth;
+but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in
+themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music.
+Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of
+rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less
+capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who
+have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine
+ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest
+power.
+
+    [11] See the _Filum Labyrinthi_, and the Essay on Death
+    particularly.
+
+A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There
+is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a
+catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion than time,
+place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of
+actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as
+existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all
+other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period
+of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again
+recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of
+a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible
+varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use
+of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should
+invest them, augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new and
+wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence
+epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the
+poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which
+obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a
+mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
+
+The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as
+a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be considered as a whole,
+though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated
+portions: a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable
+thought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy,
+were poets; and although the plan of these writers, especially that of
+Livy, restrained them from developing this faculty in its highest
+degree, they made copious and ample amends for their subjection, by
+filling all the interstices of their subjects with living images.
+
+Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed to
+estimate its effects upon society.
+
+Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it
+falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its
+delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor
+their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it
+acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above
+consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations to
+contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the
+strength and splendour of their union. Even in modern times, no living
+poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the jury which sits in
+judgement upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be
+composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the
+selectest of the wise of many generations. A poet is a nightingale,
+who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet
+sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen
+musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not
+whence or why. The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the
+delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that social system
+which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has
+reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human
+character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were
+awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and
+Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and
+persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in
+these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have
+been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely
+impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation
+they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor
+let it be objected, that these characters are remote from moral
+perfection, and that they can by no means be considered as edifying
+patterns for general imitation. Every epoch, under names more or less
+specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked idol
+of the worship of a semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit is the veiled
+image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate.
+But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as a temporary
+dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without
+concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or
+dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he
+may the ancient armour or the modern uniform around his body; whilst
+it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty
+of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental
+vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to
+the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in
+which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express
+themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets
+of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their
+conceptions in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful
+whether the alloy of costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper
+this planetary music for mortal ears.
+
+The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a
+misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral
+improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry
+has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and
+domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men
+hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one
+another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and
+enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand
+unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the
+hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they
+were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the
+impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the
+minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that
+gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and
+actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or
+a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with
+the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.
+A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;
+he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the
+pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great
+instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to
+the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference
+of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new
+delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their
+own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and
+interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens
+the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same
+manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill
+to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually
+those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which
+participate in neither. By this assumption of the inferior office of
+interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit
+himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory in a participation in
+the cause. There was little danger that Homer, or any of the eternal
+poets, should have so far misunderstood themselves as to have
+abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the
+poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan,
+Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect
+of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in
+which they compel us to advert to this purpose.
+
+Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the
+dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously
+with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the
+poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture,
+philosophy, and, we may add, the forms of civil life. For although the
+scheme of Athenian society was deformed by many imperfections which
+the poetry existing in chivalry and Christianity has erased from the
+habits and institutions of modern Europe; yet never at any other
+period has so much energy, beauty, and virtue, been developed; never
+was blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined and rendered
+subject to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the
+dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during the century which
+preceded the death of Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of
+our species have we records and fragments stamped so visibly with the
+image of the divinity in man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in
+action, or in language, which has rendered this epoch memorable above
+all others, and the storehouse of examples to everlasting time. For
+written poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other
+arts, and it is an idle inquiry to demand which gave and which
+received the light, which all, as from a common focus, have scattered
+over the darkest periods of succeeding time. We know no more of cause
+and effect than a constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found
+to co-exist with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and
+perfection of man. I appeal to what has already been established to
+distinguish between the cause and the effect.
+
+It was at the period here adverted to, that the drama had its birth;
+and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those
+few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved to
+us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was understood or
+practised according to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For
+the Athenians employed language, action, music, painting, the dance,
+and religious institutions, to produce a common effect in the
+representation of the highest idealisms of passion and of power; each
+division in the art was made perfect in its kind by artists of the
+most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful proportion
+and unity one towards the other. On the modern stage a few only of the
+elements capable of expressing the image of the poet's conception are
+employed at once. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music
+and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the
+fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. Religious
+institution has indeed been usually banished from the stage. Our
+system of divesting the actor's face of a mask, on which the many
+expressions appropriated to his dramatic character might be moulded
+into one permanent and unchanging expression, is favourable only to a
+partial and inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a
+monologue, where all the attention may be directed to some great
+master of ideal mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy with
+tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is
+undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should
+be as in _King Lear_, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the
+intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favour
+of _King Lear_ against the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ or the _Agamemnon_, or,
+if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unless the
+intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter,
+should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. _King Lear_, if it
+can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect
+specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world; in spite of the
+narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected by the ignorance of
+the philosophy of the drama which has prevailed in modern Europe.
+Calderon, in his religious _Autos_, has attempted to fulfil some of
+the high conditions of dramatic representation neglected by
+Shakespeare; such as the establishing a relation between the drama and
+religion, and the accommodating them to music and dancing; but he
+omits the observation of conditions still more important, and more is
+lost than gained by the substitution of the rigidly-defined and
+ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the living
+impersonations of the truth of human passion.
+
+But I digress.--The connexion of scenic exhibitions with the
+improvement or corruption of the manners of men, has been universally
+recognized: in other words, the presence or absence of poetry in its
+most perfect and universal form, has been found to be connected with
+good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has been
+imputed to the drama as an effect, begins, when the poetry employed in
+its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners whether the
+periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not
+corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and
+effect.
+
+The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its
+perfection, ever co-existed with the moral and intellectual greatness
+of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in
+which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of
+circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which
+every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires,
+and would become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains
+and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the
+capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are
+strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted
+calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into
+the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror
+and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence
+of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its
+wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their
+choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for
+censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
+Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon
+that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express
+poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the
+brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from
+the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with
+majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it
+with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.
+
+But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with
+that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great
+masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of
+the kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood, or a weak
+attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as
+moral truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries
+of some gross vice or weakness, with which the author, in common with
+his auditors, are infected. Hence what has been called the classical
+and domestic drama. Addison's _Cato_ is a specimen of the one; and
+would it were not superfluous to cite examples of the other! To such
+purposes poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of
+lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would
+contain it. And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this
+nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment
+and passion, which, divested of imagination, are other names for
+caprice and appetite. The period in our own history of the grossest
+degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in
+which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the
+triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone
+illuminating an age unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating
+principle pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry
+ceases to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality:
+wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph,
+instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt, succeed to
+sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which
+is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the
+very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a
+monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth new
+food, which it devours in secret.
+
+The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of
+expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other,
+the connexion of poetry and social good is more observable in the
+drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable that the
+highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the
+highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction
+of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a
+corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain
+the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli says of political
+institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should
+arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. And this
+is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all
+language, institution and form, require not only to be produced but to
+be sustained: the office and character of a poet participates in the
+divine nature as regards providence, no less than as regards creation.
+
+Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of the
+Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols of the
+extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. The
+bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of
+Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most glorious
+reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious; like the odour of the
+tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of
+sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale
+of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field,
+and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own, which endows
+the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic
+and erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that
+softness in statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners
+and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer.
+Nor is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to
+which this want of harmony is to be imputed. An equal sensibility to
+the influence of the senses and the affections is to be found in the
+writings of Homer and Sophocles: the former, especially, has clothed
+sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. Their
+superiority over these succeeding writers consists in the presence of
+those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not
+in the absence of those which are connected with the external: their
+incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. It
+is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which
+their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets,
+but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with
+any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Had
+that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to
+pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an
+imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved. For
+the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to
+pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the
+imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself
+thence as a paralysing venom, through the affections into the very
+appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense
+survives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses
+itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its
+voice is heard, like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from the
+world. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable
+of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of
+whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil
+time. It will readily be confessed that those among the luxurious
+citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were delighted with the poems
+of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensual than the remnant of
+their tribe. But corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of
+human society before poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that
+chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through
+the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from
+a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once
+connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. It is the faculty
+which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of
+social renovation. And let us not circumscribe the effects of the
+bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of
+those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of
+those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated
+portions: those who are more finely organized, or born in a happier
+age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem, which all
+poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up
+since the beginning of the world.
+
+The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient
+Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have
+been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans appear
+to have considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the
+selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have abstained from
+creating in measured language, sculpture, music, or architecture,
+anything which might bear a particular relation to their own
+condition, whilst it should bear a general one to the universal
+constitution of the world. But we judge from partial evidence, and we
+judge perhaps partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all
+great poets, have been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil
+in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen delicacy of expressions of
+the latter, are as a mist of light which conceal from us the intense
+and exceeding truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct
+with poetry. Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great
+writers of the Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of
+Greece. The institutions also, and the religion of Rome were less
+poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the
+substance. Hence poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than
+accompany, the perfection of political and domestic society. The true
+poetry of Rome lived in its institutions; for whatever of beautiful,
+true, and majestic, they contained, could have sprung only from the
+faculty which creates the order in which they consist. The life of
+Camillus, the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in
+their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls: the refusal of the
+republic to make peace with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were
+not the consequences of a refined calculation of the probable personal
+advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life,
+to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal
+dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it
+out of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire,
+and the reward everliving fame. These things are not the less poetry
+_quia carent vate sacro_. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem
+written by Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired
+rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their
+harmony.
+
+At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the
+circle of its revolutions. And the world would have fallen into utter
+anarchy and darkness, but that, there were found poets among the
+authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and
+religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before
+conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, become as
+generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. It is foreign to
+the present purpose to touch upon the evil produced by these systems:
+except that we protest, on the ground of the principles already
+established, that no portion of it can be attributed to the poetry
+they contain.
+
+It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and
+Isaiah, had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his
+disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers
+of this extraordinary person, are all instinct with the most vivid
+poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a
+certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinions founded
+upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which Plato had
+distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis, and
+became the object of the worship of the civilized world. Here it is to
+be confessed that 'Light seems to thicken', and
+
+          The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
+    Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
+    And night's black agents to their preys do rouse.
+
+But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of
+this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing
+itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its
+yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen to the music,
+unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind,
+nourishing its everlasting course with strength and swiftness.
+
+The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and
+institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived
+the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and
+victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and
+opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to
+the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations.
+Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the
+extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress of
+despotism and superstition. Men, from causes too intricate to be here
+discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will had
+become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of
+the will of others; lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud,
+characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of
+_creating_ in form, language, or institution. The moral anomalies of
+such a state of society are not justly to be charged upon any class of
+events immediately connected with them, and those events are most
+entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it most
+expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannot distinguish
+words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies have been
+incorporated into our popular religion.
+
+It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry
+of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest themselves.
+The principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in
+his _Republic_, as the theoretical rule of the mode in which the
+materials of pleasure and of power, produced by the common skill and
+labour of human beings, ought to be distributed among them. The
+limitations of this rule were asserted by him to be determined only by
+the sensibility of each, or the utility to result to all. Plato,
+following the doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral
+and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past,
+the present, and the future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged
+the sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and
+Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression
+of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The
+incorporation of the Celtic nations with the exhausted population of
+the south, impressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in
+their mythology and institutions. The result was a sum of the action
+and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed
+as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other without
+incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The
+abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of
+women from a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were
+among the consequences of these events.
+
+The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest
+political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. The
+freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a
+religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if
+the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and
+motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers; so that earth
+became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar
+appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and
+a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this
+creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language
+was the instrument of their art: 'Galeotto f� il libro, e chi lo
+scrisse.' The Proven�al Trouveurs, or inventors, preceded Petrarch,
+whose verses are as spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted
+fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love. It is
+impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of that beauty
+which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explain how the
+gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these sacred
+emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and wise, and lift
+them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self. Dante
+understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. His
+_Vita Nuova_ is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and
+language: it is the idealized history of that period, and those
+intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis of
+Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her
+loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to
+the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination of
+modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed the judgement
+of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the 'Divine Drama',
+in the measure of the admiration which they accord to the Hell,
+Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting
+love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the
+ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of
+the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns of
+society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and
+superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare,
+Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age,
+have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in
+the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force.
+The true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which human
+kind is distributed, has become less misunderstood; and if the error
+which confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two
+sexes has been partially recognized in the opinions and institutions
+of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which
+chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets.
+
+The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the
+stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world. The
+distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton
+have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these
+great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a
+difficult question to determine how far they were conscious of the
+distinction which must have subsisted in their minds between their own
+creeds and that of the people. Dante at least appears to wish to mark
+the full extent of it by placing Riphaeus, whom Virgil calls
+_iustissimus unus_, in Paradise, and observing a most heretical
+caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton's
+poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system,
+of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief
+popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the
+character of Satan as expressed in _Paradise Lost_. It is a mistake to
+suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular
+personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a
+sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an
+enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not
+to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles
+his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his
+conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far
+superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he
+has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to
+one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most
+horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of
+inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the
+alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has
+so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a
+violation) as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his
+God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is
+the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton's genius. He
+mingled as it were the elements of human nature as colours upon a
+single pallet, and arranged them in the composition of his great
+picture according to the laws of epic truth; that is, according to the
+laws of that principle by which a series of actions of the external
+universe and of intelligent and ethical beings is calculated to excite
+the sympathy of succeeding generations of mankind. The _Divina
+Commedia_ and _Paradise Lost_ have conferred upon modern mythology a
+systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more
+superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon
+the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the
+religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it
+will have been stamped with the eternity of genius.
+
+Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the
+second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and
+intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of
+the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it:
+developing itself in correspondence with their development. For
+Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the
+sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his genius,
+had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all
+that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their
+notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan,
+Statius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single condition of
+epic truth. Milton was the third epic poet. For if the title of epic
+in its highest sense be refused to the _Aeneid_, still less can it be
+conceded to the _Orlando Furioso_, the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the
+_Lusiad_, or the _Faerie Queene_.
+
+Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient religion
+of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their poetry probably
+in the same proportion as its forms survived in the unreformed worship
+of modern Europe. The one preceded and the other followed the
+Reformation at almost equal intervals. Dante was the first religious
+reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather in the rudeness and
+acrimony, than in the boldness of his censures of papal usurpation.
+Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a
+language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of
+inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator of those great spirits
+who presided over the resurrection of learning; the Lucifer of that
+starry flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from
+republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted
+world. His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a
+burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in
+the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with a lightning which has yet
+found no conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first
+acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be
+undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A
+great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of
+wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all
+its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to
+share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever
+developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.
+
+The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and
+Boccaccio, was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture, and
+architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the
+superstructure of English literature is based upon the materials of
+Italian invention.
+
+But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of
+poetry and its influence on society. Be it enough to have pointed out
+the effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the word, upon
+their own and all succeeding times.
+
+But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners
+and mechanists, on another plea. It is admitted that the exercise of
+the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that that of
+reason is more useful. Let us examine as the grounds of this
+distinction, what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a
+general sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive and
+intelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it acquiesces.
+There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal and permanent;
+the other transitory and particular. Utility may either express the
+means of producing the former or the latter. In the former sense,
+whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the
+imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. But a narrower
+meaning may be assigned to the word utility, confining it to express
+that which banishes the importunity of the wants of our animal nature,
+the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing the grosser
+delusions of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of
+mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of
+personal advantage.
+
+Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have
+their appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of poets,
+and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life.
+They make space, and give time. Their exertions are of the highest
+value, so long as they confine their administration of the concerns of
+the inferior powers of our nature within the limits due to the
+superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions,
+let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced,
+the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. Whilst
+the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines labour,
+let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence
+with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not
+tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the
+extremes of luxury and want. They have exemplified the saying, 'To him
+that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little
+that he hath shall be taken away.' The rich have become richer, and
+the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven
+between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are
+the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the
+calculating faculty.
+
+It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the
+definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an
+inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature,
+the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of
+the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair
+itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the
+highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this
+principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure
+which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which
+is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in
+sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence the
+saying, 'It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the
+house of mirth.' Nor that this highest species of pleasure is
+necessarily linked with pain. The delight of love and friendship, the
+ecstasy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perception and
+still more of the creation of poetry, is often wholly unalloyed.
+
+The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true
+utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or
+poetical philosophers.
+
+The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau,[12] and
+their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are
+entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the
+degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would
+have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would
+have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men,
+women, and children, burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment
+have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the
+Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what
+would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante,
+Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor
+Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been
+born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of
+the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments
+of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of
+the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with
+its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of
+these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser
+sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the
+aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the
+direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.
+
+    [12] Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was
+    essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere
+    reasoners.
+
+We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how
+to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical
+knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the
+produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought,
+is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes.
+There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in
+morals, government, and political economy, or at least, what is wiser
+and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let '_I dare
+not_ wait upon _I would_, like the poor cat in the adage.' We want the
+creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous
+impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our
+calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can
+digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the
+limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of
+the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the
+internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself
+a slave. To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree
+disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the
+basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention
+for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation of the
+inequality of mankind? From what other cause has it arisen that the
+discoveries which should have lightened, have added a weight to the
+curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which
+money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
+
+The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold; by one it creates
+new materials of knowledge and power and pleasure; by the other it
+engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according
+to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and
+the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than
+at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating
+principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed
+the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of
+human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which
+animates it.
+
+Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
+circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science,
+and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time
+the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from
+which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if
+blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren
+world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of
+life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all
+things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture
+of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded
+beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue,
+love, patriotism, friendship--what were the scenery of this beautiful
+universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of
+the grave--and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not
+ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the
+owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not
+like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination
+of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest
+poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal,
+which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to
+transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour
+of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
+conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its
+approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its
+original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness
+of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on
+the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been
+communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original
+conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present
+day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of
+poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay
+recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than
+a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial
+connexion of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture
+of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the
+limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived the
+_Paradise Lost_ as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have
+his own authority also for the muse having 'dictated' to him the
+'unpremeditated song'. And let this be an answer to those who would
+allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the
+_Orlando Furioso_. Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic
+is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is
+still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great
+statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in
+the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in
+formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the
+gradations, or the media of the process.
+
+Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
+and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and
+feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding
+our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing
+unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that
+even in the desire and regret they leave, there cannot but be
+pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is
+as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own;
+but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the
+coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled
+sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are
+experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and
+the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them
+is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love,
+patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions;
+and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a
+universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits
+of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they
+combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a
+trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the
+enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced
+these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past.
+Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the
+world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the
+interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form,
+sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to
+those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is no portal
+of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into
+the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of
+the divinity in man.
+
+Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that
+which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most
+deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure,
+eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all
+irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every
+form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous
+sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret
+alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from
+death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world,
+and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of
+its forms.
+
+All things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation to the
+percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a
+heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse which
+binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions.
+And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's
+dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a
+being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to
+which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe
+of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our
+inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder
+of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to
+imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has
+been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted
+by reiteration. It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso: _Non
+merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta_.
+
+A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure,
+virtue and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best,
+the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, let time
+be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of
+human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest, the
+happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally
+incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most
+spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would
+look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men: and
+the exceptions, as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty
+in a high yet inferior degree, will be found on consideration to
+confine rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop to the
+arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in our own
+persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge, and
+executioner, let us decide without trial, testimony, or form, that
+certain motives of those who are 'there sitting where we dare not
+soar', are reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard,
+that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was
+a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a
+libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with
+this division of our subject to cite living poets, but posterity has
+done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors
+have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their
+sins 'were as scarlet, they are now white as snow': they have been
+washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time. Observe in
+what a ludicrous chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime
+have been confused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and
+poets; consider how little is, as it appears--or appears, as it is;
+look to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.
+
+Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that it
+is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and
+that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connexion with the
+consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine that these are
+the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when mental effects
+are experienced unsusceptible of being referred to them. The frequent
+recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may
+produce in the mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its
+own nature and with its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals
+of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet
+becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences
+under which others habitually live. But as he is more delicately
+organized than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure, both his
+own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the
+one and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned to this
+difference. And he renders himself obnoxious to calumny, when he
+neglects to observe the circumstances under which these objects of
+universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves in one
+another's garments.
+
+But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus cruelty,
+envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil, have never
+formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of poets.
+
+I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down
+these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested to
+my mind, by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of
+observing the formality of a polemical reply; but if the view which
+they contain be just, they will be found to involve a refutation of
+the arguers against poetry, so far at least as regards the first
+division of the subject. I can readily conjecture what should have
+moved the gall of some learned and intelligent writers who quarrel
+with certain versifiers; I confess myself, like them, unwilling to be
+stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. Bavius and
+Maevius undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable persons. But
+it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than
+confound.
+
+The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its elements
+and principles; and it has been shown, as well as the narrow limits
+assigned them would permit, that what is called poetry, in a
+restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms of order
+and of beauty, according to which the materials of human life are
+susceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry in a universal
+sense.
+
+The second part[13] will have for its object an application of these
+principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, and a
+defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners and
+opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative and
+creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic
+development of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free
+development of the national will, has arisen as it were from a new
+birth. In spite of the low-thoughted envy which would undervalue
+contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual
+achievements, and we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass
+beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national
+struggle for civil and religious liberty. The most unfailing herald,
+companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a
+beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such
+periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and
+receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and
+nature. The persons in whom this power resides may often, as far as
+regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent
+correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the
+ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet
+compelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their
+own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most
+celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the
+electric life which burns within their words. They measure the
+circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a
+comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves
+perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is
+less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the
+hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the
+gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words
+which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to
+battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved
+not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
+world.
+
+    [13] This was never written.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM HAZLITT
+
+1778-1830
+
+MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH POETS (1823)
+
+
+My father was a Dissenting Minister at Wem in Shropshire; and in the
+year 1798 (the figures that compose the date are to me like the
+'dreaded name of Demogorgon') Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury, to
+succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a Unitarian congregation
+there. He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he
+was to preach; and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the coach in a
+state of anxiety and expectation to look for the arrival of his
+successor, could find no one at all answering the description but a
+round-faced man in a short black coat (like a shooting-jacket) which
+hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who seemed to be talking
+at a great rate to his fellow-passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarce returned
+to give an account of his disappointment, when the round-faced man in
+black entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject, by beginning
+to talk. He did not cease while he stayed; nor has he since, that I
+know of. He held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense
+for three weeks that he remained there, 'fluttering the _proud
+Salopians_ like an eagle in a dove-cote'; and the Welsh mountains that
+skirt the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree to have
+heard no such mystic sounds since the days of
+
+    High-born Hoel's harp or soft Llewelyn's lay!
+
+As we passed along between Wem and Shrewsbury, and I eyed their blue
+tops seen through the wintry branches, or the red rustling leaves of
+the sturdy oak-trees by the road-side, a sound was in my ears as of a
+Siren's song; I was stunned, startled with it, as from deep sleep; but
+I had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my
+admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the
+light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun's rays glittering
+in the puddles of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate,
+helpless, like a worm by the way-side, crushed, bleeding, lifeless;
+but now, bursting from the deadly bands that 'bound them,
+
+    With Styx nine times round them,'
+
+my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch
+the golden light of other years. My soul has indeed remained in its
+original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and
+unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay,
+has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that
+my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length
+found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge. But this is
+not to my purpose.
+
+My father lived ten miles from Shrewsbury, and was in the habit of
+exchanging visits with Mr. Rowe, and with Mr. Jenkins of Whitchurch
+(nine miles farther on) according to the custom of Dissenting
+Ministers in each other's neighbourhood. A line of communication is
+thus established, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is
+kept alive, and nourishes its smouldering fire unquenchable, like the
+fires in the _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus, placed at different stations,
+that waited for ten long years to announce with their blazing pyramids
+the destruction of Troy. Coleridge had agreed to come over to see my
+father, according to the courtesy of the country, as Mr. Rowe's
+probable successor; but in the meantime I had gone to hear him preach
+the Sunday after his arrival. A poet and a philosopher getting up into
+a Unitarian pulpit to preach the Gospel, was a romance in these
+degenerate days, a sort of revival of the primitive spirit of
+Christianity, which was not to be resisted.
+
+It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to
+walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach.
+Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk
+as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798.
+_Il y a des impressions que ni le temps ni les circonstances peuvent
+effacer. Duss�-je vivre des si�cles entiers, le doux temps de ma
+jeunesse ne peut renaitre pour moi, ni s'effacer jamais dans ma
+m�moire._ When I got there, the organ was playing the 100th psalm,
+and, when it was done, Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text, 'And
+he went up into the mountain to pray, HIMSELF, ALONE.' As he gave out
+this text, his voice 'rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,'
+and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud,
+deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the
+sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that
+prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The
+idea of St. John came into mind, 'of one crying in the wilderness, who
+had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey.'
+The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying
+with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war; upon church and
+state--not their alliance, but their separation--on the spirit of the
+world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed
+to one another. He talked of those who had 'inscribed the cross of
+Christ on banners dripping with human gore.' He made a poetical and
+pastoral excursion,--and to show the fatal effects of war, drew a
+striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team
+afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, 'as though
+he should never be old,' and the same poor country-lad, crimped,
+kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned into a
+wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and
+pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the loathsome
+finery of the profession of blood.
+
+    Such were the notes our once-lov'd poet sung.
+
+And for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard
+the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together,
+Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of
+Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well
+satisfied. The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the
+sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the _good cause_;
+and the cold dank drops of dew that hung half-melted on the beard of
+the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them; for there
+was a spirit of hope and youth in all nature, that turned everything
+into good The face of nature had not then the brand of JUS DIVINUM on
+it:
+
+    Like to that sanguine flower inscrib'd with woe.
+
+On the Tuesday following, the half-inspired speaker came. I was called
+down into the room where he was, and went half-hoping, half-afraid. He
+received me very graciously, and I listened for a long time without
+uttering a word. I did not suffer in his opinion by my silence. 'For
+those two hours,' he afterwards was pleased to say, 'he was conversing
+with W. H.'s forehead!' His appearance was different from what I had
+anticipated from seeing him before. At a distance, and in the dim
+light of the chapel, there was to me a strange wildness in his aspect,
+a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the small-pox. His
+complexion was at that time clear, and even bright--
+
+    As are the children of yon azure sheen.
+
+His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with
+large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a
+sea with darkened lustre. 'A certain tender bloom his face
+o'erspread,' a purple tinge as we see it in the pale thoughtful
+complexions of the Spanish portrait-painters, Murillo and Velasquez.
+His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin
+good-humoured and round; but his nose, the rudder of the face, the
+index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing--like what he has done.
+It might seem that the genius of his face as from a height surveyed
+and projected him (with sufficient capacity and huge aspiration) into
+the world unknown of thought and imagination, with nothing to support
+or guide his veering purpose, as if Columbus had launched his
+adventurous course for the New World in a scallop, without oars or
+compass. So at least I comment on it after the event. Coleridge in his
+person was rather above the common size, inclining to the corpulent,
+or like Lord Hamlet, 'somewhat fat and pursy.' His hair (now, alas!
+grey) was then black and glossy as the raven's, and fell in smooth
+masses over his forehead. This long pendulous hair is peculiar to
+enthusiasts, to those whose minds tend heavenward; and is
+traditionally inseparable (though of a different colour) from the
+pictures of Christ. It ought to belong, as a character to all who
+preach _Christ crucified_, and Coleridge was at that time one of
+those!
+
+It was curious to observe the contrast between him and my father, who
+was a veteran in the cause, and then declining into the vale of years.
+He had been a poor Irish lad, carefully brought up by his parents, and
+sent to the University of Glasgow (where he studied under Adam Smith)
+to prepare him for his future destination. It was his mother's
+proudest wish to see her son a Dissenting Minister. So if we look back
+to past generations (as far as eye can reach) we see the same hopes,
+fears, wishes, followed by the same disappointments, throbbing in the
+human heart; and so we may see them (if we look forward) rising up for
+ever, and disappearing, like vapourish bubbles, in the human breast!
+After being tossed about from congregation to congregation in the
+heats of the Unitarian controversy, and squabbles about the American
+war, he had been relegated to an obscure village, where he was to
+spend the last thirty years of his life, far from the only converse
+that he loved, the talk about disputed texts of Scripture and the
+cause of civil and religious liberty. Here he passed his days,
+repining but resigned, in the study of the Bible, and the perusal of
+the Commentators--huge folios, not easily got through, one of which
+would outlast a winter! Why did he pore on these from morn to night
+(with the exception of a walk in the fields or a turn in the garden to
+gather broccoli-plants or kidney-beans of his own rearing, with no
+small degree of pride and pleasure)?--Here were 'no figures nor no
+fantasies,'--neither poetry nor philosophy--nothing to dazzle, nothing
+to excite modern curiosity; but to his lack-lustre eyes there
+appeared, within the pages of the ponderous, unwieldy, neglected
+tomes, the sacred name of JEHOVAH in Hebrew capitals: pressed down by
+the weight of the style, worn to the last fading thinness of the
+understanding, there were glimpses, glimmering notions of the
+patriarchal wanderings, with palm-trees hovering in the horizon, and
+processions of camels at the distance of three thousand years; there
+was Moses with the Burning Bush, the number of the Twelve Tribes,
+types, shadows, glosses on the law and the prophets; there were
+discussions (dull enough) on the age of Methuselah, a mighty
+speculation! there were outlines, rude guesses at the shape of Noah's
+Ark and at the riches of Solomon's Temple; questions as to the date of
+the creation, predictions of the end of all things; the great lapses
+of time, the strange mutations of the globe were unfolded with the
+voluminous leaf, as it turned over; and though the soul might slumber
+with an hieroglyphic veil of inscrutable mysteries drawn over it, yet
+it was in a slumber ill-exchanged for all the sharpened realities of
+sense, wit, fancy, or reason. My father's life was comparatively a
+dream; but it was a dream of infinity and eternity, of death, the
+resurrection, and a judgement to come!
+
+No two individuals were ever more unlike than were the host and his
+guest. A poet was to my father a sort of nondescript: yet whatever
+added grace to the Unitarian cause was to him welcome. He could hardly
+have been more surprised or pleased, if our visitor had worn wings.
+Indeed, his thoughts had wings; and as the silken sounds rustled round
+our little wainscoted parlour, my father threw back his spectacles
+over his forehead, his white hairs mixing with its sanguine hue; and a
+smile of delight beamed across his rugged cordial face, to think that
+Truth had found a new ally in Fancy![14] Besides, Coleridge seemed to
+take considerable notice of me, and that of itself was enough. He
+talked very familiarly, but agreeably, and glanced over a variety of
+subjects. At dinner-time he grew more animated, and dilated in a very
+edifying manner on Mary Wollstonecraft and Mackintosh. The last, he
+said, he considered (on my father's speaking of his _Vindiciae
+Gallicae_ as a capital performance) as a clever scholastic man--a
+master of the topics,--or as the ready warehouseman of letters, who
+knew exactly where to lay his hand on what he wanted, though the goods
+were not his own. He thought him no match for Burke, either in style
+or matter. Burke was a metaphysician, Mackintosh a mere logician.
+Burke was an orator (almost a poet) who reasoned in figures, because
+he had an eye for nature: Mackintosh, on the other hand, was a
+rhetorician, who had only an eye to commonplaces. On this I ventured
+to say that I had always entertained a great opinion of Burke, and
+that (as far as I could find) the speaking of him with contempt might
+be made the test of a vulgar democratical mind. This was the first
+observation I ever made to Coleridge, and he said it was a very just
+and striking one. I remember the leg of Welsh mutton and the turnips
+on the table that day had the finest flavour imaginable. Coleridge
+added that Mackintosh and Tom Wedgwood (of whom, however, he spoke
+highly) had expressed a very indifferent opinion of his friend Mr.
+Wordsworth, on which he remarked to them--'He strides on so far before
+you, that he dwindles in the distance!' Godwin had once boasted to him
+of having carried on an argument with Mackintosh for three hours with
+dubious success; Coleridge told him--'If there had been a man of
+genius in the room he would have settled the question in five
+minutes.' He asked me if I had ever seen Mary Wollstonecraft, and I
+said, I had once for a few moments, and that she seemed to me to turn
+off Godwin's objections to something she advanced with quite a
+playful, easy air. He replied, that 'this was only one instance of the
+ascendancy which people of imagination exercised over those of mere
+intellect.' He did not rate Godwin very high[15] (this was caprice or
+prejudice, real or affected) but he had a great idea of Mrs.
+Wollstonecraft's powers of conversation, none at all of her talent for
+book-making. We talked a little about Holcroft. He had been asked if
+he was not much struck _with_ him, and he said, he thought himself in
+more danger of being struck _by_ him. I complained that he would not
+let me get on at all, for he required a definition of every the
+commonest word, exclaiming, 'What do you mean by a _sensation_, Sir?
+What do you mean by an _idea_?' This, Coleridge said, was barricadoing
+the road to truth:--it was setting up a turnpike-gate at every step we
+took. I forget a great number of things, many more than I remember;
+but the day passed off pleasantly, and the next morning Mr. Coleridge
+was to return to Shrewsbury. When I came down to breakfast, I found
+that he had just received a letter from his friend, T. Wedgwood,
+making him an offer of 150_l._ a year if he chose to waive his present
+pursuit, and devote himself entirely to the study of poetry and
+philosophy. Coleridge seemed to make up his mind to close with this
+proposal in the act of tying on one of his shoes. It threw an
+additional damp on his departure. It took the wayward enthusiast quite
+from us to cast him into Deva's winding vales, or by the shores of old
+romance. Instead of living at ten miles' distance, of being the pastor
+of a Dissenting congregation at Shrewsbury, he was henceforth to
+inhabit the Hill of Parnassus, to be a Shepherd on the Delectable
+Mountains. Alas! I knew not the way thither, and felt very little
+gratitude for Mr. Wedgwood's bounty. I was presently relieved from
+this dilemma; for Mr. Coleridge, asking for a pen and ink, and going
+to a table to write something on a bit of card, advanced towards me
+with undulating step, and giving me the precious document, said that
+that was his address, _Mr. Coleridge, Nether-Stowey, Somersetshire_;
+and that he should be glad to see me there in a few weeks' time, and,
+if I chose, would come half-way to meet me. I was not less surprised
+than the shepherd-boy (this simile is to be found in _Cassandra_) when
+he sees a thunderbolt fall close at his feet. I stammered out my
+acknowledgements and acceptance of this offer (I thought Mr.
+Wedgwood's annuity a trifle to it) as well as I could; and this mighty
+business being settled, the poet-preacher took leave, and I
+accompanied him six miles on the road. It was a fine morning in the
+middle of winter, and he talked the whole way. The scholar in Chaucer
+is described as going
+
+    ----Sounding on his way.
+
+    [14] My father was one of those who mistook his talent after
+    all. He used to be very much dissatisfied that I preferred
+    his Letters to his Sermons. The last were forced and dry; the
+    first came naturally from him. For ease, half-plays on words,
+    and a supine, monkish, indolent pleasantry, I have never seen
+    them equalled.
+
+    [15] He complained in particular of the presumption of his
+    attempting to establish the future immortality of man,
+    'without' (as he said) 'knowing what Death was or what Life
+    was'--and the tone in which he pronounced these two words
+    seemed to convey a complete image of both.
+
+So Coleridge went on his. In digressing, in dilating, in passing from
+subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on
+ice. He told me in confidence (going along) that he should have
+preached two sermons before he accepted the situation at Shrewsbury,
+one on Infant Baptism, the other on the Lord's Supper, showing that he
+could not administer either, which would have effectually disqualified
+him for the object in view. I observed that he continually crossed me
+on the way by shifting from one side of the footpath to the other.
+This struck me as an odd movement; but I did not at that time connect
+it with any instability of purpose or involuntary change of principle,
+as I have done since. He seemed unable to keep on in a straight line.
+He spoke slightingly of Hume (whose Essay on Miracles he said was
+stolen from an objection started in one of South's Sermons--_Credat
+Judaeus Apella!_). I was not very much pleased at this account of
+Hume, for I had just been reading, with infinite relish, that
+completest of all metaphysical _choke-pears_, his _Treatise on Human
+Nature_, to which the _Essays_, in point of scholastic subtlety and
+close reasoning, are mere elegant trifling, light summer-reading.
+Coleridge even denied the excellence of Hume's general style, which I
+think betrayed a want of taste or candour. He however made me amends
+by the manner in which he spoke of Berkeley. He dwelt particularly on
+his _Essay on Vision_ as a masterpiece of analytical reasoning. So it
+undoubtedly is. He was exceedingly angry with Dr. Johnson for striking
+the stone with his foot, in allusion to this author's Theory of Matter
+and Spirit, and saying, 'Thus I confute him, Sir.' Coleridge drew a
+parallel (I don't know how he brought about the connexion) between
+Bishop Berkeley and Tom Paine. He said the one was an instance of a
+subtle, the other of an acute mind, than which no two things could be
+more distinct. The one was a shop-boy's quality, the other the
+characteristic of a philosopher. He considered Bishop Butler as a true
+philosopher, a profound and conscientious thinker, a genuine reader of
+nature and his own mind. He did not speak of his _Analogy_, but of his
+_Sermons at the Rolls' Chapel_, of which I had never heard. Coleridge
+somehow always contrived to prefer the _unknown_ to the _known_. In
+this instance he was right. The _Analogy_ is a tissue of sophistry, of
+wire-drawn, theological special-pleading; the _Sermons_ (with the
+Preface to them) are in a fine vein of deep, matured reflection, a
+candid appeal to our observation of human nature, without pedantry and
+without bias. I told Coleridge I had written a few remarks, and was
+sometimes foolish enough to believe that I had made a discovery on the
+same subject (the _Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind_)--and
+I tried to explain my view of it to Coleridge, who listened with great
+willingness, but I did not succeed in making myself understood. I sat
+down to the task shortly afterwards for the twentieth time, got new
+pens and paper, determined to make clear work of it, wrote a few
+meagre sentences in the skeleton style of a mathematical
+demonstration, stopped half-way down the second page; and, after
+trying in vain to pump up any words, images, notions, apprehensions,
+facts, or observations, from that gulf of abstraction in which I had
+plunged myself for four or five years preceding, gave up the attempt
+as labour in vain, and shed tears of helpless despondency on the blank
+unfinished paper. I can write fast enough now. Am I better than I was
+then? Oh no! One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being
+able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in
+the world. Would that I could go back to what I then was! Why can we
+not revive past times as we can revisit old places? If I had the
+quaint Muse of Sir Philip Sidney to assist me, I would write a _Sonnet
+to the Road between Wem and Shrewsbury_, and immortalize every step
+of it by some fond enigmatical conceit. I would swear that the very
+milestones had ears, and that Harmer-hill stooped with all its pines,
+to listen to a poet, as he passed! I remember but one other topic of
+discourse in this walk. He mentioned Paley, praised the naturalness
+and clearness of his style, but condemned his sentiments, thought him
+a mere time-serving casuist, and said that 'the fact of his work on
+Moral and Political Philosophy being made a text-book in our
+Universities was a disgrace to the national character.' We parted at
+the six-mile stone; and I returned homeward pensive but much pleased.
+I had met with unexpected notice from a person whom I believed to have
+been prejudiced against me. 'Kind and affable to me had been his
+condescension, and should be honoured ever with suitable regard.' He
+was the first poet I had known, and he certainly answered to that
+inspired name. I had heard a great deal of his powers of conversation,
+and was not disappointed. In fact, I never met with any thing at all
+like them, either before or since. I could easily credit the accounts
+which were circulated of his holding forth to a large party of ladies
+and gentlemen, an evening or two before, on the Berkeleian Theory,
+when he made the whole material universe look like a transparency of
+fine words; and another story (which I believe he has somewhere told
+himself) of his being asked to a party at Birmingham, of his smoking
+tobacco and going to sleep after dinner on a sofa, where the company
+found him to their no small surprise, which was increased to wonder
+when he started up of a sudden, and rubbing his eyes, looked about
+him, and launched into a three hours' description of the third
+heaven, of which he had had a dream, very different from Mr. Southey's
+Vision of Judgement, and also from that other Vision of Judgement,
+which Mr. Murray, the Secretary of the Bridge Street Junto, has taken
+into his especial keeping.
+
+On my way back, I had a sound in my ears, it was the voice of Fancy: I
+had a light before me, it was the face of Poetry. The one still
+lingers there, the other has not quitted my side! Coleridge in truth
+met me half-way on the ground of philosophy, or I should not have been
+won over to his imaginative creed. I had an uneasy, pleasurable
+sensation all the time, till I was to visit him. During those months
+the chill breath of winter gave me a welcoming; the vernal air was
+balm and inspiration to me. The golden sunsets, the silver star of
+evening, lighted me on my way to new hopes and prospects. _I was to
+visit Coleridge in the Spring._ This circumstance was never absent
+from my thoughts, and mingled with all my feelings. I wrote to him at
+the time proposed, and received an answer postponing my intended visit
+for a week or two, but very cordially urging me to complete my promise
+then. This delay did not damp, but rather increase my ardour. In the
+meantime I went to Llangollen Vale, by way of initiating myself in the
+mysteries of natural scenery; and I must say I was enchanted with it.
+I had been reading Coleridge's description of England, in his fine
+_Ode on the Departing Year_, and I applied it, _con amore_, to the
+objects before me. That valley was to me (in a manner) the cradle of a
+new existence: in the river that winds through it, my spirit was
+baptized in the waters of Helicon!
+
+I returned home, and soon after set out on my journey with unworn
+heart and untried feet. My way lay through Worcester and Gloucester,
+and by Upton, where I thought of Tom Jones and the adventure of the
+muff. I remember getting completely wet through one day, and stopping
+at an inn (I think it was at Tewkesbury) where I sat up all night to
+read _Paul and Virginia_. Sweet were the showers in early youth that
+drenched my body, and sweet the drops of pity that fell upon the books
+I read! I recollect a remark of Coleridge's upon this very book, that
+nothing could show the gross indelicacy of French manners and the
+entire corruption of their imagination more strongly than the
+behaviour of the heroine in the last fatal scene, who turns away from
+a person on board the sinking vessel, that offers to save her life,
+because he has thrown off his clothes to assist him in swimming. Was
+this a time to think of such a circumstance? I once hinted to
+Wordsworth, as we were sailing in his boat on Grasmere lake, that I
+thought he had borrowed the idea of his _Poems on the Naming of
+Places_ from the local inscriptions of the same kind in _Paul and
+Virginia_. He did not own the obligation, and stated some distinction
+without a difference, in defence of his claim to originality. And the
+slightest variation would be sufficient for this purpose in his mind;
+for whatever _he_ added or omitted would inevitably be worth all that
+any one else had done, and contain the marrow of the sentiment.--I was
+still two days before the time fixed for my arrival, for I had taken
+care to set out early enough. I stopped these two days at Bridgewater,
+and when I was tired of sauntering on the banks of its muddy river,
+returned to the inn, and read _Camilla_. So have I loitered my life
+away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing,
+thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one
+thing to make me happy; but wanting that, have wanted everything!
+
+I arrived, and was well received. The country about Nether Stowey is
+beautiful, green and hilly, and near the sea-shore. I saw it but the
+other day, after an interval of twenty years, from a hill near
+Taunton. How was the map of my life spread out before me, as the map
+of the country lay at my feet! In the afternoon, Coleridge took me
+over to All-Foxden, a romantic old family mansion of the St. Aubins,
+where Wordsworth lived. It was then in the possession of a friend of
+the poet's, who gave him the free use of it. Somehow that period (the
+time just after the French Revolution) was not a time when _nothing
+was given for nothing_. The mind opened, and a softness might be
+perceived coming over the heart of individuals, beneath 'the scales
+that fence' our self-interest. Wordsworth himself was from home, but
+his sister kept house, and set before us a frugal repast; and we had
+free access to her brother's poems, the _Lyrical Ballads_, which were
+still in manuscript, or in the form of _Sibylline Leaves_. I dipped
+into a few of these with great satisfaction, and with the faith of a
+novice. I slept that night in an old room with blue hangings, and
+covered with the round-faced family-portraits of the age of George I
+and II, and from the wooded declivity of the adjoining park that
+overlooked my window, at the dawn of day, could
+
+    ----hear the loud stag speak.
+
+In the outset of life (and particularly at this time I felt it so) our
+imagination has a body to it. We are in a state between sleeping and
+waking, and have indistinct but glorious glimpses of strange shapes,
+and there is always something to come better than what we see. As in
+our dreams the fullness of the blood gives warmth and reality to the
+coinage of the brain, so in youth our ideas are clothed, and fed, and
+pampered with our good spirits; we breathe thick with thoughtless
+happiness, the weight of future years presses on the strong pulses of
+the heart, and we repose with undisturbed faith in truth and good. As
+we advance, we exhaust our fund of enjoyment and of hope. We are no
+longer wrapped in _lamb's-wool_, lulled in Elysium. As we taste the
+pleasures of life, their spirit evaporates, the sense palls; and
+nothing is left but the phantoms, the lifeless shadows of what _has
+been_!
+
+That morning, as soon as breakfast was over, we strolled out into the
+park, and seating ourselves on the trunk of an old ash-tree that
+stretched along the ground, Coleridge read aloud with a sonorous and
+musical voice, the ballad of _Betty Foy_. I was not critically or
+sceptically inclined. I saw touches of truth and nature, and took the
+rest for granted. But in the _Thorn_, the _Mad Mother_, and the
+_Complaint of a Poor Indian Woman_, I felt that deeper power and
+pathos which have been since acknowledged,
+
+    In spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
+
+as the characteristics of this author; and the sense of a new style
+and a new spirit in poetry came over me. It had to me something of
+the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of
+the first welcome breath of Spring,
+
+    While yet the trembling year is unconfirmed.
+
+Coleridge and myself walked back to Stowey that evening, and his voice
+sounded high
+
+    Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
+    Fix'd fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,
+
+as we passed through echoing grove, by fairy stream or waterfall,
+gleaming in the summer moonlight! He lamented that Wordsworth was not
+prone enough to believe in the traditional superstitions of the place,
+and that there was a something corporeal, a _matter-of-fact-ness_, a
+clinging to the palpable, or often to the petty, in his poetry, in
+consequence. His genius was not a spirit that descended to him through
+the air; it sprung out of the ground like a flower, or unfolded itself
+from a green spray, on which the goldfinch sang. He said, however (if
+I remember right), that this objection must be confined to his
+descriptive pieces, that his philosophic poetry had a grand and
+comprehensive spirit in it, so that his soul seemed to inhabit the
+universe like a palace, and to discover truth by intuition, rather
+than by deduction. The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at
+Coleridge's cottage. I think I see him now. He answered in some degree
+to his friend's description of him, but was more gaunt and Don
+Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the _costume_ of
+that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped
+pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not
+unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe, worn pressure of
+thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw something
+in objects more than the outward appearance), an intense high narrow
+forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose and feeling,
+and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal
+at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of his
+face. Chantrey's bust wants the marking traits; but he was teased into
+making it regular and heavy: Haydon's head of him, introduced into the
+_Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem_, is the most like his drooping
+weight of thought and expression. He sat down and talked very
+naturally and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his
+voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the
+northern _burr_, like the crust on wine. He instantly began to make
+havoc of the half of a Cheshire cheese on the table, and said
+triumphantly that 'his marriage with experience had not been so
+productive as Mr. Southey's in teaching him a knowledge of the good
+things of this life.' He had been to see the _Castle Spectre_ by Monk
+Lewis, while at Bristol, and described it very well. He said 'it
+fitted the taste of the audience like a glove.' This _ad captandum_
+merit was, however, by no means a recommendation of it, according to
+the severe principles of the new school, which reject rather than
+court popular effect. Wordsworth, looking out of the low, latticed
+window, said, 'How beautifully the sun sets on that yellow bank!' I
+thought within myself, 'With what eyes these poets see nature!' and
+ever after, when I saw the sunset stream upon the objects facing it,
+conceived I had made a discovery, or thanked Mr. Wordsworth for
+having made one for me! We went over to All-Foxden again the day
+following, and Wordsworth read us the story of Peter Bell in the open
+air; and the comment made upon it by his face and voice was very
+different from that of some later critics! Whatever might be thought
+of the poem, 'his face was as a book where men might read strange
+matters,' and he announced the fate of his hero in prophetic tones.
+There is a _chaunt_ in the recitation both of Coleridge and
+Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the
+judgement. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual
+use of this ambiguous accompaniment. Coleridge's manner is more full,
+animated, and varied; Wordsworth's more equable, sustained, and
+internal. The one might be termed more _dramatic_, the other more
+_lyrical_. Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in
+walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling
+branches of a copse wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he
+could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot
+where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption.
+Returning that same evening, I got into a metaphysical argument with
+Wordsworth, while Coleridge was explaining the different notes of the
+nightingale to his sister, in which we neither of us succeeded in
+making ourselves perfectly clear and intelligible. Thus I passed three
+weeks at Nether Stowey and in the neighbourhood, generally devoting
+the afternoons to a delightful chat in an arbour made of bark by the
+poet's friend Tom Poole, sitting under two fine elm-trees, and
+listening to the bees humming round us, while we quaffed our _flip_.
+It was agreed, among other things, that we should make a jaunt down
+the Bristol Channel, as far as Lynton. We set off together on foot,
+Coleridge, John Chester, and I. This Chester was a native of Nether
+Stowey, one of those who were attracted to Coleridge's discourse as
+flies are to honey, or bees in swarming-time to the sound of a brass
+pan. He 'followed in the chace, like a dog who hunts, not like one
+that made up the cry.' He had on a brown cloth coat, boots, and
+corduroy breeches, was low in stature, bow-legged, had a drag in his
+walk like a drover, which he assisted by a hazel switch, and kept on a
+sort of trot by the side of Coleridge, like a running footman by a
+state coach, that he might not lose a syllable or sound, that fell
+from Coleridge's lips. He told me his private opinion, that Coleridge
+was a wonderful man. He scarcely opened his lips, much less offered an
+opinion the whole way: yet of the three, had I to choose during that
+journey, I would be John Chester. He afterwards followed Coleridge
+into Germany, where the Kantean philosophers were puzzled how to bring
+him under any of their categories. When he sat down at table with his
+idol, John's felicity was complete; Sir Walter Scott's, or Mr.
+Blackwood's, when they sat down at the same table with the King, was
+not more so. We passed Dunster on our right, a small town between the
+brow of a hill and the sea. I remember eyeing it wistfully as it lay
+below us: contrasted with the woody scene around, it looked as clear,
+as pure, as _embrowned_ and ideal as any landscape I have seen since,
+of Gaspar Poussin's or Domenichino's. We had a long day's march--(our
+feet kept time to the echoes of Coleridge's tongue)--through Minehead
+and by the Blue Anchor, and on to Lynton, which we did not reach till
+near midnight, and where we had some difficulty in making a lodgement.
+We, however, knocked the people of the house up at last, and we were
+repaid for our apprehensions and fatigue by some excellent rashers of
+fried bacon and eggs. The view in coming along had been splendid. We
+walked for miles and miles on dark brown heaths overlooking the
+channel, with the Welsh hills beyond, and at times descended into
+little sheltered valleys close by the sea-side, with a smuggler's face
+scowling by us, and then had to ascend conical hills with a path
+winding up through a coppice to a barren top, like a monk's shaven
+crown, from one of which I pointed out to Coleridge's notice the bare
+masts of a vessel on the very edge of the horizon, and within the
+red-orbed disk of the setting sun, like his own spectre-ship in the
+_Ancient Mariner_. At Lynton the character of the sea-coast becomes
+more marked and rugged. There is a place called the 'Valley of Rocks'
+(I suspect this was only the poetical name for it) bedded among
+precipices overhanging the sea, with rocky caverns beneath, into which
+the waves dash, and where the sea-gull for ever wheels its screaming
+flight. On the tops of these are huge stones thrown transverse, as if
+an earthquake had tossed them there, and behind these is a fretwork of
+perpendicular rocks, something like the 'Giant's Causeway'. A
+thunder-storm came on while we were at the inn, and Coleridge was
+running out bareheaded to enjoy the commotion of the elements in the
+'Valley of Rocks', but as if in spite, the clouds only muttered a few
+angry sounds, and let fall a few refreshing drops. Coleridge told me
+that he and Wordsworth were to have made this place the scene of a
+prose-tale, which was to have been in the manner of, but far superior
+to, the _Death of Abel_, but they had relinquished the design. In the
+morning of the second day, we breakfasted luxuriously in an
+old-fashioned parlour on tea, toast, eggs, and honey, in the very
+sight of the bee-hives from which it had been taken, and a garden full
+of thyme and wild flowers that had produced it. On this occasion
+Coleridge spoke of Virgil's _Georgics_, but not well. I do not think
+he had much feeling for the classical or elegant. It was in this room
+that we found a little worn-out copy of the _Seasons_, lying in a
+window-seat, on which Coleridge exclaimed, '_That_ is true fame!' He
+said Thomson was a great poet, rather than a good one; his style was
+as meretricious as his thoughts were natural. He spoke of Cowper as
+the best modern poet. He said the _Lyrical Ballads_ were an experiment
+about to be tried by him and Wordsworth, to see how far the public
+taste would endure poetry written in a more natural and simple style
+than had hitherto been attempted; totally discarding the artifices of
+poetical diction, and making use only of such words as had probably
+been common in the most ordinary language since the days of Henry II.
+Some comparison was introduced between Shakespeare and Milton. He said
+'he hardly knew which to prefer. Shakespeare appeared to him a mere
+stripling in the art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely
+more activity than Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man's
+estate; or if he had, he would not have been a man, but a monster.' He
+spoke with contempt of Gray, and with intolerance of Pope. He did not
+like the versification of the latter. He observed that 'the ears of
+these couplet-writers might be charged with having short memories,
+that could not retain the harmony of whole passages.' He thought
+little of Junius as a writer; he had a dislike of Dr. Johnson; and a
+much higher opinion of Burke as an orator and politician, than of Fox
+or Pitt. He however thought him very inferior in richness of style and
+imagery to some of our elder prose-writers, particularly Jeremy
+Taylor. He liked Richardson, but not Fielding; nor could I get him to
+enter into the merits of _Caleb Williams_.[16] In short, he was
+profound and discriminating with respect to those authors whom he
+liked, and where he gave his judgement fair play; capricious,
+perverse, and prejudiced in his antipathies and distastes. We loitered
+on the 'ribbed sea-sands', in such talk as this, a whole morning, and
+I recollect met with a curious sea-weed, of which John Chester told us
+the country name! A fisherman gave Coleridge an account of a boy that
+had been drowned the day before, and that they had tried to save him
+at the risk of their own lives. He said 'he did not know how it was
+that they ventured, but, Sir, we have a _nature_ towards one another.'
+This expression, Coleridge remarked to me, was a fine illustration of
+that theory of disinterestedness which I (in common with Butler) had
+adopted. I broached to him an argument of mine to prove that
+_likeness_ was not mere association of ideas. I said that the mark in
+the sand put one in mind of a man's foot, not because it was part of a
+former impression of a man's foot (for it was quite new) but because
+it was like the shape of a man's foot. He assented to the justness of
+this distinction (which I have explained at length elsewhere, for the
+benefit of the curious) and John Chester listened; not from any
+interest in the subject, but because he was astonished that I should
+be able to suggest anything to Coleridge that he did not already know.
+We returned on the third morning, and Coleridge remarked the silent
+cottage-smoke curling up the valleys where, a few evenings before, we
+had seen the lights gleaming through the dark.
+
+    [16] He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Raphael, and at
+    this time I had as little as he. He sometimes gives a
+    striking account at present of the Cartoons at Pisa by
+    Buffamalco and others; of one in particular, where Death is
+    seen in the air brandishing his scythe, and the great and
+    mighty of the earth shudder at his approach, while the
+    beggars and the wretched kneel to him as their deliverer. He
+    would, of course, understand so broad and fine a moral as
+    this at any time.
+
+In a day or two after we arrived at Stowey, we set out, I on my return
+home, and he for Germany. It was a Sunday morning, and he was to
+preach that day for Dr. Toulmin of Taunton. I asked him if he had
+prepared anything for the occasion? He said he had not even thought of
+the text, but should as soon as we parted. I did not go to hear
+him,--this was a fault,--but we met in the evening at Bridgewater. The
+next day we had a long day's walk to Bristol, and sat down, I
+recollect, by a well-side on the road, to cool ourselves and satisfy
+our thirst, when Coleridge repeated to me some descriptive lines of
+his tragedy of _Remorse_; which I must say became his mouth and that
+occasion better than they, some years after, did Mr. Elliston's and
+the Drury Lane boards,--
+
+    Oh memory! shield me from the world's poor strife,
+    And give those scenes thine everlasting life.
+
+I saw no more of him for a year or two, during which period he had
+been wandering in the Hartz Forest in Germany; and his return was
+cometary, meteorous, unlike his setting out. It was not till some time
+after that I knew his friends Lamb and Southey. The last always
+appears to me (as I first saw him) with a commonplace book under his
+arm, and the first with a _bon-mot_ in his mouth. It was at Godwin's
+that I met him with Holcroft and Coleridge, where they were disputing
+fiercely which was the best--_Man as he was, or man as he is to be_.
+'Give me', says Lamb, 'man as he is _not_ to be.' This saying was the
+beginning of a friendship between us, which I believe still
+continues.--Enough of this for the present.
+
+    But there is matter for another rhyme,
+    And I to this may add a second tale.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN KEBLE
+
+1792-1866
+
+SACRED POETRY (1825)
+
+_The Star in the East; with other Poems._ By Josiah Conder. London.
+1824.
+
+
+There are many circumstances about this little volume, which tend
+powerfully to disarm criticism. In the first place, it is, for the
+most part, of a _sacred_ character: taken up with those subjects which
+least of all admit, with propriety, either in the author or critic,
+the exercise of intellectual subtlety. For the _practical_ tendency,
+indeed, of such compositions, both are most deeply responsible; the
+author who publishes, and the critic who undertakes to recommend or to
+censure them. But if they appear to be written with any degree of
+sincerity and earnestness, we naturally shrink from treating them
+merely as literary efforts. To interrupt the current of a reader's
+sympathy in such a case, by critical objections, is not merely to
+deprive him of a little harmless pleasure, it is to disturb him almost
+in a devotional exercise. The most considerate reviewer, therefore, of
+a volume of sacred poetry, will think it a subject on which it is
+easier to say too much than too little.
+
+In the present instance, this consideration is enforced by the
+unpretending tone of the volume, which bears internal evidence, for
+the most part, of not having been written to meet the eye of the
+world. It is in vain to say that this claim on the critic's favour is
+nullified by publication. The author may give it up, and yet the work
+may retain it. We may still feel that we have no right to judge
+severely of what was not, at first, intended to come before our
+judgement at all. This of course applies only to those compositions,
+which indicate, by something within themselves, this freedom from the
+pretension of authorship. And such are most of those to which we are
+now bespeaking our readers' attention.
+
+_Most_ of them, we say, because the first poem in the volume, _The
+Star in the East_, is of a more ambitious and less pleasing character.
+Although in blank verse, it is, in fact, a lyrical effusion; an ode on
+the rapid progress and final triumph of the Gospel. It looks like the
+composition of a young man: harsh and turgid in parts, but
+interspersed with some rather beautiful touches. The opening lines are
+a fair specimen.
+
+    O to have heard th' unearthly symphonies,
+    Which o'er the starlight peace of Syrian skies
+    Came floating like a dream, that blessed night
+    When angel songs were heard by sinful men,
+    Hymning Messiah's advent! O to have watch'd
+    The night with those poor shepherds, whom, when first
+    The glory of the Lord shed sudden day--
+    Day without dawn, starting from midnight, day
+    Brighter than morning--on those lonely hills
+    Strange fear surpris'd--fear lost in wondering joy,
+    When from th' angelic multitude swell'd forth
+    The many-voic�d consonance of praise:--
+    Glory in th' highest to God, and upon earth
+    Peace, towards men good will. But once before,
+    In such glad strains of joyous fellowship,
+    The silent earth was greeted by the heavens,
+    When at its first foundation they looked down
+    From their bright orbs, those heavenly ministries,
+    Hailing the new-born world with bursts of joy.
+
+Notwithstanding beauties scattered here and there, there is an effort
+and constrained stateliness in the poem, very different from the
+rapidity and simplicity of many of the shorter lyrics, which follow
+under the titles of Sacred and Domestic Poems. Such, for instance, as
+the Poor Man's Hymn
+
+    As much have I of worldly good
+      As e'er my master had:
+    I diet on as dainty food,
+      And am as richly clad,
+    Tho' plain my garb, though scant my board,
+    As Mary's Son and Nature's Lord.
+
+    The manger was his infant bed,
+      His home, the mountain-cave,
+    He had not where to lay his head,
+      He borrow'd even his grave.
+    Earth yielded him no resting spot,--
+    Her Maker, but she knew him not.
+
+    As much the world's good will I bear,
+      Its favours and applause,
+    As He, whose blessed name I bear,--
+      Hated without a cause,
+    Despis'd, rejected, mock'd by pride,
+    Betray'd, forsaken, crucified.
+
+    Why should I court my Master's foe?
+      Why should I fear its frown?
+    Why should I seek for rest below,
+      Or sigh for brief renown?--
+    A pilgrim to a better land,
+    An heir of joys at GOD's right hand?
+
+Or the following sweet lines on Home, which occur among the Domestic
+poems:
+
+    That is not home, where day by day
+    I wear the busy hours away.
+    That is not home, where lonely night
+    Prepares me for the toils of light--
+    'Tis hope, and joy, and memory, give
+    A home in which the heart can live--
+    These walls no lingering hopes endear,
+    No fond remembrance chains me here,
+    Cheerless I heave the lonely sigh--
+    Eliza, canst thou tell me why?
+    'Tis where thou art is home to me,
+    And home without thee cannot be.
+
+    There are who strangely love to roam,
+    And find in wildest haunts their home;
+    And some in halls of lordly state,
+    Who yet are homeless, desolate.
+    The sailor's home is on the main,
+    The warrior's, on the tented plain,
+    The maiden's, in her bower of rest,
+    The infant's, on his mother's breast--
+    But where thou art is home to me,
+    And home without thee cannot be.
+
+    There is no home in halls of pride,
+    They are too high, and cold, and wide.
+    No home is by the wanderer found:
+    'Tis not in place: it hath no bound.
+    It is a circling atmosphere
+    Investing all the heart holds dear;--
+    A law of strange attractive force,
+    That holds the feelings in their course;
+
+    It is a presence undefin'd,
+    O'er-shadowing the conscious mind,
+    Where love and duty sweetly blend
+    To consecrate the name of friend;--
+    Where'er thou art is home to me,
+    And home without thee cannot be.
+
+    My love, forgive the anxious sigh--
+    I hear the moments rushing by,
+    And think that life is fleeting fast,
+    That youth with us will soon be past.
+    Oh! when will time, consenting, give
+    The home in which my heart can live?
+    There shall the past and future meet,
+    And o'er our couch, in union sweet,
+    Extend their cherub wings, and shower
+    Bright influence on the present hour,
+    Oh! when shall Israel's mystic guide,
+    The pillar'd cloud, our steps decide,
+    Then, resting, spread its guardian shade,
+    To bless the home which love hath made?
+    Daily, my love, shall thence arise
+    Our hearts' united sacrifice;
+    And home indeed a home will be,
+    Thus consecrate and shar'd with thee.
+
+We will add one more specimen of the same kind, which forms a natural
+and pleasing appendix to the preceding lines.
+
+    Louise! you wept, that morn of gladness
+      Which made your Brother blest;
+    And tears of half-reproachful sadness
+      Fell on the Bridegroom's vest:
+    Yet, pearly tears were those, to gem
+    A Sister's bridal diadem.
+
+    No words could half so well have spoken,
+      What thus was deeply shown
+    By Nature's simplest, dearest token,
+      How much was then my own;
+    Endearing her for whom they fell,
+    And Thee, for having loved so well.
+
+    But now no more--nor let a Brother,
+      Louise, regretful see,
+    That still 'tis sorrow to another,
+      That he should happy be.
+    Those were, I trust, the only tears
+    That day shall cost through coming years.
+
+    Smile with us. Happy and light-hearted,
+      We three the time will while.
+    And, when sometimes a season parted,
+      Still think of us, and smile.
+    But come to us in gloomy weather;
+    We'll weep, when we must weep, together.
+
+Now, what is the reason of the great difference between these extracts
+and that from the _Star in the East_?--a difference which the earlier
+date of the latter, so far from accounting for, only makes the more
+extraordinary. In some instances, the interval of time is very short,
+but at all events more effort and turgidness might have been expected
+in the earlier poems, more simplicity and care and a more subdued tone
+in the later. We suspect a reason, which both poets and poetical
+readers are too apt to leave out of sight. There is a want of _truth_
+in the _Star in the East_--not that the author is otherwise than quite
+in earnest--but his earnestness seems rather an artificial glow, to
+which he has been worked up by reading and conversation of a
+particular cast, than the overflowing warmth of his own natural
+feelings, kindled by circumstances in which he was himself placed. In
+a word, when he writes of the success of the Bible Society, and the
+supposed amelioration of the world in consequence, he writes from
+report and fancy only; but when he speaks of a happy home, of kindly
+affections, of the comforts which piety can administer in
+disappointment and sorrow; either we are greatly mistaken, or he
+speaks from real and present experience. The poetical result is what
+the reader has seen:
+
+        ----mens onus reponit, et peregrino
+    Labore fessi venimus Larem ad nostrum--
+
+We turn gladly from our fairy voyage round the world to refresh
+ourselves with a picture, which we feel to be drawn from the life, of
+a happy and innocent fireside. Nor is it, in the slightest degree,
+derogatory to an author's talent to say that he has failed,
+comparatively, on that subject of which he must have known
+comparatively little.
+
+Let us here pause a moment to explain what is meant when we speak of
+such prospects as are above alluded to, being shadowy and unreal in
+respect of what is matter of experience. It is not that we doubt the
+tenor of the Scripture, regarding the final conversion of the whole
+world, or that we close our eyes to the wonderful arrangements, if the
+expression may be used, which Divine Providence seems everywhere
+making, with a view to that great consummation. One circumstance, in
+particular, arrests our attention, as pervading the whole of modern
+history, but gradually standing out in a stronger light as the view
+draws nearer our own times: we mean the rapid increase of colonization
+_from Christian nations only_. So that the larger half of the globe,
+and what in the nature of things will soon become the more populous,
+is already, in profession, Christian. The event, therefore, is
+unquestionable: but experience, we fear, will hardly warrant the
+exulting anticipations, which our author, in common with many of whose
+sincerity there is no reason to doubt, has raised upon it. It is but
+too conceivable that the whole world may become nominally Christian,
+yet the face of things may be very little changed for the better. And
+any view of the progress of the gospel, whether in verse or in prose,
+which leaves out this possibility, is so far wanting in truth, and in
+that depth of thought which is as necessary to the higher kinds of
+poetical beauty as to philosophy or theology itself.
+
+This, however, is too solemn and comprehensive a subject to be lightly
+or hastily spoken of. It is enough to have glanced at it, as
+accounting, in some measure, for the general failure of modern poets
+in their attempts to describe the predicted triumph of the gospel in
+the latter days.
+
+To return to the sacred and domestic poems, thus advantageously
+distinguished from that which gives name to the volume. Affection,
+whether heavenly or earthly, is the simplest idea that can be; and in
+the graceful and harmonious expression of it lies the principal beauty
+of these poems. In the descriptive parts, and in the development of
+abstract sentiment, there is more of effort, and occasionally
+something very like affectation: approaching, in one instance (the
+_Nightingale_,) far nearer than we could wish, to the most vicious of
+all styles, the style of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his miserable followers.
+
+Now, these are just the sort of merit and the sort of defect, which
+one might naturally expect to find united; the very simplicity of
+attachment, which qualifies the mind for sacred or domestic poetry,
+making its movements awkward and constrained, when scenes are to be
+described, or thoughts unravelled of more complication and less
+immediate interest. This is the rather to be observed, as many other
+sacred poets have become less generally pleasing and useful, than they
+otherwise would have been, from this very circumstance. The simple and
+touching devoutness of many of Bishop Ken's lyrical effusions has been
+unregarded, because of the ungraceful contrivances, and heavy movement
+of his narrative. The same may be said, in our own times, of some
+parts of Montgomery's writings. His bursts of sacred poetry, compared
+with his _Greenland_, remind us of a person singing enchantingly by
+ear, but becoming languid and powerless the moment he sits down to a
+note-book.
+
+Such writers, it is obvious, do not sufficiently trust to the command
+which the simple expression of their feelings would obtain over their
+readers. They think it must be relieved with something of more variety
+and imagery, to which they work themselves up with laborious, and
+therefore necessarily unsuccessful, efforts. The model for correcting
+their error is to be found in the inspired volume. We can, in general,
+be but incompetent judges of this, because we have been used to it
+from our boyhood. But let us suppose a person, whose ideas of poetry
+were entirely gathered from modern compositions, taking up the Psalms
+for the first time. Among many other remarkable differences, he would
+surely be impressed with the sacred writer's total carelessness about
+originality, and what is technically called _effect_. He would say,
+'This is something better than merely attractive poetry; it is
+absolute and divine truth.' The same remark ought to be suggested by
+all sacred hymns; and it is, indeed, greatly to be lamented, that such
+writers as we have just mentioned should have ever lost sight of
+it--should have had so little confidence in the power of simplicity,
+and have condescended so largely to the laborious refinements of the
+profane Muse.
+
+To put the same truth in a light somewhat different; it is required,
+we apprehend, in all poets, but particularly in sacred poets, that
+they should seem to write with a view of unburthening their minds, and
+not for the sake of writing; for love of the subject, not of the
+employment. The distinction is very striking in descriptive poetry.
+Compare the landscapes of Cowper with those of Burns. There is, if we
+mistake not, the same sort of difference between them, as in the
+conversation of two persons on scenery, the one originally an
+enthusiast in his love of the works of nature, the other driven, by
+disappointment or weariness, to solace himself with them as he might.
+It is a contrast which every one must have observed, when such topics
+come under discussion in society; and those who think it worth while,
+may find abundant illustration of it in the writings of this
+unfortunate but illustrious pair. The one all overflowing with the
+love of nature, and indicating, at every turn, that whatever his lot
+in life, he could not have been happy without her. The other visibly
+and wisely soothing himself, but not without effort, by attending to
+rural objects, in default of some more congenial happiness, of which
+he had almost come to despair. The latter, in consequence, laboriously
+sketching every object that came in his way: the other, in one or two
+rapid lines, which operate, as it were, like a magician's spell,
+presenting to the fancy just that picture, which was wanted to put the
+reader's mind in unison with the writer's. We would quote, as an
+instance, the description of Evening in the Fourth Book of the _Task_:
+
+    Come Ev'ning, once again, season of peace;
+    Return, sweet Ev'ning, and continue long!
+    Methinks I see thee in the streaking west
+    With matron-step slow-moving, while the night
+    Treads on thy sweeping train; one hand employ'd
+    In letting fall the curtain of repose
+    On bird and beast, the other charg'd for man
+    With sweet oblivion of the cares of day:
+    Not sumptuously adorn'd, nor needing aid,
+    Like homely-featur'd night, of clust'ring gems;
+    A star or two, just twinkling on thy brow,
+    Suffices thee; save that the moon is thine
+    No less than her's, not worn indeed on high
+    With ostentatious pageantry, but set
+    With modest grandeur in thy purple zone,
+    Resplendent less, but of an ampler round.
+    Come then, and thou shalt find thy vot'ry calm,
+    Or make me so. Composure is thy gift.
+
+And we would set over against it that purely pastoral chant:
+
+    Now rosy May comes in wi' flowers
+    To deck her gay, green spreading bowers;
+    And now comes in my happy hours,
+      To wander wi' my Davie.
+        Meet me on the warlock knowe,
+          Dainty Davie, dainty Davie,
+        There I'll spend the day wi' you,
+          My ain dear dainty Davie.
+
+    The crystal waters round us fa',
+    The merry birds are lovers a',
+    The scented breezes round us blaw,
+      A wandering wi' my Davie.
+        Meet me, &c.
+
+    When purple morning starts the hare
+    To steal upon her early fare,
+    Then thro' the dews I will repair,
+      To meet my faithful Davie.
+        Meet me, &c.
+
+    When day, expiring in the west,
+    The curtain draws o' nature's rest,
+    I flee to his arms I lo'e best,
+      And that's my ain dear Davie.
+        Meet me, &c.
+
+There is surely no need to explain how this instinctive attachment to
+his subject is especially requisite in the sacred poet. If even the
+description of material objects is found to languish without it, much
+more will it be looked for when the best and highest of all affections
+is to be expressed and communicated to others. The nobler and worthier
+the object, the greater our disappointment to find it approached with
+anything like languor or constraint.
+
+We must just mention one more quality, which may seem, upon
+consideration, essential to perfection in this kind: viz. that the
+feelings the writer expresses should appear to be specimens of his
+general tone of thought, not sudden bursts and mere flashes of
+goodness. Wordsworth's beautiful description of the Stock-dove might
+not unaptly be applied to him. He should sing
+
+                   'of love with silence blending,
+    Slow to begin, yet never ending,
+    Of serious faith and inward glee'.
+
+Some may, perhaps, object to this, as a dull and languid strain of
+sentiment. But before we yield to their censures we would inquire of
+them what style they consider, themselves, as most appropriate to
+similar subjects in a kindred art. If grave, simple, sustained
+melodies--if tones of deep but subdued emotion are what our minds
+naturally suggest to us upon the mention of sacred _music_--why should
+there not be something analogous, a kind of plain chant, in sacred
+_poetry_ also? fervent, yet sober; awful, but engaging; neither wild
+and passionate, nor light and airy; but such as we may with submission
+presume to be the most acceptable offering in its kind, as being
+indeed the truest expression of the best state of the affections. To
+many, perhaps to most, men, a tone of more violent emotion may sound
+at first more attractive. But before we _indulge_ such a preference,
+we should do well to consider, whether it is quite agreeable to that
+spirit, which alone can make us worthy readers of sacred poetry.
+'[Greek: Entheon h� poi�sis]', it is true; there must be rapture and
+inspiration, but these will naturally differ in their character as the
+powers do from whom they proceed. The worshippers of Baal may be rude
+and frantic in their cries and gestures; but the true Prophet,
+speaking to or of the true GOD, is all dignity and calmness.
+
+If then, in addition to the ordinary difficulties of poetry, all these
+things are essential to the success of the Christian lyrist--if what
+he sets before us must be true in substance, and in manner marked by a
+noble simplicity and confidence in that truth, by a sincere attachment
+to it, and entire familiarity with it--then we need not wonder that so
+few should have become eminent in this branch of their art, nor need
+we have recourse to the disheartening and unsatisfactory solutions
+which are sometimes given of that circumstance.
+
+     'Contemplative piety,' says Dr. Johnson, 'or the intercourse
+     between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man,
+     admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the
+     merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than
+     poetry can confer.'[17]
+
+    [17] _Life of Waller._
+
+The sentiment is not uncommon among serious, but somewhat fearful,
+believers; and though we believe it erroneous, we desire to treat it
+not only with tenderness, but with reverence. They start at the very
+mention of sacred poetry, as though poetry were in its essence a
+profane amusement. It is, unquestionably, by far the safer extreme to
+be too much afraid of venturing with the imagination upon sacred
+ground. Yet, if it be an error, and a practical error, it may be worth
+while cautiously to examine the grounds of it. In the generality,
+perhaps, it is not so much a deliberate opinion, as a prejudice
+against the use of the art, arising out of its abuse. But the great
+writer just referred to has endeavoured to establish it by direct
+reasoning. He argues the point, first, from the nature of poetry, and
+afterwards from that of devotion.
+
+     The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by
+     producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The
+     topics of devotion are few.
+
+It is to be hoped that many men's experience will refute the latter
+part of this statement. How can the topics of devotion be few, when we
+are taught to make every part of life, every scene in nature, an
+occasion--in other words, a topic--of devotion? It might as well be
+said that connubial love is an unfit subject for poetry, as being
+incapable of novelty, because, after all, it is only ringing the
+changes upon one simple affection, which every one understands. The
+novelty there consists, not in the original topic, but in continually
+bringing ordinary things, by happy strokes of natural ingenuity, into
+new associations with the ruling passion.
+
+    There's not a bonny flower that springs
+      By fountain, shaw, or green;
+    There's not a bonnie bird that sings
+      But minds me of my Jean.
+
+Why need we fear to extend this most beautiful and natural sentiment
+to 'the intercourse between the human soul and its Maker', possessing,
+as we do, the very highest warrant for the analogy which subsists
+between conjugal and divine love?
+
+Novelty, therefore, sufficient for all the purposes of poetry, we may
+have on sacred subjects. Let us pass to the next objection.
+
+     Poetry pleases by exhibiting an idea more grateful to the
+     mind than things themselves afford. This effect proceeds
+     from the display of those parts of nature which attract,
+     and the concealment of those which repel, the imagination;
+     but religion must be shown as it is; suppression and
+     addition equally corrupt it; and, such as it is, it is known
+     already.
+
+A fallacy may be apprehended in both parts of this statement. There
+are, surely, real landscapes which delight the mind as sincerely and
+intensely as the most perfect description could; and there are family
+groups which give a more exquisite sensation of domestic happiness
+than anything in Milton, or even Shakespeare. It is partly by
+association with these, the treasures of the memory, and not
+altogether by mere excitement of the imagination, that Poetry does her
+work. By the same rule sacred pictures and sacred songs cannot fail to
+gratify the mind which is at all exercised in devotion; recalling, as
+they will, whatever of highest perfection in that way she can remember
+in herself, or has learned of others.
+
+Then again, it is not the religious doctrine itself, so much as the
+effect of it upon the human mind and heart, which the sacred poet has
+to describe. What is said of suppression and addition may be true
+enough with regard to the former, but is evidently incorrect when
+applied to the latter: it being an acknowledged difficulty in all
+devotional writings, and not in devotional verse only, to keep clear
+of the extreme of languor on the one hand, and debasing rapture on the
+other. This requires a delicacy in the perception and enunciation of
+truth, of which the most earnest believer may be altogether destitute.
+And since, probably, no man's condition, in regard to eternal things,
+is exactly like that of any other man, and yet it is the business of
+the sacred poet to sympathize with all, his store of subjects is
+clearly inexhaustible, and his powers of discrimination--in other
+words, of suppression and addition--are kept in continual exercise.
+
+Nor is he, by any means, so straitly limited in the other and more
+difficult branch of his art, the exhibition of religious doctrine
+itself, as is supposed in the following statement:
+
+     Whatever is great, desirable, or tremendous, is comprised in
+     the name of the Supreme Being. Omnipotence cannot be
+     exalted; infinity cannot be amplified; perfection cannot be
+     improved.
+
+True: all perfection is implied in the name of GOD; and so all the
+beauties and luxuries of spring are comprised in that one word. But is
+it not the very office of poetry to develop and display the
+particulars of such complex ideas? in such a way, for example, as the
+idea of GOD'S omnipresence is developed in the 139th Psalm? and thus
+detaining the mind for a while, to force or help her to think steadily
+on truths which she would hurry unprofitably over, how strictly soever
+they may be implied in the language which she uses. It is really
+surprising that this great and acute critic did not perceive that the
+objection applies as strongly against any kind of composition of which
+the Divine Nature is the subject, as against devotional poems.
+
+We forbear to press the consideration that, even if the objection were
+allowed in respect of natural religion, it would not hold against the
+devotional compositions of a Christian; the object of whose worship
+has condescended also to become the object of description, affection,
+and sympathy, in the literal sense of these words. But this is,
+perhaps, too solemn and awful an argument for this place; and
+therefore we pass on to the concluding statement of the passage under
+consideration, in which the writer turns his view downwards, and
+argues against sacred poetry from the nature of man, as he had before
+from the nature of GOD.
+
+     The employments of pious meditation are faith, thanksgiving,
+     repentance and supplication. Faith, invariably uniform,
+     cannot be invested by fancy with decorations. Thanksgiving,
+     the most joyful of all holy effusions, yet addressed to a
+     Being without passions, is confined to a few modes, and is
+     to be felt rather than expressed.
+
+What we have said of the variation of the devout affections, as they
+exist in various persons, is sufficient, we apprehend, to answer this.
+But the rest of the paragraph requires some additional reflection:
+
+     Repentance, trembling in the presence of the Judge, is not
+     at leisure for cadences and epithets.
+
+This is rather invidiously put, and looks as if the author had not
+entire confidence in the truth of what he was saying. Indeed, it may
+very well be questioned; since many of the more refined passions, it
+is certain, naturally express themselves in poetical language. But
+repentance is not merely a passion, nor is its only office to tremble
+in the presence of the Judge. So far from it, that one great business
+of sacred poetry, as of sacred music, is to quiet and sober the
+feelings of the penitent--to make his compunction as much of 'a
+reasonable service' as possible.
+
+To proceed:
+
+     Supplication of man to man may diffuse itself through many
+     topics of persuasion: but supplication to God can only cry
+     for mercy.
+
+Certainly, this would be true, if the abstract nature of the Deity
+were alone considered. But if we turn to the sacred volume, which
+corrects so many of our erring anticipations, we there find that,
+whether in condescension to our infirmities, or for other wise
+purposes, we are furnished with inspired precedents for addressing
+ourselves to God in all the various tones, and by all the various
+topics, which we should use to a good and wise man standing in the
+highest and nearest relation to us. This is so palpably the case
+throughout the scriptures, that it is quite surprising how a person of
+so much serious thought as Dr. Johnson could have failed to recollect
+it when arguing on the subject of prayer. In fact, there is a simple
+test, by which, perhaps, the whole of his reasoning on Sacred Poetry
+might be fairly and decisively tried. Let the reader, as he goes over
+it, bear in mind the Psalms of David, and consider whether every one
+of his statements and arguments is not there practically refuted.
+
+It is not, then, because sacred subjects are peculiarly unapt for
+poetry, that so few sacred poets are popular. We have already glanced
+at some of the causes to which we attribute it--we ought to add
+another, which strikes us as important. Let us consider how the case
+stands with regard to books of devotion in _prose_.
+
+We may own it reluctantly, but must it not be owned? that if two new
+publications meet the eye at once, of which no more is known than that
+the one is what is familiarly called _a good book_, the other a work
+of mere literature, nine readers out of ten will take up the second
+rather than the first? If this be allowed, whatever accounts for it
+will contribute to account also for the comparative failure of
+devotional poetry. For this sort of coldness and languor in the reader
+must act upon the author in more ways than one. The large class who
+write for money or applause will of course be carried, by the tide of
+popularity, towards some other subject. Men of more sincere minds,
+either from true or false delicacy, will have little heart to expose
+their retired thoughts to the risk of mockery or neglect; and if they
+do venture, will be checked every moment, like an eager but bashful
+musician before a strange audience, not knowing how far the reader's
+feelings will harmonize with their own. This leaves the field open, in
+a great measure, to harder or more enthusiastic spirits; who offending
+continually, in their several ways, against delicacy, the one by
+wildness, the other by coarseness, aggravate the evil which they
+wished to cure; till the sacred subject itself comes at last to bear
+the blame due to the indifference of the reader and the indiscretion
+of the writer.
+
+Such, we apprehend, would be a probable account of the condition of
+sacred poetry, in a country where religion was coldly acknowledged,
+and literature earnestly pursued. How far the description may apply to
+England and English literature, in their various changes since the
+Reformation--how far it may hold true of our own times--is an inquiry
+which would lead us too far at present; but it is surely worth
+considering. It goes deeper than any question of mere literary
+curiosity. It is a sort of test of the genuineness of those
+pretensions, which many of us are, perhaps, too forward to advance, to
+a higher state of morality and piety, as well as knowledge and
+refinement, than has been known elsewhere or in other times.
+
+Those who, in spite of such difficulties, desire in earnest to do good
+by the poetical talent, which they may happen to possess, have only,
+as it should seem, the following alternative. Either they must veil,
+as it were, the sacredness of the subject--not necessarily by
+allegory, for it may be done in a thousand other ways--and so deceive
+the world of taste into devotional reading--
+
+    Succhi amari intanto ei beve,
+    E dall' inganno sua vita riceve--
+
+or else, directly avowing that their subject as well as purpose is
+devotion, they must be content with a smaller number of readers; a
+disadvantage, however, compensated by the fairer chance of doing good
+to each.
+
+It may be worth while to endeavour to trace this distinction, as
+exemplified in the most renowned of the sacred poets of England; and
+to glean from such a survey the best instruction we can, in the happy
+art of turning the most fascinating part of literature to the highest
+purposes of religion.
+
+We must premise that we limit the title of 'sacred poet' by excluding
+those who only devoted a small portion of their time and talent now
+and then, to sacred subjects. In all ages of our literary history it
+seems to have been considered almost as an essential part of a poet's
+duty to give up some pages to scriptural story, or to the praise of
+his Maker, how remote so ever from anything like religion the general
+strain of his writings might be. Witness the Lamentation of Mary
+Magdalene in the works of Chaucer, and the beautiful legend of Hew of
+Lincoln, which he has inserted in his Canterbury Tales; witness also
+the hymns of Ben Jonson. But these fragments alone will not entitle
+their authors to be enrolled among sacred poets. They indicate the
+taste of their age, rather than their own; a fact which may be thought
+to stand rather in painful contrast with the literary history of later
+days.
+
+There is another class likewise, of whom little need be said in this
+place; we mean those who composed, strictly and only, for the sake of
+unburthening their own minds, without any thought of publication. But
+as Chaucer's sacred effusions indicate chiefly the character of the
+times, so poems such as those we now allude to, mark only the turn of
+mind of the individual writers; and our present business is rather
+with that sort of poetry which combines both sorts of instruction;
+that, namely, which bears internal evidence of having been written by
+sincere men, with an intention of doing good, and with consideration
+of the taste of the age in which they lived.
+
+Recurring then to the distinction above laid down, between the direct
+and indirect modes of sacred poetry; at the head of the two classes,
+as the reader may perhaps have anticipated, we set the glorious names
+of Spenser and of Milton. The claim of Spenser to be considered as a
+sacred poet does by no means rest upon his hymns alone: although even
+those would be enough alone to embalm and consecrate the whole volume
+which contains them; as a splinter of the true cross is supposed by
+Catholic sailors to ensure the safety of the vessel. But whoever will
+attentively consider the _Faerie Queene_ itself, will find that it is,
+almost throughout, such as might have been expected from the author of
+those truly sacred hymns. It is a continual, deliberate endeavour to
+enlist the restless intellect and chivalrous feeling of an inquiring
+and romantic age, on the side of goodness and faith, of purity and
+justice.
+
+This position is to be made good, not solely or perhaps chiefly, yet
+with no small force, from the allegorical structure of the poem. Most
+of us, perhaps, are rather disposed to undervalue this contrivance;
+and even among the genuine admirers of Spenser, there are not a few
+who on purpose leave it out of their thoughts; finding, as they say,
+that it only embarrasses their enjoyment of the poetry. This is
+certainly far from reasonable: it is a relic of childish feeling, and
+mere love of amusement, which ill becomes any one who is old enough to
+appreciate the real beauties of Spenser. Yet it is so natural, so
+obviously to be expected, that we must suppose a scholar and
+philosopher (for such Spenser was, as well as a poet) to have been
+aware of it, and to have made up his mind to it, with all its
+disadvantages, for some strong reason or other. And what reason so
+likely as the hope of being seriously useful, both to himself and his
+readers?
+
+To _himself_, because the constant recurrence to his allegory would
+serve as a check upon a fancy otherwise too luxuriant, and would
+prevent him from indulging in such liberties as the Italian poets, in
+other respects his worthy masters, were too apt to take. The
+consequence is, that even in his freest passages, and those which one
+would most wish unwritten, Spenser is by no means a _seductive_ poet.
+Vice in him, however truly described, is always made contemptible or
+odious. The same may be said of Milton and Shakespeare; but Milton was
+of a cast of mind originally austere and rigorous. He looked on vice
+as a judge; Shakespeare, as a satirist. Spenser was far more indulgent
+than either, and acted therefore the more wisely in setting himself a
+rule, which should make it essential to the plan of his poem to be
+always recommending some virtue; and remind him, like a voice from
+heaven, that the place on which he was standing was holy ground.
+
+Then as to the benefit which the _readers_ of the _Faerie Queene_ may
+derive from its allegorical form; a good deal surely is to be gained
+from the mere habit of looking at things with a view to something
+beyond their qualities merely sensible; to their sacred and moral
+meaning, and to the high associations they were intended to create in
+us. Neither the works nor the word of God, neither poetry nor
+theology, can be duly comprehended without constant mental exercise of
+this kind. The comparison of the Old Testament with the New is nothing
+else from beginning to end. And without something of this sort,
+poetry, and all the other arts, would indeed be relaxing to the tone
+of the mind. The allegory obviates this ill effect, by serving as a
+frequent remembrancer of this higher application. Not that it is
+necessary to bend and strain everything into conformity with it; a
+little leaven, of the genuine kind, will go a good way towards
+leavening the whole lump. And so it is in the _Faerie Queene_; for one
+stanza of direct allegory there are perhaps fifty of poetical
+embellishment; and it is in these last, after all, that the chief
+moral excellency of the poem lies; as we are now about to show.
+
+But to be understood rightly, we would premise, that there is a
+disposition,--the very reverse of that which leads to parody and
+caricature,--which is common indeed to all generous minds, but is
+perhaps unrivalled in Spenser. As parody and caricature debase what is
+truly noble, by connecting it with low and ludicrous associations; so
+a mind, such as we are now speaking of, ennobles what of itself might
+seem trivial; its thoughts and language, on all occasions, taking a
+uniform and almost involuntary direction towards the best and highest
+things.
+
+This, however, is a subject which can be hardly comprehended without
+examples. The first which occurs to us is the passage which relates
+the origin of Belphoebe.
+
+    Her birth was of the womb of morning dew,
+    And her conception of the joyous prime,
+    And all her whole creation did her show
+    Pure and unspotted from all loathly crime
+    That is ingenerate in fleshly slime.
+    So was this Virgin born, so was she bred,
+    So was she trained up from time to time,
+    In all chaste virtue and true bounti-hed,
+    Till to her due perfection she was ripen�d.
+
+It is evident how high and sacred a subject was present to the poet's
+mind in composing this stanza; and any person who is well read in the
+Bible, with a clue like this may satisfy himself that all Spenser's
+writings are replete with similar tacit allusions to the language and
+the doctrines of sacred writ; allusions breathed, if we may so speak,
+rather than uttered, and much fitter to be silently considered, than
+to be dragged forward for quotation or minute criticism. Of course,
+the more numerous and natural such allusions are, the more entirely
+are we justified in the denomination we have ventured to bestow on
+their author, of a truly 'sacred' poet.
+
+It may be felt, as some derogation from this high character, what he
+has himself avowed--that much of his allegory has a turn designedly
+given it in honour of Queen Elizabeth; a turn which will be called
+courtly or adulatory according to the humour of the critic. But, in
+the first place, such was the custom of the times; it was adopted even
+in sermons by men whose sincerity it would be almost sacrilege to
+question. Then, the merits of Queen Elizabeth in respect of the
+Protestant cause were of that dazzling order, which might excuse a
+little poetical exuberance in her praise. And, what is very deserving
+of consideration, it is certain that the most gentle and generous
+spirits are commonly found laying themselves open to this charge of
+excessive compliment in addressing princes and patrons. Witness the
+high style adopted by the venerable Hooker, in speaking of this very
+Queen Elizabeth: 'Whose sacred power, matched with incomparable
+goodness of nature, hath hitherto been God's most happy instrument, by
+him miraculously kept for works of so miraculous preservation and
+safety unto others,' &c. Another instance of the same kind may be seen
+in Jeremy Taylor's dedication of his _Worthy Communicant_ to the
+Princess of Orange. Nor is it any wonder it should be so, since such
+men feel most ardently the blessing and benefit as well as the
+difficulty of whatever is right in persons of such exalted station;
+and are also most strongly tempted to bear their testimony against the
+illiberal and envious censures of the vulgar. All these things, duly
+weighed, may seem to leave little, if anything, in the panegyrical
+strains of this greatest of laureates, to be excused by the common
+infirmity of human nature; little to detract from our deliberate
+conviction that he was seriously guided, in the exercise of his art,
+by a sense of duty, and zeal for what is durably important.
+
+Spenser then was essentially a _sacred_ poet; but the delicacy and
+insinuating gentleness of his disposition were better fitted to the
+veiled than the direct mode of instruction. His was a mind which would
+have shrunk more from the chance of debasing a sacred subject by
+unhandsome treatment, than of incurring ridicule by what would be
+called unseasonable attempts to hallow things merely secular. It was
+natural therefore for him to choose not a scriptural story, but a tale
+of chivalry and romance; and the popular literature, and, in no small
+measure, the pageantry and manners of his time, would join to attract
+his efforts that way. In this way too he was enabled, with more
+propriety and grace, to introduce allusions, political or courtly, to
+subjects with which his readers were familiar; thus agreeably
+diversifying his allegory, and gratifying his affection for his
+friends and patrons, without the coarseness of direct compliment.
+
+In Milton, most evidently, a great difference was to be expected: both
+from his own character and from that of the times in which he lived.
+Religion was in those days the favourite topic of discussion; and it
+is indeed painful to reflect, how sadly it was polluted by
+intermixture with earthly passions: the most awful turns and most
+surprising miracles of the Jewish history being made to serve the base
+purposes of persons, of whom it is hard to say whether they were more
+successful in misleading others, or in deceiving themselves. It was an
+effort worthy of a manly and devout spirit to rescue religion from
+such degradation, by choosing a subject, which, being scriptural,
+would suit the habit of the times, yet, from its universal and eternal
+importance, would give least opportunity for debasing temporary
+application. Then it was the temper of the man always to speak out.
+He carried it to a faulty excess, as his prose works too amply
+demonstrate. The more unfashionable his moral was, the more he would
+have disdained to veil it: neither had he the shrinking delicacy of
+Spenser to keep him back, through fear of profaning things hallowed by
+an unworthy touch.
+
+Thus the great epic poem of our language came to be, avowedly, a
+sacred poem. One hardly dares to wish any thing other than it is in
+such a composition; yet it may be useful to point out in what respects
+the moral infirmity of the times, or of the author, has affected the
+work; so that we are occasionally tempted to regret even Milton's
+choice. But as the leading error of his mind appears to have been
+_intellectual_ pride, and as the leading fault of the generation with
+which he acted was unquestionably _spiritual_ pride, so the main
+defects of his poetry may probably be attributed to the same causes.
+
+There is a studious undervaluing of the female character, which may be
+most distinctly perceived by comparing the character of Eve with that
+of the Lady in Comus: the latter conceived, as we imagine, before the
+mind of the poet had become so deeply tainted with the fault here
+imputed to him. A remarkable instance of it is his describing Eve as
+unwilling, or unworthy, to discourse herself with the angel.
+
+            Such pleasure she reserved,
+    Adam relating; she sole auditress.--
+
+The sentiment may be natural enough, since the primaeval curse upon
+women: but does it not argue rather too strong a sense of her original
+inferiority, to put it into her mind before the fall?
+
+What again can be said for the reproachful and insulting tone, in
+which, more than once, the good angels are made to address the bad
+ones? or of the too attractive colours, in which, perhaps
+unconsciously, the poet has clothed the Author of Evil himself? It is
+a well-known complaint among many of the readers of _Paradise Lost_,
+that they can hardly keep themselves from sympathizing, in some sort,
+with Satan, as the hero of the poem. The most probable account of
+which surely is, that the author himself partook largely of the
+haughty and vindictive republican spirit which he has assigned to the
+character, and consequently, though perhaps unconsciously, drew the
+portrait with a peculiar zest.
+
+These blemishes are in part attributable to the times in which he
+lived: but there is another now to be mentioned, which cannot be so
+accounted for: we mean a want of purity and spirituality in his
+conceptions of Heaven and heavenly joys. His Paradise is a vision not
+to be surpassed; but his attempts to soar higher are embarrassed with
+too much of earth still clinging as it were to his wings. Remarks of
+this kind are in general best understood by comparison, and we invite
+our readers to compare Milton with Dante, in their descriptions of
+Heaven. The one as simple as possible in his imagery, producing
+intense effect by little more than various combinations of _three_
+leading ideas--light, motion, and music--as if he feared to introduce
+anything more gross and earthly, and would rather be censured, as
+doubtless he often is, for coldness and poverty of invention. Whereas
+Milton, with very little selection or refinement, transfers to the
+immediate neighbourhood of God's throne the imagery of Paradise and
+Earth. Indeed he seems himself to have been aware of something
+unsatisfactory in this, and has inserted into the mouth of an angel,
+a kind of apology for it:
+
+              Though what if earth
+    Be but the shadow of heav'n, and things therein
+    Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?
+
+These are blemishes, and sometimes almost tempt us to wish that even
+Milton had taken some subject not so immediately and avowedly
+connected with religion. But they do not affect his claim to be
+considered as the very lodestar and pattern of that class of sacred
+poets in England. As such we have here considered him next to Spenser;
+not that there were wanting others of the same order before him. In
+fact, most of the distinguished names in the poetical annals of
+Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I, might be included in the list. It
+may be enough just to recollect Drayton and Cowley, Herbert, Crashaw
+and Quarles.
+
+The mention of these latter names suggests the remark, how very
+desirable it is to encourage as indulgent and, if we may so term it,
+_catholic_ a spirit as may be, in poetical criticism. From having been
+over-praised in their own days, they are come now to be as much
+undervalued; yet their quaintness of manner and constrained imagery,
+adopted perhaps in compliance with the taste of their age, should
+hardly suffice to overbalance their sterling merits. We speak
+especially of Crashaw and Quarles: for Herbert is a name too venerable
+to be more than mentioned in our present discussion.
+
+After Milton, sacred poetry seems to have greatly declined, both in
+the number and merit of those who cultivated it. No other could be
+expected from the conflicting evils of those times: in which one party
+was used to brand everything sacred with the name of Puritanism, and
+the other to suspect every thing poetical of being contrary to
+morality and religion.
+
+Yet most of the great names of that age, especially among the
+Romanists, as Dryden, Pope, and before them Habington, continued to
+dedicate some of their poetry to religion. By their faith they were
+remote from the controversies which agitated the established church,
+and their devotion might indulge itself without incurring the
+suspicion of a fanatical spirit. Then the solemnity of their worship
+is fitted to inspire splendid and gorgeous strains, such as Dryden's
+paraphrase of the Veni Creator; and their own fallen fortunes in
+England, no less naturally, would fill them with a sense of decay very
+favourable to the plaintive tenderness of Habington and Crashaw.
+
+A feeling of this kind, joined to the effect of distressing languor
+and sickness, may be discerned, occasionally, in the writings of
+Bishop Ken; though he was far indeed from being a Romanist. We shall
+hardly find, in all ecclesiastical history, a greener spot than the
+later years of this courageous and affectionate pastor; persecuted
+alternately by both parties, and driven from his station in his
+declining age; yet singing on, with unabated cheerfulness, to the
+last. His poems are not popular, nor probably ever will be, for
+reasons already touched upon; but whoever in earnest loves his three
+well-known hymns, and knows how to value such unaffected strains of
+poetical devotion, will find his account, in turning over his four
+volumes, half narrative and half lyric, and all avowedly on sacred
+subjects; the narrative often cumbrous, and the lyric verse not seldom
+languid and redundant: yet all breathing such an angelic spirit,
+interspersed with such pure and bright touches of poetry, that such a
+reader as we have supposed will scarcely find it in his heart to
+criticize them.
+
+Between that time and ours, the form of sacred poetry which has
+succeeded best in attracting public attention, is the didactic: of
+which Davies in Queen Elizabeth's reign, Sir Richard Blackmore in King
+William's, Young in the middle, and Cowper in the close, of the last
+century, may fairly be taken as specimens, differing from each other
+according to the differences of their respective literary eras.
+Davies, with his Lucretian majesty (although he wants the moral pathos
+of the Roman poet), representing aptly enough the age of Elizabeth;
+Blackmore, with his easy paragraphs, the careless style of King
+Charles's days; Young, with his pointed sentences, transferring to
+graver subjects a good deal of the manner of Pope; and Cowper, with
+his agreeable but too unsparing descriptions, coming nearer to the
+present day, which appears, both in manners and in scenery, to delight
+in Dutch painting, rather than in what is more delicately classical.
+
+With regard to the indirect, and, perhaps, more effective, species of
+sacred poetry, we fear it must be acknowledged, to the shame of the
+last century, that there is hardly a single specimen of it (excepting,
+perhaps, Gray's Elegy, and possibly some of the most perfect of
+Collins's poems) which has obtained any celebrity. We except the
+writers of our own times, who do not fall within the scope of this
+inquiry.
+
+To Spenser, therefore, upon the whole, the English reader must revert,
+as being, pre-eminently, the sacred poet of his country: as most
+likely, in every way, to answer the purposes of his art; especially in
+an age of excitation and refinement, in which the gentler and more
+homely beauties, both of character and of scenery, are too apt to be
+despised: with passion and interest enough to attract the most ardent,
+and grace enough to win the most polished; yet by a silent preference
+everywhere inculcating the love of better and more enduring things;
+and so most exactly fulfilling what he has himself declared to be 'the
+general end of all his book'--'to fashion a gentleman, or noble
+person, in virtuous and gentle discipline': and going the straight way
+to the accomplishment of his own high-minded prayer:
+
+    That with the glory of so goodly sight,
+    The hearts of men, which fondly here admire
+    Fair-seeming shows, and feed on vain delight,
+    Transported with celestial desire
+    Of those fair forms, may lift themselves up higher,
+    And learn to love, with zealous humble duty,
+    Th' eternal fountain of that heavenly beauty.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
+
+1801-1890
+
+POETRY
+
+WITH REFERENCE TO ARISTOTLE'S POETICS (1829).
+
+_The Theatre of the Greeks; or the History, Literature, and Criticism
+of the Grecian Drama. With an original Treatise on the Principal
+Tragic and Comic Metres._ Second Edition. Cambridge. 1827.
+
+
+This work is well adapted for the purpose it has in view--the
+illustration of the Greek drama. It has been usual for the young
+student to engage in a perusal of this difficult branch of classical
+literature, with none of that previous preparation or collateral
+assistance which it pre-eminently requires. Not to mention his
+ordinary want of information as regards the history of the drama,
+which, though necessary to the full understanding the nature of that
+kind of poetry, may still seem too remotely connected with the
+existing Greek plays to be an actual deficiency; nor, again, his
+ignorance of the dramatic dialect and metres, which, without external
+helps, may possibly be overcome by minds of superior talent while
+engaged upon them; at least without some clear ideas of the usages of
+the ancient stage, the Greek dramas are but partially intelligible.
+The circumstances under which the representation was conducted, the
+form and general arrangements of the theatre, the respective offices
+and disposition of the actors, the nature and duties of the chorus,
+the proprieties of the scene itself, are essential subjects of
+information, yet they are generally neglected. The publication before
+us is a compilation of the most useful works or parts of works on the
+criticism, history, and antiquities of the drama; among which will be
+found extracts from Bentley's _Dissertation on the Epistles of
+Phalaris_ and from Schlegel's work on Dramatic Literature; the more
+important parts of Twining's Translation of Aristotle's _Poetics_, and
+critical remarks, by Dawes, Porson, Elmsley, Tate, and the writers in
+the _Museum Criticum_.
+
+If we were disposed to find fault with a useful work, we should
+describe it as over-liberal of condensed critical information. Such
+ample assistance is given to the student, that little is left to
+exercise his own personal thought and judgement. This is a fault of
+not a few publications of the present day, written for our
+universities. From a false estimate of the advantages of accurate
+scholarship, the reader is provided with a multitude of minute facts,
+which are useful to his mind, not when barely remembered, but chiefly
+when he has acquired them for himself. It is of comparatively trifling
+importance, whether the scholar knows the force of [Greek: ou m�] or
+[Greek: alla gar]; but it may considerably improve his acumen or
+taste, to have gone through a process of observation, comparison, and
+induction, more or less original and independent of grammarians and
+critics. It is an officious aid which renders the acquisition of a
+language mechanical. Commentators are of service to stimulate the
+mind, and suggest thought; and though, when we view the wide field of
+criticism, it is impossible they should do more, yet, when that field
+is narrowed to the limit of academical success, there is a danger of
+their indulging indolence, or confirming the contracted views of
+dullness. These remarks are not so much directed against a valuable
+work like the present, the very perusal of which may be made an
+exercise for the mind, as against an especial fault of the age. The
+uses of knowledge in forming the intellectual and moral character, are
+too commonly overlooked; and the possession itself being viewed as a
+peculiar good, short ways are on all subjects excogitated for avoiding
+the labour of learning; whereas the very length and process of the
+journey is in many the chief, in all an important advantage.
+
+But, dismissing a train of thought which would soon lead us very far
+from the range of subjects which the _Theatre of the Greeks_
+introduces to our notice, we propose to offer some speculations of our
+own on Greek tragedy and poetry in general, founded on the doctrine of
+Aristotle as contained in the publication before us. A compilation of
+standard works, (and such in its general character is the _Greek
+Theatre_,) scarcely affords the occasion of lengthened criticism on
+itself; whereas it may be of use to the classical student to add some
+further illustrations of the subject which is the common basis of the
+works compiled.
+
+Aristotle considers the excellence of a tragedy to depend upon its
+_plot_--and, since a tragedy, as such, is obviously the exhibition of
+an _action_, no one can deny his statement to be abstractedly true.
+Accordingly he directs his principal attention to the economy of the
+fable; determines its range of subjects, delineates its proportions,
+traces its progress from a complication of incidents to their just
+and satisfactory arrangement, investigates the means of making a train
+of events striking or affecting, and shows how the exhibition of
+character may be made subservient to the purposes of the action. His
+treatise is throughout interesting and valuable. It is one thing,
+however, to form the beau id�al of a tragedy on scientific principles;
+another to point out the actual beauty of a particular school of
+dramatic composition. The Greek tragedians are not generally
+felicitous in the construction of their plots. Aristotle, then, rather
+tells us what tragedy should be, than what Greek tragedy really was.
+And this doubtless was the intention of the philosopher. Since,
+however, the Greek drama has obtained so extended and lasting a
+celebrity, and yet its excellence does not fall under the strict rules
+of the critical art, we should inquire in what it consists.
+
+That the charm of Greek tragedy does not ordinarily arise from
+scientific correctness of plot, is certain as a matter of fact. Seldom
+does any great interest arise from the action; which, instead of being
+progressive and sustained, is commonly either a mere necessary
+condition of the drama, or a convenience for the introduction of
+matter more important than itself. It is often stationary--often
+irregular--sometimes either wants or outlives the catastrophe. In the
+plays of Aeschylus it is always simple and inartificial--in four out
+of the seven there is hardly any plot at all;--and, though it is of
+more prominent importance in those of Sophocles, yet even here the
+_Oedipus at Colonus_ is a mere series of incidents, and the _Ajax_ a
+union of two separate tales; while in the _Philoctetes_, which is
+apparently busy, the circumstances of the action are but slightly
+connected with the _d�nouement_. The carelessness of Euripides in the
+construction of his plots is well known. The action then will be more
+justly viewed as the vehicle for introducing the personages of the
+drama, than as the principal object of the poet's art; it is not in
+the plot, but in the characters, sentiments, and diction, that the
+actual merit and poetry of the composition is placed. To show this to
+the satisfaction of the reader, would require a minuter investigation
+of details than our present purpose admits; yet a few instances in
+point may suggest others to the memory. E. g. in neither the _Oedipus
+Coloneus_ nor the _Philoctetes_, the two most beautiful plays of
+Sophocles, is the plot striking; but how exquisite is the delineation
+of the characters of Antigone and Oedipus, in the former tragedy,
+particularly in their interview with Polynices, and the various
+descriptions of the scene itself which the Chorus furnishes! In the
+_Philoctetes_, again, it is the contrast between the worldly wisdom of
+Ulysses, the inexperienced frankness of Neoptolemus, and the
+simplicity of the afflicted Philoctetes, which constitutes the
+principal charm of the drama. Or we may instance the spirit and nature
+displayed in the grouping of the characters in the _Prometheus_ which
+is almost without action;--the stubborn enemy of the new dynasty of
+gods; Oceanus trimming, as an accomplished politician, with the change
+of affairs; the single-hearted and generous Nereids; and Hermes the
+favourite and instrument of the usurping potentate. So again, the
+beauties of the _Thebae_ are almost independent of the plot;--it is
+the Chorus which imparts grace and interest to the actionless scene;
+and the speech of Antigone at the end, one of the most simply striking
+in any play, has, scientifically speaking, no place in the tragedy,
+which should already have been brought to its conclusion. Amid the
+multitude of the beauties of the irregular Euripides, it is obvious to
+notice the characters of Alcestis and the Clytemnestra of the
+_Electra_; the soliloquies of _Medea_; the picturesque situation of
+Ion, the minister of the Pythian temple; the opening scene of the
+_Orestes_; and the dialogues between Phaedra and her attendant in the
+_Hippolytus_, and the old man and Antigone in the _Phoenissae_;--passages
+which are either unconnected with the development of the plot, or of
+an importance superior to it. Thus the Greek drama, as a fact, was
+modelled on no scientific principle. It was a pure recreation of the
+imagination, revelling without object or meaning beyond its own
+exhibition. Gods, heroes, kings, and dames, enter and retire: they may
+have a good reason for appearing--they may have a very poor one;
+whatever it is, still we have no right to ask for it;--the question is
+impertinent. Let us listen to their harmonious and majestic
+language--to the voices of sorrow, joy, compassion, or religious
+emotion--to the animated odes of the chorus. Why interrupt so divine a
+display of poetical genius by inquiries degrading it to the level of
+every-day events, and implying incompleteness in the action till a
+catastrophe arrives? The very spirit of beauty breathes through every
+part of the composition. We may liken the Greek drama to the music of
+the Italian school; in which the wonder is, how so much richness of
+invention in detail can be accommodated to a style so simple and
+uniform. Each is the development of grace, fancy, pathos, and taste,
+in the respective media of representation and sound.
+
+However true then it may be, that one or two of the most celebrated
+dramas answer to the requisitions of Aristotle's doctrine, still for
+the most part, Greek Tragedy has its own distinct and peculiar praise,
+which must not be lessened by a criticism conducted on principles,
+whether correct or not, still leading to excellence of another
+character. This being, as we hope, shown, we shall be still bolder,
+and proceed to question even the sufficiency of the rules of Aristotle
+for the production of dramas of the highest order. These rules, it
+would appear, require a plot not merely natural and unaffected, as a
+vehicle of more poetical matter, but one laboured and complicated as
+the sole legitimate channel of tragic effect; and thus tend to
+withdraw the mind of the poet from the spontaneous exhibition of
+pathos or imagination, to a minute diligence in the formation of a
+plan. To explain our views on the subject, we will institute a short
+comparison between three tragedies, the _Agamemnon_, the _Oedipus_,
+and the _Bacchae_, one of each of the tragic poets, where, by
+reference to Aristotle's principles, we think it will be found that
+the most perfect in plot is not the most poetical.
+
+Of these the action of the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ is frequently instanced
+by the critic as a specimen of judgement and skill in the selection
+and combination of the incidents; and in this point of view it is
+truly a masterly composition. The clearness, precision, certainty,
+and vigour, with which the line of the action moves on to its
+termination, is admirable. The character of Oedipus too is finely
+drawn, and identified with the development of the action.
+
+The _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus presents us with the slow and difficult
+birth of a portentous secret--an event of old written in the resolves
+of destiny, a crime long meditated in the bosom of the human agents.
+The Chorus here has an importance altogether wanting in the Chorus of
+the _Oedipus_. They throw a pall of ancestral honour over the bier of
+the hereditary monarch, which would have been unbecoming in the case
+of the upstart king of Thebes. Till the arrival of Agamemnon, they
+occupy our attention, as the prophetic organ, not commissioned indeed
+but employed by heaven, to proclaim the impending horrors. Succeeding
+to the brief intimation of the watcher who opens the play, they seem
+oppressed with forebodings of woe and crime which they can neither
+justify nor analyse. The expression of their anxiety forms the stream
+in which the plot flows--every thing, even news of joy, takes a
+colouring from the depth of their gloom. On the arrival of the king,
+they retire before Cassandra, a more regularly commissioned
+prophetess; who, speaking first in figure, then in plain terms, only
+ceases that we may hear the voice of the betrayed monarch himself,
+informing us of the striking of the fatal blow. Here then the very
+simplicity of the fable constitutes its especial beauty. The death of
+Agamemnon is intimated at first--it is accomplished at last:
+throughout we find but the growing in volume and intensity of one and
+the same note--it is a working up of one musical ground, by fugue and
+imitation, into the richness of combined harmony. But we look in vain
+for the progressive and thickening incidents of the _Oedipus_.
+
+The action of the _Bacchae_ is also simple. It is the history of the
+reception of the worship of Bacchus in Thebes; who, first depriving
+Pentheus of his reason, and thereby drawing him on to his ruin,
+establishes his divinity. The interest of the scene arises from the
+gradual process by which the derangement of the Theban king is
+effected, which is powerfully and originally described. It would be
+comic, were it unconnected with religion. As it is, it exhibits the
+grave irony of a god triumphing over the impotent presumption of man,
+the sport and terrible mischievousness of an insulted deity. It is an
+exemplification of the adage, _quem deus vult perdere, prius
+dementat_. So delicately balanced is the action along the verge of the
+sublime and grotesque, that it is both solemn and humorous, without
+violence to the propriety of the composition: the mad and merry fire
+of the Chorus, the imbecile mirth of old Cadmus and Tiresias, and the
+infatuation of Pentheus, who is ultimately induced to dress himself in
+female garb to gain admittance among the Bacchae, are made to
+harmonize with the terrible catastrophe which concludes the life of
+the intruder. Perhaps the victim's first discovery of the disguised
+deity is the finest conception in this splendid drama. His madness
+enables him to discern the emblematic horns on the head of Bacchus,
+which were hid from him when in his sound mind; yet this discovery,
+instead of leading him to an acknowledgement of the divinity,
+provides him only with matter for a stupid and perplexed
+astonishment.
+
+    [Greek: kai tauros h�min prosthen h�geisthai dokeis,
+    kai s� kerate krati prospephykenai.
+    all' � pot' �stha th�r; tetaur�sai gar oun.][18]
+
+This play is on the whole the most favourable specimen of the genius
+of Euripides--not breathing the sweet composure, the melodious
+fullness, the majesty and grace of Sophocles; nor rudely and
+overpoweringly tragic as Aeschylus; but brilliant, versatile,
+imaginative, as well as deeply pathetic.
+
+    [18]
+
+        A Bull, thou seem'st to lead us; on thy head
+        Horns have grown forth: wast heretofore a beast?
+        For such thy semblance now.
+
+Here then are two dramas of extreme poetical power, but deficient in
+skilfulness of plot. Are they on that account to be rated below the
+_Oedipus_, which, in spite of its many beauties, has not even a share
+of the richness and sublimity of either?
+
+Aristotle, then, it must be allowed, treats dramatic composition more
+as an exhibition of ingenious workmanship, than as a free and
+unfettered effusion of genius. The inferior poem may, on his
+principle, be the better tragedy. He may indeed have intended solely
+to delineate the outward framework most suitable to the reception of
+the spirit of poetry, not to discuss the nature of poetry itself. If
+so, it cannot be denied that, the poetry being given equal in the two
+cases, the more perfect plot will merit the greater share of praise.
+And it may seem to agree with this view of his meaning, that he
+pronounces Euripides, in spite of the irregularity of his plots, to
+be, after all, the most tragic of the Greek dramatists, inasmuch (i.
+e.) as he excels in his appeal to those passions which the outward
+form of the drama merely subserves. Still there is surely too much
+stress laid by the philosopher upon the artificial part; which, after
+all, leads to negative, more than to positive excellence; and should
+rather be the natural and (so to say) unintentional result of the
+poet's feeling and imagination, than be separated from them as the
+direct object of his care. Perhaps it is hardly fair to judge of
+Aristotle's sentiments by the fragment of his work which has come down
+to us. Yet as his natural taste led him to delight in the explication
+of systems, and in those large and connected views which his vigorous
+talent for thinking through subjects supplied, we may be allowed to
+suspect him of entertaining too cold and formal conceptions of the
+nature of poetical composition, as if its beauties were less subtle
+and delicate than they really are. A word has power to convey a world
+of information to the imagination, and to act as a spell upon the
+feelings: there is no need of sustained fiction--often no room for
+it.[19] Some confirmation of the judgement we have ventured to pass on
+the greatest of analytical philosophers, is the account he gives of
+the source of poetical pleasure; which he almost identifies with a
+gratification of the reasoning faculty, placing it in the satisfaction
+derived from recognizing in fiction a resemblance to the realities of
+life--[Greek: symbainei the�rountas manthanein kai syllogizesthai, ti
+hekaston.][20]
+
+    [19] The sudden inspiration, e. g. of the blind Oedipus, in
+    the second play bearing his name, by which he is enabled,
+    [Greek: athiktos h�g�t�ros] ['without a guide'], to lead the
+    way to his place of death, in our judgement, produces more
+    poetical effect than all the skilful intricacy of the plot of
+    the _Tyrannus_. The latter excites an interest which scarcely
+    lasts beyond the first reading--the former _decies repetita
+    placebit_.
+
+    [20] In seeing the picture one is at the same time
+    learning,--gathering the meaning of things.
+
+But as we have treated, rather unceremoniously, a deservedly high
+authority, we will try to compensate for our rudeness, by illustrating
+his general doctrine of the nature of poetry, which we hold to be most
+true and philosophical.
+
+Poetry, according to Aristotle, is a representation of the ideal.
+Biography and history represent individual characters and actual
+facts; poetry, on the contrary, generalizing from the phenomena of
+nature and life, supplies us with pictures drawn not after an existing
+pattern, but after a creation of the mind. _Fidelity_ is the primary
+merit of biography and history; the essence of poetry is _fiction_.
+_Poesis nihil aliud est_ (says Bacon) _quam historiae imitatio ad
+placitum_. It delineates that perfection which the imagination
+suggests, and to which as a limit the present system of divine
+Providence actually tends. Moreover, by confining the attention to one
+series of events and scene of action, it bounds and finishes off the
+confused luxuriance of real nature; while, by a skilful adjustment of
+circumstances, it brings into sight the connexion of cause and effect,
+completes the dependence of the parts one on another, and harmonizes
+the proportions of the whole. It is then but the type and model of
+history or biography, if we may be allowed the comparison, bearing
+some resemblance to the abstract mathematical formula of physics,
+before it is modified by the contingencies of gravity and friction.
+Hence, while it recreates the imagination by the superhuman loveliness
+of its views, it provides a solace for the mind broken by the
+disappointments and sufferings of actual life; and becomes, moreover,
+the utterance of the inward emotions of a right moral feeling, seeking
+a purity and a truth which this world will not give.
+
+It follows that the poetical mind is one full of the eternal forms of
+beauty and perfection; these are its material of thought, its
+instrument and medium of observation--these colour each object to
+which it directs its view. It is called imaginative or creative, from
+the originality and independence of its modes of thinking, compared
+with the common-place and matter-of-fact conceptions of ordinary
+minds, which are fettered down to the particular and individual. At
+the same time it feels a natural sympathy with everything great and
+splendid in the physical and moral world; and selecting such from the
+mass of common phenomena, incorporates them, as it were, into the
+substance of its own creations. From living thus in a world of its
+own, it speaks the language of dignity, emotion, and refinement.
+Figure is its necessary medium of communication with man; for in the
+feebleness of ordinary words to express its ideas, and in the absence
+of terms of abstract perfection, the adoption of metaphorical language
+is the only poor means allowed it for imparting to others its intense
+feelings. A metrical garb has, in all languages, been appropriated to
+poetry--it is but the outward development of the music and harmony
+within. The verse, far from being a restraint on the true poet, is the
+suitable index of his sense, and is adopted by his free and deliberate
+choice.
+
+We shall presently show the applicability of our doctrine to the
+various departments of poetical composition; first, however, it will
+be right to volunteer an explanation which may save it from much
+misconception and objection. Let not our notion be thought arbitrarily
+to limit the number of poets, generally considered such. It will be
+found to lower particular works, or parts of works, rather than the
+writers themselves; sometimes to condemn only the vehicle in which the
+poetry is conveyed. There is an ambiguity in the word poetry, which is
+taken to signify both the talent itself, and the written composition
+which is the result of it. Thus there is an apparent, but no real
+contradiction, in saying a poem may be but partially poetical; in some
+passages more so than in others; and sometimes not poetical at all. We
+only maintain--not that writers forfeit the name of poet who fail at
+times to answer to our requisitions, but--that they are poets only so
+far forth and inasmuch as they do answer to them. We may grant, for
+instance, that the vulgarities of old Phoenix in the ninth _Iliad_, or
+of the nurse of Orestes in the _Choephoroe_, or perhaps of the
+grave-diggers in _Hamlet_, are in themselves unworthy of their
+respective authors, and refer them to the wantonness of exuberant
+genius; and yet maintain that the scenes in question contain much
+_incidental_ poetry. Now and then the lustre of the true metal catches
+the eye, redeeming whatever is unseemly and worthless in the rude ore;
+still the ore is not the metal. Nay sometimes, and not unfrequently in
+Shakespeare, the introduction of unpoetical matter may be necessary
+for the sake of relief, or as a vivid expression of recondite
+conceptions, and (as it were) to make friends with the reader's
+imagination. This necessity, however, cannot make the additions in
+themselves beautiful and pleasing. Sometimes, on the other hand, while
+we do not deny the incidental beauty of a poem, we are ashamed and
+indignant on witnessing the unworthy substance in which that beauty is
+imbedded. This remark applies strongly to the immoral compositions to
+which Lord Byron devoted his last years. Now to proceed with our
+proposed investigation.
+
+We will notice _descriptive poetry_ first. Empedocles wrote his
+physics in verse, and Oppian his history of animals. Neither were
+poets--the one was an historian of nature, the other a sort of
+biographer of brutes. Yet a poet may make natural history or
+philosophy the material of his composition. But under his hands they
+are no longer a bare collection of facts or principles, but are
+painted with a meaning, beauty, and harmonious order not their own.
+Thomson has sometimes been commended for the novelty and minuteness of
+his remarks upon nature. This is not the praise of a poet; whose
+office rather is to represent _known_ phenomena in a new connexion or
+medium. In _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ the poetical magician
+invests the commonest scenes of a country life with the hues, first of
+a mirthful, then of a pensive mind.[21] Pastoral poetry is a
+description of rustics, agriculture, and cattle, softened off and
+corrected from the rude health of nature. Virgil, and much more Pope
+and others, have run into the fault of colouring too highly;--instead
+of drawing generalized and ideal forms of _shepherds_, they have given
+us pictures of _gentlemen_ and _beaux_. Their composition may be
+poetry, but it is not pastoral poetry.
+
+    [21] It is the charm of the descriptive poetry of a religious
+    mind, that nature is viewed in a moral connexion. Ordinary
+    writers (e. g.) compare aged men to trees in autumn--a gifted
+    poet will reverse the metaphor. Thus:--
+
+        'How quiet shows the woodland scene!
+          Each flower and tree, its duty done,
+        Reposing in decay serene,
+          _Like weary men when age is won_,' &c.
+
+The difference between poetical and historical _narrative_ may be
+illustrated by the 'Tales Founded on Facts', generally of a religious
+character, so common in the present day, which we must not be thought
+to approve, because we use them for our purpose. The author finds in
+the circumstances of the case many particulars too trivial for public
+notice, or irrelevant to the main story, or partaking perhaps too much
+of the peculiarity of individual minds:--these he omits. He finds
+connected events separated from each other by time or place, or a
+course of action distributed among a multitude of agents; he limits
+the scene or duration of the tale, and dispenses with his host of
+characters by condensing the mass of incident and action in the
+history of a few. He compresses long controversies into a concise
+argument--and exhibits characters by dialogue--and (if such be his
+object) brings prominently forward the course of Divine Providence by
+a fit disposition of his materials. Thus he selects, combines,
+refines, colours--in fact, _poetizes_. His facts are no longer
+_actual_ but _ideal_--a tale _founded on_ facts is a tale _generalized
+from_ facts. The authors of _Peveril of the Peak_, and of _Brambletye
+House_, have given us their respective descriptions of the profligate
+times of Charles II. Both accounts are interesting, but for different
+reasons. That of the latter writer has the fidelity of history;
+Walter Scott's picture is the hideous reality unintentionally softened
+and decorated by the poetry of his own mind. Miss Edgeworth sometimes
+apologizes for certain incidents in her tales, by stating they took
+place 'by one of those strange chances which occur in life, but seem
+incredible when found in writing'. Such an excuse evinces a
+misconception of the principle of fiction, which, being the
+_perfection_ of the actual, prohibits the introduction of any such
+anomalies of experience. It is by a similar impropriety that painters
+sometimes introduce unusual sunsets, or other singular phenomena of
+lights and forms. Yet some of Miss Edgeworth's works contain much
+poetry of narrative. _Manoeuvring_ is perfect in its way--the plot and
+characters are natural, without being too real to be pleasing.
+
+_Character_ is made poetical by a like process. The writer draws
+indeed from experience; but unnatural peculiarities are laid aside,
+and harsh contrasts reconciled. If it be said, the fidelity of the
+imitation is often its greatest merit, we have only to reply, that in
+such cases the pleasure is not poetical, but consists in the mere
+recognition. All novels and tales which introduce real characters, are
+in the same degree unpoetical. Portrait-painting, to be poetical,
+should furnish an abstract representation of an individual; the
+abstraction being more rigid, inasmuch as the painting is confined to
+one point of time. The artist should draw independently of the
+accidents of attitude, dress, occasional feeling, and transient
+action. He should depict the general spirit of his subject--as if he
+were copying from memory, not from a few particular sittings. An
+ordinary painter will delineate with rigid fidelity, and will make a
+caricature. But the learned artist contrives so to temper his
+composition, as to sink all offensive peculiarities and hardnesses of
+individuality, without diminishing the striking effect of the
+likeness, or acquainting the casual spectator with the secret of his
+art. Miss Edgeworth's representations of the Irish character are
+actual, and not poetical--nor were they intended to be so. They are
+interesting, because they are faithful. If there is poetry about them,
+it exists in the personages themselves, not in her representation of
+them. She is only the accurate reporter in word of what was poetical
+in fact. Hence, moreover, when a deed or incident is striking in
+itself, a judicious writer is led to describe it in the most simple
+and colourless terms, his own being unnecessary; e. g. if the
+greatness of the action itself excites the imagination, or the depth
+of the suffering interests the feelings. In the usual phrase, the
+circumstances are left to 'speak for themselves'.
+
+Let it not be said that our doctrine is adverse to that individuality
+in the delineation of character, which is a principal charm of
+fiction. It is not necessary for the ideality of a composition to
+avoid those minuter shades of difference between man and man, which
+give to poetry its plausibility and life; but merely such violation of
+general nature, such improbabilities, wanderings, or coarsenesses, as
+interfere with the refined and delicate enjoyment of the imagination;
+which would have the elements of beauty extracted out of the confused
+multitude of ordinary actions and habits, and combined with
+consistency and ease. Nor does it exclude the introduction of
+imperfect or odious characters. The original conception of a weak or
+guilty mind may have its intrinsic beauty. And much more so, when it
+is connected with a tale which finally adjusts whatever is
+reprehensible in the personages themselves. Richard and Iago are
+subservient to the plot. Moral excellence of character may sometimes
+be even a fault. The Clytemnestra of Euripides is so interesting, that
+the divine vengeance, which is the main subject of the drama, seems
+almost unjust. Lady Macbeth, on the contrary, is the conception of one
+deeply learned in the poetical art. She is polluted with the most
+heinous crimes, and meets the fate she deserves. Yet there is nothing
+in the picture to offend the taste, and much to feed the imagination.
+Romeo and Juliet are too good for the termination to which the plot
+leads--so are Ophelia and the bride of Lammermoor. In these cases
+there is something inconsistent with correct beauty, and therefore
+unpoetical. We do not say the fault could be avoided without
+sacrificing more than would be gained; still it is a fault. It is
+scarcely possible for a poet satisfactorily to connect innocence with
+ultimate unhappiness, when the notion of a future life is excluded.
+Honours paid to the memory of the dead are some alleviation of the
+harshness. In his use of the doctrine of a future life, Southey is
+admirable. Other writers are content to conduct their heroes to
+temporal happiness--Southey refuses present comfort to his Ladurlad,
+Thalaba, and Roderick, but carries them on through suffering to
+another world. The death of his hero is the termination of the action;
+yet so little in two of them, at least, does this catastrophe excite
+sorrowful feelings, that some readers may be startled to be reminded
+of the fact. If a melancholy is thrown over the conclusion of the
+_Roderick_, it is from the peculiarities of the hero's previous
+history.
+
+Opinions, feelings, manners, and customs, are made poetical by the
+delicacy or splendour with which they are expressed. This is seen in
+the _ode_, _elegy_, _sonnet_, and _ballad_; in which a single idea
+perhaps, or familiar occurrence, is invested by the poet with pathos
+or dignity. The ballad of _Old Robin Gray_ will serve, for an
+instance, out of a multitude; again, Lord Byron's _Hebrew Melody_,
+beginning 'Were my bosom as false', &c.; or Cowper's _Lines on his
+Mother's Picture_; or Milman's 'Funeral Hymn' in the _Martyr of
+Antioch_; or Milton's _Sonnet on his Blindness_; or Bernard Barton's
+_Dream_. As picturesque specimens, we may name Campbell's _Battle of
+the Baltic_; or Joanna Baillie's _Chough and Crow_; and for the more
+exalted and splendid style, Gray's _Bard_; or Milton's _Hymn on the
+Nativity_; in which facts, with which every one is familiar, are made
+new by the colouring of a poetical imagination. It must all along be
+observed, that we are not adducing instances for their own sake; but
+in order to illustrate our general doctrine, and to show its
+applicability to those compositions which are, by universal consent,
+acknowledged to be poetical.
+
+The department of poetry we are now speaking of, is of much wider
+extent than might at first sight appear. It will include such
+moralizing and philosophical poems as Young's _Night Thoughts_, and
+Byron's _Childe Harold_.[22] There is much bad taste, at present, in
+the judgement passed on compositions of this kind. It is the fault of
+the day to mistake mere eloquence for poetry; whereas, in direct
+opposition to the conciseness and simplicity of the poet, the talent
+of the orator consists in making much of a single idea. '_Sic dicet
+ille ut verset saepe multis modis eandem et unam rem, ut haereat in
+eadem commoreturque sententia._' This is the great art of Cicero
+himself, who, whether he is engaged in statement, argument, or
+raillery, never ceases till he has exhausted the subject; going round
+about it, and placing it in every different light, yet without
+repetition to offend or weary the reader. This faculty seems to
+consist in the power of throwing off harmonious sentences, which,
+while they have a respectable proportion of meaning, yet are
+especially intended to charm the ear. In popular poems, common ideas
+are unfolded with copiousness, and set off in polished verse--and this
+is called poetry. In the _Pleasures of Hope_ we find this done with
+exquisite taste; but it is in his minor poems that the author's
+powerful and free poetical genius rises to its natural elevation. In
+_Childe Harold_, too, the writer is carried through his Spenserian
+stanza with the unweariness and equable fullness of accomplished
+eloquence; opening, illustrating, and heightening one idea, before he
+passes on to another. His composition is an extended funeral oration
+over buried joys and pleasures. His laments over Greece, Rome, and the
+fallen in various engagements, have quite the character of panegyrical
+orations; while by the very attempt to describe the celebrated
+buildings and sculptures of antiquity, he seems to confess that _they_
+are the poetical text, his the rhetorical comment. Still it is a work
+of splendid talent, though, as a whole, not of the highest poetical
+excellence. Juvenal is, perhaps, the only ancient author who
+habitually substitutes declamation for poetry.[23]
+
+    [22] We would here mention Rogers's _Italy_, if such a
+    cursory notice could convey our high opinion of its merit.
+
+    [23] The difference between oratory and poetry is well
+    illustrated by a passage in a recent tragedy.
+
+          _Col._ Joined! by what tie?
+
+          _Rien._ By hatred--
+        By danger--the two hands that tightest grasp
+        Each other--the two cords that soonest knit
+        A fast and stubborn tie; your true love knot
+        Is nothing to it. Faugh! the supple touch
+        Of pliant interest, or the dust of time,
+        Or the pin-point of temper, loose or rot
+        Or snap love's silken band. Fear and old hate,
+        They are sure weavers--they work for the storm,
+        The whirlwind, and the rocking surge; their knot
+        Endures till death.
+
+    The idea is good, and if expressed in a line or two, might
+    have been poetry--spread out into nine or ten lines, it
+    yields but a languid and ostentatious declamation.
+
+The _philosophy of mind_ may equally be made subservient to poetry, as
+the philosophy of nature. It is a common fault to mistake a mere
+knowledge of the heart for poetical talent. Our greatest masters have
+known better;--they have subjected metaphysics to their art. In
+_Hamlet_, _Macbeth_, _Richard_, and _Othello_, the philosophy of mind
+is but the material of the poet. These personages are ideal; they are
+effects of the contact of a given internal character with given
+outward circumstances, the results of combined conditions determining
+(so to say) a moral curve of original and inimitable properties.
+Philosophy is exhibited in the same subserviency to poetry in many
+parts of Crabbe's _Tales of the Hall_. In the writings of this author
+there is much to offend a refined taste; but at least in the work in
+question there is much of a highly poetical cast. It is a
+representation of the action and re-action of two minds upon each
+other and upon the world around them. Two brothers of different
+characters and fortunes, and strangers to each other, meet. Their
+habits of mind, the formation of those habits by external
+circumstances, their respective media of judgement, their points of
+mutual attraction and repulsion, the mental position of each in
+relation to a variety of trifling phenomena of every-day nature and
+life, are beautifully developed in a series of tales moulded into a
+connected narrative. We are tempted to single out the fourth book,
+which gives an account of the childhood and education of the younger
+brother, and which for variety of thought as well as fidelity of
+description is in our judgement beyond praise. The Waverley novels
+would afford us specimens of a similar excellence. One striking
+peculiarity of these tales is the author's practice of describing a
+group of characters bearing the same general features of mind, and
+placed in the same general circumstances; yet so contrasted with each
+other in minute differences of mental constitution, that each diverges
+from the common starting-place into a path peculiar to himself. The
+brotherhood of villains in _Kenilworth_, of knights in _Ivanhoe_, and
+of enthusiasts in _Old Mortality_ are instances of this. This bearing
+of character and plot on each other is not often found in Byron's
+poems. The Corsair is intended for a remarkable personage. We pass by
+the inconsistencies of his character, considered by itself. The grand
+fault is that, whether it be natural or not, we are obliged to accept
+the author's word for the fidelity of his portrait. We are told, not
+shown, what the hero was. There is nothing in the plot which results
+from his peculiar formation of mind. An every-day bravo might equally
+well have satisfied the requirements of the action. Childe Harold,
+again, if he is any thing, is a being professedly isolated from the
+world, and uninfluenced by it. One might as well draw Tityrus's stags
+grazing in the air, as a character of this kind; which yet, with more
+or less alteration, passes through successive editions in his other
+poems. Byron had very little versatility or elasticity of genius; he
+did not know how to make poetry out of existing materials. He declaims
+in his own way, and has the upper hand as long as he is allowed to go
+on; but, if interrogated on principles of nature and good sense, he is
+at once put out and brought to a stand. Yet his conception of
+Sardanapalus and Myrrha is fine and ideal, and in the style of
+excellence which we have just been admiring in Shakespeare and Scott.
+
+These illustrations of Aristotle's doctrine may suffice.
+
+Now let us proceed to a fresh position; which, as before, shall first
+be broadly stated, then modified and explained. How does originality
+differ from the poetical talent? Without affecting the accuracy of a
+definition, we may call the latter the originality of right moral
+feeling.
+
+Originality may perhaps be defined as the power of abstracting for
+oneself, and is in thought what strength of mind is in action. Our
+opinions are commonly derived from education and society. Common minds
+transmit as they receive, good and bad, true and false; minds of
+original talent feel a continual propensity to investigate subjects
+and strike out views for themselves;--so that even old and established
+truths do not escape modification and accidental change when subjected
+to this process of mental digestion. Even the style of original
+writers is stamped with the peculiarities of their minds. When
+originality is found apart from good sense, which more or less is
+frequently the case, it shows itself in paradox and rashness of
+sentiment, and eccentricity of outward conduct. Poetry, on the other
+hand, cannot be separated from its good sense, or taste, as it is
+called; which is one of its elements. It is originality energizing in
+the world of beauty; the originality of grace, purity, refinement, and
+feeling. We do not hesitate to say, that poetry is ultimately founded
+on correct moral perception;--that where there is no sound principle
+in exercise there will be no poetry, and that on the whole
+(originality being granted) in proportion to the standard of a
+writer's moral character, will his compositions vary in poetical
+excellence. This position, however, requires some explanation.[24]
+
+    [24] A living prelate, in his Academical Prelections, even
+    suggests the converse of our position--'_Neque enim facile
+    crediderim de eo qui semel hac imbutus fuerit disciplina, qui
+    in id tota mentis acie assuefactus fuerit incumbere, ut quid
+    sit in rebus decens, quid pulchrum, quid congruum, penitus
+    intueretur, quin idem harum rerum perpetuum amorem foveat, et
+    cum ab his studiis discesserit, etiam ad reliqua vitae
+    officia earum imaginem quasi animo infixam transferat._'
+
+Of course, then, we do not mean to imply that a poet must necessarily
+_display_ virtuous and religious feeling;--we are not speaking of the
+actual _material_ of poetry, but of its _sources_. A right moral state
+of heart is the formal and scientific condition of a poetical mind.
+Nor does it follow from our position that every poet must in fact be a
+man of consistent and practical principle; except so far as good
+feeling commonly produces or results from good practice. Burns was a
+man of inconsistent practice--still, it is known, of much really sound
+principle at bottom. Thus his acknowledged poetical talent is in no
+wise inconsistent with the truth of our doctrine, which will refer the
+beauty which exists in his compositions to the remains of a virtuous
+and diviner nature within him. Nay, further than this, our theory
+holds good even though it be shown that a bad man may write a poem. As
+motives short of the purest lead to actions intrinsically good, so
+frames of mind short of virtuous will produce a partial and limited
+poetry. But even where it is exhibited, the poetry of a vicious mind
+will be inconsistent and debased; i. e. so far only such, as the
+traces and shadows of holy truth still remain upon it. On the other
+hand, a right moral feeling places the mind in the very centre of that
+circle from which all the rays have their origin and range; whereas
+minds otherwise placed command but a portion of the whole circuit of
+poetry. Allowing for human infirmity and the varieties of opinion,
+Milton, Spenser, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Southey, may be considered,
+as far as their writings go, to approximate to this moral centre. The
+following are added as further illustrations of our meaning. Walter
+Scott's centre is chivalrous honour; Shakespeare exhibits the [Greek:
+�thos], the physiognomy of an unlearned and undisciplined piety; Homer
+the religion of nature and the heart, at times debased by polytheism.
+All these poets are religious:--the occasional irreligion of Virgil's
+poetry is painful to the admirers of his general taste and delicacy.
+Dryden's _Alexander's Feast_ is a magnificent composition, and has
+high poetical beauties; but to a delicate judgement there is something
+intrinsically unpoetical in the end to which it is devoted, the
+praises of revel and sensuality. It corresponds to a process of
+clever reasoning erected on an untrue foundation--the one is a
+fallacy, the other is out of taste. Lord Byron's _Manfred_ is in parts
+intensely poetical; yet the refined mind naturally shrinks from the
+spirit which here and there reveals itself, and the basis on which the
+fable is built. From a perusal of it we should infer, according to the
+above theory, that there was right and fine feeling in the poet's
+mind, but that the central and consistent character was wanting. From
+the history of his life we know this to be the fact. The connexion
+between want of the religious principle and want of poetical feeling,
+is seen in the instances of Hume and Gibbon; who had radically
+unpoetical minds. Rousseau is not an exception to our doctrine, for
+his heart was naturally religious. Lucretius too had much poetical
+talent; but his work evinces that his miserable philosophy was rather
+the result of a bewildered judgement than a corrupt heart.
+
+According to the above theory, revealed religion should be especially
+poetical--and it is so in fact. While its disclosures have an
+originality in them to engage the intellect, they have a beauty to
+satisfy the moral nature. It presents us with those ideal forms of
+excellence in which a poetical mind delights, and with which all grace
+and harmony are associated. It brings us into a new world--a world of
+overpowering interest, of the sublimest views, and the tenderest and
+purest feelings. The peculiar grace of mind of the New Testament
+writers is as striking as the actual effect produced upon the hearts
+of those who have imbibed their spirit. At present we are not
+concerned with the practical, but the poetical nature of revealed
+truth. With Christians a poetical view of things is a duty--we are bid
+to colour all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in
+every event, and a superhuman tendency. Even our friends around are
+invested with unearthly brightness--no longer imperfect men, but
+beings taken into divine favour, stamped with his seal, and in
+training for future happiness. It may be added that the virtues
+peculiarly Christian are especially poetical;--meekness, gentleness,
+compassion, contentment, modesty, not to mention the devotional
+virtues: whereas the ruder and more ordinary feelings are the
+instruments of rhetoric more justly than of poetry--anger,
+indignation, emulation, martial spirit, and love of independence.
+
+A few remarks on poetical composition, and we have done.--The art of
+composition is merely accessory to the poetical talent. But where that
+talent exists it necessarily gives its own character to the style, and
+renders it perfectly different from all others. As the poet's habits
+of mind lead to contemplation rather than communication with others,
+he is more or less obscure, according to the particular style of
+poetry he has adopted; less so, in epic or narrative and dramatic
+representation--more so, in odes and choruses. He will be obscure,
+moreover, from the depth of his feelings, which require a congenial
+reader to enter into them--and from their acuteness, which shrinks
+from any formal accuracy in the expression of them. And he will be
+obscure, not only from the carelessness of genius and from the
+originality of his conceptions, but (it may be) from natural
+deficiency in the power of clear and eloquent expression, which, we
+must repeat, is a talent distinct from poetry, though often mistaken
+for it.
+
+Dexterity in composition, or _eloquence_ as it may be called in a
+contracted sense of the word, is however manifestly more or less
+necessary in every branch of literature, though its elements may be
+different in each. _Poetical_ eloquence consists, first in the power
+of illustration--which the poet uses, not as the orator, voluntarily,
+for the sake of clearness or ornament; but almost by constraint, as
+the sole outlet and expression of intense inward feeling. The
+spontaneous power of comparison is in some poetical minds entirely
+wanting; these of course cannot show to advantage as poets.--Another
+talent necessary to composition is the power of unfolding the meaning
+in an orderly manner. A poetical mind is often too impatient to
+explain itself justly; it is overpowered by a rush of emotions, which
+sometimes want of power, sometimes the indolence of inward enjoyment
+prevents it from describing. Nothing is more difficult than to analyse
+the feelings of our own minds; and the power of doing so, whether
+natural or acquired, is clearly distinct from experiencing them. Yet,
+though distinct from the poetical talent, it is obviously necessary to
+its exhibition. Hence it is a common praise bestowed upon writers,
+that they express what we have often felt but could never describe.
+The power of arrangement, which is necessary for an extended poem, is
+a modification of the same talent;--being to poetry what method is to
+logic. Besides these qualifications, poetical compositions requires
+that command of language which is the mere effect of practice. The
+poet is a compositor; words are his types; he must have them within
+reach, and in unlimited abundance. Hence the need of careful labour to
+the accomplished poet--not in order that his diction may attract, but
+that language may be subjected to him. He studies the art of
+composition as we might learn dancing or elocution; not that we may
+move or speak according to rule, but that by the very exercise our
+voice and carriage may become so unembarrassed as to allow of our
+doing what we will with them.
+
+A talent for composition then is no essential part of poetry, though
+indispensable to its exhibition. Hence it would seem that attention to
+the language _for its own sake_ evidences not the true poet but the
+mere artist. Pope is said to have tuned our tongue. We certainly owe
+much to him--his diction is rich, musical, and expressive. Still he is
+not on this account a poet; he elaborated his composition for its own
+sake. If we give him poetical praise on this account, we may as
+appropriately bestow it on a tasteful cabinet-maker. This does not
+forbid us to ascribe the grace of his verse to an inward principle of
+poetry, which supplied him with archetypes of the beautiful and
+splendid to work by. But a similar internal gift must direct the skill
+of every fancy-artist who subserves the luxuries and elegancies of
+life. On the other hand, though Virgil is celebrated as a master of
+composition, yet his style is so identified with his conceptions, as
+their outward development, as to preclude the possibility of our
+viewing the one apart from the other. In Milton, again, the harmony of
+the verse is but the echo of the inward music which the thoughts of
+the poet breathe. In Moore's style the ornament continually outstrips
+the sense. Cowper and Walter Scott, on the other hand, are slovenly in
+their versification. Sophocles writes, on the whole, without studied
+attention to the style; but Euripides frequently affects a simplicity
+and prettiness which exposed him to the ridicule of the comic poets.
+Lastly, the style of Homer's poems is perfect in their particular
+department. It is free, manly, simple, perspicuous, energetic, and
+varied. It is the style of one who rhapsodized without deference to
+hearer or judge, in an age prior to the temptations which more or less
+prevailed over succeeding writers--before the theatre had degraded
+poetry into an exhibition, and criticism narrowed it into an art.
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS CARLYLE
+
+1795-1881
+
+THE HERO AS POET. DANTE; SHAKESPEARE (1840)
+
+
+The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old
+ages; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain
+rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific
+knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world
+vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in their loving
+wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with
+the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past. We are now to see
+our Hero in the less ambitious, but also less questionable, character
+of Poet; a character which does not pass. The Poet is a heroic figure
+belonging to all ages; whom all ages possess, when once he is
+produced, whom the newest age as the oldest may produce;--and will
+produce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul; in
+no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a Poet.
+
+Hero, Prophet, Poet,--many different names, in different times and
+places, do we give to Great Men; according to varieties we note in
+them, according to the sphere in which they have displayed themselves!
+We might give many more names, on this same principle. I will remark
+again, however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that the
+different _sphere_ constitutes the grand origin of such distinction;
+that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will,
+according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess,
+I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be _all_ sorts of
+men. The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas,
+would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic
+warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. I fancy
+there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator,
+Philosopher;--in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is
+all these. So too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that great
+glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears
+that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and
+touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and education
+led him thitherward. The grand fundamental character is that of Great
+Man; that the man be great. Napoleon has words in him which are like
+Austerlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth's Marshals are a kind of poetical
+men withal; the things Turenne says are full of sagacity and
+geniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The great heart, the clear
+deep-seeing eye: there it lies; no man whatever, in what province
+soever, can prosper at all without these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did
+diplomatic messages, it seems, quite well: one can easily believe it;
+they had done things a little harder than these! Burns, a gifted
+song-writer, might have made a still better Mirabeau. Shakespeare,--one
+knows not what _he_ could not have made, in the supreme degree.
+
+True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not make all
+great men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. Varieties
+of aptitude doubtless; but infinitely more of circumstance; and far
+oftenest it is the _latter_ only that are looked to. But it is as with
+common men in the learning of trades. You take any man, as yet a vague
+capability of a man, who could be any kind of craftsman; and make him
+into a smith, a carpenter, a mason: he is then and thenceforth that
+and nothing else. And if, as Addison complains, you sometimes see a
+street-porter staggering under his load on spindle-shanks, and near at
+hand a tailor with the frame of a Samson handling a bit of cloth and
+small Whitechapel needle,--it cannot be considered that aptitude of
+Nature alone has been consulted here either!--The Great Man also, to
+what shall he be bound apprentice? Given your Hero, is he to become
+Conqueror, King, Philosopher, Poet? It is an inexplicably complex
+controversial-calculation between the world and him! He will read the
+world and its laws; the world with its laws will be there to be read.
+What the world, on _this_ matter, shall permit and bid is, as we said,
+the most important fact about the world.--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them.
+In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; _Vates_ means
+both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well
+understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they
+are still the same; in this most important respect especially, That
+they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the
+Universe; what Goethe calls 'the open secret'. 'Which is the great
+secret?' asks one.--'The _open_ secret,'--open to all, seen by almost
+none! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, 'the
+Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom of
+Appearance,' as Fichte styles it; of which all Appearance, from the
+starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the Appearance of
+Man and his work, is but the _vesture_, the embodiment that renders it
+visible. This divine mystery _is_ in all times and in all places;
+veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked; and
+the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect, as the
+realized Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace
+matter,--as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some
+upholsterer had put together! It could do no good, at present, to
+_speak_ much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do
+not know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful
+pity;--a failure to live at all, if we live otherwise!
+
+But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the _Vates_,
+whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither
+to make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message;
+he is to reveal that to us,--that sacred mystery which he more than
+others lives ever present with. While others forget it, he knows
+it;--I might say, he has been driven to know it; without consent asked
+of _him_, he finds himself living in it, bound to live in it. Once
+more, here is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Belief; this man
+too could not help being a sincere man! Whosoever may live in the
+shows of things, it is for him a necessity of nature to live in the
+very fact of things. A man, once more, in earnest with the Universe,
+though all others were but toying with it. He is a _Vates_, first of
+all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet,
+participators in the 'open secret,' are one.
+
+With respect to their distinction again: The _Vates_ Prophet, we might
+say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good
+and Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the _Vates_ Poet on what the Germans
+call the �sthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may
+call a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are to
+love. But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot
+be disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye on what we are to love: how
+else shall he know what it is we are to do? The highest Voice ever
+heard on this Earth said withal, 'Consider the lilies of the field;
+they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was
+not arrayed like one of these.' A glance, that, into the deepest deep
+of Beauty. 'The lilies of the field,'--dressed finer than earthly
+princes, springing up there in the humble furrow-field; a beautiful
+_eye_ looking out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty! How
+could the rude Earth make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks
+and is, were not inwardly Beauty?--In this point of view, too, a
+saying of Goethe's, which has staggered several, may have meaning:
+'The Beautiful', he intimates, 'is higher than the Good; the Beautiful
+includes in it the Good.' The _true_ Beautiful; which however, I have
+said somewhere, 'differs from the _false_, as Heaven does from
+Vauxhall!' So much for the distinction and identity of Poet and
+Prophet.--
+
+In ancient and also in modern periods, we find a few Poets who are
+accounted perfect; whom it were a kind of treason to find fault with.
+This is noteworthy; this is right: yet in strictness it is only an
+illusion. At bottom, clearly enough, there is no perfect Poet! A vein
+of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether
+of Poetry. We are all poets when we _read_ a poem well. The
+'imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante,' is not that the same
+faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No one but Shakespeare can
+embody, out of Saxo Grammaticus, the story of _Hamlet_ as Shakespeare
+did: but every one models some kind of story out of it; every one
+embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Where
+there is no specific difference, as between round and square, all
+definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has _so_ much
+more of the poetic element developed in him as to have become
+noticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbours. World-Poets too,
+those whom we are to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics in
+the same way. One who rises _so_ far above the general level of Poets
+will, to such and such critics, seem a Universal Poet; as he ought to
+do. And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction. All Poets,
+all men, have some touches of the Universal; no man is wholly made of
+that. Most Poets are very soon forgotten: but not the noblest
+Shakespeare or Homer of them can be remembered _for ever_;--a day
+comes when he too is not!
+
+Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a difference between true
+Poetry and true Speech not Poetical: what is the difference? On this
+point many things have been written, especially by late German
+Critics, some of which are not very intelligible at first. They say,
+for example, that the Poet has an _infinitude_ in him; communicates an
+_Unendlichkeit_, a certain character of 'infinitude', to whatsoever he
+delineates. This, though not very precise, yet on so vague a matter is
+worth remembering: if well meditated, some meaning will gradually be
+found in it. For my own part, I find considerable meaning in the old
+vulgar distinction of Poetry being _metrical_, having music in it,
+being a Song. Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one might say
+this as soon as anything else: If your delineation be authentically
+_musical_, musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in
+all the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it,
+then it will be poetical; if not, not.--Musical: how much lies in
+that! A _musical_ thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated
+into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it,
+namely the _melody_ that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of
+coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be,
+here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious;
+naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who
+is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on
+us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the
+edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!
+
+Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of song in
+it: not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent;--the rhythm
+or _tune_ to which the people there _sing_ what they have to say!
+Accent is a kind of chanting; all men have accent of their
+own,--though they only _notice_ that of others. Observe too how all
+passionate language does of itself become musical,--with a finer music
+than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger
+becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehow
+the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but
+wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all
+things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they
+had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices
+and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call
+_musical Thought_. The Poet is he who _thinks_ in that manner. At
+bottom, it turns still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity
+and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you
+see musically; the heart of Nature _being_ everywhere music, if you
+can only reach it.
+
+The _Vates_ Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse of Nature, seems to
+hold a poor rank among us, in comparison with the _Vates_ Prophet; his
+function, and our esteem of him for his function, alike slight. The
+Hero taken as Divinity; the Hero taken as Prophet; then next the Hero
+taken only as Poet: does it not look as if our estimate of the Great
+Man, epoch after epoch, were continually diminishing? We take him
+first for a god, then for one god-inspired; and now in the next stage
+of it, his most miraculous word gains from us only the recognition
+that he is a Poet, beautiful verse-maker, man of genius, or
+such-like!--It looks so; but I persuade myself that intrinsically it
+is not so. If we consider well, it will perhaps appear that in man
+still there is the _same_ altogether peculiar admiration for the
+Heroic Gift, by what name soever called, that there at any time was.
+
+I should say, if we do not now reckon a Great Man literally divine, it
+is that our notions of God, of the supreme unattainable Fountain of
+Splendour, Wisdom and Heroism, are ever rising _higher_; not
+altogether that our reverence for these qualities, as manifested in
+our like, is getting lower. This is worth taking thought of. Sceptical
+Dilettantism, the curse of these ages, a curse which will not last for
+ever, does indeed in this the highest province of human things, as in
+all provinces, make sad work; and our reverence for great men, all
+crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is, comes out in poor plight,
+hardly recognizable. Men worship the shows of great men; the most
+disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship. The
+dreariest, fatallest faith; believing which, one would literally
+despair of human things. Nevertheless look, for example, at Napoleon!
+A Corsican lieutenant of artillery; that is the show of _him_: yet is
+he not obeyed, _worshipped_ after his sort, as all the Tiaraed and
+Diademed of the world put together could not be? High Duchesses, and
+ostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rustic, Burns;--a strange
+feeling dwelling in each that they never heard a man like this; that,
+on the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of these people it
+still dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited way of
+uttering it at present, that this rustic, with his black brows and
+flashing sun-eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears, is of
+a dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable with all others. Do
+not we feel it so? But now, were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triviality,
+and all that sorrowful brood, cast-out of us,--as, by God's blessing,
+they shall one day be; were faith in the shows of things entirely
+swept out, replaced by clear faith in the _things_, so that a man
+acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the other non-extant;
+what a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it!
+
+Nay here in these ages, such as they are, have we not two mere Poets,
+if not deified, yet we may say beatified? Shakespeare and Dante are
+Saints of Poetry; really, if we will think of it, _canonized_, so that
+it is impiety to meddle with them. The unguided instinct of the world,
+working across all these perverse impediments, has arrived at such
+result. Dante and Shakespeare are a peculiar Two. They dwell apart, in
+a kind of royal solitude; none equal, none second to them: in the
+general feeling of the world, a certain transcendentalism, a glory as
+of complete perfection, invests these two. They _are_ canonized,
+though no Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing it! Such, in spite of
+every perverting influence, in the most unheroic times, is still our
+indestructible reverence for heroism.--We will look a little at these
+Two, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakespeare: what little it is
+permitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet will most fitly arrange
+itself in that fashion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and his
+Book; yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as it
+were, irrecoverably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering,
+sorrowstricken man, not much note was taken of him while he lived; and
+the most of that has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes.
+It is five centuries since he ceased writing and living here. After
+all commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The
+Book;--and one might add that Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto,
+which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine,
+whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all faces
+that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, with
+the simple laurel wound round it; the deathless sorrow and pain, the
+known victory which is also deathless;--significant of the whole
+history of Dante! I think it is the mournfullest face that ever was
+painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face.
+There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle
+affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into sharp
+contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain. A soft
+ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as
+from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too,
+a silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of god-like disdain
+of the thing that is eating-out his heart,--as if it were withal a
+mean insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and
+strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and
+lifelong unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection all
+converted into indignation: an implacable indignation; slow, equable,
+silent, like that of a god! The eye too, it looks out as in a kind of
+_surprise_, a kind of inquiry, Why the world was of such a sort? This
+is Dante: so he looks, this 'voice of ten silent centuries', and sings
+us 'his mystic unfathomable song'.
+
+The little that we know of Dante's Life corresponds well enough with
+this Portrait and this Book. He was born at Florence, in the upper
+class of society, in the year 1265. His education was the best then
+going; much school-divinity, Aristotelean logic, some Latin
+classics,--no inconsiderable insight into certain provinces of things:
+and Dante, with his earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt,
+learned better than most all that was learnable. He has a clear
+cultivated understanding, and of great subtlety; this best fruit of
+education he had contrived to realize from these scholastics. He knows
+accurately and well what lies close to him; but, in such a time,
+without printed books or free intercourse, he could not know well what
+was distant: the small clear light, most luminous for what is near,
+breaks itself into singular _chiaroscuro_ striking on what is far off.
+This was Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he had gone
+through the usual destinies; been twice out campaigning as a soldier
+for the Florentine State, been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth
+year, by natural gradation of talent and service, become one of the
+Chief Magistrates of Florence. He had met in boyhood a certain
+Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl of his own age and rank,
+and grown-up thenceforth in partial sight of her, in some distant
+intercourse with her. All readers know his graceful affecting account
+of this; and then of their being parted; of her being wedded to
+another, and of her death soon after. She makes a great figure in
+Dante's Poem; seems to have made a great figure in his life. Of all
+beings it might seem as if she, held apart from him, far apart at last
+in the dim Eternity, were the only one he had ever with his whole
+strength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself was wedded; but
+it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy, the rigorous earnest
+man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make
+happy.
+
+We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with him
+as he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podest�, or whatsoever they
+call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbours,--and the world
+had wanted one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence
+would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb
+centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries
+(for there will be ten of them and more) had no _Divina Commedia_ to
+hear! We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for
+this Dante; and he, struggling like a man led towards death and
+crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give _him_ the choice of
+his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really happy,
+what was really miserable.
+
+In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or some
+other confused disturbances rose to such a height, that Dante, whose
+party had seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedly
+forth into banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and
+wandering. His property was all confiscated and more; he had the
+fiercest feeling that it was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight
+of God and man. He tried what was in him to get reinstated; tried even
+by warlike surprisal, with arms in his hand: but it would not do; bad
+only had become worse. There is a record, I believe, still extant in
+the Florence Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever caught, to be
+burnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands, they say: a very curious
+civic document. Another curious document, some considerable number of
+years later, is a Letter of Dante's to the Florentine Magistrates,
+written in answer to a milder proposal of theirs, that he should
+return on condition of apologizing and paying a fine. He answers, with
+fixed stern pride: 'If I cannot return without calling myself guilty,
+I will never return, _nunquam revertar_.'
+
+For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from patron
+to patron, from place to place; proving, in his own bitter words, 'How
+hard is the path, _Come � duro calle_.' The wretched are not cheerful
+company. Dante, poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, with
+his moody humours, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reports
+of him that being at Can della Scala's court, and blamed one day for
+his gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like way. Della
+Scala stood among his courtiers, with mimes and buffoons (_nebulones
+ac histriones_) making him heartily merry; when turning to Dante, he
+said: 'Is it not strange, now, that this poor fool should make himself
+so entertaining; while you, a wise man, sit there day after day, and
+have nothing to amuse us with at all?' Dante answered bitterly: 'No,
+not strange; your Highness is to recollect the Proverb, _Like to
+Like_;'--given the amuser, the amusee must also be given! Such a man,
+with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was not
+made to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be evident to him
+that he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit, in this
+earth. The earthly world had cast him forth, to wander, wander; no
+living heart to love him now; for his sore miseries there was no
+solace here.
+
+The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him;
+that awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with its
+Florences and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence
+thou shalt never see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt
+surely see! What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life
+altogether? ETERNITY: thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, art thou
+and all things bound! The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made
+its home more and more in that awful other world. Naturally his
+thoughts brooded on that, as on the one fact important for him. Bodied
+or bodiless, it is the one fact important for all men:--but to Dante,
+in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape; he
+no more doubted of that _Malebolge_ Pool, that it all lay there with
+its gloomy circles, with its _alti guai_, and that he himself should
+see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went
+thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in
+speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into 'mystic
+unfathomable song'; and this his _Divine Comedy_, the most remarkable
+of all modern Books, is the result.
+
+It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see,
+a proud thought for him at times, That he, here in exile, could do
+this work; that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him from
+doing it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that
+it was great; the greatest a man could do. 'If thou follow thy star,
+_Se tu segui tua stella_,'--so could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in
+his extreme need, still say to himself: 'Follow thou thy star, thou
+shalt not fail of a glorious heaven!' The labour of writing, we find,
+and indeed could know otherwise, was great and painful for him; he
+says, This Book, 'which has made me lean for many years.' Ah yes, it
+was won, all of it, with pain and sore toil,--not in sport, but in
+grim earnest. His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has been
+written, in many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his whole
+history, this Book. He died after finishing it; not yet very old, at
+the age of fifty-six;--broken-hearted rather, as is said. He lies
+buried in his death-city Ravenna: _Hic claudor Dantes patriis extorris
+ab oris_. The Florentines begged back his body, in a century after;
+the Ravenna people would not give it. 'Here am I Dante laid, shut out
+from my native shores.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it 'a mystic
+unfathomable Song'; and such is literally the character of it.
+Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a
+sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words,
+there is something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and
+soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song:
+we said before, it was the Heroic of Speech! All _old_ Poems, Homer's
+and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness,
+that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not _sung_ is properly no
+Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,--to the great
+injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most
+part! What we want to get at is the _thought_ the man had, if he had
+any: why should he twist it into jingle, if he _could_ speak it out
+plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion
+of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark,
+become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, that
+we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, and
+listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,--whose speech _is_ Song.
+Pretenders to this are many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is
+for most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business,
+that of reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be
+rhymed;--it ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what it
+was aiming at. I would advise all men who _can_ speak their thought,
+not to sing it; to understand that, in a serious time, among serious
+men, there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as we love
+the true song, and are charmed by it as by something divine, so shall
+we hate the false song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing
+hollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere and offensive thing.
+
+I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his _Divine Comedy_ that
+it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there
+is a _canto fermo_; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his
+simple _terza rima_, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along
+naturally with a sort of _lilt_. But I add, that it could not be
+otherwise; for the essence and material of the work are themselves
+rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes it
+musical;--go _deep_ enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward
+symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it,
+proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the
+character of music. The three kingdoms, _Inferno_, _Purgatorio_,
+_Paradiso_, look out on one another like compartments of a great
+edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern,
+solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the
+_sincerest_ of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the
+measure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts;
+and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people
+of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, '_Eccovi l'
+uom ch' � stato all' Inferno_, See, there is the man that was in
+Hell!' Ah, yes, he had been in Hell;--in Hell enough, in long severe
+sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been.
+Commedias that come-out _divine_ are not accomplished otherwise.
+Thought, true labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the
+daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;--true _effort_,
+in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought.
+In all ways we are 'to become perfect through _suffering_.'--But, as I
+say, no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has
+all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made
+him 'lean' for many years. Not the general whole only; every
+compartment of it is worked-out, with intense earnestness, into truth,
+into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each fits in its
+place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the
+soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the Middle Ages, rendered for
+ever rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense one:
+but a task which is _done_.
+
+Perhaps one would say, _intensity_, with the much that depends on it,
+is the prevailing character of Dante's genius. Dante does not come
+before us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and even
+sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but
+partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses,
+concentered itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great
+not because he is world-wide, but because he is world-deep. Through
+all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know
+nothing so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with the
+outermost development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has
+a great power of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents
+that and nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the
+Hall of Dite: _red_ pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glowing through the
+dim immensity of gloom;--so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and
+for ever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante. There is a
+brevity, an abrupt precision in him: Tacitus is not briefer, more
+condensed; and then in Dante it seems a natural condensation,
+spontaneous to the man. One smiting word; and then there is silence,
+nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than words. It is
+strange with what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the true likeness
+of a matter: cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the
+blustering giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke; it is 'as the sails
+sink, the mast being suddenly broken'. Or that poor Sordello, with the
+_cotto aspetto_, 'face _baked_', parched brown and lean; and the
+'fiery snow' that falls on them there, a 'fiery snow without wind',
+slow, deliberate, never-ending! Or the lids of those Tombs; square
+sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each with its Soul in
+torment; the lids laid open there; they are to be shut at the Day of
+Judgement, through Eternity. And how Farinata rises; and how
+Cavalcante falls--at hearing of his Son, and the past tense '_fue_!'
+The very movements in Dante have something brief; swift, decisive,
+almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius this sort
+of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent,
+passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent 'pale rages',
+speaks itself in these things.
+
+For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a
+man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is
+physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a
+likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of
+doing it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could
+not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it,
+unless he had, what we may call, _sympathized_ with it,--had sympathy
+in him to bestow on objects. He must have been _sincere_ about it too;
+sincere and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the
+likeness of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and
+trivial hearsay, about all objects. And indeed may we not say that
+intellect altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning what
+an object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may have will come
+out here. Is it even of business, a matter to be done? The gifted man
+is he who _sees_ the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as
+surplusage: it is his faculty too, the man of business's faculty, that
+he discern the true _likeness_, not the false superficial one, of the
+thing he has got to work in. And how much of _morality_ is in the kind
+of insight we get of anything; 'the eye seeing in all things what it
+brought with it the faculty of seeing!' To the mean eye all things are
+trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael,
+the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No
+most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the
+commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with
+him.
+
+Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness
+as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is everyway
+noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what
+qualities in that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of
+eternal black. A small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into
+our very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too: _della bella
+persona, che mi fu tolta_; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a
+solace that _he_ will never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these
+_alti guai_. And the racking winds, in that _aer bruno_, whirl them
+away again, to wail for ever!--Strange to think: Dante was the friend
+of this poor Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon
+the Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet
+also infinite rigour of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante
+discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his
+_Divine Comedy's_ being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel;
+putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth! I
+suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was in the heart of any
+man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity
+either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic,--sentimentality, or
+little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of
+Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like
+the wail of Aeolean harps, soft, soft; like a child's young
+heart;--and then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of
+his towards his Beatrice; their meeting together in the _Paradiso_;
+his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes, her that had been purified
+by death so long, separated from him so far:--one likens it to the
+gong of angels; it is among the purest utterances of affection,
+perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human soul.
+
+For the _intense_ Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the
+essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too
+as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity.
+Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of
+all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;--as indeed,
+what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love? '_A Dio
+spiacenti, ed a' nemici sui_, Hateful to God and to the enemies of
+God:' lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; '_Non
+ragionam di lor_, We will not speak of _them_, look only and pass.' Or
+think of this: 'They have not the _hope_ to die, _Non han speranza di
+morte_.' One day, it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of
+Dante, that he, wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full
+surely _die_; 'that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die.'
+Such words are in this man. For rigour, earnestness and depth, he is
+not to be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his parallel we must
+go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets there.
+
+I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the
+_Inferno_ to the two other parts of the Divine _Commedia_. Such
+preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and
+is like to be a transient feeling. The _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_,
+especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellent
+than it. It is a noble thing that _Purgatorio_, 'Mountain of
+Purification'; an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If Sin
+is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in
+Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act.
+It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The _tremolar dell' onde_,
+that 'trembling' of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of
+morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an
+altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company
+still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of daemons and reprobate
+is under foot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher,
+to the Throne of Mercy itself. 'Pray for me,' the denizens of that
+Mount of Pain all say to him. 'Tell my Giovanna to pray for me,' my
+daughter Giovanna; 'I think her mother loves me no more!' They toil
+painfully up by that winding steep, 'bent-down like corbels of a
+building,' some of them,--crushed together so 'for the sin of pride';
+yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons, they shall have reached
+the top, which is Heaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted
+in. The joy too of all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain
+shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises, when one soul has
+perfected repentance, and got its sin and misery left behind! I call
+all this a noble embodiment of a true noble thought.
+
+But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are
+indispensable to one another. The _Paradiso_, a kind of inarticulate
+music to me, is the redeeming side of the _Inferno_; the _Inferno_
+without it were untrue. All three make up the true Unseen World, as
+figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing for ever
+memorable, for ever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was
+perhaps delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as in
+this of Dante's; a man _sent_ to sing it, to keep it long memorable.
+Very notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of the every-day
+reality, into the Invisible one; and in the second or third stanza, we
+find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among
+things palpable, indubitable! To Dante they _were_ so; the real world,
+as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely
+higher Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as _preter_natural as
+the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit, but
+is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes
+it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say
+again, is the saving merit, now as always.
+
+Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic
+representation of his Belief about this Universe:--some Critic in a
+future age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased
+altogether to think as Dante did, may find this too all an 'Allegory',
+perhaps an idle Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of
+the soul of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge world-wide
+architectural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to
+be the two polar elements of this Creation, on which it all turns;
+that these two differ not by _preferability_ of one to the other, but
+by incompatibility absolute and infinite; that the one is excellent
+and high as light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehenna and
+the Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence, with
+everlasting Pity,--all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle Ages had
+it, is emblemed there. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged the other day,
+with what entire truth of purpose; how unconscious of any embleming!
+Hell, Purgatory, Paradise: these things were not fashioned as emblems;
+was there, in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of their
+being emblems! Were they not indubitable awful facts; the whole heart
+of man taking them for practically true, all Nature everywhere
+confirming them? So is it always in these things. Men do not believe
+an Allegory. The future Critic, whatever his new thought may be, who
+considers this of Dante to have been all got-up as an Allegory, will
+commit one sore mistake!--Paganism we recognized as a veracious
+expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards the
+Universe; veracious, true once, and still not without worth for us.
+But mark here the difference of Paganism and Christianism; one great
+difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the
+destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in
+this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law
+of Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a rude helpless utterance of
+the _first_ Thought of men,--the chief recognized virtue, Courage,
+Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, but
+for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect only!--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in a very
+strange way, found a voice. The _Divina Commedia_ is of Dante's
+writing; yet in truth _it_ belongs to ten Christian centuries, only
+the finishing of it is Dante's. So always. The craftsman there, the
+smith with that metal of his, with these tools, with these cunning
+methods,--how little of all he does is properly _his_ work! All past
+inventive men work there with him;--as indeed with all of us, in all
+things. Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the Thought they
+lived by stands here, in everlasting music. These sublime ideas of
+his, terrible and beautiful, are the fruit of the Christian Meditation
+of all the good men who had gone before him. Precious they; but also
+is not he precious? Much, had not he spoken, would have been dumb; not
+dead, yet living voiceless.
+
+On the whole, is it not an utterance, this mystic Song, at once of one
+of the greatest human souls, and of the highest thing that Europe had
+hitherto realized for itself? Christianism, as Dante sings it, is
+another than Paganism in the rude Norse mind; another than 'Bastard
+Christianism' half articulately spoken in the Arab desert, seven
+hundred years before!--The noblest _idea_ made _real_ hitherto among
+men, is sung, and emblemed forth abidingly, by one of the noblest men.
+In the one sense and in the other, are we not right glad to possess
+it? As I calculate, it may last yet for long thousands of years. For
+the thing that is uttered from the inmost parts of a man's soul,
+differs altogether from what is uttered by the outer part. The outer
+is of the day, under the empire of mode; the outer passes away, in
+swift endless changes; the inmost is the same yesterday, to-day, and
+for ever. True souls, in all generations of the world, who look on
+this Dante, will find a brotherhood in him; the deep sincerity of his
+thoughts, his woes and hopes, will speak likewise to their sincerity;
+they will feel that this Dante too was a brother. Napoleon in
+Saint-Helena is charmed with the genial veracity of old Homer. The
+oldest Hebrew Prophet, under a vesture the most diverse from ours,
+does yet, because he speaks from the heart of man, speak to all men's
+hearts. It is the one sole secret of continuing long memorable. Dante,
+for depth of sincerity, is like an antique Prophet too; his words,
+like theirs, come from his very heart. One need not wonder if it were
+predicted that his Poem might be the most enduring thing our Europe
+has yet made; for nothing so endures as a truly spoken word. All
+cathedrals, pontificalities, brass and stone, and outer arrangement
+never so lasting, are brief in comparison to an unfathomable
+heart-song like this: one feels as if it might survive, still of
+importance to men, when these had all sunk into new irrecognizable
+combinations, and had ceased individually to be. Europe has made much;
+great cities, great empires, encyclopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion
+and practice: but it has made little of the class of Dante's Thought.
+Homer yet _is_, veritably present face to face with every open soul of
+us; and Greece, where is _it_? Desolate for thousands of years; away,
+vanished; a bewildered heap of stones and rubbish, the life and
+existence of it all gone. Like a dream; like the dust of King
+Agamemnon! Greece was; Greece, except in the _words_ it spoke, is not.
+
+The uses of this Dante? We will not say much about his 'uses'. A human
+soul who has once got into that primal element of _Song_, and sung
+forth fitly somewhat therefrom, has worked in the _depths_ of our
+existence; feeding through long times the life-_roots_ of all
+excellent human things whatsoever,--in a way that 'utilities' will not
+succeed well in calculating! We will not estimate the Sun by the
+quantity of gas-light it saves us; Dante shall be invaluable, or of no
+value. One remark I may make: the contrast in this respect between the
+Hero-Poet and the Hero-Prophet. In a hundred years, Mahomet, as we
+saw, had his Arabians at Grenada and at Delhi; Dante's Italians seem
+to be yet very much where they were. Shall we say, then, Dante's
+effect on the world was small in comparison? Not so: his arena is far
+more restricted; but also it is far nobler, clearer;--perhaps not less
+but more important. Mahomet speaks to great masses of men, in the
+coarse dialect adapted to such; a dialect filled with inconsistencies,
+crudities, follies: on the great masses alone can he act, and there
+with good and with evil strangely blended. Dante speaks to the noble,
+the pure and great, in all times and places. Neither does he grow
+obsolete, as the other does. Dante burns as a pure star, fixed there
+in the firmament, at which the great and the high of all ages kindle
+themselves: he is the possession of all the chosen of the world for
+uncounted time. Dante, one calculates, may long survive Mahomet. In
+this way the balance may be made straight again.
+
+But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on the
+world by what _we_ can judge of their effect there, that a man and his
+work are measured. Effect? Influence? Utility? Let a man _do_ his
+work; the fruit of it is the care of Another than he. It will grow its
+own fruit; and whether embodied in Caliph Thrones and Arabian
+Conquests, so that it 'fills all Morning and Evening Newspapers', and
+all Histories, which are a kind of distilled Newspapers; or not
+embodied so at all;--what matters that? That is not the real fruit of
+it! The Arabian Caliph, in so far only as he did something, was
+something. If the great Cause of Man, and Man's work in God's Earth,
+got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph, then no matter how many
+scimitars he drew, how many gold piastres pocketed, and what uproar
+and blaring he made in this world,--_he_ was but a loud-sounding
+inanity and futility; at bottom, he _was_ not at all. Let us honour
+the great empire of _Silence_, once more! The boundless treasury which
+we do _not_ jingle in our pockets, or count up and present before men!
+It is perhaps, of all things, the usefulest for each of us to do, in
+these loud times.-- --
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically
+the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe,
+its Inner Life; so Shakespeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer
+Life of our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies,
+humours, ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at
+the world, men then had. As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece;
+so in Shakespeare and Dante, after thousands of years, what our Modern
+Europe was, in Faith and in Practice, will still be legible. Dante has
+given us the Faith or soul; Shakespeare, in a not less noble way, has
+given us the Practice or body. This latter also we were to have; a man
+was sent for it, the man Shakespeare. Just when that chivalry way of
+life had reached its last finish, and was on the point of breaking
+down into slow or swift dissolution, as we now see it everywhere, this
+other sovereign Poet, with his seeing eye, with his perennial singing
+voice, was sent to take note of it, to give long-enduring record of
+it. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce as the central fire of the world;
+Shakespeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as the Sun, the upper light of
+the world. Italy produced the one world-voice; we English had the
+honour of producing the other.
+
+Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man came to us.
+I think always, so great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is this
+Shakespeare, had the Warwickshire Squire not prosecuted him for
+deer-stealing, we had perhaps never heard of him as a Poet! The woods
+and skies, the rustic Life of Man in Stratford there, had been enough
+for this man! But indeed that strange outbudding of our whole English
+Existence, which we call the Elizabethan Era, did not it too come as
+of its own accord? The 'Tree Igdrasil' buds and withers by its own
+laws,--too deep for our scanning. Yet it does bud and wither, and
+every bough and leaf of it is there, by fixed eternal laws; not a Sir
+Thomas Lucy but comes at the hour fit for him. Curious, I say, and not
+sufficiently considered: how everything does co-operate with all; not
+a leaf rotting on the highway but is indissoluble portion of solar and
+stellar systems; no thought, word or act of man but has sprung withal
+out of all men, and works sooner or later, recognizably or
+irrecognizably, on all men! It is all a Tree: circulation of sap and
+influences, mutual communication of every minutest leaf with the
+lowest talon of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portion
+of the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the
+Kingdoms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread the highest
+Heaven!--
+
+In some sense it may be said that this glorious Elizabethan Era with
+its Shakespeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had
+preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle
+Ages. The Christian Faith, which was the theme of Dante's Song, had
+produced this Practical Life which Shakespeare was to sing. For
+Religion then, as it now and always is, was the soul of Practice; the
+primary vital fact in men's life. And remark here, as rather curious,
+that Middle-Age Catholicism was abolished, so far as Acts of
+Parliament could abolish it, before Shakespeare, the noblest product
+of it, made his appearance. He did make his appearance nevertheless.
+Nature at her own time, with Catholicism or what else might be
+necessary, sent him forth; taking small thought of Acts of Parliament.
+King-Henrys, Queen-Elizabeths go their way; and Nature too goes hers.
+Acts of Parliament, on the whole, are small, notwithstanding the noise
+they make. What Act of Parliament, debate at St. Stephens, on the
+hustings or elsewhere, was it that brought this Shakespeare into
+being? No dining at Freemasons' Tavern, opening subscription-lists,
+selling of shares, and infinite other jangling and true or false
+endeavouring! This Elizabethan Era, and all its nobleness and
+blessedness, came without proclamation, preparation of ours. Priceless
+Shakespeare was the free gift of Nature; given altogether
+silently;--received altogether silently, as if it had been a thing of
+little account. And yet, very literally, it is a priceless thing. One
+should look at that side of matters too.
+
+Of this Shakespeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a
+little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the
+best judgement not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is
+slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakespeare is the chief of
+all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world,
+has left record of himself in the way of literature. On the whole, I
+know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take
+all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth;
+placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so
+true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea! It has been said,
+that in the constructing of Shakespeare's Dramas there is, apart from
+all other 'faculties' as they are called, an understanding manifested,
+equal to that in Bacon's _Novum Organum_. That is true; and it is not
+a truth that strikes every one. It would become more apparent if we
+tried, any of us for himself, how, out of Shakespeare's dramatic
+materials, _we_ could fashion such a result! The built house seems all
+so fit,--everyway as it should be, as if it came there by its own law
+and the nature of things,--we forget the rude disorderly quarry it was
+shaped from. The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself
+had made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more perfect than any
+other man, we may call Shakespeare in this: he discerns, knows as by
+instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are, what
+his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory
+glance of insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illumination of
+the whole matter; it is a calmly _seeing_ eye; a great intellect, in
+short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will
+construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will
+give of it,--is the best measure you could get of what intellect is
+in the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent;
+which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true
+_beginning_, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task
+the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must _understand_
+the thing; according to the depth of his understanding, will the
+fitness of his answer be. You will try him so. Does like join itself
+to like; does the spirit of method stir in that confusion, so that its
+embroilment becomes order? Can the man say, _Fiat lux_, Let there be
+light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there, is _light_
+in himself, will he accomplish this.
+
+Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting,
+delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is
+great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is
+unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare.
+The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its
+inmost heart and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light
+before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative,
+we said: poetic creation, what is this too but _seeing_ the thing
+sufficiently? The _word_ that will describe the thing, follows of
+itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not
+Shakespeare's _morality_, his valour, candour, tolerance,
+truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can
+triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world!
+No _twisted_, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with
+its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly _level_ mirror;--that
+is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related to
+all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how
+this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an
+Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their
+round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. _Novum
+Organum_, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite
+secondary order; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. Among
+modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank.
+Goethe alone, since the days of Shakespeare, reminds me of it. Of him
+too you say that he _saw_ the object; you may say what he himself says
+of Shakespeare: 'His characters are like watches with dial-plates of
+transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the
+inward mechanism also is all visible.'
+
+The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things;
+what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in these
+often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye
+that something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? You
+can laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way or
+other genially relate yourself to them;--you can, at lowest, hold your
+peace about them, turn away your own and others' face from them, till
+the hour come for practically exterminating and extinguishing them! At
+bottom, it is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have
+intellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word; or
+failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write at
+all; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on
+accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents,--perhaps on
+his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his
+boyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart
+of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for what soever exists
+has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and
+exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of
+Nature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort
+soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, _See_. If
+you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together,
+jingling sensibilities against each other, and _name_ yourself a Poet;
+there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in
+action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old
+Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, 'But are
+ye sure he's _not a dunce_?' Why, really one might ask the same thing,
+in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider
+it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he's not a dunce? There is,
+in this world, no other entirely fatal person.
+
+For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a
+correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakespeare's faculty,
+I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all
+under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they
+were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect,
+imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a
+capital error. Then again, we hear of a man's 'intellectual nature',
+and of his 'moral nature', as if these again were divisible, and
+existed apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms
+of utterance; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to
+speak at all. But words ought not to harden into things for us. It
+seems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part,
+radically falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep for
+ever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but _names_; that
+man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is
+essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy,
+understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same
+Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other,
+physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know
+all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man,
+what is this but another _side_ of the one vital Force whereby he is
+and works? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see
+how a man would fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or
+want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he
+has formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes. He is _one_; and
+preaches the same Self abroad in all these ways.
+
+Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but,
+consider it,--without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a
+thoroughly immoral _man_ could not know anything at all! To know a
+thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first _love_ the thing,
+sympathize with it: that is, be _virtuously_ related to it. If he have
+not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the
+courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he
+know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge.
+Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the
+pusillanimous for ever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is
+mean, superficial, small; for the uses of the day merely.--But does
+not the very Fox know something of Nature? Exactly so: it knows where
+the geese lodge! The human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in the
+world, what more does he know but this and the like of this? Nay, it
+should be considered too, that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine
+_morality_, he could not even know where the geese were, or get at the
+geese! If he spent his time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his
+own misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so
+forth; and had not courage, promptitude, practicality, and other
+suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he would catch no geese. We may say
+of the Fox too, that his morality and insight are of the same
+dimensions; different faces of the same internal unity of vulpine
+life!--These things are worth stating; for the contrary of them acts
+with manifold very baleful perversion, in this time: what limitations,
+modifications they require, your own candour will supply.
+
+If I say, therefore, that Shakespeare is the greatest of Intellects, I
+have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's
+intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious
+intellect; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of.
+Novalis beautifully remarks of him, that those Dramas of his are
+Products of Nature too, deep as Nature herself. I find a great truth
+in this saying. Shakespeare's Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth
+of it is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows up from the
+deeps of Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of
+Nature. The latest generations of men will find new meanings in
+Shakespeare, new elucidations of their own human being; 'new harmonies
+with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later
+ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man.' This
+well deserves meditating. It is Nature's highest award to a true
+simple great soul, that he get thus to be _a part of herself_. Such a
+man's works, whatsoever he with utmost conscious exertion and
+forethought shall accomplish, grow up withal _un_consciously, from the
+unknown deeps in him;--as the oak-tree grows from the Earth's bosom,
+as the mountains and waters shape themselves; with a symmetry grounded
+on Nature's own laws, conformable to all Truth whatsoever. How much in
+Shakespeare lies hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles known to
+himself; much that was not known at all, not speakable at all: like
+_roots_, like sap and forces working underground! Speech is great; but
+Silence is greater.
+
+Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I will not
+blame Dante for his misery: it is as battle without victory; but true
+battle,--the first, indispensable thing. Yet I call Shakespeare
+greater than Dante, in that he fought truly, and did conquer. Doubt it
+not, he had his own sorrows: those _Sonnets_ of his will even testify
+expressly in what deep waters he had waded, and swum struggling for
+his life;--as what man like him ever failed to have to do? It seems to
+me a heedless notion, our common one, that he sat like a bird on the
+bough; and sang forth, free and offhand, never knowing the troubles of
+other men. Not so; with no man is it so. How could a man travel
+forward from rustic deer-poaching to such tragedy-writing, and not
+fall in with sorrows by the way? Or, still better, how could a man
+delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth, so many suffering heroic
+hearts, if his own heroic heart had never suffered?--And now, in
+contrast with all this, observe his mirthfulness, his genuine
+overflowing love of laughter! You would say, in no point does he
+_exaggerate_ but only in laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that
+pierce and burn, are to be found in Shakespeare; yet he is always in
+measure here; never what Johnson would remark as a specially 'good
+hater'. But his laughter seems to pour from him in floods; he heaps
+all manner of ridiculous nicknames on the butt he is bantering,
+tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of horse-play; you would say,
+roars and laughs. And then, if not always the finest, it is always a
+genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No
+man who _can_ laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these
+things. It is some poor character only _desiring_ to laugh, and have
+the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy; good
+laughter is not 'the crackling of thorns under the pot'. Even at
+stupidity and pretension this Shakespeare does not laugh otherwise
+than genially. Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts; and we
+dismiss them covered with explosions of laughter: but we like the poor
+fellows only the better for our laughing; and hope they will get on
+well there, and continue Presidents of the City-watch.--Such laughter,
+like sunshine on the deep sea, is very beautiful to me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have no room to speak of Shakespeare's individual works; though
+perhaps there is much still waiting to be said on that head. Had we,
+for instance, all his plays reviewed as _Hamlet_, in _Wilhelm
+Meister_, is! A thing which might, one day, be done. August Wilhelm
+Schlegel has a remark on his Historical Plays, _Henry Fifth_ and the
+others, which is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of National
+Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, said, he knew no English History but
+what he had learned from Shakespeare. There are really, if we look to
+it, few as memorable Histories. The great salient points are admirably
+seized; all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence; it
+is, as Schlegel says, _epic_;--as indeed all delineation by a great
+thinker will be. There are right beautiful things in those Pieces,
+which indeed together form one beautiful thing. That battle of
+Agincourt strikes me as one of the most perfect things, in its sort,
+we anywhere have of Shakespeare's. The description of the two hosts:
+the worn-out, jaded English; the dread hour, big with destiny, when
+the battle shall begin; and then that deathless valour: 'Ye good
+yeomen, whose limbs were made in England!' There is a noble Patriotism
+in it,--far other than the 'indifference' you sometimes hear ascribed
+to Shakespeare. A true English heart breathes, calm and strong,
+through the whole business; not boisterous, protrusive; all the better
+for that. There is a sound in it like the ring of steel. This man too
+had a right stroke in him, had it come to that!
+
+But I will say, of Shakespeare's works generally, that we have no full
+impress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His works
+are so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that
+was in him. All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory,
+imperfect, written under cramping circumstances; giving only here and
+there a note of the full utterance of the man. Passages there are that
+come upon you like splendour out of Heaven; bursts of radiance,
+illuminating the very heart of the thing: you say, 'That is _true_,
+spoken once and forever; wheresoever and whensoever there is an open
+human soul, that will be recognized as true!' Such bursts, however,
+make us feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant; that it is,
+in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakespeare had to write for
+the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could,
+into that and no other mould. It was with him, then, as it is with us
+all. No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his
+own free Thought before us; but his Thought as he could translate it
+into the stone that was given, with the tools that were given.
+_Disjecta membra_ are all that we find of any Poet, or of any man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakespeare may recognize that he
+too was a _Prophet_, in his way; of an insight analogous to the
+Prophetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to
+this man also divine; _un_speakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven:
+'We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!' That scroll in Westminster
+Abbey, which few read with understanding, is of the depth of any Seer.
+But the man sang; did not preach, except musically. We called Dante
+the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism. May we not call
+Shakespeare the still more melodious Priest of a _true_ Catholicism,
+the 'Universal Church' of the Future and of all times? No narrow
+superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or
+perversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousandfold
+hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let all men
+worship as they can! We may say without offence, that there rises a
+kind of universal Psalm out of this Shakespeare too; not unfit to make
+itself heard among the still more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony
+with these, if we understood them, but in unison!--I cannot call this
+Shakespeare a 'Sceptic', as some do; his indifference to the creeds
+and theological quarrels of his time misleading them. No: neither
+unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism; no sceptic,
+though he says little about his Faith. Such 'indifference' was the
+fruit of his greatness withal: his whole heart was in his own grand
+sphere of worship (we may call it such); these other controversies,
+vitally important to other men, were not vital to him.
+
+But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right glorious
+thing and set of things, this that Shakespeare has brought us? For
+myself, I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the fact
+of such a man being sent into this Earth. Is he not an eye to us all;
+a blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light?--And, at bottom, was it not
+perhaps far better that this Shakespeare, everyway an unconscious man,
+was _conscious_ of no Heavenly message? He did not feel, like Mahomet,
+because he saw into those internal Splendours, that he specially was
+the 'Prophet of God': and was he not greater than Mahomet in that?
+Greater; and also, if we compute strictly, as we did in Dante's case,
+more successful. It was intrinsically an error that notion of
+Mahomet's, of his supreme Prophethood; and has come down to us
+inextricably involved in error to this day; dragging along with it
+such a coil of fables, impurities, intolerances, as makes it a
+questionable step for me here and now to say, as I have done, that
+Mahomet was a true Speaker at all, and not rather an ambitious
+charlatan, perversity, and simulacrum, no Speaker, but a Babbler! Even
+in Arabia, as I compute, Mahomet will have exhausted himself and
+become obsolete, while this Shakespeare, this Dante may still be
+young;--while this Shakespeare may still pretend to be a Priest of
+Mankind, of Arabia as of other places, for unlimited periods to come!
+Compared with any speaker or singer one knows, even with Aeschylus or
+Homer, why should he not, for veracity and universality, last like
+them? He is _sincere_ as they; reaches deep down like them, to the
+universal and perennial. But as for Mahomet, I think it had been
+better for him _not_ to be so conscious! Alas, poor Mahomet; all that
+he was _conscious_ of was a mere error; a futility and triviality,--as
+indeed such ever is. The truly great in him too was the unconscious:
+that he was a wild Arab lion of the desert, and did speak out with
+that great thunder-voice of his, not by words which he _thought_ to be
+great, but by actions, by feelings, by a history which _were_ great!
+His Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity; we do not
+believe, like him, that God wrote that! The Great Man here too, as
+always, is a Force of Nature: whatsoever is truly great in him springs
+up from the _in_articulate deeps.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of
+a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of
+Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many
+thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account
+him a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;--on which point there
+were much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite of
+the sad state Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this Shakespeare
+has actually become among us. Which Englishman we ever made, in this
+land of ours, which million of Englishmen, would we not give up rather
+than the Stratford Peasant? There is no regiment of highest
+Dignitaries that we would sell him for. He is the grandest thing we
+have yet done. For our honour among foreign nations, as an ornament to
+our English Household, what item is there that we would not surrender
+rather than him? Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give up your
+Indian Empire or your Shakespeare, you English; never have had any
+Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakespeare? Really it were a
+grave question. Official persons would answer doubtless in official
+language; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer:
+Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakespeare!
+Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare
+does not go, he lasts for ever with us; we cannot give up our
+Shakespeare!
+
+Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely as a real,
+marketable, tangibly-useful possession. England, before long, this
+Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in
+America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there
+will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what
+is it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so
+that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike
+intercourse, helping one another? This is justly regarded as the
+greatest practical problem, the thing all manner of sovereignties and
+governments are here to accomplish: what is it that will accomplish
+this? Acts of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot.
+America is parted from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call it
+not fantastic, for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is an
+English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of
+Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakespeare, does not he shine,
+in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet
+strongest of rallying-signs; _in_destructible; really more valuable in
+that point of view, than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We
+can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a
+thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever,
+under what sort of Parish-Constable soever, English men and women are,
+they will say to one another: 'Yes, this Shakespeare is ours: we
+produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind
+with him.' The most common-sense politician, too, if he pleases, may
+think of that.
+
+Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate
+voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the
+heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered,
+scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity
+at all; yet the noble Italy is actually _one_: Italy produced its
+Dante: Italy can speak! The Czar of all the Russias, he is strong,
+with so many bayonets, Cossacks, and cannons: and does a great feat in
+keeping such a tract of Earth politically together; but he cannot yet
+speak. Something great in him, but it is a dumb greatness. He has had
+no voice of genius, to be heard of all men and times. He must learn to
+speak. He is a great dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and Cossacks
+will all have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante's voice is still
+audible. The Nation that has a Dante is bound together as no dumb
+Russia can be.--We must here end what we had to say of the
+_Hero-Poet_.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT
+
+1784-1859
+
+AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION
+
+WHAT IS POETRY? (1844)
+
+
+Poetry, strictly and artistically so called, that is to say,
+considered not merely as poetic feeling, which is more or less shared
+by all the world, but as the operation of that feeling, such as we see
+it in the poet's book, is the utterance of a passion for truth,
+beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by
+imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of
+variety in uniformity. Its means are whatever the universe contains;
+and its ends, pleasure and exaltation. Poetry stands between nature
+and convention, keeping alive among us the enjoyment of the external
+and the spiritual world: it has constituted the most enduring fame of
+nations; and, next to Love and Beauty, which are its parents, is the
+greatest proof to man of the pleasure to be found in all things, and
+of the probable riches of infinitude.
+
+Poetry is a passion,[25] because it seeks the deepest impressions; and
+because it must undergo, in order to convey, them.
+
+    [25] _Passio_, suffering in a good sense,--ardent subjection
+    of one's-self to emotion.
+
+It is a passion for truth, because without truth the impression would
+be false or defective.
+
+It is a passion for beauty, because its office is to exalt and refine
+by means of pleasure, and because beauty is nothing but the loveliest
+form of pleasure.
+
+It is a passion for power, because power is impression triumphant,
+whether over the poet, as desired by himself, or over the reader, as
+affected by the poet.
+
+It embodies and illustrates its impressions by imagination, or images
+of the objects of which it treats, and other images brought in to
+throw light on those objects, in order that it may enjoy and impart
+the feeling of their truth in its utmost conviction and affluence.
+
+It illustrates them by fancy, which is a lighter play of imagination,
+or the feeling of analogy coming short of seriousness, in order that
+it may laugh with what it loves, and show how it can decorate it with
+fairy ornament.
+
+It modulates what it utters, because in running the whole round of
+beauty it must needs include beauty of sound; and because, in the
+height of its enjoyment, it must show the perfection of its triumph,
+and make difficulty itself become part of its facility and joy.
+
+And lastly, Poetry shapes this modulation into uniformity for its
+outline, and variety for its parts, because it thus realizes the last
+idea of beauty itself, which includes the charm of diversity within
+the flowing round of habit and ease.
+
+Poetry is imaginative passion. The quickest and subtlest test of the
+possession of its essence is in expression; the variety of things to
+be expressed shows the amount of its resources; and the continuity of
+the song completes the evidence of its strength and greatness. He who
+has thought, feeling, expression, imagination, action, character, and
+continuity, all in the largest amount and highest degree, is the
+greatest poet.
+
+Poetry includes whatsoever of painting can be made visible to the
+mind's eye, and whatsoever of music can be conveyed by sound and
+proportion without singing or instrumentation. But it far surpasses
+those divine arts in suggestiveness, range, and intellectual
+wealth;--the first, in expression of thought, combination of images,
+and the triumph over space and time; the second, in all that can be
+done by speech, apart from the tones and modulations of pure sound.
+Painting and music, however, include all those portions of the gift of
+poetry that can be expressed and heightened by the visible and
+melodious. Painting, in a certain apparent manner, is things
+themselves; music, in a certain audible manner, is their very emotion
+and grace. Music and painting are proud to be related to poetry, and
+poetry loves and is proud of them.
+
+Poetry begins where matter of fact or of science ceases to be merely
+such, and to exhibit a further truth; that is to say, the connexion it
+has with the world of emotion, and its power to produce imaginative
+pleasure. Inquiring of a gardener, for instance, what flower it is we
+see yonder, he answers, 'a lily'. This is matter of fact. The botanist
+pronounces it to be of the order of 'Hexandria Monogynia'. This is
+matter of science. It is the 'lady' of the garden, says Spenser; and
+here we begin to have a poetical sense of its fairness and grace. It
+is
+
+    The plant and flower of _light_,
+
+says Ben Jonson; and poetry then shows us the beauty of the flower in
+all its mystery and splendour.
+
+If it be asked, how we know perceptions like these to be true, the
+answer is, by the fact of their existence--by the consent and delight
+of poetic readers. And as feeling is the earliest teacher, and
+perception the only final proof, of things the most demonstrable by
+science, so the remotest imaginations of the poets may often be found
+to have the closest connexion with matter of fact; perhaps might
+always be so, if the subtlety of our perceptions were a match for the
+causes of them. Consider this image of Ben Jonson's--of a lily being
+the flower of light. Light, undecomposed, is white; and as the lily is
+white, and light is white, and whiteness itself is nothing _but_
+light, the two things, so far, are not merely similar, but identical.
+A poet might add, by an analogy drawn from the connexion of light and
+colour, that there is a 'golden dawn' issuing out of the white lily,
+in the rich yellow of the stamens. I have no desire to push this
+similarity farther than it may be worth. Enough has been stated to
+show that, in poetical as in other analogies, 'the same feet of
+Nature', as Bacon says, may be seen 'treading in different paths'; and
+that the most scornful, that is to say, dullest disciple of fact,
+should be cautious how he betrays the shallowness of his philosophy by
+discerning no poetry in its depths.
+
+But the poet is far from dealing only with these subtle and analogical
+truths. Truth of every kind belongs to him, provided it can bud into
+any kind of beauty, or is capable of being illustrated and impressed
+by the poetic faculty. Nay, the simplest truth is often so beautiful
+and impressive of itself, that one of the greatest proofs of his
+genius consists in his leaving it to stand alone, illustrated by
+nothing but the light of its own tears or smiles, its own wonder,
+might, or playfulness. Hence the complete effect of many a simple
+passage in our old English ballads and romances, and of the passionate
+sincerity in general of the greatest early poets, such as Homer and
+Chaucer, who flourished before the existence of a 'literary world',
+and were not perplexed by a heap of notions and opinions, or by doubts
+how emotion ought to be expressed. The greatest of their successors
+never write equally to the purpose, except when they can dismiss
+everything from their minds but the like simple truth. In the
+beautiful poem of _Sir Eger, Sir Graham and Sir Gray-Steel_ (see it in
+Ellis's _Specimens_, or Laing's _Early Metrical Tales_), a knight
+thinks himself disgraced in the eyes of his mistress:--
+
+    Sir Eger said, 'If it be so,
+    Then wot I well I must forgo
+    Love-liking, and manhood, all clean!'
+    _The water rush'd out of his een!_
+
+Sir Gray-Steel is killed:
+
+    Gray-Steel into his death thus thraws[26]
+    He _walters[27] and the grass up draws;_
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    _A little while then lay he still
+    (Friends that him saw, liked full ill)
+    And bled into his armour bright._
+
+    [26] throes?
+
+    [27] welters,--throws himself about.
+
+The abode of Chaucer's _Reeve_, or Steward, in the _Canterbury Tales_,
+is painted in two lines, which nobody ever wished longer:
+
+    His wonning[28] was full fair upon an heath,
+    With greeny trees yshadowed was his place.
+
+    [28] dwelling.
+
+Every one knows the words of Lear, 'most _matter-of-fact_, most
+melancholy.'
+
+            Pray, do not mock me;
+    I am a very foolish fond old man,
+    Fourscore and upwards:
+    Not an hour more, nor less; and, to deal plainly
+    I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
+
+It is thus, by exquisite pertinence, melody, and the implied power of
+writing with exuberance, if need be, that beauty and truth become
+identical in poetry, and that pleasure, or at the very worst, a balm
+in our tears, is drawn out of pain.
+
+It is a great and rare thing, and shows a lovely imagination, when the
+poet can write a commentary, as it were, of his own, on such sufficing
+passages of nature, and be thanked for the addition. There is an
+instance of this kind in Warner, an old Elizabethan poet, than which I
+know nothing sweeter in the world. He is speaking of Fair Rosamond,
+and of a blow given her by Queen Eleanor.
+
+    With that she dash'd her on the lips,
+      _So dy�d double red:
+    Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
+      Soft were those lips that bled._
+
+There are different kinds and degrees of imagination, some of them
+necessary to the formation of every true poet, and all of them
+possessed by the greatest. Perhaps they may be enumerated as
+follows:--First, that which presents to the mind any object or
+circumstance in every-day life; as when we imagine a man holding a
+sword, or looking out of a window;--Second, that which presents real,
+but not every-day circumstances; as King Alfred tending the loaves,
+or Sir Philip Sidney giving up the water to the dying soldier;--Third,
+that which combines character and events directly imitated from real
+life, with imitative realities of its own invention; as the probable
+parts of the histories of Priam and _Macbeth_, or what may be called
+natural fiction as distinguished from supernatural;--Fourth, that
+which conjures up things and events not to be found in nature; as
+Homer's gods, and Shakespeare's witches, enchanted horses and spears,
+Ariosto's hippogriff, &c.;--Fifth, that which, in order to illustrate
+or aggravate one image, introduces another; sometimes in simile, as
+when Homer compares Apollo descending in his wrath at noon-day to the
+coming of night-time: sometimes in metaphor, or simile comprised in a
+word, as in Milton's 'motes that _people_ the sunbeams'; sometimes in
+concentrating into a word the main history of any person or thing,
+past or even future, as in the 'starry Galileo' of Byron, and that
+ghastly foregone conclusion of the epithet 'murdered' applied to the
+yet living victim in Keats's story from Boccaccio,--
+
+    So the two brothers and their _murder'd_ man
+    Rode towards fair Florence;--
+
+sometimes in the attribution of a certain representative quality which
+makes one circumstance stand for others; as in Milton's grey-fly
+winding its '_sultry_ horn', which epithet contains the heat of a
+summer's day;--Sixth, that which reverses this process, and makes a
+variety of circumstances take colour from one, like nature seen with
+jaundiced or glad eyes, or under the influence of storm or sunshine;
+as when in _Lycidas_, or the Greek pastoral poets, the flowers and
+the flocks are made to sympathize with a man's death; or, in the
+Italian poet, the river flowing by the sleeping Angelica seems talking
+of love--
+
+    Parea che l'erba le fiorisse intorno,
+    _E d'amor ragionasse quella riva!_
+
+                    _Orlando Innamorato_, Canto iii.
+
+or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping Imogen by the very
+light in the chamber, and the reaction of her own beauty upon itself;
+or in the 'witch element' of the tragedy of _Macbeth_ and the May-day
+night of _Faust_;--Seventh, and last, that which by a single
+expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but
+surpasses in its effect the extremest force of the most particular
+description; as in that exquisite passage of Coleridge's _Christabel_,
+where the unsuspecting object of the witch's malignity is bidden to go
+to bed:
+
+    Quoth Christabel, So let it be!
+    And as the lady bade, did she.
+    Her gentle limbs did she undress,
+    _And lay down in her loveliness;--_
+
+a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music. The very
+smoothness and gentleness of the limbs is in the series of the letter
+_l's_.
+
+I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing that most lovely
+inclusion of physical beauty in moral, neither can I call to mind any
+instances of the imagination that turns accompaniments into
+accessories, superior to those I have alluded to. Of the class of
+comparison, one of the most touching (many a tear must it have drawn
+from parents and lovers) is in a stanza which has been copied into
+the _Friar of Orders Grey_, out of Beaumont and Fletcher:
+
+    Weep no more, lady, weep no more,
+      Thy sorrow is in vain;
+    _For violets pluck'd the sweetest showers
+      Will ne'er make grow again._
+
+And Shakespeare and Milton abound in the very grandest; such as
+Antony's likening his changing fortunes to the cloud-rack; Lear's
+appeal to the old age of the heavens; Satan's appearance in the
+horizon, like a fleet 'hanging in the clouds'; and the comparisons of
+him with the comet and the eclipse. Nor unworthy of this glorious
+company, for its extraordinary combination of delicacy and vastness,
+is that enchanting one of Shelley's in the _Adonais_:
+
+    Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
+    Stains the white radiance of eternity.
+
+I multiply these particulars in order to impress upon the reader's
+mind the great importance of imagination in all its phases, as a
+constituent part of the highest poetic faculty.
+
+The happiest instance I remember of imaginative metaphor, is
+Shakespeare's moonlight 'sleeping' on a bank; but half his poetry may
+be said to be made up of it, metaphor indeed being the common coin of
+discourse. Of imaginary creatures, none out of the pale of mythology
+and the East are equal, perhaps, in point of invention, to
+Shakespeare's Ariel and Caliban; though poetry may grudge to prose the
+discovery of a Winged Woman, especially such as she has been described
+by her inventor in the story of _Peter Wilkins_; and in point of
+treatment, the Mammon and Jealousy of Spenser, some of the monsters
+in Dante, particularly his Nimrod, his interchangements of creatures
+into one another, and (if I am not presumptuous in anticipating what I
+think will be the verdict of posterity) the Witch in Coleridge's
+_Christabel_, may rank even with the creations of Shakespeare. It may
+be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare had bile and nightmare enough
+in him to have thought of such detestable horrors as those of the
+interchanging adversaries (now serpent, now man), or even of the huge,
+half-blockish enormity of Nimrod,--in Scripture, the 'mighty hunter'
+and builder of the tower of Babel,--in Dante, a tower of a man in his
+own person, standing with some of his brother giants up to the middle
+in a pit in hell, blowing a horn to which a thunderclap is a whisper,
+and hallooing after Dante and his guide in the jargon of a lost
+tongue! The transformations are too odious to quote: but of the
+towering giant we cannot refuse ourselves the 'fearful joy' of a
+specimen. It was twilight, Dante tells us, and he and his guide Virgil
+were silently pacing through one of the dreariest regions of hell,
+when the sound of a tremendous horn made him turn all his attention to
+the spot from which it came. He there discovered through the dusk,
+what seemed to be the towers of a city. Those are no towers, said his
+guide; they are giants, standing up to the middle in one of these
+circular pits.
+
+    I look'd again; and as the eye makes out,
+    By little and little, what the mist conceal'd
+    In which, till clearing up, the sky was steep'd;
+    So, looming through the gross and darksome air,
+    As we drew nigh, those mighty bulks grew plain,
+    And error quitted me, and terror join'd:
+    For in like manner as all round its height
+    Montereggione crowns itself with towers,
+    So tower'd above the circuit of that pit,
+    Though but half out of it, and half within,
+    The horrible giants that fought Jove, and still
+    Are threaten'd when he thunders. As we near'd
+    The foremost, I discern'd his mighty face,
+    His shoulders, breast, and more than half his trunk,
+    With both the arms down hanging by the sides.
+    His face appear'd to me, in length and breadth,
+    Huge as St. Peter's pinnacle at Rome,
+    And of a like proportion all his bones.
+    He open'd, as we went, his dreadful mouth,
+    Fit for no sweeter psalmody; and shouted
+    After us, in the words of some strange tongue,
+    R�fel ma-�e amech zab�e almee!--
+    'Dull wretch!' my leader cried, 'keep to thine horn,
+    And so vent better whatsoever rage
+    Or other passion stuff thee. Feel thy throat
+    And find the chain upon thee, thou confusion!
+    Lo! what a hoop is clench'd about thy gorge.'
+    Then turning to myself, he said, 'His howl
+    Is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he
+    Through whose ill thought it was that humankind
+    Were tongue-confounded. Pass him, and say nought:
+    For as he speaketh language known of none,
+    So none can speak save jargon to himself.'
+
+                       _Inferno_, Canto xxxi, ver. 34.
+
+Assuredly it could not have been easy to find a fiction so uncouthly
+terrible as this in the hypochondria of Hamlet. Even his father had
+evidently seen no such ghost in the other world. All his phantoms were
+in the world he had left. Timon, Lear, Richard, Brutus, Prospero,
+Macbeth himself, none of Shakespeare's men had, in fact, any thought
+but of the earth they lived on, whatever supernatural fancy crossed
+them. The thing fancied was still a thing of this world, 'in its habit
+as it lived,' or no remoter acquaintance than a witch or a fairy. Its
+lowest depths (unless Dante suggested them) were the cellars under the
+stage. Caliban himself is a cross-breed between a witch and a clown.
+No offence to Shakespeare; who was not bound to be the greatest of
+healthy poets, and to have every morbid inspiration besides. What he
+might have done, had he set his wits to compete with Dante, I know
+not: all I know is, that in the infernal line he did nothing like him;
+and it is not to be wished he had. It is far better that, as a higher,
+more universal, and more beneficent variety of the genus Poet, he
+should have been the happier man he was, and left us the plump cheeks
+on his monument, instead of the carking visage of the great, but
+over-serious, and comparatively one-sided Florentine. Even the
+imagination of Spenser, whom we take to have been a 'nervous
+gentleman' compared with Shakespeare, was visited with no such dreams
+as Dante. Or, if it was, he did not choose to make himself thinner (as
+Dante says _he_ did) with dwelling upon them. He had twenty visions of
+nymphs and bowers, to one of the mud of Tartarus. Chaucer, for all he
+was 'a man of this world' as well as the poets' world, and as great,
+perhaps a greater enemy of oppression than Dante, besides being one of
+the profoundest masters of pathos that ever lived, had not the heart
+to conclude the story of the famished father and his children, as
+finished by the inexorable anti-Pisan. But enough of Dante in this
+place. Hobbes, in order to daunt the reader from objecting to his
+friend Davenant's want of invention, says of these fabulous creations
+in general, in his letter prefixed to the poem of _Gondibert_, that
+'impenetrable armours, enchanted castles, invulnerable bodies, iron
+men, flying horses, and a thousand other such things, are easily
+feigned by them that dare'. These are girds at Spenser and Ariosto.
+But, with leave of Hobbes (who translated Homer as if on purpose to
+show what execrable verses could be written by a philosopher),
+enchanted castles and flying horses are not easily feigned as Ariosto
+and Spenser feigned them; and that just makes all the difference. For
+proof, see the accounts of Spenser's enchanted castle in Book the
+Third, Canto Twelfth, of the _Faerie Queene_; and let the reader of
+Italian open the _Orlando Furioso_ at its first introduction of the
+Hippogriff (Canto iii, st. 4), where Bradamante, coming to an inn,
+hears a great noise, and sees all the people looking up at something
+in the air; upon which, looking up herself, she sees a knight in
+shining armour riding towards the sunset upon a creature with
+variegated wings, and then dipping and disappearing among the hills.
+Chaucer's steed of brass, that was
+
+    So horsly and so quick of eye,
+
+is copied from the life. You might pat him and feel his brazen
+muscles. Hobbes, in objecting to what he thought childish, made a
+childish mistake. His criticism is just such as a boy might pique
+himself upon, who was educated on mechanical principles, and thought
+he had outgrown his Goody Two-shoes. With a wonderful dimness of
+discernment in poetic matters, considering his acuteness in others, he
+fancies he has settled the question by pronouncing such creations
+'impossible'! To the brazier they are impossible, no doubt; but not to
+the poet. Their possibility, if the poet wills it, is to be conceded;
+the problem is, the creature being given, how to square its actions
+with probability, according to the nature assumed of it. Hobbes did
+not see, that the skill and beauty of these fictions lay in bringing
+them within those very regions of truth and likelihood in which he
+thought they could not exist. Hence the serpent Python of Chaucer,
+
+    _Sleeping against the sun upon a day,_
+
+when Apollo slew him. Hence the chariot-drawing dolphins of Spenser,
+softly swimming along the shore lest they should hurt themselves
+against the stones and gravel. Hence Shakespeare's Ariel, living under
+blossoms, and riding at evening on the bat; and his domestic namesake
+in the _Rape of the Lock_ (the imagination of the drawing-room) saving
+a lady's petticoat from the coffee with his plumes, and directing
+atoms of snuff into a coxcomb's nose. In the _Orlando Furioso_ (Canto
+xv, st. 65) is a wild story of a cannibal necromancer, who laughs at
+being cut to pieces, coming together again like quicksilver, and
+picking up his head when it is cut off, sometimes by the hair,
+sometimes by the nose! This, which would be purely childish and
+ridiculous in the hands of an inferior poet, becomes interesting, nay
+grand, in Ariosto's, from the beauties of his style, and its
+conditional truth to nature. The monster has a fated hair on his
+head,--a single hair,--which must be taken from it before he can be
+killed. Decapitation itself is of no consequence, without that
+proviso. The Paladin Astolfo, who has fought this phenomenon on
+horseback, and succeeded in getting the head and galloping off with
+it, is therefore still at a loss what to be at. How is he to discover
+such a needle in such a bottle of hay? The trunk is spurring after him
+to recover it, and he seeks for some evidence of the hair in vain. At
+length he bethinks him of scalping the head. He does so; and the
+moment the operation arrives at the place of the hair, _the face of
+the head becomes pale, the eyes turn in their sockets_, and the
+lifeless pursuer tumbles from his horse.
+
+    Then grew the visage pale, and deadly wet;
+    The eyes turn'd in their sockets, drearily;
+    And all things show'd the villain's sun was set.
+    His trunk that was in chase, fell from its horse,
+    And giving the last shudder, was a corse.
+
+It is thus, and thus only, by making Nature his companion wherever he
+goes, even in the most supernatural region, that the poet, in the
+words of a very instructive phrase, takes the world along with him. It
+is true, he must not (as the Platonists would say) humanize weakly or
+mistakenly in that region; otherwise he runs the chance of forgetting
+to be true to the supernatural itself, and so betraying a want of
+imagination from that quarter. His nymphs will have no taste of their
+woods and waters; his gods and goddesses be only so many fair or
+frowning ladies and gentlemen, such as we see in ordinary paintings;
+he will be in no danger of having his angels likened to a sort of
+wild-fowl, as Rembrandt has made them in his Jacob's Dream. His
+Bacchuses will never remind us, like Titian's, of the force and fury,
+as well as of the graces, of wine. His Jupiter will reduce no females
+to ashes; his fairies be nothing fantastical; his gnomes not 'of the
+earth, earthy'. And this again will be wanting to Nature; for it will
+be wanting to the supernatural, as Nature would have made it, working
+in a supernatural direction. Nevertheless, the poet, even for
+imagination's sake, must not become a bigot to imaginative truth,
+dragging it down into the region of the mechanical and the limited,
+and losing sight of its paramount privilege, which is to make beauty,
+in a human sense, the lady and queen of the universe. He would gain
+nothing by making his ocean-nymphs mere fishy creatures, upon the plea
+that such only could live in the water: his wood-nymphs with faces of
+knotted oak; his angels without breath and song, because no lungs
+could exist between the earth's atmosphere and the empyrean. The
+Grecian tendency in this respect is safer than the Gothic; nay, more
+imaginative; for it enables us to imagine _beyond_ imagination, and to
+bring all things healthily round to their only present final ground of
+sympathy,--the human. When we go to heaven, we may idealize in a
+superhuman mode, and have altogether different notions of the
+beautiful; but till then we must be content with the loveliest
+capabilities of earth. The sea-nymphs of Greece were still beautiful
+women, though they lived in the water. The gills and fins of the
+ocean's natural inhabitants were confined to their lowest semi-human
+attendants; or if Triton himself was not quite human, it was because
+be represented the fiercer part of the vitality of the seas, as they
+did the fairer.
+
+To conclude this part of my subject, I will quote from the greatest of
+all narrative writers two passages;--one exemplifying the imagination
+which brings supernatural things to bear on earthly, without
+confounding them; the other, that which paints events and
+circumstances after real life. The first is where Achilles, who has
+long absented himself from the conflict between his countrymen and the
+Trojans, has had a message from heaven bidding him reappear in the
+enemy's sight, standing outside the camp-wall upon the trench, but
+doing nothing more; that is to say, taking no part in the fight. He is
+simply to be seen. The two armies down by the sea-side are contending
+which shall possess the body of Patroclus; and the mere sight of the
+dreadful Grecian chief--supernaturally indeed impressed upon them, in
+order that nothing may be wanting to the full effect of his courage
+and conduct upon courageous men--is to determine the question. We are
+to imagine a slope of ground towards the sea, in order to elevate the
+trench; the camp is solitary; the battle ('a dreadful roar of men,' as
+Homer calls it) is raging on the sea-shore; and the goddess Iris has
+just delivered her message, and disappeared.
+
+    But up Achilles rose, the lov'd of heaven;
+    And Pallas on his mighty shoulders cast
+    The shield of Jove; and round about his head
+    She put the glory of a golden mist,
+    From which there burnt a fiery-flaming light.
+    And as, when smoke goes heavenward from a town,
+    In some far island which its foes besiege,
+    Who all day long with dreadful martialness
+    Have pour'd from their own town; soon as the sun
+    Has set, thick lifted fires are visible,
+    Which, rushing upward, make a light in the sky,
+    And let the neighbours know, who may perhaps
+    Bring help across the sea; so from the head
+    Of great Achilles went up an effulgence.
+
+    Upon the trench he stood, without the wall,
+    But mix'd not with the Greeks, for he rever'd
+    His mother's word; and so, thus standing there,
+    He shouted; and Minerva, to his shout,
+    Added a dreadful cry; and there arose
+    Among the Trojans an unspeakable tumult.
+    And as the clear voice of a trumpet, blown
+    Against a town by spirit-withering foes,
+    So sprang the clear voice of Aeacides.
+    And when they heard the brazen cry, their hearts
+    All leap'd within them; and the proud-maned horses
+    Ran with the chariots round, for they foresaw
+    Calamity; and the charioteers were smitten,
+    When they beheld the ever-active fire
+    Upon the dreadful head of the great-minded one
+    Burning; for bright-eyed Pallas made it burn.
+    Thrice o'er the trench divine Achilles shouted;
+    And thrice the Trojans and their great allies
+    Roll'd back; and twelve of all their noblest men
+    Then perish'd, crush'd by their own arms and chariots.
+
+                                 _Iliad_, xviii. 203.
+
+Of course there is no further question about the body of Patroclus. It
+is drawn out of the press, and received by the awful hero with tears.
+
+The other passage is where Priam, kneeling before Achilles, and
+imploring him to give up the dead body of Hector, reminds him of his
+own father; who, whatever (says the poor old king) may be his troubles
+with his enemies, has the blessing of knowing that his son is still
+alive, and may daily hope to see him return. Achilles, in accordance
+with the strength and noble honesty of the passions in those times,
+weeps aloud himself at this appeal, feeling, says Homer, 'desire' for
+his father in his very 'limbs'. He joins in grief with the venerable
+sufferer, and can no longer withstand the look of 'his grey head and
+his grey _chin_'. Observe the exquisite introduction of this last
+word. It paints the touching fact of the chin's being imploringly
+thrown upward by the kneeling old man, and the very motion of his
+beard as he speaks.
+
+    So saying, Mercury vanished up to heaven:
+    And Priam then alighted from his chariot,
+    Leaving Idaeus with it, who remain'd
+    Holding the mules and horses; and the old man
+    Went straight indoors, where the belov'd of Jove
+    Achilles sat, and found him. In the room
+    Were others, but apart; and two alone,
+    The hero Automedon, and Alcimus,
+    A branch of Mars, stood by him. They had been
+    At meals, and had not yet remov'd the board.
+    Great Priam came, without their seeing him,
+    And kneeling down, he clasp'd Achilles' knees,
+    And kiss'd those terrible, homicidal hands,
+    Which had deprived him of so many sons.
+    And as a man who is press'd heavily
+    For having slain another, flies away
+    To foreign lands, and comes into the house
+    Of some great man, and is beheld with wonder,
+    So did Achilles wonder to see Priam;
+    And the rest wonder'd, looking at each other.
+    But Priam, praying to him, spoke these words:--
+    'God-like Achilles, think of thine own father!
+    To the same age have we both come, the same
+    Weak pass; and though the neighbouring chiefs may vex
+    Him also, and his borders find no help,
+    Yet when he hears that thou art still alive,
+    He gladdens inwardly, and daily hopes
+    To see his dear son coming back from Troy.
+    But I, bereav'd old Priam! I had once
+    Brave sons in Troy, and now I cannot say
+    That one is left me. Fifty children had I,
+    When the Greeks came; nineteen were of one womb;
+    The rest my women bore me in my house.
+    The knees of many of these fierce Mars has loosen'd;
+    And he who had no peer, Troy's prop and theirs,
+    Him hast thou kill'd now, fighting for his country,
+    Hector; and for his sake am I come here
+    To ransom him, bringing a countless ransom.
+    But thou, Achilles, fear the gods, and think
+    Of thine own father, and have mercy on me:
+    For I am much more wretched, and have borne
+    What never mortal bore, I think on earth,
+    To lift unto my lips the hand of him
+    Who slew my boys.'
+
+                He ceased; and there arose
+    Sharp longing in Achilles for his father;
+    And taking Priam by the hand, he gently
+    Put him away; for both shed tears to think
+    Of other times; the one most bitter ones
+    For Hector, and with wilful wretchedness
+    Lay right before Achilles: and the other,
+    For his own father now, and now his friend;
+    And the whole house might hear them as they moan'd.
+    But when divine Achilles had refresh'd
+    His soul with tears, and sharp desire had left
+    His heart and limbs, he got up from his throne,
+    And rais'd the old man by the hand, and took
+    Pity on his grey head and his grey chin.
+
+                                 _Iliad_, xxiv. 468.
+
+O lovely and immortal privilege of genius! that can stretch its hand
+out of the wastes of time, thousands of years back, and touch our
+eyelids with tears. In these passages there is not a word which a man
+of the most matter-of-fact understanding might not have written, _if
+he had thought of it_. But in poetry, feeling and imagination are
+necessary to the perception and presentation even of matters of fact.
+They, and they only, see what is proper to be told, and what to be
+kept back; what is pertinent, affecting, and essential. Without
+feeling, there is a want of delicacy and distinction; without
+imagination, there is no true embodiment. In poets, even good of their
+kind, but without a genius for narration, the action would have been
+encumbered or diverted with ingenious mistakes. The over-contemplative
+would have given us too many remarks; the over-lyrical, a style too
+much carried away; the over-fanciful, conceits and too many similes;
+the unimaginative, the facts without the feeling, and not even those.
+We should have been told nothing of the 'grey chin', of the house
+hearing them as they moaned, or of Achilles gently putting the old man
+aside; much less of that yearning for his father, which made the hero
+tremble in every limb. Writers without the greatest passion and power
+do not feel in this way, nor are capable of expressing the feeling;
+though there is enough sensibility and imagination all over the world
+to enable mankind to be moved by it, when the poet strikes his truth
+into their hearts.
+
+The reverse of imagination is exhibited in pure absence of ideas, in
+commonplaces, and, above all, in conventional metaphor, or such images
+and their phraseology as have become the common property of discourse
+and writing. Addison's _Cato_ is full of them.
+
+    Passion unpitied and successless love
+    _Plant daggers in my breast._
+
+    I've sounded my Numidians, man by man,
+    And find them _ripe for a revolt_.
+
+    The virtuous Marcia _towers above her sex_.
+
+Of the same kind is his 'courting the yoke'--'distracting my very
+heart'--'calling up all' one's 'father' in one's soul--'working every
+nerve'--'copying a bright example'; in short, the whole play, relieved
+now and then with a smart sentence or turn of words. The following is
+a pregnant example of plagiarism and weak writing. It is from another
+tragedy of Addison's time--the _Mariamne_ of Fenton:
+
+            Mariamne, _with superior charms_,
+    _Triumphs o'er reason_: in her look she _bears_
+    A paradise of ever-blooming sweets;
+    Fair as the first idea beauty _prints_
+    In the young lover's soul; a winning grace
+    Guides every gesture, and obsequious love
+    _Attends_ on all her steps.
+
+'Triumphing o'er reason' is an old acquaintance of everybody's.
+'Paradise in her look' is from the Italian poets through Dryden. 'Fair
+as the first idea', &c., is from Milton, spoilt;--'winning grace' and
+'steps' from Milton and Tibullus, both spoilt. Whenever beauties are
+stolen by such a writer, they are sure to be spoilt: just as when a
+great writer borrows, he improves.
+
+To come now to Fancy,--she is a younger sister of Imagination, without
+the other's weight of thought and feeling. Imagination indeed, purely
+so called, is all feeling; the feeling of the subtlest and most
+affecting analogies; the perception of sympathies in the natures of
+things, or in their popular attributes. Fancy is a sporting with their
+resemblance, real or supposed, and with airy and fantastical
+creations.
+
+    --Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid
+    Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
+    _And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane,
+    Be shook to air._
+
+                      _Troilus and Cressida_, Act iii, sc. 3.
+
+That is imagination;--the strong mind sympathizing with the strong
+beast, and the weak love identified with the weak dew-drop.
+
+                  Oh!--and I forsooth
+    In love! I that have been love's whip I
+    _A very beadle to a humorous sigh!--_
+    A domineering pedant o'er the boy,--
+    This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,
+    This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid,
+    _Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,
+    The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans_, &c.
+
+                      _Love's Labour's Lost_, Act iii, sc. 1.
+
+That is fancy;--a combination of images not in their nature connected,
+or brought together by the feeling, but by the will and pleasure; and
+having just enough hold of analogy to betray it into the hands of its
+smiling subjector.
+
+                        Silent icicles
+    _Quietly shining to the quiet moon._
+
+                      Coleridge's _Frost at Midnight_.
+
+That, again, is imagination;--analogical sympathy; and exquisite of
+its kind it is.
+
+     'You are now sailed _into the north of my lady's opinion_;
+     where you will hang _like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard_,
+     unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt.'
+
+                       _Twelfth Night_, Act iii, sc. 2.
+
+And that is fancy;--one image capriciously suggested by another, and
+but half connected with the subject of discourse; nay, half opposed to
+it; for in the gaiety of the speaker's animal spirits, the 'Dutchman's
+beard' is made to represent the lady!
+
+Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy to the
+comic. _Macbeth_, _Lear_, _Paradise Lost_, the poem of Dante, are full
+of imagination: the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ and the _Rape of the
+Lock_, of fancy: _Romeo and Juliet_, the _Tempest_, the _Faerie
+Queene_, and the _Orlando Furioso_, of both. The terms were formerly
+identical, or used as such; and neither is the best that might be
+found. The term Imagination is too confined: often too material. It
+presents too invariably the idea of a solid body;--of 'images' in the
+sense of the plaster-cast cry about the streets. Fancy, on the other
+hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual image or apparition
+([Greek: Phantasma], appearance, _phantom_), has rarely that freedom
+from visibility which is one of the highest privileges of
+imagination. Viola, in _Twelfth Night_, speaking of some beautiful
+music, says:
+
+    It gives a very echo to the seat
+    Where Love is throned.
+
+In this charming thought, fancy and imagination are combined; yet the
+fancy, the assumption of Love's sitting on a throne, is the image of a
+solid body; while the imagination, the sense of sympathy between the
+passion of love and impassioned music, presents us no image at all.
+Some new term is wanting to express the more spiritual sympathies of
+what is called Imagination.
+
+One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy; and like Melancholy,
+as Albert Durer has painted her, she looks out among the stars, and is
+busied with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the universe.
+Fancy turns her sister's wizard instruments into toys. She takes a
+telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and
+sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the
+child-like and sportive. She chases butterflies, while her sister
+takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of
+gallantries, of fashions; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and
+capricious; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings
+to the images of wit; and delights as much to people nature with
+smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies together,
+and make them strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not
+incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her
+company; always, in the case of the greatest poets; often in that of
+less, though with them she is the greater favourite. Spenser has great
+imagination and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton both also,
+the very greatest, but with imagination predominant; Chaucer, the
+strongest imagination of real life, beyond any writers but Homer,
+Dante, and Shakespeare, and in comic painting inferior to none; Pope
+has hardly any imagination, but he has a great deal of fancy;
+Coleridge little fancy, but imagination exquisite. Shakespeare alone,
+of all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal
+perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing [the Oberon-Titania
+scenes from the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_] will be found in the
+present volume.[29] See also his famous description of Queen Mab and
+her equipage, in _Romeo and Juliet_:
+
+    Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs;
+    The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers:
+    Her traces of the smallest spider's web;
+    Her collars of the moonshine's watery beams, &c.
+
+    [29] Leigh Hunt's _Imagination and Fancy, or Selections from
+    the English Poets_, 1844.
+
+That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As a small but pretty
+rival specimen, less known, take the description of a fairy palace
+from Drayton's _Nymphidia_:
+
+    This palace standeth in the air,
+    By necromancy plac�d there,
+    That it no tempest needs to fear,
+      Which way soe'er it blow it:
+    And somewhat southward tow'rd the noon,
+    Whence lies a way up to the moon,
+    And thence the fairy can as soon
+      Pass to the earth below it.
+    The walls of spiders' legs are made,
+    Well mortic�d and finely laid:
+    He was the master of his trade
+      It curiously that builded:
+    _The windows of the eyes of cats:_
+
+(because they see best at night)
+
+    And for the roof instead of slats
+    Is cover'd with the skins of bats,
+      _With moonshine that are gilded._
+
+Here also is a fairy bed, very delicate, from the same poet's _Muse's
+Elysium_:
+
+    Of leaves of roses, _white and red_,
+    Shall be the covering of the bed;
+    The curtains, vallens, tester all,
+    Shall be the flower imperial;
+    And for the fringe it all along
+    _With azure hare-bells shall be hung.
+    Of lilies shall the pillows be,
+    With down stuft of the butterfly._
+
+Of fancy, so full of gusto as to border on imagination, Sir John
+Suckling, in his _Ballad on a Wedding_, has given some of the most
+playful and charming specimens in the language. They glance like
+twinkles of the eye, or cherries bedewed:
+
+    _Her feet beneath her petticoat,
+    Like little mice stole in and out,
+      As if they fear'd the light:_
+    But oh! she dances such a way!
+    _No sun upon an Easter day_
+      Is half so fine a sight.
+
+It is very daring, and has a sort of playful grandeur, to compare a
+lady's dancing with the sun. But as the sun has it all to himself in
+the heavens, so she, in the blaze of her beauty, on earth. This is
+imagination fairly displacing fancy. The following has enchanted
+everybody:
+
+    Her lips were red, _and one was thin_
+    _Compared with that was next her chin,
+      Some bee had stung it newly._
+
+Every reader has stolen a kiss at that lip, gay or grave.
+
+With regard to the principle of Variety in Uniformity by which verse
+ought to be modulated, and oneness of impression diversely produced,
+it has been contended by some, that Poetry need not be written in
+verse at all; that prose is as good a medium, provided poetry be
+conveyed through it; and that to think otherwise is to confound letter
+with spirit, or form with essence. But the opinion is a prosaical
+mistake. Fitness and unfitness for _song_, or metrical excitement,
+just make all the difference between a poetical and prosaical subject;
+and the reason why verse is necessary to the form of poetry, is, that
+the perfection of poetical spirit demands it;--that the circle of its
+enthusiasm, beauty and power, is incomplete without it. I do not mean
+to say that a poet can never show himself a poet in prose; but that,
+being one, his desire and necessity will be to write in verse; and
+that, if he were unable to do so, he would not, and could not, deserve
+his title. Verse to the true poet is no clog. It is idly called a
+trammel and a difficulty. It is a help. It springs from the same
+enthusiasm as the rest of his impulses, and is necessary to their
+satisfaction and effect. Verse is no more a clog than the condition of
+rushing upward is a clog to fire, or than the roundness and order of
+the globe we live on is a clog to the freedom and variety that abound
+within its sphere. Verse is no dominator over the poet, except
+inasmuch as the bond is reciprocal, and the poet dominates over the
+verse. They are lovers, playfully challenging each other's rule, and
+delighted equally to rule and to obey. Verse is the final proof to the
+poet that his mastery over his art is complete. It is the shutting up
+of his powers in '_measureful_ content'; the answer of form to his
+spirit; of strength and ease to his guidance. It is the willing
+action, the proud and fiery happiness, of the winged steed on whose
+back he has vaulted,
+
+    To witch the world with wondrous horsemanship.
+
+Verse, in short, is that finishing, and rounding, and 'tuneful
+planetting' of the poet's creations, which is produced of necessity by
+the smooth tendencies of their energy or inward working, and the
+harmonious dance into which they are attracted round the orb of the
+beautiful. Poetry, in its complete sympathy with beauty, must, of
+necessity, leave no sense of the beautiful, and no power over its
+forms, unmanifested; and verse flows as inevitably from this condition
+of its integrity, as other laws of proportion do from any other kind
+of embodiment of beauty (say that of the human figure), however free
+and various the movements may be that play within their limits. What
+great poet ever wrote his poems in prose? or where is a good prose
+poem, of any length, to be found? The poetry of the Bible is
+understood to be in verse, in the original. Mr. Hazlitt has said a
+good word for those prose enlargements of some fine old song, which
+are known by the name of Ossian; and in passages they deserve what he
+said; but he judiciously abstained from saying anything about the
+form. Is Gesner's _Death of Abel_ a poem? or Hervey's _Meditations_?
+The _Pilgrim's Progress_ has been called one; and, undoubtedly, Bunyan
+had a genius which tended to make him a poet, and one of no mean
+order: and yet it was of as ungenerous and low a sort as was
+compatible with so lofty an affinity; and this is the reason why it
+stopped where it did. He had a craving after the beautiful, but not
+enough of it in himself to echo to its music. On the other hand, the
+possession of the beautiful will not be sufficient without force to
+utter it. The author of _Telemachus_ had a soul full of beauty and
+tenderness. He was not a man who, if he had had a wife and children,
+would have run away from them, as Bunyan's hero did, to get a place by
+himself in heaven. He was 'a little lower than the angels', like our
+own Bishop Jewells and Berkeleys; and yet he was no poet. He was too
+delicately, not to say feebly, absorbed in his devotions, to join in
+the energies of the seraphic choir.
+
+Every poet, then, is a versifier; every fine poet an excellent one;
+and he is the best whose verse exhibits the greatest amount of
+strength, sweetness, straightforwardness, unsuperfluousness,
+_variety_, and _oneness_;--oneness, that is to say, consistency, in
+the general impression, metrical and moral; and variety, or every
+pertinent diversity of tone and rhythm, in the process. _Strength_ is
+the muscle of verse, and shows itself in the number and force of the
+marked syllables; as,
+
+    Son�rous m�tal bl�wing m�rtial s�unds.
+
+                                 _Paradise Lost._
+
+    Beh�moth, b�ggest born of e�rth, �ph�av'd
+    His v�stness.
+
+                                  _Id._
+
+    Bl�w w�nds and cr�ck your ch�eks! r�ge! bl�w!
+    You c�t[)a]r[)a]cts and hurric�noes, sp�ut,
+    Till you have dr�nch'd our st�eples, dr�wn'd the c�cks!
+    You s�lphurous and tho�ght-�xecuting f�res,
+    Va�nt co�riers of �ak-cl�aving th�nderb�lts,
+    S�nge my wh�te h�ad! and th�u, �ll-sh�king th�nder,
+    Str�ke fl�t the th�ck rot�ndity o' the w�rld!
+
+                                 _Lear._
+
+Unexpected locations of the accent double this force, and render it
+characteristic of passion and abruptness. And here comes into play the
+reader's corresponding fineness of ear, and his retardations and
+accelerations in accordance with those of the poet:
+
+                  Then in the keyhole turns
+    The �ntr[)i]c[)a]te wards, and every bolt and bar
+    Unfastens.--On [)a] s[)u]dd[)e]n �pen fly
+    W[)i]th [)i]mp�tuous recoil and jarring sound
+    The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
+    Harsh thunder.
+
+                                 _Paradise Lost_, Book II.
+
+    Ab�m[)i]n[)a]bl[)e]--un�tt[)e]r[)a]bl[)e]--and worse
+    Than fables yet have feigned.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+    W�ll[)o]w[)i]ng [)u]nw�[)e]ldy--[)e]n�rmous in their gait.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+Of unusual passionate accent, there is an exquisite specimen in the
+_Faerie Queene_, where Una is lamenting her desertion by the Red-Cross
+Knight:
+
+      But he, my lion, and my noble lord,
+      How does he find in cruel heart to hate
+      Her that him lov'd, and ever most ador'd
+    _As the g�d of my l�fe?_[30] Why hath he me abhorr'd?
+
+    [30] Pray let not the reader consent to read this first half
+    of the line in any manner less marked and peremptory. It is a
+    striking instance of the beauty of that 'acceleration and
+    retardation of true verse' which Coleridge speaks of. There
+    is to be a hurry on the words _as the_, and a passionate
+    emphasis and passing stop on the word _god_; and so of the
+    next three words.
+
+The abuse of strength is harshness and heaviness; the reverse of it is
+weakness. There is a noble sentiment--it appears both in Daniel's and
+Sir John Beaumont's works, but is most probably the latter's,--which
+is a perfect outrage of strength in the sound of the words:
+
+    Only the firmest and the _constant'st_ hearts
+    God sets to act the _stout'st_ and hardest parts.
+
+_Stout'st_ and _constant'st_ for 'stoutest' and 'most constant'! It is
+as bad as the intentional crabbedness of the line in _Hudibras_:
+
+    He that hangs or _beats out's_ brains,
+    The devil's in him if _he_ feigns.
+
+_Beats out's brains_, for 'beats out his brains'. Of heaviness,
+Davenant's _Gondibert_ is a formidable specimen, almost throughout:
+
+    With s�lence (�rder's help, and m�rk of c�re)
+      They ch�de th�t n�ise which h�edless y�uth aff�ct;
+    St�ll co�rse for �se, for he�lth th�y cl�anness w�ar,
+      And s�ve in w�ll-f�x'd �rms, all n�ceness ch�ck'd.
+    Th�y tho�ght, th�se that, un�rm'd, exp�s'd fr�il l�fe,
+      But n�ked n�ture v�liantly betr�y'd;
+    Wh� w�s, tho�gh n�ked, s�fe, till pr�de m�de str�fe,
+      But m�de def�nce must �se, n�w d�nger's m�de.
+
+And so he goes digging and lumbering on, like a heavy preacher
+thumping the pulpit in italics, and spoiling many ingenious
+reflections.
+
+Weakness in versification is want of accent and emphasis. It generally
+accompanies prosaicalness, and is the consequence of weak thoughts,
+and of the affectation of a certain well-bred enthusiasm. The writings
+of the late Mr. Hayley were remarkable for it; and it abounds among
+the lyrical imitators of Cowley, and the whole of what is called our
+French school of poetry, when it aspired above its wit and 'sense'. It
+sometimes breaks down in a horrible, hopeless manner, as if giving way
+at the first step. The following ludicrous passage in Congreve,
+intended to be particularly fine, contains an instance:
+
+      And lo! Silence himself is here;
+    Methinks I see the midnight god appear.
+      In all his downy pomp array'd,
+        Behold the reverend shade.
+      _An ancient sigh he sits upon!!!_
+    Whose memory of sound is long since gone,
+    _And purposely annihilated for his throne!!!_
+
+                      _Ode on the singing of Mrs. Arabella Hunt._
+
+See also the would-be enthusiasm of Addison about music:
+
+        For ever consecrate the _day_
+        To music and _Cecilia_;
+    Music, the greatest good that mortals know,
+        And all of heaven we have below,
+        Music can noble HINTS _impart!!!_
+
+It is observable that the unpoetic masters of ridicule are apt to make
+the most ridiculous mistakes, when they come to affect a strain higher
+than the one they are accustomed to. But no wonder. Their habits
+neutralize the enthusiasm it requires.
+
+_Sweetness_, though not identical with smoothness, any more than
+feeling is with sound, always includes it; and smoothness is a thing
+so little to be regarded for its own sake, and indeed so worthless in
+poetry but for some taste of sweetness, that I have not thought
+necessary to mention it by itself; though such an all-in-all in
+versification was it regarded not a hundred years back, that Thomas
+Warton himself, an idolater of Spenser, ventured to wish the following
+line in the _Faerie Queene_,
+
+    And was admir�d much of fools, _w�men_, and boys--
+
+altered to
+
+    And was admir�d much of women, fools, and boys--
+
+thus destroying the fine scornful emphasis on the first syllable of
+'women'! (an ungallant intimation, by the way, against the fair sex,
+very startling in this no less woman-loving than great poet). Any
+poetaster can be smooth. Smoothness abounds in all small poets, as
+sweetness does in the greater. Sweetness is the smoothness of grace
+and delicacy,--of the sympathy with the pleasing and lovely. Spenser
+is full of it,--Shakespeare--Beaumont and Fletcher--Coleridge. Of
+Spenser's and Coleridge's versification it is the prevailing
+characteristic. Its main secrets are a smooth progression between
+variety and sameness, and a voluptuous sense of the continuous,--'linked
+sweetness long drawn out'. Observe the first and last lines of the
+stanza in the _Faerie Queene_, describing a shepherd brushing away the
+gnats;--the open and the close _e's_ in the one,
+
+    As g�ntle sh�pherd in sw[=e][=e]t [=e]ventide--
+
+and the repetition of the word _oft_, and the fall from the vowel _a_,
+into the two _u's_ in the other,--
+
+    She brusheth _oft_, and _oft_ doth m�r their m[=u]rm[)u]rings.
+
+So in his description of two substances in the handling, both equally
+smooth:
+
+    _Each smoother seems than each, and each than each seems smoother._
+
+An abundance of examples from his poetry will be found in the volume
+before us. His beauty revolves on itself with conscious loveliness.
+And Coleridge is worthy to be named with him, as the reader will see
+also, and has seen already. Let him take a sample meanwhile from the
+poem called the _Day Dream_! Observe both the variety and sameness of
+the vowels, and the repetition of the soft consonants:
+
+    My eyes make pictures when they're shut:--
+      I see a fountain, large and fair,
+    A willow and a ruin'd hut,
+      And _thee_ and _me_ and Mary there.
+    _O Mary! make thy gentle lap our pillow;
+    Bend o'er us, like a bower, my beautiful green willow._
+
+By _Straightforwardness_ is meant the flow of words, in their natural
+order, free alike from mere prose, and from those inversions to which
+bad poets recur in order to escape the charge of prose, but chiefly to
+accommodate their rhymes. In Shadwell's play of _Psyche_, Venus gives
+the sisters of the heroine an answer, of which the following is the
+_entire_ substance, literally, in so many words. The author had
+nothing better for her to say:
+
+     I receive your prayers with kindness, and will give success
+     to your hopes. I have seen, with anger, mankind adore your
+     sister's beauty and deplore her scorn: which they shall do
+     no more. For I'll so resent their idolatry, as shall content
+     your wishes to the full.
+
+Now in default of all imagination, fancy, and expression, how was the
+writer to turn these words into poetry or rhyme? Simply by diverting
+them from their natural order, and twisting the halves of the
+sentences each before the other.
+
+      With kindness I your prayers receive,
+      And to your hopes success will give.
+    I have, with anger, seen mankind adore
+    Your sister's beauty and her scorn deplore;
+      Which they shall do no more.
+    For their idolatry I'll so resent,
+    As shall your wishes to the full content!!
+
+This is just as if a man were to allow that there was no poetry in the
+words, 'How do you find yourself?' 'Very well, I thank you'; but to
+hold them inspired, if altered into
+
+    Yourself how do you find?
+    Very well, you I thank.
+
+It is true, the best writers in Shadwell's age were addicted to these
+inversions, partly for their own reasons, as far as rhyme was
+concerned, and partly because they held it to be writing in the
+classical and Virgilian manner. What has since been called Artificial
+Poetry was then flourishing, in contradistinction to Natural; or
+Poetry seen chiefly through art and books, and not in its first
+sources. But when the artificial poet partook of the natural, or, in
+other words, was a true poet after his kind, his best was always
+written in his most natural and straightforward manner. Hear
+Shadwell's antagonist Dryden. Not a particle of inversion, beyond what
+is used for the sake of emphasis in common discourse, and this only in
+one line (the last but three), is to be found in his immortal
+character of the Duke of Buckingham:
+
+    A man so various, that he seemed to be
+    Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
+    Stiff in opinions, _always in the wrong_,
+    _Was everything by starts, and nothing long;_
+    But in the course of one revolving moon
+    Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:
+    Then all for women, rhyming, dancing, drinking,
+    _Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking._
+    _Blest madman!_ who could every hour employ
+    _With something new to wish or to enjoy!_
+    Railing and praising were his usual themes;
+    And both, to show his judgement, in extremes:
+    So over violent, or over civil,
+    _That every man with him was god or devil._
+    In squandering wealth was his peculiar art;
+    _Nothing went unrewarded, but desert._
+    Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late,
+    _He had his jest, and they had his estate._
+
+Inversion itself was often turned into a grace in these poets, and may
+be in others, by the power of being superior to it; using it only with
+a classical air, and as a help lying next to them, instead of a
+salvation which they are obliged to seek. In jesting passages also it
+sometimes gave the rhyme a turn agreeably wilful, or an appearance of
+choosing what lay in its way; as if a man should pick up a stone to
+throw at another's head, where a less confident foot would have
+stumbled over it. Such is Dryden's use of the word _might_--the mere
+sign of a tense--in his pretended ridicule of the monkish practice of
+rising to sing psalms in the night.
+
+    And much they griev'd to see so nigh their hall
+    The bird that warn'd St. Peter of his fall;
+    That he should raise his mitred crest on high,
+    And clap his wings and call his family
+    To sacred rites; and vex th' ethereal powers
+    With midnight matins at uncivil hours;
+    Nay more, his quiet neighbours should molest
+    _Just in the sweetness of their morning rest._
+
+(What a line full of 'another doze' is that!)
+
+    _Beast of a bird!_ supinely, when he _might_
+    Lie snug and sleep, to rise before the light!
+    What if his dull forefathers used that cry?
+    Could he not let a bad example die?
+
+I the more gladly quote instances like those of Dryden, to illustrate
+the points in question, because they are specimens of the very highest
+kind of writing in the heroic couplet upon subjects not heroical. As
+to prosaicalness in general, it is sometimes indulged in by young
+writers on the plea of its being natural; but this is a mere
+confusion of triviality with propriety, and is usually the result of
+indolence.
+
+_Unsuperfluousness_ is rather a matter of style in general, than of
+the sound and order of words: and yet versification is so much
+strengthened by it, and so much weakened by its opposite, that it
+could not but come within the category of its requisites. When
+superfluousness of words is not occasioned by overflowing animal
+spirits, as in Beaumont and Fletcher, or by the very genius of luxury,
+as in Spenser (in which cases it is enrichment as well as overflow),
+there is no worse sign for a poet altogether, except pure barrenness.
+Every word that could be taken away from a poem, unreferable to either
+of the above reasons for it, is a damage; and many such are death; for
+there is nothing that posterity seems so determined to resent as this
+want of respect for its time and trouble. The world is too rich in
+books to endure it. Even true poets have died of this Writer's Evil.
+Trifling ones have survived, with scarcely any pretensions but the
+terseness of their trifles. What hope can remain for wordy mediocrity?
+Let the discerning reader take up any poem, pen in hand, for the
+purpose of discovering how many words he can strike out of it that
+give him no requisite ideas, no relevant ones that he cares for, and
+no reasons for the rhyme beyond its necessity, and he will see what
+blot and havoc he will make in many an admired production of its
+day,--what marks of its inevitable fate. Bulky authors in particular,
+however safe they may think themselves, would do well to consider what
+parts of their cargo they might dispense with in their proposed voyage
+down the gulfs of time; for many a gallant vessel, thought
+indestructible in its age, has perished;--many a load of words,
+expected to be in eternal demand, gone to join the wrecks of
+self-love, or rotted in the warehouses of change and vicissitude. I
+have said the more on this point, because in an age when the true
+inspiration has undoubtedly been reawakened by Coleridge and his
+fellows, and we have so many new poets coming forward, it may be as
+well to give a general warning against that tendency to an
+accumulation and ostentation of _thoughts_, which is meant to be a
+refutation in full of the pretensions of all poetry less cogitabund,
+whatever may be the requirements of its class. Young writers should
+bear in mind, that even some of the very best materials for poetry are
+not poetry built; and that the smallest marble shrine, of exquisite
+workmanship, outvalues all that architect ever chipped away. Whatever
+can be so dispensed with is rubbish.
+
+_Variety_ in versification consists in whatsoever can be done for the
+prevention of monotony, by diversity of stops and cadences,
+distribution of emphasis, and retardation and acceleration of time;
+for the whole real secret of versification is a musical secret, and is
+not attainable to any vital effect, save by the ear of genius. All the
+mere knowledge of feet and numbers, of accent and quantity, will no
+more impart it, than a knowledge of the 'Guide to Music' will make a
+Beethoven or a Paisiello. It is a matter of sensibility and
+imagination; of the beautiful in poetical passion, accompanied by
+musical; of the imperative necessity for a pause here, and a cadence
+there, and a quicker or slower utterance in this or that place,
+created by analogies of sound with sense, by the fluctuations of
+feeling, by the demands of the gods and graces that visit the poet's
+harp, as the winds visit that of Aeolus. The same time and quantity
+which are occasioned by the spiritual part of this secret, thus become
+its formal ones,--not feet and syllables, long and short, iambics or
+trochees; which are the reduction of it to its _less_ than dry bones.
+You might get, for instance, not only ten and eleven, but thirteen or
+fourteen syllables into a rhyming, as well as blank, heroical verse,
+if time and the feeling permitted; and in irregular measure this is
+often done; just as musicians put twenty notes in a bar instead of
+two, quavers instead of minims, according as the feeling they are
+expressing impels them to fill up the time with short and hurried
+notes, or with long; or as the choristers in a cathedral retard or
+precipitate the words of the chant, according as the quantity of its
+notes, and the colon which divides the verse of the psalm, conspire to
+demand it. Had the moderns borne this principle in mind when they
+settled the prevailing systems of verse, instead of learning them, as
+they appear to have done, from the first drawling and one-syllabled
+notation of the church hymns, we should have retained all the
+advantages of the more numerous versification of the ancients, without
+being compelled to fancy that there was no alternative for us between
+our syllabical uniformity and the hexameters or other special forms
+unsuited to our tongues. But to leave this question alone, we will
+present the reader with a few sufficing specimens of the difference
+between monotony and variety in versification, first from Pope,
+Dryden, and Milton, and next from Gay and Coleridge. The following is
+the boasted melody of the nevertheless exquisite poet of the _Rape of
+the Lock_,--exquisite in his wit and fancy, though not in his numbers.
+The reader will observe that it is literally _see-saw_, like the
+rising and falling of a plank, with a light person at one end who is
+jerked up in the briefer time, and a heavier one who is set down more
+leisurely at the other. It is in the otherwise charming description of
+the heroine of that poem:
+
+    On her white breast--a sparkling cross she wore,
+    Which Jews might kiss--and infidels adore;
+    Her lively looks--a sprightly mind disclose,
+    Quick as her eyes--and as unfix'd as those;
+    Favours to none--to all she smiles extends,
+    Oft she rejects--but never once offends;
+    Bright as the sun--her eyes the gazers strike,
+    And like the sun--they shine on all alike;
+    Yet graceful ease--and sweetness void of pride,
+    Might hide her faults--if belles had faults to hide;
+    If to her share--some female errors fall,
+    Look on her face--and you'll forget them all.
+
+Compare with this the description of Iphigenia in one of Dryden's
+stories from Boccaccio:
+
+    It happen'd--on a summer's holiday,                        }
+    That to the greenwood shade--he took his way,              }
+    For Cymon shunn'd the church--and used not much to pray.   }
+    His quarter-staff--which he could ne'er forsake,
+    Hung half before--and half behind his back;
+    He trudg'd along--not knowing what he sought,
+    And whistled as he went--for want of thought.
+
+    By chance conducted--or by thirst constrain'd,
+    The deep recesses of a grove he gain'd:--
+    Where--in a plain defended by a wood,              }
+    Crept through the matted grass--a crystal flood,   }
+    By which--an alabaster fountain stood;             }
+    And on the margent of the fount was laid--
+    Attended by her slaves--a sleeping maid;
+    Like Dian and her nymphs--when, tir'd with sport,
+    To rest by cool Eurotas they resort.--
+    The dame herself--the goddess well express'd,
+    Not more distinguished by her purple vest--
+    Than by the charming features of the face--
+    And e'en in slumber--a superior grace:
+    Her comely limbs--compos'd with decent care,    }
+    Her body shaded--by a light cymar,              }
+    Her bosom to the view--was only bare;           }
+    Where two beginning paps were scarcely spied--
+    For yet their places were but signified.--
+    The fanning wind upon her bosom blows--                      }
+    To meet the fanning wind--the bosom rose;                    }
+    The fanning wind--and purling stream--continue her repose.   }
+
+For a further variety take, from the same author's _Theodore and
+Honoria_, a passage in which the couplets are run one into the other,
+and all of it modulated, like the former, according to the feeling
+demanded by the occasion:
+
+    Whilst listening to the murmuring leaves he stood--
+    More than a mile immers'd within the wood--
+    At once the wind was laid.|--The whispering sound
+    Was dumb.|--A rising earthquake rock'd the ground.
+    With deeper brown the grove was overspread--         }
+    A sudden horror seiz'd his giddy head--              }
+    And his ears tinkled--and his colour fled.           }
+
+    Nature was in alarm.--Some danger nigh
+    Seem'd threaten'd--though unseen to mortal eye.
+    Unus'd to fear--he summon'd all his soul,
+    And stood collected in himself--and whole:
+    Not long.--
+
+But for a crowning specimen of variety of pause and accent, apart from
+emotion, nothing can surpass the account, in _Paradise Lost_, of the
+Devil's search for an accomplice:
+
+                             There was a pl�ce,
+    N�w n�t--though S�n--not T�me--f�rst wro�ght the ch�nge,
+    Where T�gris--at the foot of P�radise,
+    Into a g�lf--sh�t under ground--till p�rt
+    R�se up a fo�ntain by the Tr�e of L�fe.
+    _In_ with the river sunk--and _w�th_ it _r�se_
+    S�tan--inv�lv'd in r�sing m�st--then so�ght
+    Wh�re to lie h�d.--S�a he had search'd--and l�nd
+    From Eden over P�ntus--and the p�ol
+    Mae�tis--_�p_ beyond the river _Ob_;
+    D�wnward as f�r ant�rctic;--and in l�ngth
+    W�st from Or�ntes--to the �cean b�rr'd
+    At D�ri�n--th�nce to the l�nd wh�re fl�ws
+    G�nges and Indus.--Th�s the �rb he r�am'd
+    With n�rrow s�arch;--and with insp�ction d�ep
+    Cons�der'd �very cr�ature--wh�ch of �ll
+    M�st opport�ne m�ght s�rve his w�les--and fo�nd
+    The s�rpent--s�btlest b�ast of all the fi�ld.
+
+If the reader cast his eye again over this passage, he will not find a
+verse in it which is not varied and harmonized in the most remarkable
+manner. Let him notice in particular that curious balancing of the
+lines in the sixth and tenth verses:
+
+    _In_ with the river sunk, &c.
+
+and
+
+    _Up_ beyond the river _Ob_.
+
+It might, indeed, be objected to the versification of Milton, that it
+exhibits too constant a perfection of this kind. It sometimes forces
+upon us too great a sense of consciousness on the part of the
+composer. We miss the first sprightly runnings of verse,--the ease and
+sweetness of spontaneity. Milton, I think, also too often condenses
+weight into heaviness.
+
+Thus much concerning the chief of our two most popular measures. The
+other, called octo-syllabic, or the measure of eight syllables,
+offered such facilities for _namby-pamby_, that it had become a jest
+as early as the time of Shakespeare, who makes Touchstone call it the
+'butterwoman's rate to market', and the 'very false gallop of verses'.
+It has been advocated, in opposition to the heroic measure, upon the
+ground that ten syllables lead a man into epithets and other
+superfluities, while eight syllables compress him into a sensible and
+pithy gentleman. But the heroic measure laughs at it. So far from
+compressing, it converts one line into two, and sacrifices everything
+to the quick and importunate return of the rhyme. With Dryden, compare
+Gay, even in the strength of Gay,--
+
+    The wind was high, the window shakes;
+    With sudden start the miser wakes;
+    Along the silent room he stalks,
+
+(A miser never 'stalks'; but a rhyme was desired for 'walks')
+
+    Looks back, and trembles as he walks:
+    Each lock and every bolt he tries,
+    In every creek and corner pries;
+    Then opes the chest with treasure stor'd,
+    And stands in rapture o'er his hoard;
+
+('Hoard' and 'treasure stor'd' are just made for one another)
+
+    But now, with sudden qualms possess'd,
+    He wrings his hands, he beats his breast;
+    By conscience stung, he wildly stares,
+    And thus his guilty soul declares.
+
+And so he denounces his gold, as miser never denounced it; and sighs,
+because
+
+    Virtue resides on earth no more!
+
+Coleridge saw the mistake which had been made with regard to this
+measure, and restored it to the beautiful freedom of which it was
+capable, by calling to mind the liberties allowed its old musical
+professors the minstrels, and dividing it by _time_ instead of
+_syllables_;--by the _beat of four_ into which you might get as many
+syllables as you could, instead of allotting eight syllables to the
+poor time, whatever it might have to say. He varied it further with
+alternate rhymes and stanzas, with rests and omissions precisely
+analogous to those in music, and rendered it altogether worthy to
+utter the manifold thoughts and feelings of himself and his lady
+Christabel. He even ventures, with an exquisite sense of solemn
+strangeness and licence (for there is witchcraft going forward), to
+introduce a couplet of blank verse, itself as mystically and
+beautifully modulated as anything in the music of Gluck or Weber.
+
+    'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
+    And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock;
+    Tu-whit!--Tu-whoo!
+    And hark, again! the crowing cock,
+    _How drowsily he crew._
+    Sir Leoline, the baron rich,
+    Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
+    From her kennel beneath the rock
+    She maketh answer to the clock,
+    _F�ur f[)o]r th[)e] q�art[)e]rs [)a]nd tw�lve f[)o]r th[)e] ho�r,_
+    Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
+    Sixteen short howls, not over loud:
+    Some say, she sees my lady's shroud.
+
+    _Is the n�ght ch�lly and d�rk?
+    The n�ght is ch�lly, but n�t d�rk._
+    The thin grey cloud is spread on high,
+    It covers, but not hides, the sky.
+    The moon is behind, and at the full,
+    And yet she looks both small and dull.
+    The night is chilly, the cloud is grey;
+
+(These are not superfluities, but mysterious returns of importunate
+feeling)
+
+    _'Tis a month before the month of May,
+    And the spring comes slowly up this way._
+    The lovely lady, Christabel,
+    Whom her father loves so well,
+    What makes her in the wood so late,
+    A furlong from the castle-gate?
+
+    She had dreams all yesternight
+    Of her own betroth�d knight;
+    And sh� [)i]n th[)e] midnight wood will pray
+    For the w�al [)o]f h[)e]r lover that's far away.
+
+    She stole along, she nothing spoke,
+    The sighs she heav'd were soft and low,
+    And nought was green upon the oak,
+    But moss and rarest mistletoe;
+    She kneels beneath the huge oak tree,
+    And in silence prayeth she.
+
+    The lady sprang up suddenly,
+    The lovely lady, Christabel!
+    It moan'd as near as near can be,
+    But what it is, she cannot tell.
+    On the other side it seems to be
+    Of th[)e] h�ge, bro�d-bre�sted, �ld o�k tr�e.
+
+    The night is chill, the forest bare;
+    Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?
+
+(This 'bleak moaning' is a witch's)
+
+    There is not wind enough in the air
+    To move away the ringlet curl
+    From the lovely lady's cheek--
+    There is not wind enough to twirl
+    _The �ne r�d l�af, the l�st [)o]f [)i]ts clan,
+    That d�nc[)e]s [)a]s �ft[)e]n [)a]s d�nce it c�n,
+    H�ng[)i]ng s[)o] l�ght and h�ng[)i]ng s[)o] h�gh,
+    On th[)e] t�pmost tw�g th[)a]t lo[)o]ks �p [)a]t th[)e] sky._
+
+    Hush, beating heart of Christabel!
+    Jesu Maria, shield her well!
+    She folded her arms beneath her cloak,
+    And stole to the other side of the oak.
+          What sees she there?
+
+    There she sees a damsel bright,
+    Drest in a robe of silken white,
+    That shadowy in the moonlight shone:
+    The neck that made that white robe wan,
+    Her stately neck and arms were bare:
+    Her blue-vein'd feet unsandall'd were;
+    And wildly glitter'd, here and there,
+    The gems entangled in her hair.
+    I guess 'twas _frightful_ there to see
+    _A lady so richly clad as she--
+    Beautiful exceedingly._
+
+The principle of Variety in Uniformity is here worked out in a style
+'beyond the reach of art'. Everything is diversified according to the
+demand of the moment, of the sounds, the sights, the emotions; the
+very uniformity of the outline is gently varied; and yet we feel that
+_the whole is one and of the same character_, the single and sweet
+unconsciousness of the heroine making all the rest seem more
+conscious, and ghastly, and expectant. It is thus that _versification
+itself becomes part of the sentiment of a poem_, and vindicates the
+pains that have been taken to show its importance. I know of no very
+fine versification unaccompanied with fine poetry; no poetry of a mean
+order accompanied with verse of the highest.
+
+As to Rhyme, which might be thought too insignificant to mention, it
+is not at all so. The universal consent of modern Europe, and of the
+East in all ages, has made it one of the musical beauties of verse for
+all poetry but epic and dramatic, and even for the former with
+Southern Europe,--a sustainment for the enthusiasm, and a demand to
+enjoy. The mastery of it consists in never writing it for its own
+sake, or at least never appearing to do so; in knowing how to vary
+it, to give it novelty, to render it more or less strong, to divide
+it (when not in couplets) at the proper intervals, to repeat it many
+times where luxury or animal spirits demand it (see an instance in
+Titania's speech to the Fairies), to impress an affecting or startling
+remark with it, and to make it, in comic poetry, a new and surprising
+addition to the jest.
+
+    Large was his bounty and his soul sincere,
+      Heav'n did a recompense as largely send;
+    He gave to misery all he had, _a tear_;
+      He gain'd from heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) _a friend_.
+
+                                 Gray's _Elegy_.
+
+    The fops are proud of scandal; for they cry
+    At every lewd, low character, 'That's _I_'.
+
+                                 Dryden's _Prologue to the Pilgrim_.
+
+    What makes all doctrines plain and clear?
+    _About two hundred pounds a-year._
+    And that which was proved true before,
+    Prove false again? _Two hundred more._
+
+                                 _Hudibras._
+
+    Compound for sins they are _inclin'd to_,
+    By damning those they have _no mind to_.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+    ----Stor'd with deletery _med'cines_,
+    Which whosoever took is _dead since_.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+Sometimes it is a grace in a master like Butler to force his rhyme,
+thus showing a laughing wilful power over the most stubborn materials:
+
+                                  Win
+    The women, and make them draw in
+    The men, as Indians with a _f�male_
+    Tame elephant inveigle _the_ male.
+
+                                 _Hudibras._
+
+    He made an instrument to know
+    If the moon shines at full or no;
+    That would, as soon as e'er she _shone, straight_
+    Whether 'twere day or night _demonstrate_;
+    Tell what her diameter to an _inch is_,
+    And prove that she's not made of _green cheese_.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+Pronounce it, by all means, _grinches_, to make the joke more wilful.
+The happiest triple rhyme, perhaps, that ever was written, is in _Don
+Juan_:
+
+    But oh! ye lords of ladies _intellectual_,
+    Inform us truly,--haven't they _hen-peck'd you all_?
+
+The sweepingness of the assumption completes the flowing breadth of
+effect.
+
+Dryden confessed that a rhyme often gave him a thought. Probably the
+happy word 'sprung' in the following passage from Ben Jonson was
+suggested by it; but then the poet must have had the feeling in him.
+
+      --Let our trumpets sound,
+    And cleave both air and ground
+      With beating of our drums.
+    Let every lyre be strung,
+    Harp, lute, theorbo, _sprung_
+      _With touch of dainty thumbs_.
+
+Boileau's trick for appearing to rhyme naturally was to compose the
+second line of his couplet first! which gives one the crowning idea of
+the 'artificial school of poetry'. Perhaps the most perfect master of
+rhyme, the easiest and most abundant, was the greatest writer of
+comedy that the world has seen,--Moli�re.
+
+If a young reader should ask, after all, What is the quickest way of
+knowing bad poets from good, the best poets from the next best, and so
+on? the answer is, the only and twofold way: first, the perusal of the
+best poets with the greatest attention; and, second, the cultivation
+of that love of truth and beauty which made them what they are. Every
+true reader of poetry partakes a more than ordinary portion of the
+poetic nature; and no one can be completely such, who does not love,
+or take an interest in, everything that interests the poet, from the
+firmament to the daisy,--from the highest heart of man to the most
+pitiable of the low. It is a good practice to read with pen in hand,
+marking what is liked or doubted. It rivets the attention, realizes
+the greatest amount of enjoyment, and facilitates reference. It
+enables the reader also, from time to time, to see what progress he
+makes with his own mind, and how it grows up towards the stature of
+its exalter.
+
+If the same person should ask, What class of poetry is the highest? I
+should say, undoubtedly, the Epic; for it includes the drama, with
+narration besides; or the speaking and action of the characters, with
+the speaking of the poet himself, whose utmost address is taxed to
+relate all well for so long a time, particularly in the passages least
+sustained by enthusiasm. Whether this class has included the greatest
+poet, is another question still under trial; for Shakespeare perplexes
+all such verdicts, even when the claimant is Homer; though, if a
+judgement may be drawn from his early narratives (_Venus and Adonis_,
+and the _Rape of Lucrece_), it is to be doubted whether even
+Shakespeare could have told a story like Homer, owing to that
+incessant activity and superfoetation of thought, a little less of
+which might be occasionally desired even in his plays;--if it were
+possible, once possessing anything of his, to wish it away. Next to
+Homer and Shakespeare come such narrators as the less universal, but
+still intenser Dante; Milton, with his dignified imagination; the
+universal, profoundly simple Chaucer; and luxuriant, remote
+Spenser--immortal child in poetry's most poetic solitudes: then the
+great second-rate dramatists; unless those who are better acquainted
+with Greek tragedy than I am, demand a place for them before Chaucer:
+then the airy yet robust universality of Ariosto; the hearty,
+out-of-door nature of Theocritus, also a universalist; the finest
+lyrical poets (who only take short flights, compared with the
+narrators); the purely contemplative poets who have more thought than
+feeling; the descriptive, satirical, didactic, epigrammatic. It is to
+be borne in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior class
+may be superior to followers in the train of a higher one, though the
+superiority is by no means to be taken for granted; otherwise Pope
+would be superior to Fletcher, and Butler to Pope. Imagination,
+teeming with action and character, makes the greatest poets; feeling
+and thought the next; fancy (by itself) the next; wit the last.
+Thought by itself makes no poet at all; for the mere conclusions of
+the understanding can at best be only so many intellectual matters of
+fact. Feeling, even destitute of conscious thought, stands a far
+better poetical chance; feeling being a sort of thought without the
+process of thinking,--a grasper of the truth without seeing it. And
+what is very remarkable, feeling seldom makes the blunders that
+thought does. An idle distinction has been made between taste and
+judgement. Taste is the very maker of judgement. Put an artificial
+fruit in your mouth, or only handle it, and you will soon perceive the
+difference between judging from taste or tact, and judging from the
+abstract figment called judgement. The latter does but throw you into
+guesses and doubts. Hence the conceits that astonish us in the
+gravest, and even subtlest, thinkers, whose taste is not proportionate
+to their mental perceptions; men like Donne, for instance; who, apart
+from accidental personal impressions, seem to look at nothing as it
+really is, but only as to what may be thought of it. Hence, on the
+other hand, the delightfulness of those poets who never violate truth
+of feeling, whether in things real or imaginary; who are always
+consistent with their object and its requirements; and who run the
+great round of nature, not to perplex and be perplexed, but to make
+themselves and us happy. And luckily, delightfulness is not
+incompatible with greatness, willing soever as men may be in their
+present imperfect state to set the power to subjugate above the power
+to please. Truth, of any great kind whatsoever, makes great writing.
+This is the reason why such poets as Ariosto, though not writing with
+a constant detail of thought and feeling like Dante, are justly
+considered great as well as delightful. Their greatness proves itself
+by the same truth of nature, and sustained power, though in a
+different way. Their action is not so crowded and weighty; their
+sphere has more territories less fertile; but it has enchantments of
+its own, which excess of thought would spoil,--luxuries, laughing
+graces, animal spirits; and not to recognize the beauty and greatness
+of these, treated as they treat them, is simply to be defective in
+sympathy. Every planet is not Mars or Saturn. There is also Venus and
+Mercury. There is one genius of the south, and another of the north,
+and others uniting both. The reader who is too thoughtless or too
+sensitive to like intensity of any sort, and he who is too thoughtful
+or too dull to like anything but the greatest possible stimulus of
+reflection or passion, are equally wanting in complexional fitness
+for a thorough enjoyment of books. Ariosto occasionally says as fine
+things as Dante, and Spenser as Shakespeare; but the business of both
+is to enjoy; and in order to partake their enjoyment to its full
+extent, you must feel what poetry is in the general as well as the
+particular, must be aware that there are different songs of the
+spheres, some fuller of notes, and others of a sustained delight; and
+as the former keep you perpetually alive to thought or passion, so
+from the latter you receive a constant harmonious sense of truth and
+beauty, more agreeable perhaps on the whole, though less exciting.
+Ariosto, for instance, does not _tell a story_ with the brevity and
+concentrated passion of Dante; every sentence is not so full of
+matter, nor the style so removed from the indifference of prose; yet
+you are charmed with a truth of another sort, equally characteristic
+of the writer, equally drawn from nature and substituting a healthy
+sense of enjoyment for intenser emotion. Exclusiveness of liking for
+this or that mode of truth, only shows, either that a reader's
+perceptions are limited, or that he would sacrifice truth itself to
+his favourite form of it. Sir Walter Raleigh, who was as trenchant
+with his pen as his sword, hailed the _Faerie Queene_ of his friend
+Spenser in verses in which he said that 'Petrarch' was thenceforward
+to be no more heard of; and that in all English poetry, there was
+nothing he counted 'of any price' but the effusions of the new author.
+Yet Petrarch is still living; Chaucer was not abolished by Sir Walter;
+and Shakespeare is thought somewhat valuable. A botanist might as well
+have said, that myrtles and oaks were to disappear, because acacias
+had come up. It is with the poet's creations, as with nature's, great
+or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their amount, can be
+worthily shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our
+hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether in productions grand and
+beautiful as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no
+bigger and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets;
+whether in Homer's epic or Gray's _Elegy_, in the enchanted gardens of
+Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the _Schoolmistress_ of
+Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and
+feel this, is to be deficient in the universality of Nature herself,
+who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who
+calls upon us to admire all her productions; not indeed with the same
+degree of admiration, but with no refusal of it, except to defect.
+
+I cannot draw this essay towards its conclusion better than with three
+memorable words of Milton; who has said, that poetry, in comparison
+with science, is 'simple, sensuous, and passionate'. By simple, he
+means unperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of
+imagery; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware that
+different constructions have been put on some of these words; but the
+context seems to me to necessitate those before us. I quote, however,
+not from the original, but from an extract in the _Remarks on Paradise
+Lost_ by Richardson.
+
+What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and
+truth;--what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the
+false. He will get no good by proposing to be 'in earnest at the
+moment'. His earnestness must be innate and habitual; born with him,
+and felt to be his most precious inheritance. 'I expect neither
+profit nor general fame by my writings,' says Coleridge, in the
+Preface to his Poems; 'and I consider myself as having been amply
+repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its "_own exceeding great
+reward_"; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined
+my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit
+of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets
+and surrounds me.'
+
+'Poetry', says Shelley, 'lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the
+world, _and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar_.
+It reproduces all that it represents; and the impersonations clothed
+in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who
+have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted
+content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which
+it co-exists. The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of
+our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
+which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be
+greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put
+himself in the place of another, and of many others: the pains and
+pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of
+moral good is imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by
+acting upon the cause.'
+
+I would not willingly say anything after perorations like these; but
+as treatises on poetry may chance to have auditors who think
+themselves called upon to vindicate the superiority of what is termed
+useful knowledge, it may be as well to add, that if the poet may be
+allowed to pique himself on any one thing more than another, compared
+with those who undervalue him, it is on that power of undervaluing
+nobody, and no attainments different from his own, which is given him
+by the very faculty of imagination they despise. The greater includes
+the less. They do not see that their inability to comprehend him
+argues the smaller capacity. No man recognizes the worth of utility
+more than the poet: he only desires that the meaning of the term may
+not come short of its greatness, and exclude the noblest necessities
+of his fellow-creatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance,
+with the facilities for rapid conveyance afforded him by the railroad,
+as the dullest confiner of its advantages to that single idea, or as
+the greatest two-idea'd man who varies that single idea with hugging
+himself on his 'buttons' or his good dinner. But he sees also the
+beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the
+heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming along like
+a magic horse, of the affections that are carrying, perhaps, half the
+passengers on their journey, nay, of those of the great two-idea'd
+man; and, beyond all this, he discerns the incalculable amount of
+good, and knowledge, and refinement, and mutual consideration, which
+this wonderful invention is fitted to circulate over the globe,
+perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and certainly to the
+diffusion of millions of enjoyments.
+
+'And a button-maker, after all, invented it!' cries our friend.
+
+Pardon me--it was a nobleman. A button-maker may be a very excellent,
+and a very poetical man too, and yet not have been the first man
+visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the combination of water
+and fire. It was a nobleman who first thought of this most poetical
+bit of science. It was a nobleman who first thought of it--a captain
+who first tried it--and a button-maker who perfected it. And he who
+put the nobleman on such thoughts was the great philosopher, Bacon,
+who said that poetry had 'something divine in it', and was necessary
+to the satisfaction of the human mind.
+
+
+
+
+MATTHEW ARNOLD
+
+1822-1888
+
+THE CHOICE OF SUBJECTS IN POETRY
+
+[Preface to 'Poems', 1853]
+
+
+In two small volumes of Poems, published anonymously, one in 1849, the
+other in 1852, many of the Poems which compose the present volume have
+already appeared. The rest are now published for the first time.
+
+I have, in the present collection, omitted the Poem from which the
+volume published in 1852 took its title. I have done so, not because
+the subject of it was a Sicilian Greek born between two and three
+thousand years ago, although many persons would think this a
+sufficient reason. Neither have I done so because I had, in my own
+opinion, failed in the delineation which I intended to effect. I
+intended to delineate the feelings of one of the last of the Greek
+religious philosophers, one of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus,
+having survived his fellows, living on into a time when the habits of
+Greek thought and feeling had begun fast to change, character to
+dwindle, the influence of the Sophists to prevail. Into the feelings
+of a man so situated there entered much that we are accustomed to
+consider as exclusively modern; how much, the fragments of Empedocles
+himself which remain to us are sufficient at least to indicate. What
+those who are familiar only with the great monuments of early Greek
+genius suppose to be its exclusive characteristics, have disappeared;
+the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have
+disappeared: the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced;
+modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts,
+we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.
+
+The representation of such a man's feelings must be interesting, if
+consistently drawn. We all naturally take pleasure, says Aristotle, in
+any imitation or representation whatever: this is the basis of our
+love of Poetry: and we take pleasure in them, he adds, because all
+knowledge is naturally agreeable to us; not to the philosopher only,
+but to mankind at large. Every representation therefore which is
+consistently drawn may be supposed to be interesting, inasmuch as it
+gratifies this natural interest in knowledge of all kinds. What is
+_not_ interesting, is that which does not add to our knowledge of any
+kind; that which is vaguely conceived and loosely drawn; a
+representation which is general, indeterminate, and faint, instead of
+being particular, precise, and firm.
+
+Any accurate representation may therefore be expected to be
+interesting; but, if the representation be a poetical one, more than
+this is demanded. It is demanded, not only that it shall interest, but
+also that it shall inspirit and rejoice the reader: that it shall
+convey a charm, and infuse delight. For the Muses, as Hesiod says,
+were born that they might be 'a forgetfulness of evils, and a truce
+from cares'; and it is not enough that the Poet should add to the
+knowledge of men, it is required of him also that he should add to
+their happiness. 'All Art', says Schiller, 'is dedicated to Joy, and
+there is no higher and no more serious problem, than how to make men
+happy. The right Art is that alone, which creates the highest
+enjoyment.'
+
+A poetical work, therefore, is not yet justified when it has been
+shown to be an accurate, and therefore interesting, representation; it
+has to be shown also that it is a representation from which men can
+derive enjoyment. In presence of the most tragic circumstances,
+represented in a work of Art, the feeling of enjoyment, as is well
+known, may still subsist: the representation of the most utter
+calamity, of the liveliest anguish, is not sufficient to destroy it:
+the more tragic the situation, the deeper becomes the enjoyment; and
+the situation is more tragic in proportion as it becomes more
+terrible.
+
+What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though
+accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in
+which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous
+state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope,
+or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to
+be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in
+the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in
+actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them
+in poetry is painful also.
+
+To this class of situations, poetically faulty as it appears to me,
+that of Empedocles, as I have endeavoured to represent him, belongs;
+and I have therefore excluded the Poem from the present collection.
+
+And why, it may be asked, have I entered into this explanation
+respecting a matter so unimportant as the admission or exclusion of
+the Poem in question? I have done so, because I was anxious to avow
+that the sole reason for its exclusion was that which has been stated
+above; and that it has not been excluded in deference to the opinion
+which many critics of the present day appear to entertain against
+subjects chosen from distant times and countries: against the choice,
+in short, of any subjects but modern ones.
+
+'The Poet,' it is said, and by an intelligent critic, 'the Poet who
+would really fix the public attention must leave the exhausted past,
+and draw his subjects from matters of present import, and _therefore_
+both of interest and novelty.'
+
+Now this view I believe to be completely false. It is worth examining,
+inasmuch as it is a fair sample of a class of critical dicta
+everywhere current at the present day, having a philosophical form and
+air, but no real basis in fact; and which are calculated to vitiate
+the judgement of readers of poetry, while they exert, so far as they
+are adopted, a misleading influence on the practice of those who write
+it.
+
+What are the eternal objects of Poetry, among all nations and at all
+times? They are actions; human actions; possessing an inherent
+interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an
+interesting manner by the art of the Poet. Vainly will the latter
+imagine that he has everything in his own power; that he can make an
+intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent
+one by his treatment of it: he may indeed compel us to admire his
+skill, but his work will possess, within itself, an incurable defect.
+
+The Poet, then, has in the first place to select an excellent action;
+and what actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most
+powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those
+elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which
+are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same;
+that which interests them is permanent and the same also. The
+modernness or antiquity of an action, therefore, has nothing to do
+with its fitness for poetical representation; this depends upon its
+inherent qualities. To the elementary part of our nature, to our
+passions, that which is great and passionate is eternally interesting;
+and interesting solely in proportion to its greatness and to its
+passion. A great human action of a thousand years ago is more
+interesting to it than a smaller human action of to-day, even though
+upon the representation of this last the most consummate skill may
+have been expended, and though it has the advantage of appealing by
+its modern language, familiar manners, and contemporary allusions, to
+all our transient feelings and interests. These, however, have no
+right to demand of a poetical work that it shall satisfy them; their
+claims are to be directed elsewhere. Poetical works belong to the
+domain of our permanent passions: let them interest these, and the
+voice of all subordinate claims upon them is at once silenced.
+
+Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido--what modern poem presents
+personages as interesting, even to us moderns, as these personages of
+an 'exhausted past'? We have the domestic epic dealing with the
+details of modern life which pass daily under our eyes; we have poems
+representing modern personages in contact with the problems of modern
+life, moral, intellectual, and social; these works have been produced
+by poets the most distinguished of their nation and time; yet I
+fearlessly assert that _Hermann and Dorothea_, _Childe Harold_,
+_Jocelyn_, _The Excursion_, leave the reader cold in comparison with
+the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the
+_Orestea_, or by the episode of Dido. And why is this? Simply because
+in the three latter cases the action is greater, the personages
+nobler, the situations more intense: and this is the true basis of the
+interest in a poetical work, and this alone.
+
+It may be urged, however, that past actions may be interesting in
+themselves, but that they are not to be adopted by the modern Poet,
+because it is impossible for him to have them clearly present to his
+own mind, and he cannot therefore feel them deeply, nor represent them
+forcibly. But this is not necessarily the case. The externals of a
+past action, indeed, he cannot know with the precision of a
+contemporary; but his business is with its essentials. The outward man
+of Oedipus or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the
+ceremonies of their courts, he cannot accurately figure to himself;
+but neither do they essentially concern him. His business is with
+their inward man; with their feelings and behaviour in certain tragic
+situations, which engage their passions as men; these have in them
+nothing local and casual; they are as accessible to the modern Poet as
+to a contemporary.
+
+The date of an action, then, signifies nothing: the action itself, its
+selection and construction, this is what is all-important. This the
+Greeks understood far more clearly than we do. The radical difference
+between their poetical theory and ours consists, as it appears to me,
+in this: that, with them, the poetical character of the action in
+itself, and the conduct of it, was the first consideration; with us,
+attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts and
+images which occur in the treatment of an action. They regarded the
+whole; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over
+the expression of it; with us, the expression predominates over the
+action. Not that they failed in expression, or were inattentive to it;
+on the contrary, they are the highest models of expression, the
+unapproached masters of the _grand style_: but their expression is so
+excellent because it is so admirably kept in its right degree of
+prominence; because it is so simple and so well subordinated; because
+it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it
+conveys. For what reason was the Greek tragic poet confined to so
+limited a range of subjects? Because there are so few actions which
+unite in themselves, in the highest degree, the conditions of
+excellence: and it was not thought that on any but an excellent
+subject could an excellent Poem be constructed. A few actions,
+therefore, eminently adapted for tragedy, maintained almost exclusive
+possession of the Greek tragic stage; their significance appeared
+inexhaustible; they were as permanent problems, perpetually offered to
+the genius of every fresh poet. This too is the reason of what appears
+to us moderns a certain baldness of expression in Greek tragedy; of
+the triviality with which we often reproach the remarks of the
+Chorus, where it takes part in the dialogue: that the action itself,
+the situation of Orestes, or Merope, or Alcmaeon, was to stand the
+central point of interest, unforgotten, absorbing, principal; that no
+accessories were for a moment to distract the spectator's attention
+from this; that the tone of the parts was to be perpetually kept down,
+in order not to impair the grandiose effect of the whole. The terrible
+old mythic story on which the drama was founded stood, before he
+entered the theatre, traced in its bare outlines upon the spectator's
+mind; it stood in his memory, as a group of statuary, faintly seen, at
+the end of a long and dark vista: then came the Poet, embodying
+outlines, developing situations, not a word wasted, not a sentiment
+capriciously thrown in; stroke upon stroke, the drama proceeded: the
+light deepened upon the group; more and more it revealed itself to the
+riveted gaze of the spectator: until at last, when the final words
+were spoken, it stood before him in broad sunlight, a model of
+immortal beauty.
+
+This was what a Greek critic demanded; this was what a Greek poet
+endeavoured to effect. It signified nothing to what time an action
+belonged; we do not find that the _Persae_ occupied a particularly
+high rank among the dramas of Aeschylus, because it represented a
+matter of contemporary interest: this was not what a cultivated
+Athenian required; he required that the permanent elements of his
+nature should be moved; and dramas of which the action, though taken
+from a long-distant mythic time, yet was calculated to accomplish this
+in a higher degree than that of the _Persae_, stood higher in his
+estimation accordingly. The Greeks felt, no doubt, with their
+exquisite sagacity of taste, that an action of present times was too
+near them, too much mixed up with what was accidental and passing, to
+form a sufficiently grand, detached, and self-subsistent object for a
+tragic poem: such objects belonged to the domain of the comic poet,
+and of the lighter kinds of poetry. For the more serious kinds, for
+_pragmatic_ poetry, to use an excellent expression of Polybius, they
+were more difficult and severe in the range of subjects which they
+permitted. Their theory and practice alike, the admirable treatise of
+Aristotle, and the unrivalled works of their poets, exclaim with a
+thousand tongues--'All depends upon the subject; choose a fitting
+action, penetrate yourself with the feeling of its situations; this
+done, everything else will follow.'
+
+But for all kinds of poetry alike there was one point on which they
+were rigidly exacting; the adaptability of the subject to the kind of
+poetry selected, and the careful construction of the poem.
+
+How different a way of thinking from this is ours! We can hardly at
+the present day understand what Menander meant, when he told a man who
+inquired as to the progress of his comedy that he had finished it, not
+having yet written a single line, because he had constructed the
+action of it in his mind. A modern critic would have assured him that
+the merit of his piece depended on the brilliant things which arose
+under his pen as he went along. We have poems which seem to exist
+merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of
+producing any total impression. We have critics who seem to direct
+their attention merely to detached expressions, to the language about
+the action, not to the action itself. I verily think that the
+majority of them do not in their hearts believe that there is such a
+thing as a total-impression to be derived from a poem at all, or to be
+demanded from a poet; they think the term a commonplace of
+metaphysical criticism. They will permit the Poet to select any action
+he pleases, and to suffer that action to go as it will, provided he
+gratifies them with occasional bursts of fine writing, and with a
+shower of isolated thoughts and images. That is, they permit him to
+leave their poetical sense ungratified, provided that he gratifies
+their rhetorical sense and their curiosity. Of his neglecting to
+gratify these, there is little danger; he needs rather to be warned
+against the danger of attempting to gratify these alone; he needs
+rather to be perpetually reminded to prefer his action to everything
+else; so to treat this, as to permit its inherent excellences to
+develop themselves, without interruption from the intrusion of his
+personal peculiarities: most fortunate when he most entirely succeeds
+in effacing himself, and in enabling a noble action to subsist as it
+did in nature.
+
+But the modern critic not only permits a false practice; he absolutely
+prescribes false aims.--'A true allegory of the state of one's own
+mind in a representative history,' the Poet is told, 'is perhaps the
+highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry.'--And
+accordingly he attempts it. An allegory of the state of one's own
+mind, the highest problem of an art which imitates actions! No
+assuredly, it is not, it never can be so: no great poetical work has
+ever been produced with such an aim. _Faust_ itself, in which
+something of the kind is attempted, wonderful passages as it contains,
+and in spite of the unsurpassed beauty of the scenes which relate to
+Margaret, _Faust_ itself, judged as a whole, and judged strictly as a
+poetical work, is defective: its illustrious author, the greatest poet
+of modern times, the greatest critic of all times, would have been the
+first to acknowledge it; he only defended his work, indeed, by
+asserting it to be 'something incommensurable'.
+
+The confusion of the present times is great, the multitude of voices
+counselling different things bewildering, the number of existing works
+capable of attracting a young writer's attention and of becoming his
+models, immense: what he wants is a hand to guide him through the
+confusion, a voice to prescribe to him the aim which he should keep in
+view, and to explain to him that the value of the literary works which
+offer themselves to his attention is relative to their power of
+helping him forward on his road towards this aim. Such a guide the
+English writer at the present day will nowhere find. Failing this, all
+that can be looked for, all indeed that can be desired, is, that his
+attention should be fixed on excellent models; that he may reproduce,
+at any rate, something of their excellence, by penetrating himself
+with their works and by catching their spirit, if he cannot be taught
+to produce what is excellent independently.
+
+Foremost among these models for the English writer stands Shakespeare:
+a name the greatest perhaps of all poetical names; a name never to be
+mentioned without reverence. I will venture, however, to express a
+doubt, whether the influence of his works, excellent and fruitful for
+the readers of poetry, for the great majority, has been of unmixed
+advantage to the writers of it. Shakespeare indeed chose excellent
+subjects; the world could afford no better than Macbeth, or Romeo and
+Juliet, or Othello: he had no theory respecting the necessity of
+choosing subjects of present import, or the paramount interest
+attaching to allegories of the state of one's own mind; like all great
+poets, he knew well what constituted a poetical action; like them,
+wherever he found such an action, he took it; like them, too, he found
+his best in past times. But to these general characteristics of all
+great poets, he added a special one of his own; a gift, namely, of
+happy, abundant, and ingenious expression, eminent and unrivalled: so
+eminent as irresistibly to strike the attention first in him, and even
+to throw into comparative shade his other excellences as a poet. Here
+has been the mischief. These other excellences were his fundamental
+excellences _as a poet_; what distinguishes the artist from the mere
+amateur, says Goethe, is _Architectonic�_ in the highest sense; that
+power of execution, which creates, forms, and constitutes: not the
+profoundness of single thoughts, not the richness of imagery, not the
+abundance of illustration. But these attractive accessories of a
+poetical work being more easily seized than the spirit of the whole,
+and these accessories being possessed by Shakespeare in an unequalled
+degree, a young writer having recourse to Shakespeare as his model
+runs great risk of being vanquished and absorbed by them, and, in
+consequence, of reproducing, according to the measure of his power,
+these, and these alone. Of this preponderating quality of
+Shakespeare's genius, accordingly, almost the whole of modern English
+poetry has, it appears to me, felt the influence. To the exclusive
+attention on the part of his imitators to this it is in a great degree
+owing, that of the majority of modern poetical works the details
+alone are valuable, the composition worthless. In reading them one is
+perpetually reminded of that terrible sentence on a modern French
+poet--_il dit tout ce qu'il veut, mais malheureusement il n'a rien �
+dire_.
+
+Let me give an instance of what I mean. I will take it from the works
+of the very chief among those who seem to have been formed in the
+school of Shakespeare: of one whose exquisite genius and pathetic
+death render him for ever interesting. I will take the poem of
+_Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, by Keats. I choose this rather than
+the _Endymion_, because the latter work (which a modern critic has
+classed with the _Faerie Queene_!), although undoubtedly there blows
+through it the breath of genius, is yet as a whole so utterly
+incoherent, as not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all. The
+poem of _Isabella_, then, is a perfect treasure-house of graceful and
+felicitous words and images: almost in every stanza there occurs one
+of those vivid and picturesque turns of expression, by which the
+object is made to flash upon the eye of the mind, and which thrill the
+reader with a sudden delight. This one short poem contains, perhaps, a
+greater number of happy single expressions which one could quote than
+all the extant tragedies of Sophocles. But the action, the story? The
+action in itself is an excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by
+the Poet, so loosely constructed, that the effect produced by it, in
+and for itself, is absolutely null. Let the reader, after he has
+finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story in the _Decameron_:
+he will then feel how pregnant and interesting the same action has
+become in the hands of a great artist, who above all things
+delineates his object; who subordinates expression to that which it is
+designed to express.
+
+I have said that the imitators of Shakespeare, fixing their attention
+on his wonderful gift of expression, have directed their imitation to
+this, neglecting his other excellences. These excellences, the
+fundamental excellences of poetical art, Shakespeare no doubt
+possessed them--possessed many of them in a splendid degree; but it
+may perhaps be doubted whether even he himself did not sometimes give
+scope to his faculty of expression to the prejudice of a higher
+poetical duty. For we must never forget that Shakespeare is the great
+poet he is from his skill in discerning and firmly conceiving an
+excellent action, from his power of intensely feeling a situation, of
+intimately associating himself with a character; not from his gift of
+expression, which rather even leads him astray, degenerating sometimes
+into a fondness for curiosity of expression, into an irritability of
+fancy, which seems to make it impossible for him to say a thing
+plainly, even when the press of the action demands the very directest
+language, or its level character the very simplest. Mr. Hallam, than
+whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has
+had the courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark,
+how extremely and faultily difficult Shakespeare's language often is.
+It is so: you may find main scenes in some of his greatest tragedies,
+_King Lear_ for instance, where the language is so artificial, so
+curiously tortured, and so difficult, that every speech has to be read
+two or three times before its meaning can be comprehended. This
+overcuriousness of expression is indeed but the excessive employment
+of a wonderful gift--of the power of saying a thing in a happier way
+than any other man; nevertheless, it is carried so far that one
+understands what M. Guizot meant, when he said that Shakespeare
+appears in his language to have tried all styles except that of
+simplicity. He has not the severe and scrupulous self-restraint of the
+ancients, partly, no doubt, because he had a far less cultivated and
+exacting audience: he has indeed a far wider range than they had, a
+far richer fertility of thought; in this respect he rises above them:
+in his strong conception of his subject, in the genuine way in which
+he is penetrated with it, he resembles them, and is unlike the
+moderns: but in the accurate limitation of it, the conscientious
+rejection of superfluities, the simple and rigorous development of it
+from the first line of his work to the last, he falls below them, and
+comes nearer to the moderns. In his chief works, besides what he has
+of his own, he has the elementary soundness of the ancients; he has
+their important action and their large and broad manner: but he has
+not their purity of method. He is therefore a less safe model; for
+what he has of his own is personal, and inseparable from his own rich
+nature; it may be imitated and exaggerated, it cannot be learned or
+applied as an art; he is above all suggestive; more valuable,
+therefore, to young writers as men than as artists. But clearness of
+arrangement, rigour of development, simplicity of style--these may to
+a certain extent be learned: and these may, I am convinced, be learned
+best from the ancients, who, although infinitely less suggestive than
+Shakespeare, are thus, to the artist, more instructive.
+
+What then, it will be asked, are the ancients to be our sole models?
+the ancients with their comparatively narrow range of experience, and
+their widely different circumstances? Not, certainly, that which is
+narrow in the ancients, nor that in which we can no longer sympathize.
+An action like the action of the _Antigone_ of Sophocles, which turns
+upon the conflict between the heroine's duty to her brother's corpse
+and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is
+possible that we should feel a deep interest. I am speaking too, it
+will be remembered, not of the best sources of intellectual stimulus
+for the general reader, but of the best models of instruction for the
+individual writer. This last may certainly learn of the ancients,
+better than anywhere else, three things which it is vitally important
+for him to know:--the all-importance of the choice of a subject; the
+necessity of accurate construction; and the subordinate character of
+expression. He will learn from them how unspeakably superior is the
+effect of the one moral impression left by a great action treated as a
+whole, to the effect produced by the most striking single thought or
+by the happiest image. As he penetrates into the spirit of the great
+classical works, as he becomes gradually aware of their intense
+significance, their noble simplicity, and their calm pathos, he will
+be convinced that it is this effect, unity and profoundness of moral
+impression, at which the ancient Poets aimed; that it is this which
+constitutes the grandeur of their works, and which makes them
+immortal. He will desire to direct his own efforts towards producing
+the same effect. Above all, he will deliver himself from the jargon of
+modern criticism, and escape the danger of producing poetical works
+conceived in the spirit of the passing time, and which partake of its
+transitoriness.
+
+The present age makes great claims upon us: we owe it service, it will
+not be satisfied without our admiration. I know not how it is, but
+their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those
+who constantly practise it, a steadying and composing effect upon
+their judgement, not of literary works only, but of men and events in
+general. They are like persons who have had a very weighty and
+impressive experience; they are more truly than others under the
+empire of facts, and more independent of the language current among
+those with whom they live. They wish neither to applaud nor to revile
+their age: they wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and
+whether this is what they want. What they want, they know very well;
+they want to educe and cultivate what is best and noblest in
+themselves: they know, too, that this is no easy task--[Greek:
+chalepon], as Pittacus said, [Greek: chalepon esthlon emmenai]--and
+they ask themselves sincerely whether their age and its literature can
+assist them in the attempt. If they are endeavouring to practise any
+art, they remember the plain and simple proceedings of the old
+artists, who attained their grand results by penetrating themselves
+with some noble and significant action, not by inflating themselves
+with a belief in the pre-eminent importance and greatness of their own
+times. They do not talk of their mission, nor of interpreting their
+age, nor of the coming Poet; all this, they know, is the mere delirium
+of vanity; their business is not to praise their age, but to afford to
+the men who live in it the highest pleasure which they are capable of
+feeling. If asked to afford this by means of subjects drawn from the
+age itself, they ask what special fitness the present age has for
+supplying them: they are told that it is an era of progress, an age
+commissioned to carry out the great ideas of industrial development
+and social amelioration. They reply that with all this they can do
+nothing; that the elements they need for the exercise of their art are
+great actions, calculated powerfully and delightfully to affect what
+is permanent in the human soul; that so far as the present age can
+supply such actions, they will gladly make use of them; but that an
+age wanting in moral grandeur can with difficulty supply such, and an
+age of spiritual discomfort with difficulty be powerfully and
+delightfully affected by them.
+
+A host of voices will indignantly rejoin that the present age is
+inferior to the past neither in moral grandeur nor in spiritual
+health. He who possesses the discipline I speak of will content
+himself with remembering the judgements passed upon the present age,
+in this respect, by the two men, the one of strongest head, the other
+of widest culture, whom it has produced; by Goethe and by Niebuhr. It
+will be sufficient for him that he knows the opinions held by these
+two great men respecting the present age and its literature; and that
+he feels assured in his own mind that their aims and demands upon life
+were such as he would wish, at any rate, his own to be; and their
+judgement as to what is impeding and disabling such as he may safely
+follow. He will not, however, maintain a hostile attitude towards the
+false pretensions of his age; he will content himself with not being
+overwhelmed by them. He will esteem himself fortunate if he can
+succeed in banishing from his mind all feelings of contradiction, and
+irritation, and impatience; in order to delight himself with the
+contemplation of some noble action of a heroic time, and to enable
+others, through his representation of it, to delight in it also.
+
+I am far indeed from making any claim, for myself, that I possess this
+discipline; or for the following Poems, that they breathe its spirit.
+But I say, that in the sincere endeavour to learn and practise, amid
+the bewildering confusion of our times, what is sound and true in
+poetical art, I seemed to myself to find the only sure guidance, the
+only solid footing, among the ancients. They, at any rate, knew what
+they wanted in Art, and we do not. It is this uncertainty which is
+disheartening, and not hostile criticism. How often have I felt this
+when reading words of disparagement or of cavil: that it is the
+uncertainty as to what is really to be aimed at which makes our
+difficulty, not the dissatisfaction of the critic, who himself suffers
+from the same uncertainty. _Non me tua fervida terrent Dicta; Dii me
+terrent, et Jupiter hostis._
+
+Two kinds of _dilettanti_, says Goethe, there are in poetry: he who
+neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and thinks he has done
+enough if he shows spirituality and feeling; and he who seeks to
+arrive at poetry merely by mechanism, in which he can acquire an
+artisan's readiness, and is without soul and matter. And he adds, that
+the first does most harm to Art, and the last to himself. If we must
+be _dilettanti_: if it is impossible for us, under the circumstances
+amidst which we live, to think clearly, to feel nobly, and to
+delineate firmly: if we cannot attain to the mastery of the great
+artists--let us, at least, have so much respect for our Art as to
+prefer it to ourselves: let us not bewilder our successors: let us
+transmit to them the practice of Poetry, with its boundaries and
+wholesome regulative laws, under which excellent works may again,
+perhaps, at some future time, be produced, not yet fallen into
+oblivion through our neglect, not yet condemned and cancelled by the
+influence of their eternal enemy, Caprice.
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION
+
+(1854)
+
+I have allowed the Preface to the former edition of these Poems to
+stand almost without change, because I still believe it to be, in the
+main, true. I must not, however, be supposed insensible to the force
+of much that has been alleged against portions of it, or unaware that
+it contains many things incompletely stated, many things which need
+limitation. It leaves, too, untouched the question, how far, and in
+what manner, the opinions there expressed respecting the choice of
+subjects apply to lyric poetry; that region of the poetical field
+which is chiefly cultivated at present. But neither have I time now to
+supply these deficiencies, nor is this the proper place for attempting
+it: on one or two points alone I wish to offer, in the briefest
+possible way, some explanation.
+
+An objection has been ably urged to the classing together, as subjects
+equally belonging to a past time, Oedipus and Macbeth. And it is no
+doubt true that to Shakespeare, standing on the verge of the Middle
+Ages, the epoch of Macbeth was more familiar than that of Oedipus. But
+I was speaking of actions as they presented themselves to us moderns:
+and it will hardly be said that the European mind, since Voltaire, has
+much more affinity with the times of Macbeth than with those of
+Oedipus. As moderns, it seems to me, we have no longer any direct
+affinity with the circumstances and feelings of either; as
+individuals, we are attracted towards this or that personage, we have
+a capacity for imagining him, irrespective of his times, solely
+according to a law of personal sympathy; and those subjects for which
+we feel this personal attraction most strongly, we may hope to treat
+successfully. Alcestis or Joan of Arc, Charlemagne or Agamemnon--one
+of these is not really nearer to us now than another; each can be made
+present only by an act of poetic imagination: but this man's
+imagination has an affinity for one of them, and that man's for
+another.
+
+It has been said that I wish to limit the Poet, in his choice of
+subjects to the period of Greek and Roman antiquity: but it is not so:
+I only counsel him to choose for his subjects great actions, without
+regarding to what time they belong. Nor do I deny that the poetic
+faculty can and does manifest itself in treating the most trifling
+action, the most hopeless subject. But it is a pity that power should
+be wasted; and that the Poet should be compelled to impart interest
+and force to his subject, instead of receiving them from it, and
+thereby doubling his impressiveness. There is, it has been excellently
+said, an immortal strength in the stories of great actions: the most
+gifted poet, then, may well be glad to supplement with it that mortal
+weakness, which, in presence of the vast spectacle of life and the
+world, he must for ever feel to be his individual portion.
+
+Again, with respect to the study of the classical writers of
+antiquity: it has been said that we should emulate rather than imitate
+them. I make no objection: all I say is, let us study them. They can
+help to cure us of what is, it seems to me, the great vice of our
+intellect, manifesting itself in our incredible vagaries in
+literature, in art, in religion, in morals; namely, that it is
+_fantastic_, and wants _sanity_. Sanity--that is the great virtue of
+the ancient literature: the want of that is the great defect of the
+modern, in spite of all its variety and power. It is impossible to
+read carefully the great ancients, without losing something of our
+caprice and eccentricity; and to emulate them we must at least read
+them.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN RUSKIN
+
+1819-1900
+
+OF THE PATHETIC FALLACY
+
+[_Modern Painters_, vol. iii, pt. 4, 1856]
+
+
+� 1. German dulness, and English affectation, have of late much
+multiplied among us the use of two of the most objectionable words
+that were ever coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysicians--namely,
+'Objective' and 'Subjective'.
+
+No words can be more exquisitely, and in all points, useless; and I
+merely speak of them that I may, at once and for ever, get them out of
+my way, and out of my reader's. But to get that done, they must be
+explained.
+
+The word 'Blue', say certain philosophers, means the sensation of
+colour which the human eye receives in looking at the open sky, or at
+a bell gentian.
+
+Now, say they farther, as this sensation can only be felt when the eye
+is turned to the object, and as, therefore, no such sensation is
+produced by the object when nobody looks at it, therefore the thing,
+when it is not looked at, is not blue; and thus (say they) there are
+many qualities of things which depend as much on something else as on
+themselves. To be sweet, a thing must have a taster; it is only sweet
+while it is being tasted, and if the tongue had not the capacity of
+taste, then the sugar would not have the quality of sweetness.
+
+And then they agree that the qualities of things which thus depend
+upon our perception of them, and upon our human nature as affected by
+them, shall be called Subjective; and the qualities of things which
+they always have, irrespective of any other nature, as roundness or
+squareness, shall be called Objective.
+
+From these ingenious views the step is very easy to a farther opinion,
+that it does not much matter what things are in themselves, but only
+what they are to us; and that the only real truth of them is their
+appearance to, or effect upon, us. From which position, with a hearty
+desire for mystification, and much egotism, selfishness, shallowness,
+and impertinence, a philosopher may easily go so far as to believe,
+and say, that everything in the world depends upon his seeing or
+thinking of it, and that nothing, therefore, exists, but what he sees
+or thinks of.
+
+� 2. Now, to get rid of all these ambiguities and troublesome words at
+once, be it observed that the word 'Blue' does _not_ mean the
+_sensation_ caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the
+_power_ of producing that sensation; and this power is always there,
+in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would
+remain there though there were not left a man on the face of the
+earth. Precisely in the same way gunpowder has a power of exploding.
+It will not explode if you put no match to it. But it has always the
+power of so exploding, and is therefore called an explosive compound,
+which it very positively and assuredly is, whatever philosophy may say
+to the contrary.
+
+In like manner, a gentian does not produce the sensation of blueness
+if you don't look at it. But it has always the power of doing so; its
+particles being everlastingly so arranged by its Maker. And,
+therefore, the gentian and the sky are always verily blue, whatever
+philosophy may say to the contrary; and if you do not see them blue
+when you look at them, it is not their fault but yours.
+
+� 3. Hence I would say to these philosophers: If, instead of using the
+sonorous phrase, 'It is objectively so,' you will use the plain old
+phrase, 'It _is_ so;' and if instead of the sonorous phrase, 'It is
+subjectively so,' you will say, in plain old English, 'It does so,' or
+'It seems so to me;' you will, on the whole, be more intelligible to
+your fellow-creatures: and besides, if you find that a thing which
+generally 'does so' to other people (as a gentian looks blue to most
+men), does _not_ so to you, on any particular occasion, you will not
+fall into the impertinence of saying, that the thing is not so, or did
+not so, but you will say simply (what you will be all the better for
+speedily finding out), that something is the matter with you. If you
+find that you cannot explode the gunpowder, you will not declare that
+all gunpowder is subjective, and all explosion imaginary, but you will
+simply suspect and declare yourself to be an ill-made match. Which, on
+the whole, though there may be a distant chance of a mistake about it,
+is, nevertheless, the wisest conclusion you can come to until farther
+experiment.
+
+� 4. Now, therefore, putting these tiresome and absurd words quite out
+of our way, we may go on at our ease to examine the point in
+question--namely, the difference between the ordinary, proper, and
+true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false
+appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or
+contemplative fancy; false appearances, I say, as being entirely
+unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only
+imputed to it by us.
+
+For instance--
+
+    The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould
+    Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.
+
+This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a
+spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron.
+How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that
+it is anything else than a plain crocus?
+
+It is an important question. For, throughout our past reasonings about
+art, we have always found that nothing could be good, or useful, or
+ultimately pleasurable, which was untrue. But here is something
+pleasurable in written poetry which is nevertheless _un_true. And what
+is more, if we think over our favourite poetry, we shall find it full
+of this kind of fallacy, and that we like it all the more for being
+so.
+
+� 5. It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this
+fallacy is of two principal kinds. Either, as in this case of the
+crocus, it is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real
+expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused
+by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or
+less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we shall have to speak
+presently; but, in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the
+other error, that which the mind admits when affected strongly by
+emotion. Thus, for instance, in Alton Locke--
+
+    They rowed her in across the rolling foam--
+    The cruel, crawling foam.
+
+The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which
+attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which
+the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same
+effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of
+external things, which I would generally characterize as the 'Pathetic
+Fallacy'.
+
+� 6. Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as eminently
+a character of poetical description, and the temper of mind in which
+we allow it as one eminently poetical, because passionate. But, I
+believe, if we look well into the matter, that we shall find the
+greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness--that it is
+only the second order of poets who much delight in it.[31]
+
+    [31] I admit two orders of poets, but no third; and by these
+    two orders I mean the Creative (Shakespeare, Homer, Dante),
+    and Reflective or Perceptive (Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson).
+    But both of these must be _first_-rate in their range, though
+    their range is different; and with poetry second-rate in
+    _quality_ no one ought to be allowed to trouble mankind.
+    There is quite enough of the best,--much more than we can
+    ever read or enjoy in the length of a life; and it is a
+    literal wrong or sin in any person to encumber us with
+    inferior work. I have no patience with apologies made by
+    young pseudo-poets, 'that they believe there is _some_ good
+    in what they have written: that they hope to do better in
+    time,' &c. _Some_ good! If there is not _all_ good, there is
+    no good. If they ever hope to do better, why do they trouble
+    us now? Let them rather courageously burn all they have done,
+    and wait for the better days. There are few men, ordinarily
+    educated, who in moments of strong feeling could not strike
+    out a poetical thought, and afterwards polish it so as to be
+    presentable. But men of sense know better than so to waste
+    their time; and those who sincerely love poetry, know the
+    touch of the master's hand on the chords too well to fumble
+    among them after him. Nay, more than this; all inferior
+    poetry is an injury to the good, inasmuch as it takes away
+    the freshness of rhymes, blunders upon and gives a wretched
+    commonalty to good thoughts; and, in general, adds to the
+    weight of human weariness in a most woful and culpable
+    manner. There are few thoughts likely to come across ordinary
+    men, which have not already been expressed by greater men in
+    the best possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, more
+    noble thing to remember and point out the perfect words, than
+    to invent poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily the
+    world.
+
+Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of
+Acheron 'as dead leaves flutter from a bough', he gives the most
+perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness,
+passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an
+instant losing his own clear perception that _these_ are souls, and
+_those_ are leaves; he makes no confusion of one with the other. But
+when Coleridge speaks of
+
+    The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
+    That dances as often as dance it can,
+
+he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea about the leaf:
+he fancies a life in it, and will, which there are not; confuses its
+powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merriment, and the
+wind that shakes it with music. Here, however, there is some beauty,
+even in the morbid passage; but take an instance in Homer and Pope.
+Without the knowledge of Ulysses, Elpenor, his youngest follower, has
+fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace, and has been left
+dead, unmissed by his leader, or companions, in the haste of their
+departure. They cross the sea to the Cimmerian land; and Ulysses
+summons the shades from Tartarus. The first which appears is that of
+the lost Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the spirit of bitter
+and terrified lightness which is seen in Hamlet,[32] addresses the
+spirit with the simple, startled words:--
+
+     Elpenor! How camest thou under the shadowy darkness? Hast
+     thou come faster on foot than I in my black ship?
+
+    [32] 'Well said, old mole! can'st work i' the ground so
+    fast?'
+
+Which Pope renders thus:--
+
+    O, say, what angry power Elpenor led
+    To glide in shades, and wander with the dead?
+    How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,
+    Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind?
+
+I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the
+nimbleness of the sail, or the laziness of the wind! And yet how is it
+that these conceits are so painful now, when they have been pleasant
+to us in the other instances?
+
+� 7. For a very simple reason. They are not a _pathetic_ fallacy at
+all, for they are put into the mouth of the wrong passion--a passion
+which never could possibly have spoken them--agonized curiosity.
+Ulysses wants to know the facts of the matter; and the very last thing
+his mind could do at the moment would be to pause, or suggest in
+anywise what was _not_ a fact. The delay in the first three lines, and
+conceit in the last, jar upon us instantly, like the most frightful
+discord in music. No poet of true imaginative power could possibly
+have written the passage.[33]
+
+    [33] It is worth while comparing the way a similar question
+    is put by the exquisite sincerity of Keats:--
+
+              He wept, and his bright tears
+        Went trickling down the golden bow he held.
+        Thus, with half-shut, suffused eyes, he stood;
+        While from beneath some cumb'rous boughs hard by,
+        With solemn step, an awful goddess came.
+        And there was purport in her looks for him,
+        Which he with eager guess began to read:
+        Perplexed the while, melodiously he said,
+        '_How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea?_'
+
+Therefore, we see that the spirit of truth must guide us in some
+sort, even in our enjoyment of fallacy. Coleridge's fallacy has no
+discord in it, but Pope's has set our teeth on edge. Without farther
+questioning, I will endeavour to state the main bearings of this
+matter.
+
+� 8. The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is, as I said
+above, that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully
+with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or overclouded, or
+over-dazzled by emotion; and it is a more or less noble state,
+according to the force of the emotion which has induced it. For it is
+no credit to a man that he is not morbid or inaccurate in his
+perceptions, when he has no strength of feeling to warp them; and it
+is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of
+being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly,
+the intellect, and make it believe what they choose. But it is still a
+grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong
+enough to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost
+efforts of the passions; and the whole man stands in an iron glow,
+white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating; even
+if he melts, losing none of his weight.
+
+So, then, we have the three ranks: the man who perceives rightly,
+because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately
+the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who
+perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is
+anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy's shield,
+or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives
+rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for
+ever nothing else than itself--a little flower, apprehended in the
+very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the
+associations and passions may be, that crowd around it. And, in
+general, these three classes may be rated in comparative order, as the
+men who are not poets at all, and the poets of the second order, and
+the poets of the first; only however great a man may be, there are
+always some subjects which _ought_ to throw him off his balance; some,
+by which his poor human capacity of thought should be conquered, and
+brought into the inaccurate and vague state of perception, so that the
+language of the highest inspiration becomes broken, obscure, and wild
+in metaphor, resembling that of the weaker man, overborne by weaker
+things.
+
+� 9. And thus, in full, there are four classes: the men who feel
+nothing, and therefore see truly; the men who feel strongly, think
+weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets); the men who feel
+strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order of poets); and
+the men who, strong as human creatures can be, are yet submitted to
+influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, because what
+they see is inconceivably above them. This last is the usual condition
+of prophetic inspiration.
+
+� 10. I separate these classes, in order that their character may be
+clearly understood; but of course they are united each to the other by
+imperceptible transitions, and the same mind, according to the
+influences to which it is subjected, passes at different times into
+the various states. Still, the difference between the great and less
+man is, on the whole, chiefly in this point of _alterability_. That is
+to say, the one knows too much, and perceives and feels too much of
+the past and future, and of all things beside and around that which
+immediately affects him, to be in anywise shaken by it. His mind is
+made up; his thoughts have an accustomed current; his ways are
+steadfast; it is not this or that new sight which will at once
+unbalance him. He is tender to impression at the surface, like a rock
+with deep moss upon it; but there is too much mass of him to be moved.
+The smaller man, with the same degree of sensibility, is at once
+carried off his feet; he wants to do something he did not want to do
+before; he views all the universe in a new light through his tears; he
+is gay or enthusiastic, melancholy or passionate, as things come and
+go to him. Therefore the high creative poet might even be thought, to
+a great extent, impassive (as shallow people think Dante stern),
+receiving indeed all feelings to the full, but having a great centre
+of reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene, and watches the
+feeling, as it were, from far off.
+
+Dante, in his most intense moods, has entire command of himself, and
+can look around calmly, at all moments, for the image or the word that
+will best tell what he sees to the upper or lower world. But Keats and
+Tennyson, and the poets of the second order, are generally themselves
+subdued by the feelings under which they write, or, at least, write as
+choosing to be so, and therefore admit certain expressions and modes
+of thought which are in some sort diseased or false.
+
+� 11. Now so long as we see that the _feeling_ is true, we pardon, or
+are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces:
+we are pleased, for instance, with those lines of Kingsley's, above
+quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they
+faithfully describe sorrow. But the moment the mind of the speaker
+becomes cold, that moment every such expression becomes untrue, as
+being for ever untrue in the external facts. And there is no greater
+baseness in literature than the habit of using these metaphorical
+expressions in cold blood. An inspired writer, in full impetuosity of
+passion, may speak wisely and truly of 'raging waves of the sea,
+foaming out their own shame'; but it is only the basest writer who
+cannot speak of the sea without talking of 'raging waves',
+'remorseless floods', 'ravenous billows', &c.; and it is one of the
+signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of
+thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the _pure fact_, out of
+which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a
+true one.
+
+To keep to the waves, I forget who it is who represents a man in
+despair, desiring that his body may be cast into the sea,
+
+    _Whose changing mound, and foam that passed away,_
+    Might mock the eye that questioned where I lay.
+
+Observe, there is not a single false, or even overcharged, expression.
+'Mound' of the sea wave is perfectly simple and true; 'changing' is as
+familiar as may be; 'foam that passed away', strictly literal; and the
+whole line descriptive of the reality with a degree of accuracy which
+I know not any other verse, in the range of poetry, that altogether
+equals. For most people have not a distinct idea of the clumsiness and
+massiveness of a large wave. The word 'wave' is used too generally of
+ripples and breakers, and bendings in light drapery or grass: it does
+not by itself convey a perfect image. But the word 'mound' is heavy,
+large, dark, definite; there is no mistaking the kind of wave meant,
+nor missing the sight of it. Then the term 'changing' has a peculiar
+force also. Most people think of waves as rising and falling. But if
+they look at the sea carefully, they will perceive that the waves do
+not rise and fall. They change. Change both place and form, but they
+do not fall; one wave goes on, and on, and still on; now lower, now
+higher, now tossing its mane like a horse, now building itself
+together like a wall, now shaking, now steady, but still the same
+wave, till at last it seems struck by something, and changes, one
+knows not how,--becomes another wave.
+
+The close of the line insists on this image, and paints it still more
+perfectly,--'foam that passed away'. Not merely melting, disappearing,
+but passing on, out of sight, on the career of the wave. Then, having
+put the absolute ocean fact as far as he may before our eyes, the poet
+leaves us to feel about it as we may, and to trace for ourselves the
+opposite fact,--the image of the green mounds that do not change, and
+the white and written stones that do not pass away; and thence to
+follow out also the associated images of the calm life with the quiet
+grave, and the despairing life with the fading foam:
+
+    Let no man move his bones.
+
+    As for Samaria, her king is out off like the foam upon the water.
+
+But nothing of this is actually told or pointed out, and the
+expressions, as they stand, are perfectly severe and accurate, utterly
+uninfluenced by the firmly governed emotion of the writer. Even the
+word 'mock' is hardly an exception, as it may stand merely for
+'deceive' or 'defeat', without implying any impersonation of the
+waves.
+
+� 12. It may be well, perhaps, to give one or two more instances to
+show the peculiar dignity possessed by all passages which thus limit
+their expression to the pure fact, and leave the hearer to gather what
+he can from it. Here is a notable one from the Iliad. Helen, looking
+from the Scaean gate of Troy over the Grecian host, and telling Priam
+the names of its captains, says at last:
+
+     I see all the other dark-eyed Greeks; but two I cannot
+     see,--Castor and Pollux,--whom one mother bore with me. Have
+     they not followed from fair Lacedaemon, or have they indeed
+     come in their sea-wandering ships, but now will not enter
+     into the battle of men, fearing the shame and the scorn that
+     is in Me?
+
+Then Homer:
+
+     So she spoke. But them, already, the life-giving earth
+     possessed, there in Lacedaemon, in the dear fatherland.
+
+Note, here, the high poetical truth carried to the extreme. The poet
+has to speak of the earth in sadness, but he will not let that sadness
+affect or change his thoughts of it. No; though Castor and Pollux be
+dead, yet the earth is our mother still, fruitful, life-giving. These
+are the facts of the thing. I see nothing else than these. Make what
+you will of them.
+
+� 13. Take another very notable instance from Casimir de la Vigne's
+terrible ballad, _La Toilette de Constance_. I must quote a few lines
+out of it here and there, to enable the reader who has not the book by
+him, to understand its close.
+
+        Vite, Anna, vite; au miroir
+          Plus vite, Anna. L'heure s'avance,
+        Et je vais au bal ce soir
+          Chez l'ambassadeur de France.
+
+    Y pensez-vous, ils sont fan�s, ces noeuds,
+      Ils sont d'hier, mon Dieu, comme tout passe!
+    Que du r�seau qui retient mes cheveux
+      Les glands d'azur retombent avec gr�ce.
+    Plus haut! Plus bas! Vous ne comprenez rien!
+      Que sur mon front ce saphir �tincelle:
+    Vous me piquez, maladroite. Ah, c'est bien,
+      Bien,--ch�re Anna! Je t'aime, je suis belle.
+
+    Celui qu'en vain je voudrais oublier
+      (Anna, ma robe) il y sera, j'espere.
+    (Ah, fi! profane, est-ce l� mon collier?
+      Quoi! ces grains d'or b�nits par le Saint-P�re!)
+    Il y sera; Dieu, s'il pressait ma main,
+      En y pensant, � peine je respire;
+    P�re Anselmo doit m'entendre demain,
+      Comment ferai-je, Anna, pour tout lui dire?
+
+        Vite un coup d'oeil au miroir,
+          Le dernier. ----J'ai l'assurance
+        Qu'on va m'adorer ce soir
+          Chez l'ambassadeur de France.
+
+    Pr�s du foyer, Constance s'admirait.
+      Dieu! sur sa robe il vole une �tincelle!
+    Au feu! Courez! Quand l'espoir l'enivrait,
+      Tout perdre ainsi! Quoi! Mourir,--et si belle!
+    L'horrible feu ronge avec volupt�
+      Ses bras, son sein, et l'entoure, et s'�l�ve,
+    Et sans piti� d�vore sa beaut�,
+      Ses dix-huit ans, h�las, et son doux r�ve!
+
+        Adieu, bal, plaisir, amour!
+          On disait, Pauvre Constance!
+        Et on dansait, jusqu'au jour,
+          Chez l'ambassadeur de France.
+
+Yes, that is the fact of it. Right or wrong, the poet does not say.
+What you may think about it, he does not know. He has nothing to do
+with that. There lie the ashes of the dead girl in her chamber. There
+they danced, till the morning, at the Ambassador's of France. Make
+what you will of it.
+
+If the reader will look through the ballad, of which I have quoted
+only about the third part, he will find that there is not, from
+beginning to end of it, a single poetical (so called) expression,
+except in one stanza. The girl speaks as simple prose as may be; there
+is not a word she would not have actually used as she was dressing.
+The poet stands by, impassive as a statue, recording her words just as
+they come. At last the doom seizes her, and in the very presence of
+death, for an instant, his own emotions conquer him. He records no
+longer the facts only, but the facts as they seem to him. The fire
+gnaws with _voluptuousness--without pity_. It is soon past. The fate
+is fixed for ever; and he retires into his pale and crystalline
+atmosphere of truth. He closes all with the calm veracity,
+
+    They said, 'Poor Constance!'
+
+� 14. Now in this there is the exact type of the consummate poetical
+temperament. For, be it clearly and constantly remembered, that the
+greatness of a poet depends upon the two faculties, acuteness of
+feeling, and command of it. A poet is great, first in proportion to
+the strength of his passion, and then, that strength being granted, in
+proportion to his government of it; there being, however, always a
+point beyond which it would be inhuman and monstrous if he pushed this
+government, and, therefore, a point at which all feverish and wild
+fancy becomes just and true. Thus the destruction of the kingdom of
+Assyria cannot be contemplated firmly by a prophet of Israel. The fact
+is too great, too wonderful. It overthrows him, dashes him into a
+confused element of dreams. All the world is, to his stunned thought,
+full of strange voices. 'Yea, the fir-trees rejoice at thee, and the
+cedars of Lebanon, saying, "Since thou art gone down to the grave, no
+feller is come up against us."' So, still more, the thought of the
+presence of Deity cannot be borne without this great astonishment.
+'The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into
+singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.'
+
+� 15. But by how much this feeling is noble when it is justified by
+the strength of its cause, by so much it is ignoble when there is not
+cause enough for it; and beyond all other ignobleness is the mere
+affectation of it, in hardness of heart. Simply bad writing may almost
+always, as above noticed, be known by its adoption of these fanciful
+metaphorical expressions, as a sort of current coin; yet there is even
+a worse, at least a more harmful, condition of writing than this, in
+which such expressions are not ignorantly and feelinglessly caught up,
+but, by some master, skilful in handling, yet insincere, deliberately
+wrought out with chill and studied fancy; as if we should try to make
+an old lava stream look red-hot again, by covering it with dead
+leaves, or white-hot, with hoar-frost.
+
+When Young is lost in veneration, as he dwells on the character of a
+truly good and holy man, he permits himself for a moment to be
+overborne by the feeling so far as to exclaim:
+
+    Where shall I find him? angels, tell me where.
+    You know him; he is near you; point him out.
+    Shall I see glories beaming from his brow,
+    Or trace his footsteps by the rising flowers?
+
+This emotion has a worthy cause, and is thus true and right. But now
+hear the cold-hearted Pope say to a shepherd girl:
+
+    Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;
+    Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade;
+    Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove,
+    And winds shall waft it to the powers above.
+    But would you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain,
+    The wondering forests soon should dance again;
+    The moving mountains hear the powerful call,
+    And headlong streams hang, listening, in their fall.
+
+This is not, nor could it for a moment be mistaken for, the language
+of passion. It is simple falsehood, uttered by hypocrisy; definite
+absurdity, rooted in affectation, and coldly asserted in the teeth of
+nature and fact. Passion will indeed go far in deceiving itself; but
+it must be a strong passion, not the simple wish of a lover to tempt
+his mistress to sing. Compare a very closely parallel passage in
+Wordsworth, in which the lover has lost his mistress:
+
+    Three years had Barbara in her grave been laid,
+    When thus his moan he made:--
+
+    'Oh move, thou cottage, from behind yon oak,
+      Or let the ancient tree uprooted lie,
+    That in some other way yon smoke
+      May mount into the sky.
+    If still behind yon pine-tree's ragged bough,
+      Headlong, the waterfall must come,
+      Oh, let it, then, be dumb--
+    Be anything, sweet stream, but that which thou art now.'
+
+Here is a cottage to be moved, if not a mountain, and a waterfall to
+be silent, if it is not to hang listening: but with what different
+relation to the mind that contemplates them! Here, in the extremity of
+its agony, the soul cries out wildly for relief, which at the same
+moment it partly knows to be impossible, but partly believes possible,
+in a vague impression that a miracle _might_ be wrought to give relief
+even to a less sore distress,--that nature is kind, and God is kind,
+and that grief is strong: it knows not well what _is_ possible to such
+grief. To silence a stream, to move a cottage wall,--one might think
+it could do as much as that!
+
+� 16. I believe these instances are enough to illustrate the main
+point I insist upon respecting the pathetic fallacy,--that so far as
+it _is_ a fallacy, it is always the sign of a morbid state of mind,
+and comparatively of a weak one. Even in the most inspired prophet it
+is a sign of the incapacity of his human sight or thought to bear what
+has been revealed to it. In ordinary poetry, if it is found in the
+thoughts of the poet himself, it is at once a sign of his belonging to
+the inferior school; if in the thoughts of the characters imagined by
+him, it is right or wrong according to the genuineness of the emotion
+from which it springs; always, however, implying necessarily _some_
+degree of weakness in the character.
+
+Take two most exquisite instances from master hands. The Jessy of
+Shenstone, and the Ellen of Wordsworth, have both been betrayed and
+deserted. Jessy, in the course of her most touching complaint, says:
+
+    If through the garden's flowery tribes I stray,
+      Where bloom the jasmines that could once allure,
+    'Hope not to find delight in us,' they say,
+      'For we are spotless, Jessy; we are pure.'
+
+Compare with this some of the words of Ellen:
+
+    'Ah, why,' said Ellen, sighing to herself,
+    'Why do not words, and kiss, and solemn pledge,
+    And nature, that is kind in woman's breast,
+    And reason, that in man is wise and good,
+    And fear of Him who is a righteous Judge,--
+    Why do not these prevail for human life,
+    To keep two hearts together, that began
+    Their springtime with one love, and that have need
+    Of mutual pity and forgiveness, sweet
+    To grant, or be received; while that poor bird--
+    O, come and hear him! Thou who hast to me
+    Been faithless, hear him;--though a lowly creature,
+    One of God's simple children, that yet know not
+    The Universal Parent, _how_ he sings!
+    As if he wished the firmament of heaven
+    Should listen, and give back to him the voice
+    Of his triumphant constancy and love.
+    The proclamation that he makes, how far
+    His darkness doth transcend our fickle light.'
+
+The perfection of both these passages, as far as regards truth and
+tenderness of imagination in the two poets, is quite insuperable. But,
+of the two characters imagined, Jessy is weaker than Ellen, exactly in
+so far as something appears to her to be in nature which is not. The
+flowers do not really reproach her. God meant them to comfort her, not
+to taunt her; they would do so if she saw them rightly.
+
+Ellen, on the other hand, is quite above the slightest erring emotion.
+There is not the barest film of fallacy in all her thoughts. She
+reasons as calmly as if she did not feel. And, although the singing of
+the bird suggests to her the idea of its desiring to be heard in
+heaven, she does not for an instant admit any veracity in the thought.
+'As if,' she says,--'I know he means nothing of the kind; but it does
+verily seem as if.' The reader will find, by examining the rest of the
+poem, that Ellen's character is throughout consistent in this clear
+though passionate strength.[34]
+
+    [34] I cannot quit this subject without giving two more
+    instances, both exquisite, of the pathetic fallacy, which I
+    have just come upon, in _Maud_:
+
+                     For a great speculation had fail'd;
+          And ever he mutter'd and madden'd, and ever wann'd with despair;
+        And out he walk'd, when the wind like a broken worldling wail'd,
+          And the _flying gold of the ruin'd woodlands drove, thro'
+              the air_.
+
+          There has fallen a splendid tear
+            From the passion-flower at the gate.
+          _The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near!'
+            And the white rose weeps, 'She is late.'
+          The larkspur listens, 'I hear, I hear!'
+            And the lily whispers, 'I wait.'_
+
+It is, I hope, now made clear to the reader in all respects that the
+pathetic fallacy is powerful only so far as it is pathetic, feeble so
+far as it is fallacious, and, therefore, that the dominion of Truth is
+entire, over this, as over every other natural and just state of the
+human mind.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN STUART MILL
+
+1806-1873
+
+THOUGHTS ON POETRY AND ITS VARIETIES (1859)
+
+
+I
+
+It has often been asked, What is Poetry? And many and various are the
+answers which have been returned. The vulgarest of all--one with which
+no person possessed of the faculties to which Poetry addresses itself
+can ever have been satisfied--is that which confounds poetry with
+metrical composition: yet to this wretched mockery of a definition,
+many have been led back, by the failure of all their attempts to find
+any other that would distinguish what they have been accustomed to
+call poetry, from much which they have known only under other names.
+
+That, however, the word 'poetry' imports something quite peculiar in
+its nature, something which may exist in what is called prose as well
+as in verse, something which does not even require the instrument of
+words, but can speak through the other audible symbols called musical
+sounds, and even through the visible ones which are the language of
+sculpture, painting, and architecture; all this, we believe, is and
+must be felt, though perhaps indistinctly, by all upon whom poetry in
+any of its shapes produces any impression beyond that of tickling the
+ear. The distinction between poetry and what is not poetry, whether
+explained or not, is felt to be fundamental: and where every one feels
+a difference, a difference there must be. All other appearances may be
+fallacious, but the appearance of a difference is a real difference.
+Appearances too, like other things, must have a cause, and that which
+can cause anything, even an illusion, must be a reality. And hence,
+while a half-philosophy disdains the classifications and distinctions
+indicated by popular language, philosophy carried to its highest point
+frames new ones, but rarely sets aside the old, content with
+correcting and regularizing them. It cuts fresh channels for thought,
+but does not fill up such as it finds ready-made; it traces, on the
+contrary, more deeply, broadly, and distinctly, those into which the
+current has spontaneously flowed.
+
+Let us then attempt, in the way of modest inquiry, not to coerce and
+confine nature within the bounds of an arbitrary definition, but
+rather to find the boundaries which she herself has set, and erect a
+barrier round them; not calling mankind to account for having
+misapplied the word 'poetry', but attempting to clear up the
+conception which they already attach to it, and to bring forward as a
+distinct principle that which, as a vague feeling, has really guided
+them in their employment of the term.
+
+The object of poetry is confessedly to act upon the emotions; and
+therein is poetry sufficiently distinguished from what Wordsworth
+affirms to be its logical opposite, namely, not prose, but matter of
+fact or science. The one addresses itself to the belief, the other to
+the feelings. The one does its work by convincing or persuading, the
+other by moving. The one acts by presenting a proposition to the
+understanding, the other by offering interesting objects of
+contemplation to the sensibilities.
+
+This, however, leaves us very far from a definition of poetry. This
+distinguishes it from one thing, but we are bound to distinguish it
+from everything. To bring thoughts or images before the mind for the
+purpose of acting upon the emotions, does not belong to poetry alone.
+It is equally the province (for example) of the novelist: and yet the
+faculty of the poet and that of the novelist are as distinct as any
+other two faculties; as the faculties of the novelist and of the
+orator, or of the poet and the metaphysician. The two characters may
+be united, as characters the most disparate may; but they have no
+natural connexion.
+
+Many of the greatest poems are in the form of fictitious narratives,
+and in almost all good serious fictions there is true poetry. But
+there is a radical distinction between the interest felt in a story as
+such, and the interest excited by poetry; for the one is derived from
+incident, the other from the representation of feeling. In one, the
+source of the emotion excited is the exhibition of a state or states
+of human sensibility; in the other, of a series of states of mere
+outward circumstances. Now, all minds are capable of being affected
+more or less by representations of the latter kind, and all, or almost
+all, by those of the former; yet the two sources of interest
+correspond to two distinct, and (as respects their greatest
+development) mutually exclusive, characters of mind.
+
+At what age is the passion for a story, for almost any kind of story,
+merely as a story, the most intense? In childhood. But that also is
+the age at which poetry, even of the simplest description, is least
+relished and least understood; because the feelings with which it is
+especially conversant are yet undeveloped, and not having been even in
+the slightest degree experienced, cannot be sympathized with. In what
+stage of the progress of society, again, is story-telling most valued,
+and the story-teller in greatest request and honour?--In a rude state
+like that of the Tartars and Arabs at this day, and of almost all
+nations in the earliest ages. But in this state of society there is
+little poetry except ballads, which are mostly narrative, that is,
+essentially stories, and derive their principal interest from the
+incidents. Considered as poetry, they are of the lowest and most
+elementary kind: the feelings depicted, or rather indicated, are the
+simplest our nature has; such joys and griefs as the immediate
+pressure of some outward event excites in rude minds, which live
+wholly immersed in outward things, and have never, either from choice
+or a force they could not resist, turned themselves to the
+contemplation of the world within. Passing now from childhood, and
+from the childhood of society, to the grown-up men and women of this
+most grown-up and unchildlike age--the minds and hearts of greatest
+depth and elevation are commonly those which take greatest delight in
+poetry; the shallowest and emptiest, on the contrary, are, at all
+events, not those least addicted to novel-reading. This accords, too,
+with all analogous experience of human nature. The sort of persons
+whom not merely in books but in their lives, we find perpetually
+engaged in hunting for excitement from without, are invariably those
+who do not possess, either in the vigour of their intellectual powers
+or in the depth of their sensibilities, that which would enable them
+to find ample excitement nearer home. The most idle and frivolous
+persons take a natural delight in fictitious narrative; the excitement
+it affords is of the kind which comes from without. Such persons are
+rarely lovers of poetry, though they may fancy themselves so, because
+they relish novels in verse. But poetry, which is the delineation of
+the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion, is interesting
+only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt, or whose
+imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they
+might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been
+different.
+
+Poetry, when it is really such, is truth; and fiction also, if it is
+good for anything, is truth: but they are different truths. The truth
+of poetry is to paint the human soul truly: the truth of fiction is to
+give a true picture of life. The two kinds of knowledge are different,
+and come by different ways, come mostly to different persons. Great
+poets are often proverbially ignorant of life. What they know has come
+by observation of themselves; they have found within them one highly
+delicate and sensitive specimen of human nature, on which the laws of
+emotion are written in large characters, such as can be read off
+without much study. Other knowledge of mankind, such as comes to men
+of the world by outward experience, is not indispensable to them as
+poets: but to the novelist such knowledge is all in all; he has to
+describe outward things, not the inward man; actions and events, not
+feelings; and it will not do for him to be numbered among those who,
+as Madame Roland said of Brissot, know man but not _men_.
+
+All this is no bar to the possibility of combining both elements,
+poetry and narrative or incident, in the same work, and calling it
+either a novel or a poem; but so may red and white combine on the same
+human features, or on the same canvas. There is one order of
+composition which requires the union of poetry and incident, each in
+its highest kind--the dramatic. Even there the two elements are
+perfectly distinguishable, and may exist of unequal quality, and in
+the most various proportion. The incidents of a dramatic poem may be
+scanty and ineffective, though the delineation of passion and
+character may be of the highest order; as in Goethe's admirable
+_Torquato Tasso_; or again, the story as a mere story may be well got
+up for effect, as is the case with some of the most trashy productions
+of the Minerva press: it may even be, what those are not, a coherent
+and probable series of events, though there be scarcely a feeling
+exhibited which is not represented falsely, or in a manner absolutely
+commonplace. The combination of the two excellences is what renders
+Shakespeare so generally acceptable, each sort of readers finding in
+him what is suitable to their faculties. To the many he is great as a
+story-teller, to the few as a poet.
+
+In limiting poetry to the delineation of states of feeling, and
+denying the name where nothing is delineated but outward objects, we
+may be thought to have done what we promised to avoid--to have not
+found, but made a definition, in opposition to the usage of language,
+since it is established by common consent that there is a poetry
+called descriptive. We deny the charge. Description is not poetry
+because there is descriptive poetry, no more than science is poetry
+because there is such a thing as a didactic poem. But an object which
+admits of being described, or a truth which may fill a place in a
+scientific treatise, may also furnish an occasion for the generation
+of poetry, which we thereupon choose to call descriptive or didactic.
+The poetry is not in the object itself, nor in the scientific truth
+itself, but in the state of mind in which the one and the other may be
+contemplated. The mere delineation of the dimensions and colours of
+external objects is not poetry, no more than a geometrical ground-plan
+of St. Peter's or Westminster Abbey is painting. Descriptive poetry
+consists, no doubt, in description, but in description of things as
+they appear, not as they are; and it paints them not in their bare and
+natural lineaments, but seen through the medium and arrayed in the
+colours of the imagination set in action by the feelings. If a poet
+describes a lion, he does not describe him as a naturalist would, nor
+even as a traveller would, who was intent upon stating the truth, the
+whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He describes him by imagery,
+that is, by suggesting the most striking likenesses and contrasts
+which might occur to a mind contemplating the lion, in the state of
+awe, wonder, or terror, which the spectacle naturally excites, or is,
+on the occasion, supposed to excite. Now this is describing the lion
+professedly, but the state of excitement of the spectator really. The
+lion may be described falsely or with exaggeration, and the poetry be
+all the better; but if the human emotion be not painted with
+scrupulous truth, the poetry is bad poetry, i. e. is not poetry at
+all, but a failure.
+
+Thus far our progress towards a clear view of the essentials of
+poetry has brought us very close to the last two attempts at a
+definition of poetry which we happen to have seen in print, both of
+them by poets and men of genius. The one is by Ebenezer Elliott, the
+author of _Corn-Law Rhymes_, and other poems of still greater merit.
+'Poetry', says he, 'is impassioned truth.' The other is by a writer in
+_Blackwood's Magazine_, and comes, we think, still nearer the mark. He
+defines poetry, 'man's thoughts tinged by his feelings'. There is in
+either definition a near approximation to what we are in search of.
+Every truth which a human being can enunciate, every thought, even
+every outward impression, which can enter into his consciousness, may
+become poetry when shown through any impassioned medium, when invested
+with the colouring of joy, or grief, or pity, or affection, or
+admiration, or reverence, or awe, or even hatred or terror: and,
+unless so coloured, nothing, be it as interesting as it may, is
+poetry. But both these definitions fail to discriminate between poetry
+and eloquence. Eloquence, as well as poetry, is impassioned truth;
+eloquence, as well as poetry, is thoughts coloured by the feelings.
+Yet common apprehension and philosophic criticism alike recognize a
+distinction between the two: there is much that every one would call
+eloquence, which no one would think of classing as poetry. A question
+will sometimes arise, whether some particular author is a poet; and
+those who maintain the negative commonly allow that, though not a
+poet, he is a highly eloquent writer. The distinction between poetry
+and eloquence appears to us to be equally fundamental with the
+distinction between poetry and narrative, or between poetry and
+description, while it is still farther from having been satisfactorily
+cleared up than either of the others.
+
+Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of
+feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that
+eloquence is _heard_, poetry is _over_heard. Eloquence supposes an
+audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's
+utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing
+itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in
+symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling
+in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind. Eloquence is
+feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or
+endeavouring to influence their belief or move them to passion or to
+action.
+
+All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy. It may be said that poetry
+which is printed on hot-pressed paper and sold at a bookseller's shop,
+is a soliloquy in full dress, and on the stage. It is so; but there is
+nothing absurd in the idea of such a mode of soliloquizing. What we
+have said to ourselves, we may tell to others afterwards; what we have
+said or done in solitude, we may voluntarily reproduce when we know
+that other eyes are upon us. But no trace of consciousness that any
+eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself. The actor knows
+that there is an audience present; but if he act as though he knew it,
+he acts ill. A poet may write poetry not only with the intention of
+printing it, but for the express purpose of being paid for it; that it
+should _be_ poetry, being written under such influences, is less
+probable; not, however, impossible; but no otherwise possible than if
+he can succeed in excluding from his work every vestige of such
+lookings-forth into the outward and every-day world, and can express
+his emotions exactly as he has felt them in solitude, or as he is
+conscious that he should feel them though they were to remain for ever
+unuttered, or (at the lowest) as he knows that others feel them in
+similar circumstances of solitude. But when he turns round and
+addresses himself to another person; when the act of utterance is not
+itself the end, but a means to an end,--viz. by the feelings he
+himself expresses, to work upon the feelings, or upon the belief, or
+the will, of another,--when the expression of his emotions, or of his
+thoughts tinged by his emotions, is tinged also by that purpose, by
+that desire of making an impression upon another mind, then it ceases
+to be poetry, and becomes eloquence.
+
+Poetry, accordingly, is the natural fruit of solitude and meditation;
+eloquence, of intercourse with the world. The persons who have most
+feeling of their own, if intellectual culture has given them a
+language in which to express it, have the highest faculty of poetry;
+those who best understand the feelings of others, are the most
+eloquent. The persons, and the nations, who commonly excel in poetry,
+are those whose character and tastes render them least dependent upon
+the applause, or sympathy, or concurrence of the world in general.
+Those to whom that applause, that sympathy, that concurrence are most
+necessary, generally excel most in eloquence. And hence, perhaps, the
+French, who are the least poetical of all great and intellectual
+nations, are among the most eloquent: the French, also, being the most
+sociable, the vainest, and the least self-dependent.
+
+If the above be, as we believe, the true theory of the distinction
+commonly admitted between eloquence and poetry; or even though it be
+not so, yet if, as we cannot doubt, the distinction above stated be a
+real bona fide distinction, it will be found to hold, not merely in
+the language of words, but in all other language, and to intersect the
+whole domain of art.
+
+Take, for example, music: we shall find in that art, so peculiarly the
+expression of passion, two perfectly distinct styles; one of which may
+be called the poetry, the other the oratory of music. This difference,
+being seized, would put an end to much musical sectarianism. There has
+been much contention whether the music of the modern Italian school,
+that of Rossini and his successors, be impassioned or not. Without
+doubt, the passion it expresses is not the musing, meditative
+tenderness, or pathos, or grief of Mozart or Beethoven. Yet it is
+passion, but garrulous passion--the passion which pours itself into
+other ears; and therein the better calculated for dramatic effect,
+having a natural adaptation for dialogue. Mozart also is great in
+musical oratory; but his most touching compositions are in the
+opposite style--that of soliloquy. Who can imagine 'Dove sono'
+_heard_? We imagine it _over_heard.
+
+Purely pathetic music commonly partakes of soliloquy. The soul is
+absorbed in its distress, and though there may be bystanders, it is
+not thinking of them. When the mind is looking within, and not
+without, its state does not often or rapidly vary; and hence the even,
+uninterrupted flow, approaching almost to monotony, which a good
+reader, or a good singer, will give to words or music of a pensive or
+melancholy cast. But grief taking the form of a prayer, or of a
+complaint, becomes oratorical; no longer low, and even, and subdued,
+it assumes a more emphatic rhythm, a more rapidly returning accent;
+instead of a few slow equal notes, following one after another at
+regular intervals, it crowds note upon note, and often assumes a hurry
+and bustle like joy. Those who are familiar with some of the best of
+Rossini's serious compositions, such as the air 'Tu che i miseri
+conforti', in the opera of _Tancredi_, or the duet 'Ebben per mia
+memoria', in _La Gazza Ladra_, will at once understand and feel our
+meaning. Both are highly tragic and passionate; the passion of both is
+that of oratory, not poetry. The like may be said of that most moving
+invocation in Beethoven's _Fidelio_--
+
+    Komm, Hoffnung, lass das letzte Stern
+      Der M�de nicht erbleichen;
+
+in which Madame Schr�der Devrient exhibited such consummate powers of
+pathetic expression. How different from Winter's beautiful 'Paga fui',
+the very soul of melancholy exhaling itself in solitude; fuller of
+meaning, and, therefore, more profoundly poetical than the words for
+which it was composed--for it seems to express not simple melancholy,
+but the melancholy of remorse.
+
+If, from vocal music, we now pass to instrumental, we may have a
+specimen of musical oratory in any fine military symphony or march:
+while the poetry of music seems to have attained its consummation in
+Beethoven's Overture to Egmont, so wonderful in its mixed expression
+of grandeur and melancholy.
+
+In the arts which speak to the eye, the same distinctions will be
+found to hold, not only between poetry and oratory, but between
+poetry, oratory, narrative, and simple imitation or description.
+
+Pure description is exemplified in a mere portrait or a mere
+landscape--productions of art, it is true, but of the mechanical
+rather than of the fine arts, being works of simple imitation, not
+creation. We say, a mere portrait, or a mere landscape, because it is
+possible for a portrait or a landscape, without ceasing to be such, to
+be also a picture; like Turner's landscapes, and the great portraits
+by Titian or Vandyke.
+
+Whatever in painting or sculpture expresses human feeling--or
+character, which is only a certain state of feeling grown
+habitual--may be called, according to circumstances, the poetry, or
+the eloquence, of the painter's or the sculptor's art: the poetry, if
+the feeling declares itself by such signs as escape from us when we
+are unconscious of being seen; the oratory, if the signs are those we
+use for the purpose of voluntary communication.
+
+The narrative style answers to what is called historical painting,
+which it is the fashion among connoisseurs to treat as the climax of
+the pictorial art. That it is the most difficult branch of the art we
+do not doubt, because, in its perfection, it includes the perfection
+of all the other branches: as in like manner an epic poem, though in
+so far as it is epic (i. e. narrative) it is not poetry at all, is yet
+esteemed the greatest effort of poetic genius, because there is no
+kind whatever of poetry which may not appropriately find a place in
+it. But an historical picture as such, that is, as the representation
+of an incident, must necessarily, as it seems to us, be poor and
+ineffective. The narrative powers of painting are extremely limited.
+Scarcely any picture, scarcely even any series of pictures, tells its
+own story without the aid of an interpreter. But it is the single
+figures which, to us, are the great charm even of an historical
+picture. It is in these that the power of the art is really seen. In
+the attempt to narrate, visible and permanent signs are too far behind
+the fugitive audible ones, which follow so fast one after another,
+while the faces and figures in a narrative picture, even though they
+be Titian's, stand still. Who would not prefer one Virgin and Child of
+Raphael, to all the pictures which Rubens, with his fat, frouzy Dutch
+Venuses, ever painted? Though Rubens, besides excelling almost every
+one in his mastery over the mechanical parts of his art, often shows
+real genius in _grouping_ his figures, the peculiar problem of
+historical painting. But then, who, except a mere student of drawing
+and colouring, ever cared to look twice at any of the figures
+themselves? The power of painting lies in poetry, of which Rubens had
+not the slightest tincture--not in narrative, wherein he might have
+excelled.
+
+The single figures, however, in an historical picture, are rather the
+eloquence of painting than the poetry: they mostly (unless they are
+quite out of place in the picture) express the feelings of one person
+as modified by the presence of others. Accordingly the minds whose
+bent leads them rather to eloquence than to poetry, rush to historical
+painting. The French painters, for instance, seldom attempt, because
+they could make nothing of, single heads, like those glorious ones of
+the Italian masters, with which they might feed themselves day after
+day in their own Louvre. They must all be historical; and they are,
+almost to a man, attitudinizers. If we wished to give any young
+artist the most impressive warning our imagination could devise
+against that kind of vice in the pictorial, which corresponds to rant
+in the histrionic art, we would advise him to walk once up and once
+down the gallery of the Luxembourg. Every figure in French painting or
+statuary seems to be showing itself off before spectators; they are
+not poetical, but in the worst style of corrupted eloquence.
+
+
+II
+
+_Nascitur Poeta_ is a maxim of classical antiquity, which has passed
+to these latter days with less questioning than most of the doctrines
+of that early age. When it originated, the human faculties were
+occupied, fortunately for posterity, less in examining how the works
+of genius are created, than in creating them: and the adage, probably,
+had no higher source than the tendency common among mankind to
+consider all power which is not visibly the effect of practice, all
+skill which is not capable of being reduced to mechanical rules, as
+the result of a peculiar gift. Yet this aphorism, born in the infancy
+of psychology, will perhaps be found, now when that science is in its
+adolescence, to be as true as an epigram ever is, that is, to contain
+some truth: truth, however, which has been so compressed and bent out
+of shape, in order to tie it up into so small a knot of only two words
+that it requires an almost infinite amount of unrolling and laying
+straight, before it will resume its just proportions.
+
+We are not now intending to remark upon the grosser misapplications of
+this ancient maxim, which have engendered so many races of
+poetasters. The days are gone by when every raw youth whose borrowed
+phantasies have set themselves to a borrowed tune, mistaking, as
+Coleridge says, an ardent desire of poetic reputation for poetic
+genius, while unable to disguise from himself that he had taken no
+means whereby he might _become_ a poet, could fancy himself a born
+one. Those who would reap without sowing, and gain the victory without
+fighting the battle, are ambitious now of another sort of distinction,
+and are born novelists, or public speakers, not poets. And the wiser
+thinkers understand and acknowledge that poetic excellence is subject
+to the same necessary conditions with any other mental endowment; and
+that to no one of the spiritual benefactors of mankind is a higher or
+a more assiduous intellectual culture needful than to the poet. It is
+true, he possesses this advantage over others who use the 'instrument
+of words', that, of the truths which he utters, a larger proportion
+are derived from personal consciousness, and a smaller from
+philosophic investigation. But the power itself of discriminating
+between what really is consciousness, and what is only a process of
+inference completed in a single instant--and the capacity of
+distinguishing whether that of which the mind is conscious be an
+eternal truth, or but a dream--are among the last results of the most
+matured and perfect intellect. Not to mention, that the poet, no more
+than any other person who writes, confines himself altogether to
+intuitive truths, nor has any means of communicating even these but by
+words, every one of which derives all its power of conveying a
+meaning, from a whole host of acquired notions, and facts learnt by
+study and experience.
+
+Nevertheless, it seems undeniable in point of fact, and consistent
+with the principles of a sound metaphysics, that there are poetic
+_natures_. There is a mental and physical constitution or temperament,
+peculiarly fitted for poetry. This temperament will not of itself make
+a poet, no more than the soil will the fruit; and as good fruit may be
+raised by culture from indifferent soils, so may good poetry from
+naturally unpoetical minds. But the poetry of one who is a poet by
+nature, will be clearly and broadly distinguishable from the poetry of
+mere culture. It may not be truer; it may not be more useful; but it
+will be different: fewer will appreciate it, even though many should
+affect to do so; but in those few it will find a keener sympathy, and
+will yield them a deeper enjoyment.
+
+One may write genuine poetry, and not be a poet; for whosoever writes
+out truly any human feeling, writes poetry. All persons, even the most
+unimaginative, in moments of strong emotion, speak poetry; and hence
+the drama is poetry, which else were always prose, except when a poet
+is one of the characters. What _is_ poetry, but the thoughts and words
+in which emotion spontaneously embodies itself? As there are few who
+are not, at least for some moments and in some situations, capable of
+some strong feeling, poetry is natural to most persons at some period
+of their lives. And any one whose feelings are genuine, though but of
+the average strength,--if he be not diverted by uncongenial thoughts
+or occupations from the indulgence of them, and if he acquire by
+culture, as all persons may, the faculty of delineating them
+correctly,--has it in his power to be a poet, so far as a life passed
+in writing unquestionable poetry may be considered to confer that
+title. But _ought_ it to do so? Yes, perhaps, in a collection of
+'British Poets'. But 'poet' is the name also of a variety of man, not
+solely of the author of a particular variety of book: now, to have
+written whole volumes of real poetry is possible to almost all kinds
+of characters, and implies no greater peculiarity of mental
+construction, than to be the author of a history, or a novel.
+
+Whom, then, shall we call poets? Those who are so constituted, that
+emotions are the links of association by which their ideas, both
+sensuous and spiritual, are connected together. This constitution
+belongs (within certain limits) to all in whom poetry is a pervading
+principle. In all others, poetry is something extraneous and
+superinduced: something out of themselves, foreign to the habitual
+course of their every-day lives and characters; a world to which they
+may make occasional visits, but where they are sojourners, not
+dwellers, and which, when out of it, or even when in it, they think
+of, peradventure, but as a phantom-world, a place of _ignes fatui_ and
+spectral illusions. Those only who have the peculiarity of association
+which we have mentioned, and which is a natural though not a universal
+consequence of intense sensibility, instead of seeming not themselves
+when they are uttering poetry, scarcely seem themselves when uttering
+anything to which poetry is foreign. Whatever be the thing which they
+are contemplating, if it be capable of connecting itself with their
+emotions, the aspect under which it first and most naturally paints
+itself to them, is its poetic aspect. The poet of culture sees his
+object in prose, and describes it in poetry; the poet of nature
+actually sees it in poetry.
+
+This point is perhaps worth some little illustration; the rather, as
+metaphysicians (the ultimate arbiters of all philosophical criticism),
+while they have busied themselves for two thousand years, more or
+less, about the few _universal_ laws of human nature, have strangely
+neglected the analysis of its _diversities_. Of these, none lie deeper
+or reach further than the varieties which difference of nature and of
+education makes in what may be termed the habitual bond of
+association. In a mind entirely uncultivated, which is also without
+any strong feelings, objects whether of sense or of intellect arrange
+themselves in the mere casual order in which they have been seen,
+heard, or otherwise perceived. Persons of this sort may be said to
+think chronologically. If they remember a fact, it is by reason of a
+fortuitous coincidence with some trifling incident or circumstance
+which took place at the very time. If they have a story to tell, or
+testimony to deliver in a witness-box, their narrative must follow the
+exact order in which the events took place: _dodge_ them, and the
+thread of association is broken; they cannot go on. Their
+associations, to use the language of philosophers, are chiefly of the
+successive, not the synchronous kind, and whether successive or
+synchronous, are mostly casual.
+
+To the man of science, again, or of business, objects group themselves
+according to the artificial classifications which the understanding
+has voluntarily made for the convenience of thought or of practice.
+But where any of the impressions are vivid and intense, the
+associations into which these enter are the ruling ones: it being a
+well-known law of association, that the stronger a feeling is, the
+more quickly and strongly it associates itself with any other object
+or feeling. Where, therefore, nature has given strong feelings, and
+education has not created factitious tendencies stronger than the
+natural ones, the prevailing associations will be those which connect
+objects and ideas with emotions, and with each other through the
+intervention of emotions. Thoughts and images will be linked together,
+according to the similarity of the feelings which cling to them. A
+thought will introduce a thought by first introducing a feeling which
+is allied with it. At the centre of each group of thoughts or images
+will be found a feeling; and the thoughts or images will be there only
+because the feeling was there. The combinations which the mind puts
+together, the pictures which it paints, the wholes which Imagination
+constructs out of the materials supplied by Fancy, will be indebted to
+some dominant _feeling_, not as in other natures to a dominant
+_thought_, for their unity and consistency of character, for what
+distinguishes them from incoherencies.
+
+The difference, then, between the poetry of a poet, and the poetry of
+a cultivated but not naturally poetic mind, is, that in the latter,
+with however bright a halo of feeling the thought may be surrounded
+and glorified, the thought itself is always the conspicuous object;
+while the poetry of a poet is Feeling itself, employing Thought only
+as the medium of its expression. In the one, feeling waits upon
+thought; in the other, thought upon feeling. The one writer has a
+distinct aim, common to him with any other didactic author; he desires
+to convey the thought, and he conveys it clothed in the feelings which
+it excites in himself, or which he deems most appropriate to it. The
+other merely pours forth the overflowing of his feelings; and all the
+thoughts which those feelings suggest are floated promiscuously along
+the stream.
+
+It may assist in rendering our meaning intelligible, if we illustrate
+it by a parallel between the two English authors of our own day who
+have produced the greatest quantity of true and enduring poetry,
+Wordsworth and Shelley. Apter instances could not be wished for; the
+one might be cited as the type, the _exemplar_, of what the poetry of
+culture may accomplish: the other as perhaps the most striking example
+ever known of the poetic temperament. How different, accordingly, is
+the poetry of these two great writers! In Wordsworth, the poetry is
+almost always the mere setting of a thought. The thought may be more
+valuable than the setting, or it may be less valuable, but there can
+be no question as to which was first in his mind: what he is impressed
+with, and what he is anxious to impress, is some proposition, more or
+less distinctly conceived; some truth, or something which he deems
+such. He lets the thought dwell in his mind, till it excites, as is
+the nature of thought, other thoughts, and also such feelings as the
+measure of his sensibility is adequate to supply. Among these thoughts
+and feelings, had he chosen a different walk of authorship (and there
+are many in which he might equally have excelled), he would probably
+have made a different selection of media for enforcing the parent
+thought: his habits, however, being those of poetic composition, he
+selects in preference the strongest feelings, and the thoughts with
+which most of feeling is naturally or habitually connected. His
+poetry, therefore, may be defined to be, his thoughts, coloured by,
+and impressing themselves by means of, emotions. Such poetry,
+Wordsworth has occupied a long life in producing. And well and wisely
+has he so done. Criticisms, no doubt, may be made occasionally both
+upon the thoughts themselves, and upon the skill he has demonstrated
+in the choice of his media: for an affair of skill and study, in the
+most rigorous sense, it evidently was. But he has not laboured in
+vain; he has exercised, and continues to exercise, a powerful, and
+mostly a highly beneficial influence over the formation and growth of
+not a few of the most cultivated and vigorous of the youthful minds of
+our time, over whose heads poetry of the opposite description would
+have flown, for want of an original organization, physical or mental,
+in sympathy with it.
+
+On the other hand, Wordsworth's poetry is never bounding, never
+ebullient; has little even of the appearance of spontaneousness: the
+well is never so full that it overflows. There is an air of calm
+deliberateness about all he writes, which is not characteristic of the
+poetic temperament: his poetry seems one thing, himself another; he
+seems to be poetical because he wills to be so, not because he cannot
+help it: did he will to dismiss poetry, he need never again, it might
+almost seem, have a poetical thought. He never seems _possessed_ by
+any feeling; no emotion seems ever so strong as to have entire sway,
+for the time being, over the current of his thoughts. He never, even
+for the space of a few stanzas, appears entirely given up to
+exultation, or grief, or pity, or love, or admiration, or devotion, or
+even animal spirits. He now and then, though seldom, attempts to write
+as if he were: and never, we think, without leaving an impression of
+poverty: as the brook which on nearly level ground quite fills its
+banks, appears but a thread when running rapidly down a precipitous
+declivity. He has feeling enough to form a decent, graceful, even
+beautiful decoration to a thought which is in itself interesting and
+moving; but not so much as suffices to stir up the soul by mere
+sympathy with itself in its simplest manifestation, nor enough to
+summon up that array of 'thoughts of power' which in a richly stored
+mind always attends the call of really intense feeling. It is for this
+reason, doubtless, that the genius of Wordsworth is essentially
+unlyrical. Lyric poetry, as it was the earliest kind, is also, if the
+view we are now taking of poetry be correct, more eminently and
+peculiarly poetry than any other: it is the poetry most natural to a
+really poetic temperament, and least capable of being successfully
+imitated by one not so endowed by nature.
+
+Shelley is the very reverse of all this. Where Wordsworth is strong,
+he is weak; where Wordsworth is weak, he is strong. Culture, that
+culture by which Wordsworth has reared from his own inward nature the
+richest harvest ever brought forth by a soil of so little depth, is
+precisely what was wanting to Shelley: or let us rather say, he had
+not, at the period of his deplorably early death, reached sufficiently
+far in that intellectual progression of which he was capable, and
+which, if it has done so much for greatly inferior natures, might have
+made of him the most perfect, as he was already the most gifted of our
+poets. For him, voluntary mental discipline had done little: the
+vividness of his emotions and of his sensations had done all. He
+seldom follows up an idea; it starts into life, summons from the
+fairy-land of his inexhaustible fancy some three or four bold images,
+then vanishes, and straight he is off on the wings of some casual
+association into quite another sphere. He had scarcely yet acquired
+the consecutiveness of thought necessary for a long poem; his more
+ambitious compositions too often resemble the scattered fragments of a
+mirror; colours brilliant as life, single images without end, but no
+picture. It is only when under the overruling influence of some one
+state of feeling, either actually experienced, or summoned up in the
+vividness of reality by a fervid imagination, that he writes as a
+great poet; unity of feeling being to him the harmonizing principle
+which a central idea is to minds of another class, and supplying the
+coherency and consistency which would else have been wanting. Thus it
+is in many of his smaller, and especially his lyrical poems. They are
+obviously written to exhale, perhaps to relieve, a state of feeling,
+or of conception of feeling, almost oppressive from its vividness. The
+thoughts and imagery are suggested by the feeling, and are such as it
+finds unsought. The state of feeling may be either of soul or of
+sense, or oftener (might we not say invariably?) of both: for the
+poetic temperament is usually, perhaps always, accompanied by
+exquisite senses. The exciting cause may be either an object or an
+idea. But whatever of sensation enters into the feeling, must not be
+local, or consciously organic; it is a condition of the whole frame,
+not of a part only. Like the state of sensation produced by a fine
+climate, or indeed like all strongly pleasurable or painful sensations
+in an impassioned nature, it pervades the entire nervous system.
+States of feeling, whether sensuous or spiritual, which thus possess
+the whole being, are the fountains of that which we have called the
+poetry of poets; and which is little else than a pouring forth of the
+thoughts and images that pass across the mind while some permanent
+state of feeling is occupying it.
+
+To the same original fineness of organization, Shelley was doubtless
+indebted for another of his rarest gifts, that exuberance of imagery,
+which when unrepressed, as in many of his poems it is, amounts to a
+fault. The susceptibility of his nervous system, which made his
+emotions intense, made also the impressions of his external senses
+deep and clear; and agreeably to the law of association by which, as
+already remarked, the strongest impressions are those which associate
+themselves the most easily and strongly, these vivid sensations were
+readily recalled to mind by all objects or thoughts which had
+co-existed with them, and by all feelings which in any degree
+resembled them. Never did a fancy so teem with sensuous imagery as
+Shelley's. Wordsworth economizes an image, and detains it until he has
+distilled all the poetry out of it, and it will not yield a drop more:
+Shelley lavishes his with a profusion which is unconscious because it
+is inexhaustible.
+
+If, then, the maxim _Nascitur poeta_ mean, either that the power of
+producing poetical compositions is a peculiar faculty which the poet
+brings into the world with him, which grows with his growth like any
+of his bodily powers, and is as independent of culture as his height,
+and his complexion; or that any natural peculiarity whatever is
+implied in producing poetry, real poetry, and in any quantity--such
+poetry too, as, to the majority of educated and intelligent readers,
+shall appear quite as good as, or even better than, any other; in
+either sense the doctrine is false. And nevertheless, there _is_
+poetry which could not emanate but from a mental and physical
+constitution peculiar, not in the kind, but in the degree of its
+susceptibility: a constitution which makes its possessor capable of
+greater happiness than mankind in general, and also of greater
+unhappiness; and because greater, so also more various. And such
+poetry, to all who know enough of nature to own it as being in nature,
+is much more poetry, is poetry in a far higher sense, than any other;
+since the common element of all poetry, that which constitutes poetry,
+human feeling, enters far more largely into this than into the poetry
+of culture. Not only because the natures which we have called
+poetical, really feel more, and consequently have more feeling to
+express; but because, the capacity of feeling being so great, feeling,
+when excited and not voluntarily resisted, seizes the helm of their
+thoughts, and the succession of ideas and images becomes the mere
+utterance of an emotion; not, as in other natures, the emotion a mere
+ornamental colouring of the thought.
+
+Ordinary education and the ordinary course of life are constantly at
+work counteracting this quality of mind, and substituting habits more
+suitable to their own ends: if instead of substituting they were
+content to superadd, there would be nothing to complain of. But when
+will education consist, not in repressing any mental faculty or power,
+from the uncontrolled action of which danger is apprehended, but in
+training up to its proper strength the corrective and antagonist
+power?
+
+In whomsoever the quality which we have described exists, and is not
+stifled, that person is a poet. Doubtless he is a greater poet in
+proportion as the fineness of his perceptions, whether of sense or of
+internal consciousness, furnishes him with an ampler supply of lovely
+images--the vigour and richness of his intellect, with a greater
+abundance of moving thoughts. For it is through these thoughts and
+images that the feeling speaks, and through their impressiveness that
+it impresses itself, and finds response in other hearts; and from
+these media of transmitting it (contrary to the laws of physical
+nature) increase of intensity is reflected back upon the feeling
+itself. But all these it is possible to have, and not be a poet; they
+are mere materials, which the poet shares in common with other people.
+What constitutes the poet is not the imagery nor the thoughts, nor
+even the feelings, but the law according to which they are called up.
+He is a poet, not because he has ideas of any particular kind, but
+because the succession of big ideas is subordinate to the course of
+his emotions.
+
+Many who have never acknowledged this in theory, bear testimony to it
+in their particular judgements. In listening to an oration, or reading
+a written discourse not professedly poetical, when do we begin to feel
+that the speaker or author is putting off the character of the orator
+or the prose writer, and is passing into the poet? Not when he begins
+to show strong feeling; _then_ we merely say, he is in earnest, he
+feels what he says; still less when he expresses himself in imagery;
+then, unless illustration be manifestly his sole object, we are apt to
+say, this is affectation. It is when the feeling (instead of passing
+away, or, if it continue, letting the train of thoughts run on
+exactly as they would have done if there were no influence at work but
+the mere intellect) becomes itself the originator of another train of
+association, which expels or blends with the former; when (for
+example) either his words, or the mode of their arrangement, are such
+as we spontaneously use only when in a state of excitement, proving
+that the mind is at least as much occupied by a passive state of its
+own feelings, as by the desire of attaining the premeditated end which
+the discourse has in view.[35]
+
+    [35] And this, we may remark by the way, seems to point to
+    the true theory of poetic diction; and to suggest the true
+    answer to as much as is erroneous of Wordsworth's celebrated
+    doctrine on that subject. For on the one hand, _all_ language
+    which is the natural expression of feeling, is really
+    poetical, and will be felt as such, apart from conventional
+    associations; but on the other, whenever intellectual culture
+    has afforded a choice between several modes of expressing the
+    same emotion, the stronger the feeling is, the more naturally
+    and certainly will it prefer the language which is most
+    peculiarly appropriated to itself, and kept sacred from the
+    contact of more vulgar objects of contemplation.
+
+Our judgements of authors who lay actual claim to the title of poets,
+follow the same principle. Whenever, after a writer's meaning is fully
+understood, it is still matter of reasoning and discussion whether he
+is a poet or not, he will be found to be wanting in the characteristic
+peculiarity of association so often adverted to. When, on the
+contrary, after reading or hearing one or two passages, we
+instinctively and without hesitation cry out, 'This is a poet', the
+probability is, that the passages are strongly marked with this
+peculiar quality. And we may add that in such case, a critic who, not
+having sufficient feeling to respond to the poetry, is also without
+sufficient philosophy to understand it though he feel it not, will be
+apt to pronounce, not 'this is prose', but 'this is exaggeration',
+'this is mysticism', or, 'this is nonsense'.
+
+Although a philosopher cannot, by culture, make himself, in the
+peculiar sense in which we now use the term, a poet, unless at least
+he have that peculiarity of nature which would probably have made
+poetry his earliest pursuit; a poet may always, by culture, make
+himself a philosopher. The poetic laws of association are by no means
+incompatible with the more ordinary laws; are by no means such as
+_must_ have their course, even though a deliberate purpose require
+their suspension. If the peculiarities of the poetic temperament were
+uncontrollable in any poet, they might be supposed so in Shelley; yet
+how powerfully, in the _Cenci_, does he coerce and restrain all the
+characteristic qualities of his genius; what severe simplicity, in
+place of his usual barbaric splendour; how rigidly does he keep the
+feelings and the imagery in subordination to the thought.
+
+The investigation of nature requires no habits or qualities of mind,
+but such as may always be acquired by industry and mental activity.
+Because at one time the mind may be so given up to a state of feeling,
+that the succession of its ideas is determined by the present
+enjoyment or suffering which pervades it, this is no reason but that
+in the calm retirement of study, when under no peculiar excitement
+either of the outward or of the inward sense, it may form any
+combinations, or pursue any trains of ideas, which are most conducive
+to the purposes of philosophic inquiry; and may, while in that state,
+form deliberate convictions, from which no excitement will afterwards
+make it swerve. Might we not go even further than this? We shall not
+pause to ask whether it be not a misunderstanding of the nature of
+passionate feeling to imagine that it is inconsistent with calmness;
+whether they who so deem of it, do not mistake passion in the militant
+or antagonistic state, for the type of passion universally; do not
+confound passion struggling towards an outward object, with passion
+brooding over itself. But without entering into this deeper
+investigation; that capacity of strong feeling, which is supposed
+necessarily to disturb the judgement, is also the material out of
+which all _motives_ are made; the motives, consequently, which lead
+human beings to the pursuit of truth. The greater the individual's
+capability of happiness and of misery, the stronger interest has that
+individual in arriving at truth; and when once that interest is felt,
+an impassioned nature is sure to pursue this, as to pursue any other
+object, with greater ardour; for energy of character is commonly the
+offspring of strong feeling. If, therefore, the most impassioned
+natures do not ripen into the most powerful intellects, it is always
+from defect of culture, or something wrong in the circumstances by
+which the being has originally or successively been surrounded.
+Undoubtedly strong feelings require a strong intellect to carry them,
+as more sail requires more ballast: and when, from neglect, or bad
+education, that strength is wanting, no wonder if the grandest and
+swiftest vessels make the most utter wreck.
+
+Where, as in some of our older poets, a poetic nature has been united
+with logical and scientific culture, the peculiarity of association
+arising from the finer nature so perpetually alternates with the
+associations attainable by commoner natures trained to high
+perfection, that its own particular law is not so conspicuously
+characteristic of the result produced, as in a poet like Shelley, to
+whom systematic intellectual culture, in a measure proportioned to the
+intensity of his own nature, has been wanting. Whether the superiority
+will naturally be on the side of the philosopher-poet or of the mere
+poet--whether the writings of the one ought, as a whole, to be truer,
+and their influence more beneficent, than those of the other--is too
+obvious in principle to need statement: it would be absurd to doubt
+whether two endowments are better than one; whether truth is more
+certainly arrived at by two processes, verifying and correcting each
+other, than by one alone. Unfortunately, in practice the matter is not
+quite so simple; there the question often is, which is least
+prejudicial to the intellect, uncultivation or malcultivation. For, as
+long as education consists chiefly of the mere inculcation of
+traditional opinions, many of which, from the mere fact that the human
+intellect has not yet reached perfection, must necessarily be false;
+so long as even those who are best taught, are rather taught to know
+the thoughts of others than to think, it is not always clear that the
+poet of acquired ideas has the advantage over him whose feeling has
+been his sole teacher. For the depth and durability of wrong as well
+as of right impressions is proportional to the fineness of the
+material; and they who have the greatest capacity of natural feeling
+are generally those whose artificial feelings are the strongest.
+Hence, doubtless, among other reasons, it is, that in an age of
+revolutions in opinion, the co-temporary poets, those at least who
+deserve the name, those who have any individuality of character, if
+they are not before their age, are almost sure to be behind it. An
+observation curiously verified all over Europe in the present century.
+Nor let it be thought disparaging. However urgent may be the necessity
+for a breaking up of old modes of belief, the most strong-minded and
+discerning, next to those who head the movement, are generally those
+who bring up the rear of it.
+
+
+
+
+WALTER BAGEHOT
+
+1826-1877
+
+WORDSWORTH, TENNYSON, AND BROWNING
+
+OR
+
+PURE, ORNATE, AND GROTESQUE ART IN ENGLISH POETRY (1864)
+
+_Enoch Arden, &c._ By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate.
+
+_Dramatis Personae._ By Robert Browning.
+
+
+We couple these two books together, not because of their likeness, for
+they are as dissimilar as books can be, nor on account of the eminence
+of their authors, for in general two great authors are too much for
+one essay, but because they are the best possible illustration of
+something we have to say upon poetical art--because they may give to
+it life and freshness. The accident of contemporaneous publication has
+here brought together two books, very characteristic of modern art,
+and we want to show how they are characteristic.
+
+Neither English poetry nor English criticism have ever recovered the
+_eruption_ which they both made at the beginning of this century into
+the fashionable world. The poems of Lord Byron were received with an
+avidity that resembles our present avidity for sensation novels, and
+were read by a class which at present reads little but such novels.
+Old men who remember those days may be heard to say, 'We hear nothing
+of poetry nowadays; it seems quite down.' And 'down' it certainly is,
+if for poetry it be a descent to be no longer the favourite excitement
+of the more frivolous part of the 'upper' world. That stimulating
+poetry is now little read. A stray schoolboy may still be detected in
+a wild admiration for the _Giaour_ or the _Corsair_ (and it is
+suitable to his age, and he should not be reproached for it), but the
+_real_ posterity--the quiet students of a past literature--never read
+them or think of them. A line or two linger in the memory; a few
+telling strokes of occasional and felicitous energy are quoted, but
+this is all. As wholes, these exaggerated stories were worthless; they
+taught nothing, and, therefore, they are forgotten. If nowadays a
+dismal poet were, like Byron, to lament the fact of his birth, and to
+hint that he was too good for the world, the _Saturday Review_ would
+say that 'they doubted if he _was_ too good; that a sulky poet was a
+questionable addition to a tolerable world; that he need not have been
+born, as far as they were concerned.' Doubtless, there is much in
+Byron besides his dismal exaggeration, but it was that exaggeration
+which made 'the sensation', which gave him a wild moment of dangerous
+fame. As so often happens, the cause of his momentary fashion is the
+cause also of his lasting oblivion. Moore's former reputation was less
+excessive, yet it has not been more permanent. The prettiness of a few
+songs preserves the memory of his name, but as a poet to _read_ he is
+forgotten. There is nothing to read in him; no exquisite thought, no
+sublime feeling, no consummate description of true character. Almost
+the sole result of the poetry of that time is the harm which it has
+done. It degraded for a time the whole character of the art. It said
+by practice, by a most efficient and successful practice, that it was
+the aim, the _duty_ of poets, to catch the attention of the passing,
+the fashionable, the busy world. If a poem 'fell dead', it was
+nothing; it was composed to please the 'London' of the year, and if
+that London did not like it, why, it had failed. It fixed upon the
+minds of a whole generation, it engraved in popular memory and
+tradition, a vague conviction that poetry is but one of the many
+_amusements_ for the light classes, for the lighter hours of all
+classes. The mere notion, the bare idea, that poetry is a deep thing,
+a teaching thing, the most surely and wisely elevating of human
+things, is even now to the coarse public mind nearly unknown.
+
+As was the fate of poetry, so inevitably was that of criticism. The
+science that expounds which poetry is good and which is bad is
+dependent for its popular reputation on the popular estimate of poetry
+itself. The critics of that day had _a_ day, which is more than can be
+said for some since; they professed to tell the fashionable world in
+what books it would find new pleasure, and therefore they were read by
+the fashionable world. Byron counted the critic and poet equal. The
+_Edinburgh Review_ penetrated among the young, and into places of
+female resort where it does not go now. As people ask, 'Have you read
+_Henry Dunbar_? and what do you think of it?' so they then asked,
+'Have you read the _Giaour_? and what do you think of it?' Lord
+Jeffrey, a shrewd judge of the world, employed himself in telling it
+what to think; not so much what it ought to think, as what at bottom
+it did think, and so by dexterous sympathy with current society he
+gained contemporary fame and power. Such fame no critic must hope for
+now. His articles will not penetrate where the poems themselves do not
+penetrate. When poetry was noisy, criticism was loud; now poetry is a
+still small voice, and criticism must be smaller and stiller. As the
+function of such criticism was limited so was its subject. For the
+great and (as time now proves) the _permanent_ part of the poetry of
+his time--for Shelley and for Wordsworth--Lord Jeffrey had but one
+word. He said[36] 'It won't do'. And it will not do to amuse a
+drawing-room.
+
+    [36] The first words in Lord Jeffrey's celebrated review of
+    the _Excursion_ were, 'This will never do.'
+
+The doctrine that poetry is a light amusement for idle hours, a
+metrical species of sensational novel, has not indeed been without
+gainsayers wildly popular. Thirty years ago, Mr. Carlyle most rudely
+contradicted it. But perhaps this is about all that he has done. He
+has denied, but he has not disproved. He has contradicted the floating
+paganism, but he has not founded the deep religion. All about and
+around us a _faith_ in poetry struggles to be extricated, but it is
+not extricated. Some day, at the touch of the true word, the whole
+confusion will by magic cease; the broken and shapeless notions cohere
+and crystallize into a bright and true theory. But this cannot be yet.
+
+But though no complete theory of the poetic art as yet be possible for
+us, though perhaps only our children's children will be able to speak
+on this subject with the assured confidence which belongs to accepted
+truth, yet something of some certainty may be stated on the easier
+elements, and something that will throw light on these two new books.
+But it will be necessary to assign reasons, and the assigning of
+reasons is a dry task. Years ago, when criticism only tried to show
+how poetry could be made a good amusement, it was not impossible that
+criticism itself should be amusing. But now it must at least be
+serious, for we believe that poetry is a serious and a deep thing.
+
+There should be a word in the language of literary art to express what
+the word 'picturesque' expresses for the fine arts. _Picturesque_
+means fit to be put into a picture; we want a word _literatesque_,
+'fit to be put into a book.' An artist goes through a hundred
+different country scenes, rich with beauties, charms, and merits, but
+he does not paint any of them. He leaves them alone; he idles on till
+he finds the hundred-and-first--a scene which many observers would not
+think much of, but which _he_ knows by virtue of his art will look
+well on canvas, and this he paints and preserves. Susceptible
+observers, though not artists, feel this quality too; they say of a
+scene, 'How picturesque!' meaning by this a quality distinct from that
+of beauty, or sublimity, or grandeur--meaning to speak not only of the
+scene as it is in itself, but also of its fitness for imitation by
+art; meaning not only that it is good, but that its goodness is such
+as ought to be transferred to paper; meaning not simply that it
+fascinates, but also that its fascination is such as ought to be
+copied by man. A fine and insensible instinct has put language to this
+subtle use; it expresses an idea without which fine art criticism
+could not go on, and it is very natural that the language of pictorial
+should be better supplied with words than that of literary criticism,
+for the eye was used before the mind, and language embodies primitive
+sensuous ideas, long ere it expresses, or need express, abstract and
+literary ones.
+
+The reason why a landscape is 'picturesque' is often said to be that
+such landscape represents an 'idea'. But this explanation, though in
+the minds of some who use it it is near akin to the truth, fails to
+explain that truth to those who did not know it before; the Word
+'idea,' is so often used in these subjects when people do not know
+anything else to say; it represents so often a kind of intellectual
+insolvency, when philosophers are at their wits' end, that shrewd
+people will never readily on any occasion give it credit for meaning
+anything. A wise explainer must, therefore, look out for other words
+to convey what he has to say. _Landscapes_, like everything else in
+nature, divide themselves as we look at them into a sort of rude
+classification. We go down a river, for example, and we see a hundred
+landscapes on both sides of it, resembling one another in much, yet
+differing in something; with trees here, and a farmhouse there, and
+shadows on one side, and a deep pool far on; a collection of
+circumstances most familiar in themselves, but making a perpetual
+novelty by the magic of their various combinations. We travel so for
+miles and hours, and then we come to a scene which also has these
+various circumstances and adjuncts, but which combines them best,
+which makes the best whole of them, which shows them in their best
+proportion at a single glance before the eye. Then we say, 'This is
+the place to paint the river; this is the picturesque point!' Or, if
+not artists or critics of art, we feel without analysis or examination
+that somehow this bend or sweep of the river, shall, in future, _be
+the river to us_: that it is the image of it which we will retain in
+our mind's eye, by which we will remember it, which we will call up
+when we want to describe or think of it. Some fine countries, some
+beautiful rivers, have not this picturesque quality: they give us
+elements of beauty, but they do not combine them together; we go on
+for a time delighted, but _after_ a time somehow we get wearied; we
+feel that we are taking in nothing and learning nothing; we get no
+collected image before our mind; we see the accidents and
+circumstances of that sort of scenery, but the summary scene we do not
+see; we find _disjecta membra_, but no form; various and many and
+faulty approximations are displayed in succession; but the absolute
+perfection in that country or river's scenery--its _type_--is
+withheld: We go away from such places in part delighted, but in part
+baffled; we have been puzzled by pretty things; we have beheld a
+hundred different inconsistent specimens of the same sort of beauty;
+but the rememberable idea, the full development, the characteristic
+individuality of it, we have not seen.
+
+We find the same sort of quality in all parts of painting. We see a
+portrait of a person we know, and we say, 'It is like--yes, like, of
+course, but it is not _the man_;' we feel it could not be any one
+else, but still, somehow it fails to bring home to us the individual
+as we know him to be. _He_ is not there. An accumulation of features
+like his are painted, but his essence is not painted; an
+approximation more or less excellent is given, but the characteristic
+expression, the _typical_ form, of the man is withheld.
+
+Literature--the painting of words--has the same quality but wants the
+analogous word. The word '_literatesque_,' would mean, if we possessed
+it, that perfect combination in the _subject-matter_ of literature,
+which suits the _art_ of literature. We often meet people, and say of
+them, sometimes meaning well and sometimes ill, 'How well so-and-so
+would do in a book!' Such people are by no means the best people; but
+they are the most effective people--the most rememberable people.
+Frequently when we first know them, we like them because they explain
+to us so much of our experience; we have known many people 'like
+that,' in one way or another, but we did not seem to understand them;
+they were nothing to us, for their traits were indistinct; we forgot
+them, for they _hitched_ on to nothing, and we could not classify
+them; but when we see the _type_ of the genus, at once we seem to
+comprehend its character; the inferior specimens are explained by the
+perfect embodiment; the approximations are definable when we know the
+ideal to which they draw near. There are an infinite number of classes
+of human beings, but in each of these classes there is a distinctive
+type which, if we could expand it out in words, would define the
+class. We cannot expand it in formal terms any more than a landscape
+or a species of landscapes; but we have an art, an art of words, which
+can draw it. Travellers and others often bring home, in addition to
+their long journals--which though so living to them, are so dead, so
+inanimate, so undescriptive to all else--a pen-and-ink sketch, rudely
+done very likely, but which, perhaps, even the more for the blots and
+strokes, gives a distinct notion, an emphatic image, to all who see
+it. They say at once, '_Now_ we know the sort of thing'. The sketch
+has _hit_ the mind. True literature does the same. It describes sorts,
+varieties, and permutations, by delineating the type of each sort, the
+ideal of each variety, the central, the marking trait of each
+permutation.
+
+On this account, the greatest artists of the world have ever shown an
+enthusiasm for reality. To care for notions and abstractions; to
+philosophize; to reason out conclusions; to care for schemes of
+thought, are signs in the artistic mind of secondary excellence. A
+Schiller, a Euripides, a Ben Jonson, cares for _ideas_--for the
+parings of the intellect, and the distillation of the mind; a
+Shakespeare, a Homer, a Goethe, finds his mental occupation, the true
+home of his natural thoughts, in the real world--'which is the world
+of all of us'--where the face of nature, the moving masses of men and
+women, are ever changing, ever multiplying, ever mixing one with the
+other. The reason is plain--the business of the poet, of the artist,
+is with _types_; and those types are mirrored in reality. As a painter
+must not only have a hand to execute, but an eye to distinguish--as he
+must go here and then there through the real world to catch the
+picturesque man, the picturesque scene, which is to live on his
+canvas--so the poet must find in that reality, the _literatesque_ man,
+the _literatesque_ scene which nature intends for him, and which will
+live in his page. Even in reality he will not find this type complete,
+or the characteristics perfect; but there, at least, he will find
+_something_, some hint, some intimation, some suggestion; whereas, in
+the stagnant home of his own thoughts he will find nothing pure,
+nothing _as it is_, nothing which does not bear his own mark, which is
+not somehow altered by a mixture with himself.
+
+The first conversation of Goethe and Schiller illustrates this
+conception of the poet's art. Goethe was at that time prejudiced
+against Schiller, we must remember, partly from what he considered the
+_outrages_ of the _Robbers_, partly because of the philosophy of Kant.
+Schiller's 'Essay on _Grace and Dignity_', he tells us, 'was yet less
+of a kind to reconcile me. The philosophy of Kant, which exalts the
+dignity of mind so highly, while appearing to restrict it, Schiller
+had joyfully embraced: it unfolded the extraordinary qualities which
+Nature had implanted in him; and in the lively feeling of freedom and
+self-direction, he showed himself unthankful to the Great Mother, who
+surely had not acted like a step-dame towards him. Instead of viewing
+her as self-subsisting, as producing with a living force, and
+according to appointed laws, alike the highest and the lowest of her
+works, he took her up under the aspect of some empirical native
+qualities of the human mind. Certain harsh passages I could even
+directly apply to myself: they exhibited my confession of faith in a
+false light; and I felt that if written without particular attention
+to me they were still worse; for in that case, the vast chasm which
+lay between us, gaped but so much the more distinctly.' After a casual
+meeting at a Society for Natural History, they walked home and Goethe
+proceeds:
+
+'We reached his house; the talk induced me to go in. I then expounded
+to him, with as much vivacity as possible, the _Metamorphosis of
+Plants_, drawing out on paper, with many characteristic strokes, a
+symbolic Plant for him, as I proceeded. He heard and saw all this,
+with much interest and distinct comprehension; but when I had done, he
+shook his head and said: 'This is no experiment, this is an idea.' I
+stopped with some degree of irritation; for the point which separated
+us was most luminously marked by this expression. The opinions in
+_Dignity and Grace_, again occurred to me; the old grudge was just
+awakening; but I smothered it, and merely said: "I was happy to find
+that I had got ideas without knowing it, nay that I saw them before my
+eyes."
+
+'Schiller had much more prudence and dexterity of management than I;
+he was also thinking of his periodical the _Horen_, about this time,
+and of course rather wished to attract than repel me. Accordingly he
+answered me like an accomplished Kantite; and as my stiff-necked
+Realism gave occasion to many contradictions, much battling took place
+between us, and at last a truce, in which neither party would consent
+to yield the victory, but each held himself invincible. Positions like
+the following grieved me to the very soul: _How can there ever be an
+experiment, that shall correspond with an idea? The specific quality
+of an idea is, that no experiment can reach it or agree with it._ Yet
+if he held as an idea, the same thing which I looked upon as an
+experiment; there must certainly, I thought, be some community between
+us, some ground whereon both of us might meet!'
+
+With Goethe's natural history, or with Kant's philosophy, we have
+here no concern, but we can combine the expressions of the two great
+poets into a nearly complete description of poetry. The 'symbolic
+plant' is the _type_ of which we speak, the ideal at which inferior
+specimens aim, the class-characteristic in which they all share, but
+which none shows forth fully: Goethe was right in searching for this
+in reality and nature; Schiller was right in saying that it was an
+'idea', a transcending notion to which approximations could be found
+in experience, but only approximations--which could not be found there
+itself. Goethe, as a poet, rightly felt the primary necessity of
+outward suggestion and experience; Schiller as a philosopher, rightly
+felt its imperfection.
+
+But in these delicate matters, it is easy to misapprehend. There is,
+undoubtedly, a sort of poetry which is produced as it were out of the
+author's mind. The description of the poet's own moods and feelings is
+a common sort of poetry--perhaps the commonest sort. But the
+peculiarity of such cases is, that the poet does not describe himself
+_as_ himself: autobiography is not his object; he takes himself as a
+specimen of human nature; he describes, not himself, but a
+distillation of himself: he takes such of his moods as are most
+characteristic, as most typify certain moods of certain men, or
+certain moods of all men; he chooses preponderant feelings of special
+sorts of men, or occasional feelings of men of all sorts; but with
+whatever other difference and diversity, the essence is that such
+self-describing poets describe what is _in_ them, but not _peculiar_
+to them,--what is generic, not what is special and individual. Gray's
+_Elegy_ describes a mood which Gray felt more than other men, but
+which most others, perhaps all others, feel too. It is more popular,
+perhaps, than any English poem, because that sort of feeling is the
+most diffused of high feelings, and because Gray added to a singular
+nicety of fancy an habitual proneness to a _contemplative_--a
+discerning but unbiassed--meditation on death and on life. Other poets
+cannot hope for such success: a subject, so popular, so grave, so
+wise, and yet so suitable to the writer's nature is hardly to be
+found. But the same ideal, the same unautobiographical character is to
+be found in the writings of meaner men. Take sonnets of Hartley
+Coleridge, for example:
+
+
+I
+
+TO A FRIEND
+
+    When we were idlers with the loitering rills,
+    The need of human love we little noted:
+    Our love was nature; and the peace that floated
+    On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills,
+    To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills:
+    One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,
+    That, wisely doating, ask'd not why it doated,
+    And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.
+    But now I find, how dear thou wert to me;
+    That man is more than half of nature's treasure,
+    Of that fair Beauty which no eye can see,
+    Of that sweet music which no ear can measure;
+    And now the streams may sing for others' pleasure,
+    The hills sleep on in their eternity.
+
+
+II
+
+TO THE SAME
+
+    In the great city we are met again,
+    Where many souls there are, that breathe and die,
+    Scarce knowing more of nature's potency,
+    Than what they learn from heat, or cold, or rain;
+    The sad vicissitude of weary pain;--
+    For busy man is lord of ear and eye,
+    And what hath nature, but the vast, void sky,
+    And the thronged river toiling to the main?
+    Oh! say not so, for she shall have her part
+    In every smile, in every tear that falls,
+    And she shall hide her in the secret heart,
+    Where love persuades, and sterner duty calls:
+    But worse it were than death, or sorrow's smart,
+    To live without a friend within these walls.
+
+
+III
+
+TO THE SAME
+
+    We parted on the mountains, as two streams
+    From one clear spring pursue their several ways;
+    And thy fleet course hath been through many a maze,
+    In foreign lands, where silvery Padus gleams
+    To that delicious sky, whose glowing beams
+    Brightened the tresses that old Poets praise;
+    Where Petrarch's patient love, and artful lays,
+    And Ariosto's song of many themes,
+    Moved the soft air. But I, a lazy brook,
+    As close pent up within my native dell,
+    Have crept along from nook to shady nook,
+    Where flowrets blow, and whispering Naiads dwell.
+    Yet now we meet, that parted were so wide,
+    O'er rough and smooth to travel side by side.
+
+The contrast of instructive and enviable locomotion with refining but
+instructive meditation is not special and peculiar to these two, but
+general and universal. It was set down by Hartley Coleridge because he
+was the most meditative and refining of men.
+
+What sort of literatesque types are fit to be described in the sort of
+literature called poetry, is a matter on which much might be written.
+Mr. Arnold, some years since, put forth a theory that the art of
+poetry could only delineate _great actions_. But though, rightly
+interpreted and understood--using the word action so as to include
+high and sound activity in contemplation--this definition may suit the
+highest poetry, it certainly cannot be stretched to include many
+inferior sorts and even many good sorts. Nobody in their senses would
+describe Gray's _Elegy_ as the delineation of a 'great action'; some
+kinds of mental contemplation may be energetic enough to deserve this
+name, but Gray would have been frightened at the very word. He loved
+scholar-like calm and quiet inaction; his very greatness depended on
+his _not_ acting, on his 'wise passiveness,' on his indulging the
+grave idleness which so well appreciates so much of human life. But
+the best answer--the _reductio ad absurdum_--of Mr. Arnold's doctrine,
+is the mutilation which it has caused him to make of his own writings.
+It has forbidden him, he tells us, to reprint _Empedocles_--a poem
+undoubtedly containing defects and even excesses, but containing also
+these lines:
+
+    And yet what days were those, Parmenides!
+    When we were young, when we could number friends
+    In all the Italian cities like ourselves,
+    When with elated hearts we join'd your train,
+    Ye Sun-born virgins! on the road of Truth.
+    Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought
+    Nor outward things were clos'd and dead to us,
+    But we receiv'd the shock of mighty thoughts
+    On simple minds with a pure natural joy;
+    And if the sacred load oppress'd our brain,
+    We had the power to feel the pressure eas'd.
+    The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,
+    In the delightful commerce of the world.
+    We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
+    Thought's slaves and dead to every natural joy.
+    The smallest thing could give us pleasure then--
+    The sports of the country people;
+    A flute note from the woods;
+    Sunset over the sea:
+    Seed-time and harvest;
+    The reapers in the corn;
+    The vinedresser in his vineyard;
+    The village-girl at her wheel.
+    Fullness of life and power of feeling, ye
+    Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,
+    Who dwell on a firm basis of content.
+    But he who has outliv'd his prosperous days,
+    But he, whose youth fell on a different world
+    From that on which his exil'd age is thrown;
+    Whose mind was fed on other food, was train'd
+    By other rules than are in vogue to-day;
+    Whose habit of thought is fix'd, who will not change,
+    But in a world he loves not must subsist
+    In ceaseless opposition, be the guard
+    Of his own breast, fetter'd to what he guards,
+    That the world win no mastery over him;
+    Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;
+    Who has no minute's breathing space allow'd
+    To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy:--
+    Joy and the outward world must die to him
+    As they are dead to me.
+
+What freak of criticism can induce a man who has written such poetry
+as this, to discard it, and say it is not poetry? Mr. Arnold is
+privileged to speak of his own poems, but no other critic could speak
+so and not be laughed at.
+
+We are disposed to believe that no very sharp definition can be
+given--at least in the present state of the critical art--of the
+boundary line between poetry and other sorts of imaginative
+delineation. Between the undoubted dominions of the two kinds there is
+a debateable land; everybody is agreed that the _Oedipus at Colonus_
+_is_ poetry: every one is agreed that the wonderful appearance of Mrs.
+Veal is _not_ poetry. But the exact line which separates grave novels
+in verse like _Aylmer's Field_ or _Enoch Arden_, from grave novels not
+in verse like _Silas Marner_ or _Adam Bede_, we own we cannot draw
+with any confidence. Nor, perhaps, is it very important; whether a
+narrative is thrown into verse or not certainly depends in part on the
+taste of the age, and in part on its mechanical helps. Verse is the
+only mechanical help to the memory in rude times, and there is little
+writing till a cheap something is found to write upon, and a cheap
+something to write with. Poetry--verse at least--is the literature of
+_all work_ in early ages; it is only later ages which write in what
+_they_ think a natural and simple prose. There are other casual
+influences in the matter too; but they are not material now. We need
+only say here that poetry, because it has a more marked rhythm than
+prose, must be more intense in meaning and more concise in style than
+prose. People expect a 'marked rhythm' to imply something worth
+marking; if it fails to do so they are disappointed. They are
+displeased at the visible waste of a powerful instrument; they call it
+'doggerel,' and rightly call it, for the metrical expression of full
+thought and eager feeling--the burst of metre--incident to high
+imagination, should not be wasted on petty matters which prose does as
+well,--which it does better--which it suits by its very limpness and
+weakness, whose small changes it follows more easily, and to whose
+lowest details it can fully and without effort degrade itself. Verse,
+too, should be _more concise_, for long-continued rhythm tends to jade
+the mind, just as brief rhythm tends to attract the attention. Poetry
+should be memorable and emphatic, intense, and _soon over_.
+
+The great divisions of poetry, and of all other literary art, arise
+from the different modes in which these _types_--these characteristic
+men, these characteristic feelings--may be variously described. There
+are three principal modes which we shall attempt to describe--the
+_pure_, which is sometimes, but not very wisely, called the classical;
+the _ornate_, which is also unwisely called romantic; and the
+_grotesque_, which might be called the mediaeval. We will describe the
+nature of these a little. Criticism we know must be brief--not, like
+poetry, because its charm is too intense to be sustained--but on the
+contrary, because its interest is too weak to be prolonged; but
+elementary criticism, if an evil, is a necessary evil; a little while
+spent among the simple principles of art is the first condition, the
+absolute pre-requisite, for surely apprehending and wisely judging the
+complete embodiments and miscellaneous forms of actual literature.
+
+The definition of _pure_ literature is that it describes the type in
+its simplicity, we mean, with the exact amount of accessory
+circumstance which is necessary to bring it before the mind in
+finished perfection, and _no more_ than that amount. The _type_ needs
+some accessories from its nature--a picturesque landscape does not
+consist wholly of picturesque features. There is a setting of
+surroundings--as the Americans would say, of _fixings_--without which
+the reality is not itself. By a traditional mode of speech, as soon as
+we see a picture in which a complete effect is produced by detail so
+rare and so harmonized as to escape us, we say 'how classical'. The
+whole which is to be seen appears at once and through the detail, but
+the detail itself is not seen: we do not think of that which gives us
+the idea; we are absorbed in the idea itself. Just so in literature
+the pure art is that which works with the fewest strokes; the fewest,
+that is, for its purpose, for its aim is to call up and bring home to
+men an idea, a form, a character, and if that idea be twisted, that
+form be involved, that character perplexed, many strokes of literary
+art will be needful. Pure art does not mutilate its object: it
+represents it as fully as is possible with the slightest effort which
+is possible: it shrinks from no needful circumstances, as little as it
+inserts any which are needless. The precise peculiarity is not merely
+that no incidental circumstance is inserted which does not tell on the
+main design: no art is fit to be called _art_ which permits a stroke
+to be put in without an object; but that only the minimum of such
+circumstance is inserted at all. The form is sometimes said to be
+bare, the accessories are sometimes said to be invisible, because the
+appendages are so choice that the shape only is perceived.
+
+The English literature undoubtedly contains much impure literature;
+impure in its style if not in its meaning: but it also contains one
+great, one nearly perfect, model of the pure style in the literary
+expression of typical _sentiment_; and one not perfect, but gigantic
+and close approximation to perfection in the pure delineation of
+objective character. Wordsworth, perhaps, comes as near to choice
+purity of style in sentiment as is possible; Milton, with exceptions
+and conditions to be explained, approaches perfection by the
+strenuous purity with which he depicts character.
+
+A wit once said, that '_pretty_ women had more features than
+_beautiful_ women', and though the expression may be criticized, the
+meaning is correct. Pretty women seem to have a great number of
+attractive points, each of which attracts your attention, and each one
+of which you remember afterwards; yet these points have not _grown
+together_, their features have not linked themselves into a single
+inseparable whole. But a beautiful woman is a whole as she is; you no
+more take her to pieces than a Greek statue; she is not an aggregate
+of divisible charms, she is a charm in herself. Such ever is the
+dividing test of pure art; if you catch yourself admiring its details,
+it is defective; you ought to think of it as a single whole which you
+must remember, which you must admire, which somehow subdues you while
+you admire it, which is a 'possession' to you 'for ever'.
+
+Of course no individual poem embodies this ideal perfectly; of course
+every human word and phrase has its imperfections, and if we choose an
+instance to illustrate that ideal, the instance has scarcely a fair
+chance. By contrasting it with the ideal we suggest its imperfections;
+by protruding it as an example, we turn on its defectiveness the
+microscope of criticism. Yet these two sonnets of Wordsworth may be
+fitly read in this place, not because they are quite without faults,
+or because they are the very best examples of their kind of style; but
+because they are _luminous_ examples; the compactness of the sonnet
+and the gravity of the sentiment, hedging in the thoughts,
+restraining the fancy, and helping to maintain a singleness of
+expression:
+
+
+THE TROSACHS.
+
+    There's not a nook within this solemn Pass,
+    But were an apt Confessional for one
+    Taught by his summer spent; his autumn gone,
+    That Life is but a tale of morning grass
+    Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase
+    That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes
+    Feed it 'mid Nature's old felicities,
+    Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass
+    Untouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy guest,
+    If from a golden perch of aspen spray
+    (October's workmanship to rival May)
+    The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast
+    That moral teaches by a heaven-taught lay,
+    Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest!
+
+
+COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPT. 3, 1802
+
+    Earth has not anything to show more fair:
+    Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
+    A sight so touching in its majesty:
+    This city now doth, like a garment, wear
+    The beauty of the morning; silent, bare.
+    Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
+    Open unto the fields and to the sky;
+    All bright and open in the smokeless air.
+    Never did sun more beautifully steep
+    In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
+    Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
+    The river glideth at his own sweet will:
+    Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
+    And all that mighty heart is lying still!
+
+Instances of barer style than this may easily be found, instances of
+colder style--few better instances of purer style. Not a single
+expression (the invocation in the concluding couplet of the second
+sonnet perhaps excepted) can be spared, yet not a single expression
+rivets the attention. If, indeed, we take out the phrase--
+
+    The city now doth like a garment wear
+    The beauty of the morning,
+
+and the description of the brilliant yellow of autumn--
+
+    October's workmanship to rival May,
+
+they have independent value, but they are not noticed in the sonnet
+when we read it through; they fall into place there, and being in
+their place are not seen. The great subjects of the two sonnets, the
+religious aspect of beautiful but grave nature--the religious aspect
+of a city about to awaken and be alive, are the only ideas left in our
+mind. To Wordsworth has been vouchsafed the last grace of the
+self-denying artist; you think neither of him nor his style, but you
+cannot help thinking of--you _must_ recall--the exact phrase, the
+_very_ sentiment he wished.
+
+Milton's purity is more eager. In the most exciting parts of
+Wordsworth--and these sonnets are not very exciting--you always feel,
+you never forget, that what you have before you is the excitement of a
+recluse. There is nothing of the stir of life; nothing of the _brawl_
+of the world. But Milton though always a scholar by trade, though
+solitary in old age, was through life intent on great affairs, lived
+close to great scenes, watched a revolution, and if not an actor in
+it, was at least secretary to the actors. He was familiar--by daily
+experience and habitual sympathy--with the earnest debate of arduous
+questions, on which the life and death of the speakers certainly
+depended, on which the weal or woe of the country perhaps depended.
+He knew how profoundly the individual character of the speakers--their
+inner and real nature--modifies their opinion on such questions; he
+knew how surely that nature will appear in the expression of them.
+This great experience, fashioned by a fine imagination, gives to the
+debate of Satanic Council in Pandaemonium its reality and its life. It
+is a debate in the Long Parliament, and though the _theme_ of
+_Paradise Lost_ obliged Milton to side with the monarchical element in
+the universe, his old habits are often too much for him; and his real
+sympathy--the impetus and energy of his nature--side with the
+rebellious element. For the purposes of art this is much better--of a
+court, a poet can make but little; of a heaven he can make very
+little, but of a courtly heaven, such as Milton conceived, he can make
+nothing at all. The idea of a court and the idea of a heaven are so
+radically different, that a distinct combination of them is always
+grotesque and often ludicrous. _Paradise Lost_, as a whole, is
+radically tainted by a vicious principle. It professes to justify the
+ways of God to man, to account for sin and death, and it tells you
+that the whole originated in a political event; in a court squabble as
+to a particular act of patronage and the due or undue promotion of an
+eldest son. Satan may have been wrong, but on Milton's theory he had
+an _arguable_ case at least. There was something arbitrary in the
+promotion; there were little symptoms of a job; in _Paradise Lost_ it
+is always clear that the devils are the weaker, but it is never clear
+that the angels are the better. Milton's sympathy and his imagination
+slip back to the Puritan rebels whom he loved, and desert the courtly
+angels whom he could not love although he praised. There is no wonder
+that Milton's hell is better than his heaven, for he hated officials
+and he loved rebels, for he employs his genius below, and accumulates
+his pedantry above. On the great debate in Pandaemonium all his genius
+is concentrated. The question is very practical; it is, 'What are we
+devils to do, now we have lost heaven?' Satan who presides over and
+manipulates the assembly; Moloch
+
+                              the fiercest spirit
+    That fought in Heaven, now fiercer by despair,
+
+who wants to fight again; Belial, 'the man of the world', who does not
+want to fight any more; Mammon, who is for commencing an industrial
+career; Beelzebub, the official statesman,
+
+                      deep on his front engraven
+    Deliberation sat and Public care,
+
+who, at Satan's instance, proposes the invasion of earth--are as
+distinct as so many statues. Even Belial, 'the man of the world', the
+sort of man with whom Milton had least sympathy, is perfectly painted.
+An inferior artist would have made the actor who 'counselled ignoble
+ease and peaceful sloth', a degraded and ugly creature; but Milton
+knew better. He knew that low notions require a better garb than high
+notions. Human nature is not a high thing, but at least it has a high
+idea of itself; it will not accept mean maxims, unless they are gilded
+and made beautiful. A prophet in goatskin may cry, 'Repent, repent',
+but it takes 'purple and fine linen' to be able to say, 'Continue in
+your sins'. The world vanquishes with its speciousness and its show,
+and the orator who is to persuade men to worldliness must have a share
+in them. Milton well knew this; after the warlike speech of the fierce
+Moloch he introduces a brighter and a more graceful spirit:
+
+    He ended frowning, and his look denounced
+    Desp'rate revenge, and battle dangerous
+    To less than Gods. On th' other side up rose
+    Belial, in act more graceful and humane:
+    A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seem'd
+    For dignity composed and high exploit:
+    But all was false and hollow, though his tongue
+    Dropt manna, and could make the worse appear
+    The better reason, to perplex and dash
+    Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low;
+    To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds
+    Tim'rous and slothful: yet he pleased the ear,
+    And with persuasive accent thus began:
+
+He does not begin like a man with a strong case, but like a man with a
+weak case; he knows that the pride of human nature is irritated by
+mean advice, and though he may probably persuade men to _take_ it, he
+must carefully apologise for _giving_ it. Here, as elsewhere, though
+the formal address is to devils, the real address is to men: to the
+human nature which we know, not to the fictitious demonic nature we do
+not know:
+
+    I should be much for open war, O Peers!
+    As not behind in hate, if what was urged
+    Main reason to persuade immediate war,
+    Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast
+    Ominous conjecture on the whole success:
+    When he who most excels in fact of arms,
+    In what he counsels and in what excels
+    Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair,
+    And utter dissolution, as the scope
+    Of all his aim, after some dire revenge.
+    First, what revenge? The tow'rs of Heav'n are fill'd
+    With armed watch, that render all access
+    Impregnable; oft on the bord'ring deep
+    Encamp their legions, or with obscure wing
+    Scout far and wide into the realm of night,
+    Scorning surprise. Or could we break our way
+    By force, and at our heels all hell should rise
+    With blackest insurrection, to confound
+    Heav'n's purest light, yet our great Enemy,
+    All incorruptible, would on his throne
+    Sit unpolluted, and th' ethereal mould
+    Incapable of stain would soon expel
+    Her mischief, and purge oft the baser fire
+    Victorious. Thus repulsed, our final hope
+    Is flat despair. We must exasperate
+    Th' Almighty Victor to spend all his rage,
+    And that must end us: that must be our cure,
+    To be no more? Sad cure; for who would lose,
+    Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
+    Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
+    To perish rather, swallow'd up and lost
+    In the wide womb of uncreated night,
+    Devoid of sense and motion? And who knows,
+    Let this be good, whether our angry Foe
+    Can give it, or will ever? How he can
+    Is doubtful; that he never will is sure.
+    Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire
+    Belike through impotence, or unaware,
+    To give his enemies their wish, and end
+    Them in his anger, whom his anger saves
+    To punish endless? Wherefore cease we then?
+    Say they who counsel war, we are decreed,
+    Reserved, and destined, to eternal woe;
+    Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,
+    What can we suffer worse? Is this then worst,
+    Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so on.
+
+Mr. Pitt knew this speech by heart, and Lord Macaulay has called it
+incomparable; and these judges of the oratorical art have well
+decided. A mean foreign policy cannot be better defended. Its
+sensibleness is effectually explained, and its tameness as much as
+possible disguised.
+
+But we have not here to do with the excellence of Belial's policy, but
+with the excellence of his speech; and with that speech in a peculiar
+manner. This speech, taken with the few lines of description with
+which Milton introduces them, embody, in as short a space as possible,
+with as much perfection as possible, the delineation of the type of
+character common at all times, dangerous in many times, sure to come
+to the surface in moments of difficulty, and never more dangerous than
+then. As Milton describes, it is one among several _typical_
+characters which will ever have their place in great councils, which
+will ever be heard at important decisions, which are part of the
+characteristic and inalienable whole of this statesmanlike world. The
+debate in Pandaemonium is a debate among these typical characters at
+the greatest conceivable crisis, and with adjuncts of solemnity which
+no other situation could rival. It is the greatest _classical_
+triumph, the highest achievement of the pure _style_ in English
+literature; it is the greatest description of the highest and most
+typical characters with the most choice circumstances and in the
+fewest words.
+
+It is not unremarkable that we should find in Milton and in _Paradise
+Lost_ the best specimen of pure style. He was schoolmaster in a
+pedantic age, and there is nothing so unclassical--nothing so impure
+in style--as pedantry. The out-of-door conversational life of Athens
+was as opposed to bookish scholasticism as a life can be. The most
+perfect books have been written not by those who thought much of
+books, but by those who thought little, by those who were under the
+restraint of a sensitive talking world, to which books had contributed
+something, and a various eager life the rest. Milton is generally
+unclassical in spirit where he is learned, and naturally, because the
+purest poets do not overlay their conceptions with book knowledge, and
+the classical poets, having in comparison no books, were under little
+temptation to impair the purity of their style by the accumulation of
+their research. Over and above this, there is in Milton, and a little
+in Wordsworth also, one defect which is in the highest degree faulty
+and unclassical, which mars the effect and impairs the perfection of
+the pure style. There is a want of _spontaneity_, and a sense of
+effort. It has been happily said that Plato's words must have _grown_
+into their places. No one would say so of Milton or even of
+Wordsworth. About both of them there is a taint of duty; a vicious
+sense of the good man's task. Things seem right where they are, but
+they seem to be put where they are. _Flexibility_ is essential to the
+consummate perfection of the pure style because the sensation of the
+poet's efforts carries away our thoughts from his achievements. We are
+admiring his labours when we should be enjoying his words. But this is
+a defect in those two writers, not a defect in pure art. Of course it
+is more difficult to write in few words than to write in many; to take
+the best adjuncts, and those only, for what you have to say, instead
+of using all which comes to hand; it _is_ an additional labour if you
+write verses in a morning, to spend the rest of the day in _choosing_,
+or making those verses fewer. But a perfect artist in the pure style
+is as effortless and as natural as in any style, perhaps is more so.
+Take the well-known lines:
+
+    There was a little lawny islet
+    By anemone and violet,
+        Like mosaic, paven:
+    And its roof was flowers and leaves
+    Which the summer's breath enweaves,
+    Where nor sun, nor showers, nor breeze,
+    Pierce the pines and tallest trees,
+        Each a gem engraven;--
+    Girt by many an azure wave
+    With which the clouds and mountains pave
+        A lake's blue chasm.
+
+Shelley had many merits and many defects. This is not the place for a
+complete or indeed for _any_ estimate of him. But one excellence is
+most evident. His words are as flexible as any words; the rhythm of
+some modulating air seems to move them into their place without a
+struggle by the poet and almost without his knowledge. This is the
+perfection of pure art, to embody typical conceptions in the choicest,
+the fewest accidents, to embody them so that each of these accidents
+may produce its full effect, and so to embody them without effort.
+
+The extreme opposite to this pure art is what may be called ornate
+art. This species of art aims also at giving a delineation of the
+typical idea in its perfection and its fullness, but it aims at so
+doing in a manner most different. It wishes to surround the type with
+the greatest number of circumstances which it will _bear_. It works
+not by choice and selection, but by accumulation and aggregation. The
+idea is not, as in the pure style, presented with the least clothing
+which it will endure, but with the richest and most involved clothing
+that it will admit.
+
+We are fortunate in not having to hunt out of past literature an
+illustrative specimen of the ornate style. Mr. Tennyson has just given
+one admirable in itself, and most characteristic of the defects and
+the merits of this style. The story of Enoch Arden, as he has enhanced
+and presented it, is a rich and splendid composite of imagery and
+illustration. Yet how simple that story is in itself. A sailor who
+sells fish, breaks his leg, gets dismal, gives up selling fish, goes
+to sea, is wrecked on a desert island, stays there some years, on his
+return finds his wife married to a miller, speaks to a landlady on the
+subject, and dies. Told in the pure and simple, the unadorned and
+classical style, this story would not have taken three pages, but Mr.
+Tennyson has been able to make it the principal--the largest tale in
+his new volume. He has done so only by giving to every event and
+incident in the volume an accompanying commentary. He tells a great
+deal about the torrid zone which a rough sailor like Enoch Arden
+certainly would not have perceived; and he gives to the fishing
+village, to which all the characters belong, a softness and a
+fascination which such villages scarcely possess in reality.
+
+The description of the tropical island on which the sailor is thrown,
+is an absolute model of adorned art:
+
+    The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
+    And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
+    The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes,
+    The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
+    The lustre of the long convolvuluses
+    That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran
+    Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows
+    And glories of the broad belt of the world,
+    All these he saw; but what he fain had seen
+    He could not see, the kindly human face,
+    Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard
+    The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
+    The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
+    The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd
+    And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep
+    Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
+    As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
+    Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
+    A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail:
+    No sail from day to day, but every day
+    The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
+    Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
+    The blaze upon the waters to the east;
+    The blaze upon his island overhead;
+    The blaze upon the waters to the west;
+    Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
+    The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
+    The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail.
+
+No expressive circumstance can be added to this description, no
+enhancing detail suggested. A much less happy instance is the
+description of Enoch's life before he sailed:
+
+    While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas,
+    Or often journeying landward; for in truth
+    Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean spoil
+    In ocean-smelling osier, and his face,
+    Rough-redden'd with a thousand winter gales,
+    Not only to the market-cross were known,
+    But in the leafy lanes behind the down,
+    Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp,
+    And peacock yew-tree of the lonely Hall,
+    Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering.
+
+So much has not often been made of selling fish.
+
+The essence of ornate art is in this manner to accumulate round the
+typical object, everything which can be said about it, every
+associated thought that can be connected with it without impairing the
+essence of the delineation.
+
+The first defect which strikes a student of ornate art--the first
+which arrests the mere reader of it--is what is called a want of
+simplicity. Nothing is described as it is, everything has about it an
+atmosphere of _something else_. The combined and associated thoughts,
+though they set off and heighten particular ideas and aspects of the
+central conception, yet complicate it: a simple thing--'a daisy by the
+river's brim'--is never left by itself, something else is put with it;
+something not more connected with it than 'lion-whelp' and the
+'peacock yew-tree' are with the 'fresh fish for sale' that Enoch
+carries past them. Even in the highest cases ornate art leaves upon a
+cultured and delicate taste, the conviction that it is not the highest
+art, that it is somehow excessive and over-rich, that it is not chaste
+in itself or chastening to the mind that sees it--that it is in an
+unexplained manner unsatisfactory, 'a thing in which we feel there is
+some hidden want!'
+
+That want is a want of 'definition'. We must all know landscapes,
+river landscapes especially, which are in the highest sense beautiful,
+which when we first see them give us a delicate pleasure; which in
+some--and these the best cases--give even a gentle sense of surprise
+that such things should be so beautiful, and yet when we come to live
+in them, to spend even a few hours in them, we seem stifled and
+oppressed. On the other hand there are people to whom the sea-shore is
+a companion, an exhilaration; and not so much for the brawl of the
+shore as for the _limited_ vastness, the finite infinite of the ocean
+as they see it. Such people often come home braced and nerved, and if
+they spoke out the truth, would have only to say, 'We have seen the
+horizon line'; if they were let alone indeed, they would gaze on it
+hour after hour, so great to them is the fascination, so full the
+sustaining calm, which they gain from that union of form and
+greatness. To a very inferior extent, but still, perhaps, to an extent
+which most people understand better, a common arch will have the same
+effect. A bridge completes a river landscape; if of the old and
+many-arched sort it regulates by a long series of defined forms the
+vague outline of wood and river which before had nothing to measure
+it; if of the new scientific sort it introduces still more strictly a
+geometrical element; it stiffens the scenery which was before too
+soft, too delicate, too vegetable. Just such is the effect of pure
+style in literary art. It calms by conciseness; while the ornate style
+leaves on the mind a mist of beauty, an excess of fascination, a
+complication of charm, the pure style leaves behind it the simple,
+defined, measured idea, as it is, and by itself. That which is chaste
+chastens; there is a poised energy--a state half thrill, and half
+tranquillity--which pure art gives, which no other can give; a
+pleasure justified as well as felt; an ennobled satisfaction at what
+ought to satisfy us, and must ennoble us.
+
+Ornate art is to pure art what a painted statue is to an unpainted. It
+is impossible to deny that a touch of colour _does_ bring out certain
+parts, does convey certain expressions, does heighten certain
+features, but it leaves on the work as a whole, a want, as we say,
+'of something'; a want of that inseparable chasteness which clings to
+simple sculpture, an impairing predominance of alluring details which
+impairs our satisfaction with our own satisfaction; which makes us
+doubt whether a higher being than ourselves will be satisfied even
+though we are so. In the very same manner, though the _rouge_ of
+ornate literature excites our eye, it also impairs our confidence.
+
+Mr. Arnold has justly observed that this self-justifying,
+self-_proving_ purity of style, is commoner in ancient literature than
+in modern literature, and also that Shakespeare is not a great or an
+unmixed example of it. No one can say that he is. His works are full
+of undergrowth, are full of complexity, are not models of style;
+except by a miracle nothing in the Elizabethan age could be a model of
+style; the restraining taste of that age was feebler and more mistaken
+than that of any other equally great age. Shakespeare's mind so teemed
+with creation that he required the most just, most forcible, most
+constant restraint from without. He most needed to be guided of poets,
+and he was the least and worst guided. As a whole no one can call his
+works finished models of the pure style, or of any style. But he has
+many passages of the most pure style, passages which could be easily
+cited if space served. And we must remember that the task which
+Shakespeare undertook was the most difficult which any poet has ever
+attempted, and that it is a task in which after a million efforts
+every other poet has failed. The Elizabethan drama--as Shakespeare has
+immortalized it--undertakes to delineate in five acts, under stage
+restrictions, and in mere dialogue, a whole list of dramatis
+personae, a set of characters enough for a modern novel, and with the
+distinctness of a modern novel. Shakespeare is not content to give two
+or three great characters in solitude and in dignity, like the
+classical dramatists; he wishes to give a whole _party_ of characters
+in the play of life, and according to the nature of each. He would
+'hold the mirror up to nature', not to catch a monarch in a tragic
+posture, but a whole group of characters engaged in many actions,
+intent on many purposes, thinking many thoughts. There is life enough,
+there is action enough, in single plays of Shakespeare to set up an
+ancient dramatist for a long career. And Shakespeare succeeded. His
+characters, taken _en masse_, and as a whole, are as well-known as any
+novelist's characters; cultivated men know all about them, as young
+ladies know all about Mr. Trollope's novels. But no other dramatist
+has succeeded in such an aim. No one else's characters are staple
+people in English literature, hereditary people whom every one knows
+all about in every generation. The contemporary dramatists, Beaumont
+and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, &c., had many merits, some of them
+were great men. But a critic must say of them the worst thing he has
+to say; 'they were men who failed in their characteristic aim;' they
+attempted to describe numerous sets of complicated characters, and
+they failed. No one of such characters, or hardly one, lives in common
+memory; the Faustus of Marlowe, a really great idea, is not
+remembered. They undertook to write what they could not write, five
+acts full of real characters, and in consequence, the fine individual
+things they conceived are forgotten by the mixed multitude, and known
+only to a few of the few. Of the Spanish theatre we cannot speak; but
+there are no such characters in any French tragedy: the whole aim of
+that tragedy forbade it. Goethe has added to literature a few great
+characters; he may be said almost to have added to literature the idea
+of 'intellectual creation',--the idea of describing great characters
+through the intellect; but he has not added to the common stock what
+Shakespeare added, a new _multitude_ of men and women; and these not
+in simple attitudes, but amid the most complex parts of life, with all
+their various natures roused, mixed, and strained. The severest art
+must have allowed many details, much overflowing circumstance to a
+poet who undertook to describe what almost defies description. Pure
+art would have _commanded_ him to use details lavishly, for only by a
+multiplicity of such could the required effect have been at all
+produced. Shakespeare could accomplish it, for his mind was a
+_spring_, an inexhaustible fountain of human nature, and it is no
+wonder that being compelled by the task of his time to let the
+fullness of his nature overflow, he sometimes let it overflow too
+much, and covered with erroneous conceits and superfluous images
+characters and conceptions which would have been far more justly, far
+more effectually, delineated with conciseness and simplicity. But
+there is an infinity of pure art _in_ Shakespeare, although there is a
+great deal else also.
+
+It will be said, if ornate art be as you say, an inferior species or
+art, why should it ever be used? If pure art be the best sort of art,
+why should it not always be used?
+
+The reason is this: literary art, as we just now explained, is
+concerned with literatesque characters in literatesque situations; and
+the _best_ art is concerned with the _most_ literatesque characters in
+the _most_ literatesque situations. Such are the subjects of pure art;
+it embodies with the fewest touches, and under the most select and
+choice circumstances, the highest conceptions; but it does not follow
+that only the best subjects are to be treated by art, and then only in
+the very best way. Human nature could not endure such a critical
+commandment as that, and it would be an erroneous criticism which gave
+it. _Any_ literatesque character may be described in literature under
+_any_ circumstances which exhibit its literatesqueness.
+
+The essence of pure art consists in its describing what is as it is,
+and this is very well for what can bear it, but there are many
+inferior things which will not bear it, and which nevertheless ought
+to be described in books. A certain kind of literature deals with
+illusions, and this kind of literature has given a colouring to the
+name romantic. A man of rare genius, and even of poetical genius, has
+gone so far as to make these illusions the true subject of
+poetry--almost the sole subject. 'Without,' says Father Newman, of one
+of his characters, 'being himself a poet, he was in the season of
+poetry, in the sweet spring-time, when the year is most beautiful
+because it is new. Novelty was beauty to a heart so open and cheerful
+as his; not only because it was novelty, and had its proper charm as
+such, but because when we first see things, we see them in a gay
+confusion, which is a principal element of the poetical. As time goes
+on, and we number and sort and measure things,--as we gain views,--we
+advance towards philosophy and truth, but we recede from poetry.
+
+'When we ourselves were young, we once on a time walked on a hot
+summer-day from Oxford to Newington--a dull road, as any one who has
+gone it knows; yet it was new to us; and we protest to you, reader,
+believe it or not, laugh or not, as you will, to us it seemed on that
+occasion quite touchingly beautiful; and a soft melancholy came over
+us, of which the shadows fall even now, when we look back upon that
+dusty, weary journey. And why? because every object which met us was
+unknown and full of mystery. A tree or two in the distance seemed the
+beginning of a great wood, or park, stretching endlessly; a hill
+implied a vale beyond, with that vale's history; the bye-lanes, with
+their green hedges, wound on and vanished, yet were not lost to the
+imagination. Such was our first journey; but when we had gone it
+several times, the mind refused to act, the scene ceased to enchant,
+stern reality alone remained; and we thought it one of the most
+tiresome, odious roads we ever had occasion to traverse.'
+
+That is to say, that the function of the poet is to introduce a 'gay
+confusion', a rich medley which does not exist in the actual
+world--which perhaps could not exist in any world--but which would
+seem pretty if it did exist. Everyone who reads _Enoch Arden_ will
+perceive that this notion of all poetry is exactly applicable to this
+one poem. Whatever be made of Enoch's 'Ocean spoil in ocean-smelling
+osier,' of the 'portal-warding lion-whelp, and peacock yew-tree',
+every one knows that in himself Enoch could not have been charming.
+People who sell fish about the country (and that is what he did,
+though Mr. Tennyson won't speak out, and wraps it up) never are
+beautiful. As Enoch was and must be coarse, in itself the poem must
+depend for its charm on a 'gay confusion'--on a splendid accumulation
+of impossible accessories.
+
+Mr. Tennyson knows this better than many of us--he knows the country
+world; he has proved it that no one living knows it better; he has
+painted with pure art--with art which describes what is a race perhaps
+more refined, more delicate, more conscientious, than the sailor--the
+'Northern Farmer', and we all know what a splendid, what a living
+thing, he has made of it. He could, if he only would, have given us
+the ideal sailor in like manner--the ideal of the natural sailor we
+mean--the characteristic present man as he lives and is. But this he
+has not chosen. He has endeavoured to describe an exceptional sailor,
+at an exceptionally refined port, performing a graceful act, an act of
+relinquishment. And with this task before him, his profound taste
+taught him that ornate art was a necessary medium--was the sole
+effectual instrument--for his purpose. It was necessary for him if
+possible to abstract the mind from reality, to induce us _not_ to
+conceive or think of sailors as they are while we are reading of his
+sailors, but to think of what a person who did not know might fancy
+sailors to be. A casual traveller on the sea-shore, with the sensitive
+mood and the romantic imagination Mr. Newman has described, might
+fancy, would fancy, a seafaring village to be like that. Accordingly,
+Mr. Tennyson has made it his aim to call off the stress of fancy from
+real life, to occupy it otherwise, to bury it with pretty accessories;
+to engage it on the 'peacock yew-tree', and the 'portal-warding
+lion-whelp'. Nothing, too, can be more splendid than the description
+of the tropics as Mr. Tennyson delineates them, but a sailor would not
+have felt the tropics in that manner. The beauties of nature would not
+have so much occupied him. He would have known little of the scarlet
+shafts of sunrise and nothing of the long convolvuluses. As in
+_Robinson Crusoe_, his own petty contrivances and his small ailments
+would have been the principal subject to him. 'For three years', he
+might have said, 'my back was bad, and then I put two pegs into a
+piece of drift wood and so made a chair, and after that it pleased God
+to send me a chill.' In real life his piety would scarcely have gone
+beyond that.
+
+It will indeed be said, that though the sailor had no words for, and
+even no explicit consciousness of the splendid details of the torrid
+zone, yet that he had, notwithstanding, a dim latent inexpressible
+conception of them: though he could not speak of them or describe
+them, yet they were much to him. And doubtless such is the case. Rude
+people are impressed by what is beautiful--deeply impressed--though
+they could not describe what they see, or what they feel. But what is
+absurd in Mr. Tennyson's description--absurd when we abstract it from
+the gorgeous additions and ornaments with which Mr. Tennyson distracts
+us--is, that his hero feels nothing else but these great splendours.
+We hear nothing of the physical ailments, the rough devices, the low
+superstitions, which really would have been the _first_ things, the
+favourite and principal occupations of his mind. Just so when he gets
+home he _may_ have had such fine sentiments, though it is odd, and he
+_may_ have spoken of them to his landlady, though that is odder
+still--but it is incredible that his whole mind should be made up of
+fine sentiments. Beside those sweet feelings, if he had them, there
+must have been many more obvious, more prosaic, and some perhaps more
+healthy. Mr. Tennyson has shown a profound judgement in distracting us
+as he does. He has given us a classic delineation of the 'Northern
+Farmer' with no ornament at all--as bare a thing as can be--because he
+then wanted to describe a true type of real men: he has given us a
+sailor crowded all over with ornament and illustration, because he
+then wanted to describe an unreal type of fancied men, not sailors as
+they are, but sailors as they might be wished.
+
+Another prominent element in _Enoch Arden_ is yet more suitable to,
+yet more requires the aid of, ornate art. Mr. Tennyson undertook to
+deal with _half belief_. The presentiments which Annie feels are
+exactly of that sort which everybody has felt, and which every one has
+half believed--which hardly any one has more than half believed.
+Almost every one, it has been said, would be angry if any one else
+reported that he believed in ghosts; yet hardly any one, when thinking
+by himself, wholly disbelieves them. Just so such presentiments as Mr.
+Tennyson depicts, impress the inner mind so much that the outer
+mind--the rational understanding--hardly likes to consider them nicely
+or to discuss them sceptically. For these dubious themes an ornate or
+complex style is needful. Classical art speaks out what it has to say
+plainly and simply. Pure style cannot hesitate; it describes in
+concisest outline what is, as it is. If a poet really believes in
+presentiments he can speak out in pure style. One who could have been
+a poet--one of the few in any age of whom one can say certainly that
+they could have been, and have not been--has spoken thus:
+
+    When Heaven sends sorrow,
+      Warnings go first,
+      Lest it should burst
+      With stunning might
+      On souls too bright
+        To fear the morrow.
+
+    Can science bear us
+      To the hid springs
+      Of human things?
+      Why may not dream,
+      Or thought's day-gleam,
+        Startle, yet cheer us?
+
+    Are such thoughts fetters,
+      While faith disowns
+      Dread of earth's tones,
+      Recks but Heaven's call,
+      And on the wall,
+        Reads but Heaven's letters?
+
+But if a poet is not sure whether presentiments are true or not true;
+if he wishes to leave his readers in doubt; if he wishes an atmosphere
+of indistinct illusion and of moving shadow, he must use the romantic
+style, the style of miscellaneous adjunct, the style 'which shirks,
+not meets' your intellect, the style which as you are scrutinizing
+disappears.
+
+Nor is this all, or even the principal lesson, which _Enoch Arden_ may
+suggest to us, of the use of ornate art. That art is the appropriate
+art for an _unpleasing type_. Many of the characters of real life, if
+brought distinctly, prominently, and plainly before the mind, as they
+really are, if shown in their inner nature, their actual essence, are
+doubtless very unpleasant. They would be horrid to meet and horrid to
+think of. We fear it must be owned that Enoch Arden is this kind of
+person. A dirty sailor who did _not_ go home to his wife is not an
+agreeable being: a varnish must be put on him to make him shine. It is
+true that he acts rightly; that he is very good. But such is human
+nature that it finds a little tameness in mere morality. Mere virtue
+belongs to a charity school-girl, and has a taint of the catechism.
+All of us feel this, though most of us are too timid, too scrupulous,
+too anxious about the virtue of others, to speak out. We are ashamed
+of our nature in this respect, but it is not the less our nature. And
+if we look deeper into the matter there are many reasons why we should
+not be ashamed of it. The soul of man, and as we necessarily believe
+of beings greater than man, has many parts beside its moral part. It
+has an intellectual part, an artistic part, even a religious part, in
+which mere morals have no share. In Shakespeare or Goethe, even in
+Newton or Archimedes, there is much which will not be cut down to the
+shape of the commandments. They have thoughts, feelings,
+hopes--immortal thoughts and hopes--which have influenced the life of
+men, and the souls of men, ever since their age, but which the 'whole
+duty of man', the ethical compendium, does not recognize. Nothing is
+more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind. A highly
+developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature,
+an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature,
+is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature--a good
+bit, of course, but a bit only--in disproportionate, unnatural, and
+revolting prominence; and, therefore, unless an artist use delicate
+care, we are offended. The dismal act of a squalid man needed many
+condiments to make it pleasant, and therefore Mr. Tennyson was right
+to mix them subtly and to use them freely.
+
+A mere act of self-denial can indeed scarcely be pleasant upon paper.
+An heroic struggle with an external adversary, even though it end in a
+defeat, may easily be made attractive. Human nature likes to see
+itself look grand, and it looks grand when it is making a brave
+struggle with foreign foes. But it does not look grand when it is
+divided against itself. An excellent person striving with temptation
+is a very admirable being in reality, but he is not a pleasant being
+in description. We hope he will win and overcome his temptation, but
+we feel that he would be a more interesting being, a higher being, if
+he had not felt that temptation so much. The poet must make the
+struggle great in order to make the self-denial virtuous, and if the
+struggle be too great, we are apt to feel some mixture of contempt.
+The internal metaphysics of a divided nature are but an inferior
+subject for art, and if they are to be made attractive, much else must
+be combined with them. If the excellence of _Hamlet_ had depended on
+the ethical qualities of Hamlet, it would not have been the
+masterpiece of our literature. He acts virtuously of course, and kills
+the people he ought to kill, but Shakespeare knew that such goodness
+would not much interest the pit. He made him a handsome prince, and a
+puzzling meditative character; these secular qualities relieve his
+moral excellence, and so he becomes 'nice'. In proportion as an artist
+has to deal with types essentially imperfect, he must disguise their
+imperfections; he must accumulate around them as many first-rate
+accessories as may make his readers forget that they are themselves
+second-rate. The sudden _millionaires_ of the present day hope to
+disguise their social defects by buying old places, and hiding among
+aristocratic furniture; just so a great artist who has to deal with
+characters artistically imperfect will use an ornate style, will fit
+them into a scene where there is much else to look at.
+
+For these reasons ornate art is within the limits as legitimate as
+pure art. It does what pure art could not do. The very excellence of
+pure art confines its employment. Precisely because it gives the best
+things by themselves and exactly as they are, it fails when it is
+necessary to describe inferior things among other things, with a list
+of enhancements and a crowd of accompaniments that in reality do not
+belong to it. Illusion, half belief, unpleasant types, imperfect
+types, are as much the proper sphere of ornate art, as an inferior
+landscape is the proper sphere for the true efficacy of moonlight. A
+really great landscape needs sunlight and bears sunlight; but
+moonlight is an equalizer of beauties; it gives a romantic unreality
+to what will not stand the bare truth. And just so does romantic art.
+
+There is, however, a third kind of art which differs from these on the
+point in which they most resemble one another. Ornate art and pure art
+have this in common, that they paint the types of literature in as
+good perfection as they can. Ornate art, indeed, uses undue disguises
+and unreal enhancements; it does not confine itself to the best types;
+on the contrary it is its office to make the best of imperfect types
+and lame approximations; but ornate art, as much as pure art, catches
+its subject in the best light it can, takes the most developed aspect
+of it which it can find, and throws upon it the most congruous colours
+it can use. But grotesque art does just the contrary. It takes the
+type, so to say, _in difficulties_. It gives a representation of it in
+its minimum development, amid the circumstances least favourable to
+it, just while it is struggling with obstacles, just where it is
+encumbered with incongruities. It deals, to use the language of
+science, not with normal types but with abnormal specimens; to use the
+language of old philosophy, not with what nature is striving to be,
+but with what by some lapse she has happened to become.
+
+This art works by contrast. It enables you to see, it makes you see,
+the perfect type by painting the opposite deviation. It shows you what
+ought to be by what ought not to be, when complete it reminds you of
+the perfect image, by showing you the distorted and imperfect image.
+Of this art we possess in the present generation one prolific master.
+Mr. Browning is an artist working by incongruity. Possibly hardly one
+of his most considerable efforts can be found which is not great
+because of its odd mixture. He puts together things which no one else
+would have put together, and produces on our minds a result which no
+one else would have produced, or tried to produce. His admirers may
+not like all we may have to say of him. But in our way we too are
+among his admirers. No one ever read him without seeing not only his
+great ability but his great _mind_. He not only possesses superficial
+useable talents, but the strong something, the inner secret something
+which uses them and controls them; he is great, not in mere
+accomplishments, but in himself. He has applied a hard strong
+intellect to real life; he has applied the same intellect to the
+problems of his age. He has striven to know what _is_: he has
+endeavoured not to be cheated by counterfeits, not to be infatuated
+with illusions. His heart is in what he says. He has battered his
+brain against his creed till he believes it. He has accomplishments
+too, the more effective because they are mixed. He is at once a
+student of mysticism, and a citizen of the world. He brings to the
+club sofa distinct visions of old creeds, intense images of strange
+thoughts: he takes to the bookish student tidings of wild Bohemia, and
+little traces of the _demi-monde_. He puts down what is good for the
+naughty and what is naughty for the good. Over women his easier
+writings exercise that imperious power which belongs to the writings
+of a great man of the world upon such matters. He knows women, and
+therefore they wish to know him. If we blame many of Browning's
+efforts, it is in the interest of art, and not from a wish to hurt or
+degrade him.
+
+If we wanted to illustrate the nature of grotesque art by an
+exaggerated instance we should have selected a poem which the chance
+of late publication brings us in this new volume. Mr. Browning has
+undertaken to describe what may be called _mind in difficulties_--mind
+set to make out the universe under the worst and hardest
+circumstances. He takes 'Caliban', not perhaps exactly Shakespeare's
+Caliban, but an analogous and worse creature; a strong thinking power,
+but a nasty creature--a gross animal, uncontrolled and unelevated by
+any feeling of religion or duty. The delineation of him will show that
+Mr. Browning does not wish to take undue advantage of his readers by a
+choice of nice subjects.
+
+    'Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
+    Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire,
+    With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin;
+    And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
+    And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
+    Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh;
+    And while above his head a pompion-plant,
+    Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
+    Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
+    And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
+    And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch:
+
+This pleasant creature proceeds to give his idea of the origin of the
+Universe, and it is as follows. Caliban speaks in the third person,
+and is of opinion that the maker of the Universe took to making it on
+account of his personal discomfort:
+
+    Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
+    'Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon.
+
+    'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
+    But not the stars: the stars came otherwise;
+    Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
+    Also this isle, what lives, and grows thereon,
+    And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.
+
+    'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:
+    He hated that He cannot change His cold,
+    Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish
+    That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived,
+    And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
+    O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
+    A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave;
+    Only she ever sickened, found repulse
+    At the other kind of water, not her life,
+    (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun)
+    Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,
+    And in her old bounds buried her despair,
+    Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.
+
+    'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,
+    Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
+    Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
+    Yon auk, one fire-eye, in a ball of foam,
+    That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
+    He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
+    By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
+    That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
+    And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
+    But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
+    That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
+    About their hole--He made all these and more,
+    Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?
+
+It may seem perhaps to most readers that these lines are very
+difficult, and that they are unpleasant. And so they are. We quote
+them to illustrate, not the _success_ of grotesque art, but the
+_nature_ of grotesque art. It shows the end at which this species of
+art aims, and if it fails, it is from over-boldness in the choice of a
+subject by the artist, or from the defects of its execution. A
+thinking faculty more in difficulties--a great type,--an inquisitive,
+searching intellect under more disagreeable conditions, with worse
+helps, more likely to find falsehood, less likely to find truth, can
+scarcely be imagined. Nor is the mere description of the thought at
+all bad: on the contrary, if we closely examine it, it is very clever.
+Hardly any one could have amassed so many ideas at once nasty and
+suitable. But scarcely any readers--any casual readers--who are not of
+the sect of Mr. Browning's admirers will be able to examine it enough
+to appreciate it. From a defect, partly of subject, and partly of
+style, many of Mr. Browning's works make a demand upon the reader's
+zeal and sense of duty to which the nature of most readers is unequal.
+They have on the turf the convenient expression 'staying power': some
+horses can hold on and others cannot. But hardly any reader not of
+especial and peculiar nature can hold on through such composition.
+There is not enough of 'staying power' in human nature. One of his
+greatest admirers once owned to us that he seldom or never began a new
+poem without looking on in advance, and foreseeing with caution what
+length of intellectual adventure he was about to commence. Whoever
+will work hard at such poems will find much mind in them: they are a
+sort of quarry of ideas, but whoever goes there will find these ideas
+in such a jagged, ugly, useless shape that he can hardly bear them.
+
+We are not judging Mr. Browning simply from a hasty recent production.
+All poets are liable to misconceptions, and if such a piece as
+_Caliban upon Setebos_ were an isolated error, a venial and particular
+exception, we should have given it no prominence. We have put it
+forward because it just elucidates both our subject and the
+characteristics of Mr. Browning. But many other of his best known
+pieces do so almost equally; what several of his devotees think his
+best piece is quite enough illustrative for anything we want. It
+appears that on Holy Cross day at Rome the Jews were obliged to listen
+to a Christian sermon in the hope of their conversion, though this is,
+according to Mr. Browning, what they really said when they came away:
+
+    Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
+    Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week,
+    Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough,
+    Stinking and savoury, smug and gruff,
+    Take the church-road, for the bell's due chime
+    Gives us the summons--'t is sermon-time.
+
+    Boh, here's Barnabas! Job, that's you?
+    Up stumps Solomon--bustling too?
+    Shame, man! greedy beyond your years
+    To handsel the bishop's shaving-shears?
+    Fair play's a jewel! leave friends in the lurch?
+    Stand on a line ere you start for the church.
+
+    Higgledy, piggledy, packed we lie,
+    Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,
+    Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,
+    Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.
+    Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs
+    And buzz for the bishop--here he comes.
+
+And after similar nice remarks for a church, the edified congregation
+concludes:
+
+    But now, while the scapegoats leave our flock,
+    And the rest sit silent and count the clock,
+    Since forced to muse the appointed time
+    On these precious facts and truths sublime,--
+    Let us fitly employ it, under our breath,
+    In saying Ben Ezra's Song of Death.
+
+    For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died,
+    Called sons and sons' sons to his side,
+    And spoke, 'This world has been harsh and strange;
+    Something is wrong: there needeth a change.
+    But what, or where? at the last, or first?
+    In one point only we sinned, at worst.
+
+    'The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,
+    And again in his border see Israel set.
+    When Judah beholds Jerusalem,
+    The stranger-seed shall be joined to them:
+    To Jacob's House shall the Gentiles cleave,
+    So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.
+
+    'Ay, the children of the chosen race
+    Shall carry and bring them to their place:
+    In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,
+    Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blame
+    When the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o'er
+    The oppressor triumph for evermore?
+
+    'God spoke, and gave us the word to keep,
+    Bade never fold the hands nor sleep
+    'Mid a faithless world,--at watch and ward,
+    Till Christ at the end relieve our guard.
+    By His servant Moses the watch was set:
+    Though near upon cock-crow, we keep it yet.
+
+    'Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid-watch came,
+    By the starlight, naming a dubious Name!
+    And if, too heavy with sleep--too rash
+    With fear--O Thou, if that martyr-gash
+    Fell on Thee coming to take Thine own,
+    And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne--
+
+    'Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.
+    But, the judgement over, join sides with us!
+    Thine too is the cause! and not more Thine
+    Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,
+    Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,
+    Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!
+
+    'We withstood Christ then? be mindful how
+    At least we withstand Barabbas now!
+    Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,
+    To have called these--Christians, had we dared!
+    Let defiance to them pay mistrust of Thee,
+    And Rome make amends for Calvary!
+
+    'By the torture, prolonged from age to age,
+    By the infamy, Israel's heritage,
+    By the Ghetto's plague, by the garb's disgrace,
+    By the badge of shame, by the felon's place,
+    By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,
+    And the summons to Christian fellowship,--
+
+    'We boast our proof that at least the Jew
+    Would wrest Christ's name from the Devil's crew.
+    Thy face took never so deep a shade
+    But we fought them in it, God our aid!
+    A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band,
+    South, East, and on to the Pleasant Land!'
+
+It is very natural that a poet whose wishes incline, or whose genius
+conducts him to a grotesque art, should be attracted towards mediaeval
+subjects. There is no age whose legends are so full of grotesque
+subjects, and no age where real life was so fit to suggest them. Then,
+more than at any other time, good principles have been under great
+hardships. The vestiges of ancient civilization, the germs of modern
+civilization, the little remains of what had been, the small
+beginnings of what is, were buried under a cumbrous mass of barbarism
+and cruelty. Good elements hidden in horrid accompaniments are the
+special theme of grotesque art, and these mediaeval life and legends
+afford more copiously than could have been furnished before
+Christianity gave its new elements of good, or since modern
+civilization has removed some few at least of the old elements of
+destruction. A _buried_ life like the spiritual mediaeval was Mr.
+Browning's natural element, and he was right to be attracted by it.
+His mistake has been, that he has not made it pleasant; that he has
+forced his art to topics on which no one could charm, or on which he,
+at any rate, could not; that on these occasions and in these poems he
+has failed in fascinating men and women of sane taste.
+
+We say 'sane' because there is a most formidable and estimable
+_insane_ taste. The will has great though indirect power over the
+taste, just as it has over the belief. There are some horrid beliefs
+from which human nature revolts, from which at first it shrinks, to
+which, at first, no effort can force it. But if we fix the mind upon
+them they have a power over us just because of their natural
+offensiveness. They are like the sight of human blood: experienced
+soldiers tell us that at first men are sickened by the smell and
+newness of blood almost to death and fainting, but that as soon as
+they harden their hearts and stiffen their minds, as soon as they
+_will_ bear it, then comes an appetite for slaughter, a tendency to
+gloat on carnage, to love blood, at least for the moment, with a deep
+eager love. It is a principle that if we put down a healthy
+instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy
+insane attraction. For this reason the most earnest truth-seeking men
+fall into the worst delusions; they will not let their mind alone;
+they force it towards some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a
+conceit of intellect recommends, and nature punishes their disregard
+of her warning by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so
+the most industrious critics get the most admiration. They think it
+unjust to rest in their instinctive natural horror: they overcome it,
+and angry nature gives them over to ugly poems and marries them to
+detestable stanzas.
+
+Mr. Browning possibly, and some of the worst of Mr. Browning's
+admirers certainly, will say that these grotesque objects exist in
+real life, and therefore they ought to be, at least may be, described
+in art. But though pleasure is not the end of poetry, pleasing is a
+condition of poetry. An exceptional monstrosity of horrid ugliness
+cannot be made pleasing, except it be made to suggest--to recall--the
+perfection, the beauty, from which it is a deviation. Perhaps in
+extreme cases no art is equal to this; but then such self-imposed
+problems should not be worked by the artist; these out-of-the-way and
+detestable subjects should be let alone by him. It is rather
+characteristic of Mr. Browning to neglect this rule. He is the most of
+a realist, and the least of an idealist of any poet we know. He
+evidently sympathizes with some part at least of Bishop Blougram's
+apology. Anyhow this world exists. 'There _is_ good wine--there _are_
+pretty women--there _are_ comfortable benefices--there _is_ money, and
+it is pleasant to spend it. Accept the creed of your age and you get
+these, reject that creed and you lose them. And for what do you lose
+them? For a fancy creed of your own, which no one else will accept,
+which hardly any one will call a "creed", which most people will
+consider a sort of unbelief.' Again, Mr. Browning evidently loves what
+we may call the realism, the grotesque realism, of orthodox
+christianity. Many parts of it in which great divines have felt keen
+difficulties are quite pleasant to him. He must _see_ his religion, he
+must nave an 'object-lesson' in believing. He must have a creed that
+will _take_, which wins and holds the miscellaneous world, which stout
+men will heed, which nice women will adore. The spare moments of
+solitary religion--the 'obdurate questionings', the high 'instincts',
+the 'first affections', the 'shadowy recollections',
+
+          Which, do they what they may,
+    Are yet the fountain-light of all our day--
+    Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
+
+the great but vague faith--the unutterable tenets seem to him
+worthless, visionary; they are not enough immersed in matter; they
+move about 'in worlds not realized'. We wish he could be tried like
+the prophet once; he would have found God in the earthquake and the
+storm; he could have deciphered from them a bracing and a rough
+religion: he would have known that crude men and ignorant women felt
+them too, and he would accordingly have trusted them; but he would
+have distrusted and disregarded the 'still small voice'; he would have
+said it was 'fancy'--a thing you thought you heard to-day, but were
+not sure you had heard to-morrow: he would call it a nice illusion, an
+immaterial prettiness; he would ask triumphantly 'How are you to get
+the mass of men to heed this little thing?' he would have persevered
+and insisted '_My wife_ does not hear it'.
+
+But although a suspicion of beauty, and a taste for ugly reality, have
+led Mr. Browning to exaggerate the functions, and to caricature the
+nature of grotesque art, we own or rather we maintain that he has
+given many excellent specimens of that art within its proper
+boundaries and limits. Take an example, his picture of what we may
+call the _bourgeois_ nature in _difficulties_; in the utmost
+difficulty, in contact with magic and the supernatural. He has made of
+it something homely, comic, true; reminding us of what _bourgeois_
+nature really is. By showing us the type under abnormal conditions,
+he reminds us of the type under its best and most satisfactory
+conditions--
+
+    Hamelin Town's in Brunswick,
+      By famous Hanover city;
+    The river Weser, deep and wide,
+    Washes its walls on the southern side;
+    A pleasanter spot you never spied;
+      But, when begins my ditty,
+    Almost five hundred years ago,
+    To see the townsfolk suffer so
+      From vermin was a pity.
+
+      Rats!
+    They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
+    And bit the babies in the cradles,
+    And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
+      And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles,
+    Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
+    Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
+    And even spoiled the women's chats
+      By drowning their speaking
+      With shrieking and squeaking
+    In fifty different sharps and flats.
+
+    At last the people in a body
+      To the Town Hall came flocking:
+    ''Tis clear', cried they, 'our Mayor's a noddy;
+      And as for our Corporation--shocking
+    To think we buy gowns lined with ermine
+    For dolts that can't or won't determine
+    What's best to rid us of our vermin!
+    You hope, because you're old and obese,
+    To find in the furry civic robe ease?
+    Rouse up, Sirs! Give your brains a racking
+    To find the remedy we're lacking,
+    Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing!'
+    At this the Mayor and Corporation
+    Quaked with a mighty consternation.
+
+A person of musical abilities proposes to extricate the civic
+dignitaries from the difficulty, and they promise him a thousand
+guilders if he does.
+
+    Into the street the Piper stept,
+      Smiling first a little smile,
+    As if he knew what magic slept
+      In his quiet pipe the while;
+    Then, like a musical adept,
+    To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
+    And green and blue his sharp eye twinkled
+    Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled;
+    And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered
+    You heard as if an army muttered;
+    And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
+    And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
+    And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
+    Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
+    Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
+    Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
+      Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
+    Cooking tails and pricking whiskers,
+      Families by tens and dozens,
+    Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives--
+    Followed the Piper for their lives.
+    From street to street he piped advancing,
+    And step for step they followed dancing,
+    Until they came to the river Weser,
+    Wherein all plunged and perished!
+    --Save one who, stout as Julius C�sar,
+    Swam across and lived to carry
+    (As he, the manuscript he cherished)
+    To Rat-land home his commentary:
+    Which was, 'At the first shrill notes of the pipe,
+    I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
+    And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
+    Into a cider-press's gripe:
+    And a moving away of pickle-tub boards,
+    And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,
+    And a drawing the corks of train-oil flasks,
+    And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks:
+    And it seemed as if a voice
+    (Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
+    Is breathed) called out, "Oh rats, rejoice!
+    The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!
+    So, munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
+    Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!"
+    And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,
+    All ready staved, like a great sun shone
+    Glorious scarce an inch before me,
+    Just as methought it said, "Come, bore me!"
+    --I found the Weser rolling o'er me.'
+    You should have heard the Hamelin people
+    Ringing the bells till they rocked the steeple.
+    'Go', cried the Mayor, 'and get long poles,
+    Poke out the nests and block up the holes!
+    Consult with carpenters and builders,
+    And leave in our town not even a trace
+    Of the rats!'--when suddenly, up the face
+    Of the Piper perked in the market-place,
+    With a 'First, if you please, my thousand guilders!'
+    A thousand guilders! The Mayor looked blue;
+    So did the Corporation too.
+    For council dinners made rare havoc
+    With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock;
+    And half the money would replenish
+    Their cellar's biggest butt with Rhenish.
+    To pay this sum to a wandering fellow
+    With a gipsy coat of red and yellow!
+    'Beside,' quoth the Mayor with a knowing wink,
+    'Our business was done at the river's brink;
+    We saw with our eyes the vermin sink,
+    And what's dead can't come to life, I think.
+    So, friend, we're not the folks to shrink
+    From the duty of giving you something for drink,
+    And a matter of money to put in your poke;
+    But as for the guilders, what we spoke
+    Of them, as you very well know, was in joke.
+    Besides, our losses have made us thrifty.
+    A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!'
+
+    The piper's face fell, and he cried,
+    'No trifling! I can't wait, beside!
+    I've promised to visit by dinner time
+    Bagdat, and accept the prime
+    Of the Head-Cook's pottage, all he's rich in,
+    For having left, in the Caliph's kitchen,
+    Of a nest of scorpions no survivor--
+    With him I proved no bargain-driver,
+    With you, don't think I'll bate a stiver!
+    And folks who put me in a passion
+    May find me pipe to another fashion.'
+
+    'How?' cried the Mayor, 'd'ye think I'll brook
+    Being worse treated than a Cook?
+    Insulted by a lazy ribald
+    With idle pipe and vesture piebald?
+    You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,
+    Blow your pipe there till you burst!'
+
+    Once more he stept into the street
+      And to his lips again
+    Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;
+      And ere he blew three notes (such sweet
+    Soft notes as yet musician's cunning
+      Never gave the enraptured air)
+    There was a rustling, that seemed like a bustling
+    Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling.
+    Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,
+    Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering,
+    And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,
+    Out came the children running.
+
+    All the little boys and girls,
+    With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
+    And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls.
+    Tripping and skipping ran merrily after
+    The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    And I must not omit to say
+    That in Transylvania there's a tribe
+    Of alien people that ascribe
+    The outlandish ways and dress
+    On which their neighbours lay such stress,
+    To their fathers and mothers having risen
+    Out of some subterraneous prison
+    Into which they were trepanned
+    Long time ago in a mighty band
+    Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
+    But how or why, they don't understand.
+
+Something more we had to say of Mr. Browning, but we must stop. It is
+singularly characteristic of this age that the poems which rise to the
+surface should be examples of ornate art, and grotesque art, not of
+pure art. We live in the realm of the _half_ educated. The number of
+readers grows daily, but the quality of readers does not improve
+rapidly. The middle class is scattered, headless; it is well-meaning
+but aimless; wishing to be wise, but ignorant how to be wise. The
+aristocracy of England never was a literary aristocracy, never even in
+the days of its full power, of its unquestioned predominance, did it
+guide--did it even seriously try to guide--the taste of England.
+Without guidance young men and tired men are thrown amongst a mass of
+books; they have to choose which they like; many of them would much
+like to improve their culture, to chasten their taste, if they knew
+how. But left to themselves they take, not pure art, but showy art;
+not that which permanently relieves the eye and makes it happy
+whenever it looks, and as long as it looks, but _glaring_ art which
+catches and arrests the eye for a moment, but which in the end
+fatigues it. But before the wholesome remedy of nature--the
+fatigue--arrives, the hasty reader has passed on to some new
+excitement, which in its turn stimulates for an instant, and then is
+passed by for ever. These conditions are not favourable to the due
+appreciation of pure art--of that art which must be known before it is
+admired--which must have fastened irrevocably on the brain before you
+appreciate it--which you must love ere it will seem worthy of your
+love. Women too, whose voice in literature counts as well as that of
+men--and in a light literature counts for more than that of
+men--women, such as we know them, such as they are likely to be, ever
+prefer a delicate unreality to a true or firm art. A dressy
+literature, an exaggerated literature seem to be fated to us. These
+are our curses, as other times had theirs.
+
+                                   And yet
+    Think not the living times forget,
+    Ages of heroes fought and fell,
+    That Homer in the end might tell;
+    O'er grovelling generations past
+    Upstood the Gothic fane at last;
+    And countless hearts in countless years
+    Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,
+    Rude laughter and unmeaning tears;
+    Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome
+    The pure perfection of her dome.
+    Others I doubt not, if not we,
+    The issue of our toils shall see;
+    And (they forgotten and unknown)
+    Young children gather as their own
+    The harvest that the dead had sown.
+
+
+
+
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+1839-1894
+
+COLERIDGE'S WRITINGS (1866)
+
+_Conversations, Letters, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge._ Edited
+by THOMAS ALLSOP. London. 1864.
+
+
+Forms of intellectual and spiritual culture often exercise their
+subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing from them.
+Searching and irresistible as are the changes of the human spirit on
+its way to perfection, there is yet so much elasticity of temper that
+what must pass away sooner or later is not disengaged all at once even
+from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by one law of
+development evolves ideas, moralities, modes of inward life, and
+represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier
+growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the
+whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the
+spectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined
+by the antagonism of the new. That current of new life chastens them
+as they contend against it. Weaker minds do not perceive the change;
+clearer minds abandon themselves to it. To feel the change everywhere,
+yet not to abandon oneself to it, is a situation of difficulty and
+contention. Communicating in this way to the passing stage of culture
+the charm of what is chastened, high-strung, athletic, they yet
+detach the highest minds from the past by pressing home its
+difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such is the charm of
+Julian, of St. Louis, perhaps of Luther; in the narrower compass of
+modern times, of Dr. Newman and Lacordaire; it is also the peculiar
+charm of Coleridge.
+
+Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the
+'relative' spirit in place of the 'absolute'. Ancient philosophy
+sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in
+a necessary formula, and types of life in a classification by 'kinds'
+or _genera_. To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known
+except relatively under conditions. An ancient philosopher indeed
+started a philosophy of the relative, but only as an enigma. So the
+germs of almost all philosophical ideas were enfolded in the mind of
+antiquity, and fecundated one by one in after ages by the external
+influences of art, religion, culture in the natural sciences,
+belonging to a particular generation, which suddenly becomes
+preoccupied by a formula or theory, not so much new as penetrated by a
+new meaning and expressiveness. So the idea of 'the relative' has been
+fecundated in modern times by the influence of the sciences of
+observation. These sciences reveal types of life evanescing into each
+other by inexpressible refinements of change. Things pass into their
+opposites by accumulation of undefinable quantities. The growth of
+those sciences consists in a continual analysis of facts of rough and
+general observation into groups of facts more precise and minute. A
+faculty for truth is a power of distinguishing and fixing delicate and
+fugitive details. The moral world is ever in contact with the
+physical; the relative spirit has invaded moral philosophy from the
+ground of the inductive science. There it has started a new analysis
+of the relations of body and mind, good and evil, freedom and
+necessity. Hard and abstract moralities are yielding to a more exact
+estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life. Always, as an
+organism increases in perfection the conditions of its life become
+more complex. Man is the most complex of the products of nature.
+Character merges into temperament; the nervous system refines itself
+into intellect. His physical organism is played upon not only by the
+physical conditions about it, but by remote laws of inheritance, the
+vibrations of long past acts reaching him in the midst of the new
+order of things in which he lives. When we have estimated these
+conditions he is not yet simple and isolated; for the mind of the
+race, the character of the age, sway him this way or that through the
+medium of language and ideas. It seems as if the most opposite
+statements about him were alike true; he is so receptive, all the
+influences of the world and of society ceaselessly playing upon him,
+so that every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a
+stray word, or glance, or touch. The truth of these relations
+experience gives us; not the truth of eternal outlines effected once
+for all, but a world of fine gradations and subtly linked conditions,
+shifting intricately as we ourselves change; and bids us by constant
+clearing of the organs of observation and perfecting of analysis to
+make what we can of these. To the intellect, to the critical spirit,
+these subtleties of effect are more precious than anything else. What
+is lost in precision of form is gained in intricacy of expression. To
+suppose that what is called 'ontology' is what the speculative
+instinct seeks, is the misconception of a backward school of
+logicians. Who would change the colour or curve of a roseleaf for that
+[Greek: ousia achr�matos, asch�matistos, anaph�s]. A transcendentalism
+that makes what is abstract more excellent than what is concrete has
+nothing akin to the leading philosophies of the world. The true
+illustration of the speculative temper is not the Hindoo, lost to
+sense, understanding, individuality; but such an one as Goethe, to
+whom every moment of life brought its share of experimental,
+individual knowledge, by whom no touch of the world of form, colour,
+and passion was disregarded.
+
+The literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle against
+the application of the relative spirit to moral and religious
+questions. Everywhere he is restlessly scheming to apprehend the
+absolute; to affirm it effectively; to get it acknowledged. Coleridge
+failed in that attempt, happily even for him, for it was a struggle
+against the increasing life of the mind itself. The real loss was,
+that this controversial interest betrayed him into a direction which
+was not for him the path of the highest intellectual success; a
+direction in which his artistic talent could never find the conditions
+of its perfection. Still, there is so much witchery about his poems,
+that it is as a poet that he will most probably be permanently
+remembered. How did his choice of a controversial interest, his
+determination to affirm the absolute, weaken or modify his poetical
+gift?
+
+In 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the composition of a volume of
+poems--the _Lyrical Ballads_. What Wordsworth then wrote is already
+vibrant with that blithe _�lan_ which carried him to final happiness
+and self-possession. In Coleridge we feel already that faintness and
+obscure dejection which cling like some contagious damp to all his
+writings. Wordsworth was to be distinguished by a joyful and
+penetrative conviction of the existence of certain latent affinities
+between nature and the human mind, which reciprocally gild the mind
+and nature with a kind of 'heavenly alchemy':
+
+                 ... My voice proclaims
+    How exquisitely the individual mind
+    (And the progressive powers perhaps no less
+    Of the whole species) to the external world
+    Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too,
+    The external world is fitted to the mind:
+    And the creation, by no lower name
+    Can it be called, which they with blended might
+    Accomplish.[37]
+
+    [37] Preface to the _Excursion_.
+
+In Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken dreaming over the
+aspects and transitions of nature, a reflective, but altogether
+unformulated, analysis of them.
+
+There are in Coleridge's poems expressions of this conviction as deep
+as Wordsworth's. But Coleridge could never have abandoned himself to
+the dream as Wordsworth did, because the first condition of such
+abandonment is an unvexed quietness of heart. No one can read the
+_Lines composed above Tintern_ without feeling how potent the physical
+element was among the conditions of Wordsworth's genius:--'felt in the
+blood and felt along the heart,'--'My whole life I have lived in
+quiet thought.' The stimulus which most artists require from nature he
+can renounce. He leaves the ready-made glory of the Swiss mountains to
+reflect a glory on a mouldering leaf. He loves best to watch the
+floating thistledown, because of its hint at an unseen life in the
+air. Coleridge's temperament, [Greek: aei en sphodra orexei], with its
+faintness, its grieved dejection, could never have been like that.
+
+          My genial spirits fail
+          And what can these avail
+    To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
+          It were a vain endeavour,
+          Though I should gaze for ever
+    On that green light that lingers in the west:
+    I may not hope from outward forms to win
+    The passion and the life whose fountains are within.
+
+It is that flawless temperament in Wordsworth which keeps his
+conviction of a latent intelligence in nature within the limits of
+sentiment or instinct, and confines it, to those delicate and subdued
+shades of expression which perfect art allows. In sadder dispositions,
+that is in the majority of cases, where such a conviction has existed,
+it has stiffened into a formula, it has frozen into a scientific or
+pseudo-scientific theory. For the perception of those affinities
+brings one so near the absorbing speculative problems of
+life--optimism, the proportion of man to his place in nature, his
+prospects in relation to it--that it ever tends to become theory
+through their contagion. Even in Goethe, who has brilliantly handled
+the subject in his lyrics entitled _Gott und Welt_, it becomes
+something stiffer than poetry; it is tempered by the 'pale cast' of
+his technical knowledge of the nature of colours, of anatomy, of the
+metamorphosis of plants.
+
+That, however, which had only a limited power over Coleridge as
+sentiment, entirely possessed him as a philosophical idea. We shall
+see in what follows how deep its power was, how it pursued him
+everywhere, and seemed to him to interpret every question.
+Wordsworth's poetry is an optimism; it says man's relation to the
+world is, and may be seen by man to be, a perfect relation; but it is
+an optimism that begins and ends in an abiding instinct. Coleridge
+accepts the same optimism as a philosophical idea, but an idea is
+relative to an intellectual assent; sometimes it seems a better
+expression of facts, sometimes a worse, as the understanding weighs it
+in the logical balances. And so it is not a permanent consolation. It
+is only in the rarer moments of intellectual warmth and sunlight that
+it is entirely credible. In less exhilarating moments that perfect
+relation of man and nature seems to shift and fail; that is, the
+philosophical idea ceases to be realizable; and with Coleridge its
+place is not supplied, as with Wordsworth, by the corresponding
+sentiment or instinct.
+
+What in Wordsworth is a sentiment or instinct, is in Coleridge a
+philosophical idea. In other words, Coleridge's talent is a more
+intellectual one than Wordsworth's, more dramatic, more
+self-conscious. Wordsworth's talent, deeply reflective as it is,
+because its base is an instinct, is deficient in self-knowledge.
+Possessed by the rumours and voices of the haunted country, the
+borders of which he has passed alone, he never thinks of withdrawing
+from it to look down upon it from one of the central heights of human
+life. His power absorbs him, not he it; he cannot turn it round or get
+without it; he does not estimate its general relation to life. But
+Coleridge, just because the essence of his talent is the intuition of
+an idea, commands his talent. He not only feels with Wordsworth the
+expression of mind in nature, but he can project that feeling outside
+him, reduce it to a psychological law, define its relation to other
+elements of culture, place it in a complete view of life.
+
+And in some such activity as that, varied as his wide learning, in a
+many-sided dramatic kind of poetry, assigning its place and value to
+every mode of the inward life, seems to have been for Coleridge the
+original path of artistic success. But in order to follow that path
+one must hold ideas loosely in the relative spirit, not seek to
+stereotype any one of the many modes of that life; one must
+acknowledge that the mind is ever greater than its own products,
+devote ideas to the service of art rather than of [Greek: gn�sis], not
+disquiet oneself about the absolute. Perhaps Coleridge is more
+interesting because he did not follow this path. Repressing his
+artistic interest and voluntarily discolouring his own work, he turned
+to console and strengthen the human mind, vulgarized or dejected, as
+he believed, by the acquisition of new knowledge about itself in the
+_�claircissement_ of the eighteenth century.
+
+What the reader of our own generation will least find in Coleridge's
+prose writings is the excitement of the literary sense. And yet in
+those grey volumes we have the production of one who made way ever by
+a charm, the charm of voice, of aspect, of language, above all, by
+the intellectual charm of new, moving, luminous ideas. Perhaps the
+chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of seriousness, a seriousness
+that arises not from any moral principle, but from a misconception of
+the perfect manner. There is a certain shade of levity and unconcern,
+the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which marks complete
+culture in the handling of abstract questions. The humanist, he who
+possesses that complete culture, does not 'weep' over the failure of
+'a theory of the quantification of the predicate', nor 'shriek' over
+the fall of a philosophical formula. A kind of humour is one of the
+conditions of the true mental attitude in the criticism of past stages
+of thought. Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them, any
+more than a man of good sense can afford to be too serious in looking
+back upon his own childhood. Plato, whom Coleridge claims as the first
+of his spiritual ancestors, Plato, as we remember him, a true
+humanist, with Petrarch and Goethe and M. Renan, holds his theories
+lightly, glances with a blithe and na�ve inconsequence from one view
+to another, not anticipating the burden of meaning 'views' will one
+day have for humanity. In reading him one feels how lately it was that
+Croesus thought it a paradox to say that external prosperity was not
+necessarily happiness. But on Coleridge lies the whole weight of the
+sad reflection that has since come into the world, with which for us
+the air is full, which the children in the market-place repeat to each
+other. Even his language is forced and broken, lest some saving
+formula should be lost--'distinctities', 'enucleation', 'pentad of
+operative Christianity'--he has a whole vocabulary of such phrases,
+and expects to turn the tide of human thought by fixing the sense of
+such expressions as 'reason', 'understanding', 'idea'.
+
+Again, he has not the jealousy of the true artist in excluding all
+associations that have no charm or colour or gladness in them;
+everywhere he allows the impress of an inferior theological
+literature; he is often prolix and importunate about most indifferent
+heroes--Sir Alexander Ball, Dr. Bell, even Dr. Bowyer, the coarse
+pedant of the Blue-coat School. And the source of all this is closely
+connected with the source of his literary activity. For Coleridge had
+chosen as the mark of his literary egotism a kind of intellectual
+_tour de force_--to found a religious philosophy, to do something with
+the 'idea' in spite of the essential nature of the 'idea'. And
+therefore all is fictitious from the beginning. He had determined,
+that which is humdrum, insipid, which the human spirit has done with,
+shall yet stimulate and inspire. What he produced symbolizes this
+purpose--the mass of it _ennuyant_, depressing: the _Aids to
+Reflection_, for instance, with Archbishop Leighton's vague pieties
+all twisted into the jargon of a spiritualistic philosophy. But
+sometimes 'the pulse of the God's blood' does transmute it, kindling
+here and there a spot that begins to live; as in that beautiful
+fragment at the end of the _Church and State_, or in the distilled and
+concentrated beauty of such a passage as this:
+
+     The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of
+     human life, is the horizon for the majority of its
+     inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and
+     departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they
+     vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and
+     bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher
+     ascents are too often hidden by mists and clouds from
+     uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to
+     penetrate. To the multitude below these vapours appear now
+     as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may
+     intrude with impunity; and now all a-glow, with colours not
+     their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of
+     happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few
+     who, measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the
+     feet of their furthest inaccessible falls, have learned that
+     the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few who,
+     even in the level streams, have detected elements which
+     neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains
+     contained or could supply.
+
+                                 _Biographia Literaria._
+
+'I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation.'
+So Coleridge sums up his childhood with its delicacy, its
+sensitiveness, and passion. From his tenth to his eighteenth year he
+was at a rough school in London. Speaking of this time, he says:
+
+     When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my
+     birthplace and family, Providence, it has often occurred to
+     me, gave me the first intimation that it was my lot, and
+     that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a
+     detached individual, a _terrae filius_, who was to ask love
+     or service of no one on any more specific relation than that
+     of being a man, and as such to take my chance for the free
+     charities of humanity.[38]
+
+    [38] Biographical Supplement to _Biographia Literaria_, chap.
+    ii.
+
+Even his fine external nature was for years repressed, wronged, driven
+inward--'at fourteen I was in a continual state of low fever.' He
+becomes a dreamer, an eager student, but without ambition.
+
+This depressed boy is nevertheless, on the spiritual side, the child
+of a noble house. At twenty-five he is exercising a wonderful charm,
+and has defined for himself a peculiar line of intellectual activity.
+He had left Cambridge without a degree, a Unitarian. Unable to take
+orders, he determined through Southey's influence to devote himself to
+literature. When he left Cambridge there was a prejudice against him
+which has given occasion to certain suspicions. Those who knew him
+best discredit these suspicions. What is certain is that he was
+subject to fits of violent, sometimes fantastic, despondency. He
+retired to Stowey, in Somersetshire, to study poetry and philosophy.
+In 1797 his poetical gift was in full flower; he wrote _Kubla Khan_,
+the first part of _Christabel_, and _The Ancient Mariner_. His
+literary success grew in spite of opposition. He had a strange
+attractive gift of conversation, or rather of monologue, as De Stael
+said, full of _bizarrerie_, with the rapid alternations of a dream,
+and here and there a sudden summons into a world strange to the
+hearer, abounding with images drawn from a sort of divided, imperfect
+life, as of one to whom the external world penetrated only in part,
+and, blended with all this, passages of the deepest obscurity,
+precious only for their musical cadence, the echo in Coleridge of the
+eloquence of the older English writers, of whom he was so ardent a
+lover. All through this brilliant course we may discern the power of
+the Asiatic temperament, of that voluptuousness which is perhaps
+connected with his appreciation of the intimacy, the almost mystical
+_rapport_, between man and nature. 'I am much better', he writes, 'and
+my new and tender health is all over me like a voluptuous feeling.'
+
+And whatever fame, or charm, or life-inspiring gift he has had is the
+vibration of the interest he excited then, the propulsion into years
+that clouded his early promise of that first buoyant, irresistible
+self-assertion: so great is even the indirect power of a sincere
+effort towards the ideal life, of even a temporary escape of the
+spirit from routine. Perhaps the surest sign of his election--that he
+was indeed, on the spiritual side, the child of a noble house--is that
+story of the Pantisocratic scheme, which at this distance looks so
+grotesque. In his enthusiasm for the French Revolution, the old
+communistic dream with its appeal to nature (perhaps a little
+theatrical), touched him, as it had touched Rousseau, Saint-Pierre,
+and Chateaubriand. He had married one, his affection for whom seems to
+have been only a passing feeling; with her and a few friends he was to
+found a communistic settlement on the banks of the Susquehannah--'the
+name was pretty and metrical.' It was one of Coleridge's lightest
+dreams; but also one which could only have passed through the liberal
+air of his earlier life. The later years of the French Revolution,
+which for us have discredited all such dreams, deprived him of that
+youthfulness which is the preservative element in a literary talent.
+
+In 1798, he visited Germany. A beautiful fragment of this period
+remains, describing a spring excursion to the Brocken. His excitement
+still vibrates in it. Love, all joyful states of mind, are
+self-expressive; they loosen the tongue, they fill the thoughts with
+sensuous images, they harmonize one with the world of sight. We hear
+of the 'rich graciousness and courtesy' of Coleridge's manner, of the
+white and delicate skin, the abundant black hair, the full, almost
+animal lips, that whole physiognomy of the dreamer already touched
+with fanaticism. One says of the text of one of his Unitarian sermons,
+'his voice rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes'; another,
+'he talks like an angel, and does--nothing.'
+
+Meantime, he had designed an intellectual novelty in the shape of a
+religious philosophy. Socinian theology and the philosophy of Hartley
+had become distasteful. 'Whatever is against right reason, that no
+faith can oblige us to believe.' Coleridge quotes these words from
+Jeremy Taylor. And yet ever since the dawn of the Renaissance, had
+subsisted a conflict between reason and faith. From the first, indeed,
+the Christian religion had affirmed the existence of such a conflict,
+and had even based its plea upon its own weakness in it. In face of
+the classical culture, with its deep wide-struck roots in the world as
+it permanently exists, St. Paul asserted the claims of that which
+could not appeal with success to any genuinely human principle.
+Paradox as it was, that was the strength of the new spirit; for how
+much is there at all times in humanity which cannot appeal with
+success for encouragement or tolerance to any genuinely human
+principle. In the Middle Ages it might seem that faith had reconciled
+itself to philosophy; the Catholic church was the leader of the
+world's life as well as of the spirit's. Looking closer we see that
+the conflict is still latent there; the supremacy of faith is only a
+part of the worship of sorrow and weakness which marks the age. The
+weak are no longer merely a majority, they are all Europe. It is not
+that faith has become one with reason; but a strange winter, a strange
+suspension of life, has passed over the classical culture which is
+only the human reason in its most trenchant form. Glimpse after
+glimpse, as that pagan culture awoke to life, the conflict was felt
+once more. It is at the court of Frederick II that the Renaissance
+first becomes discernible as an actual power in European society. How
+definite and unmistakable is the attitude of faith towards that! Ever
+since the Reformation all phases of theology had been imperfect
+philosophies--that is, in which there was a religious _arri�re
+pens�e_; philosophies which could never be in the ascendant in a
+sincerely scientific sphere. The two elements had never really mixed.
+Writers so different as Locke and Taylor have each his liberal
+philosophy, and each has his defence of the orthodox belief; but,
+also, each has a divided mind; we wonder how the two elements could
+have existed side by side; brought together in a single mind, but
+unable to fuse in it, they reveal their radical contrariety. The
+Catholic church and humanity are two powers that divide the intellect
+and spirit of man. On the Catholic side is faith, rigidly logical as
+Ultramontanism, with a proportion of the facts of life, that is, all
+that is despairing in life coming naturally under its formula. On the
+side of humanity is all that is desirable in the world, all that is
+sympathetic with its laws, and succeeds through that sympathy.
+Doubtless, for the individual, there are a thousand intermediate
+shades of opinion, a thousand resting-places for the religious spirit;
+still, [Greek: to diorizein ouk esti t�n poll�n], fine distinctions
+are not for the majority; and this makes time eventually a dogmatist,
+working out the opposition in its most trenchant form, and fixing the
+horns of the dilemma; until, in the present day, we have on one side
+Pius IX, the true descendant of the fisherman, issuing the Encyclical,
+pleading the old promise against the world with a special kind of
+justice; and on the other side, the irresistible modern culture,
+which, as religious men often remind us, is only Christian
+accidentally.
+
+The peculiar temper of Coleridge's intellect made the idea of
+reconciling this conflict very seductive. With a true speculative
+talent he united a false kind of subtlety and the full share of
+vanity. A dexterous intellectual _tour de force_ has always an
+independent charm; and therefore it is well for the cause of truth
+that the directness, sincerity, and naturalness of things are beyond a
+certain limit sacrificed in vain to a factitious interest. A method so
+forced as that of Coleridge's religious philosophy is from the first
+doomed to be insipid, so soon as the temporary interest or taste or
+curiosity it was designed to meet has passed away. Then, as to the
+manner of such books as the _Aids to Reflection_, or _The
+Friend_:--These books came from one whose vocation was in the world of
+art; and yet, perhaps, of all books that have been influential in
+modern times, they are farthest from the classical form--bundles of
+notes--the original matter inseparably mixed up with that borrowed
+from others--the whole, just that mere preparation for an artistic
+effect which the finished artist would be careful one day to destroy.
+Here, again, we have a trait profoundly characteristic of Coleridge.
+He often attempts to reduce a phase of thought, subtle and exquisite,
+to conditions too rough for it. He uses a purely speculative gift in
+direct moral edification. Scientific truth is something fugitive,
+relative, full of fine gradations; he tries to fix it in absolute
+formulas. The _Aids to Reflection_, or _The Friend_, is an effort to
+propagate the volatile spirit of conversation into the less ethereal
+fabric of a written book; and it is only here and there that the
+poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really lifted by the spirit.
+
+At forty-two, we find Coleridge saying in a letter:
+
+     I feel with an intensity unfathomable by words my utter
+     nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness in and for myself.
+     I have learned what a sin is against an infinite,
+     imperishable being such as is the soul of man. The
+     consolations, at least the sensible sweetness of hope, I do
+     not possess. On the contrary, the temptation which I have
+     constantly to fight up against is a fear that, if
+     annihilation and the possibility of heaven were offered to
+     my choice, I should choose the former.
+
+What was the cause of this change? That is precisely the point on
+which, after all the gossip there has been, we are still ignorant. At
+times Coleridge's opium excesses were great; but what led to those
+excesses must not be left out of account. From boyhood he had a
+tendency to low fever, betrayed by his constant appetite for bathing
+and swimming, which he indulged even when a physician had opposed it.
+In 1803, he went to Malta as secretary to the English Governor. His
+daughter suspects that the source of the evil was there, that for one
+of his constitution the climate of Malta was deadly. At all events,
+when he returned, the charm of those five wonderful years had failed
+at the source.
+
+De Quincey said of him, 'he wanted better bread than can be made with
+wheat.' Lamb said of him that from boyhood he had 'hungered for
+eternity'. Henceforth those are the two notes of his life. From this
+time we must look for no more true literary talent in him. His style
+becomes greyer and greyer, his thoughts _outr�_, exaggerated, a kind
+of credulity or superstition exercised upon abstract words. Like
+Clifford, in Hawthorne's beautiful romance--the born Epicurean, who by
+some strange wrong has passed the best of his days in a prison--he is
+the victim of a division of the will, often showing itself in trivial
+things: he could never choose on which side of the garden path he
+would walk. In 1803, he wrote a poem on 'The Pains of Sleep'. That
+unrest increased. Mr. Gillman tells us 'he had long been greatly
+afflicted with nightmare, and when residing with us was frequently
+aroused from this painful sleep by any one of the family who might
+hear him'.
+
+That faintness and continual dissolution had its own consumptive
+refinements, and even brought, as to the 'Beautiful Soul' in _Wilhelm
+Meister_, a faint religious ecstasy--that 'singing in the sails' which
+is not of the breeze. Here, again, is a note of Coleridge's:
+
+     'In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at
+     yonder moon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem
+     rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical
+     language for something within me that already and for ever
+     exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter
+     is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling, as
+     if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten
+     or hidden truth of my inner nature.' Then, 'while I was
+     preparing the pen to write this remark, I lost the train of
+     thought which had led me to it.'
+
+What a distemper of the eye of the mind! What an almost bodily
+distemper there is in that!
+
+Coleridge's intellectual sorrows were many; but he had one singular
+intellectual happiness. With an inborn taste for transcendental
+philosophy he lived just at the time when that philosophy took an
+immense spring in Germany, and connected itself with a brilliant
+literary movement. He had the luck to light upon it in its freshness,
+and introduce it to his countrymen. What an opportunity for one reared
+on the colourless English philosophies, but who feels an irresistible
+attraction towards metaphysical synthesis! How rare are such occasions
+of intellectual contentment! This transcendental philosophy, chiefly
+as systematized by Schelling, Coleridge applies, with an eager,
+unwearied subtlety, to the questions of theology and art-criticism. It
+is in his theory of art-criticism that he comes nearest to true and
+important principles; that is the least fugitive part of his work. Let
+us take this first; here we shall most clearly apprehend his main
+principle.
+
+What, then, is the essence of this criticism? On the whole it may be
+described as an attempt to reclaim the world of art as a world of
+fixed laws--to show that the creative activity of genius and the
+simplest act of thought are but higher and lower products of the laws
+of a universal logic. Criticism, feeling its own unsuccess in dealing
+with the greater works of art, has sometimes made too much of those
+dark and capricious suggestions of genius which even the intellect
+possessed by them is unable to track or recall. It has seemed due to
+their half-sacred character to look for no link between the process by
+which they were produced and the slighter processes of the mind.
+Coleridge assumes that the highest phases of thought must be more, not
+less, than the lower, subjects of law.
+
+With this interest, in the _Biographia Literaria_, he refines
+Schelling's 'Philosophy of Nature' into a theory of art. 'Es giebt
+kein Plagiat in der Philosophie' says Heine, alluding to the charge
+brought against Schelling of unacknowledged borrowing from Bruno, and
+certainly that which is common to Coleridge and Schelling is of far
+earlier origin than the Renaissance. Schellingism, the 'Philosophy of
+Nature', is indeed a constant tradition in the history of thought; it
+embodies a permanent type of the speculative temper. That mode of
+conceiving nature as a mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man may
+be traced up to the first beginnings of Greek speculation. There are
+two ways of envisaging those aspects of nature which appear to bear
+the impress of reason or intelligence. There is the deist's way, which
+regards them merely as marks of design, which separates the informing
+mind from nature, as the mechanist from the machine; and there is the
+pantheistic way, which identifies the two, which regards nature itself
+as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as, but
+vaster than, the human. Greek philosophy, finding indications of mind
+everywhere, dwelling exclusively in its observations on that which is
+general or formal, on that which modern criticism regards as the
+modification of things by the mind of the observer, adopts the latter,
+or pantheistic way, through the influence of the previous mythological
+period. Mythology begins in the early necessities of language, of
+which it is a kind of accident. But at a later period its essence
+changes; it becomes what it was not at its birth, the servant of a
+genuine poetic interest, a kind of _vivification_ of nature. Played
+upon by those accidents of language, the Greek mind becomes possessed
+by the conception of nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to
+the mind of man. This unfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an
+abstract form, petrified into an idea, is the conception which gives a
+unity of aim to Greek philosophy. Step by step it works out the
+substance of the Hegelian formula: 'Was ist, das ist vern�nftig; was
+vern�nftig ist, das ist'--'Whatever is, is according to reason;
+whatever is according to reason, that is.' A science of which that
+could be the formula is still but an intellectual aspiration; the
+formula of true science is different. Experience, which has gradually
+saddened the earth's colour, stiffened its motions, withdrawn from it
+some blithe and debonair presence, has moderated our demands upon
+science. The positive method makes very little account of marks of
+intelligence in nature; in its wider view of phenomena it sees that
+those incidents are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences; it
+absorbs them in the simpler conception of law. But the suspicion of a
+mind latent in nature, struggling for release and intercourse with the
+intellect of man through true ideas, has never ceased to haunt a
+certain class of minds. Started again and again in successive periods
+by enthusiasts on the antique pattern, in each case the thought has
+seemed paler and more evanescent amidst the growing consistency and
+sharpness of outline of other and more positive forms of knowledge.
+Still, wherever a speculative instinct has been united with extreme
+inwardness of temperament, as in Jakob B�hme, there the old Greek
+conception, like some seed floating in the air, has taken root and
+sprung up anew. Coleridge, thrust inward upon himself, driven from
+'life in thought and sensation' to life in thought only, feels in that
+dark London school a thread of the Greek mind vibrating strangely in
+him. At fifteen he is discoursing on Plotinus, and has translated the
+hymns of Synesius. So in later years he reflects from Schelling the
+flitting tradition. He conceives a subtle co-ordination between the
+ideas of the mind and the laws of the natural world. Science is to be
+attained, not by observation, analysis, generalization, but by the
+evolution or recovery of those ideas from within, by a sort of [Greek:
+anamn�sis], every group of observed facts remaining an enigma until
+the appropriate idea is struck upon them from the mind of Newton or
+Cuvier, the genius in whom sympathy with the universal reason is
+entire. Next he supposes that this reason or intelligence in nature
+gradually becomes reflective--self-conscious. He fancies he can track
+through all the simpler orders of life fragments of an eloquent
+prophecy about the human mind. He regards the whole of nature as a
+development of higher forms out of the lower, through shade after
+shade of systematic change. The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the
+axes of a crystal form, the trance-like life of plants, the animal
+troubled by strange irritabilities, are stages which anticipate
+consciousness. All through that increasing stir of life this was
+forming itself; each stage in its unsatisfied susceptibilities seeming
+to be drawn out of its own limits by the more pronounced current of
+life on its confines, the 'shadow of approaching humanity' gradually
+deepening, the latent intelligence working to the surface. At this
+point the law of development does not lose itself in caprice; rather
+it becomes more constraining and incisive. From the lowest to the
+highest acts of intelligence, there is another range of refining
+shades. Gradually the mind concentrates itself, frees itself from the
+limits of the particular, the individual, attains a strange power of
+modifying and centralizing what it receives from without according to
+an inward ideal. At last, in imaginative genius, ideas become
+effective; the intelligence of nature, with all its elements connected
+and justified, is clearly reflected; and the interpretation of its
+latent purposes is fixed in works of art.
+
+In this fanciful and bizarre attempt to rationalize art, to range it
+under the dominion of law, there is still a gap to be filled up. What
+is that common law of the mind, of which a work of art and the
+slighter acts of thought are alike products? Here Coleridge weaves in
+Kant's fine-spun theory of the transformation of sense into
+perception. What every theory of perception has to explain is that
+associative power which gathers isolated sensible qualities into the
+objects of the world about us. Sense, without an associative power,
+would be only a threadlike stream of colours, sounds, odours--each
+struck upon one for a moment, and then withdrawn. The basis of this
+association may be represented as a material one, a kind of
+many-coloured 'etching' on the brain. Hartley has dexterously handled
+this hypothesis. The charm of his 'theory of vibrations' is the vivid
+image it presents to the fancy. How large an element in a speculative
+talent is the command of these happy images! Coleridge, by a finer
+effort of the same kind, a greater delicacy of fancy, detects all
+sorts of slips, transitions, breaks of continuity in Hartley's
+glancing cobweb. Coleridge, with Kant, regards all association as
+effected by a power within, to which he gives a fanciful Greek
+name.[39] In an act of perception there is the matter which sense
+presents, colour, tone, feeling; but also a form or mould, such as
+space, unity, causation, suggested from within. In these forms we
+arrest and frame the many attributes of sense. It is like that simple
+chemical phenomenon where two colourless fluids uniting reflect a full
+colour. Neither matter nor form can be perceived asunder; they unite
+into the many-coloured image of life. This theory has not been able to
+bear a loyal induction. Even if it were true, how little it would tell
+us; how it attenuates fact! There, again, the charm is all in the
+clear image; the image of the artist combining a few elementary
+colours, curves, sounds into a new whole. Well, this power of
+association, of concentrating many elements of sense in an object of
+perception, is refined and deepened into the creative acts of
+imagination.
+
+    [39] Esemplastic.
+
+We of the modern ages have become so familiarized with the greater
+works of art that we are little sensitive of the act of creation in
+them; they do not impress us as a new presence in the world. Only
+sometimes in productions which realize immediately a profound emotion
+and enforce a change in taste, such as _Werther_ or _Emile_, we are
+actual witnesses of the moulding of an unforeseen type by some new
+principle of association. By imagination, the distinction between
+which and fancy is so thrust upon his readers, Coleridge means a
+vigorous act of association, which, by simplifying and restraining
+their natural expression to an artificial order, refines and perfects
+the types of human passion. It represents the excitements of the
+human kind, but reflected in a new manner, 'excitement itself
+imitating order.' 'Originally the offspring of passion,' he somewhere
+says, 'but now the adopted children of power.' So far there is nothing
+new or distinctive; every one who can receive from a poem or picture a
+total impression will admit so much. What makes the view distinctive
+in Coleridge are the Schellingistic associations with which he colours
+it, that faint glamour of the philosophy of nature which was ever
+influencing his thoughts. That suggested the idea of a subtly winding
+parallel, a 'rapport' in every detail, between the human mind and the
+world without it, laws of nature being so many transformed ideas.
+Conversely, the ideas of the human mind would be only transformed
+laws. Genius would be in a literal sense an exquisitely purged
+sympathy with nature. Those associative conceptions of the
+imagination, those unforeseen types of passion, would come, not so
+much of the artifice and invention of the understanding, as from
+self-surrender to the suggestions of nature; they would be evolved by
+the stir of nature itself realizing the highest reach of its latent
+intelligence; they would have a kind of antecedent necessity to rise
+at some time to the surface of the human mind.
+
+It is natural that Shakespeare should be the idol of all such
+criticism, whether in England or Germany. The first effect in
+Shakespeare is that of capricious detail, of the waywardness that
+plays with the parts careless of the impression of the whole. But
+beyond there is the constraining unity of effect, the uneffaceable
+impression, of _Hamlet_ or _Macbeth_. His hand moving freely is
+curved round by some law of gravitation from within; that is, there is
+the most constraining unity in the most abundant variety. Coleridge
+exaggerates this unity into something like the unity of a natural
+organism, the associative act that effected it into something closely
+akin to the primitive power of nature itself. 'In the Shakespearian
+drama', he says, 'there is a vitality which grows and evolves itself
+from within.' Again:
+
+     He, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the
+     germ from within by the imaginative power according to the
+     idea. For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea
+     in mind to a law in nature. They are correlatives which
+     suppose each other.
+
+Again:
+
+     The organic form is innate; it shapes, as it develops,
+     itself from within, and the fulness of its development is
+     one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.
+     Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime
+     genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally
+     inexhaustible in forms; each exterior is the physiognomy of
+     the being within, and even such is the appropriate
+     excellence of Shakespeare, himself a nature humanized, a
+     genial understanding, directing self-consciously a power and
+     an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.
+
+There 'the absolute' has been affirmed in the sphere of art; and
+thought begins to congeal. Coleridge has not only overstrained the
+elasticity of his hypothesis, but has also obscured the true interest
+of art. For, after all, the artist has become something almost
+mechanical; instead of being the most luminous and self-possessed
+phase of consciousness, the associative act itself looks like some
+organic process of assimilation. The work of art is sometimes likened
+to the living organism. That expresses the impression of a
+self-delighting, independent life which a finished work of art gives
+us; it does not express the process by which that work was produced.
+Here there is no blind ferment of lifeless elements to realize a type.
+By exquisite analysis the artist attains clearness of idea, then, by
+many stages of refining, clearness of expression. He moves slowly over
+his work, calculating the tenderest tone, and restraining the subtlest
+curve, never letting his hand or fancy move at large, gradually
+refining flaccid spaces to the higher degree of expressiveness.
+Culture, at least, values even in transcendent works of art the power
+of the understanding in them, their logical process of construction,
+the spectacle of supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.
+
+Coleridge's criticism may well be remembered as part of the long
+pleading of German culture for the things 'behind the veil'. It
+recalls us from the work of art to the mind of the artist; and, after
+all, this is what is infinitely precious, and the work of art only as
+the index of it. Still, that is only the narrower side of a complete
+criticism. Perhaps it is true, as some one says in Lessing's _Emilie
+Galotti_, that, if Michael Angelo had been born without hands, he
+would still have been the greatest of artists. But we must admit the
+truth also of an opposite view: 'In morals as in art', says M. Renan,
+'the word is nothing--the fact is everything. The idea which lurks
+under a picture of Raphael is a slight matter; it is the picture
+itself only that counts.'
+
+What constitutes an artistic gift is, first of all, a natural
+susceptibility to moments of strange excitement, in which the colours
+freshen upon our thread bare world, and the routine of things about
+us is broken by a novel and happier synthesis. These are moments into
+which other minds may be made to enter, but which they cannot
+originate. This susceptibility is the element of genius in an artistic
+gift. Secondly, there is what may be called the talent of projection,
+of throwing these happy moments into an external concrete form--a
+statue, or play, or picture. That projection is of all degrees of
+completeness; its facility and transparence are modified by the
+circumstances of the individual, his culture, and his age. When it is
+perfectly transparent, the work is classical. Compare the power of
+projection in Mr. Browning's _Sordello_, with that power in the
+_Sorrows of Werther_. These two elements determine the two chief aims
+of criticism. First, it has to classify those initiative moments
+according to the amount of interest excited in them, to estimate their
+comparative acceptability, their comparative power of giving joy to
+those who undergo them. Secondly, it has to test, by a study of the
+artistic product itself, in connexion with the intellectual and
+spiritual condition of its age, the completeness of the projection.
+These two aims form the positive, or concrete, side of criticism;
+their direction is not towards a metaphysical definition of the
+universal element in an artistic effort, but towards a subtle
+gradation of the shades of difference between one artistic gift and
+another. This side of criticism is infinitely varied; and it is what
+French culture more often achieves than the German.
+
+Coleridge has not achieved this side in an equal degree with the
+other; and this want is not supplied by the _Literary Remains_, which
+contain his studies on Shakespeare. There we have a repetition, not
+an application, of the absolute formula. Coleridge is like one who
+sees in a picture only the rules of perspective, and is always trying
+to simplify even those. Thus: 'Where there is no humour, but only wit,
+or the like, there is no growth from within.' 'What is beauty'? he
+asks. 'It is the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the
+diverse.' So of Dante: 'There is a total impression of infinity; the
+wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in an inner feeling of
+totality and absolute being.' Again, of the _Paradise Lost_: 'It has
+the totality of the poem as distinguished from the _ab ovo_ birth and
+parentage or straight line of history.'
+
+That exaggerated inwardness is barren. Here, too, Coleridge's thoughts
+require to be thawed, to be set in motion. He is admirable in the
+detection, the analysis, and statement of a few of the highest general
+laws of art-production. But he withdraws us too far from what we can
+see, hear, and feel. Doubtless, the idea, the intellectual element, is
+the spirit and life of art. Still, art is the triumph of the senses
+and the emotions; and the senses and the emotions must not be cheated
+of their triumph after all. That strange and beautiful psychology
+which he employs, with its evanescent delicacies, has not sufficient
+corporeity. Again, one feels that the discussion about Hartley,
+meeting us in the way, throws a tone of insecurity over the critical
+theory which it introduces. Its only effect is to win for the terms in
+which that criticism is expressed, the associations of one side in a
+metaphysical controversy.
+
+The vagueness and fluidity of Coleridge's theological opinions have
+been exaggerated through an illusion, which has arisen from the
+occasional form in which they have reached us. Criticism, then, has to
+methodize and focus them. They may be arranged under three heads; the
+general principles of supernaturalism, orthodox dogmas, the
+interpretation of Scripture. With regard to the first and second,
+Coleridge ranks as a Conservative thinker; but his principles of
+Scriptural interpretation resemble Lessing's; they entitle him to be
+regarded as the founder of the modern liberal school of English
+theology. By supernaturalism is meant the theory of a divine person in
+immediate communication with the human mind, dealing with it out of
+that order of nature which includes man's body and his ordinary trains
+of thought, according to fixed laws, which the theologian sums up in
+the doctrines of 'grace' and 'sin'. Of this supernaturalism, the _Aids
+to Reflection_ attempts to give a metaphysical proof. The first
+necessity of the argument is to prove that religion, with its supposed
+experiences of grace and sin, and the realities of a world above the
+world of sense, is the fulfilment of the constitution of every man,
+or, in the language of the 'philosophy of nature', is part of the
+'idea' of man; so that, when those experiences are absent, all the
+rest of his nature is unexplained, like some enigmatical fragment, the
+construction and working of which we cannot surmise. According to
+Schelling's principle, the explanation of every phase of life is to be
+sought in that next above it. This axiom is applied to three supposed
+stages of man's reflective life: Prudence, Morality, Religion.
+Prudence, by which Coleridge means something like Bentham's
+'enlightened principle of self-preservation', is, he says, an
+inexplicable instinct, a blind motion in the dark, until it is
+expanded into morality. Morality, again, is but a groundless
+prepossession until transformed into a religious recognition of a
+spiritual world, until, as Coleridge says in his rich figurative
+language, 'like the main feeder into some majestic lake, rich with
+hidden springs of its own, it flows into, and becomes one with, the
+spiritual life.' A spiritual life, then, being the fulfilment of human
+nature, implied, if we see clearly, in those instincts which enable
+one to live on from day to day, is part of the 'idea' of man.
+
+The second necessity of the argument is to prove that 'the idea',
+according to the principle of the 'philosophy of nature', is an
+infallible index of the actual condition of the world without us. Here
+Coleridge introduces an analogy:
+
+     In the world, we see everywhere evidences of a unity, which
+     the component parts are so far from explaining, that they
+     necessarily presuppose it as the cause and condition of
+     their existing as those parts, or even of their existing at
+     all. This antecedent unity, or cause and principle of each
+     union, it has, since the time of Bacon and Kepler, been
+     customary to call a law. This crocus for instance; or any
+     other flower the reader may have before his sight, or choose
+     to bring before his fancy; that the root, stem, leaves,
+     petals, &c., cohere to one plant is owing to an antecedent
+     power or principle in the seed which existed before a single
+     particle of the matters that constitute the size and
+     visibility of the crocus had been attracted from the
+     surrounding soil, air, and moisture. Shall we turn to the
+     seed? there, too, the same necessity meets us: an antecedent
+     unity must here, too, be supposed. Analyse the seeds with
+     the finest tools, and let the solar microscope come in aid
+     of your senses, what do you find?--means and instruments; a
+     wondrous fairy tale of nature, magazines of food, stores of
+     various sorts, pipes, spiracles, defences; a house of many
+     chambers, and the owner and inhabitant invisible.
+
+                                 _Aids to Reflection._
+
+Nature, that is, works by what we may call 'intact ideas'. It
+co-ordinates every part of the crocus to all the other parts; one
+stage of its growth to the whole process; and having framed its
+organism to assimilate certain external elements, it does not cheat it
+of those elements, soil, air, moisture. Well, if the 'idea' of man is
+to be intact, he must be enveloped in a supernatural world; and nature
+always works by intact ideas. The spiritual life is the highest
+development of the idea of man; there must be a supernatural world
+corresponding to it.
+
+One finds, it is hard to say how many, difficulties in drawing
+Coleridge's conclusion. To mention only one of them--the argument
+looks too like the exploded doctrine of final causes. Of course the
+crocus would not live unless the conditions of its life were supplied.
+The flower is made for soil, air, moisture, and it has them; just as
+man's senses are made for a sensible world, and we have the sensible
+world. But give the flower the power of dreaming, nourish it on its
+own reveries, put man's wild hunger of heart and susceptibility to
+_ennui_ in it, and what indication of the laws of the world without
+it, would be afforded by its longing to break its bonds?
+
+In theology people are content with analogies, probabilities, with the
+empty schemes of arguments for which the data are still lacking;
+arguments, the rejection of which Coleridge tells us implies 'an evil
+heart of unbelief', but of which we might as truly say that they
+derive all their consistency from the peculiar atmosphere of the mind
+which receives them. Such arguments are received in theology because
+what chains men to a religion is not its claim on their reason, their
+hopes or fears, but the glow it affords to the world, its 'beau
+ideal'. Coleridge thinks that if we reject the supernatural, the
+spiritual element in life will evaporate also, that we shall have to
+accept a life with narrow horizons, without disinterestedness, harshly
+cut off from the springs of life in the past. But what is this
+spiritual element? It is the passion for inward perfection, with its
+sorrows, its aspirations, its joy. These mental states are the
+delicacies of the higher morality of the few, of Augustine, of the
+author of the 'Imitation', of Francis de Sales; in their essence they
+are only the permanent characteristics of the higher life. Augustine,
+or the author of the 'Imitation', agreeably to the culture of their
+age, had expressed them in the terms of a metaphysical theory, and
+expanded them into what theologians call the doctrines of grace and
+sin, the fluctuations of the union of the soul with its unseen friend.
+The life of those who are capable of a passion for perfection still
+produces the same mental states; but that religious expression of them
+is no longer congruous with the culture of the age. Still, all inward
+life works itself out in a few simple forms, and culture cannot go
+very far before the religious graces reappear in it in a subtilized
+intellectual shape. There are aspects of the religious character which
+have an artistic worth distinct from their religious import. Longing,
+a chastened temper, spiritual joy, are precious states of mind, not
+because they are part of man's duty or because God has commanded them,
+still less because they are means of obtaining a reward, but because
+like culture itself they are remote, refined, intense, existing only
+by the triumph of a few over a dead world of routine in which there
+is no lifting of the soul at all. If there is no other world, art in
+its own interest must cherish such characteristics as beautiful
+spectacles. Stephen's face, 'like the face of an angel,' has a worth
+of its own, even if the opened heaven is but a dream.
+
+Our culture, then, is not supreme, our intellectual life is
+incomplete, we fail of the intellectual throne, if we have no inward
+longing, inward chastening, inward joy. Religious belief, the craving
+for objects of belief, may be refined out of our hearts, but they must
+leave their sacred perfume, their spiritual sweetness behind. This law
+of the highest intellectual life has sometimes seemed hard to
+understand. Those who maintain the claims of the older and narrower
+forms of religious life against the claims of culture are often
+embarrassed at finding the intellectual life heated through with the
+very graces to which they would sacrifice it. How often in the higher
+class of theological writings--writings which really spring from an
+original religious genius, such as those of Dr. Newman--does the
+modern aspirant to perfect culture seem to find the expression of the
+inmost delicacies of his own life, the same yet different! The
+spiritualities of the Christian life have often drawn men on, little
+by little, into the broader spiritualities of systems opposed to
+it--pantheism, or positivism, or a philosophy of indifference. Many in
+our own generation, through religion, have become dead to religion.
+How often do we have to look for some feature of the ancient religious
+life, not in a modern saint, but in a modern artist or philosopher!
+For those who have passed out of Christianity, perhaps its most
+precious souvenir is the ideal of a transcendental disinterestedness.
+Where shall we look for this ideal? In Spinoza; or perhaps in Bentham
+or in Austin.
+
+Some of those who have wished to save supernaturalism--as, for
+instance, Theodore Parker--have rejected more or less entirely the
+dogmas of the Church. Coleridge's instinct is truer than theirs; the
+two classes of principles are logically connected. It was in defence
+of the dogmas of the Church that Coleridge elaborated his unhappy
+crotchet of the diversity of the reason from the understanding. The
+weakness of these dogmas had ever been, not so much a failure of the
+authority of Scripture or tradition in their favour, as their conflict
+with the reason that they were words rather than conceptions. That
+analysis of words and conceptions which in modern philosophy has been
+a principle of continual rejuvenescence with Descartes and Berkeley,
+as well as with Bacon and Locke, had desolated the field of scholastic
+theology. It is the rationality of the dogmas of that theology that
+Coleridge had a taste for proving.
+
+Of course they conflicted with the understanding, with the common
+daylight of the mind, but then might there not be some mental faculty
+higher than the understanding? The history of philosophy supplied many
+authorities for this opinion. Then, according to the 'philosophy of
+nature', science and art are both grounded upon the 'ideas' of genius,
+which are a kind of intuition, which are their own evidence. Again,
+this philosophy was always saying the ideas of the mind must be true,
+must correspond to reality; and what an aid to faith is that, if one
+is not too nice in distinguishing between ideas and mere convictions,
+or prejudices, or habitual views, or safe opinions! Kant also had
+made a distinction between the reason and the understanding. True,
+this harsh division of mental faculties is exactly what is most
+sterile in Kant, the essential tendency of the German school of
+thought being to show that the mind always acts _en masse_. Kant had
+defined two senses of reason as opposed to the understanding. First,
+there was the 'speculative reason', with its 'three categories of
+totality', God, the soul, and the universe--three mental forms which
+might give a sort of unity to science, but to which no actual
+intuition corresponded. The tendency of this part of Kant's critique
+is to destroy the rational groundwork of theism. Then there was the
+'practical reason', on the relation of which to the 'speculative', we
+may listen to Heinrich Heine:
+
+     'After the tragedy comes the farce. [The tragedy is Kant's
+     destructive criticism of the speculative reason.] So far
+     Immanuel Kant has been playing the relentless philosopher;
+     he has laid siege to heaven.' Heine goes on with some
+     violence to describe the havoc Kant has made of the orthodox
+     belief: 'Old Lampe,[40] with the umbrella under his arm,
+     stands looking on much disturbed, perspiration and tears of
+     sorrow running down his cheeks. Then Immanuel Kant grows
+     pitiful, and shows that he is not only a great philosopher
+     but also a good man. He considers a little; and then, half
+     in good nature, half in irony, he says, "Old Lampe must have
+     a god, otherwise the poor man will not be happy; but man
+     ought to be happy in this life, the practical reason says
+     that; let the practical reason stand surety for the
+     existence of a god; it is all the same to me." Following
+     this argument, Kant distinguishes between the theoretical
+     and the practical reason, and, with the practical reason for
+     a magic wand, he brings to life the dead body of deism,
+     which the theoretical reason had slain.'
+
+    [40] The servant who attended Kant in his walks.
+
+Coleridge first confused the speculative reason with the practical,
+and then exaggerated the variety and the sphere of their combined
+functions. Then he has given no consistent definition of the reason.
+It is 'the power of universal and necessary convictions'; it is 'the
+knowledge of the laws of the whole considered as one'; it is 'the
+science of all as a whole'. Again, the understanding is 'the faculty
+judging according to sense', or 'the faculty of means to mediate
+ends'; and so on. The conception floating in his mind seems to have
+been a really valuable one; that, namely, of a distinction between an
+organ of adequate and an organ of inadequate ideas. But when we find
+him casting about for a definition, not precisely determining the
+functions of the reason, making long preparations for the 'deduction'
+of the faculty, as in the third column of _The Friend_, but never
+actually starting, we suspect that the reason is a discovery in
+psychology which Coleridge has a good will to make, and that is all;
+that he has got no farther than the old vague desire to escape from
+the limitations of thought by some extraordinary mystical faculty.
+Some of the clergy eagerly welcomed the supposed discovery. In their
+difficulties they had often appealed in the old simple way to
+sentiment and emotion as of higher authority than the understanding,
+and on the whole had had to get on with very little philosophy. Like
+M. Jourdain, they were amazed to find that they had been all the time
+appealing to the reason; now they might actually go out to meet the
+enemy. Orthodoxy might be cured by a hair of the dog that had bitten
+it.
+
+Theology is a great house, scored all over with hieroglyphics by
+perished hands. When we decipher one of these hieroglyphics, we find
+in it the statement of a mistaken opinion; but knowledge has crept
+onward since the hand dropped from the wall; we no longer entertain
+the opinion, and we can trace the origin of the mistake. Dogmas are
+precious as memorials of a class of sincere and beautiful spirits, who
+in a past age of humanity struggled with many tears, if not for true
+knowledge, yet for a noble and elevated happiness. That struggle is
+the substance, the dogma only its shadowy expression; received
+traditionally in an altered age, it is the shadow of a shadow, a mere
+[Greek: triton eid�lon], twice removed from substance and reality. The
+true method then in the treatment of dogmatic theology must be
+historical. Englishmen are gradually finding out how much that method
+has done since the beginning of modern criticism by the hands of such
+writers as Baur. Coleridge had many of the elements of this method:
+learning, inwardness, a subtle psychology, a dramatic power of
+sympathy with modes of thought other than his own. Often in carrying
+out his own method he gives the true historical origin of a dogma,
+but, with a strange dullness of the historical sense, he regards this
+as a reason for the existence of the dogma now, not merely as reason
+for its having existed in the past. Those historical elements he could
+not envisage in the historical method, because this method is only one
+of the applications, the most fruitful of them all, of the relative
+spirit.
+
+After Coleridge's death, seven letters of his on the inspiration of
+Scripture were published, under the title of _Confessions of an
+Inquiring Spirit_. This little book has done more than any other of
+Coleridge's writings to discredit his name with the orthodox. The
+frequent occurrence in it of the word 'bibliolatry', borrowed from
+Lessing, would sufficiently account for this pious hatred. From
+bibliolatry Coleridge was saved by the spiritualism, which, in
+questions less simple than that of the infallibility of Scripture, was
+so retarding to his culture. Bibliolators may remember that one who
+committed a kind of intellectual suicide by catching at any appearance
+of a fixed and absolute authority, never dreamed of resting on the
+authority of a book. His Schellingistic notion of the possibility of
+absolute knowledge, of knowing God, of a light within every man which
+might discover to him the doctrines of Christianity, tended to
+depreciate historical testimony, perhaps historical realism
+altogether. Scripture is a legitimate sphere for the understanding. He
+says, indeed, that there is more in the Bible that 'finds' him than he
+has experienced in all other books put together. But still, 'There is
+a Light higher than all, even the Word that was in the beginning. If
+between this Word and the written letter I shall anywhere seem to
+myself to find a discrepance, I will not conclude that such there
+actually is; nor on the other hand will I fall under the condemnation
+of them that would lie for God, but seek as I may, be thankful for
+what I have--and wait.' Coleridge is the inaugurator of that _via
+media_ of Scriptural criticism which makes much of saving the word
+'inspiration', while it attenuates its meaning; which supposes a sort
+of modified inspiration residing in the whole, not in the several
+parts. 'The Scriptures were not dictated by an infallible
+intelligence;' nor 'the writers each and all divinely informed as
+well as inspired'. 'They refer to other documents, and in all points
+express themselves as sober-minded and veracious writers under
+ordinary circumstances are known to do.' To make the Bible itself 'the
+subject of a special article of faith, is an unnecessary and useless
+abstraction'.
+
+His judgement on the popular view of inspiration is severe. It is
+borrowed from the Cabbalists; it 'petrifies at once the whole body of
+Holy Writ, with all its harmonies and symmetrical gradations;--turns
+it at once into a colossal Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a
+voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many men, and speaks in their
+names, and yet is but one voice and the same;--and no man uttered it
+and never in a human heart was it conceived'. He presses very hard on
+the tricks of the 'routiniers of desk and pulpit'; forced and
+fantastic interpretations; 'the strange--in all other writings
+unexampled--practice of bringing together into logical dependency
+detached sentences from books composed at the distance of centuries,
+nay, sometimes a millennium, from each other, under different
+dispensations, and for different objects.'
+
+Certainly he is much farther from bibliolatry than from the perfect
+freedom of the humanist interpreters. Still he has not freed himself
+from the notion of a sacred canon; he cannot regard the books of
+Scripture simply as fruits of the human spirit; his criticism is not
+entirely disinterested. The difficulties he finds are chiefly the
+supposed immoralities of Scripture; just those difficulties which fade
+away before the modern or relative spirit, which in the moral world,
+as in the physical traces everywhere change, growth, development. Of
+historical difficulties, of those deeper moral difficulties which
+arise, for instance, from a consideration of the constitutional
+unveracity of the Oriental mind, he has no suspicion. He thinks that
+no book of the New Testament was composed so late as A.D. 120.
+
+Coleridge's undeveloped opinions would be hardly worth stating except
+for the warning they afford against retarding compromises. In reading
+these letters one never doubts what Coleridge tells us of himself:
+'that he loved truth with an indescribable awe,' or, as he beautifully
+says, 'that he would creep towards the light, even if the light had
+made its way through a rent in the wall of the temple.' And yet there
+is something sad in reading them by the light which twenty-five years
+have thrown back upon them. Taken as a whole, they contain a fallacy
+which a very ardent lover of truth might have detected.
+
+The Bible is not to judge the spirit, but the spirit the Bible. The
+Bible is to be treated as a literary product. Well, but that is a
+conditional, not an absolute principle--that is not, if we regard it
+sincerely, a delivery of judgement, but only a suspension of it. If we
+are true to the spirit of that, we must wait patiently the complete
+result of modern criticism. Coleridge states that the authority of
+Scripture is on its trial--that at present it is not known to be an
+absolute resting-place; and then, instead of leaving that to aid in
+the formation of a fearless spirit, the spirit which, for instance,
+would accept the results of M. Renan's investigations, he turns it
+into a false security by anticipating the judgement of an undeveloped
+criticism. Twenty-five years of that criticism have gone by, and have
+hardly verified the anticipation.
+
+The man of science asks, Are absolute principles attainable? What are
+the limits of knowledge? The answer he receives from science itself is
+not ambiguous. What the moralist asks is, Shall we gain or lose by
+surrendering human life to the relative spirit? Experience answers,
+that the dominant tendency of life is to turn ascertained truth into a
+dead letter--to make us all the phlegmatic servants of routine. The
+relative spirit, by dwelling constantly on the more fugitive
+conditions or circumstances of things, breaking through a thousand
+rough and brutal classifications, and giving elasticity to inflexible
+principles, begets an intellectual finesse, of which the ethical
+result is a delicate and tender justness in the criticism of human
+life. Who would gain more than Coleridge by criticism in such a
+spirit? We know how his life has appeared when judged by absolute
+standards. We see him trying to apprehend the absolute, to stereotype
+one form of faith, to attain, as he says, 'fixed principles' in
+politics, morals, and religion; to fix one mode of life as the essence
+of life, refusing to see the parts as parts only; and all the time his
+own pathetic history pleads for a more elastic moral philosophy than
+his, and cries out against every formula less living and flexible than
+life itself.
+
+'From his childhood he hungered for eternity.' After all, that is the
+incontestable claim of Coleridge. The perfect flower of any elementary
+type of life must always be precious to humanity, and Coleridge is the
+perfect flower of the romantic type. More than Childe Harold, more
+than Werther, more than Ren�, Coleridge, by what he did, what he was,
+and what he failed to do, represents that inexhaustible discontent,
+languor, and home-sickness, the chords of which ring all through our
+modern literature. Criticism may still discuss the claims of classical
+and romantic art, or literature, or sentiment; and perhaps one day we
+may come to forget the horizon, with full knowledge to be content with
+what is here and now; and that is the essence of classical feeling.
+But by us of the present moment, by us for whom the Greek spirit, with
+its engaging naturalness, simple, chastened, debonair, [Greek:
+tryph�s, habrot�tos, chlid�s, charit�n, himerou pothou pat�r], is
+itself the Sangraal of an endless pilgrimage, Coleridge, with his
+passion for the absolute, for something fixed where all is moving, his
+faintness, his broken memory, his intellectual disquiet, may still be
+ranked among the interpreters of one of the constituent elements of
+our life.
+
+
+
+
+RALPH WALDO EMERSON
+
+1803-1882
+
+SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET. 1850.
+
+
+Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
+originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,
+like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and
+making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor
+does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
+is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what
+men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of
+sight and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is
+the most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes
+uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something
+good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is
+nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad
+earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with
+the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.
+
+The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have
+any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice
+to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say,
+'I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent:
+to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a
+new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a
+new mechanic power:' no, but he finds himself in the river of the
+thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his
+contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and
+their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The
+church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the
+advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her
+chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by
+trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
+counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of
+production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.
+Every master has found his material collected, and his power lay in
+his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he
+wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
+shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him
+thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the
+hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations,
+poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into
+their labours. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency,
+out of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do
+for himself; his powers would be expended in the first preparations.
+Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being
+original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world
+do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed
+through the mind.
+
+Shakespeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were
+importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily
+at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans,
+a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican
+church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,
+houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs,
+were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted
+this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers
+now,--no, not by the strongest party,--neither then could king,
+prelate, or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ, which was
+ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, punch, and library, at the
+same time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all found their own
+account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national interest,--by
+no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of
+treating it in an English history,--but not a whit less considerable,
+because it was cheap, and of no account, like a baker's shop. The best
+proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke
+into this field: Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker,
+Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and
+Fletcher.
+
+The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the
+first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
+idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
+case of Shakespeare, there is much more. At the time when he left
+Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all
+dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced
+on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear
+hearing some part of every week; the Death of Julius C�sar, and other
+stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of
+English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the
+royal Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful
+tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the
+London prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or
+less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and
+tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote
+them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so long, and so
+many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a
+speech, or a whole Scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer
+claim copyright in this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to.
+They are not yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many
+spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.
+
+Shakespeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
+plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had
+the _prestige_ which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing
+could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England
+circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he
+wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in
+popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain
+his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people,
+supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much
+work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for
+the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his
+legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in
+Greece, grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the ornament
+of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then
+the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the
+wall, the groups being still arranged with reference to the building,
+which serves also as a frame to hold the figures; and when, at last,
+the greatest freedom of style and treatment was reached, the
+prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness
+and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for
+itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began
+to decline; freak, extravagance, and exhibition, took the place of the
+old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in
+architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the
+accumulated dramatic materials to which the people were already
+wonted, and which had a certain excellence which no single genius,
+however extraordinary, could hope to create.
+
+In point of fact, it appears that Shakespeare did owe debts in all
+directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
+indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's laborious computations in
+regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of _Henry VI_, in which,
+'out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
+Shakespeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;
+and 1899 were entirely his own.' And the proceeding investigation
+hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's
+sentence is an important piece of external history. In _Henry VIII_, I
+think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his
+own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior,
+thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know
+well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene
+with Cromwell, where,--instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose
+secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for
+the sense will best bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are
+constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit
+eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable
+traits of Shakespeare's hand, and some passages, as the account of the
+coronation, are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen
+Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm.
+
+Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any
+invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his
+resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was
+not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The
+universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who
+appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light
+which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of
+sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes
+to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore little
+solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through
+translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant
+countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are
+equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near
+home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good
+many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He
+knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place,
+wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps; of
+Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are
+librarians and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was
+heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world,--
+
+    Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line,
+    And the tale of Troy divine.
+
+The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;
+and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to
+him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large
+unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence
+which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.
+Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from
+Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a
+compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch,
+Boccaccio, and the Proven�al poets are his benefactors: the _Romaunt
+of the Rose_ is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and
+John of Meun: _Troilus and Creseide_, from Lollius of Urbino: _The
+Cock and the Fox_, from the _Lais_ of Marie: _The House of Fame_, from
+the French or Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a
+brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build his house. He
+steals by this apology; that what he takes has no worth where he finds
+it, and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically
+a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself
+capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the
+writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who
+can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain
+awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we
+have learned what to do with them, they become our own.
+
+Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The
+learned member of the legislature at Westminster or at Washington,
+speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now
+invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes,
+the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or
+conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates,
+and it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of something of
+their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so
+Locke and Rousseau think for thousands; and so there were fountains
+all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew;
+friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all perished,--which,
+if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with
+authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion? The
+appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his
+breast a Delphi whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing,
+whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely
+on that? All the debts which such a man could contract to other wit,
+would never disturb his consciousness of originality: for the
+ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a whiff of smoke to
+that most private reality with which he has conversed.
+
+It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the
+world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labour, when a
+thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible
+is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English
+language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but
+centuries and churches brought it to perfection; There never was a
+time when there was not some translation existing. The Liturgy,
+admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of
+ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the
+Catholic church,--these collected, too, in long periods, from the
+prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer, all over the
+world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's Prayer,
+that the single clauses of which it is composed were already in use,
+in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms. He picked out the
+grains of gold. The nervous language of the Common Law, the impressive
+forms of our courts, and the precision and substantial truth of the
+legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the sharp-sighted,
+strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws
+govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being
+translation on translation. There never was a time when there was
+none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and all
+others successively picked out, and thrown away. Something like the
+same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these
+books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, �sop's
+Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish
+Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of such
+works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter,
+the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book
+supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every
+trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic genius who is
+not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of
+all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his
+own.
+
+We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakespeare
+Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the
+Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final
+detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from
+_Ferrex and Porrex_, and _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, down to the
+possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakespeare altered,
+remodelled, and finally made his own. Elated with success, and piqued
+by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no bookstall
+unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow
+accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to
+discover whether the boy Shakespeare poached or not, whether he held
+horses at the theatre door, whether he kept school, and why he left in
+his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.
+
+There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age
+mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are
+turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen
+Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and
+Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the founder
+of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be
+remembered,--the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the
+inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people
+of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to
+receive this and not another bias. A popular player,--nobody suspected
+he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as
+faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and
+frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human
+understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson,
+though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no
+suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was
+attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him
+generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet
+of the two.
+
+If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakespeare's
+time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born
+four years after Shakespeare, and died twenty-three years after him;
+and I find, among his correspondents and acquaintances, the following
+persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of
+Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane,
+Izaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton,
+John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi,
+Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having
+communicated, without enumerating many others, whom doubtless he
+saw,--Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts,
+Marlowe, Chapman, and the rest. Since the constellation of great men
+who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any
+such society; yet their genius failed them to find out the best head
+in the universe. Our poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the
+mountain near. It took a century to make it suspected; and not until
+two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we
+think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the
+history of Shakespeare till now; for he is the father of German
+literature: it was on the introduction of Shakespeare into German, by
+Lessing, and the translation of his works by Wieland and Schlegel,
+that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately
+connected. It was not until the nineteenth century, whose speculative
+genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could
+find such wondering readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought
+are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present,
+we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge
+and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our convictions
+with any adequate fidelity; but there is in all cultivated minds a
+silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like
+Christianity, qualifies the period.
+
+The Shakespeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised
+the missing facts, offered money for any information that will lead
+to proof; and with what result? Beside some important illustration of
+the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted, they have
+gleaned a few facts touching the property, and dealings in regard to
+property, of the poet. It appears that, from year to year, he owned a
+larger share in the Blackfriars Theatre: its wardrobe and other
+appurtenances were his; that he bought an estate in his native
+village, with his earnings, as writer and shareholder; that he lived
+in the best house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbours with
+their commissions in London, as of borrowing money, and the like; that
+he was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was writing
+_Macbeth_, he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford,
+for thirty-five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at
+different times; and, in all respects, appears as a good husband, with
+no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good-natured sort
+of man, an actor and shareholder in the theatre, not in any striking
+manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit the
+importance of this information. It was well worth the pains that have
+been taken to procure it.
+
+But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these
+researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite
+invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We
+are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of
+parentage, birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of
+money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we
+have come to an end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears
+between it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at
+random into the _Modern Plutarch_ and read any other life there, it
+would have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to
+spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to
+abolish the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and
+Collier have wasted their oil. The famed theatres, Covent Garden,
+Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton,
+Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready dedicate their lives to this
+genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows
+them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal
+from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with
+invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once to
+see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of the English stage;
+and all I then heard, and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was
+that in which the tragedian had no part; simply, Hamlet's question to
+the ghost:
+
+                    What may this mean,
+    That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
+    Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?
+
+That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's
+dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces
+the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his
+magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any biography
+shed light on the localities into which the _Midsummer Night's Dream_
+admits me? Did Shakespeare confide to any notary or parish recorder,
+sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate
+creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the
+moonlight of Portia's villa, 'the antres vast and desarts idle' of
+Othello's captivity,--where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the
+chancellor's file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one
+word of those transcendent secrets? In fine, in this drama, as in all
+great works of art,--in the Cyclopean architecture of Egypt and India;
+in the Phidian sculpture; the Gothic minsters; the Italian painting;
+the Ballads of Spain and Scotland;--the Genius draws up the ladder
+after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a
+new age, which sees the works, and asks in vain for a history.
+
+Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can
+tell nothing, except to the Shakespeare in us; that is, to our most
+apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod,
+and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents
+extricated, analysed, and compared by the assiduous Dyce and Collier;
+and now read one of those skyey sentences,--aerolites,--which seem to
+have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but the man
+within the breast, has accepted as words of fate; and tell me if they
+match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or which
+gives the most historical insight into the man.
+
+Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet with Shakespeare
+for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the
+information which is material, that which describes character and
+fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with
+him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions on
+those questions which knock for answer at every heart,--on life and
+death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and the
+ways whereby we come at them; on the characters of men, and the
+influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes; and on those
+mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science, and which yet
+interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who
+ever read the volume of the Sonnets, without finding that the poet had
+there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the
+lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the
+most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men?
+What trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can
+discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, what
+forms and humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of friends, in
+large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let
+Antonio the merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from
+Shakespeare's being the least known, he is the one person, in all
+modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of
+economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life,
+has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge
+of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not
+remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught
+Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What
+lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What
+gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behaviour?
+
+Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare
+valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is
+falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these
+critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a
+full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images,
+which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less,
+we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good
+a dramatist he was, and he is the best in the world. But it turns out,
+that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw some
+attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is
+to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs
+and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which
+gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer,
+or of a code of laws, is immaterial, compared with the universality of
+its application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of
+life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text of
+modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and
+Europe; the father of the man in America: he drew the man, and
+described the day, and what is done in it; he read the hearts of men
+and women, their probity, and their second thought, and wiles; the
+wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices
+slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother's part from
+the father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine
+demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression
+which make the police of nature; and all the sweets and all the
+terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the
+landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life
+sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like making a
+question concerning the paper on which a king's message is written.
+
+Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he
+is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others,
+conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain,
+and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of
+doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No
+man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety
+compatible with an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and
+only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of
+life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He
+clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if
+they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have
+left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in
+language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him
+into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent
+humanity co-ordinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story
+to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain
+observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence,
+and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves
+that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his
+fitness and strength. But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no
+importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities:
+no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no
+discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small,
+subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong,
+as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without
+effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and
+likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of
+power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so
+incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other
+readers.
+
+This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of
+things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has
+added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into
+natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing
+new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without
+loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with
+compass; the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any
+distortion or favour. He carried his powerful execution into minute
+details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as
+he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the
+scrutiny of the solar microscope.
+
+In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of
+production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the
+power to make one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch
+its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to etch
+a million. There are always objects; but there was never
+representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let
+the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given
+for the making of a Shakespeare; but the possibility of the
+translation of things into song is demonstrated.
+
+His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though
+their excellence is lost in the splendour of the dramas, are as
+inimitable as they; and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit
+of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so
+is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now
+as a whole poem.
+
+Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty
+which tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism, yet the
+sentence is so loaded with meaning, and so linked with its foregoers
+and followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as
+admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps
+himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is
+not reduced to dismount and walk, because his horses are running off
+with him in some distant direction: he always rides.
+
+The finest poetry was first experience: but the thought has suffered a
+transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men often attain
+a good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy to read,
+through their poems, their personal history: any one acquainted with
+parties can name every figure: this is Andrew, and that is Rachel. The
+sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and not
+yet a butterfly. In the poet's mind, the fact has gone quite over into
+the new element of thought, and has lost all that is exuvial. This
+generosity abides with Shakespeare. We say, from the truth and
+closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart. Yet
+there is not a trace of egotism.
+
+One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his
+cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his
+aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace: he
+delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that
+sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds
+over the universe. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such charms that
+a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the true
+bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies
+in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, 'It was
+rumoured abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with
+repentance?' Not less sovereign and cheerful,--much more sovereign and
+cheerful, is the tone of Shakespeare. His name suggests joy and
+emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any company
+of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing
+that does not borrow health and longevity from his festal style.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and benefactor,
+when in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame,
+we seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere lessons; it can
+teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs Shakespeare
+also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection of
+humanity.
+
+Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendour of meaning that
+plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than
+for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the
+earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and
+finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and
+conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on
+human life. Shakespeare employed them as colours to compose his
+picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the step which
+seemed inevitable to such genius, namely, to explore the virtue which
+resides in these symbols, and imparts this power,--What is that which
+they themselves say? He converted the elements, which waited on his
+command, into entertainments. He was master of the revels to mankind.
+Is it not as if one should have, through majestic powers of science,
+the comets given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, and
+should draw them from their orbits to glare with the municipal
+fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all towns, 'very
+superior pyrotechny this evening!' Are the agents of nature, and the
+power to understand them, worth no more than a street serenade, or the
+breath of a cigar? One remembers again the trumpet-text in the
+Koran,--'The heavens and the earth, and all that is between them,
+think ye we have created them in jest?' As long as the question is of
+talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show.
+But when the question is to life, and its materials, and its
+auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it signify? It is but a
+Twelfth Night, or Midsummer Night's Dream, or a Winter Evening's Tale:
+what signifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of
+the Shakespeare Societies comes to mind, that he was a jovial actor
+and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable
+men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but
+this man, in wide contrast. Had he been less, had he reached only the
+common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes,
+we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but, that this
+man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger
+subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity
+some furlongs forward into Chaos,--that he should not be wise for
+himself,--it must even go into the world's history, that the best poet
+led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public
+amusement.
+
+Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German, and Swede,
+beheld the same objects: they also saw through them that which was
+contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished; they
+read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a
+sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly,
+joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered round with
+doleful histories of Adam's fall and curse, behind us; with doomsdays
+and purgatorial and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer
+and the heart of the listener sank in them.
+
+It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The world
+still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle with
+Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the
+mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration.
+For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than
+private affection; and love is compatible with universal wisdom.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
+
+1819-1891
+
+WORDSWORTH (1875)
+
+
+A generation has now passed away since Wordsworth was laid with the
+family in the churchyard at Grasmere. Perhaps it is hardly yet time to
+take a perfectly impartial measure of his value as a poet. To do this
+is especially hard for those who are old enough to remember the last
+shot which the foe was sullenly firing in that long war of critics
+which began when he published his manifesto as Pretender, and which
+came to a pause rather than end when they flung up their caps with the
+rest at his final coronation. Something of the intensity of the _odium
+theologicum_ (if indeed the _aestheticum_ be not in these days the
+more bitter of the two) entered into the conflict. The Wordsworthians
+were a sect, who, if they had the enthusiasm, had also not a little of
+the exclusiveness and partiality to which sects are liable. The verses
+of the master had for them the virtue of religious canticles stimulant
+of zeal and not amenable to the ordinary tests of cold-blooded
+criticism. Like the hymns of the Huguenots and Covenanters, they were
+songs of battle no less than of worship, and the combined ardours of
+conviction and conflict lent them a fire that was not naturally their
+own. As we read them now, that virtue of the moment is gone out of
+them, and whatever of Dr. Wattsiness there is gives us a slight shock
+of disenchantment. It is something like the difference between the
+_Marseillaise_ sung by armed propagandists on the edge of battle, or
+by Brissotins in the tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in the
+closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy of Th�r�se. It was
+natural in the early days of Wordsworth's career to dwell most fondly
+on those profounder qualities to appreciate which settled in some sort
+the measure of a man's right to judge of poetry at all. But now we
+must admit the shortcomings, the failures, the defects, as no less
+essential elements in forming a sound judgement as to whether the seer
+and artist were so united in him as to justify the claim first put in
+by himself and afterwards maintained by his sect to a place beside the
+few great poets who exalt men's minds, and give a right direction and
+safe outlet to their passions through the imagination, while
+insensibly helping them toward balance of character and serenity of
+judgement by stimulating their sense of proportion, form, and the nice
+adjustment of means to ends. In none of our poets has the constant
+propulsion of an unbending will, and the concentration of exclusive,
+if I must not say somewhat narrow, sympathies done so much to make the
+original endowment of nature effective, and in none accordingly does
+the biography throw so much light on the works, or enter so largely
+into their composition as an element whether of power or of weakness.
+Wordsworth never saw, and I think never wished to see, beyond the
+limits of his own consciousness and experience. He early conceived
+himself to be, and through life was confirmed by circumstances in the
+faith that he was, a 'dedicated spirit',[41] a state of mind likely
+to further an intense but at the same time one-sided development of
+the intellectual powers. The solitude in which the greater part of his
+mature life was passed, while it doubtless ministered to the
+passionate intensity of his musings upon man and nature, was, it may
+be suspected, harmful to him as an artist, by depriving him of any
+standard of proportion outside himself by which to test the
+comparative value of his thoughts, and by rendering him more and more
+incapable of that urbanity of mind which could be gained only by
+commerce with men more nearly on his own level, and which gives tone
+without lessening individuality. Wordsworth never quite saw the
+distinction between the eccentric and the original. For what we call
+originality seems not so much anything peculiar, much less anything
+odd, but that quality in a man which touches human nature at most
+points of its circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of
+our own powers by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations
+and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings,
+and adequate utterance to our own stammering conceptions or emotions.
+The poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one crying in the
+wilderness to a knot of already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid
+the throng of men, and lifting their common aspirations and
+sympathies (so first clearly revealed to themselves) on the wings of
+his song to a purer ether and a wider reach of view. We cannot, if we
+would, read the poetry of Wordsworth as mere poetry; at every other
+page we find ourselves entangled in a problem of aesthetics. The
+world-old question of matter and form, of whether nectar _is_ of
+precisely the same flavour when served to us from a Grecian chalice or
+from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up for decision anew. The
+Teutonic nature has always shown a sturdy preference of the solid bone
+with a marrow of nutritious moral to any shadow of the same on the
+flowing mirror of sense. Wordsworth never lets us long forget the
+deeply rooted stock from which he sprang,--_vien ben d� lui_.
+
+    [41] In the _Prelude_ he attributes this consecration to a
+    sunrise seen (during a college vacation) as he walked
+    homeward from some village festival where he had danced all
+    night:
+
+        My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
+        Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
+        Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly.
+        A dedicated Spirit.--Book IV.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland on the 7th of
+April, 1770, the second of five children. His father was John
+Wordsworth, an attorney-at-law, and agent of Sir James Lowther,
+afterwards first Earl of Lonsdale. His mother was Anne Cookson, the
+daughter of a mercer in Penrith. His paternal ancestors had been
+settled immemorially at Penistone in Yorkshire, whence his grandfather
+had emigrated to Westmorland. His mother, a woman of piety and wisdom,
+died in March 1778, being then in her thirty-second year. His father,
+who never entirely cast off the depression occasioned by her death,
+survived her but five years, dying in December 1783, when William was
+not quite fourteen years old.
+
+The poet's early childhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, and
+partly with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher
+appears to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone's
+Schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her pupils, teaching them
+chiefly by rote, and not endeavouring to cultivate their reasoning
+faculties, a process by which children are apt to be converted from
+natural logicians into impertinent sophists. Among his schoolmates
+here was Mary Hutchinson, who afterwards became his wife.
+
+In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of
+York, in the year 1585, at Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawkshead is a
+small market-town in the vale of Esthwaite, about a third of a mile
+north-west of the lake. Here Wordsworth passed nine years, among a
+people of simple habits and scenery of a sweet and pastoral dignity.
+His earliest intimacies were with the mountains, lakes, and streams of
+his native district, and the associations with which his mind was
+stored during its most impressible period were noble and pure. The
+boys were boarded among the dames of the village, thus enjoying a
+freedom from scholastic restraints, which could be nothing but
+beneficial in a place where the temptations were only to sports that
+hardened the body, while they fostered a love of nature in the spirit
+and habits of observation in the mind. Wordsworth's ordinary
+amusements here were hunting and fishing, rowing, skating, and long
+walks around the lake and among the hills, with an occasional scamper
+on horseback.[42] His life as a schoolboy was favourable also to his
+poetic development, in being identified with that of the people among
+whom he lived. Among men of simple habits, and where there are small
+diversities of condition, the feelings and passions are displayed with
+less restraint, and the young poet grew acquainted with that primal
+human basis of character where the Muse finds firm foothold, and to
+which he ever afterward cleared his way through all the overlying
+drift of conventionalism. The dalesmen were a primitive and hardy race
+who kept alive the traditions and often the habits of a more
+picturesque time. A common level of interests and social standing
+fostered unconventional ways of thought and speech, and friendly human
+sympathies. Solitude induced reflection, a reliance of the mind on its
+own resources, and individuality of character. Where everybody knew
+everybody, and everybody's father had known everybody's father, the
+interest of man in man was not likely to become a matter of cold
+hearsay and distant report. When death knocked at any door in the
+hamlet, there was an echo from every fireside, and a wedding dropped
+its white flowers at every threshold. There was not a grave in the
+churchyard but had its story; not a crag or glen or aged tree
+untouched with some ideal hue of legend. It was here that Wordsworth
+learned that homely humanity which gives such depth and sincerity to
+his poems. Travel, society, culture, nothing could obliterate the deep
+trace of that early training which enables him to speak directly to
+the primitive instincts of man. He was apprenticed early to the
+difficult art of being himself.
+
+    [42] _Prelude_, Book II.
+
+At school he wrote some task-verses on subjects imposed by the master,
+and also some voluntaries of his own, equally undistinguished by any
+peculiar merit. But he seems to have made up his mind as early as in
+his fourteenth year to become a poet.[43] 'It is recorded', says his
+biographer vaguely, 'that the poet's father set him very early to
+learn portions of the best English poets by heart, so that at an early
+age he could repeat large portions of Shakespeare, Milton, and
+Spenser.'
+
+    [43]
+
+        I to the muses have been bound,
+        These fourteen years, by strong indentures.
+
+                                 _Idiot Boy_ (1798).]
+
+The great event of Wordsworth's schooldays was the death of his
+father, who left what may be called a hypothetical estate, consisting
+chiefly of claims upon the first Earl of Lonsdale, the payment of
+which, though their justice was acknowledged, that nobleman contrived
+in some unexplained way to elude so long as he lived. In October 1787
+he left school for St. John's College, Cambridge. He was already, we
+are told, a fair Latin scholar, and had made some progress in
+mathematics. The earliest books we hear of his reading were _Don
+Quixote_, _Gil Blas_, _Gulliver's Travels_, and the _Tale of a Tub_;
+but at school he had also become familiar with the works of some
+English poets, particularly Goldsmith and Gray, of whose poems he had
+learned many by heart. What is more to the purpose, he had become,
+without knowing it, a lover of Nature in all her moods, and the same
+mental necessities of a solitary life which compel men to an interest
+in the transitory phenomena of scenery, had made him also studious of
+the movements of his own mind, and the mutual interaction and
+dependence of the external and internal universe.
+
+Doubtless his early orphanage was not without its effect in confirming
+a character naturally impatient of control, and his mind, left to
+itself, clothed itself with an indigenous growth, which grew fairly
+and freely, unstinted by the shadow of exotic plantations. It has
+become a truism, that remarkable persons have remarkable mothers; but
+perhaps this is chiefly true of such as have made themselves
+distinguished by their industry, and by the assiduous cultivation of
+faculties in themselves of only an average quality. It is rather to be
+noted how little is known of the parentage of men of the first
+magnitude, how often they seem in some sort foundlings, and how early
+an apparently adverse destiny begins the culture of those who are to
+encounter and master great intellectual or spiritual experiences.
+
+Of his disposition as a child little is known, but that little is
+characteristic. He himself tells us that he was 'stiff, moody, and of
+violent temper'. His mother said of him that he was the only one of
+her children about whom she felt any anxiety,--for she was sure that
+he would be remarkable for good or evil. Once, in resentment at some
+fancied injury, he resolved to kill himself, but his heart failed him.
+I suspect that few boys of passionate temperament have escaped these
+momentary suggestions of despairing helplessness. 'On another
+occasion,' he says, 'while I was at my grandfather's house at Penrith,
+along with my eldest brother Richard, we were whipping tops together
+in the long drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid down on
+particular occasions. The walls were hung round with family pictures,
+and I said to my brother, "Dare you strike your whip through that old
+lady's petticoat?" He replied, "No, I won't." "Then," said I, "here
+goes," and I struck my lash through her hooped petticoat, for which,
+no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was properly punished. But,
+possibly from some want of judgement in punishments inflicted, I had
+become perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather
+proud of it than otherwise.' This last anecdote is as happily typical
+as a bit of Greek mythology which always prefigured the lives of
+heroes in the stories of their childhood. Just so do we find him
+afterward striking his defiant lash through the hooped petticoat of
+the artificial style of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the
+punishment of the Reviewers.
+
+Of his college life the chief record is to be found in _The Prelude_.
+He did not distinguish himself as a scholar, and if his life had any
+incidents, they were of that interior kind which rarely appear in
+biography, though they may be of controlling influence upon the life.
+He speaks of reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton while at
+Cambridge,[44] but no reflection from them is visible in his earliest
+published poems. The greater part of his vacations was spent in his
+native Lake-country, where his only sister, Dorothy, was the companion
+of his rambles. She was a woman of large natural endowments, chiefly
+of the receptive kind, and had much to do with the formation and
+tendency of the poet's mind. It was she who called forth the shyer
+sensibilities of his nature, and taught an originally harsh and
+austere imagination to surround itself with fancy and feeling, as the
+rock fringes itself with a sun-spray of ferns. She was his first
+public, and belonged to that class of prophetically appreciative
+temperaments whose apparent office it is to cheer the early solitude
+of original minds with messages from the future. Through the greater
+part of his life she continued to be a kind of poetical conscience to
+him.
+
+    [44] _Prelude_, Book III.
+
+Wordsworth's last college vacation was spent in a foot journey upon
+the Continent (1790). In January 1791 he took his degree of B.A., and
+left Cambridge. During the summer of this year he visited Wales, and,
+after declining to enter upon holy orders under the plea that he was
+not of age for ordination, went over to France in November, and
+remained during the winter at Orleans. Here he became intimate with
+the republican General Beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations he
+ardently sympathized. In the spring of 1792 he was at Blois, and
+returned thence to Orleans, which he finally quitted in October for
+Paris. He remained here as long as he could with safety, and at the
+close of the year went back to England, thus, perhaps, escaping the
+fate which soon after overtook his friends the Brissotins.
+
+As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be called a fortunate one, not
+less so in the training and expansion of his faculties was this period
+of his stay in France. Born and reared in a country where the homely
+and familiar nestles confidingly amid the most savage and sublime
+forms of nature, he had experienced whatever impulses the creative
+faculty can receive from mountain and cloud and the voices of winds
+and waters, but he had known man only as an actor in fireside
+histories and tragedies, for which the hamlet supplied an ample stage.
+In France he first felt the authentic beat of a nation's heart; he was
+a spectator at one of those dramas where the terrible footfall of the
+Eumenides is heard nearer and nearer in the pauses of the action; and
+he saw man such as he can only be when he is vibrated by the orgasm of
+a national emotion. He sympathized with the hopes of France and of
+mankind deeply, as was fitting in a young man and a poet; and if his
+faith in the gregarious advancement of men was afterward shaken, he
+only held the more firmly by his belief in the individual, and his
+reverence for the human as something quite apart from the popular and
+above it. Wordsworth has been unwisely blamed, as if he had been
+recreant to the liberal instincts of his youth. But it was inevitable
+that a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind which always
+compensated itself for its artistic radicalism by an involuntary
+leaning toward external respectability, should recoil from whatever
+was convulsionary and destructive in politics, and above all in
+religion. He reads the poems of Wordsworth without understanding, who
+does not find in them the noblest incentives to faith in man and the
+grandeur of his destiny, founded always upon that personal dignity and
+virtue, the capacity for whose attainment alone makes universal
+liberty possible and assures its permanence. He was to make men better
+by opening to them the sources of an inalterable well-being; to make
+them free, in a sense higher than political, by showing them that
+these sources are within them, and that no contrivance of man can
+permanently emancipate narrow natures and depraved minds. His politics
+were always those of a poet, circling in the larger orbit of causes
+and principles, careless of the transitory oscillation of events.
+
+The change in his point of view (if change there was) certainly was
+complete soon after his return from France, and was perhaps due in
+part to the influence of Burke.
+
+    While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
+    Against all systems built on abstract rights,
+    Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
+    Of institutes and laws hallowed by time;
+    Declares the vital power of social ties
+    Endeared by custom; and with high disdain,
+    Exploding upstart theory, insists
+    Upon the allegiance to which men are born.
+              ... Could a youth, and one
+    In ancient story versed, whose breast had heaved
+    Under the weight of classic eloquence,
+    Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired?[45]
+
+    [45] _Prelude_, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring
+    to a still earlier date.
+
+He had seen the French for a dozen years eagerly busy in tearing up
+whatever had roots in the past, replacing the venerable trunks of
+tradition and orderly growth with liberty-poles, then striving vainly
+to piece together the fibres they had broken, and to reproduce
+artificially that sense of permanence and continuity which is the main
+safeguard of vigorous self-consciousness in a nation. He became a Tory
+through intellectual conviction, retaining, I suspect, to the last, a
+certain radicalism of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells us that
+in 1809 Sir George Beaumont said to him and Wilkie, 'Wordsworth may
+perhaps walk in; if he do, I caution you both against his terrific
+democratic notions'; and it must have been many years later that
+Wordsworth himself told Crabb Robinson, 'I have no respect whatever
+for Whigs, but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me'. In 1802,
+during his tour in Scotland, he travelled on Sundays as on the other
+days of the week. He afterwards became a theoretical churchgoer.
+'Wordsworth defended earnestly the Church establishment. He even said
+he would shed his blood for it. Nor was he disconcerted by a laugh
+raised against him on account of his having confessed that he knew not
+when he had been in a church in his own country. "All our ministers
+are so vile," said he. The mischief of allowing the clergy to depend
+on the caprice of the multitude he thought more than outweighed all
+the evils of an establishment.'
+
+In December 1792 Wordsworth had returned to England, and in the
+following year published _Descriptive Sketches_ and the _Evening
+Walk_. He did this, as he says in one of his letters, to show that,
+although he had gained no honours at the University, he _could_ do
+something. They met with no great success, and he afterward corrected
+them so much as to destroy all their interest as juvenile productions,
+without communicating to them any of the merits of maturity. In
+commenting, sixty years afterward, on a couplet in one of these
+poems,--
+
+    And, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines
+    Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines,--
+
+he says: 'This is feebly and imperfectly expressed, but I recollect
+distinctly the very spot where this first struck me.... The moment was
+important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness
+of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been
+unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was
+acquainted with them, and I made a resolution to supply in some degree
+the deficiency.'
+
+It is plain that Wordsworth's memory was playing him a trick here,
+misled by that instinct (it may almost be called) of consistency which
+leads men first to desire that their lives should have been without
+break or seam, and then to believe that they have been such. The more
+distant ranges of perspective are apt to run together in
+retrospection. How far could Wordsworth at fourteen have been
+acquainted with the poets of all ages and countries,--he who to his
+dying day could not endure to read Goethe and knew nothing of
+Calderon? It seems to me rather that the earliest influence traceable
+in him is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and it is, perhaps,
+some slight indication of its having already begun that his first
+volume of _Descriptive Sketches_ (1793) was put forth by Johnson, who
+was Cowper's publisher. By and by the powerful impress of Burns is
+seen both in the topics of his verse and the form of his expression.
+But whatever their ultimate effect upon his style, certain it is that
+his juvenile poems were clothed in the conventional habit of the
+eighteenth century. 'The first verses from which he remembered to have
+received great pleasure were Miss Carter's _Poem on Spring_, a poem in
+the six-line stanza which he was particularly fond of and had composed
+much in,--for example, _Ruth_.' This is noteworthy, for Wordsworth's
+lyric range, especially so far as tune is concerned, was always
+narrow. His sense of melody was painfully dull, and some of his
+lighter effusions, as he would have called them, are almost
+ludicrously wanting in grace of movement. We cannot expect in a modern
+poet the thrush-like improvisation, the impulsively bewitching
+cadences, that charm us in our Elizabethan drama and whose last
+warble died with Herrick; but Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have
+shown that the simple pathos of their music was not irrecoverable,
+even if the artless poignancy of their phrase be gone beyond recall.
+We feel this lack in Wordsworth all the more keenly if we compare such
+verses as
+
+    Like an army defeated
+    The snow hath retreated
+    And now doth fare ill
+    On the top of the bare hill,
+
+with Goethe's exquisite _Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh_, in which the
+lines (as if shaken down by a momentary breeze of emotion) drop
+lingeringly one after another like blossoms upon turf.
+
+_The Evening Walk_ and _Descriptive Sketches_ show plainly the
+prevailing influence of Goldsmith, both in the turn of thought and the
+mechanism of the verse. They lack altogether the temperance of tone
+and judgement in selection which have made the _Traveller_ and the
+_Deserted Village_ perhaps the most truly classical poems in the
+language. They bear here and there, however, the unmistakable stamp of
+the maturer Wordsworth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in
+the intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. Of this realism, from
+which Wordsworth never wholly freed himself, the following verses may
+suffice as a specimen. After describing the fate of a chamois-hunter
+killed by falling from a crag, his fancy goes back to the bereaved
+wife and son:
+
+    Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze,
+    Passing his father's bones in future days,
+    Start at the reliques of that very thigh
+    On which so oft he prattled when a boy.
+
+In these poems there is plenty of that 'poetic diction' against which
+Wordsworth was to lead the revolt nine years later.
+
+    To wet the peak's impracticable sides
+    He opens of his feet the sanguine tides,
+    Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes
+    Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies.
+
+Both of these passages have disappeared from the revised edition, as
+well as some curious outbursts of that motiveless despair which Byron
+made fashionable not long after. Nor are there wanting touches of
+fleshliness which strike us oddly as coming from Wordsworth.
+
+    Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade
+    Rest near their little plots of oaten glade,
+    Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire
+    To throw the 'sultry ray' of young Desire;
+    Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go
+    Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow;
+    Those shadowy breasts in love's soft light arrayed,
+    And rising by the moon of passion swayed.
+
+The political tone is also mildened in the revision, as where he
+changes 'despotcourts' into 'tyranny'. One of the alterations is
+interesting. In the _Evening Walk_ he had originally written
+
+    And bids her soldier come her wars to share
+    Asleep on Minden's charnel hill afar.
+
+An erratum at the end directs us to correct the second verse, thus:
+
+    Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar.
+
+Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for making the owl a bodeful
+bird. He had himself done so in the _Evening Walk_, and corrects his
+epithets to suit his later judgement, putting 'gladsome' for 'boding',
+and replacing
+
+    The tremulous sob of the complaining owl
+
+by
+
+    The sportive outcry of the mocking owl.
+
+Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much changed in the
+revision as to make the dates appended to them a misleading
+anachronism. But there is one truly Wordsworthian passage which
+already gives us a glimpse of that passion with which he was the first
+to irradiate descriptive poetry and which sets him on a level with
+Turner.
+
+    'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour
+    All day the floods a deepening murmur pour:
+    The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight;
+    Dark is the region as with coming night;
+    But what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
+    Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
+    Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;
+    Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine
+    The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;
+    Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
+    At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
+    Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun
+    The West that burns like one dilated sun,
+    Where in a mighty crucible expire
+    The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire.
+
+Wordsworth has made only one change in these verses, and that for the
+worse, by substituting 'glorious' (which was already implied in
+'glances' and 'fire-clad') for 'wheeling'. In later life he would have
+found it hard to forgive the man who should have made cliffs recline
+over a lake. On the whole, what strikes us as most prophetic in these
+poems is their want of continuity, and the purple patches of true
+poetry on a texture of unmistakable prose; perhaps we might add the
+incongruous clothing of prose thoughts in the ceremonial robes of
+poesy.
+
+During the same year (1793) he wrote, but did not publish, a political
+tract, in which he avowed himself opposed to monarchy and to the
+hereditary principle, and desirous of a republic, if it could be had
+without a revolution. He probably continued to be all his life in
+favour of that ideal republic 'which never was on land or sea', but
+fortunately he gave up politics that he might devote himself to his
+own nobler calling, to which politics are subordinate, and for which
+he found freedom enough in England as it was. Dr. Wordsworth admits
+that his uncle's opinions were democratical so late as 1802. I suspect
+that they remained so in an esoteric way to the end of his days. He
+had himself suffered by the arbitrary selfishness of a great
+landholder, and he was born and bred in a part of England where there
+is a greater social equality than elsewhere. The look and manner of
+the Cumberland people especially are such as recall very vividly to a
+New-Englander the associations of fifty years ago, ere the change from
+New England to New Ireland had begun. But meanwhile, Want, which makes
+no distinctions of Monarchist or Republican, was pressing upon him.
+The debt due to his father's estate had not been paid, and Wordsworth
+was one of those rare idealists who esteem it the first duty of a
+friend of humanity to live for, and not on, his neighbour. He at first
+proposed establishing a periodical journal to be called _The
+Philanthropist_, but luckily went no further with it, for the receipts
+from an organ of opinion which professed republicanism, and at the
+same time discountenanced the plans of all existing or defunct
+republicans, would have been necessarily scanty. There being no
+appearance of any demand, present or prospective, for philanthropists,
+he tried to get employment as correspondent of a newspaper. Here also
+it was impossible that he should succeed; he was too great to be
+merged in the editorial We, and had too well defined a private opinion
+on all subjects to be able to express that average of public opinion
+which constitutes able editorials. But so it is that to the prophet in
+the wilderness the birds of ill omen are already on the wing with food
+from heaven; and while Wordsworth's relatives were getting impatient
+at what they considered his waste of time, while one thought he had
+gifts enough to make a good parson, and another lamented the rare
+attorney that was lost in him, the prescient muse guided the hand of
+Raisley Calvert while he wrote the poet's name in his will for a
+legacy of �900. By the death of Calvert, in 1795, this timely help
+came to Wordsworth at the turning-point of his life, and made it
+honest for him to write poems that will never die, instead of
+theatrical critiques as ephemeral as play-bills, or leaders that led
+only to oblivion.
+
+In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sister took up their abode at
+Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. Here nearly two years
+were passed, chiefly in the study of poetry, and Wordsworth to some
+extent recovered from the fierce disappointment of his political
+dreams, and regained that equable tenor of mind which alone is
+consistent with a healthy productiveness. Here Coleridge, who had
+contrived to see something more in the _Descriptive Sketches_ than
+the public had discovered there, first made his acquaintance. The
+sympathy and appreciation of an intellect like Coleridge's supplied
+him with that external motive to activity which is the chief use of
+popularity, and justified to him his opinion of his own powers. It was
+now that the tragedy of _The Borderers_ was for the most part written,
+and that plan of the _Lyrical Ballads_ suggested which gave Wordsworth
+a clue to lead him out of the metaphysical labyrinth in which he was
+entangled. It was agreed between the two young friends, that
+Wordsworth was to be a philosophic poet, and, by a good fortune
+uncommon to such conspiracies, Nature had already consented to the
+arrangement. In July 1797, the two Wordsworths removed to Allfoxden in
+Somersetshire, that they might be near Coleridge, who in the meanwhile
+had married and settled himself at Nether Stowey. In November _The
+Borderers_ was finished, and Wordsworth went up to London with his
+sister to offer it for the stage. The good Genius of the poet again
+interposing, the play was decisively rejected, and Wordsworth went
+back to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first tragi-comedy so
+common to young authors.
+
+The play has fine passages, but is as unreal as _Jane Eyre_. It shares
+with many of Wordsworth's narrative poems the defect of being written
+to illustrate an abstract moral theory, so that the overbearing thesis
+is continually thrusting the poetry to the wall. Applied to the drama,
+such predestination makes all the personages puppets and disenables
+them for being characters. Wordsworth seems to have felt this when he
+published _The Borderers_ in 1842, and says in a note that it was 'at
+first written ... without any view to its exhibition upon the stage'.
+But he was mistaken. The contemporaneous letters of Coleridge to
+Cottle show that he was long in giving up the hope of getting it
+accepted by some theatrical manager.
+
+He now applied himself to the preparation of the first volume of the
+_Lyrical Ballads_ for the press, and it was published toward the close
+of 1798. The book, which contained also _The Ancient Mariner_ of
+Coleridge, attracted little notice, and that in great part
+contemptuous. When Mr. Cottle, the publisher, shortly after sold his
+copyrights to Mr. Longman, that of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was reckoned
+at _zero_, and it was at last given up to the authors. A few persons
+were not wanting, however, who discovered the dawn-streaks of a new
+day in that light which the critical fire-brigade thought to
+extinguish with a few contemptuous spurts of cold water.
+
+Lord Byron describes himself as waking one morning and finding himself
+famous, and it is quite an ordinary fact, that a blaze may be made
+with a little saltpetre that will be stared at by thousands who would
+have thought the sunrise tedious. If we may believe his biographer,
+Wordsworth might have said that he awoke and found himself infamous,
+for the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ undoubtedly raised him to
+the distinction of being the least popular poet in England. Parnassus
+has two peaks; the one where improvising poets cluster; the other
+where the singer of deep secrets sits alone,--a peak veiled sometimes
+from the whole morning of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke
+of kitchen fires, only to glow the more consciously at sunset, and
+after nightfall to crown itself with imperishable stars. Wordsworth
+had that self-trust which in the man of genius is sublime, and in the
+man of talent insufferable. It mattered not to him though all the
+reviewers had been in a chorus of laughter or conspiracy of silence
+behind him. He went quietly over to Germany to write more Lyrical
+Ballads, and to begin a poem on the growth of his own mind, at a time
+when there were only two men in the world (himself and Coleridge) who
+were aware that he had one, or at least one anywise differing from
+those mechanically uniform ones which are stuck drearily, side by
+side, in the great pin-paper of society.
+
+In Germany Wordsworth dined in company with Klopstock, and after
+dinner they had a conversation, of which Wordsworth took notes. The
+respectable old poet, who was passing the evening of his days by the
+chimney-corner, Darby and Joan like, with his respectable Muse, seems
+to have been rather bewildered by the apparition of a living genius.
+The record is of value now chiefly for the insight it gives us into
+Wordsworth's mind. Among other things he said, 'that it was the
+province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to
+descend to theirs',--memorable words, the more memorable that a
+literary life of sixty years was in keeping with them.
+
+It would be instructive to know what were Wordsworth's studies during
+his winter in Goslar. De Quincey's statement is mere conjecture. It
+may be guessed fairly enough that he would seek an entrance to the
+German language by the easy path of the ballad, a course likely to
+confirm him in his theories as to the language of poetry. The
+Spinozism with which he has been not unjustly charged was certainly
+not due to any German influence, for it appears unmistakably in the
+_Lines composed at Tintern Abbey_ in July 1798. It is more likely to
+have been derived from his talks with Coleridge in 1797. When Emerson
+visited him in 1833, he spoke with loathing of _Wilhelm Meister_, a
+part of which he had read in Carlyle's translation apparently. There
+was some affectation in this, it should seem, for he had read
+Smollett. On the whole, it may be fairly concluded that the help of
+Germany in the development of his genius may be reckoned as very
+small, though there is certainly a marked resemblance both in form and
+sentiment between some of his earlier lyrics and those of Goethe. His
+poem of the _Thorn_, though vastly more imaginative, may have been
+suggested by B�rger's _Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain_. The little
+grave _drei Spannen lang_, in its conscientious measurement, certainly
+recalls a famous couplet in the English poem.
+
+After spending the winter at Goslar, Wordsworth and his sister
+returned to England in the spring of 1799, and settled at Grasmere in
+Westmorland. In 1800, the first edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ being
+exhausted, it was republished with the addition of another volume, Mr.
+Longman paying �100 for the copyright of two editions. The book passed
+to a second edition in 1802, and to a third in 1805. Wordsworth sent a
+copy of it, with a manly letter, to Mr. Fox, particularly recommending
+to his attention the poems _Michael_ and _The Brothers_, as displaying
+the strength and permanence among a simple and rural population of
+those domestic affections which were certain to decay gradually under
+the influence of manufactories and poor-houses. Mr. Fox wrote a civil
+acknowledgement, saying that his favourites among the poems were
+_Harry Gill_, _We are Seven_, _The Mad Mother_, and _The Idiot_, but
+that he was prepossessed against the use of blank verse for simple
+subjects. Any political significance in the poems he was apparently
+unable to see. To this second edition Wordsworth prefixed an
+argumentative Preface, in which he nailed to the door of the cathedral
+of English song the critical theses which he was to maintain against
+all comers in his poetry and his life. It was a new thing for an
+author to undertake to show the goodness of his verses by the logic
+and learning of his prose; but Wordsworth carried to the reform of
+poetry all that fervour and faith which had lost their political
+object, and it is another proof of the sincerity and greatness of his
+mind, and of that heroic simplicity which is their concomitant, that
+he could do so calmly what was sure to seem ludicrous to the greater
+number of his readers. Fifty years have since demonstrated that the
+true judgement of one man outweighs any counterpoise of false
+judgement, and that the faith of mankind is guided to a man only by a
+well-founded faith in himself. To this _Defensio_ Wordsworth afterward
+added a supplement, and the two form a treatise of permanent value for
+philosophic statement and decorous English. Their only ill effect has
+been, that they have encouraged many otherwise deserving young men to
+set a Sibylline value on their verses in proportion as they were
+unsaleable. The strength of an argument for self-reliance drawn from
+the example of a great man depends wholly on the greatness of him who
+uses it; such arguments being like coats of mail, which, though they
+serve the strong against arrow-flights and lance-thrusts, may only
+suffocate the weak or sink him the sooner in the waters of oblivion.
+
+An advertisement prefixed to the _Lyrical Ballads_, as originally
+published in one volume, warned the reader that 'they were written
+chiefly with a view to ascertain how far _the language of conversation
+in the middle and lower classes_ of society is adapted to the purposes
+of poetic pleasure'. In his preface to the second edition, in two
+volumes, Wordsworth already found himself forced to shift his ground a
+little (perhaps in deference to the wider view and finer sense of
+Coleridge), and now says of the former volume that 'it was published
+as an experiment which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain how
+far, by fitting to metrical arrangement, _a selection of the real
+language of men in a state of vivid sensation_, that sort of pleasure
+and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted which a poet may
+_rationally endeavour_ to impart'. Here is evidence of a retreat
+towards a safer position, though Wordsworth seems to have remained
+unconvinced at heart, and for many years longer clung obstinately to
+the passages of bald prose into which his original theory had betrayed
+him. In 1815 his opinions had undergone a still further change, and an
+assiduous study of the qualities of his own mind and of his own poetic
+method (the two subjects in which alone he was ever a thorough
+scholar) had convinced him that poetry was in no sense that appeal to
+the understanding which is implied by the words 'rationally endeavour
+to impart'. In the preface of that year he says, 'The observations
+prefixed to that portion of these volumes which was published many
+years ago under the title of _Lyrical Ballads_ have so little of
+special application to the greater part of the present enlarged and
+diversified collection, that they could not with propriety stand as an
+introduction to it.' It is a pity that he could not have become an
+earlier convert to Coleridge's pithy definition, that 'prose was words
+in their best order, and poetry the _best_ words in the best order'.
+But idealization was something that Wordsworth was obliged to learn
+painfully. It did not come to him naturally as to Spenser and Shelley
+and to Coleridge in his higher moods. Moreover, it was in the too
+frequent choice of subjects incapable of being idealized without a
+manifest jar between theme and treatment that Wordsworth's great
+mistake lay. For example, in _The Blind Highland Boy_ he had
+originally the following stanzas:
+
+    Strong is the current, but be mild,
+    Ye waves, and spare the helpless child!
+    If ye in anger fret or chafe,
+    A bee-hive would be ship as safe
+      As that in which he sails.
+
+    But say, what was it? Thought of fear!
+    Well may ye tremble when ye hear!
+    --A household tub like one of those
+    Which women use to wash their clothes,
+      This carried the blind boy.
+
+In endeavouring to get rid of the downright vulgarity of phrase in the
+last stanza, Wordsworth invents an impossible tortoise-shell, and thus
+robs his story of the reality which alone gave it a living interest.
+Any extemporized raft would have floated the boy down to immortality.
+But Wordsworth never quite learned the distinction between Fact, which
+suffocates the Muse, and Truth, which is the very breath of her
+nostrils. Study and self-culture did much for him, but they never
+quite satisfied him that he was capable of making a mistake. He
+yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on certain points, and gave
+up, for example, the ludicrous exactness of
+
+    I've measured it from side to side,
+    'Tis three feet long and two feet wide.
+
+But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to his dying day he
+could never quite shake off that habit of over-minute detail which
+renders the narratives of uncultivated people so tedious, and
+sometimes so distasteful. _Simon Lee_, after his latest revision,
+still contains verses like these:
+
+    And he is lean and he is sick;
+    His body, dwindled and awry,
+    Rests upon ankles swollen and thick;
+    His legs are thin and dry;
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Few months of life he has in store,
+    As he to you will tell,
+    For still, the more he works, the more
+    Do his weak ankles swell,--
+
+which are not only prose, but _bad_ prose, and moreover guilty of the
+same fault for which Wordsworth condemned Dr. Johnson's famous parody
+on the ballad-style,--that their '_matter_ is contemptible'. The
+sonorousness of conviction with which Wordsworth sometimes gives
+utterance to commonplaces of thought and trivialities of sentiment has
+a ludicrous effect on the profane and even on the faithful in
+unguarded moments. We are reminded of a passage in _The Excursion_:
+
+             List! I heard
+    From yon huge breast of rock _a solemn bleat_,
+    _Sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice_.
+
+In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with Lamb began, and was
+thenceforward never interrupted. He continued to live at Grasmere,
+conscientiously diligent in the composition of poems, secure of
+finding the materials of glory within and around him; for his genius
+taught him that inspiration is no product of a foreign shore, and that
+no adventurer ever found it, though he wandered as long as Ulysses.
+Meanwhile the appreciation of the best minds and the gratitude of the
+purest hearts gradually centred more and more towards him. In 1802 he
+made a short visit to France, in company with Miss Wordsworth, and
+soon after his return to England was married to Mary Hutchinson, on
+the 4th of October of the same year. Of the good fortune of this
+marriage no other proof is needed than the purity and serenity of his
+poems, and its record is to be sought nowhere else.
+
+On the 18th of June, 1803, his first child, John, was born, and on the
+14th of August of the same year he set out with his sister on a foot
+journey into Scotland. Coleridge was their companion during a part of
+this excursion, of which Miss Wordsworth kept a full diary. In
+Scotland he made the acquaintance of Scott, who recited to him a part
+of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, then in manuscript. The travellers
+returned to Grasmere on the 25th of September. It was during this
+year that Wordsworth's intimacy with the excellent Sir George
+Beaumont began. Sir George was an amateur painter of considerable
+merit, and his friendship was undoubtedly of service to Wordsworth in
+making him familiar with the laws of a sister art and thus
+contributing to enlarge the sympathies of his criticism, the tendency
+of which was toward too great exclusiveness. Sir George Beaumont,
+dying in 1827, did not forgo his regard for the poet, but contrived to
+hold his affection in mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of �100, to
+defray the charges of a yearly journey.
+
+In March 1805, the poet's brother, John, lost his life by the
+shipwreck of the _Abergavenny_ East-Indiaman, of which he was captain.
+He was a man of great purity and integrity, and sacrificed himself to
+his sense of duty by refusing to leave the ship till it was impossible
+to save him. Wordsworth was deeply attached to him, and felt such
+grief at his death as only solitary natures like his are capable of,
+though mitigated by a sense of the heroism which was the cause of it.
+The need of mental activity as affording an outlet to intense emotion
+may account for the great productiveness of this and the following
+year. He now completed _The Prelude_, wrote _The Waggoner_, and
+increased the number of his smaller poems enough to fill two volumes,
+which were published in 1807.
+
+This collection, which contained some of the most beautiful of his
+shorter pieces, and among others the incomparable _Odes_ to Duty and
+on Immortality, did not reach a second edition till 1815. The
+reviewers had another laugh, and rival poets pillaged while they
+scoffed, particularly Byron, among whose verses a bit of Wordsworth
+showed as incongruously as a sacred vestment on the back of some
+buccaneering plunderer of an abbey. There was a general combination to
+put him down, but on the other hand there was a powerful party in his
+favour, consisting of William Wordsworth. He not only continued in
+good heart himself, but, reversing the order usual on such occasions,
+kept up the spirits of his friends.
+
+Wordsworth passed the winter of 1806-7 in a house of Sir George
+Beaumont's, at Coleorton in Leicestershire, the cottage at Grasmere
+having become too small for his increased family. On his return to the
+Vale of Grasmere he rented the house at Allan Bank, where he lived
+three years. During this period he appears to have written very little
+poetry, for which his biographer assigns as a primary reason the
+smokiness of the Allan Bank chimneys. This will hardly account for the
+failure of the summer crop, especially as Wordsworth composed chiefly
+in the open air. It did not prevent him from writing a pamphlet upon
+the Convention of Cintra, which was published too late to attract much
+attention, though Lamb says that its effect upon him was like that
+which one of Milton's tracts might have had upon a contemporary. It
+was at Allan Bank that Coleridge dictated _The Friend_, and Wordsworth
+contributed to it two essays, one in answer to a letter of Mathetes
+(Professor Wilson), and the other on Epitaphs, republished in the
+Notes to _The Excursion_. Here also he wrote his _Description of the
+Scenery of the Lakes_. Perhaps a truer explanation of the comparative
+silence of Wordsworth's Muse during these years is to be found in the
+intense interest which he took in current events, whose variety,
+picturesqueness, and historical significance were enough to absorb all
+the energies of his imagination.
+
+In the spring of 1811 Wordsworth removed to the Parsonage at Grasmere.
+Here he remained two years, and here he had his second intimate
+experience of sorrow in the loss of two of his children, Catharine and
+Thomas, one of whom died 4th June, and the other 1st December, 1812.
+Early in 1813 he bought Rydal Mount, and, having removed thither,
+changed his abode no more during the rest of his life. In March of
+this year he was appointed Distributor of Stamps for the county of
+Westmorland, an office whose receipts rendered him independent, and
+whose business he was able to do by deputy, thus leaving him ample
+leisure for nobler duties. De Quincey speaks of this appointment as an
+instance of the remarkable good luck which waited upon Wordsworth
+through his whole life. In our view it is only another illustration of
+that scripture which describes the righteous as never forsaken. Good
+luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and
+conscientious observance of duty. Wordsworth owed his nomination to
+the friendly exertions of the Earl of Lonsdale, who desired to atone
+as far as might be for the injustice of the first Earl, and who
+respected the honesty of the man more than he appreciated the
+originality of the poet. The Collectorship at Whitehaven (a more
+lucrative office) was afterwards offered to Wordsworth, and declined.
+He had enough for independence, and wished nothing more. Still later,
+on the death of the Stamp-Distributor for Cumberland, a part of that
+district was annexed to Westmorland, and Wordsworth's income was
+raised to something more than �1,000 a year.
+
+In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland, visiting Yarrow in
+company with the Ettrick Shepherd. During this year _The Excursion_
+was published, in an edition of five hundred copies, which supplied
+the demand for six years. Another edition of the same number of copies
+was published in 1827, and not exhausted till 1834. In 1815 _The White
+Doe of Rylstone_ appeared, and in 1816 _A Letter to a Friend of
+Burns_, in which Wordsworth gives his opinion upon the limits to be
+observed by the biographers of literary men. It contains many valuable
+suggestions, but allows hardly scope enough for personal details, to
+which he was constitutionally indifferent. Nearly the same date may be
+ascribed to a rhymed translation of the first three books of the
+_Aeneid_, a specimen of which was printed in the Cambridge
+_Philological Museum_ (1832). In 1819 _Peter Bell_, written twenty
+years before, was published, and, perhaps in consequence of the
+ridicule of the reviewers, found a more rapid sale than any of his
+previous volumes. _The Waggoner_, printed in the same year, was less
+successful. His next publication was the volume of _Sonnets on the
+river Duddon_, with some miscellaneous poems, 1820. A tour on the
+Continent in 1820 furnished the subjects for another collection,
+published in 1822. This was followed in the same year by the volume of
+_Ecclesiastical Sketches_. His subsequent publications were _Yarrow
+Revisited_, 1835, and the tragedy of _The Borderers_, 1842.
+
+During all these years his fame was increasing slowly but steadily,
+and his age gathered to itself the reverence and the troops of
+friends which his poems and the nobly simple life reflected in them
+deserved. Public honours followed private appreciation. In 1838 the
+University of Dublin conferred upon him the degree of D.C.L. In 1839
+Oxford did the same, and the reception of the poet (now in his
+seventieth year) at the University was enthusiastic. In 1842 he
+resigned his office of Stamp-Distributor, and Sir Robert Peel had the
+honour of putting him upon the civil list for a pension of �300. In
+1843 he was appointed Laureate, with the express understanding that it
+was a tribute of respect, involving no duties except such as might be
+self-imposed. His only official production was an Ode for the
+installation of Prince Albert as Chancellor of the University of
+Cambridge. His life was prolonged yet seven years, almost, it should
+seem, that he might receive that honour which he had truly conquered
+for himself by the unflinching bravery of a literary life of half a
+century, unparalleled for the scorn with which its labours were
+received, and the victorious acknowledgement which at last crowned
+them. Surviving nearly all his contemporaries, he had, if ever any man
+had, a foretaste of immortality, enjoying in a sort his own posthumous
+renown, for the hardy slowness of its growth gave a safe pledge of its
+durability. He died on the 23rd of April, 1850, the anniversary of the
+death of Shakespeare.
+
+We have thus briefly sketched the life of Wordsworth,--a life
+uneventful even for a man of letters; a life like that of an oak, of
+quiet self-development, throwing out stronger roots toward the side
+whence the prevailing storm-blasts blow, and of tougher fibre in
+proportion to the rocky nature of the soil in which it grows. The
+life and growth of his mind, and the influences which shaped it, are
+to be looked for, even more than is the case with most poets, in his
+works, for he deliberately recorded them there.
+
+Of his personal characteristics little is related. He was somewhat
+above the middle height, but, according to De Quincey, of indifferent
+figure, the shoulders being narrow and drooping. His finest feature
+was the eye, which was grey and full of spiritual light. Leigh Hunt
+says: 'I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired, so supernatural.
+They were like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of
+acrid fixture of regard. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have
+had such eyes.' Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and
+Haydon that he had none of form. The best likeness of him, in De
+Quincey's judgement, is the portrait of Milton prefixed to
+Richardson's notes on _Paradise Lost_. He was active in his habits,
+composing in the open air, and generally dictating his poems. His
+daily life was regular, simple, and frugal; his manners were dignified
+and kindly; and in his letters and recorded conversations it is
+remarkable how little that was personal entered into his judgement of
+contemporaries.
+
+The true rank of Wordsworth among poets is, perhaps, not even yet to
+be fairly estimated, so hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of
+judgement uninflamed by the tumult of partisanship which besets the
+doors.
+
+Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great poet, at a time when
+the artificial school of poetry was enthroned with all the authority
+of long succession and undisputed legitimacy, it was almost
+inevitable that Wordsworth, who, both by nature and judgement was a
+rebel against the existing order, should become a partisan.
+Unfortunately, he became not only the partisan of a system, but of
+William Wordsworth as its representative. Right in general principle,
+he thus necessarily became wrong in particulars. Justly convinced that
+greatness only achieves its ends by implicitly obeying its own
+instincts, he perhaps reduced the following his instincts too much to
+a system, mistook his own resentments for the promptings of his
+natural genius, and, compelling principle to the measure of his own
+temperament or even of the controversial exigency of the moment, fell
+sometimes into the error of making naturalness itself artificial. If a
+poet resolve to be original, it will end commonly in his being merely
+peculiar.
+
+Wordsworth himself departed more and more in practice, as he grew
+older, from the theories which he had laid down in his prefaces;[46]
+but those theories undoubtedly had a great effect in retarding the
+growth of his fame. He had carefully constructed a pair of spectacles
+through which his earlier poems were to be studied, and the public
+insisted on looking through them at his mature works, and were
+consequently unable to see fairly what required a different focus. He
+forced his readers to come to his poetry with a certain amount of
+conscious preparation, and thus gave them beforehand the impression of
+something like mechanical artifice, and deprived them of the contented
+repose of implicit faith. To the child a watch seems to be a living
+creature; but Wordsworth would not let his readers be children, and
+did injustice to himself by giving them an uneasy doubt whether
+creations which really throbbed with the very heart's-blood of genius,
+and were alive with nature's life of life, were not contrivances of
+wheels and springs. A naturalness which we are told to expect has lost
+the crowning grace of nature. The men who walked in Cornelius
+Agrippa's visionary gardens had probably no more pleasurable emotion
+than that of a shallow wonder, or an equally shallow self-satisfaction
+in thinking they had hit upon the secret of the thaumaturgy; but to a
+tree that has grown as God willed we come without a theory and with
+no botanical predilections, enjoying it simply and thankfully; or the
+Imagination recreates for us its past summers and winters, the birds
+that have nested and sung in it, the sheep that have clustered in its
+shade, the winds that have visited it, the cloud-bergs that have
+drifted over it, and the snows that have ermined it in winter. The
+Imagination is a faculty that flouts at foreordination, and Wordsworth
+seemed to do all he could to cheat his readers of her company by
+laying out paths with a peremptory _Do not step off the gravel!_ at
+the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every conceivable
+emotion, with guide-boards to tell each when and where it must be
+caught.
+
+    [46] How far he swung backward toward the school under whose
+    influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he
+    had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The
+    advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his
+    _Thanksgiving Ode_ which, if one met with it by itself, he
+    would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope:
+
+        While the _tubed engine_ [the organ] feels the inspiring blast.
+
+    And in _The Italian Itinerant_ and _The Swiss Goatherd_ we
+    find a thermometer or barometer called
+
+                      The well-wrought scale
+        Whose sentient tube instructs to time
+        A purpose to a fickle clime.
+
+    Still worse in the _Eclipse of the Sun_, 1821:
+
+        High on her speculative tower
+        Stood Science, waiting for the hour
+        When Sol was destined to endure
+          That darkening.
+
+    So in _The Excursion_,
+
+        The cold March wind raised in her tender throat
+        Viewless obstructions.
+
+But if these things stood in the way of immediate appreciation, he had
+another theory which interferes more seriously with the total and
+permanent effect of his poems. He was theoretically determined not
+only to be a philosophic poet, but to be a _great_ philosophic poet,
+and to this end he must produce an epic. Leaving aside the question
+whether the epic be obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether the
+history of a single man's mind is universal enough in its interest to
+furnish all the requirements of the epic machinery, and it may be more
+than doubted whether a poet's philosophy be ordinary metaphysics,
+divisible into chapter and section. It is rather something which is
+more energetic in a word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts
+unclose themselves instinctively at its simple _Open sesame!_ while
+they would stand firm against the reading of the whole body of
+philosophy. In point of fact, the one element of greatness which _The
+Excursion_ possesses indisputably is heaviness. It is only the
+episodes that are universally read, and the effect of these is diluted
+by the connecting and accompanying lectures on metaphysics. Wordsworth
+had his epic mould to fill, and, like Benvenuto Cellini in casting his
+Perseus, was forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal, lest
+it should run short. Separated from the rest, the episodes are perfect
+poems in their kind, and without example in the language.
+
+Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong minds, was a good critic
+of the substance of poetry, but somewhat niggardly in the allowance he
+made for those subsidiary qualities which make it the charmer of
+leisure and the employment of minds without definite object. It may be
+doubted, indeed, whether he set much store by any contemporary writing
+but his own, and whether he did not look upon poetry too exclusively
+as an exercise rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the
+imagination. He says of himself, speaking of his youth:
+
+                                     In fine,
+    I was a better judge of thoughts than words,
+    Misled in estimating words, not only
+    By common inexperience of youth,
+    But by the trade in classic niceties,
+    The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase
+    From languages that want the living voice
+    To carry meaning to the natural heart;
+    To tell us what is passion, what is truth,
+    What reason, what simplicity and sense.[47]
+
+    [47] _Prelude_, Book VI.
+
+Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this was always true of
+him, and his thought seems often to lean upon a word too weak to bear
+its weight. No reader of adequate insight can help regretting that he
+did not earlier give himself to 'the trade of classic niceties'. It
+was precisely this which gives to the blank-verse of Landor the severe
+dignity and reserved force which alone among later poets recall the
+tune of Milton, and to which Wordsworth never attained. Indeed,
+Wordsworth's blank-verse (though the passion be profounder) is always
+essentially that of Cowper. They were alike also in their love of
+outward nature and of simple things. The main difference between them
+is one of scenery rather than of sentiment, between the lifelong
+familiar of the mountains and the dweller on the plain.
+
+It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest powers of the
+poetic mind were associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and
+commonplace. It is in the understanding (always prosaic) that the
+great golden veins of his imagination are imbedded. He wrote too much
+to write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes-army of words, but
+a compact Greek ten thousand, that march safely down to posterity. He
+set tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to
+make Jove's eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout _The
+Prelude_ and _The Excursion_ he seems striving to bind the wizard
+Imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have
+forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the particles cohere.
+There is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress
+wearisome. Yet with what splendours as of mountain-sunsets are we
+rewarded! what golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching
+heavenward with angels ascending and descending! what haunting
+harmonies hover around us deep and eternal like the undying baritone
+of the sea! and if we are compelled to fare through sands and desert
+wildernesses, how often do we not hear airy shapes that syllable our
+names with a startling personal appeal to our highest consciousness
+and our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for in vain in any other
+poet!
+
+Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot but allow,
+and what is left will show how truly great he was. He had no humour,
+no dramatic power, and his temperament was of that dry and juiceless
+quality, that in all his published correspondence you shall not find a
+letter, but only essays. If we consider carefully where he was most
+successful, we shall find that it was not so much in description of
+natural scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid expression
+of the effect produced by external objects and events upon his own
+mind, and of the shape and hue (perhaps momentary) which they in turn
+took from his mood or temperament. His finest passages are always
+monologues. He had a fondness for particulars, and there are parts of
+his poems which remind us of local histories in the undue relative
+importance given to trivial matters. He was the historian of
+Wordsworthshire. This power of particularization (for it is as truly a
+power as generalization) is what gives such vigour and greatness to
+single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a
+single thought or sentiment. It was this that made him so fond of the
+sonnet. That sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his
+fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was never self-denying
+enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary and meditative
+temper, and it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of what was
+permanent in literature) liked him best. Its narrow bounds, but
+fourteen paces from end to end, turn into a virtue his too common
+fault of giving undue prominence to every passing emotion. He excels
+in monologue, and the law of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy.
+In _The Excursion_ we are driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict
+of extenuating circumstances. His mind had not that reach and
+elemental movement of Milton's, which, like the trade-wind, gathered
+to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter;
+some deep with silks and spicery, some brooding over the silent
+thunders of their battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their
+destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of
+canvas strained by the unifying breath of their common epic impulse.
+It was an organ that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable
+equally of the trumpet's ardours or the slim delicacy of the flute,
+and sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his prose, as
+if he touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. If
+Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it
+aside soon and willingly for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral
+reed. And it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream, but that which
+Apollo breathed through, tending the flocks of Admetus,--that which
+Pan endowed with every melody of the visible universe,--the same in
+which the soul of the despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her
+dual nature,--so that ever and anon, amid the notes of human joy or
+sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone,
+thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity.
+
+Wordsworth's absolute want of humour, while it no doubt confirmed his
+self-confidence by making him insensible both to the comical
+incongruity into which he was often led by his earlier theory
+concerning the language of poetry and to the not unnatural ridicule
+called forth by it, seems to have been indicative of a certain
+dullness of perception in other directions.[48] We cannot help
+feeling that the material of his nature was essentially prose, which,
+in his inspired moments, he had the power of transmuting, but which,
+whenever the inspiration failed or was factitious, remained
+obstinately leaden. The normal condition of many poets would seem to
+approach that temperature to which Wordsworth's mind could be raised
+only by the white heat of profoundly inward passion. And in proportion
+to the intensity needful to make his nature thoroughly aglow is the
+very high quality of his best verses. They seem rather the productions
+of nature than of man, and have the lastingness of such, delighting
+our age with the same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our
+youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of
+diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of
+fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed for ever in immutable
+grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very
+ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of
+mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of
+prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavouring it, falls more below
+himself, and is, more even than many poets his inferiors in
+imaginative quality, a poet of passages. Indeed, one cannot help
+having the feeling sometimes that the poem is there for the sake of
+these passages, rather than that these are the natural jets and
+elations of a mind energized by the rapidity of its own motion. In
+other words, the happy couplet or gracious image seems not to spring
+from the inspiration of the poem conceived as a whole, but rather to
+have dropped of itself into the mind of the poet in one of his
+rambles, who then, in a less rapt mood, has patiently built up around
+it a setting of verse too often ungraceful in form and of a material
+whose cheapness may cast a doubt on the priceless quality of the gem
+it encumbers.[49] During the most happily productive period of his
+life, Wordsworth was impatient of what may be called the mechanical
+portion of his art. His wife and sister seem from the first to have
+been his scribes. In later years, he had learned and often insisted
+on the truth that poetry was an art no less than a gift, and corrected
+his poems in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment. But he
+certainly had more of the vision than of the faculty divine, and was
+always a little numb on the side of form and proportion. Perhaps his
+best poem in these respects is the _Laodamia_, and it is not
+uninstructive to learn from his own lips that 'it cost him more
+trouble than almost anything of equal length he had ever written'. His
+longer poems (miscalled epical) have no more intimate bond of union
+than their more or less immediate relation to his own personality. Of
+character other than his own he had but a faint conception, and all
+the personages of _The Excursion_ that are not Wordsworth are the
+merest shadows of himself upon mist, for his self-concentrated nature
+was incapable of projecting itself into the consciousness of other men
+and seeing the springs of action at their source in the recesses of
+individual character. The best parts of these longer poems are bursts
+of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers were always clumsy at the
+_callida junctura_. The stream of narration is sluggish, if varied by
+times with pleasing reflections (_viridesque placido aequore sylvas_);
+we are forced to do our own rowing, and only when the current is
+hemmed in by some narrow gorge of the poet's personal consciousness do
+we feel ourselves snatched along on the smooth but impetuous rush of
+unmistakable inspiration. The fact that what is precious in
+Wordsworth's poetry was (more truly even than with some greater poets
+than he) a gift rather than an achievement should always be borne in
+mind in taking the measure of his power. I know not whether to call
+it height or depth, this peculiarity of his, but it certainly endows
+those parts of his work which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian
+with an unexpectedness and impressiveness of originality such as we
+feel in the presence of Nature herself. He seems to have been half
+conscious of this, and recited his own poems to all comers with an
+enthusiasm of wondering admiration that would have been profoundly
+comic but for its simple sincerity and for the fact that William
+Wordsworth, Esquire, of Rydal Mount, was one person, and the William
+Wordsworth whom he so heartily reverenced quite another. We recognize
+two voices in him, as Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah and
+his scribe Baruch. If the prophet cease from dictating, the
+amanuensis, rather than be idle, employs his pen in jotting down some
+anecdotes of his master, how he one day went out and saw an old woman,
+and the next day did _not_, and so came home and dictated some verses
+on this ominous phenomenon, and how another day he saw a cow. These
+marginal annotations have been carelessly taken up into the text, have
+been religiously held by the pious to be orthodox scripture, and by
+dexterous exegesis have been made to yield deeply oracular meanings.
+Presently the real prophet takes up the word again and speaks as one
+divinely inspired, the Voice of a higher and invisible power.
+Wordsworth's better utterances have the bare sincerity, the absolute
+abstraction from time and place, the immunity from decay, that belong
+to the grand simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more his own
+than ours and every man's, the word of the inalterable Mind. This gift
+of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament, and
+accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product belongs to
+the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the
+pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.[50] He did not
+grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant. One
+of the most delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is
+the poet Albert, who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly
+idealizing hand, does his best afterwards to look like it. Many of
+Wordsworth's later poems seem like rather unsuccessful efforts to
+resemble his former self. They would never, as Sir John Harington says
+of poetry, 'keep a child from play and an old man from the
+chimney-corner'.[51]
+
+    [48] Nowhere is this displayed with more comic
+    self-complacency than when he thought it needful to rewrite
+    the ballad of Helen of Kirconnel,--a poem hardly to be
+    matched in any language for swiftness of movement and savage
+    sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly.
+    Compare:
+
+        Curst be the heart that thought the thought,
+        And curst the hand that fired the shot,
+        When in my arms burd Helen dropt,
+          That died to succour me!
+        O, think ye not my heart was sair
+        When my love dropt down and spake na mair?
+
+    Compare this with,--
+
+        Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts
+          That through his brain are travelling,
+        And, starting up, to Bruce's heart
+          He launched a deadly javelin:
+        Fair Ellen saw it when it came,
+        And, _stepping forth to meet the same_,
+        Did with her body cover
+        The Youth, her chosen lover.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+        And Bruce (_as soon as he had slain_
+        _The Gordon_) sailed away to Spain,
+        And fought with rage incessant
+        Against the Moorish Crescent.
+
+    These are surely the versos of an attorney's clerk 'penning a
+    stanza when he should engross'. It will be noticed that
+    Wordsworth here also departs from his earlier theory of the
+    language of poetry by substituting a javelin for a bullet as
+    less modern and familiar. Had he written
+
+        And Gordon never gave a hint,
+        But, having somewhat picked his flint,
+        Let fly the fatal bullet
+        That killed that lovely pullet,
+
+    it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest.
+    He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the _Ancient
+    Mariner_ in the second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_: 'The
+    poem of my friend has indeed great defects; first, that the
+    principal person has no distinct character, either in his
+    profession of mariner, or as a human being who, having been
+    long under the control of supernatural impressions, might be
+    supposed himself to partake of something supernatural;
+    secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted
+    upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary
+    connexion, do not produce each other; and lastly, that the
+    imagery is somewhat laboriously accumulated.' Here is an
+    indictment, to be sure, and drawn, plainly enough, by the
+    attorney's clerk aforenamed. One would think that the strange
+    charm of Coleridge's most truly original poems lay in this
+    very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect.
+
+    [49]
+
+        A hundred times when, roving high and low,
+        I have been harassed with the toil of verse,
+        Much pains and little progress, and at once
+        Some lovely Image in the song rose up,
+        Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea.
+
+                                 _Prelude_, Book IV.
+
+    [50] His best poetry was written when he was under the
+    immediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have
+    felt this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes
+    when he speaks of 'those who have been so well pleased that I
+    should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills
+    into _their_ main stream' (_Letters, Conversations, and
+    Recollections of S. T. C._, vol. i, pp. 5-6). Wordsworth
+    found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of
+    the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees:
+
+        The singing masons building roofs of gold.
+
+    This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have
+    written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the
+    repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the
+    singers' (Leigh Hunt's _Autobiography_). Wordsworth writes to
+    Crabb Robinson in 1837, 'My ear is susceptible to the
+    clashing of sounds almost to disease.' One cannot help
+    thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by
+    Coleridge.
+
+    [51] In the Preface to his translation of the _Orlando
+    Furioso_.
+
+Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted a junior counsel who
+was arguing certain obvious points of law at needless length, by
+saying, 'Brother Jones, there are _some_ things which a Supreme Court
+of the United States sitting in equity may be presumed to know.'
+Wordsworth has this fault of enforcing and restating obvious points
+till the reader feels as if his own intelligence were somewhat
+underrated. He is over-conscientious in giving us full measure, and
+once profoundly absorbed in the sound of his own voice, he knows not
+when to stop. If he feel himself flagging, he has a droll way of
+keeping the floor, as it were, by asking himself a series of questions
+sometimes not needing, and often incapable of answer. There are three
+stanzas of such near the close of the First Part of _Peter Bell_,
+where Peter first catches a glimpse of the dead body in the water, all
+happily incongruous, and ending with one which reaches the height of
+comicality:
+
+    Is it a fiend that to a stake
+    Of fire his desperate self is tethering?
+    Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell,
+    In solitary ward or cell,
+    Ten thousand miles from all his brethren?
+
+The same want of humour which made him insensible to incongruity may
+perhaps account also for the singular unconsciousness of disproportion
+which so often strikes us in his poetry. For example, a little farther
+on in _Peter Bell_ we find:
+
+    _Now_--like a tempest-shattered bark
+    That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,
+    And in a moment to the verge
+    Is lifted of a foaming surge--
+    Full suddenly the Ass doth rise!
+
+And one cannot help thinking that the similes of the huge stone, the
+sea-beast, and the cloud, noble as they are in themselves, are
+somewhat too lofty for the service to which they are put.[52]
+
+    [52] In _Resolution and Independence_.
+
+The movement of Wordsworth's mind was too slow and his mood too
+meditative for narrative poetry. He values his own thoughts and
+reflections too much to sacrifice the least of them to the interests
+of his story. Moreover, it is never action that interests him, but the
+subtle motives that lead to or hinder it. _The Waggoner_ involuntarily
+suggests a comparison with _Tam O'Shanter_, infinitely to its own
+disadvantage. _Peter Bell_, full though it be of profound touches and
+subtle analysis, is lumbering and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced to
+confess that he did not like it. _The White Doe_, the most
+Wordsworthian of them all in the best meaning of the epithet, is also
+only the more truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What charms in
+Wordsworth and will charm for ever is the
+
+                    Happy tone
+    Of meditation slipping in between
+    The beauty coming and the beauty gone.
+
+A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their words to the tune of
+our own feelings and fancies, in the charm of their manner,
+indefinable as the sympathetic grace of woman, _are_ everything to us
+without our being able to say that they are much in themselves. They
+rather narcotize than fortify. Wordsworth must subject our mood to his
+own before he admits us to his intimacy; but, once admitted, it is for
+life, and we find ourselves in his debt, not for what he has been to
+us in our hours of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a
+reinforcement of faltering purpose and personal independence of
+character. His system of a Nature-cure, first professed by Dr. Jean
+Jacques and continued by Cowper, certainly breaks down as a whole. The
+Solitary of _The Excursion_, who has not been cured of his scepticism
+by living among the medicinal mountains, is, so far as we can see,
+equally proof against the lectures of Pedlar and Parson. Wordsworth
+apparently felt that this would be so, and accordingly never saw his
+way clear to finishing the poem. But the treatment, whether a panacea
+or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as it inculcates abstinence,
+exercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure, indeed, that the
+Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in constitutions less
+vigorous than Wordsworth's what Milton would call a fugitive and
+cloistered virtue at a dear expense of manlier qualities. The ancients
+and our own Elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become
+fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by taking a frank delight
+in its action and passion and by grappling with the facts of this
+world, rather than muddling themselves over the insoluble problems of
+another. If they had not discovered the picturesque, as we understand
+it, they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his destiny, and
+would have seen something ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the
+spectacle of a grown man running to hide his head in the apron of the
+Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in
+the tussle for existence.
+
+But when, as I have said, our impartiality has made all those
+qualifications and deductions against which even the greatest poet may
+not plead his privilege, what is left to Wordsworth is enough to
+justify his fame. Even where his genius is wrapped in clouds, the
+unconquerable lightning of imagination struggles through, flashing out
+unexpected vistas, and illuminating the humdrum pathway of our daily
+thought with a radiance of momentary consciousness that seems like a
+revelation. If it be the most delightful function of the poet to set
+our lives to music, yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our
+maturer gratitude if he do his part also as moralist and philosopher
+to purify and enlighten; if he define and encourage our vacillating
+perceptions of duty; if he piece together our fragmentary
+apprehensions of our own life and that larger life whose unconscious
+instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected map of
+experience a coherent chart. In the great poets there is an exquisite
+sensibility both of soul and sense that sympathizes like gossamer
+sea-moss with every movement of the element in which it floats, but
+which is rooted on the solid rock of our common sympathies. Wordsworth
+shows less of this finer feminine fibre of organization than one or
+two of his contemporaries, notably than Coleridge or Shelley; but he
+was a masculine thinker, and in his more characteristic poems there is
+always a kernel of firm conclusion from far-reaching principles that
+stimulates thought and challenges meditation. Groping in the dark
+passages of life, we come upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall
+that gives us our bearings and enables us to find an outlet. Compared
+with Goethe we feel that he lacks that serene impartiality of mind
+which results from breadth of culture; nay, he seems narrow, insular,
+almost provincial. He reminds us of those saints of Dante who gather
+brightness by revolving on their own axis. But through this very
+limitation of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the
+impressiveness which results from eagerness of personal conviction. If
+we read Wordsworth through, as I have just done, we find ourselves
+changing our mind about him at every other page, so uneven is he. If
+we read our favourite poems or passages only, he will seem uniformly
+great. And even as regards _The Excursion_ we should remember how few
+long poems will bear consecutive reading. For my part I know of but
+one,--the _Odyssey_.
+
+None of our great poets can be called popular in any exact sense of
+the word, for the highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions
+which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that
+shore between our abiding divine and our fluctuating human nature,
+rooted in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid bare, and
+otherwise visible only at exceptional moments of entire calm and
+clearness. Of no other poet except Shakespeare have so many phrases
+become household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more
+epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of
+having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those
+faint and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentle
+ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely
+ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won for himself a secure
+immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds at
+their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and
+by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest
+heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and
+abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us
+to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own
+instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs not to bid
+
+    Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh
+    To rare Beaumont, and learned Beaumont lie
+    A little nearer Spenser;
+
+for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with whom he
+is now enrolled as fifth in the succession of the great English Poets.
+
+
+
+
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of English Critical Essays, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: English Critical Essays
+       Nineteenth Century
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Edmund D. Jones
+
+Release Date: February 15, 2010 [EBook #31283]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH CRITICAL ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Irma Spehar and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h3 class="classics">The World&#8217;s Classics</h3>
+
+
+<h2 class="ccvi"><small>CCVI</small><br /><br />
+
+ENGLISH<br />
+CRITICAL ESSAYS<br />
+
+<small>NINETEENTH CENTURY</small></h2>
+
+<p class="publisher">
+<span style="letter-spacing: 0.20ex">OXFORD</span><br />
+<span style="letter-spacing: 0.20ex">UNIVERSITY PRESS</span><br />
+LONDON: AMEN HOUSE, E.C. 4<br />
+EDINBURGH GLASGOW LEIPZIG<br />
+COPENHAGEN NEW YORK TORONTO<br />
+MELBOURNE CAPETOWN BOMBAY<br />
+CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI<br />
+HUMPHREY MILFORD<br />
+PUBLISHER TO THE<br />
+UNIVERSITY<br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<h2 class="cvii"><a name="ENGLISH" id="ENGLISH"></a>ENGLISH<br />
+CRITICAL ESSAYS<br />
+<small>NINETEENTH CENTURY</small></h2>
+
+
+<p class="jones"><span style="font-size: 80%">SELECTED AND EDITED BY</span><br />
+EDMUND D. JONES</p>
+
+
+<p class="publisher">OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS<br />
+LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD</p>
+
+<p class="edition"><i>The present selection of English Critical Essays (Nineteenth
+Century) was first published in &#8216;The World&#8217;s Classics&#8217;
+in 1916 and reprinted in 1919, 1920, 1921, 1924 and 1928.</i></p>
+
+
+<p class="printer">PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD<br />
+BY JOHN JOHNSON PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY</p>
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> essays here brought together are meant to
+illustrate English literary criticism during the nineteenth
+century. A companion volume representative
+of Renaissance and Neo-classic criticism will,
+it is hoped, be issued at a future date. Meanwhile
+this volume may well go forth alone. For the nineteenth
+century forms an epoch in English literature
+whose beginnings are more clearly defined
+than those of most literary epochs. The publication
+of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> in 1798, and of Wordsworth&#8217;s
+Preface to the second edition in 1800, show
+the Romantic Movement grown conscious and deliberate,
+with results that have coloured the whole
+stream of English poetry and criticism ever since.</p>
+
+<p>The greater part of the present collection deals
+with general principles rather than with criticisms
+of individual books or authors. The nineteenth
+century, having discarded the dogmas and &#8216;rules&#8217;
+of Neo-classicism, had perforce to investigate
+afresh the Theory of Poetry, and though no systematic
+treatment of the subject in all its bearings
+appeared, some valuable contributions were made,
+the most notable of which came from the poets
+themselves.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[vi]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The extracts from the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> are
+placed next to the Wordsworthian doctrines
+which they criticize; otherwise the arrangement
+of the essays is chronological.</p>
+
+<p>American criticism is represented&mdash;inadequately,
+but, it is hoped, not unworthily&mdash;by the last two
+essays.</p>
+
+<p>In the preparation of this volume I have received
+much valuable help from Mr. J.&nbsp;C. Smith,
+which I now gratefully acknowledge.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Edmund D. Jones.</span></p>
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+<table summary="contents">
+<tr><td class="ral" colspan="2"><span class="smcap" style="font-size: 80%">Page</span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname"><a href="#WILLIAM_WORDSWORTH">William Wordsworth, 1770-1850</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">Poetry and Poetic Diction. (1800)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#SAMUEL_TAYLOR_COLERIDGE">Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">Wordsworth&#8217;s Theory of Diction. (1817)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_40">40</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">Metrical Composition. (1817)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_57">57</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#WILLIAM_BLAKE">William Blake, 1757-1827</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">The Canterbury Pilgrims. (1809)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_85">85</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#CHARLES_LAMB">Charles Lamb, 1775-1834</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered
+    with Reference to their Fitness for Stage
+    Representation. (1811)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_95">95</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#PERCY_BYSSHE_SHELLEY">Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">A Defence of Poetry. (1821)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#WILLIAM_HAZLITT">William Hazlitt, 1778-1830</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">My First Acquaintance with Poets. (1823)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_164">164</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#JOHN_KEBLE">John Keble, 1792-1866</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">Sacred Poetry. (1825)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#JOHN_HENRY_NEWMAN">John Henry Newman, 1801-1890</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">Poetry with reference to Aristotle&#8217;s Poetics. (1829)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_223">223</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#THOMAS_CARLYLE">Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakespeare. (1840)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_254">254</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#JAMES_HENRY_LEIGH_HUNT">James Henry Leigh Hunt, 1784-1859</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">An Answer to the Question: What is Poetry? (1844)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_300">300</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#MATTHEW_ARNOLD">Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">The Choice of Subjects in Poetry. (1853)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_356">356</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#JOHN_RUSKIN">John Ruskin, 1819-1900</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">Of the Pathetic Fallacy. (1856)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_378">378</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#JOHN_STUART_MILL">John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties. (1833, revised 1859)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_398">398</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#WALTER_BAGEHOT">Walter Bagehot, 1826-1877</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure,
+    Ornate and Grotesque Art in English Poetry. (1864)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_430">430</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#WALTER_HORATIO_PATER">Walter Horatio Pater, 1839-1894</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">Coleridge&#8217;s Writings. (1866)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_492">492</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#RALPH_WALDO_EMERSON">Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">Shakespeare; or, the Poet. (1850)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_535">535</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="aname" colspan="2"><a href="#JAMES_RUSSELL_LOWELL">James Russell Lowell, 1819-1891</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="awork">Wordsworth. (1875)</td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_558">558</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="WILLIAM_WORDSWORTH" id="WILLIAM_WORDSWORTH"></a>WILLIAM WORDSWORTH<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1770-1850</h3>
+
+<h3>POETRY AND POETIC DICTION</h3>
+
+<h4>[Preface to the Second Edition of <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>, 1800]</h4>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> first Volume of these Poems has already
+been submitted to general perusal. It was published,
+as an experiment, which, I hoped, might
+be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting
+to metrical arrangement a selection of the real
+language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that
+sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure
+may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally
+endeavour to impart.</p>
+
+<p>I had formed no very inaccurate estimate of
+the probable effect of those Poems: I flattered
+myself that they who should be pleased with
+them would read them with more than common
+pleasure: and, on the other hand, I was well
+aware, that by those who should dislike them,
+they would be read with more than common
+dislike. The result has differed from my expectation
+in this only, that a greater number have
+been pleased than I ventured to hope I should
+please.</p>
+
+<p class="dotted">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Several of my Friends are anxious for the
+success of these Poems, from a belief, that, if the
+views with which they were composed were indeed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span>
+realized, a class of Poetry would be produced, well
+adapted to interest mankind permanently, and not
+unimportant in the quality, and in the multiplicity
+of its moral relations: and on this account they
+have advised me to prefix a systematic defence of
+the theory upon which the Poems were written.
+But I was unwilling to undertake the task, knowing
+that on this occasion the Reader would look coldly
+upon my arguments, since I might be suspected of
+having been principally influenced by the selfish
+and foolish hope of <i>reasoning</i> him into an approbation
+of these particular Poems: and I was still
+more unwilling to undertake the task, because,
+adequately to display the opinions, and fully to
+enforce the arguments, would require a space
+wholly disproportionate to a preface. For, to
+treat the subject with the clearness and coherence
+of which it is susceptible, it would be necessary
+to give a full account of the present state of the
+public taste in this country, and to determine
+how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which,
+again, could not be determined, without pointing
+out in what manner language and the human
+mind act and re-act on each other, and without
+retracing the revolutions, not of literature alone,
+but likewise of society itself. I have therefore
+altogether declined to enter regularly upon this
+defence; yet I am sensible, that there would be
+something like impropriety in abruptly obtruding
+upon the Public, without a few words of introduction,
+Poems so materially different from those
+upon which general approbation is at present
+bestowed.</p>
+
+<p>It is supposed, that by the act of writing in
+verse an Author makes a formal engagement that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span>
+he will gratify certain known habits of association;
+that he not only thus apprises the Reader that
+certain classes of ideas and expressions will be
+found in his book, but that others will be carefully
+excluded. This exponent or symbol held forth
+by metrical language must in different eras of
+literature have excited very different expectations:
+for example, in the age of Catullus, Terence, and
+Lucretius, and that of Statius or Claudian; and
+in our own country, in the age of Shakespeare and
+Beaumont and Fletcher, and that of Donne and
+Cowley, or Dryden, or Pope. I will not take upon
+me to determine the exact import of the promise
+which, by the act of writing in verse, an Author
+in the present day makes to his reader: but it
+will undoubtedly appear to many persons that
+I have not fulfilled the terms of an engagement
+thus voluntarily contracted. They who have been
+accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology
+of many modern writers, if they persist in reading
+this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently
+have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and
+awkwardness: they will look round for poetry,
+and will be induced to inquire by what species of
+courtesy these attempts can be permitted to
+assume that title. I hope therefore the reader
+will not censure me for attempting to state what
+I have proposed to myself to perform; and also
+(as far as the limits of a preface will permit) to
+explain some of the chief reasons which have
+determined me in the choice of my purpose: that
+at least he may be spared any unpleasant feeling
+of disappointment, and that I myself may be
+protected from one of the most dishonourable
+accusations which can be brought against an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>
+Author; namely, that of an indolence which
+prevents him from endeavouring to ascertain
+what is his duty, or, when his duty is ascertained,
+prevents him from performing it.</p>
+
+<p>The principal object, then, proposed in these
+Poems was to choose incidents and situations
+from common life, and to relate or describe them,
+throughout, as far as was possible in a selection
+of language really used by men, and, at the same
+time, to throw over them a certain colouring of
+imagination, whereby ordinary things should be
+presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and,
+further, and above all, to make these incidents
+and situations interesting by tracing in them,
+truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws
+of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the
+manner in which we associate ideas in a state of
+excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally
+chosen, 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.
+The language, too, of these men has been adopted
+(purified indeed from what appear to be its real<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
+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 influence of social vanity,
+they convey their feelings and notions in simple
+and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such
+a language, 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 separate
+themselves from the sympathies of men, and
+indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of
+expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes,
+and fickle appetites, of their own creation.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>I cannot, however, be insensible to the present
+outcry against the triviality and meanness, both
+of thought and language, which some of my
+contemporaries have occasionally introduced into
+their metrical compositions; and I acknowledge
+that this defect, where it exists, is more dishonourable
+to the Writer&#8217;s own character than false
+refinement or arbitrary innovation, though I should
+contend at the same time, that it is far less pernicious
+in the sum of its consequences. From such verses
+the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished
+at least by one mark of difference, that each
+of them has a worthy <i>purpose</i>. Not that I always
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>began to write with a distinct purpose formally
+conceived; but habits of meditation have, I trust,
+so prompted and regulated my feelings, that my
+descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those
+feelings, will be found to carry along with them
+a <i>purpose</i>. If this opinion be erroneous, I can have
+little right to the name of a Poet. For all good
+poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
+feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which
+any value can be attached were never produced
+on any variety of subjects but by a man who,
+being possessed of more than usual organic
+sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.
+For our continued influxes of feeling are modified
+and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed
+the representatives of all our past feelings; and,
+as by contemplating the relation of these general
+representatives to each other, we discover what
+is really important to men, so, by the repetition
+and continuance of this act, our feelings will be
+connected with important subjects, till at length,
+if we be originally possessed of much sensibility,
+such habits of mind will be produced, that, by
+obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of
+those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter
+sentiments, of such a nature, and in such connexion
+with each other, that the understanding of the
+Reader must necessarily be in some degree
+enlightened, and his affections strengthened and
+purified.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that each of these poems
+has a purpose. Another circumstance must be
+mentioned which distinguishes these Poems from
+the popular Poetry of the day; it is this, that
+the feeling therein developed gives importance to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>
+the action and situation, and not the action and
+situation to the feeling.</p>
+
+<p>A sense of false modesty shall not prevent me
+from asserting, that the Reader&#8217;s attention is
+pointed to this mark of distinction, far less for
+the sake of these particular Poems than from the
+general importance of the subject. The subject
+is indeed important! For the human mind is
+capable of being excited without the application
+of gross and violent stimulants; and he must
+have a very faint perception of its beauty and
+dignity who does not know this, and who does
+not further know, that one being is elevated above
+another, in proportion as he possesses this capability.
+It has therefore appeared to me, that to
+endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is
+one of the best services in which, at any period,
+a Writer can be engaged; but this service,
+excellent at all times, is especially so at the
+present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown
+to former times, are now acting with a combined
+force to blunt the discriminating powers of the
+mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion,
+to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.
+The most effective of these causes are the great
+national events which are daily taking place, and
+the increasing accumulation of men in cities,
+where the uniformity of their occupations produces
+a craving for extraordinary incident, which the
+rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.
+To this tendency of life and manners the literature
+and theatrical exhibitions of the country have
+conformed themselves. The invaluable works of
+our elder writers, I had almost said the works of
+Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
+by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German
+Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant
+stories in verse.&mdash;When I think upon this degrading
+thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am almost
+ashamed to have spoken of the feeble endeavour
+made in these volumes to counteract it; and,
+reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil,
+I should be oppressed with no dishonourable
+melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain
+inherent and indestructible qualities of the human
+mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great
+and permanent objects that act upon it, which
+are equally inherent and indestructible; and were
+there not added to this impression a belief, that
+the time is approaching when the evil will be
+systematically opposed, by men of greater powers,
+and with far more distinguished success.</p>
+
+<p>Having dwelt thus long on the subjects and
+aim of these Poems, I shall request the Reader&#8217;s
+permission to apprise him of a few circumstances
+relating to their <i>style</i>, in order, among other
+reasons, that he may not censure me for not
+having performed what I never attempted. The
+Reader will find that personifications of abstract
+ideas rarely occur in these volumes; and are
+utterly rejected, as an ordinary device to elevate
+the style, and raise it above prose. My purpose
+was to imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt
+the very language of men; and assuredly such
+personifications do not make any natural or regular
+part of that language. They are, indeed, a figure
+of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and
+I have made use of them as such; but have
+endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechanical
+device of style, or as a family language which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
+Writers in metre seem to lay claim to by prescription.
+I have wished to keep the Reader in
+the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that
+by so doing I shall interest him. Others who
+pursue a different track will interest him likewise;
+I do not interfere with their claim, but wish to
+prefer a claim of my own. There will also be found
+in these volumes little of what is usually called
+poetic diction; as much pains has been taken to
+avoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it; this
+has been done for the reason already alleged, to
+bring my language near to the language of men;
+and further, because the pleasure which I have
+proposed to myself to impart, is of a kind very
+different from that which is supposed by many
+persons to be the proper object of poetry. Without
+being culpably particular, I do not know how to
+give my Reader a more exact notion of the style
+in which it was my wish and intention to write,
+than by informing him that I have at all times
+endeavoured to look steadily at my subject;
+consequently, there is I hope in these Poems
+little falsehood of description, and my ideas are
+expressed in language fitted to their respective
+importance. Something must have been gained
+by this practice, as it is friendly to one property
+of all good poetry, namely, good sense: but it
+has necessarily cut me off from a large portion of
+phrases and figures of speech which from father
+to son have long been regarded as the common
+inheritance of Poets. I have also thought it
+expedient to restrict myself still further, having
+abstained from the use of many expressions, in
+themselves proper and beautiful, but which have
+been foolishly repeated by bad Poets, till such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
+feelings of disgust are connected with them as it
+is scarcely possible by any art of association to
+overpower.</p>
+
+<p>If in a poem there should be found a series of
+lines, or even a single line, in which the language,
+though naturally arranged, and according to the
+strict laws of metre, does not differ from that of
+prose, there is a numerous class of critics, who,
+when they stumble upon these prosaisms, as they
+call them, imagine that they have made a notable
+discovery, and exult over the Poet as over a man
+ignorant of his own profession. Now these men
+would establish a canon of criticism which the
+Reader will conclude he must utterly reject, if he
+wishes to be pleased with these volumes. And it
+would be a most easy task to prove to him, 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. To
+illustrate the subject in a general manner, I will
+here adduce a short composition of Gray, who
+was at the head of those who, by their reasonings,
+have attempted to widen the space of separation
+betwixt Prose and Metrical composition, and was
+more than any other man curiously elaborate in
+the structure of his own poetic diction.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The birds in vain their amorous descant join,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or cheerful fields resume their green attire.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These ears, alas! for other notes repine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>A different object do these eyes require;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And in my breast the imperfect joys expire;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To warm their little loves the birds complain.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And weep the more because I weep in vain</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;fruitless&#8217;
+for fruitlessly, which is so far a defect, the language
+of these lines does in no respect differ from that of
+prose.</p>
+
+<p>By the foregoing quotation it has been shown
+that the language of Prose may yet be well
+adapted to Poetry; and it was previously asserted,
+that a large portion of the language of every good
+poem can in no respect differ from that of good
+Prose. We will go further. It may be safely
+affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any
+<i>essential</i> difference between the language of prose
+and metrical composition. We are fond of tracing
+the resemblance between Poetry and Painting,
+and, accordingly, we call them Sisters: but where
+shall we find bonds of connexion sufficiently strict
+to typify the affinity betwixt metrical and prose
+composition? They both speak by and to the
+same organs; the bodies in which both of them
+are clothed may be said to be of the same substance,
+their affections are kindred, and almost identical,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
+not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>
+sheds no tears &#8216;such as Angels weep&#8217;, but natural
+and human tears; she can boast of no celestial
+ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those
+of prose; the same human blood circulates through
+the veins of them both.</p>
+
+<p>If it be affirmed that rhyme and metrical
+arrangement of themselves constitute a distinction
+which overturns what has just been said on the
+strict affinity of metrical language with that of
+prose, and paves the way for other artificial
+distinctions which the mind voluntarily admits,
+I answer that the language of such Poetry as is
+here recommended is, as far as is possible, a selection
+of the language really spoken by men; that this
+selection, wherever it is made with true taste and
+feeling, will of itself form a distinction far greater
+than would at first be imagined, and will entirely
+separate the composition from the vulgarity and
+meanness of ordinary life; and, if metre be
+superadded thereto, I believe that a dissimilitude
+will be produced altogether sufficient for the
+gratification of a rational mind. What other
+distinction would we have? Whence is it to
+come? And where is it to exist? Not, surely,
+where the Poet speaks through the mouths of his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>characters: it cannot be necessary here, either
+for elevation of style, or any of its supposed
+ornaments: for, if the Poet&#8217;s subject be judiciously
+chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occasion,
+lead him to passions the language of which, if
+selected truly and judiciously, must necessarily
+be dignified and variegated, and alive with
+metaphors and figures. I forbear to speak of an
+incongruity which would shock the intelligent
+Reader, should the Poet interweave any foreign
+splendour of his own with that which the passion
+naturally suggests: it is sufficient to say that such
+addition is unnecessary. And, surely, it is more
+probable that those passages, which with propriety
+abound with metaphors and figures, will have their
+due effect, if, upon other occasions where the
+passions are of a milder character, the style also
+be subdued and temperate.</p>
+
+<p>But, as the pleasure which I hope to give by
+the Poems now presented to the Reader must
+depend entirely on just notions upon this subject,
+and, as it is in itself of high importance to our
+taste and moral feelings, I cannot content myself
+with these detached remarks. And if, in what I
+am about to say, it shall appear to some that my
+labour is unnecessary, and that I am like a man
+fighting a battle without enemies, such persons
+may be reminded, that, whatever be the language
+outwardly holden by men, a practical faith in the
+opinions which I am wishing to establish is almost
+unknown. If my conclusions are admitted, and
+carried as far as they must be carried if admitted
+at all, our judgements concerning the works of
+the greatest Poets both ancient and modern will
+be far different from what they are at present,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
+both when we praise, and when we censure: and
+our moral feelings influencing and influenced by
+these judgements will, I believe, be corrected and
+purified.</p>
+
+<p>Taking up the subject, then, upon general
+grounds, let me ask, what is meant by the word
+Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he
+address himself? And what language is to be
+expected from him?&mdash;He is a man speaking to
+men: a man, it is true, endowed with more
+lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness,
+who has a greater knowledge of human nature,
+and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed
+to be common among mankind; a man pleased
+with his own passions and volitions, and who
+rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life
+that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar
+volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on
+of the Universe, and habitually impelled to
+create them where he does not find them. To
+these qualities he has added a disposition to be
+affected more than other men by absent things as if
+they were present; an ability of conjuring up in
+himself passions, which are indeed far from being
+the same as those produced by real events, yet
+(especially in those parts of the general sympathy
+which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly
+resemble the passions produced by real events,
+than anything which, from the motions of their
+own minds merely, other men are accustomed to
+feel in themselves:&mdash;whence, and from practice,
+he has acquired a greater readiness and power in
+expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially
+those thoughts and feelings which, by his own
+choice, or from the structure of his own mind,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>
+arise in him without immediate external excitement.</p>
+
+<p>But whatever portion of this faculty we may
+suppose even the greatest Poet to possess, there
+cannot be a doubt that the language which it will
+suggest to him, must often, in liveliness and truth,
+fall short of that which is uttered by men in real
+life, under the actual pressure of those passions,
+certain shadows of which the Poet thus produces,
+or feels to be produced, in himself.</p>
+
+<p>However exalted a notion we would wish to
+cherish of the character of a Poet, it is obvious,
+that while he describes and imitates passions,
+his employment is in some degree mechanical,
+compared with the freedom and power of real
+and substantial action and suffering. So that it
+will be the wish of the Poet to bring his feelings
+near to those of the persons whose feelings he
+describes, nay, for short spaces of time, perhaps,
+to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and
+even confound and identify his own feelings with
+theirs; modifying only the language which is
+thus suggested to him by a consideration that he
+describes for a particular purpose, that of giving
+pleasure. Here, then, he will apply the principle
+of selection which has been already insisted upon.
+He will depend upon this for removing what would
+otherwise be painful or disgusting in the passion;
+he will feel that there is no necessity to trick out
+or to elevate nature: and, the more industriously
+he applies this principle, the deeper will be his
+faith that no words, which <i>his</i> fancy or imagination
+can suggest, will be to be compared with those
+which are the emanations of reality and truth.</p>
+
+<p>But it may be said by those who do not object<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
+to the general spirit of these remarks, that, as it
+is impossible for the Poet to produce upon all
+occasions language as exquisitely fitted for the
+passion as that which the real passion itself
+suggests, it is proper that he should consider
+himself as in the situation of a translator, who
+does not scruple to substitute excellencies of
+another kind for those which are unattainable
+by him; and endeavours occasionally to surpass
+his original, in order to make some amends for
+the general inferiority to which he feels that he
+must submit. But this would be to encourage
+idleness and unmanly despair. Further, it is the
+language of men who speak of what they do not
+understand; who talk of Poetry as of a matter
+of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse
+with us as gravely about a <i>taste</i> for Poetry,
+as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent
+as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry.
+Aristotle, I have been told, has said, that Poetry
+is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so:
+its object is truth, not individual and local, but
+general, and operative; not standing upon external
+testimony, but carried alive into the heart by
+passion; truth which is its own testimony, which
+gives competence and confidence to the tribunal
+to which it appeals, and receives them from the
+same tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and
+nature. The obstacles which stand in the way of
+the fidelity of the Biographer and Historian, and
+of their consequent utility, are incalculably greater
+than those which are to be encountered by the
+Poet who comprehends the dignity of his art.
+The Poet writes under one restriction only,
+namely, the necessity of giving immediate pleasure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
+to a human Being possessed of that information
+which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer,
+a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural
+philosopher, but as a Man. Except this one
+restriction, there is no object standing between
+the Poet and the image of things; between this,
+and the Biographer and Historian, there are
+a thousand.</p>
+
+<p>Nor let this necessity of producing immediate
+pleasure be considered as a degradation of the
+Poet&#8217;s art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgement
+of the beauty of the universe, an
+acknowledgement the more sincere, because not
+formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy
+to him who looks at the world in the spirit of
+love: further, it is a homage paid to the native
+and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary
+principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels,
+and lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but
+what is propagated by pleasure: I would not be
+misunderstood; but wherever we sympathize with
+pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced
+and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure.
+We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles
+drawn from the contemplation of particular facts,
+but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists
+in us by pleasure alone. The Man of science, the
+Chemist and Mathematician, whatever difficulties
+and disgusts they may have had to struggle with,
+know and feel this. However painful may be the
+objects with which the Anatomist&#8217;s knowledge is
+connected, he feels that his knowledge is pleasure;
+and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge.
+What then does the Poet? He considers man
+and the objects that surround him as acting and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
+re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an
+infinite complexity of pain and pleasure; he
+considers man in his own nature and in his ordinary
+life as contemplating this with a certain quantity
+of immediate knowledge, with certain convictions,
+intuitions, and deductions, which from habit
+acquire the quality of intuitions; he considers
+him as looking upon this complex scene of ideas
+and sensations, and finding everywhere objects
+that immediately excite in him sympathies which,
+from the necessities of his nature, are accompanied
+by an overbalance of enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p>To this knowledge which all men carry about
+with them, and to these sympathies in which,
+without any other discipline than that of our
+daily life, we are fitted to take delight, the Poet
+principally directs his attention. He considers
+man and nature as essentially adapted to each
+other, and the mind of man as naturally the
+mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties
+of nature. And thus the Poet, prompted by this
+feeling of pleasure, which accompanies him through
+the whole course of his studies, converses with
+general nature, with affections akin to those, which,
+through labour and length of time, the Man of
+science has raised up in himself, by conversing
+with those particular parts of nature which are
+the objects of his studies. The knowledge both of
+the Poet and the Man of science is pleasure; but
+the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary
+part of our existence, our natural and unalienable
+inheritance; the other is a personal and individual
+acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual
+and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow-beings.
+The Man of science seeks truth as a remote<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>
+and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves
+it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which
+all human beings join with him, rejoices in the
+presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly
+companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit
+of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression
+which is in the countenance of all Science. Emphatically
+may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare
+hath said of man, &#8216;that he looks before and after.&#8217;
+He is the rock of defence for human nature; an
+upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with
+him relationship and love. In spite of difference
+of soil and climate, of language and manners, of
+laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone
+out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the
+Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the
+vast empire of human society, as it is spread over
+the whole earth, and over all time. The objects
+of the Poet&#8217;s thoughts are everywhere; though
+the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his
+favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever
+he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which
+to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all
+knowledge&mdash;it is as immortal as the heart of man.
+If the labours of Men of science should ever create
+any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our
+condition, and in the impressions which we
+habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no
+more than at present; he will be ready to follow
+the steps of the Man of science, not only in those
+general indirect effects, but he will be at his side,
+carrying sensation into the midst of the objects
+of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of
+the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will
+be as proper objects of the Poet&#8217;s art as any upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
+which it can be employed, if the time should ever
+come when these things shall be familiar to us, and
+the relations under which they are contemplated
+by the followers of these respective sciences shall
+be manifestly and palpably material to us as
+enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should
+ever come when what is now called science, thus
+familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as
+it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will
+lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration,
+and will welcome the Being thus produced, as
+a dear and genuine inmate of the household of
+man.&mdash;It is not, then, to be supposed that any
+one, who holds that sublime notion of Poetry
+which I have attempted to convey, will break in
+upon the sanctity and truth of his pictures by
+transitory and accidental ornaments, and endeavour
+to excite admiration of himself by arts,
+the necessity of which must manifestly depend
+upon the assumed meanness of his subject.</p>
+
+<p>What has been thus far said applies to Poetry
+in general; but especially to those parts of
+composition where the Poet speaks through the
+mouths of his characters; and upon this point
+it appears to authorize the conclusion that there
+are few persons of good sense, who would not
+allow that the dramatic parts of composition are
+defective, in proportion as they deviate from the
+real language of nature, and are coloured by
+a diction of the Poet&#8217;s own, either peculiar to him
+as an individual Poet or belonging simply to Poets
+in general; to a body of men who, from the circumstance
+of their compositions being in metre,
+it is expected will employ a particular language.</p>
+
+<p>It is not, then, in the dramatic parts of composition<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
+that we look for this distinction of
+language; but still it may be proper and necessary
+where the Poet speaks to us in his own person
+and character. To this I answer by referring the
+Reader to the description before given of a Poet.
+Among the qualities there enumerated as principally
+conducing to form a Poet, is implied nothing
+differing in kind from other men, but only in
+degree. The sum of what was said is, that the
+Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by
+a greater promptness to think and feel without
+immediate external excitement, and a greater
+power in expressing such thoughts and feelings
+as are produced in him in that manner. But
+these passions and thoughts and feelings are the
+general passions and thoughts and feelings of men.
+And with what are they connected? Undoubtedly
+with our moral sentiments and animal sensations,
+and with the causes which excite these; with the
+operations of the elements, and the appearances
+of the visible universe; with storm and sunshine,
+with the revolutions of the seasons, with cold and
+heat, with loss of friends and kindred, with injuries
+and resentments, gratitude and hope, with fear and
+sorrow. These, and the like, are the sensations
+and objects which the Poet describes, as they are
+the sensations of other men, and the objects which
+interest them. The Poet thinks and feels in the
+spirit of human passions. How, then, can his
+language differ in any material degree from that
+of all other men who feel vividly and see clearly?
+It might be <i>proved</i> that it is impossible. But
+supposing that this were not the case, the Poet
+might then be allowed to use a peculiar language
+when expressing his feelings for his own gratification,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
+or that of men like himself. But Poets do
+not write for Poets alone, but for men. Unless
+therefore we are advocates for that admiration
+which subsists upon ignorance, and that pleasure
+which arises from hearing what we do not understand,
+the Poet must descend from this supposed
+height; and, in order to excite rational sympathy,
+he must express himself as other men express
+themselves. To this it may be added, that while
+he is only selecting from the real language of men,
+or, which amounts to the same thing, composing
+accurately in the spirit of such selection, he is
+treading upon safe ground, and we know what we
+are to expect from him. Our feelings are the same
+with respect to metre; for, as it may be proper
+to remind the Reader, the distinction of metre is
+regular and uniform, and not, like that which is
+produced by what is usually called <small>POETIC DICTION</small>,
+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;
+whereas, in the other, the metre obeys certain
+laws, to which the Poet and Reader both willingly
+submit because they are certain, and because no
+interference is made by them with the passion,
+but such as the concurring testimony of ages has
+shown to heighten and improve the pleasure
+which co-exists with it.</p>
+
+<p>It will now be proper to answer an obvious
+question, namely, Why, professing these opinions,
+have I written in verse? To this, in addition to
+such answer as is included in what has been
+already said, I reply, in the first place, Because,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
+however I may have restricted myself, there is
+still left open to me what confessedly constitutes
+the most valuable object of all writing, whether
+in prose or verse; the great and universal passions
+of men, the most general and interesting of their
+occupations, and the entire world of nature before
+me&mdash;to supply endless combinations of forms and
+imagery. Now, supposing for a moment that
+whatever is interesting in these objects may be as
+vividly described in prose, why should I be condemned
+for attempting to superadd to such
+description the charm which, by the consent of
+all nations, is acknowledged to exist in metrical
+language? To this, by such as are yet unconvinced,
+it may be answered that a very small part of the
+pleasure given by Poetry depends upon the metre,
+and that it is injudicious to write in metre,
+unless it be accompanied with the other artificial
+distinctions of style with which metre is usually
+accompanied, and that, by such deviation, more will
+be lost from the shock which will thereby be given
+to the Reader&#8217;s associations than will be counterbalanced
+by any pleasure which he can derive
+from the general power of numbers. In answer to
+those who still contend for the necessity of accompanying
+metre with certain appropriate colours
+of style in order to the accomplishment of its
+appropriate end, and who also, in my opinion,
+greatly underrate the power of metre in itself, it
+might, perhaps, as far as relates to these Volumes,
+have been almost sufficient to observe, that poems
+are extant, written upon more humble subjects,
+and in a still more naked and simple style, which
+have continued to give pleasure from generation
+to generation. Now, if nakedness and simplicity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
+be a defect, the fact here mentioned affords
+a strong presumption that poems somewhat less
+naked and simple are capable of affording pleasure
+at the present day; and, what I wished <i>chiefly</i>
+to attempt, at present, was to justify myself for
+having written under the impression of this belief.</p>
+
+<p>But various causes might be pointed out why,
+when the style is manly, and the subject of some
+importance, words metrically arranged will long
+continue to impart such a pleasure to mankind
+as he who proves the extent of that pleasure will
+be desirous to impart. The end of Poetry is to
+produce excitement in co-existence with an
+overbalance of pleasure; but, by the supposition,
+excitement is an unusual and irregular state of
+the mind; ideas and feelings do not, in that
+state, succeed each other in accustomed order.
+If the words, however, by which this excitement
+is produced be in themselves powerful, or the
+images and feelings have an undue proportion of
+pain connected with them, there is some danger
+that the excitement may be carried beyond its
+proper bounds. Now the co-presence of something
+regular, something to which the mind has been
+accustomed in various moods and in a less excited
+state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering
+and restraining the passion by an intertexture of
+ordinary feeling, and of feeling not strictly and
+necessarily connected with the passion. This is
+unquestionably true; and hence, though the
+opinion will at first appear paradoxical, from the
+tendency of metre to divest language, in a certain
+degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of
+half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over
+the whole composition, there can be little doubt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>
+but that more pathetic situations and sentiments,
+that is, those which have a greater proportion of
+pain connected with them, may be endured in
+metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in
+prose. The metre of the old ballads is very artless;
+yet they contain many passages which would
+illustrate this opinion; and, I hope, if the following
+Poems be attentively perused, similar instances
+will be found in them. This opinion may be
+further illustrated by appealing to the Reader&#8217;s
+own experience of the reluctance with which he
+comes to the re-perusal of the distressful parts
+of <i>Clarissa Harlowe</i>, or the <i>Gamester</i>; while
+Shakespeare&#8217;s writings, in the most pathetic scenes,
+never act upon us, as pathetic, beyond the bounds
+of pleasure&mdash;an effect which, in a much greater
+degree than might at first be imagined, is to be
+ascribed to small, but continual and regular
+impulses of pleasurable surprise from the metrical
+arrangement.&mdash;On the other hand (what it must
+be allowed will much more frequently happen) if
+the Poet&#8217;s words should be incommensurate with
+the passion, and inadequate to raise the Reader
+to a height of desirable excitement, then (unless
+the Poet&#8217;s choice of his metre has been grossly
+injudicious), in the feelings of pleasure which the
+Reader has been accustomed to connect with
+metre in general, and in the feeling, whether
+cheerful or melancholy, which he has been accustomed
+to connect with that particular movement
+of metre, there will be found something which will
+greatly contribute to impart passion to the words,
+and to effect the complex end which the Poet
+proposes to himself.</p>
+
+<p>If I had undertaken a <small>SYSTEMATIC</small> defence of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
+the theory here maintained, it would have been
+my duty to develop the various causes upon
+which the pleasure received from metrical language
+depends. Among the chief of these causes is to be
+reckoned a principle which must be well known
+to those who have made any of the Arts the object
+of accurate reflection; namely, the pleasure which
+the mind derives from the perception of similitude
+in dissimilitude. This principle is the great spring
+of the activity of our minds, and their chief feeder.
+From this principle the direction of the sexual
+appetite, and all the passions connected with it,
+take their origin: it is the life of our ordinary
+conversation; and upon the accuracy with which
+similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in
+similitude are perceived, depend our taste and
+our moral feelings. It would not be a useless
+employment to apply this principle to the consideration
+of metre, and to show that metre is hence
+enabled to afford much pleasure, and to point out
+in what manner that pleasure is produced. But
+my limits will not permit me to enter upon this
+subject, and I must content myself with a general
+summary.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that poetry is the spontaneous
+overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin
+from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the
+emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction,
+the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an
+emotion, kindred to that which was before the
+subject of contemplation, is gradually produced,
+and does itself actually exist in the mind. In
+this mood successful composition generally begins,
+and in a mood similar to this it is carried on;
+but the emotion, of whatever kind, and in whatever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
+degree, from various causes, is qualified by
+various pleasures, so that in describing any
+passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described,
+the mind will, upon the whole, be in
+a state of enjoyment. If Nature be thus cautious
+to preserve in a state of enjoyment a being so
+employed, the Poet ought to profit by the lesson
+held forth to him, and ought especially to take
+care, that, whatever passions he communicates to
+his Reader, those passions, if his Reader&#8217;s mind
+be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied
+with an overbalance of pleasure. Now
+the music of harmonious metrical language, the
+sense of difficulty overcome, and the blind
+association of pleasure which has been previously
+received from works of rhyme or metre of the
+same or similar construction, an indistinct perception
+perpetually renewed of language closely
+resembling that of real life, and yet, in the
+circumstance of metre, differing from it so widely&mdash;all
+these imperceptibly make up a complex
+feeling of delight, which is of the most important
+use in tempering the painful feeling always found
+intermingled with powerful descriptions of the
+deeper passions. This effect is always produced
+in pathetic and impassioned poetry; while, in
+lighter compositions, the ease and gracefulness
+with which the Poet manages his numbers are
+themselves confessedly a principal source of the
+gratification of the Reader. All that it is <i>necessary</i>
+to say, however, upon this subject, may be effected
+by affirming, what few persons will deny, that, of
+two descriptions, either of passions, manners, or
+characters, each of them equally well executed,
+the one in prose and the other in verse, the verse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
+will be read a hundred times where the prose is
+read once.</p>
+
+<p>Having thus explained a few of my reasons for
+writing in verse, and why I have chosen subjects
+from common life, and endeavoured to bring my
+language near to the real language of men, if I
+have been too minute in pleading my own cause,
+I have at the same time been treating a subject
+of general interest; and for this reason a few
+words shall be added with reference solely to
+these particular poems, and to some defects which
+will probably be found in them. I am sensible
+that my associations must have sometimes been
+particular instead of general, and that, consequently,
+giving to things a false importance, I may
+have sometimes written upon unworthy subjects;
+but I am less apprehensive on this account, than
+that my language may frequently have suffered
+from those arbitrary connexions of feelings and
+ideas with particular words and phrases, from
+which no man can altogether protect himself.
+Hence I have no doubt, that, in some instances,
+feelings, even of the ludicrous, may be given to
+my Readers by expressions which appeared to
+me tender and pathetic. Such faulty expressions,
+were I convinced they were faulty at present, and
+that they must necessarily continue to be so,
+I would willingly take all reasonable pains to
+correct. But it is dangerous to make these
+alterations on the simple authority of a few
+individuals, or even of certain classes of men;
+for where the understanding of an Author is not
+convinced, or his feelings altered, this cannot be
+done without great injury to himself: for his own
+feelings are his stay and support; and, if he set<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
+them aside in one instance, he may be induced to
+repeat this act till his mind shall lose all confidence
+in itself, and become utterly debilitated. To this
+it may be added, that the critic ought never to
+forget that he is himself exposed to the same errors
+as the Poet, and, perhaps, in a much greater degree:
+for there can be no presumption in saying of most
+readers, that it is not probable they will be so well
+acquainted with the various stages of meaning
+through which words have passed, or with the
+fickleness or stability of the relations of particular
+ideas to each other; and, above all, since they are
+so much less interested in the subject, they may
+decide lightly and carelessly.</p>
+
+<p>Long as the Reader has been detained, I hope
+he will permit me to caution him against a mode
+of false criticism which has been applied to Poetry,
+in which the language closely resembles that of life
+and nature. Such verses have been triumphed
+over in parodies, of which Dr. Johnson&#8217;s stanza is
+a fair specimen:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I put my hat upon my head<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And walked into the Strand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And there I met another man<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose hat was in his hand.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Immediately under these lines let us place one
+of the most justly-admired stanzas of the &#8216;Babes
+in the Wood.&#8217;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">These pretty Babes with hand in hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Went wandering up and down;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But never more they saw the Man<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Approaching from the Town.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In both these stanzas the words, and the order
+of the words, in no respect differ from the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
+unimpassioned conversation. There are words
+in both, for example, &#8216;the Strand&#8217;, and &#8216;the
+Town&#8217;, connected with none but the most familiar
+ideas; yet the one stanza we admit as admirable,
+and the other as a fair example of the superlatively
+contemptible. Whence arises this difference?
+Not from the metre, not from the language, not
+from the order of the words; but the <i>matter</i>
+expressed in Dr. Johnson&#8217;s stanza is contemptible.
+The proper method of treating trivial and simple
+verses, to which Dr. Johnson&#8217;s stanza would be
+a fair parallelism, is not to say, this is a bad kind
+of poetry, or, this is not poetry; but, this wants
+sense; it is neither interesting in itself, nor can
+<i>lead</i> to anything interesting; the images neither
+originate in that sane state of feeling, which arises
+out of thought, nor can excite thought or feeling
+in the Reader. This is the only sensible manner
+of dealing with such verses. Why trouble yourself
+about the species till you have previously decided
+upon the genus? Why take pains to prove that
+an ape is not a Newton, when it is self-evident
+that he is not a man?</p>
+
+<p>One request I must make of my reader, which
+is, that in judging these Poems he would decide
+by his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection
+upon what will probably be the judgement of
+others. How common is it to hear a person say,
+I myself do not object to this style of composition,
+or this or that expression, but, to such and such
+classes of people it will appear mean or ludicrous!
+This mode of criticism, so destructive of all sound
+unadulterated judgement, is almost universal:
+let the Reader then abide, independently, by his
+own feelings, and, if he finds himself affected, let<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
+him not suffer such conjectures to interfere with
+his pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>If an Author, by any single composition, has
+impressed us with respect for his talents, it is
+useful to consider this as affording a presumption,
+that on other occasions where we have been
+displeased, he, nevertheless, may not have written
+ill or absurdly; and further, to give him so much
+credit for this one composition as may induce us
+to review what has displeased us, with more care
+than we should otherwise have bestowed upon it.
+This is not only an act of justice, but, in our
+decisions upon poetry especially, may conduce,
+in a high degree, to the improvement of our own
+taste; for an <i>accurate</i> taste in poetry, and in
+all the other arts, as Sir Joshua Reynolds has
+observed, is an <i>acquired</i> talent, which can only
+be produced by thought and a long-continued
+intercourse with the best models of composition.
+This is mentioned, not with so ridiculous a purpose
+as to prevent the most inexperienced Reader from
+judging for himself, (I have already said that I wish
+him to judge for himself;) but merely to temper the
+rashness of decision, and to suggest, that, if Poetry
+be a subject on which much time has not been
+bestowed, the judgement may be erroneous; and
+that, in many cases, it necessarily will be so.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing would, I know, have so effectually
+contributed to further the end which I have in
+view, as to have shown of what kind the pleasure
+is, and how that pleasure is produced, which is
+confessedly produced by metrical composition
+essentially different from that which I have here
+endeavoured to recommend: for the Reader will
+say that he has been pleased by such composition;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
+and what more can be done for him? The power
+of any art is limited; and he will suspect, that,
+if it be proposed to furnish him with new friends,
+that can be only upon condition of his abandoning
+his old friends. Besides, as I have said, the Reader
+is himself conscious of the pleasure which he has
+received from such composition, composition to
+which he has peculiarly attached the endearing
+name of Poetry; and all men feel an habitual
+gratitude, and something of an honourable bigotry,
+for the objects which have long continued to please
+them: we not only wish to be pleased, but to be
+pleased in that particular way in which we have
+Been accustomed to be pleased. There is in these
+feelings enough to resist a host of arguments; and
+I should be the less able to combat them successfully,
+as I am willing to allow, that, in order entirely
+to enjoy the Poetry which I am recommending, it
+would be necessary to give up much of what is
+ordinarily enjoyed. But, would my limits have
+permitted me to point out how this pleasure is
+produced, many obstacles might have been removed,
+and the Reader assisted in perceiving that
+the powers of language are not so limited as he may
+suppose; and that it is possible for poetry to give
+other enjoyments, of a purer, more lasting, and
+more exquisite nature. This part of the subject
+has not been altogether neglected, but it has not
+been so much my present aim to prove, that the
+interest excited by some other kinds of poetry is
+less vivid, and less worthy of the nobler powers of
+the mind, as to offer reasons for presuming, that
+if my purpose were fulfilled, a species of poetry
+would be produced, which is genuine poetry; in its
+nature well adapted to interest mankind permanently,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
+and likewise important in the multiplicity
+and quality of its moral relations.</p>
+
+<p>From what has been said, and from a perusal of
+the Poems, the Reader will be able clearly to perceive
+the object which I had in view: he will
+determine how far it has been attained; and, what
+is a much more important question, whether it be
+worth attaining: and upon the decision of these
+two questions will rest my claim to the approbation
+of the Public.</p>
+
+
+<h3 style="padding-top: 1em">APPENDIX</h3>
+
+<h4>ON POETIC DICTION</h4>
+
+<p>Perhaps, as I have no right to expect that attentive
+perusal, without which, confined, as I have
+been, to the narrow limits of a preface, my meaning
+cannot be thoroughly understood, I am anxious to
+give an exact notion of the sense in which the
+phrase poetic diction has been used; and for this
+purpose, a few words shall here be added, concerning
+the origin and characteristics of the phraseology,
+which I have condemned under that name.</p>
+
+<p>The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote
+from passion excited by real events; they wrote
+naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they
+did, their language was daring, and figurative. In
+succeeding times, Poets, and Men ambitious of the
+fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language,
+and desirous of producing the same effect
+without being animated by the same passion, set
+themselves to a mechanical adoption of these
+figures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes
+with propriety, but much more frequently applied<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>
+them to feelings and thoughts with which they had
+no natural connexion whatsoever. A language
+was thus insensibly produced, differing materially
+from the real language of men in <i>any situation</i>.
+The Reader or Hearer of this distorted language
+found himself in a perturbed and unusual state of
+mind: when affected by the genuine language of
+passion he had been in a perturbed and unusual
+state of mind also: in both cases he was willing
+that his common judgement and understanding
+should be laid asleep, and he had no instinctive and
+infallible perception of the true to make him reject
+the false; the one served as a passport for the
+other. The emotion was in both cases delightful,
+and no wonder if he confounded the one with the
+other, and believed them both to be produced
+by the same, or similar causes. Besides, the Poet
+spake to him in the character of a man to be looked
+up to, a man of genius and authority. Thus, and
+from a variety of other causes, this distorted language
+was received with admiration; and Poets,
+it is probable, who had before contented themselves
+for the most part with misapplying only
+expressions which at first had been dictated by
+real passion, carried the abuse still further, and
+introduced phrases composed apparently in the
+spirit of the original figurative language of passion,
+yet altogether of their own invention, and characterized
+by various degrees of wanton deviation
+from good sense and nature.</p>
+
+<p>It is indeed true, that the language of the earliest
+Poets was felt to differ materially from ordinary
+language, because it was the language of extraordinary
+occasions; but it was really spoken by
+men, language which the Poet himself had uttered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
+when he had been affected by the events which he
+described, or which he had heard uttered by
+those around him. To this language it is probable
+that metre of some sort or other was early superadded.
+This separated the genuine language of
+Poetry still further from common life, so that whoever
+read or heard the poems of these earliest
+Poets felt himself moved in a way in which he had
+not been accustomed to be moved in real life, and
+by causes manifestly different from those which
+acted upon him in real life. This was the great
+temptation to all the corruptions which have followed:
+under the protection of this feeling succeeding
+Poets constructed a phraseology which had
+one thing, it is true, in common with the genuine
+language of poetry, namely, that it was not heard
+in ordinary conversation; that it was unusual.
+But the first Poets, as I have said, spake a language
+which, though unusual, was still the language of
+men. This circumstance, however, was disregarded
+by their successors; they found that they
+could please by easier means: they became proud
+of modes of expression which they themselves had
+invented, and which were uttered only by themselves.
+In process of time metre became a symbol
+or promise of this unusual language, and whoever
+took upon him to write in metre, according as he
+possessed more or less of true poetic genius,
+introduced less or more of this adulterated phraseology
+into his compositions, and the true and the
+false were inseparably interwoven until, the taste
+of men becoming gradually perverted, this language
+was received as a natural language: and at length,
+by the influence of books upon men, did to a certain
+degree really become so. Abuses of this kind were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
+imported from one nation to another, and with the
+progress of refinement this diction became daily
+more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight
+the plain humanities of nature by a motley
+masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics,
+and enigmas.</p>
+
+<p>It would not be uninteresting to point out the
+causes of the pleasure given by this extravagant
+and absurd diction. It depends upon a great
+variety of causes, but upon none, perhaps, more
+than its influence in impressing a notion of the
+peculiarity and exaltation of the Poet&#8217;s character,
+and in flattering the Reader&#8217;s self-love by bringing
+him nearer to a sympathy with that character; an
+effect which is accomplished by unsettling ordinary
+habits of thinking, and thus assisting the Reader
+to approach to that perturbed and dizzy state of
+mind in which if he does not find himself, he
+imagines that he is <i>balked</i> of a peculiar enjoyment
+which poetry can and ought to bestow.</p>
+
+<p>The sonnet quoted from Gray, in the Preface,
+except the lines printed in Italics, consists of little
+else but this diction, though not of the worst kind;
+and indeed, if one may be permitted to say so, it is
+far too common in the best writers both ancient
+and modern. Perhaps in no way, by positive example,
+could more easily be given a notion of what
+I mean by the phrase <i>poetic diction</i> than by referring
+to a comparison between the metrical paraphrase
+which we have of passages in the Old and
+New Testament, and those passages as they exist
+in our common Translation. See Pope&#8217;s &#8216;Messiah&#8217;
+throughout; Prior&#8217;s &#8216;Did sweeter sounds adorn
+my flowing tongue,&#8217; &amp;c. &amp;c. &#8216;Though I speak
+with the tongues of men and of angels,&#8217; &amp;c. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>&amp;c.
+1 Corinthians, chap. xiii. By way of immediate
+example take the following of Dr. Johnson:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Turn on the prudent Ant thy heedless eyes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Observe her labours, Sluggard, and be wise;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No stern command, no monitory voice,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet, timely provident, she hastes away<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When fruitful Summer loads the teeming plain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She crops the harvest, and she stores the grain.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unnerve thy vigour, and enchain thy powers?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While artful shades thy downy couch enclose,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And soft solicitation courts repose,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Year chases year with unremitted flight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till Want now following, fraudulent and slow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall spring to seize thee, like an ambush&#8217;d foe.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>From this hubbub of words pass to the original.
+&#8216;Go to the Ant, thou Sluggard, consider her ways,
+and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or
+ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and
+gathereth her food in the harvest. How long wilt
+thou sleep, O Sluggard? when wilt thou arise out
+of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber,
+a little folding of the hands to sleep. So shall thy
+poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want
+as an armed man.&#8217; Proverbs, chap. vi.</p>
+
+<p>One more quotation, and I have done. It is
+from Cowper&#8217;s <i>Verses supposed to be written by
+Alexander Selkirk</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Religion! what treasure untold<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Resides in that heavenly word!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">More precious than silver and gold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or all that this earth can afford.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the sound of the church-going bell<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These valleys and rocks never heard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne&#8217;er sighed at the sound of a knell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or smiled when a sabbath appeared.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Ye winds, that have made me your sport,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Convey to this desolate shore<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some cordial endearing report<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of a land I must visit no more.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My Friends, do they now and then send<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A wish or a thought after me?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O tell me I yet have a friend,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Though a friend I am never to see.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This passage is quoted as an instance of three
+different styles of composition. The first four
+lines are poorly expressed; some Critics would call
+the language prosaic; the fact is, it would be bad
+prose, so bad, that it is scarcely worse in metre.
+The epithet &#8216;church-going&#8217; applied to a bell, and
+that by so chaste a writer as Cowper, is an instance
+of the strange abuses which Poets have introduced
+into their language, till they and their Readers
+take them as matters of course, if they do not
+single them out expressly as objects of admiration.
+The two lines &#8216;Ne&#8217;er sighed at the sound&#8217;, &amp;c.,
+are, in my opinion, an instance of the language
+of passion wrested from its proper use, and, from
+the mere circumstance of the composition being
+in metre, applied upon an occasion that does not
+justify such violent expressions; and I should
+condemn the passage, though perhaps few Readers
+will agree with me, as vicious poetic diction. The
+last stanza is throughout admirably expressed: it
+would be equally good whether in prose or verse,
+except that the Reader has an exquisite pleasure
+in seeing such natural language so naturally connected
+with metre. The beauty of this stanza
+tempts me to conclude with a principle which
+ought never to be lost sight of, and which has been
+my chief guide in all I have said,&mdash;namely, that in
+works of <i>imagination and sentiment</i>, for of these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
+only have I been treating, in proportion as ideas
+and feelings are valuable, whether the composition
+be in prose or in verse, they require and exact one
+and the same language. Metre is but adventitious
+to composition, and the phraseology for which that
+passport is necessary, even where it may be graceful
+at all, will be little valued by the judicious.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> It is worth while here to observe, that the affecting
+parts of Chaucer are almost always expressed in language
+pure and universally intelligible even to this day.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> I here use the word &#8216;Poetry&#8217; (though against my own
+judgement) as opposed to the word Prose, and synonymous
+with metrical composition. But much confusion has been
+introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of
+Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of
+Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science. The only strict
+antithesis to Prose is Metre; nor is this, in truth, a <i>strict</i>
+antithesis, because lines and passages of metre so naturally
+occur in writing prose, that it would be scarcely possible
+to avoid them, even were it desirable.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="SAMUEL_TAYLOR_COLERIDGE" id="SAMUEL_TAYLOR_COLERIDGE"></a>SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1772-1834</h3>
+
+<h3>WORDSWORTH&#8217;S THEORY OF DICTION</h3>
+
+<h4>[<i>Biographia Literaria</i>, chap. xvii, 1817]</h4>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">As</span> far 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 <i>dramatic</i> propriety of
+those figures and metaphors in the original poets,
+which, stripped of their justifying reasons, and converted
+into mere artifices of connexion 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&#8217;s mind is thrown by the pleasureable 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
+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 &#8216;petty
+annexments&#8217;, the removal of which leaves the
+citadel unhurt and unendangered.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>My own differences from certain supposed parts
+of Mr. Wordsworth&#8217;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, yet as a rule it is 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
+<i>as</i> 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&#8217;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&#8217;s conscious feeling of his
+superiority awakened by the contrast presented
+to him; even as for the same purpose the kings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
+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&#8217;s objects. He chose low
+and rustic life, &#8216;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.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Brothers</i>, <i>Michael</i>, <i>Ruth</i>, the <i>Mad
+Mother</i>, &amp;c., 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 &#8216;their occupations
+and abode&#8217;. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
+the same results in every state of life, whether
+in town or country. As the two principal I rank
+that <small>INDEPENDENCE</small>, 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, <small>EDUCATION</small>,
+which has rendered few books familiar, but the
+Bible, and the liturgy or hymnbook. To the 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&#8217;s
+that &#8216;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&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>It is, moreover, to be considered that to the
+formation of healthy feelings, and a reflecting mind,
+negations involve impediments not less formidable
+than sophistication and vicious intermixture. I am
+convinced, that for the human soul to prosper
+in rustic life a certain vantage-ground is pre-requisite.
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
+becomes selfish, sensual, gross, and hard-hearted.
+Let the management of the <small>POOR LAWS</small> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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;&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
+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
+beforehand 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.</p>
+
+<p>The characters of the vicar and the shepherd-mariner
+in the poem of <i>The Brothers</i>, that of the
+shepherd of Green-head Ghyll in the <i>Michael</i>,
+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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His bodily frame had been from youth to age<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in his shepherd&#8217;s calling he was prompt<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And watchful more than ordinary men.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hence he had learned the meaning of all winds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When others heeded not, he heard the South<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Make subterraneous music, like the noise<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The shepherd, at such warning, of his flock<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bethought him, and he to himself would say,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The winds are now devising work for me!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And truly at all times the storm, that drives<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The traveller to a shelter, summon&#8217;d him<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Up to the mountains. He had been alone<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Amid the heart of many thousand mists,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">That came to him and left him on the heights.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So liv&#8217;d he, until his eightieth year was pass&#8217;d.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And grossly that man errs, who should suppose<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Were things indifferent to the shepherd&#8217;s thoughts.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fields, where with chearful spirits he had breath&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The common air; the hills, which he so oft<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had climb&#8217;d with vigorous steps; which had impress&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So many incidents upon his mind<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which, like a book, preserved the memory<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the dumb animals, whom he had sav&#8217;d,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had fed or shelter&#8217;d, linking to such acts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So grateful in themselves, the certainty<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of honourable gain; these fields, these hills<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which were his living being, even more<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than his own blood&mdash;what could they less? had laid<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Strong hold on his affections, were to him<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A pleasureable feeling of blind love.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The pleasure which there is in life itself.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">On the other hand, in the poems which are pitched
+at a lower note, as the <i>Harry Gill</i>, <i>Idiot Boy</i>, 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 <i>The Idiot Boy</i>,
+indeed, the mother&#8217;s character is not so much a
+real and native product of a &#8216;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&#8217;, as it is an
+impersonation of an instinct abandoned by judgement.
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
+not, in the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude
+from the reader&#8217;s fancy the disgusting images
+of ordinary morbid idiocy, which yet it was by no
+means his intention to represent. He has even
+by the &#8216;burr, burr, burr&#8217;, uncounteracted by any
+preceding description of the boy&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>The Thorn</i>, 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, &#8216;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&#8217;.
+But in a poem, still more in a lyric poem&mdash;and the
+Nurse in Shakespeare&#8217;s <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> alone
+prevents me from extending the remark even to
+dramatic poetry, if indeed even the Nurse itself
+can be deemed altogether a case in point&mdash;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&mdash;(and these form the far larger portion
+of the whole)&mdash;which might as well or still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
+better have proceeded from the poet&#8217;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;<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> the seven last lines of the tenth;<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span></p><p>If then I am compelled to doubt the theory, by
+which the choice of characters was to be directed,
+not only <i>&agrave; priori</i>, 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. &#8216;The language, too, of
+these men is 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.&#8217; To this I reply;
+that a rustic&#8217;s language, purified from all provincialism
+and grossness, and so far reconstructed as
+to be made consistent with the rules of grammar&mdash;(which
+are in essence no other than the laws of
+universal logic, applied to psychological materials)&mdash;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&mdash;(equally important though less
+obvious)&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+experience or his traditional belief; while the educated
+man chiefly seeks to discover and express
+those connexions 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+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, &#8216;accordingly, such a language&#8217;&mdash;(meaning,
+as before, the language of
+rustic life purified from provincialism)&mdash;&#8216;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
+habits of expression;&#8217; 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&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>Here let me be permitted to remind the reader,
+that the positions, which I controvert, are contained
+in the sentences&mdash;&#8216;<i>a selection of the</i> <small>REAL</small>
+<i>language of men</i>&#8217;;&mdash;&#8216;<i>the language of these men</i>&#8217;
+(i. e. men in low and rustic life) &#8216;<i>I propose to myself
+to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very
+language of men.</i>&#8217; &#8216;<i>Between the language of prose
+and that of metrical composition, there neither is, nor
+can be, any essential difference.</i>&#8217; It is against these
+exclusively that my opposition is directed.</p>
+
+<p>I object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation
+in the use of the word &#8216;real&#8217;. Every man&#8217;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&#8217;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
+Sidney differs not at all from that, which every
+well-educated gentleman would wish to write, and
+(with due allowance 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 so much
+from the general language of cultivated society,
+as the language of Mr. Wordsworth&#8217;s homeliest
+composition differs from that of a common peasant.
+For &#8216;real&#8217; therefore, we must substitute ordinary,
+or <i>lingua communis</i>. 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 exciseman, publican, and
+barber happen to be, or not to be, zealous politicians,
+and readers of the weekly newspaper <i>pro bono
+publico</i>. Anterior to cultivation the <i>lingua communis</i>
+of every country, as Dante has well observed,
+exists everywhere in parts, and nowhere as a
+whole.</p>
+
+<p>Neither is the case rendered at all more tenable
+by the addition of the words, <i>in a state of excitement</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
+For the nature of a man&#8217;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 connexions 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
+<i>Macbeth</i>, or <i>Henry VIII</i>. 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.
+<i>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.</i></p>
+
+
+<h3 style="padding-top: 1em">METRICAL COMPOSITION<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span></h3>
+
+<h4>[<i>Biographia Literaria</i>, chap. xviii, 1817]</h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I conclude</span>, 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 judgement? 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now I will take the first stanza, on which I have
+chanced to open, in the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>. It is one
+the most simple and the least peculiar in its language.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In distant countries have I been,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And yet I have not often seen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A healthy man, a man full grown,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Weep in the public roads, alone.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But such a one, on English ground,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in the broad highway, I met;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Along the broad highway he came,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His cheeks with tears were wet:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sturdy he seem&#8217;d, though he was sad;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in his arms a lamb he had.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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. &#8216;I have been in a many parts,
+far and near, and I don&#8217;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,&#8217; &amp;c., &amp;c. But when I turn to the following
+stanza in <i>The Thorn</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">At all times of the day and night<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This wretched woman thither goes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And she is known to every star,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And every wind that blows:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And there, beside the thorn, she sits,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When the blue day-light&#8217;s in the skies:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when the whirlwind&#8217;s on the hill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or frosty air is keen and still;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And to herself she cries,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh misery! Oh misery!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh woe is me! Oh misery!<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">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 <span class="smcap">Milton</span>, 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,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The Vision and the Faculty Divine.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p class="newsection">One point then alone remains, but that the most
+important; its examination having been, indeed,
+my chief inducement for the preceding inquisition.
+&#8216;<i>There neither is nor can be any essential difference
+between the language of prose and metrical composition.</i>&#8217;
+Such is Mr. Wordsworth&#8217;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 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
+expected to distinguish prose from ordinary conversation.</p>
+
+<p>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 any one 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 &#8216;<i>essential difference</i>&#8217;
+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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 contradistinction
+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&#8217;s,
+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 (i. e. the formal construction, or
+architecture, of the words and phrases) is essentially
+different from that of prose. Now the burthen of
+the proof lies with the oppugner, not with the supporters
+of the common belief. Mr. Wordsworth,
+in consequence, assigns as the proof of his position,
+&#8216;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
+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.&#8217; He then
+quotes Gray&#8217;s sonnet:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The birds in vain their amorous descant join,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or cheerful fields resume their green attire.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These ears, alas! for other notes repine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>A different object do these eyes require;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And newborn pleasure brings to happier men;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The fields to all their wonted tribute bear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To warm their little loves the birds complain.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And weep the more because I weep in vain</i>,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">and adds the following remark:&mdash;&#8216;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 &#8220;fruitless&#8221; for &#8220;fruitlessly&#8221;,
+which is so far a defect, the language of
+these lines does in no respect differ from that of
+prose.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>An idealist defending his system by the fact, that
+when asleep we often believe ourselves awake, was
+well answered by his plain neighbour, &#8216;Ah, but
+when awake do we ever believe ourselves asleep?&#8217;&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>
+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) <i>figures of speech</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 judgement, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
+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, <i>compact</i>
+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 <span class="smcap">Polixenes</span>, in the <i>Winter&#8217;s
+Tale</i>, to <span class="smcap">Perdita&#8217;s</span> neglect of the streaked gilly-flowers,
+because she had heard it said:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There is an art which, in their piedness, shares<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With great creating nature.<br /></span>
+<span class="i9"><i>Pol.</i> Say there be;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet nature is made better by no mean,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">But nature makes that mean; so, ev&#8217;n that art,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>A gentler scion to the wildest stock;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And make conceive a bark of ruder kind<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By bud of nobler race. This is an art,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which does mend nature&mdash;change it rather; but<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The art itself is nature.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Secondly, I argue from the <small>EFFECTS</small> 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 staircase, when we had
+prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
+produce its own effects to any pleasureable 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&#8217;s distich to the
+Welsh Squire who had promised him a hare:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hast sent the hare? or hast thou swallowed her?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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
+proportionately combined.</p>
+
+<p>The reference to <i>The Children in the Wood</i> by no
+means satisfies my judgement. 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
+<i>Piers Plowman</i>, or at the end, as in rhymes),
+possessed an independent value as assisting the
+recollection, and consequently the preservation, of
+<i>any</i> series of truths or incidents. But I am not
+convinced by the collation of facts, that <i>The
+Children in the Wood</i> owes either its preservation,
+or its popularity, to its metrical form. Mr. Marshal&#8217;s
+repository affords a number of tales in prose
+inferior in pathos and general merit, some of as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
+old a date, and many as widely popular. <i>Tom
+Hickathrift</i>, <i>Jack the Giant-killer</i>, <i>Goody Two-shoes</i>,
+and <i>Little Red Riding-hood</i> 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 <i>Goody Two-shoes</i> in the church is perfectly
+susceptible of metrical narration; and, among the
+&#920;&#945;&#8017;&#956;&#945;&#964;&#945; &#952;&#945;&#965;&#956;&#945;&#963;&#964;&#8001;&#964;&#945;&#964;&#945; even of the present age, I do
+not recollect a more astonishing image than that of
+the &#8216;<i>whole rookery, that flew out of the giant&#8217;s beard</i>&#8217;,
+scared by the tremendous voice, with which this
+monster answered the challenge of the heroic <i>Tom
+Hickathrift</i>!</p>
+
+<p>If from these we turn to compositions universally,
+and independently of all early associations,
+beloved and admired, would <i>The Maria</i>,
+<i>The Monk</i>, or <i>The Poor Man&#8217;s Ass</i> 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&#8217;s own
+volumes, the <i>Anecdote for Fathers</i>, <i>Simon Lee</i>,
+<i>Alice Fell</i>, <i>The Beggars</i>, and <i>The Sailor&#8217;s Mother</i>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Metre in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention,
+and therefore excites the question: Why is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
+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 <i>The Sailor&#8217;s Mother</i>, for instance. If I could
+for a moment abstract from the effect produced on
+the author&#8217;s feelings, as a man, by the incident at
+the time of its real occurrence, I would dare appeal
+to his own judgement, whether in the metre itself he
+found a sufficient reason for their being written
+metrically?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And, thus continuing, she said,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I had a son, who many a day<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sailed on the seas; but he is dead;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In Denmark he was cast away;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I have travelled far as Hull, to see<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What clothes he might have left, or other property.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The bird and cage they both were his:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8217;Twas my son&#8217;s bird; and neat and trim<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He kept it: many voyages<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This singing-bird hath gone with him;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When last he sailed he left the bird behind;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He to a fellow-lodger&#8217;s care<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had left it, to be watched and fed,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Till he came back again; and there<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I found it when my son was dead;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And now, God help me for my little wit!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I trail it with me, Sir! he took so much delight in it.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s imagination (a state, which
+spreads its influence and colouring over all, that
+co-exists with the exciting cause, and in which</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The simplest, and the most familiar things<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them),<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">I would ask the poet whether he would not have
+felt an abrupt downfall in these verses from the
+preceding stanza?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The ancient spirit is not dead;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Old times, thought I, are breathing there;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Proud was I that my country bred<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such strength, a dignity so fair:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She begged an alms, like one in poor estate;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s writings, of an actual adoption,
+or true imitation, of the real and very language of
+low and rustic life, freed from provincialisms.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
+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 <i>mordaunt</i> between it and
+the superadded metre. Now poetry, Mr. Wordsworth
+truly affirms, does always imply <small>PASSION</small>:
+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 <span class="smcap">Donne</span>
+or <span class="smcap">Dryden</span> 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&#8217;s reply to this
+objection, or rather on his objection to this reply,
+as already anticipated in his preface.</p>
+
+<p>Fourthly, and as intimately connected with this,
+if not the same argument in a more general form,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In Mr. Wordsworth&#8217;s criticism of Gray&#8217;s Sonnet,
+the readers&#8217; 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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>A different object do these eyes require;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.</i><br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;<i>morning</i>&#8217;. (For we will set aside, at present, the
+consideration, that the particular word &#8216;<i>smiling</i>&#8217; is
+hackneyed and (as it involves a sort of personification)
+not quite congruous with the common and
+material attribute of <i>shining</i>.) 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&#8217;s conversation.
+Should the sportsman exclaim, &#8216;<i>Come boys!
+the rosy morning calls you up</i>&#8217;, he will be supposed
+to have some song in his head. But no one suspects
+this, when he says, &#8216;A wet morning shall not
+confine us to our beds.&#8217; 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
+not so much proof against all authority, as dead
+to it.</p>
+
+<p>The second line,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">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 &#8216;Phoebus&#8217; 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 rekindled, 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 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?</p>
+
+<p>I remember no poet, whose writings would
+safelier stand the test of Mr. Wordsworth&#8217;s theory,
+than Spenser. Yet will Mr. Wordsworth say,
+that the style of the following stanza is either<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
+undistinguished from prose, and the language of
+ordinary life? Or that it is vicious, and that the
+stanzas are blots in the <i>Faerie Queene</i>?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">By this the northern wagoner had set<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His sevenfold teme behind the steadfast starre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That was in ocean waves yet never wet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But firme is fixt, and sendeth light from farre<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To all that in the wild deep wandering are:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And chearful chanticleer with his note shrill<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had warned once that Phoebus&#8217; fiery carre<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In haste was climbing up the easterne hill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Full envious that night so long his roome did fill.<br /></span>
+<span class="i10">Book I, Can. 2, St. 2.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">At last the golden orientall gate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Ph&#339;bus fresh, as brydegrome to his mate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And hurl&#8217;d his glist&#8217;ring beams through gloomy ayre:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streightway<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He started up, and did him selfe prepayre<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In sun-bright armes and battailous array;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For with that pagan proud he combat will that day.<br /></span>
+<span class="i10">Book I, Can. 5, St. 2.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I put my hat upon my head<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And walk&#8217;d into the Strand;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And there I met another man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose hat was in his hand.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
+attempt to prove that an ape is not a Newton,
+when it is 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 blamable
+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 <i>Civil Wars</i> 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):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And to the end we may with better ease<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Discern the true discourse, vouchsafe to show<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What were the times foregoing near to these,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That these we may with better profit know.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tell how the world fell into this disease;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And how so great distemperature did grow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So shall we see with what degrees it came;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How things at full do soon wax out of frame.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ten kings had from the Norman conqu&#8217;ror reign&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With intermixt and variable fate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When England to her greatest height attain&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of power, dominion, glory, wealth, and state;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">After it had with much ado sustain&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The violence of princes, with debate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For titles and the often mutinies<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of nobles for their ancient liberties.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For first, the Norman, conqu&#8217;ring all by might,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By might was forc&#8217;d to keep what he had got;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mixing our customs and the form of right<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With foreign constitutions he had brought;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mast&#8217;ring the mighty, humbling the poorer wight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By all severest means that could be wrought;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, making the succession doubtful, rent<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His new-got state, and left it turbulent.<br /></span>
+<span class="i10">Book I, St. vii, viii, and ix.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Will it be contended on the one side, that these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
+lines are mean and senseless? Or on the other,
+that they are not prosaic, and for that reason unpoetic?
+This poet&#8217;s well-merited epithet is that
+of the &#8216;<i>well-languaged Daniel</i>&#8217;; but likewise, and
+by the consent of his contemporaries no less than
+of all succeeding critics, the &#8216;prosaic Daniel.&#8217; 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 <i>Epistles</i> and in his <i>Hymen&#8217;s Triumph</i>,
+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 these species of diction, may be seen in Lamb&#8217;s
+<i>Dramatic Specimens</i>, &amp;c., a work of various interest
+from the nature of the selections themselves, (all
+from the plays of Shakespeare&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>Among the possible effects of practical adherence
+to a theory that aims to identify the style of prose
+and verse,&mdash;(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)&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
+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<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> for no assignable cause or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>reason but that of the author&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>The answer or objection in the preface to the
+anticipated remark &#8216;that metre paves the way to
+other distinctions&#8217;, is contained in the following
+words. &#8216;The distinction of rhyme and metre is
+voluntary and uniform, and not, like that produced
+by (what is 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.&#8217; 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 judgement on what has been written by
+others; if indeed it were possible that the two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
+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 <span class="smcap">Taste</span>. By
+what rule that does not leave the reader at the
+poet&#8217;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
+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 connexion. 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 called 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 &#956;&#8001;&#961;&#966;&#969;&#963;&#953;&#962;, not &#960;&#959;&#7985;&#951;&#963;&#953;&#962;. The rules of
+the <span class="smcap">Imagination</span> 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&#8217;s apostrophe to the Sun in the
+second stanza of his <i>Progress of the Soul</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Thee, eye of heaven! this great soul envies not;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By thy male force is all, we have, begot.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the first East thou now beginn&#8217;st to shine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Suck&#8217;st early balm and island spices there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And wilt anon in thy loose-rein&#8217;d career<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And see at night this western world of mine:<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who before thee one day began to be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, thy frail light being quench&#8217;d, shall long, long outlive thee!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Or the next stanza but one:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Great destiny, the commissary of God,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That hast mark&#8217;d out a path and period<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For ev&#8217;ry thing! Who, where we offspring took,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Our way and ends see&#8217;st at one instant: thou<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Knot of all causes! Thou, whose changeless brow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne&#8217;er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And show my story in thy eternal book, &amp;c.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>As little difficulty do we find in excluding from
+the honours of unaffected warmth and elevation
+the madness prepense of pseudo-poesy, 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&#8217;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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Inoculation</span>, heavenly maid! descend!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s preface to his <i>Pindaric Odes, written in
+imitation of the style and manner of the odes of
+Pindar</i>. &#8216;If (says Cowley) a man should undertake
+to translate Pindar, word for word, it would
+be thought that one madman had translated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
+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.&#8217; I then proceeded with his own free
+version of the second Olympic, composed for the
+charitable purpose of rationalizing the Theban
+Eagle.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Queen of all harmonious things,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dancing words and speaking strings,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What God, what hero, wilt thou sing?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What happy man to equal glories bring?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Begin, begin thy noble choice,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pisa does to Jove belong,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Jove and Pisa claim thy song.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The fair first-fruits of war, th&#8217; Olympic games,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Alcides offer&#8217;d up to Jove;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Alcides too thy strings may move!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Join Theron boldly to their sacred names;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Theron the next honour claims;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Theron to no man gives place,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is first in Pisa&#8217;s and in Virtue&#8217;s race;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Theron there, and he alone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ev&#8217;n his own swift forefathers has outgone.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 connexions 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:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ye harp-controling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What God? what Hero?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What Man shall we celebrate?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the Olympiad (or the Olympic games) did Hercules establish,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The first-fruits of the spoils of war.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But Theron for the four-horsed car,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That bore victory to him,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It behoves us now to voice aloud:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Just, the Hospitable,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Bulwark of Agrigentum,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of renowned fathers<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Flower, even him<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who preserves his native city erect and safe.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 produce neither of the
+fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation
+consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxtaposition
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
+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
+contexture 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&#8217;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 <small>ONE</small> country nor of <small>ONE</small> age.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I&#8217;ve measured it from side to side;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8217;Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Nay, rack your brain&mdash;&#8217;tis all in vain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I&#8217;ll tell you every thing I know;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But to the Thorn, and to the Pond<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which is a little step beyond,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I wish that you would go:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Perhaps, when you are at the place,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You something of her tale may trace.<br /></span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I&#8217;ll give you the best help I can:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Before you up the mountain go,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Up to the dreary mountain-top,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I&#8217;ll tell you all I know.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8217;Tis now some two-and-twenty years<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Since she (her name is Martha Ray)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gave, with a maiden&#8217;s true good will,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her company to Stephen Hill;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And she was blithe and gay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And she was happy, happy still<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whene&#8217;er she thought of Stephen Hill.<br /></span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And they had fix&#8217;d the wedding-day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The morning that must wed them both;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But Stephen to another maid<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had sworn another oath;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, with this other maid, to church<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unthinking Stephen went&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Poor Martha! on that woeful day<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A pang of pitiless dismay<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into her soul was sent;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A fire was kindled in her breast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which might not burn itself to rest.<br /></span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">They say, full six months after this,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While yet the summer leaves were green,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She to the mountain-top would go,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And there was often seen.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8217;Tis said a child was in her womb,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As now to any eye was plain;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She was with child, and she was mad;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet often she was sober sad<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From her exceeding pain.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh me! ten thousand times I&#8217;d rather<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That he had died, that cruel father!<br /></span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3"><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i3"><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i3"><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i3"><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><br /></span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Last Christmas when we talked of this,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Old farmer Simpson did maintain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That in her womb the infant wrought<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">About its mother&#8217;s heart, and brought<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her senses back again:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, when at last her time drew near,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her looks were calm, her senses clear.<br /></span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">No more I know, I wish I did,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I would tell it all to you:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For what became of this poor child<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There&#8217;s none that ever knew:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And if a child was born or no,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There&#8217;s no one that could ever tell;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And if &#8217;twas born alive or dead,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There&#8217;s no one knows, as I have said:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But some remember well,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That Martha Ray about this time<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Would up the mountain often climb.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> As the ingenious gentleman under the influence of the
+Tragic Muse contrived to dislocate, &#8216;I wish you a good
+morning, Sir! Thank you, Sir, and I wish you the same,&#8217;
+into two blank-verse heroics:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">To you a good morning, good Sir! I wish.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You, Sir! I thank: to you the same wish I.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>
+In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth&#8217;s works which I have
+thoroughly studied, I find fewer instances in which this
+would be practicable than I have met in many poems,
+where an approximation of prose has been sedulously
+and on system guarded against. Indeed excepting the
+stanzas already quoted from <i>The Sailor&#8217;s Mother</i>, I can
+recollect but one instance: viz. a short passage of four or
+five lines in <i>The Brothers</i>, that model of English pastoral,
+which I never yet read with unclouded eye.&mdash;&#8216;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, <i>a circumstance of which they took no
+heed</i>: but one of them, going by chance into the house,
+which at this time was James&#8217;s house, learnt <i>there</i>, that
+nobody had seen him all that day.&#8217; The only change
+which has been made is in the position of the little word
+<i>there</i> in two instances, the position in the original being
+clearly such as is not adopted in ordinary conversation.
+The other words printed in <i>italics</i> 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 connexion by the genitive pronoun.
+Men in general would have said, &#8216;but that was a circumstance
+they paid no attention to, or took no notice of;&#8217;
+and the language is, on the theory of the preface, justified
+only by the narrator&#8217;s being the <i>Vicar</i>. Yet if any ear
+<i>could</i> suspect, that these sentences were ever printed as
+metre, on those very words alone could the suspicion have
+been grounded.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="WILLIAM_BLAKE" id="WILLIAM_BLAKE"></a>WILLIAM BLAKE<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1757-1827</h3>
+
+<h3>THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS (1809)</h3>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Sir Geffrey Chaucer and the Nine-and-twenty
+Pilgrims on their journey to Canterbury</span><a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></h4>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> time chosen is early morning, before sunrise,
+when the jolly company are just quitting the
+Tabarde Inn. The Knight and Squire with the
+Squire&#8217;s Yeoman lead the Procession; next follow
+the youthful Abbess, her Nun, and three Priests;
+her greyhounds attend her:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Of small hounds had she that she fed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With roast flesh, milk, and wastel bread.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Next follow the Friar and Monk; then the Tapiser,
+the Pardoner, and the Sompnour and Manciple.
+After these &#8216;Our Host&#8217;, who occupies the centre of
+the cavalcade, directs them to the Knight as the
+person who would be likely to commence their
+task of each telling a tale in their order. After the
+Host follow the Shipman, the Haberdasher, the
+Dyer, the Franklin, the Physician, the Ploughman,
+the Lawyer, the Poor Parson, the Merchant, the
+Wife of Bath, the Miller, the Cook, the Oxford
+Scholar, Chaucer himself; and the Reeve comes
+as Chaucer has described:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And ever he rode hinderest of the rout.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">These last are issuing from the gateway of the Inn
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>the Cook and the Wife of Bath are both taking
+their morning&#8217;s draught of comfort. Spectators
+stand at the gateway of the Inn, and are composed
+of an old Man, a Woman, and Children.</p>
+
+<p>The Landscape is an eastward view of the
+country, from the Tabarde Inn in Southwark, as
+it may be supposed to have appeared in Chaucer&#8217;s
+time, interspersed with cottages and villages. The
+first beams of the Sun are seen above the horizon;
+some buildings and spires indicate the situation
+of the Great City. The Inn is a Gothic building,
+which Thynne in his Glossary says was the lodging
+of the Abbot of Hyde, by Winchester. On the Inn
+is inscribed its title, and a proper advantage is
+taken of this circumstance to describe the subject of
+the Picture. The words written over the gateway
+of the Inn are as follow: &#8216;The Tabarde Inn, by
+Henry Baillie, the lodgynge-house for Pilgrims who
+journey to Saint Thomas&#8217;s Shrine at Canterbury.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>The characters of Chaucer&#8217;s Pilgrims are the
+characters which compose all ages and nations.
+As one age falls, another rises, different to mortal
+sight, but to immortals only the same; for we see
+the same characters repeated again and again, in
+animals, vegetables, minerals, and in men. Nothing
+new occurs in identical existence; Accident
+ever varies, Substance can never suffer change nor
+decay.</p>
+
+<p>Of Chaucer&#8217;s characters, as described in his
+<i>Canterbury Tales</i>, some of the names or titles are
+altered by time, but the characters themselves for
+ever remain unaltered; and consequently they
+are the physiognomies or lineaments of universal
+human life, beyond which Nature never steps.
+Names alter, things never alter. I have known<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
+multitudes of those who would have been monks
+in the age of monkery, who in this deistical age
+are deists. As Newton numbered the stars, and
+as Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer
+numbered the classes of men.</p>
+
+<p>The Painter has consequently varied the heads
+and forms of his personages into all Nature&#8217;s
+varieties; the horses he has also varied to accord
+to their riders; the costume is correct according
+to authentic monuments.</p>
+
+<p>The Knight and Squire with the Squire&#8217;s Yeoman
+lead the Procession, as Chaucer has also
+placed them first in his Prologue. The Knight is
+a true Hero, a good, great and wise man; his
+whole-length portrait on horseback, as written by
+Chaucer, cannot be surpassed. He has spent his
+life in the field, has ever been a conqueror, and is
+that species of character which in every age stands
+as the guardian of man against the oppressor. His
+son is like him, with the germ of perhaps greater
+perfection still, as he blends literature and the arts
+with his warlike studies. Their dress and their
+horses are of the first rate, without ostentation,
+and with all the true grandeur that unaffected
+simplicity when in high rank always displays.
+The Squire&#8217;s Yeoman is also a great character,
+a man perfectly knowing in his profession:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And in his hand he bare a mighty bow.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Chaucer describes here a mighty man, one who in
+war is the worthy attendant on noble heroes.</p>
+
+<p>The Prioress follows these with her female
+Chaplain:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Another Nonne also with her had she,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That was her Chaplaine, and Priests three.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">This Lady is described also as of the first rank,
+rich and honoured. She has certain peculiarities
+and little delicate affectations, not unbecoming in
+her, being accompanied with what is truly grand
+and really polite; her person and face Chaucer
+has described with minuteness; it is very elegant,
+and was the beauty of our ancestors till after
+Elizabeth&#8217;s time, when voluptuousness and folly
+began to be accounted beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>Her companion and her three Priests were no
+doubt all perfectly delineated in those parts of
+Chaucer&#8217;s work which are now lost; we ought to
+suppose them suitable attendants on rank and
+fashion.</p>
+
+<p>The Monk follows these with the Friar. The
+Painter has also grouped with these the Pardoner
+and the Sompnour and the Manciple, and has here
+also introduced one of the rich citizens of London&mdash;characters
+likely to ride in company, all being
+above the common rank in life, or attendants on
+those who were so.</p>
+
+<p>For the Monk is described by Chaucer, as a man
+of the first rank in society, noble, rich, and expensively
+attended; he is a leader of the age, with
+certain humorous accompaniments in his character,
+that do not degrade, but render him an object of
+dignified mirth, but also with other accompaniments
+not so respectable.</p>
+
+<p>The Friar is a character of a mixed kind:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A friar there was, a wanton and a merry;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">but in his office he is said to be a &#8216;full solemn
+man&#8217;; eloquent, amorous, witty and satirical;
+young, handsome and rich; he is a complete rogue,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
+with constitutional gaiety enough to make him a
+master of all the pleasures of the world:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">His neck was white as the flour de lis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thereto strong he was as a champioun.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is necessary here to speak of Chaucer&#8217;s own
+character, that I may set certain mistaken critics
+right in their conception of the humour and fun
+that occur on the journey. Chaucer is himself the
+great poetical observer of men, who in every age
+is born to record and eternize its acts. This he
+does as a master, as a father and superior, who
+looks down on their little follies from the Emperor
+to the Miller, sometimes with severity, oftener
+with joke and sport.</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly Chaucer has made his Monk a great
+tragedian, one who studied poetical art. So much
+so that the generous Knight is, in the compassionate
+dictates of his soul, compelled to cry out:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Ho,&#8217; quoth the Knyght, &#8216;good Sir, no more of this;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That ye have said is right ynough, I wis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And mokell more; for little heaviness<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is right enough for much folk, as I guesse.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I say, for me, it is a great disease,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whereas men have been in wealth and ease,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To heare of their sudden fall, alas!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the contrary is joy and solas.&#8217;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Monk&#8217;s definition of tragedy in the proem
+to his tale is worth repeating:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Tragedie is to tell a certain story,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As old books us maken memory,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of hem that stood in great prosperity,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And be fallen out of high degree,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into miserie, and ended wretchedly.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Though a man of luxury, pride and pleasure, he
+is a master of art and learning, though affecting to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
+despise it. Those who can think that the proud
+huntsman and noble housekeeper, Chaucer&#8217;s Monk,
+is intended for a buffoon or burlesque character,
+know little of Chaucer.</p>
+
+<p>For the Host who follows this group, and holds
+the centre of the cavalcade, is a first-rate character,
+and his jokes are no trifles; they are always,
+though uttered with audacity, and equally free with
+the Lord and the Peasant&mdash;they are always substantially
+and weightily expressive of knowledge
+and experience; Henry Baillie, the keeper of the
+greatest Inn of the greatest City, for such was the
+Tabarde Inn in Southwark near London, our Host,
+was also a leader of the age.</p>
+
+<p>By way of illustration I instance Shakespeare&#8217;s
+Witches in <i>Macbeth</i>. Those who dress them for
+the stage, consider them as wretched old women,
+and not, as Shakespeare intended, the Goddesses
+of Destiny; this shows how Chaucer has been
+misunderstood in his sublime work. Shakespeare&#8217;s
+Fairies also are the rulers of the vegetable world,
+and so are Chaucer&#8217;s; let them be so considered,
+and then the poet will be understood, and not
+else.</p>
+
+<p>But I have omitted to speak of a very prominent
+character, the Pardoner, the Age&#8217;s Knave, who
+always commands and domineers over the high and
+low vulgar. This man is sent in every age for a rod
+and scourge, and for a blight, for a trial of men, to
+divide the classes of men; he is in the most holy
+sanctuary, and he is suffered by Providence for
+wise ends, and has also his great use, and his grand
+leading destiny.</p>
+
+<p>His companion the Sompnour is also a Devil of
+the first magnitude, grand, terrific, rich, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
+honoured in the rank of which he holds the destiny.
+The uses to society are perhaps equal of the Devil
+and of the Angel; their sublimity who can
+dispute?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In daunger had he at his own gise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The young girls of his diocese,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And he knew well their counsel, &amp;c.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The principal figure in the next group is the
+Good Parson; an Apostle, a real Messenger of
+Heaven, sent in every age for its light and its
+warmth. This man is beloved and venerated by
+all, and neglected by all: he serves all, and is
+served by none. He is, according to Christ&#8217;s
+definition, the greatest of his age: yet he is a Poor
+Parson of a town. Read Chaucer&#8217;s description of
+the Good Parson, and bow the head and the knee
+to Him, Who in every age sends us such a burning
+and a shining light. Search, O ye rich and powerful,
+for these men and obey their counsel; then
+shall the golden age return. But alas! you will
+not easily distinguish him from the Friar or the
+Pardoner; they also are &#8216;full solemn men&#8217;, and
+their counsel you will continue to follow.</p>
+
+<p>I have placed by his side the Sergeant-at-Lawe,
+who appears delighted to ride in his company, and
+between him and his brother the Ploughman;
+as I wish men of law would always ride with
+them, and take their counsel, especially in all difficult
+points. Chaucer&#8217;s Lawyer is a character of
+great venerableness, a Judge and a real master
+of the jurisprudence of his age.</p>
+
+<p>The Doctor of Physic is in this group; and
+the Franklin, the voluptuous country gentleman,
+contrasted with the Physician, and, on his other
+hand, with two Citizens of London. Chaucer&#8217;s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>
+characters live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury
+Pilgrimage; we all pass on, each sustaining
+one of these characters; nor can a child be born
+who is not one or other of these characters of
+Chaucer. The Doctor of Physic is described as
+the first of his profession, perfect, learned, completely
+Master and Doctor in his art. Thus the
+reader will observe that Chaucer makes every one
+of his characters perfect in his kind; every one is
+an Antique Statue, the image of a class and not of
+an imperfect individual.</p>
+
+<p>This group also would furnish substantial matter,
+on which volumes might be written. The Franklin
+is one who keeps open table, who is the genius of
+eating and drinking, the Bacchus; as the Doctor
+of Physic is the Aesculapius, the Host is the Silenus,
+the Squire is the Apollo, the Miller is the Hercules,
+&amp;c. Chaucer&#8217;s characters are a description of
+the eternal Principles that exist in all ages. The
+Franklin is voluptuousness itself, most nobly
+portrayed:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It snewed in his house of meat and drink.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Ploughman is simplicity itself, with wisdom
+and strength for its stamina. Chaucer has
+divided the ancient character of Hercules between
+his Miller and his Ploughman. Benevolence is the
+Ploughman&#8217;s great characteristic; he is thin with
+excessive labour, and not with old age as some have
+supposed:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He would thresh, and thereto dike and delve,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For Christe&#8217;s sake, for every poore wight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Withouten hire, if it lay in his might.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Visions of these eternal principles or characters
+of human life appear to poets in all ages; the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
+Grecian gods were the ancient Cherubim of
+Phoenicia; but the Greeks, and since them the
+Moderns, have neglected to subdue the gods of
+Priam. These gods are visions of the eternal
+attributes, or divine names, which, when erected
+into gods, become destructive to humanity. They
+ought to be the servants, and not the masters of
+man or of society. They ought to be made to
+sacrifice to man, and not man compelled to sacrifice
+to them; for, when separated from man or
+humanity, who is Jesus the Saviour, the Vine of
+Eternity? They are thieves and rebels, they are
+destroyers.</p>
+
+<p>The Ploughman of Chaucer is Hercules in his
+supreme Eternal State, divested of his Spectrous
+Shadow, which is the Miller, a terrible fellow, such
+as exists in all times and places for the trial of
+men, to astonish every neighbourhood with brutal
+strength and courage, to get rich and powerful, to
+curb the pride of Man.</p>
+
+<p>The Reeve and the Manciple are two characters
+of the most consummate worldly wisdom. The
+Shipman, or Sailor, is a similar genius of Ulyssean
+art, but with the highest courage superadded.</p>
+
+<p>The Citizens and their Cook are each leaders
+of a class. Chaucer has been somehow made to
+number four citizens, which would make his whole
+company, himself included, thirty-one. But he says
+there was but nine-and-twenty in his company:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Full nine and twenty in a company.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Webbe, or Weaver, and the Tapiser, or
+Tapestry Weaver, appear to me to be the same
+person; but this is only an opinion, for &#8216;full nine
+and twenty&#8217; may signify one more or less. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>
+I daresay that Chaucer wrote &#8216;A Webbe Dyer&#8217;,
+that is a Cloth Dyer:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A Webbe Dyer and a Tapiser.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Merchant cannot be one of the Three
+Citizens, as his dress is different, and his character
+is more marked, whereas Chaucer says of his rich
+citizens:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All were yclothed in o liverie.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The characters of Women Chaucer has divided
+into two classes, the Lady Prioress and the Wife
+of Bath. Are not these leaders of the ages of men?
+The Lady Prioress in some ages predominates;
+and in some the Wife of Bath, in whose character
+Chaucer has been equally minute and exact;
+because she is also a scourge and a blight. I shall
+say no more of her, nor expose what Chaucer has
+left hidden; let the young reader study what he
+has said of her: it is useful as a scarecrow.
+There are of such characters born too many for the
+peace of the world.</p>
+
+<p>I come at length to the Clerk of Oxenford. This
+character varies from that of Chaucer, as the contemplative
+philosopher varies from the poetical
+genius. There are always these two classes of
+learned sages, the poetical and the philosophical.
+The Painter has put them side by side, as if the
+youthful clerk had put himself under the tuition
+of the mature poet. Let the Philosopher always
+be the servant and scholar of Inspiration, and all
+will be happy.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> From <i>A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures</i>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHARLES_LAMB" id="CHARLES_LAMB"></a>CHARLES LAMB<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1775-1834</h3>
+
+<h3>ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE,<br />
+
+<small>CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS</small><br />
+<small>FOR STAGE REPRESENTATION (1811)</small></h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Taking</span> a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was
+struck with the affected attitude of a figure, which
+I do not remember to have seen before, and which
+upon examination proved to be a whole-length of
+the celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would not
+go so far with some good Catholics abroad as to
+shut players altogether out of consecrated ground,
+yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction
+of theatrical airs and gestures into a
+place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities.
+Going nearer, I found inscribed under this harlequin
+figure the following lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">To paint fair Nature, by divine command,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A Shakespeare rose: then, to expand his fame<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wide o&#8217;er this breathing world, a Garrick came.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Actor&#8217;s genius bade them breathe anew;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Immortal Garrick call&#8217;d them back to day:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And till Eternity with power sublime<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shakespeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And earth irradiate with a beam divine.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It would be an insult to my readers&#8217; understandings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
+to attempt anything like a criticism on
+this farrago of false thoughts and nonsense. But
+the reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder,
+how, from the days of the actor here celebrated to
+our own, it should have been the fashion to compliment
+every performer in his turn, that has had
+the luck to please the town in any of the great
+characters of Shakespeare, with the notion of possessing
+a <i>mind congenial with the poet&#8217;s</i>: how people
+should come thus unaccountably to confound the
+power of originating poetical images and conceptions
+with the faculty of being able to read or recite
+the same when put into words;<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> or what connexion
+that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of
+man, which a great dramatic poet possesses, has
+with those low tricks upon the eye and ear, which
+a player by observing a few general effects,
+which some common passion, as grief, anger, &amp;c.
+usually has upon the gestures and exterior, can so
+easily compass. To know the internal workings
+and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a
+Hamlet for instance, the <i>when</i> and the <i>why</i> and the
+<i>how far</i> they should be moved; to what pitch a
+passion is becoming; to give the reins and to pull
+in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing
+in or the slackening is most graceful; seems to
+demand a reach of intellect of a vastly different
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>extent from that which is employed upon the bare
+imitation of the signs of these passions in the
+countenance or gesture, which signs are usually
+observed to be most lively and emphatic in the
+weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all
+but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger,
+or grief, generally; but of the motives and grounds
+of the passion, wherein it differs from the same
+passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the
+actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture
+than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, or the
+muscles utter intelligible sounds. But such is the
+instantaneous nature of the impressions which we
+take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared
+with the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understanding
+in reading, that we are apt not only to
+sink the play-writer in the consideration which we
+pay to the actor, but even to identify in our minds
+in a perverse manner, the actor with the character
+which he represents. It is difficult for a frequent
+playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from
+the person and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady
+Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S.
+Nor is this confusion incidental alone to unlettered
+persons, who, not possessing the advantage of
+reading, are necessarily dependent upon the stage-player
+for all the pleasure which they can receive
+from the drama, and to whom the very idea of <i>what
+an author is</i> cannot be made comprehensible without
+some pain and perplexity of mind: the error
+is one from which persons otherwise not meanly
+lettered, find it almost impossible to extricate
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the
+very high degree of satisfaction which I received<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>
+some years back from seeing for the first time a
+tragedy of Shakespeare performed, in which these
+two great performers sustained the principal parts.
+It seemed to embody and realize conceptions which
+had hitherto assumed no distinct shape. But
+dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile
+pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the
+novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of
+realizing an idea, we have only materialized and
+brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh
+and blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an
+unattainable substance.</p>
+
+<p>How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have
+its free conceptions thus crampt and pressed down
+to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality, may be
+judged from that delightful sensation of freshness
+with which we turn to those plays of Shakespeare
+which have escaped being performed, and to those
+passages in the acting plays of the same writer
+which have happily been left out in performance.
+How far the very custom of hearing anything
+<i>spouted</i>, withers and blows upon a fine passage,
+may be seen in those speeches from <i>Henry the Fifth</i>,
+&amp;c. which are current in the mouths of school-boys
+from their being to be found in <i>Enfield Speakers</i>,
+and such kind of books. I confess myself utterly
+unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in
+<i>Hamlet</i>, beginning &#8216;To be or not to be&#8217;, or to tell
+whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been
+so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys
+and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living
+place and principle of continuity in the play, till
+it is become to me a perfect dead member.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being
+of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
+calculated for performance on a stage, than those
+of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their
+distinguished excellence is a reason that they should
+be so. There is so much in them, which comes not
+under the province of acting, with which eye, and
+tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.</p>
+
+<p>The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion,
+and the turns of passion; and the more coarse and
+palpable the passion is, the more hold upon the eyes
+and ears of the spectators the performer obviously
+possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes
+where two persons talk themselves into a fit of fury,
+and then in a surprising manner talk themselves
+out of it again, have always been the most popular
+upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because
+the spectators are here most palpably appealed to,
+they are the proper judges in this war of words,
+they are the legitimate ring that should be formed
+round such &#8216;intellectual prize-fighters&#8217;. Talking
+is the direct object of the imitation here. But in
+all the best dramas, and in Shakespeare above all,
+how obvious it is, that the form of <i>speaking</i>,
+whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a
+medium, and often a highly artificial one, for putting
+the reader or spectator into possession of that
+knowledge of the inner structure and workings of
+mind in a character, which he could otherwise
+never have arrived at <i>in that form of composition</i>
+by any gift short of intuition. We do here as we
+do with novels written in the <i>epistolary form</i>.
+How many improprieties, perfect solecisms in
+letter-writing, do we put up with in <i>Clarissa</i> and
+other books, for the sake of the delight which that
+form upon the whole gives us.</p>
+
+<p>But the practice of stage representation reduces<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
+everything to a controversy of elocution. Every
+character, from the boisterous blasphemings of
+Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood,
+must play the orator. The love-dialogues of
+Romeo and Juliet, those silver-sweet sounds of
+lovers&#8217; tongues by night; the more intimate and
+sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an
+Othello or a Posthumus with their married wives,
+all those delicacies which are so delightful in the
+reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances
+in Paradise</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">As beseem&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fair couple link&#8217;d in happy nuptial league<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Alone:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">by the inherent fault of stage representation, how
+are these things sullied and turned from their very
+nature by being exposed to a large assembly;
+when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her
+lord, come drawling out of the mouth of a hired
+actress, whose courtship, though nominally addressed
+to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly
+aimed at the spectators, who are to judge of
+her endearments and her returns of love.</p>
+
+<p>The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by
+which, since the days of Betterton, a succession of
+popular performers have had the greatest ambition
+to distinguish themselves. The length of the part
+may be one of their reasons. But for the character
+itself, we find it in a play, and therefore we judge
+it a fit subject of dramatic representation. The
+play itself abounds in maxims and reflections
+beyond any other, and therefore we consider it as
+a proper vehicle for conveying moral instruction.
+But Hamlet himself&mdash;what does he suffer meanwhile
+by being dragged forth as a public schoolmaster,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
+to give lectures to the crowd! Why, nine
+parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are transactions
+between himself and his moral sense, they are the
+effusions of his solitary musings, which he retires
+to holes and corners and the most sequestered parts
+of the palace to pour forth; or rather, they are
+the silent meditations with which his bosom is
+bursting, reduced to <i>words</i> for the sake of the reader,
+who must else remain ignorant of what is passing
+there. These profound sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring
+ruminations, which the tongue
+scarce dares utter to deaf walls and chambers, how
+can they be represented by a gesticulating actor,
+who comes and mouths them out before an audience,
+making four hundred people his confidants
+at once? I say not that it is the fault of the actor
+so to do; he must pronounce them <i>ore rotundo</i>,
+he must accompany them with his eye, he must
+insinuate them into his auditory by some trick of
+eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails. <i>He must be
+thinking all the while of his appearance, because he
+knows that all the while the spectators are judging of
+it.</i> And this is the way to represent the shy,
+negligent, retiring Hamlet.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that there is no other mode of conveying
+a vast quantity of thought and feeling to
+a great portion of the audience, who otherwise
+would never earn it for themselves by reading, and
+the intellectual acquisition gained this way may,
+for aught I know, be inestimable; but I am not
+arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, but how
+much Hamlet is made another thing by being
+acted. I have heard much of the wonders which
+Garrick performed in this part; but as I never
+saw him, I must have leave to doubt whether the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
+representation of such a character came within the
+province of his art. Those who tell me of him,
+speak of his eye, of the magic of his eye, and of
+his commanding voice: physical properties, vastly
+desirable in an actor, and without which he can
+never insinuate meaning into an auditory,&mdash;but
+what have they to do with Hamlet? what have
+they to do with intellect? In fact, the things
+aimed at in theatrical representation, are to arrest
+the spectator&#8217;s eye upon the form and the gesture,
+and so to gain a more favourable hearing to what
+is spoken: it is not what the character is, but how
+he looks; not what he says, but how he speaks it.
+I see no reason to think that if the play of <i>Hamlet</i>
+were written over again by some such writer as
+Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story,
+but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the
+divine features of Shakespeare, his stupendous intellect;
+and only taking care to give us enough of
+passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never
+at a loss to furnish; I see not how the effect could
+be much different upon an audience, nor how the
+actor has it in his power to represent Shakespeare
+to us differently from his representation of Banks
+or Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful accomplished
+prince, and must be gracefully personated;
+he might be puzzled in his mind, wavering in his
+conduct, seemingly-cruel to Ophelia, he might see
+a ghost, and start at it, and address it kindly when
+he found it to be his father; all this in the poorest
+and most homely language of the servilest creeper
+after nature that ever consulted the palate of an
+audience; without troubling Shakespeare for the
+matter: and I see not but there would be room for
+all the power which an actor has, to display itself.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
+All the passions and changes of passion might remain:
+for those are much less difficult to write or
+act than is thought, it is a trick easy to be attained,
+it is but rising or falling a note or two in the voice,
+a whisper with a significant foreboding look to
+announce its approach, and so contagious the
+counterfeit appearance of any emotion is, that let
+the words be what they will, the look and tone
+shall carry it off and make it pass for deep skill in
+the passions.</p>
+
+<p>It is common for people to talk of Shakespeare&#8217;s
+plays being <i>so natural</i>; that everybody can understand
+him. They are natural indeed, they are
+grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of
+them lies out of the reach of most of us. You
+shall hear the same persons say that George
+Barnwell is very natural, and Othello is very
+natural, that they are both very deep; and to
+them they are the same kind of thing. At the one
+they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of
+young man is tempted by a naughty woman to
+commit <i>a trifling peccadillo</i>, the murder of an uncle
+or so, that is all, and so comes to an untimely end,
+which is <i>so moving</i>; and at the other, because a
+blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent
+white wife: and the odds are that ninety-nine out
+of a hundred would willingly behold the same
+catastrophe happen to both the heroes, and have
+thought the rope more due to Othello than to
+Barnwell. For of the texture of Othello&#8217;s mind,
+the inward construction marvellously laid open
+with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic
+confidences and its human misgivings, its agonies
+of hate springing from the depths of love, they see
+no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
+who pay their pennies a-piece to look through the
+man&#8217;s telescope in Leicester-fields, see into the
+inward plot and topography of the moon. Some
+dim thing or other they see, they see an actor personating
+a passion, of grief, or anger, for instance,
+and they recognize it as a copy of the usual external
+effects of such passions; for at least as
+being true to <i>that symbol of the emotion which passes
+current at the theatre for it</i>, for it is often no more
+than that: but of the grounds of the passion, its
+correspondence to a great or heroic nature, which
+is the only worthy object of tragedy,&mdash;that common
+auditors know any thing of this, or can have
+any such notions dinned into them by the mere
+strength of an actor&#8217;s lungs,&mdash;that apprehensions
+foreign to them should be thus infused into them
+by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand
+how it can be possible.</p>
+
+<p>We talk of Shakespeare&#8217;s admirable observation
+of life, when we should feel, that not from a petty
+inquisition into those cheap and every-day characters
+which surrounded him, as they surround us,
+but from his own mind, which was, to borrow
+a phrase of Ben Jonson&#8217;s, the very &#8216;sphere of
+humanity&#8217;, he fetched those images of virtue and
+of knowledge, of which every one of us recognizing
+a part, think we comprehend in our natures the
+whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which
+he positively creates in us, for nothing more than
+indigenous faculties of our own minds which only
+waited the action of corresponding virtues in him
+to return a full and clear echo of the same.</p>
+
+<p>To return to Hamlet.&mdash;Among the distinguishing
+features of that wonderful character, one of the
+most interesting (yet painful) is that soreness of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>
+mind which makes him treat the intrusions of
+Polonius with harshness, and that asperity which
+he puts on in his interviews with Ophelia. These
+tokens of an unhinged mind (if they be not mixed in
+the latter case with a profound artifice of love, to
+alienate Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to
+prepare her mind for the breaking off of that loving
+intercourse, which can no longer find a place
+amidst business so serious as that which he has to
+do) are parts of his character, which to reconcile
+with our admiration of Hamlet, the most patient
+consideration of his situation is no more than necessary;
+they are what we <i>forgive afterwards</i>, and
+explain by the whole of his character, but <i>at the
+time</i> they are harsh and unpleasant. Yet such is
+the actor&#8217;s necessity of giving strong blows to the
+audience, that I have never seen a player in this
+character, who did not exaggerate and strain to
+the utmost these ambiguous features,&mdash;these temporary
+deformities in the character. They make
+him express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which
+utterly degrades his gentility, and which no explanation
+can render palatable; they make him
+show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia&#8217;s
+father,&mdash;contempt in its very grossest and most
+hateful form; but they get applause by it: it is
+natural, people say; that is, the words are scornful,
+and the actor expresses scorn, and that they
+can judge of: but why so much scorn, and of that
+sort, they never think of asking.</p>
+
+<p>So to Ophelia.&mdash;All the Hamlets that I have
+ever seen, rant and rave at her as if she had committed
+some great crime, and the audience are
+highly pleased, because the words of the part are
+satirical, and they are enforced by the strongest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>
+expression of satirical indignation of which the face
+and voice are capable. But then, whether Hamlet
+is likely to have put on such brutal appearances
+to a lady whom he loved so dearly, is never thought
+on. The truth is, that in all such deep affections
+as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia,
+there is a stock of <i>supererogatory love</i>, (if I may
+venture to use the expression) which in any great
+grief of heart, especially where that which preys
+upon the mind cannot be communicated, confers
+a kind of indulgence upon the grieved party to
+express itself, even to its heart&#8217;s dearest object,
+in the language of a temporary alienation; but
+it is not alienation, it is a distraction purely, and
+so it always makes itself to be felt by that object:
+it is not anger, but grief assuming the appearance
+of anger,&mdash;love awkwardly counterfeiting hate, as
+sweet countenances when they try to frown: but
+such sternness and fierce disgust as Hamlet is made
+to show, is no counterfeit, but the real face of
+absolute aversion,&mdash;of irreconcilable alienation.
+It may be said he puts on the madman; but then
+he should only so far put on this counterfeit lunacy
+as his own real distraction will give him leave;
+that is, incompletely, imperfectly; not in that
+confirmed practised way, like a master of his art,
+or, as Dame Quickly would say, &#8216;like one of those
+harlotry players.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort
+of pleasure which Shakespeare&#8217;s plays give in the
+acting seems to me not at all to differ from that
+which the audience receive from those of other
+writers; and, <i>they being in themselves essentially so
+different from all others</i>, I must conclude that there
+is something in the nature of acting which levels<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
+all distinctions. And in fact, who does not speak
+indifferently of the <i>Gamester</i> and of <i>Macbeth</i> as
+fine stage performances, and praise the Mrs. Beverley
+in the same way as the Lady Macbeth of
+Mrs. S.? Belvidera, and Calista, and Isabella,
+and Euphrasia, are they less liked than Imogen,
+or than Juliet, or than Desdemona? Are they
+not spoken of and remembered in the same way?
+Is not the female performer as great (as they call
+it) in one as in the other? Did not Garrick shine,
+and was not he ambitious of shining in every
+drawling tragedy that his wretched day produced,&mdash;the
+productions of the Hills and the Murphys
+and the Browns,&mdash;and shall he have that honour
+to dwell in our minds for ever as an inseparable
+concomitant with Shakespeare? A kindred mind!
+O who can read that affecting sonnet of Shakespeare
+which alludes to his profession as a player:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That did not better for my life provide<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than public means which public custom breeds&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And almost thence my nature is subdued<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To what it works in, like the dyer&#8217;s hand&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Or that other confession:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Alas! &#8217;tis true, I have gone here and there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And made myself a motley to thy view,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gor&#8217;d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness
+in our sweet Shakespeare, and dream
+of any congeniality between him and one that, by
+every tradition of him, appears to have been as
+mere a player as ever existed; to have had his
+mind tainted with the lowest players&#8217; vices,&mdash;envy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
+and jealousy, and miserable cravings after applause;
+one who in the exercise of his profession was jealous
+even of the women-performers that stood in his
+way; a manager full of managerial tricks and
+stratagems and finesse: that any resemblance
+should be dreamed of between him and Shakespeare,&mdash;Shakespeare
+who, in the plenitude and
+consciousness of his own powers, could with that
+noble modesty, which we can neither imitate nor
+appreciate, express himself thus of his own sense
+of his own defects:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Featur&#8217;d like him, like him with friends possest;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Desiring <i>this man&#8217;s art, and that man&#8217;s scope</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the
+merit of being an admirer of Shakespeare. A true
+lover of his excellences he certainly was not; for
+would any true lover of them have admitted into
+his matchless scenes such ribald trash as Tate and
+Cibber, and the rest of them, that</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">With their darkness durst affront his light,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">have foisted into the acting plays of Shakespeare?
+I believe it impossible that he could have had
+a proper reverence for Shakespeare, and have
+condescended to go through that interpolated
+scene in Richard the Third, in which Richard
+tries to break his wife&#8217;s heart by telling her he
+loves another woman, and says, &#8216;if she survives
+this she is immortal.&#8217; Yet I doubt not he delivered
+this vulgar stuff with as much anxiety of emphasis
+as any of the genuine parts; and for acting, it is
+as well calculated as any. But we have seen the
+part of Richard lately produce great fame to an
+actor by his manner of playing it, and it lets us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
+into the secret of acting, and of popular judgements
+of Shakespeare derived from acting. Not one of
+the spectators who have witnessed Mr. C.&#8217;s
+exertions in that part, but has come away with
+a proper conviction that Richard is a very wicked
+man, and kills little children in their beds, with
+something like the pleasure which the giants and
+ogres in children&#8217;s books are represented to have
+taken in that practice; moreover, that he is very
+close and shrewd and devilish cunning, for you
+could see that by his eye.</p>
+
+<p>But is in fact this the impression we have in
+reading the Richard of Shakespeare? Do we feel
+anything like disgust, as we do at that butcher-like
+representation of him that passes for him on the
+stage? A horror at his crimes blends with the
+effect which we feel, but how is it qualified, how is
+it carried off, by the rich intellect which he displays,
+his resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast
+knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry
+of his part,&mdash;not an atom of all which is made
+perceivable in Mr. C.&#8217;s way of acting it. Nothing
+but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are
+prominent and staring; the murderer stands out,
+but where is the lofty genius, the man of vast
+capacity,&mdash;the profound, the witty, accomplished
+Richard?</p>
+
+<p>The truth is, the Characters of Shakespeare are
+so much the objects of meditation rather than of
+interest or curiosity as to their actions, that while
+we are reading any of his great criminal characters,&mdash;Macbeth,
+Richard, even Iago,&mdash;we think not
+so much of the crimes which they commit, as of
+the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual
+activity, which prompts them to overleap those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>
+moral fences. Barnwell is a wretched murderer;
+there is a certain fitness between his neck and the
+rope; he is the legitimate heir to the gallows;
+nobody who thinks at all can think of any alleviating
+circumstances in his case to make him a fit object
+of mercy. Or to take an instance from the higher
+tragedy, what else but a mere assassin is Glenalvon!
+Do we think of anything but of the crime which he
+commits, and the rack which he deserves? That
+is all which we really think about him. Whereas
+in corresponding characters in Shakespeare so little
+do the actions comparatively affect us, that while the
+impulses, the inner mind in all its perverted greatness,
+solely seems real and is exclusively attended to,
+the crime is comparatively nothing. But when we
+see these things represented, the acts which they
+do are comparatively everything, their impulses
+nothing. The state of sublime emotion into which
+we are elevated by those images of night and horror
+which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn
+prelude with which he entertains the time till the
+bell shall strike which is to call him to murder
+Duncan,&mdash;when we no longer read it in a book,
+when we have given up that vantage-ground of
+abstraction which reading possesses over seeing,
+and come to see a man in his bodily shape before
+our eyes actually preparing to commit a murder,
+if the acting be true and impressive, as I have
+witnessed it in Mr. K.&#8217;s performance of that part,
+the painful anxiety about the act, the natural
+longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated,
+the too close pressing semblance of
+reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which
+totally destroy all the delight which the words in
+the book convey, where the deed doing never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
+presses upon us with the painful sense of presence:
+it rather seems to belong to history,&mdash;to something
+past and inevitable, if it has anything to do with
+time at all. The sublime images, the poetry alone,
+is that which is present to our minds in the reading.</p>
+
+<p>So to see Lear acted&mdash;to see an old man tottering
+about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out
+of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has
+nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting.
+We want to take him into shelter and relieve him.
+That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear
+ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakespeare
+cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery
+by which they mimic the storm which he goes
+out in, is not more inadequate to represent the
+horrors of the real elements, than any actor can
+be to represent Lear: they might more easily
+propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon
+a stage, or one of Michael Angelo&#8217;s terrible figures.
+The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension,
+but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion
+are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning
+up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind,
+with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is
+laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too
+insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself
+neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but
+corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence
+of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we
+are Lear,&mdash;we are in his mind, we are sustained by
+a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters
+and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we
+discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning,
+immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life,
+but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
+listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of
+mankind. What have looks, or tones, to do with
+that sublime identification of his age with that of
+the <i>heavens themselves</i>, when in his reproaches to
+them for conniving at the injustice of his children,
+he reminds them that &#8216;they themselves are old&#8217;.
+What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What
+has the voice or the eye to do with such things?
+But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings
+with it show: it is too hard and stony; it must
+have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not
+enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine
+as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils
+of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers,
+the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty
+beast about more easily. A happy ending!&mdash;as if
+the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through,&mdash;the
+flaying of his feelings alive, did not make
+a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only
+decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be
+happy after, if he could sustain this world&#8217;s burden
+after, why all this pudder and preparation,&mdash;why
+torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy?
+As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes
+and sceptre again could tempt him to act over
+again his misused station,&mdash;as if at his years, and
+with his experience, anything was left but to die.</p>
+
+<p>Lear is essentially impossible to be represented
+on a stage. But how many dramatic personages
+are there in Shakespeare, which though more
+tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than
+Lear, yet from some circumstance, some adjunct
+to their character, are improper to be shown to
+our bodily eye. Othello for instance. Nothing can
+be more soothing, more flattering to the nobler<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
+parts of our natures, than to read of a young
+Venetian lady of highest extraction, through the
+force of love and from a sense of merit in him whom
+she loved, laying aside every consideration of
+kindred, and country, and colour, and wedding
+with <i>a coal-black Moor</i>&mdash;(for such he is represented,
+in the imperfect state of knowledge respecting
+foreign countries in those days, compared with
+our own, or in compliance with popular notions,
+though the Moors are now well enough known to
+be by many shades less unworthy of a white
+woman&#8217;s fancy)&mdash;it is the perfect triumph of virtue
+over accidents, of the imagination over the senses.
+She sees Othello&#8217;s colour in his mind. But upon
+the stage, when the imagination is no longer the
+ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor unassisted
+senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello
+played, whether he did not, on the contrary, sink
+Othello&#8217;s mind in his colour; whether he did not
+find something extremely revolting in the courtship
+and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona;
+and whether the actual sight of the thing did not
+over-weigh all that beautiful compromise which
+we make in reading;&mdash;and the reason it should do
+so is obvious, because there is just so much reality
+presented to our senses as to give a perception of
+disagreement, with not enough of belief in the
+internal motives&mdash;all that which is unseen&mdash;to
+overpower and reconcile the first and obvious
+prejudices.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> What we see upon a stage is body
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>and bodily action; what we are conscious of in
+reading is almost exclusively the mind, and its
+movements: and this I think may sufficiently
+account for the very different sort of delight with
+which the same play so often affects us in the
+reading and the seeing.</p>
+
+<p>It requires little reflection to perceive, that if
+those characters in Shakespeare which are within
+the precincts of nature, have yet something in
+them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination,
+to admit of their being made objects to the
+senses without suffering a change and a diminution,&mdash;that
+still stronger the objection must lie against
+representing another line of characters, which
+Shakespeare has introduced to give a wildness and
+a supernatural elevation to his scenes, as if to
+remove them still farther from that assimilation
+to common life in which their excellence is vulgarly
+supposed to consist. When we read the incantations
+of those terrible beings the Witches in <i>Macbeth</i>,
+though some of the ingredients of their hellish composition
+savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect
+upon us other than the most serious and appalling
+that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound
+as Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany
+a sense of their presence? We might as well laugh
+under a consciousness of the principle of Evil
+himself being truly and really present with us.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>But attempt to bring these beings on to a stage,
+and you turn them instantly into so many old
+women, that men and children are to laugh at.
+Contrary to the old saying, that &#8216;seeing is believing&#8217;,
+the sight actually destroys the faith; and the
+mirth in which we indulge at their expense, when
+we see these creatures upon a stage, seems to be
+a sort of indemnification which we make to
+ourselves for the terror which they put us in when
+reading made them an object of belief,&mdash;when we
+surrendered up our reason to the poet, as children,
+to their nurses and their elders; and we laugh at
+our fears, as children who thought they saw
+something in the dark, triumph when the bringing
+in of a candle discovers the vanity of their fears.
+For this exposure of supernatural agents upon
+a stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose
+their own delusiveness. It is the solitary taper
+and the book that generates a faith in these terrors:
+a ghost by chandelier light, and in good company,
+deceives no spectators,&mdash;a ghost that can be
+measured by the eye, and his human dimensions
+made out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted
+house, and a well-dressed audience, shall arm the
+most nervous child against any apprehensions:
+as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of
+Achilles with his impenetrable armour over it,
+&#8216;Bully Dawson would have fought the devil with
+such advantages.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation
+of the vile mixture which Dryden has thrown
+into the <i>Tempest</i>: doubtless without some such
+vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would
+never have sate out to hear so much innocence of
+love as is contained in the sweet courtship of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
+Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the <i>Tempest</i> of
+Shakespeare at all a subject for stage representation?
+It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and to
+believe the wondrous tale while we are reading it;
+but to have a conjurer brought before us in his
+conjuring-gown, with his spirits about him, which
+none but himself and some hundred of favoured
+spectators before the curtain are supposed to see,
+involves such a quantity of the <i>hateful incredible</i>,
+that all our reverence for the author cannot hinder
+us from perceiving such gross attempts upon the
+senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient.
+Spirits and fairies cannot be represented,
+they cannot even be painted,&mdash;they can only be
+believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision
+of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands,
+in these cases works a quite contrary effect to
+what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays
+of familiar life, adds so much to the life of the
+imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher
+faculties, positively destroys the illusion which it
+is introduced to aid. A parlour or a drawing-room,&mdash;a
+library opening into a garden,&mdash;a garden
+with an alcove in it,&mdash;a street, or the piazza of
+Covent Garden, does well enough in a scene; we
+are content to give as much credit to it as it
+demands; or rather, we think little about it,&mdash;it
+is little more than reading at the top of a page,
+&#8216;Scene, a Garden;&#8217; we do not imagine ourselves
+there, but we readily admit the imitation of
+familiar objects. But to think by the help of
+painted trees and caverns, which we know to be
+painted, to transport our minds to Prospero, and
+his island and his lonely cell;<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> or by the aid of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of
+speaking, to make us believe that we hear those
+supernatural noises of which the isle was full:&mdash;the
+Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as
+well hope, by his musical glasses cleverly stationed
+out of sight behind his apparatus, to make us
+believe that we do indeed hear the chrystal spheres
+ring out that chime, which if it were to inwrap our
+fancy long, Milton thinks,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Time would run back and fetch the age of gold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And speckled vanity<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Would sicken soon and die,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yea Hell itself would pass away,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it,
+is not more impossible to be shown on a stage,
+than the Enchanted Isle, with its no less interesting
+and innocent first settlers.</p>
+
+<p>The subject of Scenery is closely connected with
+that of the Dresses, which are so anxiously attended
+to on our stage. I remember the last time I saw
+Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the
+changes of garment which he varied&mdash;the shiftings
+and re-shiftings, like a Romish priest at mass.
+The luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity
+of the public eye, require this. The
+coronation robe of the Scottish monarch was
+fairly a counterpart to that which our king wears
+when he goes to the Parliament-house,&mdash;just so
+full and cumbersome, and set out with ermine
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>and pearls. And if things must be represented,
+I see not what to find fault with in this. But in
+reading, what robe are we conscious of? Some
+dim images of royalty&mdash;a crown and sceptre, may
+float before our eyes, but who shall describe the
+fashion of it? Do we see in our mind&#8217;s eye what
+Webb or any other robe-maker could pattern?
+This is the inevitable consequence of imitating
+everything, to make all things natural. Whereas
+the reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction. It
+presents to the fancy just so much of external
+appearances as to make us feel that we are among
+flesh and blood, while by far the greater and
+better part of our imagination is employed upon
+the thoughts and internal machinery of the
+character. But in acting, scenery, dress, the
+most contemptible things, call upon us to judge
+of their naturalness.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken
+the pleasure which we take in seeing one of these
+fine plays acted, compared with that quiet delight
+which we find in the reading of it, to the different
+feelings with which a reviewer, and a man that is
+not a reviewer, reads a fine poem. The accursed
+critical habit,&mdash;the being called upon to judge and
+pronounce, must make it quite a different thing
+to the former. In seeing these plays acted, we
+are affected just as judges. When Hamlet
+compares the two pictures of Gertrude&#8217;s first and
+second husband, who wants to see the pictures?
+But in the acting, a miniature must be lugged out;
+which we know not to be the picture, but only to
+show how finely a miniature may be represented.
+This showing of everything, levels all things: it
+makes tricks, bows, and curtesies, of importance.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
+Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than by
+the manner in which she dismisses the guests in
+the banquet-scene in <i>Macbeth</i>: it is as much
+remembered as any of her thrilling tones or
+impressive looks. But does such a trifle as this
+enter into the imaginations of the readers of that
+wild and wonderful scene? Does not the mind
+dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can? Does
+it care about the gracefulness of the doing it?
+But by acting, and judging of acting, all these non-essentials
+are raised into an importance, injurious
+to the main interest of the play.</p>
+
+<p>I have confined my observations to the tragic
+parts of Shakespeare. It would be no very difficult
+task to extend the inquiry to his comedies;
+and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans,
+and the rest, are equally incompatible with stage
+representation. The length to which this essay
+has run, will make it, I am afraid, sufficiently
+distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without
+going any deeper into the subject at present.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in
+<i>dramatic</i> recitations. We never dream that the gentleman
+who reads Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore
+a great poet and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom
+Davies, the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the
+<i>Paradise Lost</i> better than any man in England in his day
+(though I cannot help thinking there must be some mistake
+in this tradition), was therefore, by his intimate friends, set
+upon a level with Milton.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> The error of supposing that because Othello&#8217;s colour
+does not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend
+us in the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an
+Adam and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do in
+the poem. But in the poem we for a while have Paradisaical
+senses given us, which vanish when we see a man and his
+wife without clothes in the picture. The painters themselves
+feel this, as is apparent by the awkward shifts they
+have recourse to, to make them look not quite naked; by
+a sort of prophetic anachronism, antedating the invention
+of fig-leaves. So in the reading of the play, we see with
+Desdemona&#8217;s eyes; in the seeing of it, we are forced to look
+with our own.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> It will be said these things are done in pictures. But
+pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is
+a world of itself, but in scene-painting there is the attempt
+to deceive; and there is the discordancy, never to be got
+over, between painted scenes and real people.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="PERCY_BYSSHE_SHELLEY" id="PERCY_BYSSHE_SHELLEY"></a>PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1792-1822</h3>
+
+<h3>A DEFENCE OF POETRY (1821)</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">According</span> to one mode of regarding those two
+classes of mental action, which are called reason
+and imagination, the former may be considered as
+mind contemplating the relations borne by one
+thought to another, however produced; and the
+latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to
+colour them with its own light, and composing
+from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each
+containing within itself the principle of its own
+integrity. The one is the &#964;&#8056; &#960;&#959;&#953;&#949;&#8150;&#957;, or the principle
+of synthesis, and has for its objects those
+forms which are common to universal nature and
+existence itself; the other is the &#964;&#8056; &#955;&#959;&#947;&#8055;&#950;&#949;&#953;&#957;, or
+principle of analysis, and its action regards the
+relations of things, simply as relations; considering
+thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as the
+algebraical representations which conduct to certain
+general results. Reason is the enumeration
+of quantities already known; imagination is the
+perception of the value of those quantities, both
+separately and as a whole. Reason respects the
+differences, and imagination the similitudes of
+things. Reason is to the imagination as the instrument
+to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the
+shadow to the substance.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be
+&#8216;the expression of the imagination&#8217;: and poetry
+is connate with the origin of man. Man is an
+instrument over which a series of external and
+internal impressions are driven, like the alternations
+of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre,
+which move it by their motion to ever-changing
+melody. But there is a principle within the human
+being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which
+acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not
+melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment
+of the sounds or motions thus excited to
+the impressions which excite them. It is as if the
+lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions
+of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion
+of sound; even as the musician can accommodate
+his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child
+at play by itself will express its delight by its voice
+and motions; and every inflexion of tone and every
+gesture will bear exact relation to a corresponding
+antitype in the pleasurable impressions which
+awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that
+impression; and as the lyre trembles and sounds
+after the wind has died away, so the child seeks, by
+prolonging in its voice and motions the duration of
+the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the
+cause. In relation to the objects which delight
+a child, these expressions are, what poetry is to
+higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to
+ages what the child is to years) expresses the
+emotions produced in him by surrounding objects
+in a similar manner; and language and gesture,
+together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become
+the image of the combined effect of those objects,
+and of his apprehension of them. Man in society,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
+with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes
+the object of the passions and pleasures of
+man; an additional class of emotions produces an
+augmented treasure of expressions; and language,
+gesture, and the imitative arts, become at once
+the representation and the medium, the pencil and
+the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord
+and the harmony. The social sympathies, or those
+laws from which, as from its elements, society
+results, begin to develop themselves from the
+moment that two human beings coexist; the future
+is contained within the present, as the plant within
+the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast,
+mutual dependence, become the principles alone
+capable of affording the motives according to which
+the will of a social being is determined to action,
+inasmuch as he is social; and constitute pleasure
+in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art,
+truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of
+kind. Hence men, even in the infancy of society,
+observe a certain order in their words and actions,
+distinct from that of the objects and the impressions
+represented by them, all expression being subject
+to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But
+let us dismiss those more general considerations
+which might involve an inquiry into the principles
+of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner
+in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms.</p>
+
+<p>In the youth of the world, men dance and sing
+and imitate natural objects, observing in these
+actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order.
+And, although all men observe a similar, they
+observe not the same order, in the motions of the
+dance, in the melody of the song, in the combinations
+of language, in the series of their imitations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
+of natural objects. For there is a certain order
+or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of
+mimetic representation, from which the hearer and
+the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure
+than from any other: the sense of an approximation
+to this order has been called taste by
+modern writers. Every man in the infancy of art
+observes an order which approximates more or
+less closely to that from which this highest delight
+results: but the diversity is not sufficiently marked,
+as that its gradations should be sensible, except in
+those instances where the predominance of this
+faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so
+we may be permitted to name the relation between
+this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great.
+Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the
+most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure
+resulting from the manner in which they express
+the influence of society or nature upon their own
+minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers
+a sort of reduplication from that community.
+Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is,
+it marks the before unapprehended relations of
+things and perpetuates their apprehension, until
+the words which represent them become, through
+time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts
+instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then
+if no new poets should arise to create afresh the
+associations which have been thus disorganized,
+language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of
+human intercourse. These similitudes or relations
+are finely said by Lord Bacon to be &#8216;the same
+footsteps of nature impressed upon the various
+subjects of the world&#8217;;<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> and he considers the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of
+axioms common to all knowledge. In the infancy
+of society every author is necessarily a poet,
+because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet
+is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in
+a word, the good which exists in the relation,
+subsisting, first between existence and perception,
+and secondly between perception and expression.
+Every original language near to its source is in
+itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness
+of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar
+are the works of a later age, and are merely the
+catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry.</p>
+
+<p>But poets, or those who imagine and express
+this indestructible order, are not only the authors
+of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture,
+and statuary, and painting; they are the
+institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society,
+and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers
+who draw into a certain propinquity with the
+beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension
+of the agencies of the invisible world which is called
+religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical,
+or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus,
+have a double face of false and true. Poets,
+according to the circumstances of the age and
+nation in which they appeared, were called, in the
+earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets:
+a poet essentially comprises and unites both these
+characters. For he not only beholds intensely
+the present as it is, and discovers those laws
+according to which present things ought to be
+ordered, but he beholds the future in the present,
+and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and
+the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
+to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or
+that they can foretell the form as surely as they
+foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence
+of superstition, which would make poetry an
+attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an
+attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the
+eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates
+to his conceptions, time and place and number are
+not. The grammatical forms which express the
+moods of time, and the difference of persons, and
+the distinction of place, are convertible with
+respect to the highest poetry without injuring it
+as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the
+book of <i>Job</i>, and Dante&#8217;s <i>Paradise</i>, would afford,
+more than any other writings, examples of this
+fact, if the limits of this essay did not forbid
+citation. The creations of sculpture, painting,
+and music, are illustrations still more decisive.</p>
+
+<p>Language, colour, form, and religious and civil
+habits of action, are all the instruments and materials
+of poetry; they may be called poetry by
+that figure of speech which considers the effect as
+a synonym of the cause. But poetry in a more
+restricted sense expresses those arrangements of
+language, and especially metrical language, which
+are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne
+is curtained within the invisible nature of man.
+And this springs from the nature itself of language,
+which is a more direct representation of the actions
+and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible
+of more various and delicate combinations,
+than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic
+and obedient to the control of that faculty of
+which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily
+produced by the imagination, and has relation to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
+thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments,
+and conditions of art, have relations among
+each other, which limit and interpose between
+conception and expression. The former is as a
+mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which
+enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of
+communication. Hence the fame of sculptors,
+painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic
+powers of the great masters of these arts may yield
+in no degree to that of those who have employed
+language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has
+never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense
+of the term; as two performers of equal skill will
+produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp.
+The fame of legislators and founders of religions, so
+long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed
+that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can
+scarcely be a question, whether, if we deduct the
+celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions
+of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with that
+which belonged to them in their higher character
+of poets, any excess will remain.</p>
+
+<p>We have thus circumscribed the word poetry
+within the limits of that art which is the most
+familiar and the most perfect expression of the
+faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make
+the circle still narrower, and to determine the
+distinction between measured and unmeasured
+language; for the popular division into prose and
+verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both
+between each other and towards that which they
+represent, and a perception of the order of those
+relations has always been found connected with a
+perception of the order of the relations of thoughts.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
+Hence the language of poets has ever affected
+a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of
+sound, without which it were not poetry, and
+which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication
+of its influence, than the words themselves,
+without reference to that peculiar order.
+Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise
+to cast a violet into a crucible that you might
+discover the formal principle of its colour and
+odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into
+another the creations of a poet. The plant must
+spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower&mdash;and
+this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.</p>
+
+<p>An observation of the regular mode of the
+recurrence of harmony in the language of poetical
+minds, together with its relation to music, produced
+metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of
+harmony and language. Yet it is by no means
+essential that a poet should accommodate his
+language to this traditional form, so that the
+harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The
+practice is indeed convenient and popular, and
+to be preferred, especially in such composition as
+includes much action: but every great poet must
+inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors
+in the exact structure of his peculiar
+versification. The distinction between poets and
+prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction
+between philosophers and poets has been anticipated.
+Plato was essentially a poet&mdash;the truth
+and splendour of his imagery, and the melody of his
+language, are the most intense that it is possible to
+conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic,
+dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to
+kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
+and action, and he forbore to invent any regular
+plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate
+forms, the varied pauses of his style.
+Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his periods,
+but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a>
+His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm,
+which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost
+superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the
+intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then
+bursts the circumference of the reader&#8217;s mind, and
+pours itself forth together with it into the universal
+element with which it has perpetual sympathy.
+All the authors of revolutions in opinion are not
+only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor
+even as their words unveil the permanent analogy
+of things by images which participate in the life of
+truth; but as their periods are harmonious and
+rhythmical, and contain in themselves the elements
+of verse; being the echo of the eternal music.
+Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed
+traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form
+and action of their subjects, less capable of perceiving
+and teaching the truth of things, than
+those who have omitted that form. Shakespeare,
+Dante, and Milton (to confine ourselves to modern
+writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest power.</p>
+
+<p>A poem is the very image of life expressed in its
+eternal truth. There is this difference between
+a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of
+detached facts, which have no other connexion
+than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect;
+the other is the creation of actions according to the
+unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image
+of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies
+only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination
+of events which can never again recur;
+the other is universal, and contains within itself
+the germ of a relation to whatever motives or
+actions have place in the possible varieties of human
+nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the
+use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the
+poetry which should invest them, augments that
+of poetry, and for ever develops new and wonderful
+applications of the eternal truth which it contains.
+Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just
+history; they eat out the poetry of it. A story
+of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures
+and distorts that which should be beautiful:
+poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that
+which is distorted.</p>
+
+<p>The parts of a composition may be poetical,
+without the composition as a whole being a poem.
+A single sentence may be considered as a whole,
+though it may be found in the midst of a series of
+unassimilated portions: a single word even may be
+a spark of inextinguishable thought. And thus
+all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy,
+were poets; and although the plan of these writers,
+especially that of Livy, restrained them from
+developing this faculty in its highest degree, they
+made copious and ample amends for their subjection,
+by filling all the interstices of their subjects
+with living images.</p>
+
+<p>Having determined what is poetry, and who are
+poets, let us proceed to estimate its effects upon
+society.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>
+spirits on which it falls open themselves to receive
+the wisdom which is mingled with its delight. In
+the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves
+nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellence
+of poetry: for it acts in a divine and unapprehended
+manner, beyond and above consciousness; and it
+is reserved for future generations to contemplate
+and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the
+strength and splendour of their union. Even in
+modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the
+fullness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgement
+upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time,
+must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled
+by Time from the selectest of the wise of
+many generations. A poet is a nightingale, who
+sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude
+with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced
+by the melody of an unseen musician, who
+feel that they are moved and softened, yet know
+not whence or why. The poems of Homer and his
+contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece;
+they were the elements of that social system which
+is the column upon which all succeeding civilization
+has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection
+of his age in human character; nor can we doubt
+that those who read his verses were awakened to
+an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector,
+and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship,
+patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object,
+were unveiled to the depths in these immortal
+creations: the sentiments of the auditors must
+have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with
+such great and lovely impersonations, until from
+admiring they imitated, and from imitation they
+identified themselves with the objects of their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>
+admiration. Nor let it be objected, that these
+characters are remote from moral perfection, and
+that they can by no means be considered as edifying
+patterns for general imitation. Every epoch,
+under names more or less specious, has deified its
+peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked idol of the
+worship of a semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit
+is the veiled image of unknown evil, before which
+luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But a poet considers
+the vices of his contemporaries as a temporary
+dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and
+which cover without concealing the eternal proportions
+of their beauty. An epic or dramatic
+personage is understood to wear them around his
+soul, as he may the ancient armour or the modern
+uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive
+a dress more graceful than either. The beauty
+of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed
+by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its
+form shall communicate itself to the very disguise,
+and indicate the shape it hides from the manner
+in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful
+motions will express themselves through the most
+barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the
+highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of
+their conceptions in its naked truth and splendour;
+and it is doubtful whether the alloy of costume,
+habit, &amp;c., be not necessary to temper this planetary
+music for mortal ears.</p>
+
+<p>The whole objection, however, of the immorality
+of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner
+in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement
+of man. Ethical science arranges the elements
+which poetry has created, and propounds
+schemes and proposes examples of civil and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>
+domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable
+doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure,
+and deceive, and subjugate one another. But
+poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It
+awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering
+it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended
+combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil
+from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes
+familiar objects be as if they were not familiar;
+it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations
+clothed in its Elysian light stand
+thenceforward in the minds of those who have once
+contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle
+and exalted content which extends itself over all
+thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The
+great secret of morals is love; or a going out of
+our own nature, and an identification of ourselves
+with the beautiful which exists in thought, action,
+or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly
+good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;
+he must put himself in the place of another and of
+many others; the pains and pleasures of his species
+must become his own. The great instrument of
+moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers
+to the effect by acting upon the cause.
+Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination
+by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new
+delight, which have the power of attracting and
+assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts,
+and which form new intervals and interstices whose
+void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens
+the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature
+of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens
+a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to embody
+his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
+usually those of his place and time, in his poetical
+creations, which participate in neither. By this
+assumption of the inferior office of interpreting the
+effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit
+himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory
+in a participation in the cause. There was little
+danger that Homer, or any of the eternal poets,
+should have so far misunderstood themselves as to
+have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion.
+Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great,
+is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser,
+have frequently affected a moral aim, and the
+effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion
+to the degree in which they compel us to
+advert to this purpose.</p>
+
+<p>Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at
+a certain interval by the dramatic and lyrical poets
+of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously with
+all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions
+of the poetical faculty; architecture, painting,
+music, the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and, we
+may add, the forms of civil life. For although the
+scheme of Athenian society was deformed by many
+imperfections which the poetry existing in chivalry
+and Christianity has erased from the habits and
+institutions of modern Europe; yet never at any
+other period has so much energy, beauty, and virtue,
+been developed; never was blind strength and
+stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject
+to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the
+dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during
+the century which preceded the death of Socrates.
+Of no other epoch in the history of our species have
+we records and fragments stamped so visibly with
+the image of the divinity in man. But it is poetry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>
+alone, in form, in action, or in language, which has
+rendered this epoch memorable above all others,
+and the storehouse of examples to everlasting
+time. For written poetry existed at that epoch
+simultaneously with the other arts, and it is an
+idle inquiry to demand which gave and which
+received the light, which all, as from a common
+focus, have scattered over the darkest periods of
+succeeding time. We know no more of cause and
+effect than a constant conjunction of events:
+poetry is ever found to co-exist with whatever
+other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection
+of man. I appeal to what has already been
+established to distinguish between the cause and
+the effect.</p>
+
+<p>It was at the period here adverted to, that the
+drama had its birth; and however a succeeding
+writer may have equalled or surpassed those few
+great specimens of the Athenian drama which have
+been preserved to us, it is indisputable that the
+art itself never was understood or practised according
+to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For
+the Athenians employed language, action, music,
+painting, the dance, and religious institutions, to
+produce a common effect in the representation of
+the highest idealisms of passion and of power;
+each division in the art was made perfect in its kind
+by artists of the most consummate skill, and was
+disciplined into a beautiful proportion and unity
+one towards the other. On the modern stage
+a few only of the elements capable of expressing
+the image of the poet&#8217;s conception are employed
+at once. We have tragedy without music and
+dancing; and music and dancing without the
+highest impersonations of which they are the fit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>
+accompaniment, and both without religion and
+solemnity. Religious institution has indeed been
+usually banished from the stage. Our system of
+divesting the actor&#8217;s face of a mask, on which the
+many expressions appropriated to his dramatic
+character might be moulded into one permanent
+and unchanging expression, is favourable only to
+a partial and inharmonious effect; it is fit for
+nothing but a monologue, where all the attention
+may be directed to some great master of ideal
+mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy
+with tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point
+of practice, is undoubtedly an extension of the
+dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in
+<i>King Lear</i>, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is
+perhaps the intervention of this principle which
+determines the balance in favour of <i>King Lear</i>
+against the <i>Oedipus Tyrannus</i> or the <i>Agamemnon</i>,
+or, if you will, the trilogies with which they are
+connected; unless the intense power of the choral
+poetry, especially that of the latter, should be
+considered as restoring the equilibrium. <i>King
+Lear</i>, if it can sustain this comparison, may be
+judged to be the most perfect specimen of the
+dramatic art existing in the world; in spite of the
+narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected
+by the ignorance of the philosophy of the drama
+which has prevailed in modern Europe. Calderon,
+in his religious <i>Autos</i>, has attempted to fulfil some
+of the high conditions of dramatic representation
+neglected by Shakespeare; such as the establishing
+a relation between the drama and religion,
+and the accommodating them to music and
+dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions
+still more important, and more is lost than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>
+gained by the substitution of the rigidly-defined
+and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition
+for the living impersonations of the truth
+of human passion.</p>
+
+<p>But I digress.&mdash;The connexion of scenic exhibitions
+with the improvement or corruption of
+the manners of men, has been universally recognized:
+in other words, the presence or absence of
+poetry in its most perfect and universal form, has
+been found to be connected with good and evil in
+conduct or habit. The corruption which has been
+imputed to the drama as an effect, begins, when
+the poetry employed in its constitution ends:
+I appeal to the history of manners whether the
+periods of the growth of the one and the decline of
+the other have not corresponded with an exactness
+equal to any example of moral cause and effect.</p>
+
+<p>The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may
+have approached to its perfection, ever co-existed
+with the moral and intellectual greatness of the
+age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as
+mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself,
+under a thin disguise of circumstance, stript of all
+but that ideal perfection and energy which every
+one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves,
+admires, and would become. The imagination is
+enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions
+so mighty, that they distend in their conception the
+capacity of that by which they are conceived; the
+good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation,
+terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm is
+prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of
+them into the tumult of familiar life: even crime
+is disarmed of half its horror and all its contagion
+by being represented as the fatal consequence of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
+the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus
+divested of its wilfulness; men can no longer
+cherish it as the creation of their choice. In
+a drama of the highest order there is little food for
+censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge
+and self-respect. Neither the eye nor the mind
+can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it
+resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to
+express poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided
+mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human
+nature and divides and reproduces them from the
+simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches
+them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all
+that it reflects, and endows it with the power of
+propagating its like wherever it may fall.</p>
+
+<p>But in periods of the decay of social life, the
+drama sympathizes with that decay. Tragedy
+becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great
+masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious
+accompaniment of the kindred arts; and
+often the very form misunderstood, or a weak
+attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the
+writer considers as moral truths; and which are
+usually no more than specious flatteries of some
+gross vice or weakness, with which the author, in
+common with his auditors, are infected. Hence
+what has been called the classical and domestic
+drama. Addison&#8217;s <i>Cato</i> is a specimen of the one;
+and would it were not superfluous to cite examples
+of the other! To such purposes poetry cannot be
+made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning,
+ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard
+that would contain it. And thus we observe that
+all dramatic writings of this nature are unimaginative
+in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
+passion, which, divested of imagination, are other
+names for caprice and appetite. The period in our
+own history of the grossest degradation of the
+drama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in
+which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed
+became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over
+liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone illuminating
+an age unworthy of him. At such periods the
+calculating principle pervades all the forms of
+dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to be expressed
+upon them. Comedy loses its ideal
+universality: wit succeeds to humour; we laugh
+from self-complacency and triumph, instead of
+pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt, succeed
+to sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh,
+but we smile. Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy
+against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from
+the very veil which it assumes, more active if less
+disgusting: it is a monster for which the corruption
+of society for ever brings forth new food, which it
+devours in secret.</p>
+
+<p>The drama being that form under which a greater
+number of modes of expression of poetry are susceptible
+of being combined than any other, the
+connexion of poetry and social good is more
+observable in the drama than in whatever other
+form. And it is indisputable that the highest
+perfection of human society has ever corresponded
+with the highest dramatic excellence; and that
+the corruption or the extinction of the drama in
+a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of
+a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the
+energies which sustain the soul of social life. But,
+as Machiavelli says of political institutions, that
+life may be preserved and renewed, if men should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>
+arise capable of bringing back the drama to its
+principles. And this is true with respect to poetry
+in its most extended sense: all language, institution
+and form, require not only to be produced but
+to be sustained: the office and character of a poet
+participates in the divine nature as regards providence,
+no less than as regards creation.</p>
+
+<p>Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance
+first of the Macedonian, and then of
+the Roman arms, were so many symbols of the
+extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in
+Greece. The bucolic writers, who found patronage
+under the lettered tyrants of Sicily and Egypt,
+were the latest representatives of its most glorious
+reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious; like
+the odour of the tuberose, it overcomes and sickens
+the spirit with excess of sweetness; whilst the
+poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale
+of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the
+flowers of the field, and adds a quickening and
+harmonizing spirit of its own, which endows the
+sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight.
+The bucolic and erotic delicacy in written poetry
+is correlative with that softness in statuary, music,
+and the kindred arts, and even in manners and
+institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which
+I now refer. Nor is it the poetical faculty itself,
+or any misapplication of it, to which this want of
+harmony is to be imputed. An equal sensibility to
+the influence of the senses and the affections is to
+be found in the writings of Homer and Sophocles:
+the former, especially, has clothed sensual and
+pathetic images with irresistible attractions.
+Their superiority over these succeeding writers consists
+in the presence of those thoughts which belong<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>
+to the inner faculties of our nature, not in the
+absence of those which are connected with the
+external: their incomparable perfection consists
+in a harmony of the union of all. It is not what
+the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in
+which their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch
+as they were poets, but inasmuch as they
+were not poets, that they can be considered with
+any plausibility as connected with the corruption
+of their age. Had that corruption availed so as
+to extinguish in them the sensibility to pleasure,
+passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to
+them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil
+would have been achieved. For the end of social
+corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure;
+and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the
+imagination and the intellect as at the core, and
+distributes itself thence as a paralysing venom,
+through the affections into the very appetites,
+until all become a torpid mass in which hardly
+sense survives. At the approach of such a period,
+poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which
+are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard,
+like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from the
+world. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure
+which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still
+the light of life; the source of whatever of beautiful
+or generous or true can have place in an evil time.
+It will readily be confessed that those among the
+luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who
+were delighted with the poems of Theocritus, were
+less cold, cruel, and sensual than the remnant of
+their tribe. But corruption must utterly have
+destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry
+can ever cease. The sacred links of that chain have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
+never been entirely disjoined, which descending
+through the minds of many men is attached to
+those great minds, whence as from a magnet the
+invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once
+connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. It
+is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds
+at once of its own and of social renovation. And
+let us not circumscribe the effects of the bucolic
+and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility
+of those to whom it was addressed. They may
+have perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions,
+simply as fragments and isolated portions:
+those who are more finely organized, or born in
+a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to
+that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating
+thoughts of one great mind, have built
+up since the beginning of the world.</p>
+
+<p>The same revolutions within a narrower sphere
+had place in ancient Rome; but the actions and
+forms of its social life never seem to have been
+perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The
+Romans appear to have considered the Greeks as
+the selectest treasuries of the selectest forms of
+manners and of nature, and to have abstained from
+creating in measured language, sculpture, music, or
+architecture, anything which might bear a particular
+relation to their own condition, whilst it
+should bear a general one to the universal constitution
+of the world. But we judge from partial
+evidence, and we judge perhaps partially. Ennius,
+Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have
+been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil
+in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen
+delicacy of expressions of the latter, are as a mist
+of light which conceal from us the intense and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>
+exceeding truth of his conceptions of nature.
+Livy is instinct with poetry. Yet Horace, Catullus,
+Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the
+Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror
+of Greece. The institutions also, and the religion
+of Rome were less poetical than those of Greece,
+as the shadow is less vivid than the substance.
+Hence poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather
+than accompany, the perfection of political and
+domestic society. The true poetry of Rome lived
+in its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true,
+and majestic, they contained, could have sprung
+only from the faculty which creates the order in
+which they consist. The life of Camillus, the
+death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators,
+in their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls:
+the refusal of the republic to make peace with
+Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were not the
+consequences of a refined calculation of the probable
+personal advantage to result from such a rhythm
+and order in the shows of life, to those who were at
+once the poets and the actors of these immortal
+dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of
+this order, created it out of itself according to its
+own idea; the consequence was empire, and the
+reward everliving fame. These things are not the
+less poetry <i>quia carent vate sacro</i>. They are the
+episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon
+the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired
+rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations
+with their harmony.</p>
+
+<p>At length the ancient system of religion and
+manners had fulfilled the circle of its revolutions.
+And the world would have fallen into utter anarchy
+and darkness, but that, there were found poets<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
+among the authors of the Christian and chivalric
+systems of manners and religion, who created
+forms of opinion and action never before conceived;
+which, copied into the imaginations of men,
+become as generals to the bewildered armies of
+their thoughts. It is foreign to the present purpose
+to touch upon the evil produced by these systems:
+except that we protest, on the ground of the
+principles already established, that no portion of it
+can be attributed to the poetry they contain.</p>
+
+<p>It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job,
+David, Solomon, and Isaiah, had produced a great
+effect upon the mind of Jesus and his disciples.
+The scattered fragments preserved to us by the
+biographers of this extraordinary person, are all
+instinct with the most vivid poetry. But his
+doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At
+a certain period after the prevalence of a system of
+opinions founded upon those promulgated by him,
+the three forms into which Plato had distributed
+the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis,
+and became the object of the worship of the civilized
+world. Here it is to be confessed that &#8216;Light
+seems to thicken&#8217;, and</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And night&#8217;s black agents to their preys do rouse.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from
+the dust and blood of this fierce chaos! how the
+world, as from a resurrection, balancing itself on
+the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has
+reassumed its yet unwearied flight into the heaven
+of time. Listen to the music, unheard by outward
+ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>
+nourishing its everlasting course with strength and
+swiftness.</p>
+
+<p>The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and
+the mythology and institutions of the Celtic
+conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived the
+darkness and the convulsions connected with their
+growth and victory, and blended themselves in
+a new fabric of manners and opinion. It is an
+error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to
+the Christian doctrines or the predominance of
+the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies
+may have contained sprang from the extinction
+of the poetical principle, connected with the
+progress of despotism and superstition. Men,
+from causes too intricate to be here discussed,
+had become insensible and selfish: their own will
+had become feeble, and yet they were its slaves,
+and thence the slaves of the will of others; lust,
+fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud, characterized
+a race amongst whom no one was to be found
+capable of <i>creating</i> in form, language, or institution.
+The moral anomalies of such a state of society are
+not justly to be charged upon any class of events
+immediately connected with them, and those
+events are most entitled to our approbation which
+could dissolve it most expeditiously. It is unfortunate
+for those who cannot distinguish words
+from thoughts, that many of these anomalies have
+been incorporated into our popular religion.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until the eleventh century that the
+effects of the poetry of the Christian and chivalric
+systems began to manifest themselves. The
+principle of equality had been discovered and
+applied by Plato in his <i>Republic</i>, as the theoretical
+rule of the mode in which the materials of pleasure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>
+and of power, produced by the common skill and
+labour of human beings, ought to be distributed
+among them. The limitations of this rule were
+asserted by him to be determined only by the
+sensibility of each, or the utility to result to all.
+Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and
+Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual
+system of doctrine, comprehending at once the
+past, the present, and the future condition of man.
+Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths
+contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity,
+in its abstract purity, became the exoteric
+expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry
+and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of
+the Celtic nations with the exhausted population
+of the south, impressed upon it the figure of the
+poetry existing in their mythology and institutions.
+The result was a sum of the action and reaction of
+all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed
+as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede
+any other without incorporating into itself a portion
+of that which it supersedes. The abolition
+of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation
+of women from a great part of the degrading
+restraints of antiquity, were among the
+consequences of these events.</p>
+
+<p>The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of
+the highest political hope that it can enter into
+the mind of man to conceive. The freedom of
+women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love
+became a religion, the idols of whose worship were
+ever present. It was as if the statues of Apollo
+and the Muses had been endowed with life and
+motion, and had walked forth among their
+worshippers; so that earth became peopled by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>
+the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar
+appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful
+and heavenly, and a paradise was created as
+out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this creation
+itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and
+language was the instrument of their art: &#8216;Galeotto
+f&ugrave; il libro, e chi lo scrisse.&#8217; The Proven&ccedil;al Trouveurs,
+or inventors, preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as
+spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains
+of the delight which is in the grief of love. It is
+impossible to feel them without becoming a portion
+of that beauty which we contemplate: it were
+superfluous to explain how the gentleness and the
+elevation of mind connected with these sacred
+emotions can render men more amiable, more
+generous and wise, and lift them out of the dull
+vapours of the little world of self. Dante understood
+the secret things of love even more than
+Petrarch. His <i>Vita Nuova</i> is an inexhaustible
+fountain of purity of sentiment and language: it
+is the idealized history of that period, and those
+intervals of his life which were dedicated to love.
+His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise, and the
+gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by
+which as by steps he feigns himself to have
+ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is
+the most glorious imagination of modern poetry.
+The acutest critics have justly reversed the judgement
+of the vulgar, and the order of the great
+acts of the &#8216;Divine Drama&#8217;, in the measure of
+the admiration which they accord to the Hell,
+Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual
+hymn of everlasting love. Love, which found
+a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the ancients,
+has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>
+writers of the renovated world; and the music
+has penetrated the caverns of society, and its
+echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and
+superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto,
+Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau,
+and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated
+the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies
+in the human mind of that sublimest victory over
+sensuality and force. The true relation borne to
+each other by the sexes into which human kind is
+distributed, has become less misunderstood; and
+if the error which confounded diversity with
+inequality of the powers of the two sexes has been
+partially recognized in the opinions and institutions
+of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the
+worship of which chivalry was the law, and poets
+the prophets.</p>
+
+<p>The poetry of Dante may be considered as the
+bridge thrown over the stream of time, which
+unites the modern and ancient world. The
+distorted notions of invisible things which Dante
+and his rival Milton have idealized, are merely the
+mask and the mantle in which these great poets
+walk through eternity enveloped and disguised.
+It is a difficult question to determine how far
+they were conscious of the distinction which must
+have subsisted in their minds between their own
+creeds and that of the people. Dante at least
+appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by
+placing Riphaeus, whom Virgil calls <i>iustissimus
+unus</i>, in Paradise, and observing a most heretical
+caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments.
+And Milton&#8217;s poem contains within itself
+a philosophical refutation of that system, of which,
+by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
+a chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the
+energy and magnificence of the character of Satan
+as expressed in <i>Paradise Lost</i>. It is a mistake to
+suppose that he could ever have been intended
+for the popular personification of evil. Implacable
+hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement
+of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an
+enemy, these things are evil; and, although
+venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant;
+although redeemed by much that ennobles his
+defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that
+dishonours his conquest in the victor. Milton&#8217;s
+Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his
+God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which
+he has conceived to be excellent in spite of
+adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold
+security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most
+horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any
+mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of
+a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged
+design of exasperating him to deserve new torments.
+Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if
+this shall be judged to be a violation) as to have
+alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God
+over his Devil. And this bold neglect of a direct
+moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the
+supremacy of Milton&#8217;s genius. He mingled as it
+were the elements of human nature as colours
+upon a single pallet, and arranged them in the
+composition of his great picture according to the
+laws of epic truth; that is, according to the laws
+of that principle by which a series of actions of
+the external universe and of intelligent and ethical
+beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of
+succeeding generations of mankind. The <i>Divina<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>
+Commedia</i> and <i>Paradise Lost</i> have conferred upon
+modern mythology a systematic form; and when
+change and time shall have added one more
+superstition to the mass of those which have
+arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators
+will be learnedly employed in elucidating the
+religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly
+forgotten because it will have been stamped with
+the eternity of genius.</p>
+
+<p>Homer was the first and Dante the second epic
+poet: that is, the second poet, the series of whose
+creations bore a defined and intelligible relation
+to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of
+the age in which he lived, and of the ages which
+followed it: developing itself in correspondence
+with their development. For Lucretius had limed
+the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the
+sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill
+became his genius, had affected the fame of an
+imitator, even whilst he created anew all that
+he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds,
+though their notes were sweet, Apollonius
+Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius,
+or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single
+condition of epic truth. Milton was the third epic
+poet. For if the title of epic in its highest sense
+be refused to the <i>Aeneid</i>, still less can it be conceded
+to the <i>Orlando Furioso</i>, the <i>Gerusalemme Liberata</i>,
+the <i>Lusiad</i>, or the <i>Faerie Queene</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated
+with the ancient religion of the civilized world;
+and its spirit exists in their poetry probably in the
+same proportion as its forms survived in the
+unreformed worship of modern Europe. The one
+preceded and the other followed the Reformation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>
+at almost equal intervals. Dante was the first
+religious reformer, and Luther surpassed him
+rather in the rudeness and acrimony, than in the
+boldness of his censures of papal usurpation.
+Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe;
+he created a language, in itself music and persuasion,
+out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. He
+was the congregator of those great spirits who
+presided over the resurrection of learning; the
+Lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth
+century shone forth from republican Italy, as from
+a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world.
+His very words are instinct with spirit; each is
+as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable
+thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes
+of their birth, and pregnant with a lightning
+which has yet found no conductor. All high
+poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which
+contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may
+be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the
+meaning never exposed. A great poem is a fountain
+for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and
+delight; and after one person and one age has
+exhausted all its divine effluence which their
+peculiar relations enable them to share, another
+and yet another succeeds, and new relations are
+ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and
+an unconceived delight.</p>
+
+<p>The age immediately succeeding to that of
+Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, was characterized
+by a revival of painting, sculpture, and architecture.
+Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the
+superstructure of English literature is based upon
+the materials of Italian invention.</p>
+
+<p>But let us not be betrayed from a defence into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>
+a critical history of poetry and its influence on
+society. Be it enough to have pointed out the
+effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the
+word, upon their own and all succeeding times.</p>
+
+<p>But poets have been challenged to resign the
+civic crown to reasoners and mechanists, on
+another plea. It is admitted that the exercise of
+the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged
+that that of reason is more useful. Let us examine
+as the grounds of this distinction, what is here
+meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a general
+sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive
+and intelligent being seeks, and in which, when
+found, it acquiesces. There are two kinds of
+pleasure, one durable, universal and permanent;
+the other transitory and particular. Utility may
+either express the means of producing the former
+or the latter. In the former sense, whatever
+strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges
+the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful.
+But a narrower meaning may be assigned to the
+word utility, confining it to express that which
+banishes the importunity of the wants of our
+animal nature, the surrounding men with security
+of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions of
+superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of
+mutual forbearance among men as may consist
+with the motives of personal advantage.</p>
+
+<p>Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this
+limited sense, have their appointed office in society.
+They follow the footsteps of poets, and copy the
+sketches of their creations into the book of common
+life. They make space, and give time. Their
+exertions are of the highest value, so long as they
+confine their administration of the concerns of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
+inferior powers of our nature within the limits due
+to the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic
+destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to
+deface, as some of the French writers have defaced,
+the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations
+of men. Whilst the mechanist abridges, and
+the political economist combines labour, let them
+beware that their speculations, for want of
+correspondence with those first principles which
+belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they
+have in modern England, to exasperate at once
+the extremes of luxury and want. They have
+exemplified the saying, &#8216;To him that hath, more
+shall be given; and from him that hath not, the
+little that he hath shall be taken away.&#8217; The rich
+have become richer, and the poor have become
+poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven
+between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and
+despotism. Such are the effects which must ever
+flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating
+faculty.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest
+sense; the definition involving a number of
+apparent paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable
+defect of harmony in the constitution of human
+nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently
+connected with the pleasures of the superior
+portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish,
+despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of
+an approximation to the highest good. Our
+sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle;
+tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the
+pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source
+also of the melancholy which is inseparable from
+the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
+sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure
+itself. And hence the saying, &#8216;It is better to go
+to the house of mourning, than to the house of
+mirth.&#8217; Nor that this highest species of pleasure
+is necessarily linked with pain. The delight of
+love and friendship, the ecstasy of the admiration
+of nature, the joy of the perception and still
+more of the creation of poetry, is often wholly
+unalloyed.</p>
+
+<p>The production and assurance of pleasure in
+this highest sense is true utility. Those who
+produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or
+poetical philosophers.</p>
+
+<p>The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire,
+Rousseau,<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> and their disciples, in favour of
+oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled
+to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to
+calculate the degree of moral and intellectual
+improvement which the world would have
+exhibited, had they never lived. A little more
+nonsense would have been talked for a century
+or two; and perhaps a few more men, women,
+and children, burnt as heretics. We might not at
+this moment have been congratulating each other
+on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain.
+But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what
+would have been the moral condition of the world
+if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer,
+Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton,
+had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo
+had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had
+never been translated; if a revival of the study
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>of Greek literature had never taken place; if no
+monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed
+down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of
+the ancient world had been extinguished together
+with its belief. The human mind could never,
+except by the intervention of these excitements,
+have been awakened to the invention of the
+grosser sciences, and that application of analytical
+reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is
+now attempted to exalt over the direct expression
+of the inventive and creative faculty itself.</p>
+
+<p>We have more moral, political and historical
+wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practice;
+we have more scientific and economical knowledge
+than can be accommodated to the just distribution
+of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in
+these systems of thought, is concealed by the
+accumulation of facts and calculating processes.
+There is no want of knowledge respecting what is
+wisest and best in morals, government, and political
+economy, or at least, what is wiser and better than
+what men now practise and endure. But we let
+&#8216;<i>I dare not</i> wait upon <i>I would</i>, like the poor cat
+in the adage.&#8217; We want the creative faculty to
+imagine that which we know; we want the
+generous impulse to act that which we imagine;
+we want the poetry of life: our calculations have
+outrun conception; we have eaten more than we
+can digest. The cultivation of those sciences
+which have enlarged the limits of the empire of
+man over the external world, has, for want of the
+poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those
+of the internal world; and man, having enslaved
+the elements, remains himself a slave. To what
+but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
+disproportioned to the presence of the creative
+faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is to
+be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging
+and combining labour, to the exasperation of the
+inequality of mankind? From what other cause
+has it arisen that the discoveries which should have
+lightened, have added a weight to the curse
+imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle
+of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation,
+are the God and Mammon of the world.</p>
+
+<p>The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold;
+by one it creates new materials of knowledge
+and power and pleasure; by the other it engenders
+in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange
+them according to a certain rhythm and order
+which may be called the beautiful and the good.
+The cultivation of poetry is never more to be
+desired than at periods when, from an excess of
+the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation
+of the materials of external life exceed the
+quantity of the power of assimilating them to
+the internal laws of human nature. The body
+has then become too unwieldy for that which
+animates it.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once
+the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is
+that which comprehends all science, and that to
+which all science must be referred. It is at the
+same time the root and blossom of all other systems
+of thought; it is that from which all spring, and
+that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted,
+denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from
+the barren world the nourishment and the succession
+of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect
+and consummate surface and bloom of all things;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>
+it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the
+texture of the elements which compose it, as the
+form and splendour of unfaded beauty to the
+secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were
+virtue, love, patriotism, friendship&mdash;what were the
+scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit;
+what were our consolations on this side of the
+grave&mdash;and what were our aspirations beyond it,
+if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire
+from those eternal regions where the owl-winged
+faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry
+is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted
+according to the determination of the will. A man
+cannot say, &#8216;I will compose poetry.&#8217; The greatest
+poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation
+is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence,
+like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory
+brightness; this power arises from within, like
+the colour of a flower which fades and changes as
+it is developed, and the conscious portions of our
+natures are unprophetic either of its approach or
+its departure. Could this influence be durable in
+its original purity and force, it is impossible to
+predict the greatness of the results; but when
+composition begins, inspiration is already on the
+decline, and the most glorious poetry that has
+ever been communicated to the world is probably
+a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the
+poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present
+day, whether it is not an error to assert that the
+finest passages of poetry are produced by labour
+and study. The toil and the delay recommended
+by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no
+more than a careful observation of the inspired
+moments, and an artificial connexion of the spaces<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>
+between their suggestions by the intertexture of
+conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed
+by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself;
+for Milton conceived the <i>Paradise Lost</i> as a whole
+before he executed it in portions. We have his
+own authority also for the muse having &#8216;dictated&#8217;
+to him the &#8216;unpremeditated song&#8217;. And let this
+be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six
+various readings of the first line of the <i>Orlando
+Furioso</i>. Compositions so produced are to poetry
+what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and
+intuition of the poetical faculty is still more
+observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great
+statue or picture grows under the power of the
+artist as a child in the mother&#8217;s womb; and the
+very mind which directs the hands in formation
+is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin,
+the gradations, or the media of the process.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry is the record of the best and happiest
+moments of the happiest and best minds. We are
+aware of evanescent visitations of thought and
+feeling sometimes associated with place or person,
+sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and
+always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden,
+but elevating and delightful beyond all expression:
+so that even in the desire and regret they leave,
+there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it
+does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the
+interpenetration of a diviner nature through our
+own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind
+over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and
+whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand
+which paves it. These and corresponding conditions
+of being are experienced principally by those of
+the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>
+imagination; and the state of mind produced by
+them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm
+of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship, is
+essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst
+they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a
+universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences
+as spirits of the most refined organization,
+but they can colour all that they combine with the
+evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a
+trait in the representation of a scene or a passion,
+will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in
+those who have ever experienced these emotions, the
+sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past.
+Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and
+most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing
+apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life,
+and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends
+them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of
+kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide&mdash;abide,
+because there is no portal of expression from
+the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into
+the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay
+the visitations of the divinity in man.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts
+the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it
+adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it
+marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure,
+eternity and change; it subdues to union under its
+light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes
+all that it touches, and every form moving within
+the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous
+sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it
+breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold
+the poisonous waters which flow from death
+through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>
+the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping
+beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.</p>
+
+<p>All things exist as they are perceived; at least
+in relation to the percipient. &#8216;The mind is its
+own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell,
+a hell of heaven.&#8217; But poetry defeats the curse
+which binds us to be subjected to the accident of
+surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads
+its own figured curtain, or withdraws life&#8217;s dark
+veil from before the scene of things, it equally
+creates for us a being within our being. It makes
+us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar
+world is a chaos. It reproduces the common
+universe of which we are portions and percipients,
+and it purges from our inward sight the film of
+familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our
+being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive,
+and to imagine that which we know. It creates
+anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in
+our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted
+by reiteration. It justifies the bold and true words
+of Tasso: <i>Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio
+ed il Poeta</i>.</p>
+
+<p>A poet, as he is the author to others of the
+highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue and glory, so he
+ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the
+wisest, and the most illustrious of men. As to his
+glory, let time be challenged to declare whether
+the fame of any other institutor of human life be
+comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest,
+the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet,
+is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets
+have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the
+most consummate prudence, and, if we would look
+into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>
+of men: and the exceptions, as they regard those
+who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet
+inferior degree, will be found on consideration to
+confine rather than destroy the rule. Let us for
+a moment stoop to the arbitration of popular
+breath, and usurping and uniting in our own
+persons the incompatible characters of accuser,
+witness, judge, and executioner, let us decide
+without trial, testimony, or form, that certain
+motives of those who are &#8216;there sitting where we
+dare not soar&#8217;, are reprehensible. Let us assume
+that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was
+a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso
+was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator,
+that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was
+a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with this
+division of our subject to cite living poets, but
+posterity has done ample justice to the great
+names now referred to. Their errors have been
+weighed and found to have been dust in the
+balance; if their sins &#8216;were as scarlet, they are
+now white as snow&#8217;: they have been washed in
+the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time.
+Observe in what a ludicrous chaos the imputations
+of real or fictitious crime have been confused in
+the contemporary calumnies against poetry and
+poets; consider how little is, as it appears&mdash;or
+appears, as it is; look to your own motives, and
+judge not, lest ye be judged.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect
+from logic, that it is not subject to the control of
+the active powers of the mind, and that its birth
+and recurrence have no necessary connexion with
+the consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to
+determine that these are the necessary conditions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>
+of all mental causation, when mental effects are
+experienced unsusceptible of being referred to
+them. The frequent recurrence of the poetical
+power, it is obvious to suppose, may produce in
+the mind a habit of order and harmony correlative
+with its own nature and with its effects upon other
+minds. But in the intervals of inspiration, and
+they may be frequent without being durable,
+a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to the
+sudden reflux of the influences under which others
+habitually live. But as he is more delicately
+organized than other men, and sensible to pain
+and pleasure, both his own and that of others, in
+a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the one
+and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned
+to this difference. And he renders himself obnoxious
+to calumny, when he neglects to observe
+the circumstances under which these objects of
+universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves
+in one another&#8217;s garments.</p>
+
+<p>But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error,
+and thus cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the
+passions purely evil, have never formed any portion
+of the popular imputations on the lives of poets.</p>
+
+<p>I have thought it most favourable to the cause
+of truth to set down these remarks according to
+the order in which they were suggested to my
+mind, by a consideration of the subject itself,
+instead of observing the formality of a polemical
+reply; but if the view which they contain be just,
+they will be found to involve a refutation of the
+arguers against poetry, so far at least as regards
+the first division of the subject. I can readily
+conjecture what should have moved the gall of
+some learned and intelligent writers who quarrel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
+with certain versifiers; I confess myself, like them,
+unwilling to be stunned by the Theseids of the
+hoarse Codri of the day. Bavius and Maevius
+undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable
+persons. But it belongs to a philosophical critic
+to distinguish rather than confound.</p>
+
+<p>The first part of these remarks has related to
+poetry in its elements and principles; and it has
+been shown, as well as the narrow limits assigned
+them would permit, that what is called poetry, in
+a restricted sense, has a common source with all
+other forms of order and of beauty, according to
+which the materials of human life are susceptible of
+being arranged, and which is poetry in a universal
+sense.</p>
+
+<p>The second part<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> will have for its object an
+application of these principles to the present state
+of the cultivation of poetry, and a defence of the
+attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners
+and opinions, and compel them into a subordination
+to the imaginative and creative faculty. For the
+literature of England, an energetic development
+of which has ever preceded or accompanied
+a great and free development of the national
+will, has arisen as it were from a new birth. In
+spite of the low-thoughted envy which would
+undervalue contemporary merit, our own will be
+a memorable age in intellectual achievements,
+and we live among such philosophers and poets as
+surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared
+since the last national struggle for civil and
+religious liberty. The most unfailing herald,
+companion, and follower of the awakening of
+a great people to work a beneficial change in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods
+there is an accumulation of the power of communicating
+and receiving intense and impassioned
+conceptions respecting man and nature. The
+persons in whom this power resides may often, as
+far as regards many portions of their nature, have
+little apparent correspondence with that spirit of
+good of which they are the ministers. But even
+whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled
+to serve, the power which is seated on the throne
+of their own soul. It is impossible to read the
+compositions of the most celebrated writers of
+the present day without being startled with the
+electric life which burns within their words. They
+measure the circumference and sound the depths
+of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating
+spirit, and they are themselves perhaps
+the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations;
+for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age.
+Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended
+inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows
+which futurity casts upon the present; the words
+which express what they understand not; the
+trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what
+they inspire; the influence which is moved not,
+but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged
+legislators of the world.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <i>De Augment. Scient.</i>, cap. i, lib. iii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> See the <i>Filum Labyrinthi</i>, and the Essay on Death
+particularly.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was
+essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere
+reasoners.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> This was never written.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="WILLIAM_HAZLITT" id="WILLIAM_HAZLITT"></a>WILLIAM HAZLITT<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1778-1830</h3>
+
+<h3>MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH POETS (1823)</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My</span> father was a Dissenting Minister at Wem in
+Shropshire; and in the year 1798 (the figures that
+compose the date are to me like the &#8216;dreaded name
+of Demogorgon&#8217;) Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury,
+to succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of
+a Unitarian congregation there. He did not come
+till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to
+preach; and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to
+the coach in a state of anxiety and expectation to
+look for the arrival of his successor, could find no
+one at all answering the description but a round-faced
+man in a short black coat (like a shooting-jacket)
+which hardly seemed to have been made for
+him, but who seemed to be talking at a great rate
+to his fellow-passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarce
+returned to give an account of his disappointment,
+when the round-faced man in black entered, and
+dissipated all doubts on the subject, by beginning
+to talk. He did not cease while he stayed; nor
+has he since, that I know of. He held the good
+town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense for
+three weeks that he remained there, &#8216;fluttering the
+<i>proud Salopians</i> like an eagle in a dove-cote&#8217;;
+and the Welsh mountains that skirt the horizon
+with their tempestuous confusion, agree to have
+heard no such mystic sounds since the days of</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">High-born Hoel&#8217;s harp or soft Llewelyn&#8217;s lay!<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">As we passed along between Wem and Shrewsbury,
+and I eyed their blue tops seen through the wintry
+branches, or the red rustling leaves of the sturdy
+oak-trees by the road-side, a sound was in my ears
+as of a Siren&#8217;s song; I was stunned, startled with it,
+as from deep sleep; but I had no notion then that
+I should ever be able to express my admiration to
+others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the
+light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun&#8217;s
+rays glittering in the puddles of the road. I was at
+that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm
+by the way-side, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but
+now, bursting from the deadly bands that &#8216;bound
+them,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">With Styx nine times round them,&#8217;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand
+their plumes, catch the golden light of other years.
+My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage,
+dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied;
+my heart, shut up in the prison-house of
+this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find,
+a heart to speak to; but that my understanding
+also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length
+found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge.
+But this is not to my purpose.</p>
+
+<p>My father lived ten miles from Shrewsbury, and
+was in the habit of exchanging visits with Mr. Rowe,
+and with Mr. Jenkins of Whitchurch (nine miles
+farther on) according to the custom of Dissenting
+Ministers in each other&#8217;s neighbourhood. A line of
+communication is thus established, by which the
+flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive, and
+nourishes its smouldering fire unquenchable, like
+the fires in the <i>Agamemnon</i> of Aeschylus, placed at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>
+different stations, that waited for ten long years to
+announce with their blazing pyramids the destruction
+of Troy. Coleridge had agreed to come over
+to see my father, according to the courtesy of the
+country, as Mr. Rowe&#8217;s probable successor; but in
+the meantime I had gone to hear him preach the
+Sunday after his arrival. A poet and a philosopher
+getting up into a Unitarian pulpit to preach the
+Gospel, was a romance in these degenerate days, a
+sort of revival of the primitive spirit of Christianity,
+which was not to be resisted.</p>
+
+<p>It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning
+before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud, to
+hear this celebrated person preach. Never, the
+longest day I have to live, shall I have such another
+walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the
+winter of the year 1798. <i>Il y a des impressions que
+ni le temps ni les circonstances peuvent effacer.
+Duss&eacute;-je vivre des si&egrave;cles entiers, le doux temps de
+ma jeunesse ne peut renaitre pour moi, ni s&#8217;effacer
+jamais dans ma m&eacute;moire.</i> When I got there, the
+organ was playing the 100th psalm, and, when it
+was done, Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text,
+&#8216;And he went up into the mountain to pray,
+<small>HIMSELF, ALONE</small>.&#8217; As he gave out this text, his
+voice &#8216;rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,&#8217;
+and when he came to the two last words, which he
+pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to
+me, who was then young, as if the sounds had
+echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and
+as if that prayer might have floated in solemn
+silence through the universe. The idea of St. John
+came into mind, &#8216;of one crying in the wilderness,
+who had his loins girt about, and whose food was
+locusts and wild honey.&#8217; The preacher then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span>
+launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying
+with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and
+war; upon church and state&mdash;not their alliance,
+but their separation&mdash;on the spirit of the world and
+the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as
+opposed to one another. He talked of those who
+had &#8216;inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping
+with human gore.&#8217; He made a poetical and
+pastoral excursion,&mdash;and to show the fatal effects
+of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple
+shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or sitting
+under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, &#8216;as though
+he should never be old,&#8217; and the same poor country-lad,
+crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made
+drunk at an alehouse, turned into a wretched
+drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with
+powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and
+tricked out in the loathsome finery of the profession
+of blood.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Such were the notes our once-lov&#8217;d poet sung.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">And for myself, I could not have been more
+delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres.
+Poetry and Philosophy had met together, Truth
+and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with
+the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond
+my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The
+sun that was still labouring pale and wan through
+the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an
+emblem of the <i>good cause</i>; and the cold dank
+drops of dew that hung half-melted on the beard
+of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing
+in them; for there was a spirit of hope and youth
+in all nature, that turned everything into good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>
+The face of nature had not then the brand of <span class="smcap">Jus
+Divinum</span> on it:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Like to that sanguine flower inscrib&#8217;d with woe.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>On the Tuesday following, the half-inspired
+speaker came. I was called down into the room
+where he was, and went half-hoping, half-afraid.
+He received me very graciously, and I listened
+for a long time without uttering a word. I did
+not suffer in his opinion by my silence. &#8216;For
+those two hours,&#8217; he afterwards was pleased to
+say, &#8216;he was conversing with W. H.&#8217;s forehead!&#8217;
+His appearance was different from what I had
+anticipated from seeing him before. At a distance,
+and in the dim light of the chapel, there was to me
+a strange wildness in his aspect, a dusky obscurity,
+and I thought him pitted with the small-pox.
+His complexion was at that time clear, and even
+bright&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">As are the children of yon azure sheen.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of
+ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes
+rolling beneath them like a sea with darkened
+lustre. &#8216;A certain tender bloom his face o&#8217;erspread,&#8217;
+a purple tinge as we see it in the pale thoughtful
+complexions of the Spanish portrait-painters,
+Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth was gross,
+voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured
+and round; but his nose, the rudder of
+the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble,
+nothing&mdash;like what he has done. It might seem
+that the genius of his face as from a height surveyed
+and projected him (with sufficient capacity and
+huge aspiration) into the world unknown of thought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
+and imagination, with nothing to support or guide
+his veering purpose, as if Columbus had launched
+his adventurous course for the New World in
+a scallop, without oars or compass. So at least
+I comment on it after the event. Coleridge in his
+person was rather above the common size, inclining
+to the corpulent, or like Lord Hamlet, &#8216;somewhat
+fat and pursy.&#8217; His hair (now, alas! grey) was
+then black and glossy as the raven&#8217;s, and fell in
+smooth masses over his forehead. This long
+pendulous hair is peculiar to enthusiasts, to those
+whose minds tend heavenward; and is traditionally
+inseparable (though of a different colour) from the
+pictures of Christ. It ought to belong, as a character
+to all who preach <i>Christ crucified</i>, and Coleridge
+was at that time one of those!</p>
+
+<p>It was curious to observe the contrast between
+him and my father, who was a veteran in the
+cause, and then declining into the vale of years.
+He had been a poor Irish lad, carefully brought
+up by his parents, and sent to the University of
+Glasgow (where he studied under Adam Smith)
+to prepare him for his future destination. It was
+his mother&#8217;s proudest wish to see her son a Dissenting
+Minister. So if we look back to past
+generations (as far as eye can reach) we see the
+same hopes, fears, wishes, followed by the same
+disappointments, throbbing in the human heart;
+and so we may see them (if we look forward) rising
+up for ever, and disappearing, like vapourish
+bubbles, in the human breast! After being tossed
+about from congregation to congregation in the
+heats of the Unitarian controversy, and squabbles
+about the American war, he had been relegated
+to an obscure village, where he was to spend the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>
+last thirty years of his life, far from the only
+converse that he loved, the talk about disputed
+texts of Scripture and the cause of civil and
+religious liberty. Here he passed his days,
+repining but resigned, in the study of the Bible,
+and the perusal of the Commentators&mdash;huge folios,
+not easily got through, one of which would outlast
+a winter! Why did he pore on these from morn
+to night (with the exception of a walk in the fields
+or a turn in the garden to gather broccoli-plants
+or kidney-beans of his own rearing, with no small
+degree of pride and pleasure)?&mdash;Here were &#8216;no
+figures nor no fantasies,&#8217;&mdash;neither poetry nor
+philosophy&mdash;nothing to dazzle, nothing to excite
+modern curiosity; but to his lack-lustre eyes
+there appeared, within the pages of the ponderous,
+unwieldy, neglected tomes, the sacred name of
+JEHOVAH in Hebrew capitals: pressed down
+by the weight of the style, worn to the last fading
+thinness of the understanding, there were glimpses,
+glimmering notions of the patriarchal wanderings,
+with palm-trees hovering in the horizon, and
+processions of camels at the distance of three
+thousand years; there was Moses with the
+Burning Bush, the number of the Twelve Tribes,
+types, shadows, glosses on the law and the prophets;
+there were discussions (dull enough) on the age
+of Methuselah, a mighty speculation! there were
+outlines, rude guesses at the shape of Noah&#8217;s Ark
+and at the riches of Solomon&#8217;s Temple; questions
+as to the date of the creation, predictions of the
+end of all things; the great lapses of time, the
+strange mutations of the globe were unfolded with
+the voluminous leaf, as it turned over; and
+though the soul might slumber with an hieroglyphic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>
+veil of inscrutable mysteries drawn over it, yet it
+was in a slumber ill-exchanged for all the sharpened
+realities of sense, wit, fancy, or reason. My father&#8217;s
+life was comparatively a dream; but it was
+a dream of infinity and eternity, of death, the
+resurrection, and a judgement to come!</p>
+
+<p>No two individuals were ever more unlike than
+were the host and his guest. A poet was to my
+father a sort of nondescript: yet whatever added
+grace to the Unitarian cause was to him welcome.
+He could hardly have been more surprised or
+pleased, if our visitor had worn wings. Indeed,
+his thoughts had wings; and as the silken sounds
+rustled round our little wainscoted parlour, my
+father threw back his spectacles over his forehead,
+his white hairs mixing with its sanguine hue; and
+a smile of delight beamed across his rugged cordial
+face, to think that Truth had found a new ally
+in Fancy!<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> Besides, Coleridge seemed to take
+considerable notice of me, and that of itself was
+enough. He talked very familiarly, but agreeably,
+and glanced over a variety of subjects. At dinner-time
+he grew more animated, and dilated in a very
+edifying manner on Mary Wollstonecraft and
+Mackintosh. The last, he said, he considered (on
+my father&#8217;s speaking of his <i>Vindiciae Gallicae</i> as
+a capital performance) as a clever scholastic man&mdash;a
+master of the topics,&mdash;or as the ready warehouseman
+of letters, who knew exactly where to
+lay his hand on what he wanted, though the goods
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>were not his own. He thought him no match for
+Burke, either in style or matter. Burke was
+a metaphysician, Mackintosh a mere logician.
+Burke was an orator (almost a poet) who reasoned
+in figures, because he had an eye for nature:
+Mackintosh, on the other hand, was a rhetorician,
+who had only an eye to commonplaces. On this
+I ventured to say that I had always entertained
+a great opinion of Burke, and that (as far as I could
+find) the speaking of him with contempt might be
+made the test of a vulgar democratical mind. This
+was the first observation I ever made to Coleridge,
+and he said it was a very just and striking one.
+I remember the leg of Welsh mutton and the
+turnips on the table that day had the finest flavour
+imaginable. Coleridge added that Mackintosh and
+Tom Wedgwood (of whom, however, he spoke
+highly) had expressed a very indifferent opinion
+of his friend Mr. Wordsworth, on which he
+remarked to them&mdash;&#8216;He strides on so far before
+you, that he dwindles in the distance!&#8217; Godwin
+had once boasted to him of having carried on an
+argument with Mackintosh for three hours with
+dubious success; Coleridge told him&mdash;&#8216;If there
+had been a man of genius in the room he would
+have settled the question in five minutes.&#8217; He
+asked me if I had ever seen Mary Wollstonecraft,
+and I said, I had once for a few moments, and that
+she seemed to me to turn off Godwin&#8217;s objections
+to something she advanced with quite a playful,
+easy air. He replied, that &#8216;this was only one
+instance of the ascendancy which people of
+imagination exercised over those of mere intellect.&#8217;
+He did not rate Godwin very high<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> (this was caprice
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>or prejudice, real or affected) but he had a great
+idea of Mrs. Wollstonecraft&#8217;s powers of conversation,
+none at all of her talent for book-making. We
+talked a little about Holcroft. He had been asked
+if he was not much struck <i>with</i> him, and he said,
+he thought himself in more danger of being struck
+<i>by</i> him. I complained that he would not let me
+get on at all, for he required a definition of every
+the commonest word, exclaiming, &#8216;What do you
+mean by a <i>sensation</i>, Sir? What do you mean by
+an <i>idea</i>?&#8217; This, Coleridge said, was barricadoing
+the road to truth:&mdash;it was setting up a turnpike-gate
+at every step we took. I forget a great
+number of things, many more than I remember;
+but the day passed off pleasantly, and the next
+morning Mr. Coleridge was to return to Shrewsbury.
+When I came down to breakfast, I found that he
+had just received a letter from his friend, T. Wedgwood,
+making him an offer of 150<i>l.</i> a year if he
+chose to waive his present pursuit, and devote
+himself entirely to the study of poetry and
+philosophy. Coleridge seemed to make up his
+mind to close with this proposal in the act of
+tying on one of his shoes. It threw an additional
+damp on his departure. It took the wayward
+enthusiast quite from us to cast him into Deva&#8217;s
+winding vales, or by the shores of old romance.
+Instead of living at ten miles&#8217; distance, of being
+the pastor of a Dissenting congregation at Shrewsbury,
+he was henceforth to inhabit the Hill of
+Parnassus, to be a Shepherd on the Delectable
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>Mountains. Alas! I knew not the way thither,
+and felt very little gratitude for Mr. Wedgwood&#8217;s
+bounty. I was presently relieved from this
+dilemma; for Mr. Coleridge, asking for a pen and
+ink, and going to a table to write something on
+a bit of card, advanced towards me with undulating
+step, and giving me the precious document, said
+that that was his address, <i>Mr. Coleridge, Nether-Stowey,
+Somersetshire</i>; and that he should be
+glad to see me there in a few weeks&#8217; time, and, if
+I chose, would come half-way to meet me. I was
+not less surprised than the shepherd-boy (this
+simile is to be found in <i>Cassandra</i>) when he sees
+a thunderbolt fall close at his feet. I stammered
+out my acknowledgements and acceptance of this
+offer (I thought Mr. Wedgwood&#8217;s annuity a trifle
+to it) as well as I could; and this mighty business
+being settled, the poet-preacher took leave, and
+I accompanied him six miles on the road. It was
+a fine morning in the middle of winter, and he
+talked the whole way. The scholar in Chaucer is
+described as going</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&mdash;&mdash;Sounding on his way.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">So Coleridge went on his. In digressing, in dilating,
+in passing from subject to subject, he appeared to
+me to float in air, to slide on ice. He told me in
+confidence (going along) that he should have
+preached two sermons before he accepted the
+situation at Shrewsbury, one on Infant Baptism,
+the other on the Lord&#8217;s Supper, showing that he
+could not administer either, which would have
+effectually disqualified him for the object in view.
+I observed that he continually crossed me on the
+way by shifting from one side of the footpath to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
+the other. This struck me as an odd movement;
+but I did not at that time connect it with any
+instability of purpose or involuntary change of
+principle, as I have done since. He seemed unable
+to keep on in a straight line. He spoke slightingly
+of Hume (whose Essay on Miracles he said was
+stolen from an objection started in one of South&#8217;s
+Sermons&mdash;<i>Credat Judaeus Apella!</i>). I was not
+very much pleased at this account of Hume, for
+I had just been reading, with infinite relish, that
+completest of all metaphysical <i>choke-pears</i>, his
+<i>Treatise on Human Nature</i>, to which the <i>Essays</i>,
+in point of scholastic subtlety and close reasoning,
+are mere elegant trifling, light summer-reading.
+Coleridge even denied the excellence of Hume&#8217;s
+general style, which I think betrayed a want of taste
+or candour. He however made me amends by the
+manner in which he spoke of Berkeley. He dwelt
+particularly on his <i>Essay on Vision</i> as a masterpiece
+of analytical reasoning. So it undoubtedly is.
+He was exceedingly angry with Dr. Johnson for
+striking the stone with his foot, in allusion to this
+author&#8217;s Theory of Matter and Spirit, and saying,
+&#8216;Thus I confute him, Sir.&#8217; Coleridge drew
+a parallel (I don&#8217;t know how he brought about
+the connexion) between Bishop Berkeley and Tom
+Paine. He said the one was an instance of a subtle,
+the other of an acute mind, than which no two
+things could be more distinct. The one was
+a shop-boy&#8217;s quality, the other the characteristic
+of a philosopher. He considered Bishop Butler as
+a true philosopher, a profound and conscientious
+thinker, a genuine reader of nature and his own
+mind. He did not speak of his <i>Analogy</i>, but of his
+<i>Sermons at the Rolls&#8217; Chapel</i>, of which I had never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>
+heard. Coleridge somehow always contrived to
+prefer the <i>unknown</i> to the <i>known</i>. In this instance
+he was right. The <i>Analogy</i> is a tissue of sophistry,
+of wire-drawn, theological special-pleading; the
+<i>Sermons</i> (with the Preface to them) are in a fine
+vein of deep, matured reflection, a candid appeal
+to our observation of human nature, without
+pedantry and without bias. I told Coleridge
+I had written a few remarks, and was sometimes
+foolish enough to believe that I had made a discovery
+on the same subject (the <i>Natural Disinterestedness
+of the Human Mind</i>)&mdash;and I tried to explain my
+view of it to Coleridge, who listened with great
+willingness, but I did not succeed in making
+myself understood. I sat down to the task shortly
+afterwards for the twentieth time, got new pens
+and paper, determined to make clear work of it,
+wrote a few meagre sentences in the skeleton style
+of a mathematical demonstration, stopped half-way
+down the second page; and, after trying in vain
+to pump up any words, images, notions, apprehensions,
+facts, or observations, from that gulf of
+abstraction in which I had plunged myself for four
+or five years preceding, gave up the attempt as
+labour in vain, and shed tears of helpless despondency
+on the blank unfinished paper. I can
+write fast enough now. Am I better than I was
+then? Oh no! One truth discovered, one pang
+of regret at not being able to express it, is better
+than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.
+Would that I could go back to what I then was!
+Why can we not revive past times as we can
+revisit old places? If I had the quaint Muse of
+Sir Philip Sidney to assist me, I would write
+a <i>Sonnet to the Road between Wem and Shrewsbury</i>,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>
+and immortalize every step of it by some fond
+enigmatical conceit. I would swear that the very
+milestones had ears, and that Harmer-hill stooped
+with all its pines, to listen to a poet, as he passed!
+I remember but one other topic of discourse in this
+walk. He mentioned Paley, praised the naturalness
+and clearness of his style, but condemned
+his sentiments, thought him a mere time-serving
+casuist, and said that &#8216;the fact of his work on
+Moral and Political Philosophy being made a text-book
+in our Universities was a disgrace to the
+national character.&#8217; We parted at the six-mile
+stone; and I returned homeward pensive but
+much pleased. I had met with unexpected notice
+from a person whom I believed to have been
+prejudiced against me. &#8216;Kind and affable to me
+had been his condescension, and should be honoured
+ever with suitable regard.&#8217; He was the first poet
+I had known, and he certainly answered to that
+inspired name. I had heard a great deal of his
+powers of conversation, and was not disappointed.
+In fact, I never met with any thing at all like
+them, either before or since. I could easily credit
+the accounts which were circulated of his holding
+forth to a large party of ladies and gentlemen, an
+evening or two before, on the Berkeleian Theory,
+when he made the whole material universe look
+like a transparency of fine words; and another
+story (which I believe he has somewhere told
+himself) of his being asked to a party at Birmingham,
+of his smoking tobacco and going to sleep after
+dinner on a sofa, where the company found him
+to their no small surprise, which was increased to
+wonder when he started up of a sudden, and
+rubbing his eyes, looked about him, and launched<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>
+into a three hours&#8217; description of the third heaven,
+of which he had had a dream, very different from
+Mr. Southey&#8217;s Vision of Judgement, and also from
+that other Vision of Judgement, which Mr. Murray,
+the Secretary of the Bridge Street Junto, has taken
+into his especial keeping.</p>
+
+<p>On my way back, I had a sound in my ears, it
+was the voice of Fancy: I had a light before me,
+it was the face of Poetry. The one still lingers
+there, the other has not quitted my side! Coleridge
+in truth met me half-way on the ground of
+philosophy, or I should not have been won over
+to his imaginative creed. I had an uneasy,
+pleasurable sensation all the time, till I was to
+visit him. During those months the chill breath
+of winter gave me a welcoming; the vernal air
+was balm and inspiration to me. The golden
+sunsets, the silver star of evening, lighted me on
+my way to new hopes and prospects. <i>I was to
+visit Coleridge in the Spring.</i> This circumstance
+was never absent from my thoughts, and mingled
+with all my feelings. I wrote to him at the time
+proposed, and received an answer postponing my
+intended visit for a week or two, but very cordially
+urging me to complete my promise then. This
+delay did not damp, but rather increase my ardour.
+In the meantime I went to Llangollen Vale, by
+way of initiating myself in the mysteries of natural
+scenery; and I must say I was enchanted with it.
+I had been reading Coleridge&#8217;s description of
+England, in his fine <i>Ode on the Departing Year</i>,
+and I applied it, <i>con amore</i>, to the objects before
+me. That valley was to me (in a manner) the cradle
+of a new existence: in the river that winds through
+it, my spirit was baptized in the waters of Helicon!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I returned home, and soon after set out on my
+journey with unworn heart and untried feet. My
+way lay through Worcester and Gloucester, and
+by Upton, where I thought of Tom Jones and
+the adventure of the muff. I remember getting
+completely wet through one day, and stopping
+at an inn (I think it was at Tewkesbury) where
+I sat up all night to read <i>Paul and Virginia</i>.
+Sweet were the showers in early youth that
+drenched my body, and sweet the drops of pity
+that fell upon the books I read! I recollect
+a remark of Coleridge&#8217;s upon this very book, that
+nothing could show the gross indelicacy of French
+manners and the entire corruption of their imagination
+more strongly than the behaviour of the
+heroine in the last fatal scene, who turns away
+from a person on board the sinking vessel, that
+offers to save her life, because he has thrown off
+his clothes to assist him in swimming. Was this
+a time to think of such a circumstance? I once
+hinted to Wordsworth, as we were sailing in his
+boat on Grasmere lake, that I thought he had
+borrowed the idea of his <i>Poems on the Naming of
+Places</i> from the local inscriptions of the same kind
+in <i>Paul and Virginia</i>. He did not own the
+obligation, and stated some distinction without
+a difference, in defence of his claim to originality.
+And the slightest variation would be sufficient for
+this purpose in his mind; for whatever <i>he</i> added
+or omitted would inevitably be worth all that any
+one else had done, and contain the marrow of the
+sentiment.&mdash;I was still two days before the time
+fixed for my arrival, for I had taken care to set
+out early enough. I stopped these two days at
+Bridgewater, and when I was tired of sauntering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>
+on the banks of its muddy river, returned to the
+inn, and read <i>Camilla</i>. So have I loitered my life
+away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to
+plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased
+me best. I have wanted only one thing to make
+me happy; but wanting that, have wanted everything!</p>
+
+<p>I arrived, and was well received. The country
+about Nether Stowey is beautiful, green and hilly,
+and near the sea-shore. I saw it but the other day,
+after an interval of twenty years, from a hill near
+Taunton. How was the map of my life spread out
+before me, as the map of the country lay at my feet!
+In the afternoon, Coleridge took me over to All-Foxden,
+a romantic old family mansion of the
+St. Aubins, where Wordsworth lived. It was then
+in the possession of a friend of the poet&#8217;s, who gave
+him the free use of it. Somehow that period (the
+time just after the French Revolution) was not
+a time when <i>nothing was given for nothing</i>. The
+mind opened, and a softness might be perceived
+coming over the heart of individuals, beneath &#8216;the
+scales that fence&#8217; our self-interest. Wordsworth
+himself was from home, but his sister kept house,
+and set before us a frugal repast; and we had free
+access to her brother&#8217;s poems, the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>,
+which were still in manuscript, or in the form of
+<i>Sibylline Leaves</i>. I dipped into a few of these with
+great satisfaction, and with the faith of a novice.
+I slept that night in an old room with blue hangings,
+and covered with the round-faced family-portraits
+of the age of George I and II, and from the wooded
+declivity of the adjoining park that overlooked my
+window, at the dawn of day, could</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&mdash;&mdash;hear the loud stag speak.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In the outset of life (and particularly at this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
+time I felt it so) our imagination has a body to it.
+We are in a state between sleeping and waking,
+and have indistinct but glorious glimpses of strange
+shapes, and there is always something to come
+better than what we see. As in our dreams the
+fullness of the blood gives warmth and reality to
+the coinage of the brain, so in youth our ideas
+are clothed, and fed, and pampered with our
+good spirits; we breathe thick with thoughtless
+happiness, the weight of future years presses
+on the strong pulses of the heart, and we repose
+with undisturbed faith in truth and good. As
+we advance, we exhaust our fund of enjoyment
+and of hope. We are no longer wrapped in <i>lamb&#8217;s-wool</i>,
+lulled in Elysium. As we taste the pleasures
+of life, their spirit evaporates, the sense palls; and
+nothing is left but the phantoms, the lifeless
+shadows of what <i>has been</i>!</p>
+
+<p>That morning, as soon as breakfast was over, we
+strolled out into the park, and seating ourselves on
+the trunk of an old ash-tree that stretched along
+the ground, Coleridge read aloud with a sonorous
+and musical voice, the ballad of <i>Betty Foy</i>. I was
+not critically or sceptically inclined. I saw touches
+of truth and nature, and took the rest for granted.
+But in the <i>Thorn</i>, the <i>Mad Mother</i>, and the
+<i>Complaint of a Poor Indian Woman</i>, I felt that
+deeper power and pathos which have been since
+acknowledged,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In spite of pride, in erring reason&#8217;s spite,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">as the characteristics of this author; and the
+sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry
+came over me. It had to me something of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh
+soil, or of the first welcome breath of Spring,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">While yet the trembling year is unconfirmed.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Coleridge and myself walked back to Stowey that
+evening, and his voice sounded high</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fix&#8217;d fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">as we passed through echoing grove, by fairy
+stream or waterfall, gleaming in the summer
+moonlight! He lamented that Wordsworth was
+not prone enough to believe in the traditional
+superstitions of the place, and that there was
+a something corporeal, a <i>matter-of-fact-ness</i>, a clinging
+to the palpable, or often to the petty, in his
+poetry, in consequence. His genius was not
+a spirit that descended to him through the air; it
+sprung out of the ground like a flower, or unfolded
+itself from a green spray, on which the goldfinch
+sang. He said, however (if I remember right), that
+this objection must be confined to his descriptive
+pieces, that his philosophic poetry had a grand
+and comprehensive spirit in it, so that his soul
+seemed to inhabit the universe like a palace, and
+to discover truth by intuition, rather than by
+deduction. The next day Wordsworth arrived
+from Bristol at Coleridge&#8217;s cottage. I think I see
+him now. He answered in some degree to his
+friend&#8217;s description of him, but was more gaunt
+and Don Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed
+(according to the <i>costume</i> of that unconstrained
+period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped
+pantaloons. There was something of a roll,
+a lounge in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>
+There was a severe, worn pressure of thought
+about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw
+something in objects more than the outward
+appearance), an intense high narrow forehead,
+a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose
+and feeling, and a convulsive inclination to
+laughter about the mouth, a good deal at variance
+with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of
+his face. Chantrey&#8217;s bust wants the marking
+traits; but he was teased into making it regular
+and heavy: Haydon&#8217;s head of him, introduced
+into the <i>Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem</i>, is the
+most like his drooping weight of thought and
+expression. He sat down and talked very naturally
+and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents
+in his voice, a deep guttural intonation, and
+a strong tincture of the northern <i>burr</i>, like the
+crust on wine. He instantly began to make havoc
+of the half of a Cheshire cheese on the table, and
+said triumphantly that &#8216;his marriage with experience
+had not been so productive as Mr. Southey&#8217;s
+in teaching him a knowledge of the good things of
+this life.&#8217; He had been to see the <i>Castle Spectre</i> by
+Monk Lewis, while at Bristol, and described it very
+well. He said &#8216;it fitted the taste of the audience
+like a glove.&#8217; This <i>ad captandum</i> merit was, however,
+by no means a recommendation of it, according
+to the severe principles of the new school, which
+reject rather than court popular effect. Wordsworth,
+looking out of the low, latticed window,
+said, &#8216;How beautifully the sun sets on that
+yellow bank!&#8217; I thought within myself, &#8216;With
+what eyes these poets see nature!&#8217; and ever after,
+when I saw the sunset stream upon the objects
+facing it, conceived I had made a discovery, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>
+thanked Mr. Wordsworth for having made one for
+me! We went over to All-Foxden again the day
+following, and Wordsworth read us the story of
+Peter Bell in the open air; and the comment
+made upon it by his face and voice was very
+different from that of some later critics! Whatever
+might be thought of the poem, &#8216;his face was as
+a book where men might read strange matters,&#8217;
+and he announced the fate of his hero in prophetic
+tones. There is a <i>chaunt</i> in the recitation both of
+Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell
+upon the hearer, and disarms the judgement.
+Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making
+habitual use of this ambiguous accompaniment.
+Coleridge&#8217;s manner is more full, animated, and
+varied; Wordsworth&#8217;s more equable, sustained,
+and internal. The one might be termed more
+<i>dramatic</i>, the other more <i>lyrical</i>. Coleridge has
+told me that he himself liked to compose in walking
+over uneven ground, or breaking through the
+straggling branches of a copse wood; whereas
+Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking
+up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some
+spot where the continuity of his verse met with
+no collateral interruption. Returning that same
+evening, I got into a metaphysical argument with
+Wordsworth, while Coleridge was explaining the
+different notes of the nightingale to his sister, in
+which we neither of us succeeded in making
+ourselves perfectly clear and intelligible. Thus
+I passed three weeks at Nether Stowey and in the
+neighbourhood, generally devoting the afternoons
+to a delightful chat in an arbour made of bark by
+the poet&#8217;s friend Tom Poole, sitting under two
+fine elm-trees, and listening to the bees humming<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
+round us, while we quaffed our <i>flip</i>. It was agreed,
+among other things, that we should make a jaunt
+down the Bristol Channel, as far as Lynton. We
+set off together on foot, Coleridge, John Chester,
+and I. This Chester was a native of Nether Stowey,
+one of those who were attracted to Coleridge&#8217;s
+discourse as flies are to honey, or bees in swarming-time
+to the sound of a brass pan. He &#8216;followed
+in the chace, like a dog who hunts, not like one
+that made up the cry.&#8217; He had on a brown cloth
+coat, boots, and corduroy breeches, was low in
+stature, bow-legged, had a drag in his walk like
+a drover, which he assisted by a hazel switch, and
+kept on a sort of trot by the side of Coleridge, like
+a running footman by a state coach, that he might
+not lose a syllable or sound, that fell from Coleridge&#8217;s
+lips. He told me his private opinion, that Coleridge
+was a wonderful man. He scarcely opened his lips,
+much less offered an opinion the whole way: yet
+of the three, had I to choose during that journey,
+I would be John Chester. He afterwards followed
+Coleridge into Germany, where the Kantean
+philosophers were puzzled how to bring him under
+any of their categories. When he sat down at
+table with his idol, John&#8217;s felicity was complete;
+Sir Walter Scott&#8217;s, or Mr. Blackwood&#8217;s, when they
+sat down at the same table with the King, was not
+more so. We passed Dunster on our right, a small
+town between the brow of a hill and the sea.
+I remember eyeing it wistfully as it lay below us:
+contrasted with the woody scene around, it looked
+as clear, as pure, as <i>embrowned</i> and ideal as any
+landscape I have seen since, of Gaspar Poussin&#8217;s
+or Domenichino&#8217;s. We had a long day&#8217;s march&mdash;(our
+feet kept time to the echoes of Coleridge&#8217;s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
+tongue)&mdash;through Minehead and by the Blue
+Anchor, and on to Lynton, which we did not reach
+till near midnight, and where we had some
+difficulty in making a lodgement. We, however,
+knocked the people of the house up at last, and we
+were repaid for our apprehensions and fatigue by
+some excellent rashers of fried bacon and eggs.
+The view in coming along had been splendid.
+We walked for miles and miles on dark brown
+heaths overlooking the channel, with the Welsh
+hills beyond, and at times descended into little
+sheltered valleys close by the sea-side, with
+a smuggler&#8217;s face scowling by us, and then had
+to ascend conical hills with a path winding up
+through a coppice to a barren top, like a monk&#8217;s
+shaven crown, from one of which I pointed out to
+Coleridge&#8217;s notice the bare masts of a vessel on
+the very edge of the horizon, and within the red-orbed
+disk of the setting sun, like his own spectre-ship
+in the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>. At Lynton the
+character of the sea-coast becomes more marked
+and rugged. There is a place called the &#8216;Valley of
+Rocks&#8217; (I suspect this was only the poetical name
+for it) bedded among precipices overhanging the
+sea, with rocky caverns beneath, into which the
+waves dash, and where the sea-gull for ever wheels
+its screaming flight. On the tops of these are huge
+stones thrown transverse, as if an earthquake had
+tossed them there, and behind these is a fretwork
+of perpendicular rocks, something like the &#8216;Giant&#8217;s
+Causeway&#8217;. A thunder-storm came on while we
+were at the inn, and Coleridge was running out
+bareheaded to enjoy the commotion of the
+elements in the &#8216;Valley of Rocks&#8217;, but as if in spite,
+the clouds only muttered a few angry sounds, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>
+let fall a few refreshing drops. Coleridge told me
+that he and Wordsworth were to have made this
+place the scene of a prose-tale, which was to have
+been in the manner of, but far superior to, the
+<i>Death of Abel</i>, but they had relinquished the
+design. In the morning of the second day, we
+breakfasted luxuriously in an old-fashioned parlour
+on tea, toast, eggs, and honey, in the very sight of
+the bee-hives from which it had been taken, and
+a garden full of thyme and wild flowers that had
+produced it. On this occasion Coleridge spoke
+of Virgil&#8217;s <i>Georgics</i>, but not well. I do not think
+he had much feeling for the classical or elegant.
+It was in this room that we found a little worn-out
+copy of the <i>Seasons</i>, lying in a window-seat, on
+which Coleridge exclaimed, &#8216;<i>That</i> is true fame!&#8217;
+He said Thomson was a great poet, rather than
+a good one; his style was as meretricious as his
+thoughts were natural. He spoke of Cowper as
+the best modern poet. He said the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>
+were an experiment about to be tried by him and
+Wordsworth, to see how far the public taste would
+endure poetry written in a more natural and simple
+style than had hitherto been attempted; totally
+discarding the artifices of poetical diction, and
+making use only of such words as had probably
+been common in the most ordinary language since
+the days of Henry II. Some comparison was
+introduced between Shakespeare and Milton. He
+said &#8216;he hardly knew which to prefer. Shakespeare
+appeared to him a mere stripling in the art; he
+was as tall and as strong, with infinitely more
+activity than Milton, but he never appeared to
+have come to man&#8217;s estate; or if he had, he would
+not have been a man, but a monster.&#8217; He spoke<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>
+with contempt of Gray, and with intolerance of
+Pope. He did not like the versification of the
+latter. He observed that &#8216;the ears of these
+couplet-writers might be charged with having
+short memories, that could not retain the harmony
+of whole passages.&#8217; He thought little of Junius
+as a writer; he had a dislike of Dr. Johnson;
+and a much higher opinion of Burke as an orator
+and politician, than of Fox or Pitt. He however
+thought him very inferior in richness of style and
+imagery to some of our elder prose-writers,
+particularly Jeremy Taylor. He liked Richardson,
+but not Fielding; nor could I get him to enter into
+the merits of <i>Caleb Williams</i>.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> In short, he was
+profound and discriminating with respect to those
+authors whom he liked, and where he gave his
+judgement fair play; capricious, perverse, and
+prejudiced in his antipathies and distastes. We
+loitered on the &#8216;ribbed sea-sands&#8217;, in such talk as
+this, a whole morning, and I recollect met with
+a curious sea-weed, of which John Chester told us
+the country name! A fisherman gave Coleridge
+an account of a boy that had been drowned the
+day before, and that they had tried to save him
+at the risk of their own lives. He said &#8216;he did not
+know how it was that they ventured, but, Sir, we
+have a <i>nature</i> towards one another.&#8217; This expression,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>Coleridge remarked to me, was a fine illustration
+of that theory of disinterestedness which I (in
+common with Butler) had adopted. I broached
+to him an argument of mine to prove that <i>likeness</i>
+was not mere association of ideas. I said that the
+mark in the sand put one in mind of a man&#8217;s foot,
+not because it was part of a former impression of
+a man&#8217;s foot (for it was quite new) but because it
+was like the shape of a man&#8217;s foot. He assented
+to the justness of this distinction (which I have
+explained at length elsewhere, for the benefit of
+the curious) and John Chester listened; not from
+any interest in the subject, but because he was
+astonished that I should be able to suggest anything
+to Coleridge that he did not already know.
+We returned on the third morning, and Coleridge
+remarked the silent cottage-smoke curling up the
+valleys where, a few evenings before, we had seen
+the lights gleaming through the dark.</p>
+
+<p>In a day or two after we arrived at Stowey, we
+set out, I on my return home, and he for Germany.
+It was a Sunday morning, and he was to preach
+that day for Dr. Toulmin of Taunton. I asked him
+if he had prepared anything for the occasion?
+He said he had not even thought of the text, but
+should as soon as we parted. I did not go to hear
+him,&mdash;this was a fault,&mdash;but we met in the evening
+at Bridgewater. The next day we had a long day&#8217;s
+walk to Bristol, and sat down, I recollect, by
+a well-side on the road, to cool ourselves and
+satisfy our thirst, when Coleridge repeated to me
+some descriptive lines of his tragedy of <i>Remorse</i>;
+which I must say became his mouth and that
+occasion better than they, some years after, did
+Mr. Elliston&#8217;s and the Drury Lane boards,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh memory! shield me from the world&#8217;s poor strife,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And give those scenes thine everlasting life.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I saw no more of him for a year or two, during
+which period he had been wandering in the Hartz
+Forest in Germany; and his return was cometary,
+meteorous, unlike his setting out. It was not till
+some time after that I knew his friends Lamb and
+Southey. The last always appears to me (as I first
+saw him) with a commonplace book under his arm,
+and the first with a <i>bon-mot</i> in his mouth. It was
+at Godwin&#8217;s that I met him with Holcroft and
+Coleridge, where they were disputing fiercely
+which was the best&mdash;<i>Man as he was, or man as he
+is to be</i>. &#8216;Give me&#8217;, says Lamb, &#8216;man as he is <i>not</i>
+to be.&#8217; This saying was the beginning of a friendship
+between us, which I believe still continues.&mdash;Enough
+of this for the present.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But there is matter for another rhyme,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I to this may add a second tale.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> My father was one of those who mistook his talent after
+all. He used to be very much dissatisfied that I preferred
+his Letters to his Sermons. The last were forced and dry;
+the first came naturally from him. For ease, half-plays on
+words, and a supine, monkish, indolent pleasantry, I have
+never seen them equalled.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> He complained in particular of the presumption of his
+attempting to establish the future immortality of man,
+&#8216;without&#8217; (as he said) &#8216;knowing what Death was or what
+Life was&#8217;&mdash;and the tone in which he pronounced these two
+words seemed to convey a complete image of both.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Raphael, and
+at this time I had as little as he. He sometimes gives
+a striking account at present of the Cartoons at Pisa by
+Buffamalco and others; of one in particular, where Death
+is seen in the air brandishing his scythe, and the great and
+mighty of the earth shudder at his approach, while the
+beggars and the wretched kneel to him as their deliverer.
+He would, of course, understand so broad and fine a moral
+as this at any time.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="JOHN_KEBLE" id="JOHN_KEBLE"></a>JOHN KEBLE<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1792-1866</h3>
+
+<h3>SACRED POETRY (1825)</h3>
+
+<h4><i>The Star in the East; with other Poems.</i> By
+Josiah Conder. London. 1824.</h4>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> are many circumstances about this little
+volume, which tend powerfully to disarm criticism.
+In the first place, it is, for the most part, of a <i>sacred</i>
+character: taken up with those subjects which
+least of all admit, with propriety, either in the
+author or critic, the exercise of intellectual subtlety.
+For the <i>practical</i> tendency, indeed, of such compositions,
+both are most deeply responsible; the
+author who publishes, and the critic who undertakes
+to recommend or to censure them. But if they
+appear to be written with any degree of sincerity
+and earnestness, we naturally shrink from treating
+them merely as literary efforts. To interrupt the
+current of a reader&#8217;s sympathy in such a case, by
+critical objections, is not merely to deprive him of
+a little harmless pleasure, it is to disturb him almost
+in a devotional exercise. The most considerate
+reviewer, therefore, of a volume of sacred poetry,
+will think it a subject on which it is easier to say too
+much than too little.</p>
+
+<p>In the present instance, this consideration is enforced
+by the unpretending tone of the volume,
+which bears internal evidence, for the most part, of
+not having been written to meet the eye of the world.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
+It is in vain to say that this claim on the critic&#8217;s
+favour is nullified by publication. The author may
+give it up, and yet the work may retain it. We may
+still feel that we have no right to judge severely of
+what was not, at first, intended to come before our
+judgement at all. This of course applies only to
+those compositions, which indicate, by something
+within themselves, this freedom from the pretension
+of authorship. And such are most of those to
+which we are now bespeaking our readers&#8217; attention.</p>
+
+<p><i>Most</i> of them, we say, because the first poem in
+the volume, <i>The Star in the East</i>, is of a more ambitious
+and less pleasing character. Although in
+blank verse, it is, in fact, a lyrical effusion; an ode
+on the rapid progress and final triumph of the Gospel.
+It looks like the composition of a young man:
+harsh and turgid in parts, but interspersed with
+some rather beautiful touches. The opening lines
+are a fair specimen.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O to have heard th&#8217; unearthly symphonies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which o&#8217;er the starlight peace of Syrian skies<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Came floating like a dream, that blessed night<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When angel songs were heard by sinful men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hymning Messiah&#8217;s advent! O to have watch&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The night with those poor shepherds, whom, when first<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The glory of the Lord shed sudden day&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Day without dawn, starting from midnight, day<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Brighter than morning&mdash;on those lonely hills<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Strange fear surpris&#8217;d&mdash;fear lost in wondering joy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When from th&#8217; angelic multitude swell&#8217;d forth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The many-voic&egrave;d consonance of praise:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Glory in th&#8217; highest to God, and upon earth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Peace, towards men good will. But once before,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In such glad strains of joyous fellowship,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The silent earth was greeted by the heavens,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When at its first foundation they looked down<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From their bright orbs, those heavenly ministries,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hailing the new-born world with bursts of joy.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding beauties scattered here and
+there, there is an effort and constrained stateliness
+in the poem, very different from the rapidity and
+simplicity of many of the shorter lyrics, which follow
+under the titles of Sacred and Domestic Poems.
+Such, for instance, as the Poor Man&#8217;s Hymn</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">As much have I of worldly good<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As e&#8217;er my master had:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I diet on as dainty food,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And am as richly clad,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tho&#8217; plain my garb, though scant my board,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As Mary&#8217;s Son and Nature&#8217;s Lord.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The manger was his infant bed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His home, the mountain-cave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He had not where to lay his head,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He borrow&#8217;d even his grave.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Earth yielded him no resting spot,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her Maker, but she knew him not.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">As much the world&#8217;s good will I bear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Its favours and applause,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As He, whose blessed name I bear,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Hated without a cause,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Despis&#8217;d, rejected, mock&#8217;d by pride,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Betray&#8217;d, forsaken, crucified.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Why should I court my Master&#8217;s foe?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Why should I fear its frown?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why should I seek for rest below,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or sigh for brief renown?&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A pilgrim to a better land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">An heir of joys at <span class="smcap">God</span>&#8217;s right hand?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Or the following sweet lines on Home, which
+occur among the Domestic poems:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">That is not home, where day by day<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I wear the busy hours away.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That is not home, where lonely night<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Prepares me for the toils of light&mdash;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8217;Tis hope, and joy, and memory, give<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A home in which the heart can live&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These walls no lingering hopes endear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No fond remembrance chains me here,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cheerless I heave the lonely sigh&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Eliza, canst thou tell me why?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8217;Tis where thou art is home to me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And home without thee cannot be.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There are who strangely love to roam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And find in wildest haunts their home;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And some in halls of lordly state,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who yet are homeless, desolate.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sailor&#8217;s home is on the main,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The warrior&#8217;s, on the tented plain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The maiden&#8217;s, in her bower of rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The infant&#8217;s, on his mother&#8217;s breast&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But where thou art is home to me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And home without thee cannot be.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There is no home in halls of pride,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They are too high, and cold, and wide.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No home is by the wanderer found:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8217;Tis not in place: it hath no bound.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It is a circling atmosphere<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Investing all the heart holds dear;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A law of strange attractive force,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That holds the feelings in their course;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It is a presence undefin&#8217;d,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O&#8217;er-shadowing the conscious mind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where love and duty sweetly blend<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To consecrate the name of friend;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where&#8217;er thou art is home to me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And home without thee cannot be.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">My love, forgive the anxious sigh&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I hear the moments rushing by,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And think that life is fleeting fast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That youth with us will soon be past.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh! when will time, consenting, give<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The home in which my heart can live?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There shall the past and future meet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And o&#8217;er our couch, in union sweet,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Extend their cherub wings, and shower<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bright influence on the present hour,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh! when shall Israel&#8217;s mystic guide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The pillar&#8217;d cloud, our steps decide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then, resting, spread its guardian shade,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To bless the home which love hath made?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Daily, my love, shall thence arise<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Our hearts&#8217; united sacrifice;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And home indeed a home will be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thus consecrate and shar&#8217;d with thee.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We will add one more specimen of the same kind,
+which forms a natural and pleasing appendix to the
+preceding lines.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Louise! you wept, that morn of gladness<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Which made your Brother blest;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And tears of half-reproachful sadness<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Fell on the Bridegroom&#8217;s vest:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet, pearly tears were those, to gem<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A Sister&#8217;s bridal diadem.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">No words could half so well have spoken,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">What thus was deeply shown<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By Nature&#8217;s simplest, dearest token,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">How much was then my own;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Endearing her for whom they fell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Thee, for having loved so well.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But now no more&mdash;nor let a Brother,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Louise, regretful see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That still &#8217;tis sorrow to another,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That he should happy be.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Those were, I trust, the only tears<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That day shall cost through coming years.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Smile with us. Happy and light-hearted,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We three the time will while.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, when sometimes a season parted,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Still think of us, and smile.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But come to us in gloomy weather;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We&#8217;ll weep, when we must weep, together.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now, what is the reason of the great difference
+between these extracts and that from the <i>Star in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>
+East</i>?&mdash;a difference which the earlier date of the
+latter, so far from accounting for, only makes the
+more extraordinary. In some instances, the interval
+of time is very short, but at all events more effort
+and turgidness might have been expected in the
+earlier poems, more simplicity and care and a more
+subdued tone in the later. We suspect a reason,
+which both poets and poetical readers are too apt
+to leave out of sight. There is a want of <i>truth</i> in
+the <i>Star in the East</i>&mdash;not that the author is otherwise
+than quite in earnest&mdash;but his earnestness
+seems rather an artificial glow, to which he has been
+worked up by reading and conversation of a particular
+cast, than the overflowing warmth of his own natural
+feelings, kindled by circumstances in which he was
+himself placed. In a word, when he writes of the
+success of the Bible Society, and the supposed
+amelioration of the world in consequence, he writes
+from report and fancy only; but when he speaks
+of a happy home, of kindly affections, of the comforts
+which piety can administer in disappointment
+and sorrow; either we are greatly mistaken, or he
+speaks from real and present experience. The
+poetical result is what the reader has seen:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&mdash;&mdash;mens onus reponit, et peregrino<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Labore fessi venimus Larem ad nostrum&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">We turn gladly from our fairy voyage round the
+world to refresh ourselves with a picture, which we
+feel to be drawn from the life, of a happy and
+innocent fireside. Nor is it, in the slightest degree,
+derogatory to an author&#8217;s talent to say that he has
+failed, comparatively, on that subject of which he
+must have known comparatively little.</p>
+
+<p>Let us here pause a moment to explain what is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>
+meant when we speak of such prospects as are above
+alluded to, being shadowy and unreal in respect of
+what is matter of experience. It is not that we
+doubt the tenor of the Scripture, regarding the final
+conversion of the whole world, or that we close our
+eyes to the wonderful arrangements, if the expression
+may be used, which Divine Providence seems everywhere
+making, with a view to that great consummation.
+One circumstance, in particular, arrests
+our attention, as pervading the whole of modern
+history, but gradually standing out in a stronger
+light as the view draws nearer our own times: we
+mean the rapid increase of colonization <i>from
+Christian nations only</i>. So that the larger half of
+the globe, and what in the nature of things will soon
+become the more populous, is already, in profession,
+Christian. The event, therefore, is unquestionable:
+but experience, we fear, will hardly warrant the exulting
+anticipations, which our author, in common with
+many of whose sincerity there is no reason to doubt,
+has raised upon it. It is but too conceivable that
+the whole world may become nominally Christian,
+yet the face of things may be very little changed for
+the better. And any view of the progress of the
+gospel, whether in verse or in prose, which leaves
+out this possibility, is so far wanting in truth, and
+in that depth of thought which is as necessary to
+the higher kinds of poetical beauty as to philosophy
+or theology itself.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, is too solemn and comprehensive
+a subject to be lightly or hastily spoken of. It is
+enough to have glanced at it, as accounting, in some
+measure, for the general failure of modern poets in
+their attempts to describe the predicted triumph of
+the gospel in the latter days.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To return to the sacred and domestic poems,
+thus advantageously distinguished from that which
+gives name to the volume. Affection, whether
+heavenly or earthly, is the simplest idea that can
+be; and in the graceful and harmonious expression
+of it lies the principal beauty of these poems. In
+the descriptive parts, and in the development of
+abstract sentiment, there is more of effort, and
+occasionally something very like affectation: approaching,
+in one instance (the <i>Nightingale</i>,) far
+nearer than we could wish, to the most vicious of all
+styles, the style of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his miserable
+followers.</p>
+
+<p>Now, these are just the sort of merit and the sort
+of defect, which one might naturally expect to find
+united; the very simplicity of attachment, which
+qualifies the mind for sacred or domestic poetry,
+making its movements awkward and constrained,
+when scenes are to be described, or thoughts unravelled
+of more complication and less immediate
+interest. This is the rather to be observed, as many
+other sacred poets have become less generally
+pleasing and useful, than they otherwise would have
+been, from this very circumstance. The simple
+and touching devoutness of many of Bishop Ken&#8217;s
+lyrical effusions has been unregarded, because of
+the ungraceful contrivances, and heavy movement
+of his narrative. The same may be said, in our
+own times, of some parts of Montgomery&#8217;s writings.
+His bursts of sacred poetry, compared with his
+<i>Greenland</i>, remind us of a person singing enchantingly
+by ear, but becoming languid and powerless
+the moment he sits down to a note-book.</p>
+
+<p>Such writers, it is obvious, do not sufficiently
+trust to the command which the simple expression<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
+of their feelings would obtain over their readers.
+They think it must be relieved with something of
+more variety and imagery, to which they work
+themselves up with laborious, and therefore necessarily
+unsuccessful, efforts. The model for correcting
+their error is to be found in the inspired volume.
+We can, in general, be but incompetent judges of
+this, because we have been used to it from our boyhood.
+But let us suppose a person, whose ideas of
+poetry were entirely gathered from modern compositions,
+taking up the Psalms for the first time.
+Among many other remarkable differences, he would
+surely be impressed with the sacred writer&#8217;s total
+carelessness about originality, and what is technically
+called <i>effect</i>. He would say, &#8216;This is something
+better than merely attractive poetry; it is
+absolute and divine truth.&#8217; The same remark ought
+to be suggested by all sacred hymns; and it is,
+indeed, greatly to be lamented, that such writers as
+we have just mentioned should have ever lost sight
+of it&mdash;should have had so little confidence in the
+power of simplicity, and have condescended so
+largely to the laborious refinements of the profane
+Muse.</p>
+
+<p>To put the same truth in a light somewhat
+different; it is required, we apprehend, in all poets,
+but particularly in sacred poets, that they should
+seem to write with a view of unburthening their
+minds, and not for the sake of writing; for love of
+the subject, not of the employment. The distinction
+is very striking in descriptive poetry. Compare
+the landscapes of Cowper with those of Burns.
+There is, if we mistake not, the same sort of difference
+between them, as in the conversation of two
+persons on scenery, the one originally an enthusiast<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>
+in his love of the works of nature, the other driven,
+by disappointment or weariness, to solace himself
+with them as he might. It is a contrast which
+every one must have observed, when such topics
+come under discussion in society; and those who
+think it worth while, may find abundant illustration
+of it in the writings of this unfortunate but illustrious
+pair. The one all overflowing with the love
+of nature, and indicating, at every turn, that whatever
+his lot in life, he could not have been happy
+without her. The other visibly and wisely soothing
+himself, but not without effort, by attending to
+rural objects, in default of some more congenial
+happiness, of which he had almost come to despair.
+The latter, in consequence, laboriously sketching
+every object that came in his way: the other, in one
+or two rapid lines, which operate, as it were, like
+a magician&#8217;s spell, presenting to the fancy just that
+picture, which was wanted to put the reader&#8217;s mind
+in unison with the writer&#8217;s. We would quote, as
+an instance, the description of Evening in the Fourth
+Book of the <i>Task</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Come Ev&#8217;ning, once again, season of peace;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Return, sweet Ev&#8217;ning, and continue long!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Methinks I see thee in the streaking west<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With matron-step slow-moving, while the night<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Treads on thy sweeping train; one hand employ&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In letting fall the curtain of repose<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On bird and beast, the other charg&#8217;d for man<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With sweet oblivion of the cares of day:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not sumptuously adorn&#8217;d, nor needing aid,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like homely-featur&#8217;d night, of clust&#8217;ring gems;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A star or two, just twinkling on thy brow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Suffices thee; save that the moon is thine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No less than her&#8217;s, not worn indeed on high<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With ostentatious pageantry, but set<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With modest grandeur in thy purple zone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Resplendent less, but of an ampler round.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Come then, and thou shalt find thy vot&#8217;ry calm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or make me so. Composure is thy gift.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And we would set over against it that purely
+pastoral chant:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Now rosy May comes in wi&#8217; flowers<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To deck her gay, green spreading bowers;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And now comes in my happy hours,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To wander wi&#8217; my Davie.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Meet me on the warlock knowe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Dainty Davie, dainty Davie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There I&#8217;ll spend the day wi&#8217; you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">My ain dear dainty Davie.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The crystal waters round us fa&#8217;,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The merry birds are lovers a&#8217;,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The scented breezes round us blaw,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A wandering wi&#8217; my Davie.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Meet me, &amp;c.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When purple morning starts the hare<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To steal upon her early fare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then thro&#8217; the dews I will repair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To meet my faithful Davie.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Meet me, &amp;c.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When day, expiring in the west,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The curtain draws o&#8217; nature&#8217;s rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I flee to his arms I lo&#8217;e best,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And that&#8217;s my ain dear Davie.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Meet me, &amp;c.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is surely no need to explain how this instinctive
+attachment to his subject is especially
+requisite in the sacred poet. If even the description
+of material objects is found to languish without it,
+much more will it be looked for when the best and
+highest of all affections is to be expressed and communicated
+to others. The nobler and worthier the
+object, the greater our disappointment to find it
+approached with anything like languor or constraint.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We must just mention one more quality, which
+may seem, upon consideration, essential to perfection
+in this kind: viz. that the feelings the writer
+expresses should appear to be specimens of his
+general tone of thought, not sudden bursts and
+mere flashes of goodness. Wordsworth&#8217;s beautiful
+description of the Stock-dove might not unaptly
+be applied to him. He should sing</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">&#8216;of love with silence blending,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Slow to begin, yet never ending,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of serious faith and inward glee&#8217;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Some may, perhaps, object to this, as a dull and
+languid strain of sentiment. But before we yield
+to their censures we would inquire of them what
+style they consider, themselves, as most appropriate
+to similar subjects in a kindred art. If grave,
+simple, sustained melodies&mdash;if tones of deep but
+subdued emotion are what our minds naturally
+suggest to us upon the mention of sacred <i>music</i>&mdash;why
+should there not be something analogous, a kind
+of plain chant, in sacred <i>poetry</i> also? fervent, yet
+sober; awful, but engaging; neither wild and
+passionate, nor light and airy; but such as we may
+with submission presume to be the most acceptable
+offering in its kind, as being indeed the truest expression
+of the best state of the affections. To
+many, perhaps to most, men, a tone of more violent
+emotion may sound at first more attractive. But
+before we <i>indulge</i> such a preference, we should do
+well to consider, whether it is quite agreeable to
+that spirit, which alone can make us worthy readers
+of sacred poetry. &#8216;&#7964;&#957;&#952;&#949;&#959;&#957; &#7973; &#960;&#959;&#953;&#8053;&#963;&#953;&#962;&#8217;, it is true;
+there must be rapture and inspiration, but these
+will naturally differ in their character as the powers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>
+do from whom they proceed. The worshippers of
+Baal may be rude and frantic in their cries and
+gestures; but the true Prophet, speaking to or of
+the true <span class="smcap">God</span>, is all dignity and calmness.</p>
+
+<p>If then, in addition to the ordinary difficulties of
+poetry, all these things are essential to the success
+of the Christian lyrist&mdash;if what he sets before us
+must be true in substance, and in manner marked
+by a noble simplicity and confidence in that truth, by
+a sincere attachment to it, and entire familiarity with
+it&mdash;then we need not wonder that so few should have
+become eminent in this branch of their art, nor need
+we have recourse to the disheartening and unsatisfactory
+solutions which are sometimes given of that
+circumstance.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8216;Contemplative piety,&#8217; says Dr. Johnson, &#8216;or the intercourse
+between God and the human soul, cannot be
+poetical. Man, admitted to implore the mercy of his
+Creator, and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in
+a higher state than poetry can confer.&#8217;<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>The sentiment is not uncommon among serious,
+but somewhat fearful, believers; and though we
+believe it erroneous, we desire to treat it not only
+with tenderness, but with reverence. They start
+at the very mention of sacred poetry, as though
+poetry were in its essence a profane amusement.
+It is, unquestionably, by far the safer extreme to
+be too much afraid of venturing with the imagination
+upon sacred ground. Yet, if it be an error, and
+a practical error, it may be worth while cautiously
+to examine the grounds of it. In the generality,
+perhaps, it is not so much a deliberate opinion, as
+a prejudice against the use of the art, arising out
+of its abuse. But the great writer just referred to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>has endeavoured to establish it by direct reasoning.
+He argues the point, first, from the nature of poetry,
+and afterwards from that of devotion.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as,
+by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights.
+The topics of devotion are few.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is to be hoped that many men&#8217;s experience will
+refute the latter part of this statement. How can
+the topics of devotion be few, when we are taught to
+make every part of life, every scene in nature, an
+occasion&mdash;in other words, a topic&mdash;of devotion?
+It might as well be said that connubial love is an
+unfit subject for poetry, as being incapable of novelty,
+because, after all, it is only ringing the changes upon
+one simple affection, which every one understands.
+The novelty there consists, not in the original topic,
+but in continually bringing ordinary things, by happy
+strokes of natural ingenuity, into new associations
+with the ruling passion.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There&#8217;s not a bonny flower that springs<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">By fountain, shaw, or green;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There&#8217;s not a bonnie bird that sings<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But minds me of my Jean.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Why need we fear to extend this most beautiful
+and natural sentiment to &#8216;the intercourse between
+the human soul and its Maker&#8217;, possessing, as we
+do, the very highest warrant for the analogy which
+subsists between conjugal and divine love?</p>
+
+<p>Novelty, therefore, sufficient for all the purposes
+of poetry, we may have on sacred subjects. Let us
+pass to the next objection.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Poetry pleases by exhibiting an idea more grateful to
+the mind than things themselves afford. This effect proceeds
+from the display of those parts of nature which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>
+attract, and the concealment of those which repel, the
+imagination; but religion must be shown as it is; suppression
+and addition equally corrupt it; and, such as it is,
+it is known already.</p></div>
+
+<p>A fallacy may be apprehended in both parts of
+this statement. There are, surely, real landscapes
+which delight the mind as sincerely and intensely
+as the most perfect description could; and there are
+family groups which give a more exquisite sensation
+of domestic happiness than anything in Milton, or
+even Shakespeare. It is partly by association with
+these, the treasures of the memory, and not altogether
+by mere excitement of the imagination, that
+Poetry does her work. By the same rule sacred
+pictures and sacred songs cannot fail to gratify the
+mind which is at all exercised in devotion; recalling,
+as they will, whatever of highest perfection in that
+way she can remember in herself, or has learned of
+others.</p>
+
+<p>Then again, it is not the religious doctrine itself,
+so much as the effect of it upon the human mind and
+heart, which the sacred poet has to describe. What
+is said of suppression and addition may be true
+enough with regard to the former, but is evidently
+incorrect when applied to the latter: it being an
+acknowledged difficulty in all devotional writings,
+and not in devotional verse only, to keep clear of
+the extreme of languor on the one hand, and debasing
+rapture on the other. This requires a delicacy in the
+perception and enunciation of truth, of which the
+most earnest believer may be altogether destitute.
+And since, probably, no man&#8217;s condition, in regard
+to eternal things, is exactly like that of any other
+man, and yet it is the business of the sacred poet to
+sympathize with all, his store of subjects is clearly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span>
+inexhaustible, and his powers of discrimination&mdash;in
+other words, of suppression and addition&mdash;are kept
+in continual exercise.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is he, by any means, so straitly limited in the
+other and more difficult branch of his art, the exhibition
+of religious doctrine itself, as is supposed in
+the following statement:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Whatever is great, desirable, or tremendous, is comprised
+in the name of the Supreme Being. Omnipotence
+cannot be exalted; infinity cannot be amplified; perfection
+cannot be improved.</p></div>
+
+<p>True: all perfection is implied in the name of
+<span class="smcap">God</span>; and so all the beauties and luxuries of spring
+are comprised in that one word. But is it not the
+very office of poetry to develop and display the
+particulars of such complex ideas? in such a way,
+for example, as the idea of <span class="smcap">God&#8217;s</span> omnipresence is
+developed in the 139th Psalm? and thus detaining
+the mind for a while, to force or help her to think
+steadily on truths which she would hurry unprofitably
+over, how strictly soever they may be implied
+in the language which she uses. It is really surprising
+that this great and acute critic did not perceive
+that the objection applies as strongly against
+any kind of composition of which the Divine Nature
+is the subject, as against devotional poems.</p>
+
+<p>We forbear to press the consideration that, even if
+the objection were allowed in respect of natural
+religion, it would not hold against the devotional
+compositions of a Christian; the object of whose
+worship has condescended also to become the object
+of description, affection, and sympathy, in the literal
+sense of these words. But this is, perhaps, too
+solemn and awful an argument for this place; and
+therefore we pass on to the concluding statement<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span>
+of the passage under consideration, in which the
+writer turns his view downwards, and argues against
+sacred poetry from the nature of man, as he had
+before from the nature of <span class="smcap">God</span>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The employments of pious meditation are faith, thanksgiving,
+repentance and supplication. Faith, invariably
+uniform, cannot be invested by fancy with decorations.
+Thanksgiving, the most joyful of all holy effusions, yet
+addressed to a Being without passions, is confined to a few
+modes, and is to be felt rather than expressed.</p></div>
+
+<p>What we have said of the variation of the devout
+affections, as they exist in various persons, is sufficient,
+we apprehend, to answer this. But the rest
+of the paragraph requires some additional reflection:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Repentance, trembling in the presence of the Judge, is
+not at leisure for cadences and epithets.</p></div>
+
+<p>This is rather invidiously put, and looks as if the
+author had not entire confidence in the truth of
+what he was saying. Indeed, it may very well be
+questioned; since many of the more refined passions,
+it is certain, naturally express themselves in poetical
+language. But repentance is not merely a passion,
+nor is its only office to tremble in the presence of the
+Judge. So far from it, that one great business of
+sacred poetry, as of sacred music, is to quiet and
+sober the feelings of the penitent&mdash;to make his compunction
+as much of &#8216;a reasonable service&#8217; as
+possible.</p>
+
+<p>To proceed:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Supplication of man to man may diffuse itself through
+many topics of persuasion: but supplication to God can
+only cry for mercy.</p></div>
+
+<p>Certainly, this would be true, if the abstract
+nature of the Deity were alone considered. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>
+if we turn to the sacred volume, which corrects so
+many of our erring anticipations, we there find that,
+whether in condescension to our infirmities, or for
+other wise purposes, we are furnished with inspired
+precedents for addressing ourselves to God in all the
+various tones, and by all the various topics, which
+we should use to a good and wise man standing in the
+highest and nearest relation to us. This is so
+palpably the case throughout the scriptures, that it
+is quite surprising how a person of so much serious
+thought as Dr. Johnson could have failed to recollect
+it when arguing on the subject of prayer. In
+fact, there is a simple test, by which, perhaps, the
+whole of his reasoning on Sacred Poetry might be
+fairly and decisively tried. Let the reader, as he
+goes over it, bear in mind the Psalms of David, and
+consider whether every one of his statements and
+arguments is not there practically refuted.</p>
+
+<p>It is not, then, because sacred subjects are
+peculiarly unapt for poetry, that so few sacred poets
+are popular. We have already glanced at some of
+the causes to which we attribute it&mdash;we ought to
+add another, which strikes us as important. Let us
+consider how the case stands with regard to books
+of devotion in <i>prose</i>.</p>
+
+<p>We may own it reluctantly, but must it not be
+owned? that if two new publications meet the eye
+at once, of which no more is known than that the
+one is what is familiarly called <i>a good book</i>, the other
+a work of mere literature, nine readers out of ten
+will take up the second rather than the first? If
+this be allowed, whatever accounts for it will contribute
+to account also for the comparative failure
+of devotional poetry. For this sort of coldness and
+languor in the reader must act upon the author in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span>
+more ways than one. The large class who write
+for money or applause will of course be carried, by
+the tide of popularity, towards some other subject.
+Men of more sincere minds, either from true or false
+delicacy, will have little heart to expose their retired
+thoughts to the risk of mockery or neglect; and if
+they do venture, will be checked every moment, like
+an eager but bashful musician before a strange
+audience, not knowing how far the reader&#8217;s feelings
+will harmonize with their own. This leaves the
+field open, in a great measure, to harder or more
+enthusiastic spirits; who offending continually, in
+their several ways, against delicacy, the one by
+wildness, the other by coarseness, aggravate the
+evil which they wished to cure; till the sacred
+subject itself comes at last to bear the blame due to
+the indifference of the reader and the indiscretion of
+the writer.</p>
+
+<p>Such, we apprehend, would be a probable account
+of the condition of sacred poetry, in a country where
+religion was coldly acknowledged, and literature
+earnestly pursued. How far the description may
+apply to England and English literature, in their
+various changes since the Reformation&mdash;how far it
+may hold true of our own times&mdash;is an inquiry
+which would lead us too far at present; but it is
+surely worth considering. It goes deeper than any
+question of mere literary curiosity. It is a sort of
+test of the genuineness of those pretensions, which
+many of us are, perhaps, too forward to advance, to
+a higher state of morality and piety, as well as
+knowledge and refinement, than has been known
+elsewhere or in other times.</p>
+
+<p>Those who, in spite of such difficulties, desire in
+earnest to do good by the poetical talent, which they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span>
+may happen to possess, have only, as it should seem,
+the following alternative. Either they must veil,
+as it were, the sacredness of the subject&mdash;not
+necessarily by allegory, for it may be done in a
+thousand other ways&mdash;and so deceive the world
+of taste into devotional reading&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Succhi amari intanto ei beve,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">E dall&#8217; inganno sua vita riceve&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">or else, directly avowing that their subject as well as
+purpose is devotion, they must be content with
+a smaller number of readers; a disadvantage, however,
+compensated by the fairer chance of doing
+good to each.</p>
+
+<p>It may be worth while to endeavour to trace this
+distinction, as exemplified in the most renowned of
+the sacred poets of England; and to glean from
+such a survey the best instruction we can, in the
+happy art of turning the most fascinating part of
+literature to the highest purposes of religion.</p>
+
+<p>We must premise that we limit the title of &#8216;sacred
+poet&#8217; by excluding those who only devoted a small
+portion of their time and talent now and then, to
+sacred subjects. In all ages of our literary history
+it seems to have been considered almost as an
+essential part of a poet&#8217;s duty to give up some pages
+to scriptural story, or to the praise of his Maker,
+how remote so ever from anything like religion the
+general strain of his writings might be. Witness
+the Lamentation of Mary Magdalene in the works
+of Chaucer, and the beautiful legend of Hew of
+Lincoln, which he has inserted in his Canterbury
+Tales; witness also the hymns of Ben Jonson. But
+these fragments alone will not entitle their authors
+to be enrolled among sacred poets. They indicate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span>
+the taste of their age, rather than their own; a fact
+which may be thought to stand rather in painful
+contrast with the literary history of later days.</p>
+
+<p>There is another class likewise, of whom little
+need be said in this place; we mean those who
+composed, strictly and only, for the sake of unburthening
+their own minds, without any thought of
+publication. But as Chaucer&#8217;s sacred effusions
+indicate chiefly the character of the times, so poems
+such as those we now allude to, mark only the turn
+of mind of the individual writers; and our present
+business is rather with that sort of poetry which
+combines both sorts of instruction; that, namely,
+which bears internal evidence of having been written
+by sincere men, with an intention of doing good, and
+with consideration of the taste of the age in which
+they lived.</p>
+
+<p>Recurring then to the distinction above laid down,
+between the direct and indirect modes of sacred
+poetry; at the head of the two classes, as the reader
+may perhaps have anticipated, we set the glorious
+names of Spenser and of Milton. The claim of
+Spenser to be considered as a sacred poet does by no
+means rest upon his hymns alone: although even
+those would be enough alone to embalm and consecrate
+the whole volume which contains them;
+as a splinter of the true cross is supposed by Catholic
+sailors to ensure the safety of the vessel. But whoever
+will attentively consider the <i>Faerie Queene</i> itself,
+will find that it is, almost throughout, such as might
+have been expected from the author of those truly
+sacred hymns. It is a continual, deliberate endeavour
+to enlist the restless intellect and chivalrous feeling
+of an inquiring and romantic age, on the side of
+goodness and faith, of purity and justice.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This position is to be made good, not solely or
+perhaps chiefly, yet with no small force, from the
+allegorical structure of the poem. Most of us,
+perhaps, are rather disposed to undervalue this
+contrivance; and even among the genuine admirers
+of Spenser, there are not a few who on purpose leave
+it out of their thoughts; finding, as they say, that
+it only embarrasses their enjoyment of the poetry.
+This is certainly far from reasonable: it is a relic
+of childish feeling, and mere love of amusement,
+which ill becomes any one who is old enough to
+appreciate the real beauties of Spenser. Yet it is so
+natural, so obviously to be expected, that we must
+suppose a scholar and philosopher (for such Spenser
+was, as well as a poet) to have been aware of it, and
+to have made up his mind to it, with all its disadvantages,
+for some strong reason or other. And
+what reason so likely as the hope of being seriously
+useful, both to himself and his readers?</p>
+
+<p>To <i>himself</i>, because the constant recurrence to his
+allegory would serve as a check upon a fancy otherwise
+too luxuriant, and would prevent him from
+indulging in such liberties as the Italian poets, in
+other respects his worthy masters, were too apt to
+take. The consequence is, that even in his freest
+passages, and those which one would most wish
+unwritten, Spenser is by no means a <i>seductive</i> poet.
+Vice in him, however truly described, is always
+made contemptible or odious. The same may be
+said of Milton and Shakespeare; but Milton was of
+a cast of mind originally austere and rigorous. He
+looked on vice as a judge; Shakespeare, as a satirist.
+Spenser was far more indulgent than either, and acted
+therefore the more wisely in setting himself a rule,
+which should make it essential to the plan of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>
+poem to be always recommending some virtue;
+and remind him, like a voice from heaven, that the
+place on which he was standing was holy ground.</p>
+
+<p>Then as to the benefit which the <i>readers</i> of the
+<i>Faerie Queene</i> may derive from its allegorical form;
+a good deal surely is to be gained from the mere
+habit of looking at things with a view to something
+beyond their qualities merely sensible; to their
+sacred and moral meaning, and to the high associations
+they were intended to create in us. Neither
+the works nor the word of God, neither poetry nor
+theology, can be duly comprehended without constant
+mental exercise of this kind. The comparison
+of the Old Testament with the New is nothing else
+from beginning to end. And without something
+of this sort, poetry, and all the other arts, would
+indeed be relaxing to the tone of the mind. The
+allegory obviates this ill effect, by serving as a frequent
+remembrancer of this higher application.
+Not that it is necessary to bend and strain everything
+into conformity with it; a little leaven, of
+the genuine kind, will go a good way towards
+leavening the whole lump. And so it is in the <i>Faerie
+Queene</i>; for one stanza of direct allegory there are
+perhaps fifty of poetical embellishment; and it is in
+these last, after all, that the chief moral excellency
+of the poem lies; as we are now about to show.</p>
+
+<p>But to be understood rightly, we would premise,
+that there is a disposition,&mdash;the very reverse of that
+which leads to parody and caricature,&mdash;which is
+common indeed to all generous minds, but is perhaps
+unrivalled in Spenser. As parody and caricature
+debase what is truly noble, by connecting it with
+low and ludicrous associations; so a mind, such as
+we are now speaking of, ennobles what of itself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span>
+might seem trivial; its thoughts and language, on
+all occasions, taking a uniform and almost involuntary
+direction towards the best and highest
+things.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, is a subject which can be hardly
+comprehended without examples. The first which
+occurs to us is the passage which relates the origin
+of Belph&#339;be.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Her birth was of the womb of morning dew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And her conception of the joyous prime,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all her whole creation did her show<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pure and unspotted from all loathly crime<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That is ingenerate in fleshly slime.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So was this Virgin born, so was she bred,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So was she trained up from time to time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In all chaste virtue and true bounti-hed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till to her due perfection she was ripen&egrave;d.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is evident how high and sacred a subject was
+present to the poet&#8217;s mind in composing this stanza;
+and any person who is well read in the Bible, with
+a clue like this may satisfy himself that all Spenser&#8217;s
+writings are replete with similar tacit allusions to
+the language and the doctrines of sacred writ;
+allusions breathed, if we may so speak, rather than
+uttered, and much fitter to be silently considered,
+than to be dragged forward for quotation or minute
+criticism. Of course, the more numerous and
+natural such allusions are, the more entirely are
+we justified in the denomination we have ventured
+to bestow on their author, of a truly &#8216;sacred&#8217;
+poet.</p>
+
+<p>It may be felt, as some derogation from this high
+character, what he has himself avowed&mdash;that much
+of his allegory has a turn designedly given it in
+honour of Queen Elizabeth; a turn which will be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>
+called courtly or adulatory according to the humour
+of the critic. But, in the first place, such was the
+custom of the times; it was adopted even in sermons
+by men whose sincerity it would be almost sacrilege
+to question. Then, the merits of Queen Elizabeth
+in respect of the Protestant cause were of that
+dazzling order, which might excuse a little poetical
+exuberance in her praise. And, what is very deserving
+of consideration, it is certain that the most gentle
+and generous spirits are commonly found laying
+themselves open to this charge of excessive compliment
+in addressing princes and patrons. Witness
+the high style adopted by the venerable Hooker, in
+speaking of this very Queen Elizabeth: &#8216;Whose
+sacred power, matched with incomparable goodness
+of nature, hath hitherto been God&#8217;s most happy
+instrument, by him miraculously kept for works of
+so miraculous preservation and safety unto others,&#8217;
+&amp;c. Another instance of the same kind may be
+seen in Jeremy Taylor&#8217;s dedication of his <i>Worthy
+Communicant</i> to the Princess of Orange. Nor is it
+any wonder it should be so, since such men feel most
+ardently the blessing and benefit as well as the
+difficulty of whatever is right in persons of such
+exalted station; and are also most strongly tempted
+to bear their testimony against the illiberal and
+envious censures of the vulgar. All these things,
+duly weighed, may seem to leave little, if anything,
+in the panegyrical strains of this greatest of laureates,
+to be excused by the common infirmity of human
+nature; little to detract from our deliberate conviction
+that he was seriously guided, in the exercise
+of his art, by a sense of duty, and zeal for what is
+durably important.</p>
+
+<p>Spenser then was essentially a <i>sacred</i> poet; but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>
+the delicacy and insinuating gentleness of his disposition
+were better fitted to the veiled than the
+direct mode of instruction. His was a mind which
+would have shrunk more from the chance of debasing
+a sacred subject by unhandsome treatment, than of
+incurring ridicule by what would be called unseasonable
+attempts to hallow things merely secular. It
+was natural therefore for him to choose not a scriptural
+story, but a tale of chivalry and romance;
+and the popular literature, and, in no small measure,
+the pageantry and manners of his time, would join
+to attract his efforts that way. In this way too he
+was enabled, with more propriety and grace, to
+introduce allusions, political or courtly, to subjects
+with which his readers were familiar; thus agreeably
+diversifying his allegory, and gratifying his
+affection for his friends and patrons, without the
+coarseness of direct compliment.</p>
+
+<p>In Milton, most evidently, a great difference was
+to be expected: both from his own character and
+from that of the times in which he lived. Religion
+was in those days the favourite topic of discussion;
+and it is indeed painful to reflect, how sadly it was
+polluted by intermixture with earthly passions:
+the most awful turns and most surprising miracles
+of the Jewish history being made to serve the base
+purposes of persons, of whom it is hard to say
+whether they were more successful in misleading
+others, or in deceiving themselves. It was an
+effort worthy of a manly and devout spirit to rescue
+religion from such degradation, by choosing a subject,
+which, being scriptural, would suit the habit of
+the times, yet, from its universal and eternal importance,
+would give least opportunity for debasing
+temporary application. Then it was the temper of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>
+the man always to speak out. He carried it to
+a faulty excess, as his prose works too amply demonstrate.
+The more unfashionable his moral was,
+the more he would have disdained to veil it: neither
+had he the shrinking delicacy of Spenser to keep him
+back, through fear of profaning things hallowed by
+an unworthy touch.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the great epic poem of our language came to
+be, avowedly, a sacred poem. One hardly dares to
+wish any thing other than it is in such a composition;
+yet it may be useful to point out in what respects
+the moral infirmity of the times, or of the author,
+has affected the work; so that we are occasionally
+tempted to regret even Milton&#8217;s choice. But as the
+leading error of his mind appears to have been
+<i>intellectual</i> pride, and as the leading fault of the
+generation with which he acted was unquestionably
+<i>spiritual</i> pride, so the main defects of his poetry may
+probably be attributed to the same causes.</p>
+
+<p>There is a studious undervaluing of the female
+character, which may be most distinctly perceived
+by comparing the character of Eve with that of the
+Lady in Comus: the latter conceived, as we imagine,
+before the mind of the poet had become so deeply
+tainted with the fault here imputed to him. A remarkable
+instance of it is his describing Eve as unwilling,
+or unworthy, to discourse herself with the
+angel.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">Such pleasure she reserved,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Adam relating; she sole auditress.&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The sentiment may be natural enough, since the
+primaeval curse upon women: but does it not argue
+rather too strong a sense of her original inferiority,
+to put it into her mind before the fall?</p>
+
+<p>What again can be said for the reproachful and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>
+insulting tone, in which, more than once, the good
+angels are made to address the bad ones? or of the
+too attractive colours, in which, perhaps unconsciously,
+the poet has clothed the Author of Evil
+himself? It is a well-known complaint among many
+of the readers of <i>Paradise Lost</i>, that they can hardly
+keep themselves from sympathizing, in some sort,
+with Satan, as the hero of the poem. The most
+probable account of which surely is, that the author
+himself partook largely of the haughty and vindictive
+republican spirit which he has assigned to the
+character, and consequently, though perhaps unconsciously,
+drew the portrait with a peculiar zest.</p>
+
+<p>These blemishes are in part attributable to the
+times in which he lived: but there is another now
+to be mentioned, which cannot be so accounted for:
+we mean a want of purity and spirituality in his
+conceptions of Heaven and heavenly joys. His
+Paradise is a vision not to be surpassed; but his
+attempts to soar higher are embarrassed with too
+much of earth still clinging as it were to his wings.
+Remarks of this kind are in general best understood
+by comparison, and we invite our readers to compare
+Milton with Dante, in their descriptions of Heaven.
+The one as simple as possible in his imagery, producing
+intense effect by little more than various
+combinations of <i>three</i> leading ideas&mdash;light, motion,
+and music&mdash;as if he feared to introduce anything
+more gross and earthly, and would rather be censured,
+as doubtless he often is, for coldness and
+poverty of invention. Whereas Milton, with very
+little selection or refinement, transfers to the immediate
+neighbourhood of God&#8217;s throne the imagery
+of Paradise and Earth. Indeed he seems himself to
+have been aware of something unsatisfactory in this,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>
+and has inserted into the mouth of an angel, a kind
+of apology for it:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">Though what if earth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Be but the shadow of heav&#8217;n, and things therein<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>These are blemishes, and sometimes almost
+tempt us to wish that even Milton had taken some
+subject not so immediately and avowedly connected
+with religion. But they do not affect his claim
+to be considered as the very lodestar and pattern of
+that class of sacred poets in England. As such
+we have here considered him next to Spenser; not
+that there were wanting others of the same order
+before him. In fact, most of the distinguished
+names in the poetical annals of Elizabeth, James I,
+and Charles I, might be included in the list. It may
+be enough just to recollect Drayton and Cowley,
+Herbert, Crashaw and Quarles.</p>
+
+<p>The mention of these latter names suggests the
+remark, how very desirable it is to encourage as
+indulgent and, if we may so term it, <i>catholic</i> a spirit
+as may be, in poetical criticism. From having been
+over-praised in their own days, they are come now
+to be as much undervalued; yet their quaintness of
+manner and constrained imagery, adopted perhaps
+in compliance with the taste of their age, should
+hardly suffice to overbalance their sterling merits.
+We speak especially of Crashaw and Quarles: for
+Herbert is a name too venerable to be more than
+mentioned in our present discussion.</p>
+
+<p>After Milton, sacred poetry seems to have greatly
+declined, both in the number and merit of those who
+cultivated it. No other could be expected from the
+conflicting evils of those times: in which one party
+was used to brand everything sacred with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>
+name of Puritanism, and the other to suspect every
+thing poetical of being contrary to morality and
+religion.</p>
+
+<p>Yet most of the great names of that age, especially
+among the Romanists, as Dryden, Pope, and before
+them Habington, continued to dedicate some of their
+poetry to religion. By their faith they were remote
+from the controversies which agitated the
+established church, and their devotion might indulge
+itself without incurring the suspicion of a fanatical
+spirit. Then the solemnity of their worship is fitted
+to inspire splendid and gorgeous strains, such as
+Dryden&#8217;s paraphrase of the Veni Creator; and their
+own fallen fortunes in England, no less naturally,
+would fill them with a sense of decay very favourable
+to the plaintive tenderness of Habington and
+Crashaw.</p>
+
+<p>A feeling of this kind, joined to the effect of distressing
+languor and sickness, may be discerned,
+occasionally, in the writings of Bishop Ken; though
+he was far indeed from being a Romanist. We
+shall hardly find, in all ecclesiastical history, a greener
+spot than the later years of this courageous and
+affectionate pastor; persecuted alternately by both
+parties, and driven from his station in his declining
+age; yet singing on, with unabated cheerfulness, to
+the last. His poems are not popular, nor probably
+ever will be, for reasons already touched upon; but
+whoever in earnest loves his three well-known
+hymns, and knows how to value such unaffected
+strains of poetical devotion, will find his account, in
+turning over his four volumes, half narrative and
+half lyric, and all avowedly on sacred subjects; the
+narrative often cumbrous, and the lyric verse not
+seldom languid and redundant: yet all breathing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>
+such an angelic spirit, interspersed with such pure
+and bright touches of poetry, that such a reader as
+we have supposed will scarcely find it in his heart to
+criticize them.</p>
+
+<p>Between that time and ours, the form of sacred
+poetry which has succeeded best in attracting public
+attention, is the didactic: of which Davies in Queen
+Elizabeth&#8217;s reign, Sir Richard Blackmore in King
+William&#8217;s, Young in the middle, and Cowper in the
+close, of the last century, may fairly be taken as
+specimens, differing from each other according to
+the differences of their respective literary eras.
+Davies, with his Lucretian majesty (although he
+wants the moral pathos of the Roman poet), representing
+aptly enough the age of Elizabeth; Blackmore,
+with his easy paragraphs, the careless style of
+King Charles&#8217;s days; Young, with his pointed sentences,
+transferring to graver subjects a good deal
+of the manner of Pope; and Cowper, with his
+agreeable but too unsparing descriptions, coming
+nearer to the present day, which appears, both
+in manners and in scenery, to delight in Dutch
+painting, rather than in what is more delicately
+classical.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to the indirect, and, perhaps, more
+effective, species of sacred poetry, we fear it must
+be acknowledged, to the shame of the last century,
+that there is hardly a single specimen of it (excepting,
+perhaps, Gray&#8217;s Elegy, and possibly some of the
+most perfect of Collins&#8217;s poems) which has obtained
+any celebrity. We except the writers of our own
+times, who do not fall within the scope of this
+inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>To Spenser, therefore, upon the whole, the English
+reader must revert, as being, pre-eminently, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>
+sacred poet of his country: as most likely, in every
+way, to answer the purposes of his art; especially
+in an age of excitation and refinement, in which
+the gentler and more homely beauties, both of
+character and of scenery, are too apt to be despised:
+with passion and interest enough to attract the most
+ardent, and grace enough to win the most polished;
+yet by a silent preference everywhere inculcating the
+love of better and more enduring things; and so most
+exactly fulfilling what he has himself declared to
+be &#8216;the general end of all his book&#8217;&mdash;&#8216;to fashion a
+gentleman, or noble person, in virtuous and gentle
+discipline&#8217;: and going the straight way to the
+accomplishment of his own high-minded prayer:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">That with the glory of so goodly sight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The hearts of men, which fondly here admire<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fair-seeming shows, and feed on vain delight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Transported with celestial desire<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of those fair forms, may lift themselves up higher,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And learn to love, with zealous humble duty,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Th&#8217; eternal fountain of that heavenly beauty.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>Life of Waller.</i></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="JOHN_HENRY_NEWMAN" id="JOHN_HENRY_NEWMAN"></a>JOHN HENRY NEWMAN<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1801-1890</h3>
+
+<h3>POETRY<br />
+<small><span class="smcap">With Reference to Aristotle&#8217;s Poetics</span> (1829).</small></h3>
+
+<h4><i>The Theatre of the Greeks; or the History, Literature, and
+Criticism of the Grecian Drama. With an original
+Treatise on the Principal Tragic and Comic Metres.</i>
+Second Edition. Cambridge. 1827.</h4>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">This</span> work is well adapted for the purpose it has
+in view&mdash;the illustration of the Greek drama.
+It has been usual for the young student to engage
+in a perusal of this difficult branch of classical
+literature, with none of that previous preparation
+or collateral assistance which it pre-eminently
+requires. Not to mention his ordinary want of
+information as regards the history of the drama,
+which, though necessary to the full understanding
+the nature of that kind of poetry, may still seem
+too remotely connected with the existing Greek
+plays to be an actual deficiency; nor, again, his
+ignorance of the dramatic dialect and metres,
+which, without external helps, may possibly be
+overcome by minds of superior talent while engaged
+upon them; at least without some clear ideas of
+the usages of the ancient stage, the Greek dramas
+are but partially intelligible. The circumstances
+under which the representation was conducted,
+the form and general arrangements of the theatre,
+the respective offices and disposition of the actors,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>
+the nature and duties of the chorus, the proprieties
+of the scene itself, are essential subjects of
+information, yet they are generally neglected.
+The publication before us is a compilation of
+the most useful works or parts of works on the
+criticism, history, and antiquities of the drama;
+among which will be found extracts from Bentley&#8217;s
+<i>Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris</i> and from
+Schlegel&#8217;s work on Dramatic Literature; the more
+important parts of Twining&#8217;s Translation of Aristotle&#8217;s
+<i>Poetics</i>, and critical remarks, by Dawes,
+Porson, Elmsley, Tate, and the writers in the
+<i>Museum Criticum</i>.</p>
+
+<p>If we were disposed to find fault with a useful
+work, we should describe it as over-liberal of
+condensed critical information. Such ample assistance
+is given to the student, that little is left to
+exercise his own personal thought and judgement.
+This is a fault of not a few publications of the
+present day, written for our universities. From
+a false estimate of the advantages of accurate
+scholarship, the reader is provided with a multitude
+of minute facts, which are useful to his mind, not
+when barely remembered, but chiefly when he has
+acquired them for himself. It is of comparatively
+trifling importance, whether the scholar knows the
+force of &#959;&#8016; &#956;&#8053; or &#7936;&#955;&#955;&#945; &#947;&#8049;&#961;; but it may considerably
+improve his acumen or taste, to have gone through
+a process of observation, comparison, and induction,
+more or less original and independent of grammarians
+and critics. It is an officious aid which
+renders the acquisition of a language mechanical.
+Commentators are of service to stimulate the
+mind, and suggest thought; and though, when
+we view the wide field of criticism, it is impossible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>
+they should do more, yet, when that field is
+narrowed to the limit of academical success, there
+is a danger of their indulging indolence, or confirming
+the contracted views of dullness. These remarks
+are not so much directed against a valuable work
+like the present, the very perusal of which may be
+made an exercise for the mind, as against an
+especial fault of the age. The uses of knowledge
+in forming the intellectual and moral character,
+are too commonly overlooked; and the possession
+itself being viewed as a peculiar good, short ways
+are on all subjects excogitated for avoiding the
+labour of learning; whereas the very length and
+process of the journey is in many the chief, in all
+an important advantage.</p>
+
+<p>But, dismissing a train of thought which would
+soon lead us very far from the range of subjects
+which the <i>Theatre of the Greeks</i> introduces to our
+notice, we propose to offer some speculations of
+our own on Greek tragedy and poetry in general,
+founded on the doctrine of Aristotle as contained
+in the publication before us. A compilation of
+standard works, (and such in its general character
+is the <i>Greek Theatre</i>,) scarcely affords the occasion
+of lengthened criticism on itself; whereas it may
+be of use to the classical student to add some
+further illustrations of the subject which is the
+common basis of the works compiled.</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle considers the excellence of a tragedy
+to depend upon its <i>plot</i>&mdash;and, since a tragedy, as
+such, is obviously the exhibition of an <i>action</i>,
+no one can deny his statement to be abstractedly
+true. Accordingly he directs his principal attention
+to the economy of the fable; determines its range
+of subjects, delineates its proportions, traces its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span>
+progress from a complication of incidents to their
+just and satisfactory arrangement, investigates
+the means of making a train of events striking
+or affecting, and shows how the exhibition of
+character may be made subservient to the purposes
+of the action. His treatise is throughout
+interesting and valuable. It is one thing, however,
+to form the beau id&eacute;al of a tragedy on scientific
+principles; another to point out the actual beauty
+of a particular school of dramatic composition.
+The Greek tragedians are not generally felicitous
+in the construction of their plots. Aristotle, then,
+rather tells us what tragedy should be, than what
+Greek tragedy really was. And this doubtless was
+the intention of the philosopher. Since, however,
+the Greek drama has obtained so extended and
+lasting a celebrity, and yet its excellence does not
+fall under the strict rules of the critical art, we
+should inquire in what it consists.</p>
+
+<p>That the charm of Greek tragedy does not
+ordinarily arise from scientific correctness of plot,
+is certain as a matter of fact. Seldom does any
+great interest arise from the action; which,
+instead of being progressive and sustained, is
+commonly either a mere necessary condition of
+the drama, or a convenience for the introduction
+of matter more important than itself. It is often
+stationary&mdash;often irregular&mdash;sometimes either
+wants or outlives the catastrophe. In the plays
+of Aeschylus it is always simple and inartificial&mdash;in
+four out of the seven there is hardly any plot
+at all;&mdash;and, though it is of more prominent
+importance in those of Sophocles, yet even here
+the <i>Oedipus at Colonus</i> is a mere series of incidents,
+and the <i>Ajax</i> a union of two separate tales; while<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>
+in the <i>Philoctetes</i>, which is apparently busy, the
+circumstances of the action are but slightly
+connected with the <i>d&eacute;nouement</i>. The carelessness
+of Euripides in the construction of his plots is well
+known. The action then will be more justly
+viewed as the vehicle for introducing the personages
+of the drama, than as the principal object of the
+poet&#8217;s art; it is not in the plot, but in the
+characters, sentiments, and diction, that the
+actual merit and poetry of the composition is
+placed. To show this to the satisfaction of the
+reader, would require a minuter investigation of
+details than our present purpose admits; yet
+a few instances in point may suggest others to
+the memory. E. g. in neither the <i>Oedipus Coloneus</i>
+nor the <i>Philoctetes</i>, the two most beautiful plays
+of Sophocles, is the plot striking; but how
+exquisite is the delineation of the characters of
+Antigone and Oedipus, in the former tragedy,
+particularly in their interview with Polynices,
+and the various descriptions of the scene itself
+which the Chorus furnishes! In the <i>Philoctetes</i>,
+again, it is the contrast between the worldly
+wisdom of Ulysses, the inexperienced frankness
+of Neoptolemus, and the simplicity of the afflicted
+Philoctetes, which constitutes the principal charm
+of the drama. Or we may instance the spirit and
+nature displayed in the grouping of the characters
+in the <i>Prometheus</i> which is almost without action;&mdash;the
+stubborn enemy of the new dynasty of gods;
+Oceanus trimming, as an accomplished politician,
+with the change of affairs; the single-hearted and
+generous Nereids; and Hermes the favourite and
+instrument of the usurping potentate. So again,
+the beauties of the <i>Thebae</i> are almost independent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span>
+of the plot;&mdash;it is the Chorus which imparts grace
+and interest to the actionless scene; and the
+speech of Antigone at the end, one of the most
+simply striking in any play, has, scientifically
+speaking, no place in the tragedy, which should
+already have been brought to its conclusion.
+Amid the multitude of the beauties of the irregular
+Euripides, it is obvious to notice the characters of
+Alcestis and the Clytemnestra of the <i>Electra</i>; the
+soliloquies of <i>Medea</i>; the picturesque situation
+of Ion, the minister of the Pythian temple; the
+opening scene of the <i>Orestes</i>; and the dialogues
+between Phaedra and her attendant in the
+<i>Hippolytus</i>, and the old man and Antigone in
+the <i>Phoenissae</i>;&mdash;passages which are either
+unconnected with the development of the plot,
+or of an importance superior to it. Thus the Greek
+drama, as a fact, was modelled on no scientific
+principle. It was a pure recreation of the imagination,
+revelling without object or meaning beyond
+its own exhibition. Gods, heroes, kings, and
+dames, enter and retire: they may have a good
+reason for appearing&mdash;they may have a very poor
+one; whatever it is, still we have no right to ask
+for it;&mdash;the question is impertinent. Let us
+listen to their harmonious and majestic language&mdash;to
+the voices of sorrow, joy, compassion, or
+religious emotion&mdash;to the animated odes of the
+chorus. Why interrupt so divine a display of
+poetical genius by inquiries degrading it to the
+level of every-day events, and implying incompleteness
+in the action till a catastrophe arrives?
+The very spirit of beauty breathes through every
+part of the composition. We may liken the Greek
+drama to the music of the Italian school; in which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span>
+the wonder is, how so much richness of invention
+in detail can be accommodated to a style so simple
+and uniform. Each is the development of grace,
+fancy, pathos, and taste, in the respective media
+of representation and sound.</p>
+
+<p>However true then it may be, that one or two
+of the most celebrated dramas answer to the
+requisitions of Aristotle&#8217;s doctrine, still for the
+most part, Greek Tragedy has its own distinct
+and peculiar praise, which must not be lessened
+by a criticism conducted on principles, whether
+correct or not, still leading to excellence of another
+character. This being, as we hope, shown, we
+shall be still bolder, and proceed to question even
+the sufficiency of the rules of Aristotle for the
+production of dramas of the highest order. These
+rules, it would appear, require a plot not merely
+natural and unaffected, as a vehicle of more
+poetical matter, but one laboured and complicated
+as the sole legitimate channel of tragic effect;
+and thus tend to withdraw the mind of the poet
+from the spontaneous exhibition of pathos or
+imagination, to a minute diligence in the formation
+of a plan. To explain our views on the subject,
+we will institute a short comparison between three
+tragedies, the <i>Agamemnon</i>, the <i>Oedipus</i>, and the
+<i>Bacchae</i>, one of each of the tragic poets, where,
+by reference to Aristotle&#8217;s principles, we think it
+will be found that the most perfect in plot is not
+the most poetical.</p>
+
+<p>Of these the action of the <i>Oedipus Tyrannus</i> is
+frequently instanced by the critic as a specimen
+of judgement and skill in the selection and
+combination of the incidents; and in this point
+of view it is truly a masterly composition. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>
+clearness, precision, certainty, and vigour, with
+which the line of the action moves on to its
+termination, is admirable. The character of
+Oedipus too is finely drawn, and identified with
+the development of the action.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Agamemnon</i> of Aeschylus presents us with
+the slow and difficult birth of a portentous secret&mdash;an
+event of old written in the resolves of destiny,
+a crime long meditated in the bosom of the human
+agents. The Chorus here has an importance
+altogether wanting in the Chorus of the <i>Oedipus</i>.
+They throw a pall of ancestral honour over the
+bier of the hereditary monarch, which would have
+been unbecoming in the case of the upstart king
+of Thebes. Till the arrival of Agamemnon, they
+occupy our attention, as the prophetic organ, not
+commissioned indeed but employed by heaven,
+to proclaim the impending horrors. Succeeding
+to the brief intimation of the watcher who opens
+the play, they seem oppressed with forebodings
+of woe and crime which they can neither justify
+nor analyse. The expression of their anxiety
+forms the stream in which the plot flows&mdash;every
+thing, even news of joy, takes a colouring from
+the depth of their gloom. On the arrival of the
+king, they retire before Cassandra, a more regularly
+commissioned prophetess; who, speaking first in
+figure, then in plain terms, only ceases that we
+may hear the voice of the betrayed monarch
+himself, informing us of the striking of the fatal
+blow. Here then the very simplicity of the fable
+constitutes its especial beauty. The death of
+Agamemnon is intimated at first&mdash;it is accomplished
+at last: throughout we find but the growing in
+volume and intensity of one and the same note&mdash;it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>
+is a working up of one musical ground, by
+fugue and imitation, into the richness of combined
+harmony. But we look in vain for the
+progressive and thickening incidents of the
+<i>Oedipus</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The action of the <i>Bacchae</i> is also simple. It is
+the history of the reception of the worship of
+Bacchus in Thebes; who, first depriving Pentheus
+of his reason, and thereby drawing him on to his
+ruin, establishes his divinity. The interest of the
+scene arises from the gradual process by which the
+derangement of the Theban king is effected, which
+is powerfully and originally described. It would
+be comic, were it unconnected with religion. As it
+is, it exhibits the grave irony of a god triumphing
+over the impotent presumption of man, the sport
+and terrible mischievousness of an insulted deity.
+It is an exemplification of the adage, <i>quem deus
+vult perdere, prius dementat</i>. So delicately balanced
+is the action along the verge of the sublime and
+grotesque, that it is both solemn and humorous,
+without violence to the propriety of the composition:
+the mad and merry fire of the Chorus, the imbecile
+mirth of old Cadmus and Tiresias, and the infatuation
+of Pentheus, who is ultimately induced to
+dress himself in female garb to gain admittance
+among the Bacchae, are made to harmonize with
+the terrible catastrophe which concludes the life
+of the intruder. Perhaps the victim&#8217;s first discovery
+of the disguised deity is the finest conception in
+this splendid drama. His madness enables him to
+discern the emblematic horns on the head of
+Bacchus, which were hid from him when in his
+sound mind; yet this discovery, instead of leading
+him to an acknowledgement of the divinity, provides<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>
+him only with matter for a stupid and perplexed
+astonishment.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#954;&#945;&#8054; &#964;&#945;&#8166;&#961;&#959;&#962; &#7969;&#956;&#8150;&#957; &#960;&#961;&#8057;&#963;&#952;&#949;&#957; &#7969;&#947;&#949;&#8150;&#963;&#952;&#945;&#953; &#948;&#959;&#954;&#949;&#8150;&#962;,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#954;&#945;&#8054; &#963;&#8182; &#954;&#8051;&#961;&#945;&#964;&#949; &#954;&#961;&#945;&#964;&#8054; &#960;&#961;&#959;&#963;&#960;&#949;&#966;&#965;&#954;&#8051;&#957;&#945;&#953;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#7936;&#955;&#955;&#8217; &#7974; &#960;&#959;&#964;&#8217; &#7974;&#963;&#952;&#945; &#952;&#8053;&#961;; &#964;&#949;&#964;&#945;&#8059;&#961;&#969;&#963;&#945;&#953; &#947;&#8048;&#961; &#959;&#8022;&#957;.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">This play is on the whole the most favourable
+specimen of the genius of Euripides&mdash;not breathing
+the sweet composure, the melodious fullness, the
+majesty and grace of Sophocles; nor rudely and
+overpoweringly tragic as Aeschylus; but brilliant,
+versatile, imaginative, as well as deeply pathetic.</p>
+
+<p>Here then are two dramas of extreme poetical
+power, but deficient in skilfulness of plot. Are
+they on that account to be rated below the <i>Oedipus</i>,
+which, in spite of its many beauties, has not even
+a share of the richness and sublimity of either?</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle, then, it must be allowed, treats
+dramatic composition more as an exhibition of
+ingenious workmanship, than as a free and
+unfettered effusion of genius. The inferior poem
+may, on his principle, be the better tragedy. He
+may indeed have intended solely to delineate the
+outward framework most suitable to the reception
+of the spirit of poetry, not to discuss the nature
+of poetry itself. If so, it cannot be denied that,
+the poetry being given equal in the two cases,
+the more perfect plot will merit the greater share
+of praise. And it may seem to agree with this
+view of his meaning, that he pronounces Euripides,
+in spite of the irregularity of his plots, to be, after
+all, the most tragic of the Greek dramatists,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span>inasmuch (i. e.) as he excels in his appeal to those
+passions which the outward form of the drama
+merely subserves. Still there is surely too much
+stress laid by the philosopher upon the artificial
+part; which, after all, leads to negative, more
+than to positive excellence; and should rather be
+the natural and (so to say) unintentional result of
+the poet&#8217;s feeling and imagination, than be
+separated from them as the direct object of his
+care. Perhaps it is hardly fair to judge of Aristotle&#8217;s
+sentiments by the fragment of his work which has
+come down to us. Yet as his natural taste led
+him to delight in the explication of systems, and
+in those large and connected views which his
+vigorous talent for thinking through subjects
+supplied, we may be allowed to suspect him of
+entertaining too cold and formal conceptions of
+the nature of poetical composition, as if its beauties
+were less subtle and delicate than they really are.
+A word has power to convey a world of information
+to the imagination, and to act as a spell upon the
+feelings: there is no need of sustained fiction&mdash;often
+no room for it.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> Some confirmation of the judgement
+we have ventured to pass on the greatest of
+analytical philosophers, is the account he gives of
+the source of poetical pleasure; which he almost
+identifies with a gratification of the reasoning
+faculty, placing it in the satisfaction derived from
+recognizing in fiction a resemblance to the realities
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span>of life&mdash;&#963;&#965;&#956;&#946;&#945;&#8055;&#957;&#949;&#953; &#952;&#949;&#969;&#961;&#959;&#8166;&#957;&#964;&#945;&#962; &#956;&#945;&#957;&#952;&#8049;&#957;&#949;&#953;&#957; &#954;&#945;&#8054; &#963;&#965;&#955;&#955;&#959;&#947;&#8055;&#950;&#949;&#963;&#952;&#945;&#953;, &#964;&#8055; &#7957;&#954;&#945;&#963;&#964;&#959;&#957;.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></p>
+
+<p>But as we have treated, rather unceremoniously,
+a deservedly high authority, we will try to
+compensate for our rudeness, by illustrating his
+general doctrine of the nature of poetry, which
+we hold to be most true and philosophical.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry, according to Aristotle, is a representation
+of the ideal. Biography and history represent
+individual characters and actual facts; poetry, on
+the contrary, generalizing from the phenomena of
+nature and life, supplies us with pictures drawn
+not after an existing pattern, but after a creation
+of the mind. <i>Fidelity</i> is the primary merit of
+biography and history; the essence of poetry is
+<i>fiction</i>. <i>Poesis nihil aliud est</i> (says Bacon) <i>quam
+historiae imitatio ad placitum</i>. It delineates that
+perfection which the imagination suggests, and to
+which as a limit the present system of divine
+Providence actually tends. Moreover, by confining
+the attention to one series of events and scene of
+action, it bounds and finishes off the confused
+luxuriance of real nature; while, by a skilful
+adjustment of circumstances, it brings into sight
+the connexion of cause and effect, completes the
+dependence of the parts one on another, and harmonizes
+the proportions of the whole. It is then
+but the type and model of history or biography, if
+we may be allowed the comparison, bearing some
+resemblance to the abstract mathematical formula
+of physics, before it is modified by the contingencies
+of gravity and friction. Hence, while it
+recreates the imagination by the superhuman loveliness
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span>of its views, it provides a solace for the mind
+broken by the disappointments and sufferings of
+actual life; and becomes, moreover, the utterance of
+the inward emotions of a right moral feeling, seeking
+a purity and a truth which this world will not give.</p>
+
+<p>It follows that the poetical mind is one full of
+the eternal forms of beauty and perfection; these
+are its material of thought, its instrument and
+medium of observation&mdash;these colour each object
+to which it directs its view. It is called imaginative
+or creative, from the originality and independence
+of its modes of thinking, compared with the
+common-place and matter-of-fact conceptions of
+ordinary minds, which are fettered down to the
+particular and individual. At the same time it
+feels a natural sympathy with everything great and
+splendid in the physical and moral world; and selecting
+such from the mass of common phenomena,
+incorporates them, as it were, into the substance of
+its own creations. From living thus in a world of
+its own, it speaks the language of dignity, emotion,
+and refinement. Figure is its necessary medium
+of communication with man; for in the feebleness
+of ordinary words to express its ideas, and in the
+absence of terms of abstract perfection, the
+adoption of metaphorical language is the only
+poor means allowed it for imparting to others
+its intense feelings. A metrical garb has, in all
+languages, been appropriated to poetry&mdash;it is but
+the outward development of the music and
+harmony within. The verse, far from being
+a restraint on the true poet, is the suitable index
+of his sense, and is adopted by his free and
+deliberate choice.</p>
+
+<p>We shall presently show the applicability of our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>
+doctrine to the various departments of poetical
+composition; first, however, it will be right to
+volunteer an explanation which may save it from
+much misconception and objection. Let not our
+notion be thought arbitrarily to limit the number
+of poets, generally considered such. It will be
+found to lower particular works, or parts of works,
+rather than the writers themselves; sometimes to
+condemn only the vehicle in which the poetry is
+conveyed. There is an ambiguity in the word
+poetry, which is taken to signify both the talent
+itself, and the written composition which is the
+result of it. Thus there is an apparent, but no
+real contradiction, in saying a poem may be but
+partially poetical; in some passages more so than
+in others; and sometimes not poetical at all.
+We only maintain&mdash;not that writers forfeit the
+name of poet who fail at times to answer to our
+requisitions, but&mdash;that they are poets only so far
+forth and inasmuch as they do answer to them.
+We may grant, for instance, that the vulgarities
+of old Phoenix in the ninth <i>Iliad</i>, or of the nurse
+of Orestes in the <i>Choephoroe</i>, or perhaps of
+the grave-diggers in <i>Hamlet</i>, are in themselves
+unworthy of their respective authors, and refer
+them to the wantonness of exuberant genius; and
+yet maintain that the scenes in question contain
+much <i>incidental</i> poetry. Now and then the lustre
+of the true metal catches the eye, redeeming
+whatever is unseemly and worthless in the rude
+ore; still the ore is not the metal. Nay sometimes,
+and not unfrequently in Shakespeare, the introduction
+of unpoetical matter may be necessary for
+the sake of relief, or as a vivid expression of
+recondite conceptions, and (as it were) to make<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>
+friends with the reader&#8217;s imagination. This
+necessity, however, cannot make the additions
+in themselves beautiful and pleasing. Sometimes,
+on the other hand, while we do not deny the
+incidental beauty of a poem, we are ashamed and
+indignant on witnessing the unworthy substance
+in which that beauty is imbedded. This remark
+applies strongly to the immoral compositions to
+which Lord Byron devoted his last years. Now
+to proceed with our proposed investigation.</p>
+
+<p>We will notice <i>descriptive poetry</i> first. Empedocles
+wrote his physics in verse, and Oppian his history
+of animals. Neither were poets&mdash;the one was an
+historian of nature, the other a sort of biographer
+of brutes. Yet a poet may make natural history
+or philosophy the material of his composition.
+But under his hands they are no longer a bare
+collection of facts or principles, but are painted
+with a meaning, beauty, and harmonious order not
+their own. Thomson has sometimes been commended
+for the novelty and minuteness of his
+remarks upon nature. This is not the praise of
+a poet; whose office rather is to represent <i>known</i>
+phenomena in a new connexion or medium. In
+<i>L&#8217;Allegro</i> and <i>Il Penseroso</i> the poetical magician
+invests the commonest scenes of a country life with
+the hues, first of a mirthful, then of a pensive mind.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a>
+Pastoral poetry is a description of rustics, agriculture,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span>and cattle, softened off and corrected from the
+rude health of nature. Virgil, and much more Pope
+and others, have run into the fault of colouring
+too highly;&mdash;instead of drawing generalized and
+ideal forms of <i>shepherds</i>, they have given us pictures
+of <i>gentlemen</i> and <i>beaux</i>. Their composition may
+be poetry, but it is not pastoral poetry.</p>
+
+<p>The difference between poetical and historical
+<i>narrative</i> may be illustrated by the &#8216;Tales Founded
+on Facts&#8217;, generally of a religious character, so
+common in the present day, which we must not be
+thought to approve, because we use them for our
+purpose. The author finds in the circumstances
+of the case many particulars too trivial for public
+notice, or irrelevant to the main story, or partaking
+perhaps too much of the peculiarity of individual
+minds:&mdash;these he omits. He finds connected
+events separated from each other by time or place,
+or a course of action distributed among a multitude
+of agents; he limits the scene or duration of the tale,
+and dispenses with his host of characters by condensing
+the mass of incident and action in the history
+of a few. He compresses long controversies into
+a concise argument&mdash;and exhibits characters by
+dialogue&mdash;and (if such be his object) brings
+prominently forward the course of Divine Providence
+by a fit disposition of his materials. Thus he
+selects, combines, refines, colours&mdash;in fact, <i>poetizes</i>.
+His facts are no longer <i>actual</i> but <i>ideal</i>&mdash;a tale
+<i>founded on</i> facts is a tale <i>generalized from</i> facts.
+The authors of <i>Peveril of the Peak</i>, and of <i>Brambletye
+House</i>, have given us their respective
+descriptions of the profligate times of Charles II.
+Both accounts are interesting, but for different
+reasons. That of the latter writer has the fidelity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span>
+of history; Walter Scott&#8217;s picture is the hideous
+reality unintentionally softened and decorated by
+the poetry of his own mind. Miss Edgeworth sometimes
+apologizes for certain incidents in her tales, by
+stating they took place &#8216;by one of those strange
+chances which occur in life, but seem incredible
+when found in writing&#8217;. Such an excuse evinces
+a misconception of the principle of fiction, which,
+being the <i>perfection</i> of the actual, prohibits the
+introduction of any such anomalies of experience.
+It is by a similar impropriety that painters
+sometimes introduce unusual sunsets, or other
+singular phenomena of lights and forms. Yet
+some of Miss Edgeworth&#8217;s works contain much
+poetry of narrative. <i>Man&#339;uvring</i> is perfect in
+its way&mdash;the plot and characters are natural,
+without being too real to be pleasing.</p>
+
+<p><i>Character</i> is made poetical by a like process.
+The writer draws indeed from experience; but
+unnatural peculiarities are laid aside, and harsh
+contrasts reconciled. If it be said, the fidelity of
+the imitation is often its greatest merit, we have
+only to reply, that in such cases the pleasure is
+not poetical, but consists in the mere recognition.
+All novels and tales which introduce real characters,
+are in the same degree unpoetical. Portrait-painting,
+to be poetical, should furnish an abstract
+representation of an individual; the abstraction
+being more rigid, inasmuch as the painting is
+confined to one point of time. The artist should
+draw independently of the accidents of attitude,
+dress, occasional feeling, and transient action.
+He should depict the general spirit of his subject&mdash;as
+if he were copying from memory, not from
+a few particular sittings. An ordinary painter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span>
+will delineate with rigid fidelity, and will make
+a caricature. But the learned artist contrives so
+to temper his composition, as to sink all offensive
+peculiarities and hardnesses of individuality, without
+diminishing the striking effect of the likeness, or
+acquainting the casual spectator with the secret of
+his art. Miss Edgeworth&#8217;s representations of the
+Irish character are actual, and not poetical&mdash;nor
+were they intended to be so. They are interesting,
+because they are faithful. If there is poetry about
+them, it exists in the personages themselves, not
+in her representation of them. She is only the
+accurate reporter in word of what was poetical in
+fact. Hence, moreover, when a deed or incident
+is striking in itself, a judicious writer is led to
+describe it in the most simple and colourless terms,
+his own being unnecessary; e. g. if the greatness
+of the action itself excites the imagination, or the
+depth of the suffering interests the feelings. In the
+usual phrase, the circumstances are left to &#8216;speak for
+themselves&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>Let it not be said that our doctrine is adverse to
+that individuality in the delineation of character,
+which is a principal charm of fiction. It is not
+necessary for the ideality of a composition to avoid
+those minuter shades of difference between man and
+man, which give to poetry its plausibility and life;
+but merely such violation of general nature, such
+improbabilities, wanderings, or coarsenesses, as
+interfere with the refined and delicate enjoyment
+of the imagination; which would have the elements
+of beauty extracted out of the confused multitude
+of ordinary actions and habits, and combined with
+consistency and ease. Nor does it exclude the
+introduction of imperfect or odious characters.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span>
+The original conception of a weak or guilty mind
+may have its intrinsic beauty. And much more so,
+when it is connected with a tale which finally adjusts
+whatever is reprehensible in the personages themselves.
+Richard and Iago are subservient to the plot.
+Moral excellence of character may sometimes be
+even a fault. The Clytemnestra of Euripides is so
+interesting, that the divine vengeance, which is the
+main subject of the drama, seems almost unjust.
+Lady Macbeth, on the contrary, is the conception
+of one deeply learned in the poetical art. She is
+polluted with the most heinous crimes, and meets
+the fate she deserves. Yet there is nothing in the
+picture to offend the taste, and much to feed the
+imagination. Romeo and Juliet are too good for
+the termination to which the plot leads&mdash;so are
+Ophelia and the bride of Lammermoor. In these
+cases there is something inconsistent with correct
+beauty, and therefore unpoetical. We do not say
+the fault could be avoided without sacrificing more
+than would be gained; still it is a fault. It is
+scarcely possible for a poet satisfactorily to connect
+innocence with ultimate unhappiness, when the
+notion of a future life is excluded. Honours paid
+to the memory of the dead are some alleviation of
+the harshness. In his use of the doctrine of a future
+life, Southey is admirable. Other writers are content
+to conduct their heroes to temporal happiness&mdash;Southey
+refuses present comfort to his Ladurlad,
+Thalaba, and Roderick, but carries them on through
+suffering to another world. The death of his hero
+is the termination of the action; yet so little in two
+of them, at least, does this catastrophe excite
+sorrowful feelings, that some readers may be
+startled to be reminded of the fact. If a melancholy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span>
+is thrown over the conclusion of the <i>Roderick</i>, it is
+from the peculiarities of the hero&#8217;s previous history.</p>
+
+<p>Opinions, feelings, manners, and customs, are
+made poetical by the delicacy or splendour with
+which they are expressed. This is seen in the <i>ode</i>,
+<i>elegy</i>, <i>sonnet</i>, and <i>ballad</i>; in which a single idea
+perhaps, or familiar occurrence, is invested by the
+poet with pathos or dignity. The ballad of <i>Old
+Robin Gray</i> will serve, for an instance, out of
+a multitude; again, Lord Byron&#8217;s <i>Hebrew Melody</i>,
+beginning &#8216;Were my bosom as false&#8217;, &amp;c.; or
+Cowper&#8217;s <i>Lines on his Mother&#8217;s Picture</i>; or Milman&#8217;s
+&#8216;Funeral Hymn&#8217; in the <i>Martyr of Antioch</i>;
+or Milton&#8217;s <i>Sonnet on his Blindness</i>; or Bernard
+Barton&#8217;s <i>Dream</i>. As picturesque specimens, we
+may name Campbell&#8217;s <i>Battle of the Baltic</i>; or
+Joanna Baillie&#8217;s <i>Chough and Crow</i>; and for the
+more exalted and splendid style, Gray&#8217;s <i>Bard</i>; or
+Milton&#8217;s <i>Hymn on the Nativity</i>; in which facts,
+with which every one is familiar, are made new by
+the colouring of a poetical imagination. It must
+all along be observed, that we are not adducing
+instances for their own sake; but in order to
+illustrate our general doctrine, and to show its
+applicability to those compositions which are, by
+universal consent, acknowledged to be poetical.</p>
+
+<p>The department of poetry we are now speaking
+of, is of much wider extent than might at first sight
+appear. It will include such moralizing and
+philosophical poems as Young&#8217;s <i>Night Thoughts</i>,
+and Byron&#8217;s <i>Childe Harold</i>.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> There is much bad
+taste, at present, in the judgement passed on
+compositions of this kind. It is the fault of the day
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span>to mistake mere eloquence for poetry; whereas, in
+direct opposition to the conciseness and simplicity
+of the poet, the talent of the orator consists in
+making much of a single idea. &#8216;<i>Sic dicet ille ut
+verset saepe multis modis eandem et unam rem, ut
+haereat in eadem commoreturque sententia.</i>&#8217; This is
+the great art of Cicero himself, who, whether he is
+engaged in statement, argument, or raillery, never
+ceases till he has exhausted the subject; going
+round about it, and placing it in every different
+light, yet without repetition to offend or weary the
+reader. This faculty seems to consist in the power
+of throwing off harmonious sentences, which, while
+they have a respectable proportion of meaning,
+yet are especially intended to charm the ear. In
+popular poems, common ideas are unfolded with
+copiousness, and set off in polished verse&mdash;and this
+is called poetry. In the <i>Pleasures of Hope</i> we find
+this done with exquisite taste; but it is in his
+minor poems that the author&#8217;s powerful and free
+poetical genius rises to its natural elevation. In
+<i>Childe Harold</i>, too, the writer is carried through his
+Spenserian stanza with the unweariness and equable
+fullness of accomplished eloquence; opening,
+illustrating, and heightening one idea, before he
+passes on to another. His composition is an
+extended funeral oration over buried joys and
+pleasures. His laments over Greece, Rome, and
+the fallen in various engagements, have quite the
+character of panegyrical orations; while by the
+very attempt to describe the celebrated buildings
+and sculptures of antiquity, he seems to confess that
+<i>they</i> are the poetical text, his the rhetorical comment.
+Still it is a work of splendid talent, though,
+as a whole, not of the highest poetical excellence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span>
+Juvenal is, perhaps, the only ancient author who
+habitually substitutes declamation for poetry.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a></p>
+
+<p>The <i>philosophy of mind</i> may equally be made
+subservient to poetry, as the philosophy of nature.
+It is a common fault to mistake a mere knowledge
+of the heart for poetical talent. Our greatest
+masters have known better;&mdash;they have subjected
+metaphysics to their art. In <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Macbeth</i>,
+<i>Richard</i>, and <i>Othello</i>, the philosophy of mind is but
+the material of the poet. These personages are
+ideal; they are effects of the contact of a given
+internal character with given outward circumstances,
+the results of combined conditions determining (so
+to say) a moral curve of original and inimitable
+properties. Philosophy is exhibited in the same
+subserviency to poetry in many parts of Crabbe&#8217;s
+<i>Tales of the Hall</i>. In the writings of this author
+there is much to offend a refined taste; but at
+least in the work in question there is much of
+a highly poetical cast. It is a representation of
+the action and re-action of two minds upon each
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span>other and upon the world around them. Two
+brothers of different characters and fortunes, and
+strangers to each other, meet. Their habits of
+mind, the formation of those habits by external
+circumstances, their respective media of judgement,
+their points of mutual attraction and repulsion,
+the mental position of each in relation to a variety
+of trifling phenomena of every-day nature and life,
+are beautifully developed in a series of tales moulded
+into a connected narrative. We are tempted to
+single out the fourth book, which gives an account
+of the childhood and education of the younger
+brother, and which for variety of thought as well
+as fidelity of description is in our judgement beyond
+praise. The Waverley novels would afford us
+specimens of a similar excellence. One striking
+peculiarity of these tales is the author&#8217;s practice of
+describing a group of characters bearing the same
+general features of mind, and placed in the same
+general circumstances; yet so contrasted with each
+other in minute differences of mental constitution,
+that each diverges from the common starting-place
+into a path peculiar to himself. The brotherhood of
+villains in <i>Kenilworth</i>, of knights in <i>Ivanhoe</i>, and of
+enthusiasts in <i>Old Mortality</i> are instances of this.
+This bearing of character and plot on each other is
+not often found in Byron&#8217;s poems. The Corsair is
+intended for a remarkable personage. We pass by
+the inconsistencies of his character, considered by
+itself. The grand fault is that, whether it be natural
+or not, we are obliged to accept the author&#8217;s word for
+the fidelity of his portrait. We are told, not shown,
+what the hero was. There is nothing in the plot
+which results from his peculiar formation of mind.
+An every-day bravo might equally well have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span>
+satisfied the requirements of the action. Childe
+Harold, again, if he is any thing, is a being professedly
+isolated from the world, and uninfluenced by it.
+One might as well draw Tityrus&#8217;s stags grazing in
+the air, as a character of this kind; which yet,
+with more or less alteration, passes through successive
+editions in his other poems. Byron had very little
+versatility or elasticity of genius; he did not know
+how to make poetry out of existing materials.
+He declaims in his own way, and has the upper hand
+as long as he is allowed to go on; but, if interrogated
+on principles of nature and good sense, he is at once
+put out and brought to a stand. Yet his conception
+of Sardanapalus and Myrrha is fine and ideal, and
+in the style of excellence which we have just been
+admiring in Shakespeare and Scott.</p>
+
+<p>These illustrations of Aristotle&#8217;s doctrine may
+suffice.</p>
+
+<p>Now let us proceed to a fresh position; which,
+as before, shall first be broadly stated, then modified
+and explained. How does originality differ from the
+poetical talent? Without affecting the accuracy of
+a definition, we may call the latter the originality of
+right moral feeling.</p>
+
+<p>Originality may perhaps be defined as the power
+of abstracting for oneself, and is in thought what
+strength of mind is in action. Our opinions are
+commonly derived from education and society.
+Common minds transmit as they receive, good and
+bad, true and false; minds of original talent feel
+a continual propensity to investigate subjects and
+strike out views for themselves;&mdash;so that even old
+and established truths do not escape modification
+and accidental change when subjected to this
+process of mental digestion. Even the style of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span>
+original writers is stamped with the peculiarities
+of their minds. When originality is found apart
+from good sense, which more or less is frequently
+the case, it shows itself in paradox and rashness of
+sentiment, and eccentricity of outward conduct.
+Poetry, on the other hand, cannot be separated from
+its good sense, or taste, as it is called; which is one
+of its elements. It is originality energizing in the
+world of beauty; the originality of grace, purity,
+refinement, and feeling. We do not hesitate to say,
+that poetry is ultimately founded on correct moral
+perception;&mdash;that where there is no sound principle
+in exercise there will be no poetry, and that on the
+whole (originality being granted) in proportion to
+the standard of a writer&#8217;s moral character, will his
+compositions vary in poetical excellence. This
+position, however, requires some explanation.<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a></p>
+
+<p>Of course, then, we do not mean to imply that
+a poet must necessarily <i>display</i> virtuous and religious
+feeling;&mdash;we are not speaking of the actual <i>material</i>
+of poetry, but of its <i>sources</i>. A right moral state of
+heart is the formal and scientific condition of
+a poetical mind. Nor does it follow from our
+position that every poet must in fact be a man of
+consistent and practical principle; except so far as
+good feeling commonly produces or results from
+good practice. Burns was a man of inconsistent
+practice&mdash;still, it is known, of much really sound
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span>principle at bottom. Thus his acknowledged
+poetical talent is in no wise inconsistent with the
+truth of our doctrine, which will refer the beauty
+which exists in his compositions to the remains of
+a virtuous and diviner nature within him. Nay,
+further than this, our theory holds good even though
+it be shown that a bad man may write a poem. As
+motives short of the purest lead to actions intrinsically
+good, so frames of mind short of virtuous will
+produce a partial and limited poetry. But even
+where it is exhibited, the poetry of a vicious mind
+will be inconsistent and debased; i. e. so far only
+such, as the traces and shadows of holy truth still
+remain upon it. On the other hand, a right moral
+feeling places the mind in the very centre of that
+circle from which all the rays have their origin and
+range; whereas minds otherwise placed command
+but a portion of the whole circuit of poetry. Allowing
+for human infirmity and the varieties of opinion,
+Milton, Spenser, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Southey,
+may be considered, as far as their writings go, to
+approximate to this moral centre. The following
+are added as further illustrations of our meaning.
+Walter Scott&#8217;s centre is chivalrous honour; Shakespeare
+exhibits the &#7974;&#952;&#959;&#962;], the physiognomy of an
+unlearned and undisciplined piety; Homer the
+religion of nature and the heart, at times debased
+by polytheism. All these poets are religious:&mdash;the
+occasional irreligion of Virgil&#8217;s poetry is painful
+to the admirers of his general taste and delicacy.
+Dryden&#8217;s <i>Alexander&#8217;s Feast</i> is a magnificent composition,
+and has high poetical beauties; but to
+a delicate judgement there is something intrinsically
+unpoetical in the end to which it is devoted, the
+praises of revel and sensuality. It corresponds to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>
+a process of clever reasoning erected on an untrue
+foundation&mdash;the one is a fallacy, the other is out
+of taste. Lord Byron&#8217;s <i>Manfred</i> is in parts intensely
+poetical; yet the refined mind naturally shrinks
+from the spirit which here and there reveals itself,
+and the basis on which the fable is built. From
+a perusal of it we should infer, according to the above
+theory, that there was right and fine feeling in the
+poet&#8217;s mind, but that the central and consistent
+character was wanting. From the history of his
+life we know this to be the fact. The connexion
+between want of the religious principle and want of
+poetical feeling, is seen in the instances of Hume
+and Gibbon; who had radically unpoetical minds.
+Rousseau is not an exception to our doctrine, for
+his heart was naturally religious. Lucretius too
+had much poetical talent; but his work evinces
+that his miserable philosophy was rather the result
+of a bewildered judgement than a corrupt heart.</p>
+
+<p>According to the above theory, revealed religion
+should be especially poetical&mdash;and it is so in fact.
+While its disclosures have an originality in them to
+engage the intellect, they have a beauty to satisfy
+the moral nature. It presents us with those ideal
+forms of excellence in which a poetical mind delights,
+and with which all grace and harmony are associated.
+It brings us into a new world&mdash;a world of overpowering
+interest, of the sublimest views, and the tenderest
+and purest feelings. The peculiar grace of mind of
+the New Testament writers is as striking as the
+actual effect produced upon the hearts of those
+who have imbibed their spirit. At present we are
+not concerned with the practical, but the poetical
+nature of revealed truth. With Christians a poetical
+view of things is a duty&mdash;we are bid to colour all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span>
+things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning
+in every event, and a superhuman tendency. Even
+our friends around are invested with unearthly
+brightness&mdash;no longer imperfect men, but beings
+taken into divine favour, stamped with his seal,
+and in training for future happiness. It may be
+added that the virtues peculiarly Christian are
+especially poetical;&mdash;meekness, gentleness, compassion,
+contentment, modesty, not to mention
+the devotional virtues: whereas the ruder and
+more ordinary feelings are the instruments of
+rhetoric more justly than of poetry&mdash;anger, indignation,
+emulation, martial spirit, and love of
+independence.</p>
+
+<p>A few remarks on poetical composition, and we
+have done.&mdash;The art of composition is merely
+accessory to the poetical talent. But where that
+talent exists it necessarily gives its own character
+to the style, and renders it perfectly different from
+all others. As the poet&#8217;s habits of mind lead to
+contemplation rather than communication with
+others, he is more or less obscure, according to the
+particular style of poetry he has adopted; less so,
+in epic or narrative and dramatic representation&mdash;more
+so, in odes and choruses. He will be obscure,
+moreover, from the depth of his feelings, which
+require a congenial reader to enter into them&mdash;and
+from their acuteness, which shrinks from any
+formal accuracy in the expression of them. And he
+will be obscure, not only from the carelessness of
+genius and from the originality of his conceptions,
+but (it may be) from natural deficiency in the
+power of clear and eloquent expression, which, we
+must repeat, is a talent distinct from poetry, though
+often mistaken for it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Dexterity in composition, or <i>eloquence</i> as it may
+be called in a contracted sense of the word, is
+however manifestly more or less necessary in every
+branch of literature, though its elements may be
+different in each. <i>Poetical</i> eloquence consists, first
+in the power of illustration&mdash;which the poet uses,
+not as the orator, voluntarily, for the sake of
+clearness or ornament; but almost by constraint,
+as the sole outlet and expression of intense inward
+feeling. The spontaneous power of comparison is
+in some poetical minds entirely wanting; these of
+course cannot show to advantage as poets.&mdash;Another
+talent necessary to composition is the
+power of unfolding the meaning in an orderly
+manner. A poetical mind is often too impatient to
+explain itself justly; it is overpowered by a rush
+of emotions, which sometimes want of power,
+sometimes the indolence of inward enjoyment
+prevents it from describing. Nothing is more
+difficult than to analyse the feelings of our own
+minds; and the power of doing so, whether natural
+or acquired, is clearly distinct from experiencing
+them. Yet, though distinct from the poetical talent,
+it is obviously necessary to its exhibition. Hence
+it is a common praise bestowed upon writers, that
+they express what we have often felt but could
+never describe. The power of arrangement, which
+is necessary for an extended poem, is a modification
+of the same talent;&mdash;being to poetry what method
+is to logic. Besides these qualifications, poetical
+compositions requires that command of language
+which is the mere effect of practice. The poet is
+a compositor; words are his types; he must have
+them within reach, and in unlimited abundance.
+Hence the need of careful labour to the accomplished<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span>
+poet&mdash;not in order that his diction may attract,
+but that language may be subjected to him. He
+studies the art of composition as we might learn
+dancing or elocution; not that we may move or
+speak according to rule, but that by the very
+exercise our voice and carriage may become so
+unembarrassed as to allow of our doing what we
+will with them.</p>
+
+<p>A talent for composition then is no essential part
+of poetry, though indispensable to its exhibition.
+Hence it would seem that attention to the language
+<i>for its own sake</i> evidences not the true poet but the
+mere artist. Pope is said to have tuned our tongue.
+We certainly owe much to him&mdash;his diction is rich,
+musical, and expressive. Still he is not on this
+account a poet; he elaborated his composition
+for its own sake. If we give him poetical praise on
+this account, we may as appropriately bestow it on
+a tasteful cabinet-maker. This does not forbid us
+to ascribe the grace of his verse to an inward
+principle of poetry, which supplied him with
+archetypes of the beautiful and splendid to work by.
+But a similar internal gift must direct the skill of
+every fancy-artist who subserves the luxuries and
+elegancies of life. On the other hand, though Virgil
+is celebrated as a master of composition, yet his
+style is so identified with his conceptions, as their
+outward development, as to preclude the possibility
+of our viewing the one apart from the other. In
+Milton, again, the harmony of the verse is but the
+echo of the inward music which the thoughts of
+the poet breathe. In Moore&#8217;s style the ornament
+continually outstrips the sense. Cowper and
+Walter Scott, on the other hand, are slovenly in
+their versification. Sophocles writes, on the whole,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span>
+without studied attention to the style; but
+Euripides frequently affects a simplicity and
+prettiness which exposed him to the ridicule of the
+comic poets. Lastly, the style of Homer&#8217;s poems is
+perfect in their particular department. It is free,
+manly, simple, perspicuous, energetic, and varied.
+It is the style of one who rhapsodized without
+deference to hearer or judge, in an age prior to the
+temptations which more or less prevailed over
+succeeding writers&mdash;before the theatre had degraded
+poetry into an exhibition, and criticism narrowed
+it into an art.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a>
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A Bull, thou seem&#8217;st to lead us; on thy head<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Horns have grown forth: wast heretofore a beast?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For such thy semblance now.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> The sudden inspiration, e. g. of the blind Oedipus, in
+the second play bearing his name, by which he is enabled,
+&#7940;&#952;&#953;&#954;&#964;&#959;&#962; &#7969;&#947;&#951;&#964;&#8134;&#961;&#959;&#962; [&#8216;without a guide&#8217;], to lead the way to his
+place of death, in our judgement, produces more poetical
+effect than all the skilful intricacy of the plot of the <i>Tyrannus</i>.
+The latter excites an interest which scarcely lasts
+beyond the first reading&mdash;the former <i>decies repetita placebit</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> In seeing the picture one is at the same time learning,&mdash;gathering
+the meaning of things.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> It is the charm of the descriptive poetry of a religious
+mind, that nature is viewed in a moral connexion. Ordinary
+writers (e. g.) compare aged men to trees in autumn&mdash;a
+gifted poet will reverse the metaphor. Thus:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;How quiet shows the woodland scene!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Each flower and tree, its duty done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Reposing in decay serene,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Like weary men when age is won</i>,&#8217; &amp;c.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> We would here mention Rogers&#8217;s <i>Italy</i>, if such a cursory
+notice could convey our high opinion of its merit.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> The difference between oratory and poetry is well
+illustrated by a passage in a recent tragedy.
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1"><i>Col.</i> Joined! by what tie?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Rien.</i> By hatred&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By danger&mdash;the two hands that tightest grasp<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Each other&mdash;the two cords that soonest knit<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A fast and stubborn tie; your true love knot<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is nothing to it. Faugh! the supple touch<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of pliant interest, or the dust of time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or the pin-point of temper, loose or rot<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or snap love&#8217;s silken band. Fear and old hate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They are sure weavers&mdash;they work for the storm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The whirlwind, and the rocking surge; their knot<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Endures till death.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The idea is good, and if expressed in a line or two, might
+have been poetry&mdash;spread out into nine or ten lines, it
+yields but a languid and ostentatious declamation.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> A living prelate, in his Academical Prelections, even
+suggests the converse of our position&mdash;&#8216;<i>Neque enim facile
+crediderim de eo qui semel hac imbutus fuerit disciplina, qui
+in id tota mentis acie assuefactus fuerit incumbere, ut quid
+sit in rebus decens, quid pulchrum, quid congruum, penitus
+intueretur, quin idem harum rerum perpetuum amorem foveat,
+et cum ab his studiis discesserit, etiam ad reliqua vitae officia
+earum imaginem quasi animo infixam transferat.</i>&#8217;</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="THOMAS_CARLYLE" id="THOMAS_CARLYLE"></a>THOMAS CARLYLE<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1795-1881</h3>
+
+<h3>THE HERO AS POET. DANTE; SHAKESPEARE<br />
+(1840)</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are
+productions of old ages; not to be repeated in the
+new. They presuppose a certain rudeness of conception,
+which the progress of mere scientific knowledge
+puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were,
+a world vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms,
+if men in their loving wonder are to fancy their
+fellow-man either a god or one speaking with the
+voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past.
+We are now to see our Hero in the less ambitious,
+but also less questionable, character of Poet; a
+character which does not pass. The Poet is
+a heroic figure belonging to all ages; whom all
+ages possess, when once he is produced, whom the
+newest age as the oldest may produce;&mdash;and will
+produce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature
+send a Hero-soul; in no age is it other than possible
+that he may be shaped into a Poet.</p>
+
+<p>Hero, Prophet, Poet,&mdash;many different names, in
+different times and places, do we give to Great
+Men; according to varieties we note in them,
+according to the sphere in which they have displayed
+themselves! We might give many more
+names, on this same principle. I will remark again,
+however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span>
+that the different <i>sphere</i> constitutes the
+grand origin of such distinction; that the Hero
+can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you
+will, according to the kind of world he finds himself
+born into. I confess, I have no notion of a
+truly great man that could not be <i>all</i> sorts of men.
+The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose
+stanzas, would never make a stanza worth
+much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless
+he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too.
+I fancy there is in him the Politician, the Thinker,
+Legislator, Philosopher;&mdash;in one or the other
+degree, he could have been, he is all these. So too
+I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that
+great glowing heart, with the fire that was in it,
+with the bursting tears that were in it, could not
+have written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched
+all hearts in that way, had his course of life and
+education led him thitherward. The grand fundamental
+character is that of Great Man; that the
+man be great. Napoleon has words in him which
+are like Austerlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth&#8217;s
+Marshals are a kind of poetical men withal; the
+things Turenne says are full of sagacity and
+geniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The
+great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye: there it
+lies; no man whatever, in what province soever,
+can prosper at all without these. Petrarch and
+Boccaccio did diplomatic messages, it seems, quite
+well: one can easily believe it; they had done
+things a little harder than these! Burns, a gifted
+song-writer, might have made a still better
+Mirabeau. Shakespeare,&mdash;one knows not what
+<i>he</i> could not have made, in the supreme degree.</p>
+
+<p>True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span>
+does not make all great men, more than all other
+men, in the self-same mould. Varieties of aptitude
+doubtless; but infinitely more of circumstance;
+and far oftenest it is the <i>latter</i> only that are looked
+to. But it is as with common men in the learning
+of trades. You take any man, as yet a vague
+capability of a man, who could be any kind of
+craftsman; and make him into a smith, a carpenter,
+a mason: he is then and thenceforth that
+and nothing else. And if, as Addison complains,
+you sometimes see a street-porter staggering under
+his load on spindle-shanks, and near at hand a
+tailor with the frame of a Samson handling a bit
+of cloth and small Whitechapel needle,&mdash;it cannot
+be considered that aptitude of Nature alone has been
+consulted here either!&mdash;The Great Man also, to
+what shall he be bound apprentice? Given your
+Hero, is he to become Conqueror, King, Philosopher,
+Poet? It is an inexplicably complex controversial-calculation
+between the world and him!
+He will read the world and its laws; the world
+with its laws will be there to be read. What the
+world, on <i>this</i> matter, shall permit and bid is, as
+we said, the most important fact about the world.&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<p class="newsection">Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose
+modern notions of them. In some old languages,
+again, the titles are synonymous; <i>Vates</i> means
+both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times,
+Prophet and Poet, well understood, have much
+kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they
+are still the same; in this most important respect
+especially, That they have penetrated both of
+them into the sacred mystery of the Universe;
+what Goethe calls &#8216;the open secret&#8217;. &#8216;Which is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span>
+the great secret?&#8217; asks one.&mdash;&#8216;The <i>open</i> secret,&#8217;&mdash;open
+to all, seen by almost none! That divine
+mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, &#8216;the
+Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the
+bottom of Appearance,&#8217; as Fichte styles it; of
+which all Appearance, from the starry sky to the
+grass of the field, but especially the Appearance
+of Man and his work, is but the <i>vesture</i>, the embodiment
+that renders it visible. This divine mystery
+<i>is</i> in all times and in all places; veritably is. In
+most times and places it is greatly overlooked;
+and the Universe, definable always in one or the
+other dialect, as the realized Thought of God, is
+considered a trivial, inert, commonplace matter,&mdash;as
+if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which
+some upholsterer had put together! It could do
+no good, at present, to <i>speak</i> much about this; but
+it is a pity for every one of us if we do not know it,
+live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most
+mournful pity;&mdash;a failure to live at all, if we live
+otherwise!</p>
+
+<p>But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine
+mystery, the <i>Vates</i>, whether Prophet or Poet, has
+penetrated into it; is a man sent hither to make it
+more impressively known to us. That always is his
+message; he is to reveal that to us,&mdash;that sacred
+mystery which he more than others lives ever
+present with. While others forget it, he knows it;&mdash;I
+might say, he has been driven to know it;
+without consent asked of <i>him</i>, he finds himself
+living in it, bound to live in it. Once more, here
+is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Belief; this
+man too could not help being a sincere man! Whosoever
+may live in the shows of things, it is for him
+a necessity of nature to live in the very fact of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span>
+things. A man, once more, in earnest with the
+Universe, though all others were but toying with
+it. He is a <i>Vates</i>, first of all, in virtue of being
+sincere. So far Poet and Prophet, participators in
+the &#8216;open secret,&#8217; are one.</p>
+
+<p>With respect to their distinction again: The
+<i>Vates</i> Prophet, we might say, has seized that sacred
+mystery rather on the moral side, as Good and Evil,
+Duty and Prohibition; the <i>Vates</i> Poet on what
+the Germans call the &aelig;sthetic side, as Beautiful,
+and the like. The one we may call a revealer of
+what we are to do, the other of what we are to love.
+But indeed these two provinces run into one
+another, and cannot be disjoined. The Prophet
+too has his eye on what we are to love: how else
+shall he know what it is we are to do? The highest
+Voice ever heard on this Earth said withal, &#8216;Consider
+the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither
+do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was not
+arrayed like one of these.&#8217; A glance, that, into the
+deepest deep of Beauty. &#8216;The lilies of the field,&#8217;&mdash;dressed
+finer than earthly princes, springing up
+there in the humble furrow-field; a beautiful <i>eye</i>
+looking out on you, from the great inner Sea of
+Beauty! How could the rude Earth make these,
+if her Essence, rugged as she looks and is, were not
+inwardly Beauty?&mdash;In this point of view, too, a
+saying of Goethe&#8217;s, which has staggered several,
+may have meaning: &#8216;The Beautiful&#8217;, he intimates,
+&#8216;is higher than the Good; the Beautiful includes
+in it the Good.&#8217; The <i>true</i> Beautiful; which however,
+I have said somewhere, &#8216;differs from the
+<i>false</i>, as Heaven does from Vauxhall!&#8217; So much
+for the distinction and identity of Poet and
+Prophet.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>In ancient and also in modern periods, we find
+a few Poets who are accounted perfect; whom it
+were a kind of treason to find fault with. This is
+noteworthy; this is right: yet in strictness it is
+only an illusion. At bottom, clearly enough, there
+is no perfect Poet! A vein of Poetry exists in the
+hearts of all men; no man is made altogether of
+Poetry. We are all poets when we <i>read</i> a poem
+well. The &#8216;imagination that shudders at the Hell
+of Dante,&#8217; is not that the same faculty, weaker in
+degree, as Dante&#8217;s own? No one but Shakespeare
+can embody, out of Saxo Grammaticus, the story
+of <i>Hamlet</i> as Shakespeare did: but every one models
+some kind of story out of it; every one embodies
+it better or worse. We need not spend time in
+defining. Where there is no specific difference, as
+between round and square, all definition must be
+more or less arbitrary. A man that has <i>so</i> much
+more of the poetic element developed in him as to
+have become noticeable, will be called Poet by his
+neighbours. World-Poets too, those whom we are
+to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics in
+the same way. One who rises <i>so</i> far above the
+general level of Poets will, to such and such critics,
+seem a Universal Poet; as he ought to do. And
+yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction.
+All Poets, all men, have some touches of the Universal;
+no man is wholly made of that. Most
+Poets are very soon forgotten: but not the noblest
+Shakespeare or Homer of them can be remembered
+<i>for ever</i>;&mdash;a day comes when he too is not!</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a
+difference between true Poetry and true Speech not
+Poetical: what is the difference? On this point
+many things have been written, especially by late<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span>
+German Critics, some of which are not very intelligible
+at first. They say, for example, that the
+Poet has an <i>infinitude</i> in him; communicates an
+<i>Unendlichkeit</i>, a certain character of &#8216;infinitude&#8217;,
+to whatsoever he delineates. This, though not
+very precise, yet on so vague a matter is worth
+remembering: if well meditated, some meaning
+will gradually be found in it. For my own part,
+I find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction
+of Poetry being <i>metrical</i>, having music in
+it, being a Song. Truly, if pressed to give a definition,
+one might say this as soon as anything else:
+If your delineation be authentically <i>musical</i>, musical
+not in word only, but in heart and substance, in all
+the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole
+conception of it, then it will be poetical; if not,
+not.&mdash;Musical: how much lies in that! A <i>musical</i>
+thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated
+into the inmost heart of the thing; detected
+the inmost mystery of it, namely the <i>melody</i> that
+lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence
+which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right
+to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we
+may say, are melodious; naturally utter themselves
+in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep.
+Who is there that, in logical words, can express the
+effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate
+unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge
+of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into
+that!</p>
+
+<p>Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has
+something of song in it: not a parish in the world
+but has its parish-accent;&mdash;the rhythm or <i>tune</i>
+to which the people there <i>sing</i> what they have to
+say! Accent is a kind of chanting; all men have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span>
+accent of their own,&mdash;though they only <i>notice</i> that
+of others. Observe too how all passionate language
+does of itself become musical,&mdash;with a finer music
+than the mere accent; the speech of a man even
+in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All deep
+things are Song. It seems somehow the very central
+essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but
+wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us;
+of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled of
+Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had
+of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of
+all her voices and utterances was perfect music.
+Poetry, therefore, we will call <i>musical Thought</i>.
+The Poet is he who <i>thinks</i> in that manner. At
+bottom, it turns still on power of intellect; it is
+a man&#8217;s sincerity and depth of vision that makes
+him a Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically;
+the heart of Nature <i>being</i> everywhere music,
+if you can only reach it.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Vates</i> Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse
+of Nature, seems to hold a poor rank among us, in
+comparison with the <i>Vates</i> Prophet; his function,
+and our esteem of him for his function, alike slight.
+The Hero taken as Divinity; the Hero taken as
+Prophet; then next the Hero taken only as Poet:
+does it not look as if our estimate of the Great Man,
+epoch after epoch, were continually diminishing?
+We take him first for a god, then for one god-inspired;
+and now in the next stage of it, his most
+miraculous word gains from us only the recognition
+that he is a Poet, beautiful verse-maker,
+man of genius, or such-like!&mdash;It looks so; but I
+persuade myself that intrinsically it is not so. If
+we consider well, it will perhaps appear that in
+man still there is the <i>same</i> altogether peculiar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span>
+admiration for the Heroic Gift, by what name
+soever called, that there at any time was.</p>
+
+<p>I should say, if we do not now reckon a Great
+Man literally divine, it is that our notions of God,
+of the supreme unattainable Fountain of Splendour,
+Wisdom and Heroism, are ever rising <i>higher</i>; not
+altogether that our reverence for these qualities,
+as manifested in our like, is getting lower. This is
+worth taking thought of. Sceptical Dilettantism,
+the curse of these ages, a curse which will not last
+for ever, does indeed in this the highest province
+of human things, as in all provinces, make sad
+work; and our reverence for great men, all crippled,
+blinded, paralytic as it is, comes out in poor plight,
+hardly recognizable. Men worship the shows of
+great men; the most disbelieve that there is any
+reality of great men to worship. The dreariest,
+fatallest faith; believing which, one would literally
+despair of human things. Nevertheless look,
+for example, at Napoleon! A Corsican lieutenant
+of artillery; that is the show of <i>him</i>: yet is he
+not obeyed, <i>worshipped</i> after his sort, as all the
+Tiaraed and Diademed of the world put together
+could not be? High Duchesses, and ostlers of
+inns, gather round the Scottish rustic, Burns;&mdash;a
+strange feeling dwelling in each that they never
+heard a man like this; that, on the whole, this is
+the man! In the secret heart of these people it
+still dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited
+way of uttering it at present, that this
+rustic, with his black brows and flashing sun-eyes,
+and strange words moving laughter and tears, is
+of a dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable
+with all others. Do not we feel it so? But now,
+were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triviality, and all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span>
+that sorrowful brood, cast-out of us,&mdash;as, by God&#8217;s
+blessing, they shall one day be; were faith in the
+shows of things entirely swept out, replaced by
+clear faith in the <i>things</i>, so that a man acted on
+the impulse of that only, and counted the other
+non-extant; what a new livelier feeling towards
+this Burns were it!</p>
+
+<p>Nay here in these ages, such as they are, have
+we not two mere Poets, if not deified, yet we may
+say beatified? Shakespeare and Dante are Saints
+of Poetry; really, if we will think of it, <i>canonized</i>,
+so that it is impiety to meddle with them. The
+unguided instinct of the world, working across all
+these perverse impediments, has arrived at such
+result. Dante and Shakespeare are a peculiar Two.
+They dwell apart, in a kind of royal solitude; none
+equal, none second to them: in the general feeling
+of the world, a certain transcendentalism, a glory
+as of complete perfection, invests these two. They
+<i>are</i> canonized, though no Pope or Cardinals took
+hand in doing it! Such, in spite of every perverting
+influence, in the most unheroic times, is still
+our indestructible reverence for heroism.&mdash;We will
+look a little at these Two, the Poet Dante and the
+Poet Shakespeare: what little it is permitted us
+to say here of the Hero as Poet will most fitly
+arrange itself in that fashion.</p>
+
+
+<p class="newsection">Many volumes have been written by way of commentary
+on Dante and his Book; yet, on the whole,
+with no great result. His Biography is, as it were,
+irrecoverably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering,
+sorrowstricken man, not much note was
+taken of him while he lived; and the most of that
+has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span>
+It is five centuries since he ceased writing
+and living here. After all commentaries, the Book
+itself is mainly what we know of him. The Book;&mdash;and
+one might add that Portrait commonly attributed
+to Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot
+help inclining to think genuine, whoever did it.
+To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all
+faces that I know, the most so. Lonely there,
+painted as on vacancy, with the simple laurel
+wound round it; the deathless sorrow and pain,
+the known victory which is also deathless;&mdash;significant
+of the whole history of Dante! I think it
+is the mournfullest face that ever was painted from
+reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face.
+There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness,
+gentle affection as of a child; but all this
+is as if congealed into sharp contradiction, into
+abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain. A soft
+ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable,
+grim-trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed
+ice! Withal it is a silent pain too, a silent
+scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of god-like
+disdain of the thing that is eating-out his heart,&mdash;as
+if it were withal a mean insignificant thing, as
+if he whom it had power to torture and strangle
+were greater than it. The face of one wholly in
+protest, and lifelong unsurrendering battle, against
+the world. Affection all converted into indignation:
+an implacable indignation; slow, equable, silent,
+like that of a god! The eye too, it looks out as in
+a kind of <i>surprise</i>, a kind of inquiry, Why the world
+was of such a sort? This is Dante: so he looks,
+this &#8216;voice of ten silent centuries&#8217;, and sings us
+&#8216;his mystic unfathomable song&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>The little that we know of Dante&#8217;s Life corresponds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span>
+well enough with this Portrait and this
+Book. He was born at Florence, in the upper class
+of society, in the year 1265. His education was
+the best then going; much school-divinity, Aristotelean
+logic, some Latin classics,&mdash;no inconsiderable
+insight into certain provinces of things:
+and Dante, with his earnest intelligent nature, we
+need not doubt, learned better than most all
+that was learnable. He has a clear cultivated
+understanding, and of great subtlety; this best
+fruit of education he had contrived to realize from
+these scholastics. He knows accurately and well
+what lies close to him; but, in such a time, without
+printed books or free intercourse, he could not
+know well what was distant: the small clear light,
+most luminous for what is near, breaks itself into
+singular <i>chiaroscuro</i> striking on what is far off.
+This was Dante&#8217;s learning from the schools. In
+life, he had gone through the usual destinies; been
+twice out campaigning as a soldier for the Florentine
+State, been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth
+year, by natural gradation of talent and service,
+become one of the Chief Magistrates of Florence.
+He had met in boyhood a certain Beatrice Portinari,
+a beautiful little girl of his own age and rank, and
+grown-up thenceforth in partial sight of her, in
+some distant intercourse with her. All readers
+know his graceful affecting account of this; and
+then of their being parted; of her being wedded
+to another, and of her death soon after. She makes
+a great figure in Dante&#8217;s Poem; seems to have made
+a great figure in his life. Of all beings it might
+seem as if she, held apart from him, far apart at
+last in the dim Eternity, were the only one he had
+ever with his whole strength of affection loved.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span>
+She died: Dante himself was wedded; but it
+seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy, the
+rigorous earnest man, with his keen excitabilities,
+was not altogether easy to make happy.</p>
+
+<p>We will not complain of Dante&#8217;s miseries: had
+all gone right with him as he wished it, he might
+have been Prior, Podest&agrave;, or whatsoever they call
+it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbours,&mdash;and
+the world had wanted one of the most notable
+words ever spoken or sung. Florence would have
+had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten
+dumb centuries continued voiceless, and the ten
+other listening centuries (for there will be ten of
+them and more) had no <i>Divina Commedia</i> to hear!
+We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny
+was appointed for this Dante; and he, struggling
+like a man led towards death and crucifixion, could
+not help fulfilling it. Give <i>him</i> the choice of his
+happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what
+was really happy, what was really miserable.</p>
+
+<p>In Dante&#8217;s Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline,
+Bianchi-Neri, or some other confused disturbances
+rose to such a height, that Dante, whose party had
+seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast
+unexpectedly forth into banishment; doomed
+thenceforth to a life of woe and wandering. His
+property was all confiscated and more; he had
+the fiercest feeling that it was entirely unjust,
+nefarious in the sight of God and man. He tried
+what was in him to get reinstated; tried even by
+warlike surprisal, with arms in his hand: but it
+would not do; bad only had become worse. There
+is a record, I believe, still extant in the Florence
+Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever caught,
+to be burnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands, they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span>
+say: a very curious civic document. Another
+curious document, some considerable number of
+years later, is a Letter of Dante&#8217;s to the Florentine
+Magistrates, written in answer to a milder proposal
+of theirs, that he should return on condition of
+apologizing and paying a fine. He answers, with
+fixed stern pride: &#8216;If I cannot return without
+calling myself guilty, I will never return, <i>nunquam
+revertar</i>.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>For Dante there was now no home in this world.
+He wandered from patron to patron, from place
+to place; proving, in his own bitter words, &#8216;How
+hard is the path, <i>Come &egrave; duro calle</i>.&#8217; The wretched
+are not cheerful company. Dante, poor and
+banished, with his proud earnest nature, with his
+moody humours, was not a man to conciliate men.
+Petrarch reports of him that being at Can della
+Scala&#8217;s court, and blamed one day for his gloom
+and taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like
+way. Della Scala stood among his courtiers, with
+mimes and buffoons (<i>nebulones ac histriones</i>) making
+him heartily merry; when turning to Dante, he
+said: &#8216;Is it not strange, now, that this poor fool
+should make himself so entertaining; while you,
+a wise man, sit there day after day, and have
+nothing to amuse us with at all?&#8217; Dante answered
+bitterly: &#8216;No, not strange; your Highness is to
+recollect the Proverb, <i>Like to Like</i>;&#8217;&mdash;given the
+amuser, the amusee must also be given! Such a
+man, with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms
+and sorrows, was not made to succeed at court.
+By degrees, it came to be evident to him that he
+had no longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit,
+in this earth. The earthly world had cast him
+forth, to wander, wander; no living heart to love<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span>
+him now; for his sore miseries there was no solace
+here.</p>
+
+<p>The deeper naturally would the Eternal World
+impress itself on him; that awful reality over
+which, after all, this Time-world, with its Florences
+and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow.
+Florence thou shalt never see: but Hell and Purgatory
+and Heaven thou shalt surely see! What
+is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and
+Life altogether? <span class="smcap">Eternity</span>: thither, of a truth,
+not elsewhither, art thou and all things bound!
+The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made
+its home more and more in that awful other world.
+Naturally his thoughts brooded on that, as on the
+one fact important for him. Bodied or bodiless, it
+is the one fact important for all men:&mdash;but to Dante,
+in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific
+shape; he no more doubted of that <i>Malebolge</i>
+Pool, that it all lay there with its gloomy circles,
+with its <i>alti guai</i>, and that he himself should see it,
+than we doubt that we should see Constantinople
+if we went thither. Dante&#8217;s heart, long filled with
+this, brooding over it in speechless thought and awe,
+bursts forth at length into &#8216;mystic unfathomable
+song&#8217;; and this his <i>Divine Comedy</i>, the most
+remarkable of all modern Books, is the result.</p>
+
+<p>It must have been a great solacement to Dante,
+and was, as we can see, a proud thought for him at
+times, That he, here in exile, could do this work;
+that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder
+him from doing it, or even much help him in doing
+it. He knew too, partly, that it was great; the
+greatest a man could do. &#8216;If thou follow thy star,
+<i>Se tu segui tua stella</i>,&#8217;&mdash;so could the Hero, in his
+forsakenness, in his extreme need, still say to himself:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span>
+&#8216;Follow thou thy star, thou shalt not fail of
+a glorious heaven!&#8217; The labour of writing, we find,
+and indeed could know otherwise, was great and
+painful for him; he says, This Book, &#8216;which has
+made me lean for many years.&#8217; Ah yes, it was won,
+all of it, with pain and sore toil,&mdash;not in sport, but
+in grim earnest. His Book, as indeed most good
+Books are, has been written, in many senses, with
+his heart&#8217;s blood. It is his whole history, this Book.
+He died after finishing it; not yet very old, at the
+age of fifty-six;&mdash;broken-hearted rather, as is said.
+He lies buried in his death-city Ravenna: <i>Hic
+claudor Dantes patriis extorris ab oris</i>. The Florentines
+begged back his body, in a century after; the
+Ravenna people would not give it. &#8216;Here am I
+Dante laid, shut out from my native shores.&#8217;</p>
+
+
+<p class="newsection">I said, Dante&#8217;s Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who
+calls it &#8216;a mystic unfathomable Song&#8217;; and such
+is literally the character of it. Coleridge remarks
+very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find
+a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and
+melody in the words, there is something deep and
+good in the meaning too. For body and soul, word
+and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere.
+Song: we said before, it was the Heroic of Speech!
+All <i>old</i> Poems, Homer&#8217;s and the rest, are authentically
+Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all
+right Poems are; that whatsoever is not <i>sung</i> is
+properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped
+into jingling lines,&mdash;to the great injury of the grammar,
+to the great grief of the reader, for most part!
+What we want to get at is the <i>thought</i> the man
+had, if he had any: why should he twist it into
+jingle, if he <i>could</i> speak it out plainly? It is only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span>
+when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of
+melody, and the very tones of him, according to
+Coleridge&#8217;s remark, become musical by the greatness,
+depth and music of his thoughts, that we can
+give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him
+a Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,&mdash;whose
+speech <i>is</i> Song. Pretenders to this are
+many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is for
+most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable
+business, that of reading rhyme! Rhyme
+that had no inward necessity to be rhymed;&mdash;it
+ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle,
+what it was aiming at. I would advise all men who
+<i>can</i> speak their thought, not to sing it; to understand
+that, in a serious time, among serious men,
+there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely
+as we love the true song, and are charmed by
+it as by something divine, so shall we hate the false
+song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing
+hollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere and
+offensive thing.</p>
+
+<p>I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his
+<i>Divine Comedy</i> that it is, in all senses, genuinely a
+Song. In the very sound of it there is a <i>canto fermo</i>;
+it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple
+<i>terza rima</i>, doubtless helped him in this. One reads
+along naturally with a sort of <i>lilt</i>. But I add, that
+it could not be otherwise; for the essence and
+material of the work are themselves rhythmic. Its
+depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes it
+musical;&mdash;go <i>deep</i> enough, there is music everywhere.
+A true inward symmetry, what one calls
+an architectural harmony, reigns in it, proportionates
+it all: architectural; which also partakes
+of the character of music. The three kingdoms,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span>
+<i>Inferno</i>, <i>Purgatorio</i>, <i>Paradiso</i>, look out on one
+another like compartments of a great edifice; a
+great supernatural world-cathedral, piled up there,
+stern, solemn, awful; Dante&#8217;s World of Souls! It
+is, at bottom, the <i>sincerest</i> of all Poems; sincerity,
+here too, we find to be the measure of worth. It
+came deep out of the author&#8217;s heart of hearts; and
+it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours.
+The people of Verona, when they saw him on the
+streets, used to say, &#8216;<i>Eccovi l&#8217; uom ch&#8217; &egrave; stato all&#8217;
+Inferno</i>, See, there is the man that was in Hell!&#8217;
+Ah, yes, he had been in Hell;&mdash;in Hell enough, in
+long severe sorrow and struggle; as the like of him
+is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come-out
+<i>divine</i> are not accomplished otherwise. Thought,
+true labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it
+not the daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black
+whirlwind;&mdash;true <i>effort</i>, in fact, as of a captive
+struggling to free himself: that is Thought. In all
+ways we are &#8216;to become perfect through <i>suffering</i>.&#8217;&mdash;But,
+as I say, no work known to me is so elaborated
+as this of Dante&#8217;s. It has all been as if molten,
+in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made him
+&#8216;lean&#8217; for many years. Not the general whole only;
+every compartment of it is worked-out, with intense
+earnestness, into truth, into clear visuality. Each
+answers to the other; each fits in its place, like
+a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It
+is the soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the
+Middle Ages, rendered for ever rhythmically visible
+there. No light task; a right intense one: but
+a task which is <i>done</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps one would say, <i>intensity</i>, with the much
+that depends on it, is the prevailing character of
+Dante&#8217;s genius. Dante does not come before us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span>
+as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and
+even sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his
+age and position, but partly too of his own nature.
+His greatness has, in all senses, concentered itself
+into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great
+not because he is world-wide, but because he is
+world-deep. Through all objects he pierces as it
+were down into the heart of Being. I know nothing
+so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to
+begin with the outermost development of his intensity,
+consider how he paints. He has a great power
+of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents
+that and nothing more. You remember that first
+view he gets of the Hall of Dite: <i>red</i> pinnacle, red-hot
+cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity
+of gloom;&mdash;so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and
+for ever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of
+Dante. There is a brevity, an abrupt precision in
+him: Tacitus is not briefer, more condensed; and
+then in Dante it seems a natural condensation,
+spontaneous to the man. One smiting word; and
+then there is silence, nothing more said. His silence
+is more eloquent than words. It is strange with
+what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the true
+likeness of a matter: cuts into the matter as with
+a pen of fire. Plutus, the blustering giant, collapses
+at Virgil&#8217;s rebuke; it is &#8216;as the sails sink, the mast
+being suddenly broken&#8217;. Or that poor Sordello,
+with the <i>cotto aspetto</i>, &#8216;face <i>baked</i>&#8217;, parched brown
+and lean; and the &#8216;fiery snow&#8217; that falls on them
+there, a &#8216;fiery snow without wind&#8217;, slow, deliberate,
+never-ending! Or the lids of those Tombs; square
+sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each
+with its Soul in torment; the lids laid open there;
+they are to be shut at the Day of Judgement,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span>
+through Eternity. And how Farinata rises; and
+how Cavalcante falls&mdash;at hearing of his Son, and
+the past tense &#8216;<i>fue</i>!&#8217; The very movements in
+Dante have something brief; swift, decisive, almost
+military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius
+this sort of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature
+of the man, so silent, passionate, with its quick
+abrupt movements, its silent &#8216;pale rages&#8217;, speaks
+itself in these things.</p>
+
+<p>For though this of painting is one of the outermost
+developments of a man, it comes like all else from
+the essential faculty of him; it is physiognomical
+of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint
+you a likeness, you have found a man worth something;
+mark his manner of doing it, as very characteristic
+of him. In the first place, he could not have
+discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type
+of it, unless he had, what we may call, <i>sympathized</i>
+with it,&mdash;had sympathy in him to bestow on objects.
+He must have been <i>sincere</i> about it too; sincere
+and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot
+give you the likeness of any object; he dwells in
+vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay,
+about all objects. And indeed may we not say that
+intellect altogether expresses itself in this power
+of discerning what an object is? Whatsoever of
+faculty a man&#8217;s mind may have will come out here.
+Is it even of business, a matter to be done? The
+gifted man is he who <i>sees</i> the essential point, and
+leaves all the rest aside as surplusage: it is his
+faculty too, the man of business&#8217;s faculty, that he
+discern the true <i>likeness</i>, not the false superficial
+one, of the thing he has got to work in. And how
+much of <i>morality</i> is in the kind of insight we get
+of anything; &#8216;the eye seeing in all things what it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span>
+brought with it the faculty of seeing!&#8217; To the
+mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the
+jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the Painters
+tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal.
+No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of
+any object. In the commonest human face there
+lies more than Raphael will take away with him.</p>
+
+<p>Dante&#8217;s painting is not graphic only, brief, true,
+and of a vividness as of fire in dark night; taken on
+the wider scale, it is everyway noble, and the outcome
+of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover,
+what qualities in that! A thing woven as out of
+rainbows, on a ground of eternal black. A small
+flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into our
+very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it
+too: <i>della bella persona, che mi fu tolta</i>; and how,
+even in the Pit of woe, it is a solace that <i>he</i> will
+never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these
+<i>alti guai</i>. And the racking winds, in that <i>aer bruno</i>,
+whirl them away again, to wail for ever!&mdash;Strange
+to think: Dante was the friend of this poor Francesca&#8217;s
+father; Francesca herself may have sat upon
+the Poet&#8217;s knee, as a bright innocent little child.
+Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigour of law: it is
+so Nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that
+she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his
+<i>Divine Comedy&#8217;s</i> being a poor splenetic impotent
+terrestrial libel; putting those into Hell whom he
+could not be avenged upon on earth! I suppose if
+ever pity, tender as a mother&#8217;s, was in the heart
+of any man, it was in Dante&#8217;s. But a man who does
+not know rigour cannot pity either. His very pity
+will be cowardly, egoistic,&mdash;sentimentality, or little
+better. I know not in the world an affection equal
+to that of Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span>
+longing, pitying love: like the wail of Aeolean harps,
+soft, soft; like a child&#8217;s young heart;&mdash;and then
+that stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings
+of his towards his Beatrice; their meeting together
+in the <i>Paradiso</i>; his gazing in her pure transfigured
+eyes, her that had been purified by death so long,
+separated from him so far:&mdash;one likens it to the
+gong of angels; it is among the purest utterances
+of affection, perhaps the very purest, that ever came
+out of a human soul.</p>
+
+<p>For the <i>intense</i> Dante is intense in all things; he
+has got into the essence of all. His intellectual insight
+as painter, on occasion too as reasoner, is but the
+result of all other sorts of intensity. Morally great,
+above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of
+all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his
+love;&mdash;as indeed, what are they but the <i>inverse</i> or
+<i>converse</i> of his love? &#8216;<i>A Dio spiacenti, ed a&#8217; nemici
+sui</i>, Hateful to God and to the enemies of God:&#8217;
+lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and
+aversion; &#8216;<i>Non ragionam di lor</i>, We will not speak
+of <i>them</i>, look only and pass.&#8217; Or think of this:
+&#8216;They have not the <i>hope</i> to die, <i>Non han speranza
+di morte</i>.&#8217; One day, it had risen sternly benign on
+the scathed heart of Dante, that he, wretched,
+never-resting, worn as he was, would full surely <i>die</i>;
+&#8216;that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die.&#8217;
+Such words are in this man. For rigour, earnestness
+and depth, he is not to be paralleled in the modern
+world; to seek his parallel we must go into the
+Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets
+there.</p>
+
+<p>I do not agree with much modern criticism, in
+greatly preferring the <i>Inferno</i> to the two other parts
+of the Divine <i>Commedia</i>. Such preference belongs,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span>
+I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and is
+like to be a transient feeling. The <i>Purgatorio</i> and
+<i>Paradiso</i>, especially the former, one would almost
+say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble
+thing that <i>Purgatorio</i>, &#8216;Mountain of Purification&#8217;;
+an emblem of the noblest conception of that age.
+If Sin is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous,
+awful, yet in Repentance too is man purified;
+Repentance is the grand Christian act. It is beautiful
+how Dante works it out. The <i>tremolar dell&#8217;
+onde</i>, that &#8216;trembling&#8217; of the ocean-waves, under
+the first pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on
+the wandering Two, is as the type of an altered
+mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope,
+if in company still with heavy sorrow. The obscure
+sojourn of daemons and reprobate is under foot;
+a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and
+higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. &#8216;Pray for
+me,&#8217; the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to
+him. &#8216;Tell my Giovanna to pray for me,&#8217; my
+daughter Giovanna; &#8216;I think her mother loves me
+no more!&#8217; They toil painfully up by that winding
+steep, &#8216;bent-down like corbels of a building,&#8217; some
+of them,&mdash;crushed together so &#8216;for the sin of pride&#8217;;
+yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons, they
+shall have reached the top, which is Heaven&#8217;s gate,
+and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The
+joy too of all, when one has prevailed; the whole
+Mountain shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise
+rises, when one soul has perfected repentance, and
+got its sin and misery left behind! I call all this
+a noble embodiment of a true noble thought.</p>
+
+<p>But indeed the Three compartments mutually
+support one another, are indispensable to one
+another. The <i>Paradiso</i>, a kind of inarticulate music<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span>
+to me, is the redeeming side of the <i>Inferno</i>; the
+<i>Inferno</i> without it were untrue. All three make up
+the true Unseen World, as figured in the Christianity
+of the Middle Ages; a thing for ever memorable,
+for ever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was
+perhaps delineated in no human soul with such
+depth of veracity as in this of Dante&#8217;s; a man <i>sent</i>
+to sing it, to keep it long memorable. Very notable
+with what brief simplicity he passes out of the
+every-day reality, into the Invisible one; and in
+the second or third stanza, we find ourselves in the
+World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among things
+palpable, indubitable! To Dante they <i>were</i> so;
+the real world, as it is called, and its facts, was
+but the threshold to an infinitely higher Fact of a
+World. At bottom, the one was as <i>preter</i>natural
+as the other. Has not each man a soul? He will
+not only be a spirit, but is one. To the earnest
+Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes it, sees
+it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity,
+I say again, is the saving merit, now as always.</p>
+
+<p>Dante&#8217;s Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol
+withal, an emblematic representation of his Belief
+about this Universe:&mdash;some Critic in a future age,
+like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who
+has ceased altogether to think as Dante did, may
+find this too all an &#8216;Allegory&#8217;, perhaps an idle
+Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest,
+of the soul of Christianity. It expresses, as
+in huge world-wide architectural emblems, how the
+Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the two
+polar elements of this Creation, on which it all
+turns; that these two differ not by <i>preferability</i> of
+one to the other, but by incompatibility absolute
+and infinite; that the one is excellent and high as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span>
+light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as
+Gehenna and the Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice,
+yet with Penitence, with everlasting Pity,&mdash;all
+Christianism, as Dante and the Middle Ages had it,
+is emblemed there. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged
+the other day, with what entire truth of purpose;
+how unconscious of any embleming! Hell, Purgatory,
+Paradise: these things were not fashioned
+as emblems; was there, in our Modern European
+Mind, any thought at all of their being emblems!
+Were they not indubitable awful facts; the whole
+heart of man taking them for practically true, all
+Nature everywhere confirming them? So is it
+always in these things. Men do not believe an
+Allegory. The future Critic, whatever his new
+thought may be, who considers this of Dante to
+have been all got-up as an Allegory, will commit
+one sore mistake!&mdash;Paganism we recognized as
+a veracious expression of the earnest awe-struck
+feeling of man towards the Universe; veracious,
+true once, and still not without worth for us. But
+mark here the difference of Paganism and Christianism;
+one great difference. Paganism emblemed
+chiefly the Operations of Nature; the destinies,
+efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and
+men in this world; Christianism emblemed the Law
+of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was
+for the sensuous nature: a rude helpless utterance
+of the <i>first</i> Thought of men,&mdash;the chief recognized
+virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other
+was not for the sensuous nature, but for the moral.
+What a progress is here, if in that one respect only!&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<p class="newsection">And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent
+centuries, in a very strange way, found a voice.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span>
+The <i>Divina Commedia</i> is of Dante&#8217;s writing; yet
+in truth <i>it</i> belongs to ten Christian centuries, only
+the finishing of it is Dante&#8217;s. So always. The
+craftsman there, the smith with that metal of his,
+with these tools, with these cunning methods,&mdash;how
+little of all he does is properly <i>his</i> work! All
+past inventive men work there with him;&mdash;as
+indeed with all of us, in all things. Dante is the
+spokesman of the Middle Ages; the Thought they
+lived by stands here, in everlasting music. These
+sublime ideas of his, terrible and beautiful, are the
+fruit of the Christian Meditation of all the good men
+who had gone before him. Precious they; but also
+is not he precious? Much, had not he spoken, would
+have been dumb; not dead, yet living voiceless.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, is it not an utterance, this mystic
+Song, at once of one of the greatest human souls,
+and of the highest thing that Europe had hitherto
+realized for itself? Christianism, as Dante sings it,
+is another than Paganism in the rude Norse mind;
+another than &#8216;Bastard Christianism&#8217; half articulately
+spoken in the Arab desert, seven hundred
+years before!&mdash;The noblest <i>idea</i> made <i>real</i> hitherto
+among men, is sung, and emblemed forth abidingly,
+by one of the noblest men. In the one sense and in
+the other, are we not right glad to possess it? As
+I calculate, it may last yet for long thousands of years.
+For the thing that is uttered from the inmost parts
+of a man&#8217;s soul, differs altogether from what is
+uttered by the outer part. The outer is of the day,
+under the empire of mode; the outer passes away,
+in swift endless changes; the inmost is the same
+yesterday, to-day, and for ever. True souls, in all
+generations of the world, who look on this Dante,
+will find a brotherhood in him; the deep sincerity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span>
+of his thoughts, his woes and hopes, will speak likewise
+to their sincerity; they will feel that this
+Dante too was a brother. Napoleon in Saint-Helena
+is charmed with the genial veracity of old Homer.
+The oldest Hebrew Prophet, under a vesture the
+most diverse from ours, does yet, because he speaks
+from the heart of man, speak to all men&#8217;s hearts.
+It is the one sole secret of continuing long memorable.
+Dante, for depth of sincerity, is like an antique
+Prophet too; his words, like theirs, come from his
+very heart. One need not wonder if it were predicted
+that his Poem might be the most enduring
+thing our Europe has yet made; for nothing so
+endures as a truly spoken word. All cathedrals,
+pontificalities, brass and stone, and outer arrangement
+never so lasting, are brief in comparison to an
+unfathomable heart-song like this: one feels as if
+it might survive, still of importance to men, when
+these had all sunk into new irrecognizable combinations,
+and had ceased individually to be.
+Europe has made much; great cities, great empires,
+encyclopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion and practice:
+but it has made little of the class of Dante&#8217;s
+Thought. Homer yet <i>is</i>, veritably present face to
+face with every open soul of us; and Greece, where
+is <i>it</i>? Desolate for thousands of years; away,
+vanished; a bewildered heap of stones and rubbish,
+the life and existence of it all gone. Like a dream;
+like the dust of King Agamemnon! Greece was;
+Greece, except in the <i>words</i> it spoke, is not.</p>
+
+<p>The uses of this Dante? We will not say much
+about his &#8216;uses&#8217;. A human soul who has once got
+into that primal element of <i>Song</i>, and sung forth
+fitly somewhat therefrom, has worked in the <i>depths</i>
+of our existence; feeding through long times the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span>
+life-<i>roots</i> of all excellent human things whatsoever,&mdash;in
+a way that &#8216;utilities&#8217; will not succeed well in
+calculating! We will not estimate the Sun by the
+quantity of gas-light it saves us; Dante shall be
+invaluable, or of no value. One remark I may make:
+the contrast in this respect between the Hero-Poet
+and the Hero-Prophet. In a hundred years,
+Mahomet, as we saw, had his Arabians at Grenada
+and at Delhi; Dante&#8217;s Italians seem to be yet very
+much where they were. Shall we say, then, Dante&#8217;s
+effect on the world was small in comparison? Not
+so: his arena is far more restricted; but also it
+is far nobler, clearer;&mdash;perhaps not less but more
+important. Mahomet speaks to great masses of
+men, in the coarse dialect adapted to such; a dialect
+filled with inconsistencies, crudities, follies: on the
+great masses alone can he act, and there with good
+and with evil strangely blended. Dante speaks to
+the noble, the pure and great, in all times and places.
+Neither does he grow obsolete, as the other does.
+Dante burns as a pure star, fixed there in the firmament,
+at which the great and the high of all ages
+kindle themselves: he is the possession of all the
+chosen of the world for uncounted time. Dante,
+one calculates, may long survive Mahomet. In this
+way the balance may be made straight again.</p>
+
+<p>But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their
+effect on the world by what <i>we</i> can judge of their
+effect there, that a man and his work are measured.
+Effect? Influence? Utility? Let a man <i>do</i> his
+work; the fruit of it is the care of Another than he.
+It will grow its own fruit; and whether embodied
+in Caliph Thrones and Arabian Conquests, so that
+it &#8216;fills all Morning and Evening Newspapers&#8217;, and
+all Histories, which are a kind of distilled Newspapers;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span>
+or not embodied so at all;&mdash;what matters
+that? That is not the real fruit of it! The Arabian
+Caliph, in so far only as he did something, was
+something. If the great Cause of Man, and Man&#8217;s
+work in God&#8217;s Earth, got no furtherance from the
+Arabian Caliph, then no matter how many scimitars
+he drew, how many gold piastres pocketed, and
+what uproar and blaring he made in this world,&mdash;<i>he</i>
+was but a loud-sounding inanity and futility;
+at bottom, he <i>was</i> not at all. Let us honour the
+great empire of <i>Silence</i>, once more! The boundless
+treasury which we do <i>not</i> jingle in our pockets, or
+count up and present before men! It is perhaps,
+of all things, the usefulest for each of us to do, in
+these loud times.&mdash;&nbsp;&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<p class="newsection">As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world
+to embody musically the Religion of the Middle Ages,
+the Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner Life;
+so Shakespeare, we may say, embodies for us the
+Outer Life of our Europe as developed then, its
+chivalries, courtesies, humours, ambitions, what
+practical way of thinking, acting, looking at the
+world, men then had. As in Homer we may still
+construe Old Greece; so in Shakespeare and Dante,
+after thousands of years, what our Modern Europe
+was, in Faith and in Practice, will still be legible.
+Dante has given us the Faith or soul; Shakespeare,
+in a not less noble way, has given us the Practice
+or body. This latter also we were to have; a man
+was sent for it, the man Shakespeare. Just when
+that chivalry way of life had reached its last finish,
+and was on the point of breaking down into slow
+or swift dissolution, as we now see it everywhere,
+this other sovereign Poet, with his seeing eye, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span>
+his perennial singing voice, was sent to take note
+of it, to give long-enduring record of it. Two fit
+men: Dante, deep, fierce as the central fire of the
+world; Shakespeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as the
+Sun, the upper light of the world. Italy produced
+the one world-voice; we English had the honour
+of producing the other.</p>
+
+<p>Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident,
+this man came to us. I think always, so great, quiet,
+complete and self-sufficing is this Shakespeare, had
+the Warwickshire Squire not prosecuted him for
+deer-stealing, we had perhaps never heard of him
+as a Poet! The woods and skies, the rustic Life of
+Man in Stratford there, had been enough for this
+man! But indeed that strange outbudding of our
+whole English Existence, which we call the Elizabethan
+Era, did not it too come as of its own accord?
+The &#8216;Tree Igdrasil&#8217; buds and withers by its own
+laws,&mdash;too deep for our scanning. Yet it does bud
+and wither, and every bough and leaf of it is there,
+by fixed eternal laws; not a Sir Thomas Lucy but
+comes at the hour fit for him. Curious, I say, and
+not sufficiently considered: how everything does
+co-operate with all; not a leaf rotting on the highway
+but is indissoluble portion of solar and stellar
+systems; no thought, word or act of man but has
+sprung withal out of all men, and works sooner or
+later, recognizably or irrecognizably, on all men!
+It is all a Tree: circulation of sap and influences,
+mutual communication of every minutest leaf with
+the lowest talon of a root, with every other greatest
+and minutest portion of the whole. The Tree
+Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the Kingdoms
+of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread
+the highest Heaven!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>In some sense it may be said that this glorious
+Elizabethan Era with its Shakespeare, as the outcome
+and flowerage of all which had preceded it,
+is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle
+Ages. The Christian Faith, which was the theme
+of Dante&#8217;s Song, had produced this Practical Life
+which Shakespeare was to sing. For Religion then,
+as it now and always is, was the soul of Practice;
+the primary vital fact in men&#8217;s life. And remark
+here, as rather curious, that Middle-Age Catholicism
+was abolished, so far as Acts of Parliament could
+abolish it, before Shakespeare, the noblest product
+of it, made his appearance. He did make his appearance
+nevertheless. Nature at her own time, with
+Catholicism or what else might be necessary, sent
+him forth; taking small thought of Acts of Parliament.
+King-Henrys, Queen-Elizabeths go their
+way; and Nature too goes hers. Acts of Parliament,
+on the whole, are small, notwithstanding the noise
+they make. What Act of Parliament, debate at
+St. Stephens, on the hustings or elsewhere, was it
+that brought this Shakespeare into being? No
+dining at Freemasons&#8217; Tavern, opening subscription-lists,
+selling of shares, and infinite other jangling and
+true or false endeavouring! This Elizabethan Era,
+and all its nobleness and blessedness, came without
+proclamation, preparation of ours. Priceless Shakespeare
+was the free gift of Nature; given altogether
+silently;&mdash;received altogether silently, as if it had
+been a thing of little account. And yet, very literally,
+it is a priceless thing. One should look at that side
+of matters too.</p>
+
+<p>Of this Shakespeare of ours, perhaps the opinion
+one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed
+is, in fact, the right one; I think the best judgement<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span>
+not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is
+slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakespeare
+is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect
+who, in our recorded world, has left record of
+himself in the way of literature. On the whole, I
+know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of
+thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any
+other man. Such a calmness of depth; placid joyous
+strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his
+so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea!
+It has been said, that in the constructing of Shakespeare&#8217;s
+Dramas there is, apart from all other
+&#8216;faculties&#8217; as they are called, an understanding
+manifested, equal to that in Bacon&#8217;s <i>Novum Organum</i>.
+That is true; and it is not a truth that
+strikes every one. It would become more apparent
+if we tried, any of us for himself, how, out of Shakespeare&#8217;s
+dramatic materials, <i>we</i> could fashion such
+a result! The built house seems all so fit,&mdash;everyway
+as it should be, as if it came there by its
+own law and the nature of things,&mdash;we forget the
+rude disorderly quarry it was shaped from. The
+very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself had
+made it, hides the builder&#8217;s merit. Perfect, more
+perfect than any other man, we may call Shakespeare
+in this: he discerns, knows as by instinct,
+what condition he works under, what his materials
+are, what his own force and its relation to them is.
+It is not a transitory glance of insight that will
+suffice; it is deliberate illumination of the whole
+matter; it is a calmly <i>seeing</i> eye; a great intellect,
+in short. How a man, of some wide thing that he
+has witnessed, will construct a narrative, what kind
+of picture and delineation he will give of it,&mdash;is the
+best measure you could get of what intellect is in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span>
+the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall
+stand prominent; which unessential, fit to be suppressed;
+where is the true <i>beginning</i>, the true
+sequence and ending? To find out this, you task
+the whole force of insight that is in the man. He
+must <i>understand</i> the thing; according to the depth
+of his understanding, will the fitness of his answer
+be. You will try him so. Does like join itself to like;
+does the spirit of method stir in that confusion, so
+that its embroilment becomes order? Can the man
+say, <i>Fiat lux</i>, Let there be light; and out of chaos
+make a world? Precisely as there, is <i>light</i> in himself,
+will he accomplish this.</p>
+
+<p>Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called
+Portrait-painting, delineating of men and things,
+especially of men, that Shakespeare is great. All
+the greatness of the man comes out decisively here.
+It is unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity
+of Shakespeare. The thing he looks at
+reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost
+heart and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in
+light before him, so that he discerns the perfect
+structure of it. Creative, we said: poetic creation,
+what is this too but <i>seeing</i> the thing sufficiently?
+The <i>word</i> that will describe the thing, follows of
+itself from such clear intense sight of the thing.
+And is not Shakespeare&#8217;s <i>morality</i>, his valour, candour,
+tolerance, truthfulness; his whole victorious
+strength and greatness, which can triumph over
+such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the
+world! No <i>twisted</i>, poor convex-concave mirror,
+reflecting all objects with its own convexities and
+concavities; a perfectly <i>level</i> mirror;&mdash;that is to
+say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly
+related to all things and men, a good man. It is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span>
+truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes in
+all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an Othello,
+a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us
+in their round completeness; loving, just, the equal
+brother of all. <i>Novum Organum</i>, and all the intellect
+you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order;
+earthy, material, poor in comparison with this.
+Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost
+nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the
+days of Shakespeare, reminds me of it. Of him too
+you say that he <i>saw</i> the object; you may say what
+he himself says of Shakespeare: &#8216;His characters are
+like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal;
+they show you the hour like others, and the inward
+mechanism also is all visible.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner
+harmony of things; what Nature meant, what
+musical idea Nature has wrapped up in these often
+rough embodiments. Something she did mean.
+To the seeing eye that something were discernible.
+Are they base, miserable things? You can laugh
+over them, you can weep over them; you can in
+some way or other genially relate yourself to them;&mdash;you
+can, at lowest, hold your peace about them,
+turn away your own and others&#8217; face from them,
+till the hour come for practically exterminating and
+extinguishing them! At bottom, it is the Poet&#8217;s
+first gift, as it is all men&#8217;s, that he have intellect
+enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in
+word; or failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet
+in act. Whether he write at all; and if so, whether
+in prose or in verse, will depend on accidents: who
+knows on what extremely trivial accidents,&mdash;perhaps
+on his having had a singing-master, on his being
+taught to sing in his boyhood! But the faculty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span>
+which enables him to discern the inner heart of
+things, and the harmony that dwells there (for what
+soever exists has a harmony in the heart of it, or it
+would not hold together and exist), is not the result
+of habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature herself;
+the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort
+soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first
+of all, <i>See</i>. If you cannot do that, it is of no use to
+keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities
+against each other, and <i>name</i> yourself a Poet; there
+is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or
+verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope.
+The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when
+they brought him a new pupil, &#8216;But are ye sure he&#8217;s
+<i>not a dunce</i>?&#8217; Why, really one might ask the same
+thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever
+function; and consider it as the one inquiry
+needful: Are ye sure he&#8217;s not a dunce? There is,
+in this world, no other entirely fatal person.</p>
+
+<p>For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells
+in a man is a correct measure of the man. If called
+to define Shakespeare&#8217;s faculty, I should say
+superiority of Intellect, and think I had included
+all under that. What indeed are faculties? We
+talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things
+separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination,
+fancy, &amp;c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That
+is a capital error. Then again, we hear of a man&#8217;s
+&#8216;intellectual nature&#8217;, and of his &#8216;moral nature&#8217;, as
+if these again were divisible, and existed apart.
+Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such
+forms of utterance; we must speak, I am aware,
+in that way, if we are to speak at all. But words
+ought not to harden into things for us. It seems to
+me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span>
+radically falsified thereby. We ought to know
+withal, and to keep for ever in mind, that these
+divisions are at bottom but <i>names</i>; that man&#8217;s
+spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in
+him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what
+we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so
+forth, are but different figures of the same Power
+of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each
+other, physiognomically related; that if we knew
+one of them, we might know all of them. Morality
+itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what
+is this but another <i>side</i> of the one vital Force whereby
+he is and works? All that a man does is physiognomical
+of him. You may see how a man would
+fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or
+want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in
+the opinion he has formed, no less than in the stroke
+he strikes. He is <i>one</i>; and preaches the same Self
+abroad in all these ways.</p>
+
+<p>Without hands a man might have feet, and could
+still walk: but, consider it,&mdash;without morality,
+intellect were impossible for him; a thoroughly
+immoral <i>man</i> could not know anything at all! To
+know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must
+first <i>love</i> the thing, sympathize with it: that is, be
+<i>virtuously</i> related to it. If he have not the justice
+to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the
+courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every
+turn, how shall he know? His virtues, all of them,
+will lie recorded in his knowledge. Nature, with
+her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the
+pusillanimous for ever a sealed book: what such
+can know of Nature is mean, superficial, small; for
+the uses of the day merely.&mdash;But does not the very
+Fox know something of Nature? Exactly so: it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span>
+knows where the geese lodge! The human Reynard,
+very frequent everywhere in the world, what more
+does he know but this and the like of this? Nay,
+it should be considered too, that if the Fox had not
+a certain vulpine <i>morality</i>, he could not even know
+where the geese were, or get at the geese! If he
+spent his time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on
+his own misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and
+other Foxes, and so forth; and had not courage,
+promptitude, practicality, and other suitable vulpine
+gifts and graces, he would catch no geese. We
+may say of the Fox too, that his morality and insight
+are of the same dimensions; different faces of the
+same internal unity of vulpine life!&mdash;These things
+are worth stating; for the contrary of them acts
+with manifold very baleful perversion, in this time:
+what limitations, modifications they require, your
+own candour will supply.</p>
+
+<p>If I say, therefore, that Shakespeare is the greatest
+of Intellects, I have said all concerning him. But
+there is more in Shakespeare&#8217;s intellect than we have
+yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect;
+there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware
+of. Novalis beautifully remarks of him, that those
+Dramas of his are Products of Nature too, deep as
+Nature herself. I find a great truth in this saying.
+Shakespeare&#8217;s Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth
+of it is not there by plan or precontrivance. It
+grows up from the deeps of Nature, through this
+noble sincere soul, who is a voice of Nature. The
+latest generations of men will find new meanings in
+Shakespeare, new elucidations of their own human
+being; &#8216;new harmonies with the infinite structure
+of the Universe; concurrences with later ideas,
+affinities with the higher powers and senses of man.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span>&#8217;
+This well deserves meditating. It is Nature&#8217;s highest
+award to a true simple great soul, that he get thus
+to be <i>a part of herself</i>. Such a man&#8217;s works, whatsoever
+he with utmost conscious exertion and forethought
+shall accomplish, grow up withal <i>un</i>consciously,
+from the unknown deeps in him;&mdash;as the
+oak-tree grows from the Earth&#8217;s bosom, as the
+mountains and waters shape themselves; with a
+symmetry grounded on Nature&#8217;s own laws, conformable
+to all Truth whatsoever. How much in
+Shakespeare lies hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles
+known to himself; much that was not known at all,
+not speakable at all: like <i>roots</i>, like sap and forces
+working underground! Speech is great; but Silence
+is greater.</p>
+
+<p>Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable.
+I will not blame Dante for his misery: it is as battle
+without victory; but true battle,&mdash;the first, indispensable
+thing. Yet I call Shakespeare greater than
+Dante, in that he fought truly, and did conquer.
+Doubt it not, he had his own sorrows: those
+<i>Sonnets</i> of his will even testify expressly in what
+deep waters he had waded, and swum struggling
+for his life;&mdash;as what man like him ever failed to
+have to do? It seems to me a heedless notion,
+our common one, that he sat like a bird on the
+bough; and sang forth, free and offhand, never
+knowing the troubles of other men. Not so; with
+no man is it so. How could a man travel forward
+from rustic deer-poaching to such tragedy-writing,
+and not fall in with sorrows by the way? Or, still
+better, how could a man delineate a Hamlet, a
+Coriolanus, a Macbeth, so many suffering heroic
+hearts, if his own heroic heart had never suffered?&mdash;And
+now, in contrast with all this, observe his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span>
+mirthfulness, his genuine overflowing love of
+laughter! You would say, in no point does he
+<i>exaggerate</i> but only in laughter. Fiery objurgations,
+words that pierce and burn, are to be found
+in Shakespeare; yet he is always in measure here;
+never what Johnson would remark as a specially
+&#8216;good hater&#8217;. But his laughter seems to pour
+from him in floods; he heaps all manner of ridiculous
+nicknames on the butt he is bantering,
+tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of horse-play;
+you would say, roars and laughs. And then, if not
+always the finest, it is always a genial laughter.
+Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty;
+never. No man who <i>can</i> laugh, what we call
+laughing, will laugh at these things. It is some
+poor character only <i>desiring</i> to laugh, and have
+the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means
+sympathy; good laughter is not &#8216;the crackling
+of thorns under the pot&#8217;. Even at stupidity and
+pretension this Shakespeare does not laugh otherwise
+than genially. Dogberry and Verges tickle
+our very hearts; and we dismiss them covered
+with explosions of laughter: but we like the poor
+fellows only the better for our laughing; and hope
+they will get on well there, and continue Presidents
+of the City-watch.&mdash;Such laughter, like sunshine
+on the deep sea, is very beautiful to me.</p>
+
+
+<p class="newsection">We have no room to speak of Shakespeare&#8217;s
+individual works; though perhaps there is much
+still waiting to be said on that head. Had we,
+for instance, all his plays reviewed as <i>Hamlet</i>, in
+<i>Wilhelm Meister</i>, is! A thing which might, one
+day, be done. August Wilhelm Schlegel has a
+remark on his Historical Plays, <i>Henry Fifth</i> and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span>
+the others, which is worth remembering. He calls
+them a kind of National Epic. Marlborough, you
+recollect, said, he knew no English History but
+what he had learned from Shakespeare. There
+are really, if we look to it, few as memorable
+Histories. The great salient points are admirably
+seized; all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic
+coherence; it is, as Schlegel says, <i>epic</i>;&mdash;as indeed
+all delineation by a great thinker will be. There
+are right beautiful things in those Pieces, which
+indeed together form one beautiful thing. That
+battle of Agincourt strikes me as one of the most
+perfect things, in its sort, we anywhere have of
+Shakespeare&#8217;s. The description of the two hosts:
+the worn-out, jaded English; the dread hour, big
+with destiny, when the battle shall begin; and
+then that deathless valour: &#8216;Ye good yeomen,
+whose limbs were made in England!&#8217; There is
+a noble Patriotism in it,&mdash;far other than the
+&#8216;indifference&#8217; you sometimes hear ascribed to
+Shakespeare. A true English heart breathes,
+calm and strong, through the whole business; not
+boisterous, protrusive; all the better for that.
+There is a sound in it like the ring of steel. This
+man too had a right stroke in him, had it come
+to that!</p>
+
+<p>But I will say, of Shakespeare&#8217;s works generally,
+that we have no full impress of him there; even
+as full as we have of many men. His works are
+so many windows, through which we see a glimpse
+of the world that was in him. All his works seem,
+comparatively speaking, cursory, imperfect, written
+under cramping circumstances; giving only here
+and there a note of the full utterance of the man.
+Passages there are that come upon you like splendour<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span>
+out of Heaven; bursts of radiance, illuminating
+the very heart of the thing: you say, &#8216;That
+is <i>true</i>, spoken once and forever; wheresoever and
+whensoever there is an open human soul, that will
+be recognized as true!&#8217; Such bursts, however,
+make us feel that the surrounding matter is not
+radiant; that it is, in part, temporary, conventional.
+Alas, Shakespeare had to write for the
+Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush
+itself, as it could, into that and no other mould.
+It was with him, then, as it is with us all. No man
+works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot
+set his own free Thought before us; but his
+Thought as he could translate it into the stone
+that was given, with the tools that were given.
+<i>Disjecta membra</i> are all that we find of any Poet,
+or of any man.</p>
+
+
+<p class="newsection">Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakespeare
+may recognize that he too was a <i>Prophet</i>, in his
+way; of an insight analogous to the Prophetic,
+though he took it up in another strain. Nature
+seemed to this man also divine; <i>un</i>speakable,
+deep as Tophet, high as Heaven: &#8216;We are such
+stuff as Dreams are made of!&#8217; That scroll in
+Westminster Abbey, which few read with understanding,
+is of the depth of any Seer. But the
+man sang; did not preach, except musically. We
+called Dante the melodious Priest of Middle-Age
+Catholicism. May we not call Shakespeare the
+still more melodious Priest of a <i>true</i> Catholicism,
+the &#8216;Universal Church&#8217; of the Future and of all
+times? No narrow superstition, harsh asceticism,
+intolerance, fanatical fierceness or perversion: a
+Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousandfold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span>
+hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all
+Nature; which let all men worship as they can!
+We may say without offence, that there rises
+a kind of universal Psalm out of this Shakespeare
+too; not unfit to make itself heard among the still
+more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony with
+these, if we understood them, but in unison!&mdash;I
+cannot call this Shakespeare a &#8216;Sceptic&#8217;, as some
+do; his indifference to the creeds and theological
+quarrels of his time misleading them. No: neither
+unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism;
+no sceptic, though he says little about his
+Faith. Such &#8216;indifference&#8217; was the fruit of his
+greatness withal: his whole heart was in his own
+grand sphere of worship (we may call it such);
+these other controversies, vitally important to
+other men, were not vital to him.</p>
+
+<p>But call it worship, call it what you will, is it
+not a right glorious thing and set of things, this
+that Shakespeare has brought us? For myself,
+I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness
+in the fact of such a man being sent into this
+Earth. Is he not an eye to us all; a blessed
+heaven-sent Bringer of Light?&mdash;And, at bottom,
+was it not perhaps far better that this Shakespeare,
+everyway an unconscious man, was <i>conscious</i> of
+no Heavenly message? He did not feel, like
+Mahomet, because he saw into those internal
+Splendours, that he specially was the &#8216;Prophet
+of God&#8217;: and was he not greater than Mahomet
+in that? Greater; and also, if we compute
+strictly, as we did in Dante&#8217;s case, more successful.
+It was intrinsically an error that notion of
+Mahomet&#8217;s, of his supreme Prophethood; and has
+come down to us inextricably involved in error to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span>
+this day; dragging along with it such a coil of
+fables, impurities, intolerances, as makes it a questionable
+step for me here and now to say, as I have
+done, that Mahomet was a true Speaker at all, and
+not rather an ambitious charlatan, perversity, and
+simulacrum, no Speaker, but a Babbler! Even
+in Arabia, as I compute, Mahomet will have
+exhausted himself and become obsolete, while this
+Shakespeare, this Dante may still be young;&mdash;while
+this Shakespeare may still pretend to be a
+Priest of Mankind, of Arabia as of other places,
+for unlimited periods to come! Compared with
+any speaker or singer one knows, even with
+Aeschylus or Homer, why should he not, for
+veracity and universality, last like them? He is
+<i>sincere</i> as they; reaches deep down like them, to
+the universal and perennial. But as for Mahomet,
+I think it had been better for him <i>not</i> to be so
+conscious! Alas, poor Mahomet; all that he was
+<i>conscious</i> of was a mere error; a futility and
+triviality,&mdash;as indeed such ever is. The truly great
+in him too was the unconscious: that he was
+a wild Arab lion of the desert, and did speak out
+with that great thunder-voice of his, not by words
+which he <i>thought</i> to be great, but by actions, by
+feelings, by a history which <i>were</i> great! His Koran
+has become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity; we
+do not believe, like him, that God wrote that!
+The Great Man here too, as always, is a Force of
+Nature: whatsoever is truly great in him springs
+up from the <i>in</i>articulate deeps.</p>
+
+
+<p class="newsection">Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant,
+who rose to be Manager of a Playhouse, so that he
+could live without begging; whom the Earl of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span>
+Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom
+Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to him, was for
+sending to the Treadmill! We did not account
+him a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;&mdash;on
+which point there were much to be said. But I
+will say rather, or repeat: In spite of the sad state
+Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this
+Shakespeare has actually become among us.
+Which Englishman we ever made, in this land of
+ours, which million of Englishmen, would we not
+give up rather than the Stratford Peasant? There
+is no regiment of highest Dignitaries that we would
+sell him for. He is the grandest thing we have yet
+done. For our honour among foreign nations, as
+an ornament to our English Household, what item
+is there that we would not surrender rather than
+him? Consider now, if they asked us, Will you
+give up your Indian Empire or your Shakespeare,
+you English; never have had any Indian Empire,
+or never have had any Shakespeare? Really it
+were a grave question. Official persons would
+answer doubtless in official language; but we, for
+our part too, should not we be forced to answer:
+Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot
+do without Shakespeare! Indian Empire will go,
+at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare does
+not go, he lasts for ever with us; we cannot give
+up our Shakespeare!</p>
+
+<p>Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering
+him merely as a real, marketable, tangibly-useful
+possession. England, before long, this Island of
+ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English:
+in America, in New Holland, east and west to the
+very Antipodes, there will be a Saxondom covering
+great spaces of the Globe. And now, what is it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span>
+that can keep all these together into virtually one
+Nation, so that they do not fall out and fight, but
+live at peace, in brotherlike intercourse, helping
+one another? This is justly regarded as the
+greatest practical problem, the thing all manner
+of sovereignties and governments are here to
+accomplish: what is it that will accomplish this?
+Acts of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers
+cannot. America is parted from us, so far as Parliament
+could part it. Call it not fantastic, for
+there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is an
+English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament
+or combination of Parliaments, can dethrone!
+This King Shakespeare, does not he shine, in
+crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest,
+gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; <i>in</i>destructible;
+really more valuable in that point of view,
+than any other means or appliance whatsoever?
+We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the
+Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence.
+From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever,
+under what sort of Parish-Constable soever,
+English men and women are, they will say to
+one another: &#8216;Yes, this Shakespeare is ours: we
+produced him, we speak and think by him; we
+are of one blood and kind with him.&#8217; The most
+common-sense politician, too, if he pleases, may
+think of that.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that
+it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man
+who will speak forth melodiously what the heart
+of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies
+dismembered, scattered asunder, not appearing in
+any protocol or treaty as a unity at all; yet the
+noble Italy is actually <i>one</i>: Italy produced its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span>
+Dante: Italy can speak! The Czar of all the
+Russias, he is strong, with so many bayonets,
+Cossacks, and cannons: and does a great feat in
+keeping such a tract of Earth politically together;
+but he cannot yet speak. Something great in him,
+but it is a dumb greatness. He has had no voice
+of genius, to be heard of all men and times. He
+must learn to speak. He is a great dumb monster
+hitherto. His cannons and Cossacks will all
+have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante&#8217;s
+voice is still audible. The Nation that has a
+Dante is bound together as no dumb Russia can
+be.&mdash;We must here end what we had to say of
+the <i>Hero-Poet</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="JAMES_HENRY_LEIGH_HUNT" id="JAMES_HENRY_LEIGH_HUNT"></a>JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1784-1859</h3>
+
+<h3>AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION<br />
+
+WHAT IS POETRY? (1844)</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Poetry</span>, strictly and artistically so called, that
+is to say, considered not merely as poetic feeling,
+which is more or less shared by all the world, but
+as the operation of that feeling, such as we see it in
+the poet&#8217;s book, is the utterance of a passion for
+truth, beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating
+its conceptions by imagination and fancy,
+and modulating its language on the principle of
+variety in uniformity. Its means are whatever
+the universe contains; and its ends, pleasure and
+exaltation. Poetry stands between nature and
+convention, keeping alive among us the enjoyment
+of the external and the spiritual world: it has
+constituted the most enduring fame of nations;
+and, next to Love and Beauty, which are its
+parents, is the greatest proof to man of the pleasure
+to be found in all things, and of the probable riches
+of infinitude.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry is a passion,<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> because it seeks the deepest
+impressions; and because it must undergo, in
+order to convey, them.</p>
+
+<p>It is a passion for truth, because without truth
+the impression would be false or defective.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span></p>
+<p>It is a passion for beauty, because its office is to
+exalt and refine by means of pleasure, and because
+beauty is nothing but the loveliest form of pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>It is a passion for power, because power is impression
+triumphant, whether over the poet, as
+desired by himself, or over the reader, as affected
+by the poet.</p>
+
+<p>It embodies and illustrates its impressions by
+imagination, or images of the objects of which it
+treats, and other images brought in to throw light
+on those objects, in order that it may enjoy and
+impart the feeling of their truth in its utmost conviction
+and affluence.</p>
+
+<p>It illustrates them by fancy, which is a lighter
+play of imagination, or the feeling of analogy
+coming short of seriousness, in order that it may
+laugh with what it loves, and show how it can
+decorate it with fairy ornament.</p>
+
+<p>It modulates what it utters, because in running
+the whole round of beauty it must needs include
+beauty of sound; and because, in the height of
+its enjoyment, it must show the perfection of its
+triumph, and make difficulty itself become part of
+its facility and joy.</p>
+
+<p>And lastly, Poetry shapes this modulation into
+uniformity for its outline, and variety for its parts,
+because it thus realizes the last idea of beauty
+itself, which includes the charm of diversity within
+the flowing round of habit and ease.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry is imaginative passion. The quickest
+and subtlest test of the possession of its essence
+is in expression; the variety of things to be expressed
+shows the amount of its resources; and
+the continuity of the song completes the evidence of
+its strength and greatness. He who has thought,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span>
+feeling, expression, imagination, action, character,
+and continuity, all in the largest amount and
+highest degree, is the greatest poet.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry includes whatsoever of painting can be
+made visible to the mind&#8217;s eye, and whatsoever of
+music can be conveyed by sound and proportion
+without singing or instrumentation. But it far
+surpasses those divine arts in suggestiveness, range,
+and intellectual wealth;&mdash;the first, in expression
+of thought, combination of images, and the triumph
+over space and time; the second, in all that can
+be done by speech, apart from the tones and modulations
+of pure sound. Painting and music, however,
+include all those portions of the gift of poetry
+that can be expressed and heightened by the visible
+and melodious. Painting, in a certain apparent
+manner, is things themselves; music, in a certain
+audible manner, is their very emotion and grace.
+Music and painting are proud to be related to
+poetry, and poetry loves and is proud of them.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry begins where matter of fact or of science
+ceases to be merely such, and to exhibit a further
+truth; that is to say, the connexion it has with
+the world of emotion, and its power to produce
+imaginative pleasure. Inquiring of a gardener, for
+instance, what flower it is we see yonder, he
+answers, &#8216;a lily&#8217;. This is matter of fact. The
+botanist pronounces it to be of the order of
+&#8216;Hexandria Monogynia&#8217;. This is matter of
+science. It is the &#8216;lady&#8217; of the garden, says
+Spenser; and here we begin to have a poetical
+sense of its fairness and grace. It is</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The plant and flower of <i>light</i>,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">says Ben Jonson; and poetry then shows us the
+beauty of the flower in all its mystery and splendour.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If it be asked, how we know perceptions like
+these to be true, the answer is, by the fact of their
+existence&mdash;by the consent and delight of poetic
+readers. And as feeling is the earliest teacher, and
+perception the only final proof, of things the most
+demonstrable by science, so the remotest imaginations
+of the poets may often be found to have the
+closest connexion with matter of fact; perhaps
+might always be so, if the subtlety of our perceptions
+were a match for the causes of them. Consider this
+image of Ben Jonson&#8217;s&mdash;of a lily being the flower
+of light. Light, undecomposed, is white; and as
+the lily is white, and light is white, and whiteness
+itself is nothing <i>but</i> light, the two things, so far, are
+not merely similar, but identical. A poet might
+add, by an analogy drawn from the connexion of
+light and colour, that there is a &#8216;golden dawn&#8217;
+issuing out of the white lily, in the rich yellow of
+the stamens. I have no desire to push this
+similarity farther than it may be worth. Enough
+has been stated to show that, in poetical as in other
+analogies, &#8216;the same feet of Nature&#8217;, as Bacon says,
+may be seen &#8216;treading in different paths&#8217;; and
+that the most scornful, that is to say, dullest
+disciple of fact, should be cautious how he betrays
+the shallowness of his philosophy by discerning no
+poetry in its depths.</p>
+
+<p>But the poet is far from dealing only with these
+subtle and analogical truths. Truth of every kind
+belongs to him, provided it can bud into any kind
+of beauty, or is capable of being illustrated and
+impressed by the poetic faculty. Nay, the simplest
+truth is often so beautiful and impressive of itself,
+that one of the greatest proofs of his genius consists
+in his leaving it to stand alone, illustrated by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span>
+nothing but the light of its own tears or smiles,
+its own wonder, might, or playfulness. Hence the
+complete effect of many a simple passage in our
+old English ballads and romances, and of the passionate
+sincerity in general of the greatest early
+poets, such as Homer and Chaucer, who flourished
+before the existence of a &#8216;literary world&#8217;, and were
+not perplexed by a heap of notions and opinions,
+or by doubts how emotion ought to be expressed.
+The greatest of their successors never write equally
+to the purpose, except when they can dismiss
+everything from their minds but the like simple
+truth. In the beautiful poem of <i>Sir Eger, Sir
+Graham and Sir Gray-Steel</i> (see it in Ellis&#8217;s <i>Specimens</i>,
+or Laing&#8217;s <i>Early Metrical Tales</i>), a knight
+thinks himself disgraced in the eyes of his mistress:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sir Eger said, &#8216;If it be so,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then wot I well I must forgo<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Love-liking, and manhood, all clean!&#8217;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>The water rush&#8217;d out of his een!</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Sir Gray-Steel is killed:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza" style="margin-bottom: 0.5em">
+<span class="i0">Gray-Steel into his death thus thraws<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He <i>walters<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> and the grass up draws;</i><br /></span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza" style="margin-top: 0em; margin-bottom: 0em">
+<span class="i3"><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><span style="padding-right: 1em">*</span><br /></span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza" style="margin-top: 0em">
+<span class="i0"><i>A little while then lay he still</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>(Friends that him saw, liked full ill)</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And bled into his armour bright.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The abode of Chaucer&#8217;s <i>Reeve</i>, or Steward, in the
+<i>Canterbury Tales</i>, is painted in two lines, which
+nobody ever wished longer:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">His wonning<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> was full fair upon an heath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With greeny trees yshadowed was his place.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Every one knows the words of Lear, &#8216;most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span>
+<i>matter-of-fact</i>, most melancholy.&#8217;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">Pray, do not mock me;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I am a very foolish fond old man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fourscore and upwards:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not an hour more, nor less; and, to deal plainly<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I fear I am not in my perfect mind.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is thus, by exquisite pertinence, melody, and
+the implied power of writing with exuberance, if
+need be, that beauty and truth become identical
+in poetry, and that pleasure, or at the very worst,
+a balm in our tears, is drawn out of pain.</p>
+
+<p>It is a great and rare thing, and shows a lovely
+imagination, when the poet can write a commentary,
+as it were, of his own, on such sufficing
+passages of nature, and be thanked for the addition.
+There is an instance of this kind in Warner, an old
+Elizabethan poet, than which I know nothing
+sweeter in the world. He is speaking of Fair
+Rosamond, and of a blow given her by Queen
+Eleanor.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">With that she dash&#8217;d her on the lips,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>So dy&egrave;d double red:</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Hard was the heart that gave the blow,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Soft were those lips that bled</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There are different kinds and degrees of imagination,
+some of them necessary to the formation of
+every true poet, and all of them possessed by the
+greatest. Perhaps they may be enumerated as
+follows:&mdash;First, that which presents to the mind
+any object or circumstance in every-day life; as
+when we imagine a man holding a sword, or looking
+out of a window;&mdash;Second, that which presents
+real, but not every-day circumstances; as King<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span>
+Alfred tending the loaves, or Sir Philip Sidney
+giving up the water to the dying soldier;&mdash;Third,
+that which combines character and events directly
+imitated from real life, with imitative realities of
+its own invention; as the probable parts of the
+histories of Priam and <i>Macbeth</i>, or what may be
+called natural fiction as distinguished from supernatural;&mdash;Fourth,
+that which conjures up things
+and events not to be found in nature; as Homer&#8217;s
+gods, and Shakespeare&#8217;s witches, enchanted horses
+and spears, Ariosto&#8217;s hippogriff, &amp;c.;&mdash;Fifth, that
+which, in order to illustrate or aggravate one image,
+introduces another; sometimes in simile, as when
+Homer compares Apollo descending in his wrath
+at noon-day to the coming of night-time: sometimes
+in metaphor, or simile comprised in a word, as
+in Milton&#8217;s &#8216;motes that <i>people</i> the sunbeams&#8217;;
+sometimes in concentrating into a word the main
+history of any person or thing, past or even future,
+as in the &#8216;starry Galileo&#8217; of Byron, and that
+ghastly foregone conclusion of the epithet &#8216;murdered&#8217;
+applied to the yet living victim in Keats&#8217;s
+story from Boccaccio,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So the two brothers and their <i>murder&#8217;d</i> man<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rode towards fair Florence;&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">sometimes in the attribution of a certain representative
+quality which makes one circumstance
+stand for others; as in Milton&#8217;s grey-fly winding
+its &#8216;<i>sultry</i> horn&#8217;, which epithet contains the heat
+of a summer&#8217;s day;&mdash;Sixth, that which reverses
+this process, and makes a variety of circumstances
+take colour from one, like nature seen with jaundiced
+or glad eyes, or under the influence of storm
+or sunshine; as when in <i>Lycidas</i>, or the Greek<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span>
+pastoral poets, the flowers and the flocks are made
+to sympathize with a man&#8217;s death; or, in the
+Italian poet, the river flowing by the sleeping
+Angelica seems talking of love&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Parea che l&#8217;erba le fiorisse intorno,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>E d&#8217;amor ragionasse quella riva!</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i6"><i>Orlando Innamorato</i>, Canto iii.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping
+Imogen by the very light in the chamber, and the
+reaction of her own beauty upon itself; or in the
+&#8216;witch element&#8217; of the tragedy of <i>Macbeth</i> and the
+May-day night of <i>Faust</i>;&mdash;Seventh, and last, that
+which by a single expression, apparently of the
+vaguest kind, not only meets but surpasses in its
+effect the extremest force of the most particular
+description; as in that exquisite passage of
+Coleridge&#8217;s <i>Christabel</i>, where the unsuspecting
+object of the witch&#8217;s malignity is bidden to go to
+bed:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Quoth Christabel, So let it be!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And as the lady bade, did she.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her gentle limbs did she undress,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And lay down in her loveliness;&mdash;</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music.
+The very smoothness and gentleness of the limbs
+is in the series of the letter <i>l&#8217;s</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing
+that most lovely inclusion of physical beauty in
+moral, neither can I call to mind any instances of
+the imagination that turns accompaniments into
+accessories, superior to those I have alluded to.
+Of the class of comparison, one of the most touching
+(many a tear must it have drawn from parents and
+lovers) is in a stanza which has been copied into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span>
+the <i>Friar of Orders Grey</i>, out of Beaumont and
+Fletcher:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Weep no more, lady, weep no more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thy sorrow is in vain;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>For violets pluck&#8217;d the sweetest showers</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Will ne&#8217;er make grow again.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">And Shakespeare and Milton abound in the very
+grandest; such as Antony&#8217;s likening his changing
+fortunes to the cloud-rack; Lear&#8217;s appeal to the
+old age of the heavens; Satan&#8217;s appearance in the
+horizon, like a fleet &#8216;hanging in the clouds&#8217;; and
+the comparisons of him with the comet and the
+eclipse. Nor unworthy of this glorious company,
+for its extraordinary combination of delicacy and
+vastness, is that enchanting one of Shelley&#8217;s in
+the <i>Adonais</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stains the white radiance of eternity.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">I multiply these particulars in order to impress
+upon the reader&#8217;s mind the great importance of
+imagination in all its phases, as a constituent part
+of the highest poetic faculty.</p>
+
+<p>The happiest instance I remember of imaginative
+metaphor, is Shakespeare&#8217;s moonlight &#8216;sleeping&#8217;
+on a bank; but half his poetry may be said to be
+made up of it, metaphor indeed being the common
+coin of discourse. Of imaginary creatures, none
+out of the pale of mythology and the East are
+equal, perhaps, in point of invention, to Shakespeare&#8217;s
+Ariel and Caliban; though poetry may
+grudge to prose the discovery of a Winged Woman,
+especially such as she has been described by her
+inventor in the story of <i>Peter Wilkins</i>; and in
+point of treatment, the Mammon and Jealousy of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span>
+Spenser, some of the monsters in Dante, particularly
+his Nimrod, his interchangements of
+creatures into one another, and (if I am not presumptuous
+in anticipating what I think will be the
+verdict of posterity) the Witch in Coleridge&#8217;s
+<i>Christabel</i>, may rank even with the creations of
+Shakespeare. It may be doubted, indeed, whether
+Shakespeare had bile and nightmare enough in him
+to have thought of such detestable horrors as those
+of the interchanging adversaries (now serpent,
+now man), or even of the huge, half-blockish
+enormity of Nimrod,&mdash;in Scripture, the &#8216;mighty
+hunter&#8217; and builder of the tower of Babel,&mdash;in
+Dante, a tower of a man in his own person, standing
+with some of his brother giants up to the middle
+in a pit in hell, blowing a horn to which a thunderclap
+is a whisper, and hallooing after Dante and
+his guide in the jargon of a lost tongue! The
+transformations are too odious to quote: but of
+the towering giant we cannot refuse ourselves the
+&#8216;fearful joy&#8217; of a specimen. It was twilight,
+Dante tells us, and he and his guide Virgil were
+silently pacing through one of the dreariest regions
+of hell, when the sound of a tremendous horn made
+him turn all his attention to the spot from which it
+came. He there discovered through the dusk,
+what seemed to be the towers of a city. Those are
+no towers, said his guide; they are giants, standing
+up to the middle in one of these circular pits.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I look&#8217;d again; and as the eye makes out,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By little and little, what the mist conceal&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In which, till clearing up, the sky was steep&#8217;d;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So, looming through the gross and darksome air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As we drew nigh, those mighty bulks grew plain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And error quitted me, and terror join&#8217;d:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For in like manner as all round its height<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Montereggione crowns itself with towers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So tower&#8217;d above the circuit of that pit,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Though but half out of it, and half within,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The horrible giants that fought Jove, and still<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are threaten&#8217;d when he thunders. As we near&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The foremost, I discern&#8217;d his mighty face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His shoulders, breast, and more than half his trunk,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With both the arms down hanging by the sides.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His face appear&#8217;d to me, in length and breadth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Huge as St. Peter&#8217;s pinnacle at Rome,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And of a like proportion all his bones.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He open&#8217;d, as we went, his dreadful mouth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fit for no sweeter psalmody; and shouted<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">After us, in the words of some strange tongue,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">R&agrave;fel ma-&egrave;e amech zab&egrave;e almee!&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Dull wretch!&#8217; my leader cried, &#8216;keep to thine horn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And so vent better whatsoever rage<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or other passion stuff thee. Feel thy throat<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And find the chain upon thee, thou confusion!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lo! what a hoop is clench&#8217;d about thy gorge.&#8217;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then turning to myself, he said, &#8216;His howl<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through whose ill thought it was that humankind<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Were tongue-confounded. Pass him, and say nought:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For as he speaketh language known of none,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So none can speak save jargon to himself.&#8217;<br /></span>
+<span class="i10"><i>Inferno</i>, Canto xxxi, ver. 34.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Assuredly it could not have been easy to find
+a fiction so uncouthly terrible as this in the hypochondria
+of Hamlet. Even his father had evidently
+seen no such ghost in the other world. All his
+phantoms were in the world he had left. Timon,
+Lear, Richard, Brutus, Prospero, Macbeth himself,
+none of Shakespeare&#8217;s men had, in fact, any thought
+but of the earth they lived on, whatever supernatural
+fancy crossed them. The thing fancied was
+still a thing of this world, &#8216;in its habit as it lived,&#8217;
+or no remoter acquaintance than a witch or a fairy.
+Its lowest depths (unless Dante suggested them)
+were the cellars under the stage. Caliban himself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span>
+is a cross-breed between a witch and a clown. No
+offence to Shakespeare; who was not bound to be
+the greatest of healthy poets, and to have every
+morbid inspiration besides. What he might have
+done, had he set his wits to compete with Dante,
+I know not: all I know is, that in the infernal line
+he did nothing like him; and it is not to be wished
+he had. It is far better that, as a higher, more
+universal, and more beneficent variety of the genus
+Poet, he should have been the happier man he was,
+and left us the plump cheeks on his monument,
+instead of the carking visage of the great, but over-serious,
+and comparatively one-sided Florentine.
+Even the imagination of Spenser, whom we take
+to have been a &#8216;nervous gentleman&#8217; compared with
+Shakespeare, was visited with no such dreams as
+Dante. Or, if it was, he did not choose to make
+himself thinner (as Dante says <i>he</i> did) with dwelling
+upon them. He had twenty visions of nymphs
+and bowers, to one of the mud of Tartarus.
+Chaucer, for all he was &#8216;a man of this world&#8217; as
+well as the poets&#8217; world, and as great, perhaps
+a greater enemy of oppression than Dante, besides
+being one of the profoundest masters of pathos that
+ever lived, had not the heart to conclude the story
+of the famished father and his children, as finished
+by the inexorable anti-Pisan. But enough of
+Dante in this place. Hobbes, in order to daunt
+the reader from objecting to his friend Davenant&#8217;s
+want of invention, says of these fabulous creations
+in general, in his letter prefixed to the poem of
+<i>Gondibert</i>, that &#8216;impenetrable armours, enchanted
+castles, invulnerable bodies, iron men, flying horses,
+and a thousand other such things, are easily feigned
+by them that dare&#8217;. These are girds at Spenser<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span>
+and Ariosto. But, with leave of Hobbes (who
+translated Homer as if on purpose to show what
+execrable verses could be written by a philosopher),
+enchanted castles and flying horses are not easily
+feigned as Ariosto and Spenser feigned them;
+and that just makes all the difference. For proof,
+see the accounts of Spenser&#8217;s enchanted castle in
+Book the Third, Canto Twelfth, of the <i>Faerie
+Queene</i>; and let the reader of Italian open the
+<i>Orlando Furioso</i> at its first introduction of the
+Hippogriff (Canto iii, st. 4), where Bradamante,
+coming to an inn, hears a great noise, and sees all
+the people looking up at something in the air;
+upon which, looking up herself, she sees a knight
+in shining armour riding towards the sunset upon
+a creature with variegated wings, and then dipping
+and disappearing among the hills. Chaucer&#8217;s
+steed of brass, that was</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So horsly and so quick of eye,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">is copied from the life. You might pat him and
+feel his brazen muscles. Hobbes, in objecting to
+what he thought childish, made a childish mistake.
+His criticism is just such as a boy might pique
+himself upon, who was educated on mechanical
+principles, and thought he had outgrown his Goody
+Two-shoes. With a wonderful dimness of discernment
+in poetic matters, considering his acuteness
+in others, he fancies he has settled the question by
+pronouncing such creations &#8216;impossible&#8217;! To the
+brazier they are impossible, no doubt; but not to
+the poet. Their possibility, if the poet wills it,
+is to be conceded; the problem is, the creature
+being given, how to square its actions with probability,
+according to the nature assumed of it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[313]</a></span>
+Hobbes did not see, that the skill and beauty of
+these fictions lay in bringing them within those
+very regions of truth and likelihood in which he
+thought they could not exist. Hence the serpent
+Python of Chaucer,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Sleeping against the sun upon a day,</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">when Apollo slew him. Hence the chariot-drawing
+dolphins of Spenser, softly swimming along the
+shore lest they should hurt themselves against
+the stones and gravel. Hence Shakespeare&#8217;s Ariel,
+living under blossoms, and riding at evening on the
+bat; and his domestic namesake in the <i>Rape of the
+Lock</i> (the imagination of the drawing-room) saving
+a lady&#8217;s petticoat from the coffee with his plumes,
+and directing atoms of snuff into a coxcomb&#8217;s nose.
+In the <i>Orlando Furioso</i> (Canto xv, st. 65) is a wild
+story of a cannibal necromancer, who laughs at
+being cut to pieces, coming together again like
+quicksilver, and picking up his head when it is cut
+off, sometimes by the hair, sometimes by the nose!
+This, which would be purely childish and ridiculous
+in the hands of an inferior poet, becomes interesting,
+nay grand, in Ariosto&#8217;s, from the beauties of his
+style, and its conditional truth to nature. The
+monster has a fated hair on his head,&mdash;a single hair,&mdash;which
+must be taken from it before he can be
+killed. Decapitation itself is of no consequence,
+without that proviso. The Paladin Astolfo, who
+has fought this phenomenon on horseback, and
+succeeded in getting the head and galloping off
+with it, is therefore still at a loss what to be at.
+How is he to discover such a needle in such a bottle
+of hay? The trunk is spurring after him to recover
+it, and he seeks for some evidence of the hair<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[314]</a></span>
+in vain. At length he bethinks him of scalping
+the head. He does so; and the moment the
+operation arrives at the place of the hair, <i>the face
+of the head becomes pale, the eyes turn in their sockets</i>,
+and the lifeless pursuer tumbles from his horse.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then grew the visage pale, and deadly wet;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The eyes turn&#8217;d in their sockets, drearily;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all things show&#8217;d the villain&#8217;s sun was set.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His trunk that was in chase, fell from its horse,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And giving the last shudder, was a corse.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">It is thus, and thus only, by making Nature his
+companion wherever he goes, even in the most
+supernatural region, that the poet, in the words of
+a very instructive phrase, takes the world along
+with him. It is true, he must not (as the Platonists
+would say) humanize weakly or mistakenly in that
+region; otherwise he runs the chance of forgetting
+to be true to the supernatural itself, and so betraying
+a want of imagination from that quarter. His
+nymphs will have no taste of their woods and
+waters; his gods and goddesses be only so many
+fair or frowning ladies and gentlemen, such as we
+see in ordinary paintings; he will be in no danger
+of having his angels likened to a sort of wild-fowl,
+as Rembrandt has made them in his Jacob&#8217;s
+Dream. His Bacchuses will never remind us, like
+Titian&#8217;s, of the force and fury, as well as of the
+graces, of wine. His Jupiter will reduce no
+females to ashes; his fairies be nothing fantastical;
+his gnomes not &#8216;of the earth, earthy&#8217;. And this
+again will be wanting to Nature; for it will be
+wanting to the supernatural, as Nature would have
+made it, working in a supernatural direction.
+Nevertheless, the poet, even for imagination&#8217;s sake,
+must not become a bigot to imaginative truth,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[315]</a></span>
+dragging it down into the region of the mechanical
+and the limited, and losing sight of its paramount
+privilege, which is to make beauty, in a human
+sense, the lady and queen of the universe. He
+would gain nothing by making his ocean-nymphs
+mere fishy creatures, upon the plea that such only
+could live in the water: his wood-nymphs with
+faces of knotted oak; his angels without breath
+and song, because no lungs could exist between the
+earth&#8217;s atmosphere and the empyrean. The
+Grecian tendency in this respect is safer than the
+Gothic; nay, more imaginative; for it enables us
+to imagine <i>beyond</i> imagination, and to bring all
+things healthily round to their only present final
+ground of sympathy,&mdash;the human. When we go
+to heaven, we may idealize in a superhuman mode,
+and have altogether different notions of the beautiful;
+but till then we must be content with the
+loveliest capabilities of earth. The sea-nymphs of
+Greece were still beautiful women, though they
+lived in the water. The gills and fins of the ocean&#8217;s
+natural inhabitants were confined to their lowest
+semi-human attendants; or if Triton himself was
+not quite human, it was because be represented
+the fiercer part of the vitality of the seas, as they
+did the fairer.</p>
+
+<p>To conclude this part of my subject, I will quote
+from the greatest of all narrative writers two
+passages;&mdash;one exemplifying the imagination
+which brings supernatural things to bear on earthly,
+without confounding them; the other, that which
+paints events and circumstances after real life.
+The first is where Achilles, who has long absented
+himself from the conflict between his countrymen
+and the Trojans, has had a message from heaven<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[316]</a></span>
+bidding him reappear in the enemy&#8217;s sight, standing
+outside the camp-wall upon the trench, but doing
+nothing more; that is to say, taking no part in the
+fight. He is simply to be seen. The two armies
+down by the sea-side are contending which shall
+possess the body of Patroclus; and the mere sight
+of the dreadful Grecian chief&mdash;supernaturally
+indeed impressed upon them, in order that nothing
+may be wanting to the full effect of his courage and
+conduct upon courageous men&mdash;is to determine the
+question. We are to imagine a slope of ground
+towards the sea, in order to elevate the trench; the
+camp is solitary; the battle (&#8216;a dreadful roar of
+men,&#8217; as Homer calls it) is raging on the sea-shore;
+and the goddess Iris has just delivered her message,
+and disappeared.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But up Achilles rose, the lov&#8217;d of heaven;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Pallas on his mighty shoulders cast<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The shield of Jove; and round about his head<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She put the glory of a golden mist,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From which there burnt a fiery-flaming light.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And as, when smoke goes heavenward from a town,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In some far island which its foes besiege,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who all day long with dreadful martialness<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Have pour&#8217;d from their own town; soon as the sun<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Has set, thick lifted fires are visible,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which, rushing upward, make a light in the sky,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And let the neighbours know, who may perhaps<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bring help across the sea; so from the head<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of great Achilles went up an effulgence.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Upon the trench he stood, without the wall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But mix&#8217;d not with the Greeks, for he rever&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His mother&#8217;s word; and so, thus standing there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He shouted; and Minerva, to his shout,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Added a dreadful cry; and there arose<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Among the Trojans an unspeakable tumult.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And as the clear voice of a trumpet, blown<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Against a town by spirit-withering foes,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[317]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">So sprang the clear voice of Aeacides.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when they heard the brazen cry, their hearts<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All leap&#8217;d within them; and the proud-maned horses<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ran with the chariots round, for they foresaw<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Calamity; and the charioteers were smitten,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When they beheld the ever-active fire<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon the dreadful head of the great-minded one<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Burning; for bright-eyed Pallas made it burn.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thrice o&#8217;er the trench divine Achilles shouted;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thrice the Trojans and their great allies<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Roll&#8217;d back; and twelve of all their noblest men<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then perish&#8217;d, crush&#8217;d by their own arms and chariots.<br /></span>
+<span class="i14"><i>Iliad</i>, xviii. 203.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Of course there is no further question about the
+body of Patroclus. It is drawn out of the press,
+and received by the awful hero with tears.</p>
+
+<p>The other passage is where Priam, kneeling
+before Achilles, and imploring him to give up the
+dead body of Hector, reminds him of his own father;
+who, whatever (says the poor old king) may be his
+troubles with his enemies, has the blessing of
+knowing that his son is still alive, and may daily
+hope to see him return. Achilles, in accordance
+with the strength and noble honesty of the passions
+in those times, weeps aloud himself at this appeal,
+feeling, says Homer, &#8216;desire&#8217; for his father in his
+very &#8216;limbs&#8217;. He joins in grief with the venerable
+sufferer, and can no longer withstand the look of
+&#8216;his grey head and his grey <i>chin</i>&#8217;. Observe the
+exquisite introduction of this last word. It paints
+the touching fact of the chin&#8217;s being imploringly
+thrown upward by the kneeling old man, and the
+very motion of his beard as he speaks.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So saying, Mercury vanished up to heaven:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Priam then alighted from his chariot,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Leaving Idaeus with it, who remain&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Holding the mules and horses; and the old man<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[318]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Went straight indoors, where the belov&#8217;d of Jove<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Achilles sat, and found him. In the room<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Were others, but apart; and two alone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The hero Automedon, and Alcimus,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A branch of Mars, stood by him. They had been<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At meals, and had not yet remov&#8217;d the board.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Great Priam came, without their seeing him,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And kneeling down, he clasp&#8217;d Achilles&#8217; knees,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And kiss&#8217;d those terrible, homicidal hands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which had deprived him of so many sons.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And as a man who is press&#8217;d heavily<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For having slain another, flies away<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To foreign lands, and comes into the house<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of some great man, and is beheld with wonder,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So did Achilles wonder to see Priam;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the rest wonder&#8217;d, looking at each other.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But Priam, praying to him, spoke these words:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8216;God-like Achilles, think of thine own father!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To the same age have we both come, the same<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Weak pass; and though the neighbouring chiefs may vex<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Him also, and his borders find no help,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet when he hears that thou art still alive,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He gladdens inwardly, and daily hopes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To see his dear son coming back from Troy.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But I, bereav&#8217;d old Priam! I had once<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Brave sons in Troy, and now I cannot say<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That one is left me. Fifty children had I,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When the Greeks came; nineteen were of one womb;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The rest my women bore me in my house.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The knees of many of these fierce Mars has loosen&#8217;d;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And he who had no peer, Troy&#8217;s prop and theirs,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Him hast thou kill&#8217;d now, fighting for his country,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hector; and for his sake am I come here<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To ransom him, bringing a countless ransom.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But thou, Achilles, fear the gods, and think<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of thine own father, and have mercy on me:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For I am much more wretched, and have borne<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What never mortal bore, I think on earth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To lift unto my lips the hand of him<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who slew my boys.&#8217;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">He ceased; and there arose<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sharp longing in Achilles for his father;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[319]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">And taking Priam by the hand, he gently<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Put him away; for both shed tears to think<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of other times; the one most bitter ones<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For Hector, and with wilful wretchedness<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lay right before Achilles: and the other,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For his own father now, and now his friend;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the whole house might hear them as they moan&#8217;d.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But when divine Achilles had refresh&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His soul with tears, and sharp desire had left<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His heart and limbs, he got up from his throne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And rais&#8217;d the old man by the hand, and took<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pity on his grey head and his grey chin.<br /></span>
+<span class="i14"><i>Iliad</i>, xxiv. 468.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>O lovely and immortal privilege of genius!
+that can stretch its hand out of the wastes of time,
+thousands of years back, and touch our eyelids
+with tears. In these passages there is not a word
+which a man of the most matter-of-fact understanding
+might not have written, <i>if he had thought
+of it</i>. But in poetry, feeling and imagination are
+necessary to the perception and presentation even
+of matters of fact. They, and they only, see what
+is proper to be told, and what to be kept back;
+what is pertinent, affecting, and essential. Without
+feeling, there is a want of delicacy and distinction;
+without imagination, there is no true
+embodiment. In poets, even good of their kind,
+but without a genius for narration, the action
+would have been encumbered or diverted with
+ingenious mistakes. The over-contemplative would
+have given us too many remarks; the over-lyrical,
+a style too much carried away; the over-fanciful,
+conceits and too many similes; the unimaginative,
+the facts without the feeling, and not even those.
+We should have been told nothing of the &#8216;grey
+chin&#8217;, of the house hearing them as they moaned,
+or of Achilles gently putting the old man aside;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[320]</a></span>
+much less of that yearning for his father, which
+made the hero tremble in every limb. Writers
+without the greatest passion and power do not feel
+in this way, nor are capable of expressing the
+feeling; though there is enough sensibility and
+imagination all over the world to enable mankind
+to be moved by it, when the poet strikes his truth
+into their hearts.</p>
+
+<p>The reverse of imagination is exhibited in pure
+absence of ideas, in commonplaces, and, above all,
+in conventional metaphor, or such images and their
+phraseology as have become the common property
+of discourse and writing. Addison&#8217;s <i>Cato</i> is full of
+them.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Passion unpitied and successless love<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Plant daggers in my breast.</i><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I&#8217;ve sounded my Numidians, man by man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And find them <i>ripe for a revolt</i>.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The virtuous Marcia <i>towers above her sex</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Of the same kind is his &#8216;courting the
+yoke&#8217;&mdash;&#8216;distracting my very heart&#8217;&mdash;&#8216;calling up all&#8217;
+one&#8217;s &#8216;father&#8217; in one&#8217;s soul&mdash;&#8216;working every
+nerve&#8217;&mdash;&#8216;copying a bright example&#8217;; in short, the
+whole play, relieved now and then with a smart
+sentence or turn of words. The following is
+a pregnant example of plagiarism and weak writing.
+It is from another tragedy of Addison&#8217;s time&mdash;the
+<i>Mariamne</i> of Fenton:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">Mariamne, <i>with superior charms</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Triumphs o&#8217;er reason</i>: in her look she <i>bears</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A paradise of ever-blooming sweets;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fair as the first idea beauty <i>prints</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the young lover&#8217;s soul; a winning grace<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Guides every gesture, and obsequious love<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Attends</i> on all her steps.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[321]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>&#8216;Triumphing o&#8217;er reason&#8217; is an old acquaintance
+of everybody&#8217;s. &#8216;Paradise in her look&#8217; is from
+the Italian poets through Dryden. &#8216;Fair as the
+first idea&#8217;, &amp;c., is from Milton, spoilt;&mdash;&#8216;winning
+grace&#8217; and &#8216;steps&#8217; from Milton and Tibullus, both
+spoilt. Whenever beauties are stolen by such
+a writer, they are sure to be spoilt: just as when
+a great writer borrows, he improves.</p>
+
+<p>To come now to Fancy,&mdash;she is a younger sister
+of Imagination, without the other&#8217;s weight of
+thought and feeling. Imagination indeed, purely
+so called, is all feeling; the feeling of the subtlest
+and most affecting analogies; the perception of
+sympathies in the natures of things, or in their
+popular attributes. Fancy is a sporting with their
+resemblance, real or supposed, and with airy and
+fantastical creations.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&mdash;Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And, like a dew-drop from the lion&#8217;s mane,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Be shook to air.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i8"><i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, Act iii, sc. 3.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">That is imagination;&mdash;the strong mind sympathizing
+with the strong beast, and the weak love
+identified with the weak dew-drop.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">Oh!&mdash;and I forsooth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In love! I that have been love&#8217;s whip I<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>A very beadle to a humorous sigh!&mdash;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A domineering pedant o&#8217;er the boy,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans</i>, &amp;c.<br /></span>
+<span class="i8"><i>Love&#8217;s Labour&#8217;s Lost</i>, Act iii, sc. 1.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">That is fancy;&mdash;a combination of images not in
+their nature connected, or brought together by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[322]</a></span>
+feeling, but by the will and pleasure; and having
+just enough hold of analogy to betray it into the
+hands of its smiling subjector.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">Silent icicles<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Quietly shining to the quiet moon.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Coleridge&#8217;s <i>Frost at Midnight</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">That, again, is imagination;&mdash;analogical sympathy;
+and exquisite of its kind it is.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p style="margin-bottom: 0em">&#8216;You are now sailed <i>into the north of my lady&#8217;s opinion</i>;
+where you will hang <i>like an icicle on a Dutchman&#8217;s beard</i>,
+unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p class="sig"><i>Twelfth Night</i>, Act iii, sc. 2.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noin">And that is fancy;&mdash;one image capriciously suggested
+by another, and but half connected with the
+subject of discourse; nay, half opposed to it; for
+in the gaiety of the speaker&#8217;s animal spirits, the
+&#8216;Dutchman&#8217;s beard&#8217; is made to represent the
+lady!</p>
+
+<p>Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious
+muse; Fancy to the comic. <i>Macbeth</i>, <i>Lear</i>, <i>Paradise
+Lost</i>, the poem of Dante, are full of imagination:
+the <i>Midsummer Night&#8217;s Dream</i> and the
+<i>Rape of the Lock</i>, of fancy: <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, the
+<i>Tempest</i>, the <i>Faerie Queene</i>, and the <i>Orlando Furioso</i>,
+of both. The terms were formerly identical, or
+used as such; and neither is the best that might be
+found. The term Imagination is too confined:
+often too material. It presents too invariably
+the idea of a solid body;&mdash;of &#8216;images&#8217; in the sense
+of the plaster-cast cry about the streets. Fancy,
+on the other hand, while it means nothing but
+a spiritual image or apparition (&#934;&#945;&#957;&#964;&#945;&#963;&#956;&#945;, appearance,
+<i>phantom</i>), has rarely that freedom from
+visibility which is one of the highest privileges of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[323]</a></span>
+imagination. Viola, in <i>Twelfth Night</i>, speaking
+of some beautiful music, says:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It gives a very echo to the seat<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where Love is throned.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">In this charming thought, fancy and imagination
+are combined; yet the fancy, the assumption of
+Love&#8217;s sitting on a throne, is the image of a solid
+body; while the imagination, the sense of sympathy
+between the passion of love and impassioned
+music, presents us no image at all. Some new
+term is wanting to express the more spiritual sympathies
+of what is called Imagination.</p>
+
+<p>One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy;
+and like Melancholy, as Albert Durer has painted
+her, she looks out among the stars, and is busied
+with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the
+universe. Fancy turns her sister&#8217;s wizard instruments
+into toys. She takes a telescope in her hand,
+and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and sallies
+forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency
+is to the child-like and sportive. She chases
+butterflies, while her sister takes flight with angels.
+She is the genius of fairies, of gallantries, of
+fashions; of whatever is quaint and light, showy
+and capricious; of the poetical part of wit. She
+adds wings and feelings to the images of wit; and
+delights as much to people nature with smiling
+ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies
+together, and make them strike light on absurdity.
+Fancy, however, is not incapable of sympathy with
+Imagination. She is often found in her company;
+always, in the case of the greatest poets;
+often in that of less, though with them she is the
+greater favourite. Spenser has great imagination
+and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton both<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[324]</a></span>
+also, the very greatest, but with imagination predominant;
+Chaucer, the strongest imagination of
+real life, beyond any writers but Homer, Dante,
+and Shakespeare, and in comic painting inferior
+to none; Pope has hardly any imagination, but
+he has a great deal of fancy; Coleridge little fancy,
+but imagination exquisite. Shakespeare alone, of
+all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both
+in equal perfection. A whole fairy poem of his
+writing [the Oberon-Titania scenes from the
+<i>Midsummer-Night&#8217;s Dream</i>] will be found in the
+present volume.<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> See also his famous description
+of Queen Mab and her equipage, in <i>Romeo and
+Juliet</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners&#8217; legs;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her traces of the smallest spider&#8217;s web;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her collars of the moonshine&#8217;s watery beams, &amp;c.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As
+a small but pretty rival specimen, less known, take
+the description of a fairy palace from Drayton&#8217;s
+<i>Nymphidia</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">This palace standeth in the air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By necromancy plac&egrave;d there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That it no tempest needs to fear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Which way soe&#8217;er it blow it:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And somewhat southward tow&#8217;rd the noon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whence lies a way up to the moon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thence the fairy can as soon<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Pass to the earth below it.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The walls of spiders&#8217; legs are made,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Well mortic&egrave;d and finely laid:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He was the master of his trade<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It curiously that builded:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>The windows of the eyes of cats:</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">(because they see best at night)<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[325]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And for the roof instead of slats<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is cover&#8217;d with the skins of bats,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>With moonshine that are gilded.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Here also is a fairy bed, very delicate, from the
+same poet&#8217;s <i>Muse&#8217;s Elysium</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Of leaves of roses, <i>white and red</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall be the covering of the bed;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The curtains, vallens, tester all,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall be the flower imperial;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And for the fringe it all along<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>With azure hare-bells shall be hung.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Of lilies shall the pillows be,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>With down stuft of the butterfly</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Of fancy, so full of gusto as to border on imagination,
+Sir John Suckling, in his <i>Ballad on a Wedding</i>,
+has given some of the most playful and charming
+specimens in the language. They glance like
+twinkles of the eye, or cherries bedewed:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Her feet beneath her petticoat,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Like little mice stole in and out,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>As if they fear&#8217;d the light:</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But oh! she dances such a way!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>No sun upon an Easter day</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is half so fine a sight.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">It is very daring, and has a sort of playful grandeur,
+to compare a lady&#8217;s dancing with the sun. But as
+the sun has it all to himself in the heavens, so she,
+in the blaze of her beauty, on earth. This is
+imagination fairly displacing fancy. The following
+has enchanted everybody:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Her lips were red, <i>and one was thin</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Compared with that was next her chin,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Some bee had stung it newly</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Every reader has stolen a kiss at that lip, gay or
+grave.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[326]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>With regard to the principle of Variety in
+Uniformity by which verse ought to be modulated,
+and oneness of impression diversely produced, it
+has been contended by some, that Poetry need not
+be written in verse at all; that prose is as good
+a medium, provided poetry be conveyed through
+it; and that to think otherwise is to confound
+letter with spirit, or form with essence. But the
+opinion is a prosaical mistake. Fitness and unfitness
+for <i>song</i>, or metrical excitement, just make
+all the difference between a poetical and prosaical
+subject; and the reason why verse is necessary to
+the form of poetry, is, that the perfection of poetical
+spirit demands it;&mdash;that the circle of its enthusiasm,
+beauty and power, is incomplete without it.
+I do not mean to say that a poet can never show
+himself a poet in prose; but that, being one, his
+desire and necessity will be to write in verse; and
+that, if he were unable to do so, he would not, and
+could not, deserve his title. Verse to the true poet
+is no clog. It is idly called a trammel and a difficulty.
+It is a help. It springs from the same
+enthusiasm as the rest of his impulses, and is
+necessary to their satisfaction and effect. Verse
+is no more a clog than the condition of rushing
+upward is a clog to fire, or than the roundness and
+order of the globe we live on is a clog to the freedom
+and variety that abound within its sphere. Verse
+is no dominator over the poet, except inasmuch as
+the bond is reciprocal, and the poet dominates over
+the verse. They are lovers, playfully challenging
+each other&#8217;s rule, and delighted equally to rule and
+to obey. Verse is the final proof to the poet that
+his mastery over his art is complete. It is the
+shutting up of his powers in &#8216;<i>measureful</i> content&#8217;;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[327]</a></span>
+the answer of form to his spirit; of strength and
+ease to his guidance. It is the willing action, the
+proud and fiery happiness, of the winged steed on
+whose back he has vaulted,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">To witch the world with wondrous horsemanship.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Verse, in short, is that finishing, and rounding,
+and &#8216;tuneful planetting&#8217; of the poet&#8217;s creations,
+which is produced of necessity by the smooth
+tendencies of their energy or inward working, and
+the harmonious dance into which they are attracted
+round the orb of the beautiful. Poetry, in its complete
+sympathy with beauty, must, of necessity,
+leave no sense of the beautiful, and no power over
+its forms, unmanifested; and verse flows as inevitably
+from this condition of its integrity, as
+other laws of proportion do from any other kind
+of embodiment of beauty (say that of the human
+figure), however free and various the movements
+may be that play within their limits. What great
+poet ever wrote his poems in prose? or where is
+a good prose poem, of any length, to be found?
+The poetry of the Bible is understood to be in verse,
+in the original. Mr. Hazlitt has said a good word
+for those prose enlargements of some fine old song,
+which are known by the name of Ossian; and in
+passages they deserve what he said; but he
+judiciously abstained from saying anything about
+the form. Is Gesner&#8217;s <i>Death of Abel</i> a poem? or
+Hervey&#8217;s <i>Meditations</i>? The <i>Pilgrim&#8217;s Progress</i>
+has been called one; and, undoubtedly, Bunyan
+had a genius which tended to make him a poet, and
+one of no mean order: and yet it was of as ungenerous
+and low a sort as was compatible with so
+lofty an affinity; and this is the reason why it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[328]</a></span>
+stopped where it did. He had a craving after the
+beautiful, but not enough of it in himself to echo
+to its music. On the other hand, the possession of
+the beautiful will not be sufficient without force
+to utter it. The author of <i>Telemachus</i> had a soul
+full of beauty and tenderness. He was not a man
+who, if he had had a wife and children, would have
+run away from them, as Bunyan&#8217;s hero did, to get
+a place by himself in heaven. He was &#8216;a little
+lower than the angels&#8217;, like our own Bishop Jewells
+and Berkeleys; and yet he was no poet. He was
+too delicately, not to say feebly, absorbed in his
+devotions, to join in the energies of the seraphic
+choir.</p>
+
+<p>Every poet, then, is a versifier; every fine poet
+an excellent one; and he is the best whose verse
+exhibits the greatest amount of strength, sweetness,
+straightforwardness, unsuperfluousness, <i>variety</i>, and
+<i>oneness</i>;&mdash;oneness, that is to say, consistency, in
+the general impression, metrical and moral; and
+variety, or every pertinent diversity of tone and
+rhythm, in the process. <i>Strength</i> is the muscle of
+verse, and shows itself in the number and force
+of the marked syllables; as,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Son&ograve;rous m&egrave;tal bl&ograve;wing m&agrave;rtial s&ograve;unds.<br /></span>
+<span class="i14"><i>Paradise Lost.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Beh&egrave;moth, b&igrave;ggest born of e&agrave;rth, &ugrave;ph&egrave;av&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His v&agrave;stness.<br /></span>
+<span class="i16"><i>Id.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Bl&ograve;w w&igrave;nds and cr&agrave;ck your ch&egrave;eks! r&agrave;ge! bl&ograve;w!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You c&agrave;t&#259;r&#259;cts and hurric&agrave;noes, sp&ograve;ut,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till you have dr&egrave;nch&#8217;d our st&egrave;eples, dr&ograve;wn&#8217;d the c&ograve;cks!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You s&ugrave;lphurous and tho&ugrave;ght-&egrave;xecuting f&igrave;res,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Va&ugrave;nt co&ugrave;riers of &ograve;ak-cl&egrave;aving th&ugrave;nderb&ograve;lts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">S&igrave;nge my wh&igrave;te h&egrave;ad! and th&ograve;u, &agrave;ll-sh&agrave;king th&ugrave;nder,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Str&igrave;ke fl&agrave;t the th&igrave;ck rot&ugrave;ndity o&#8217; the w&ograve;rld!<br /></span>
+<span class="i16"><i>Lear.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Unexpected locations of the accent double this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[329]</a></span>
+force, and render it characteristic of passion and
+abruptness. And here comes into play the reader&#8217;s
+corresponding fineness of ear, and his retardations
+and accelerations in accordance with those of the
+poet:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">Then in the keyhole turns<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The &igrave;ntr&#301;c&#259;te wards, and every bolt and bar<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unfastens.&mdash;On &#259; s&#365;dd&#277;n &ograve;pen fly<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">W&#301;th &#301;mp&egrave;tuous recoil and jarring sound<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Harsh thunder.<br /></span>
+<span class="i10"><i>Paradise Lost</i>, Book II.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ab&ograve;m&#301;n&#259;bl&#277;&mdash;un&ugrave;tt&#277;r&#259;bl&#277;&mdash;and worse<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than fables yet have feigned.<br /></span>
+<span class="i16"><i>Id.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">W&agrave;ll&#335;w&#301;ng &#365;nw&igrave;&#277;ldy&mdash;&#277;n&ograve;rmous in their gait.<br /></span>
+<span class="i16"><i>Id.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Of unusual passionate accent, there is an exquisite
+specimen in the <i>Faerie Queene</i>, where Una
+is lamenting her desertion by the Red-Cross
+Knight:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">But he, my lion, and my noble lord,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">How does he find in cruel heart to hate<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Her that him lov&#8217;d, and ever most ador&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>As the g&ograve;d of my l&igrave;fe?</i><a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> Why hath he me abhorr&#8217;d?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The abuse of strength is harshness and heaviness;
+the reverse of it is weakness. There is a noble
+sentiment&mdash;it appears both in Daniel&#8217;s and Sir
+John Beaumont&#8217;s works, but is most probably the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[330]</a></span>latter&#8217;s,&mdash;which is a perfect outrage of strength in
+the sound of the words:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Only the firmest and the <i>constant&#8217;st</i> hearts<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">God sets to act the <i>stout&#8217;st</i> and hardest parts.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin"><i>Stout&#8217;st</i> and <i>constant&#8217;st</i> for &#8216;stoutest&#8217; and &#8216;most
+constant&#8217;! It is as bad as the intentional crabbedness
+of the line in <i>Hudibras</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He that hangs or <i>beats out&#8217;s</i> brains,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The devil&#8217;s in him if <i>he</i> feigns.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin"><i>Beats out&#8217;s brains</i>, for &#8216;beats out his brains&#8217;. Of
+heaviness, Davenant&#8217;s <i>Gondibert</i> is a formidable
+specimen, almost throughout:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">With s&igrave;lence (&ograve;rder&#8217;s help, and m&agrave;rk of c&agrave;re)<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">They ch&igrave;de th&agrave;t n&ograve;ise which h&egrave;edless y&ograve;uth aff&egrave;ct;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">St&igrave;ll co&ugrave;rse for &ugrave;se, for he&agrave;lth th&egrave;y cl&egrave;anness w&egrave;ar,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And s&agrave;ve in w&egrave;ll-f&igrave;x&#8217;d &agrave;rms, all n&igrave;ceness ch&egrave;ck&#8217;d.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Th&egrave;y tho&ugrave;ght, th&ograve;se that, un&agrave;rm&#8217;d, exp&ograve;s&#8217;d fr&agrave;il l&igrave;fe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But n&agrave;ked n&agrave;ture v&agrave;liantly betr&agrave;y&#8217;d;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wh&ograve; w&agrave;s, tho&ugrave;gh n&agrave;ked, s&agrave;fe, till pr&igrave;de m&agrave;de str&igrave;fe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But m&agrave;de def&egrave;nce must &ugrave;se, n&ograve;w d&agrave;nger&#8217;s m&agrave;de.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">And so he goes digging and lumbering on, like
+a heavy preacher thumping the pulpit in italics,
+and spoiling many ingenious reflections.</p>
+
+<p>Weakness in versification is want of accent and
+emphasis. It generally accompanies prosaicalness,
+and is the consequence of weak thoughts, and of
+the affectation of a certain well-bred enthusiasm.
+The writings of the late Mr. Hayley were remarkable
+for it; and it abounds among the lyrical imitators
+of Cowley, and the whole of what is called our
+French school of poetry, when it aspired above
+its wit and &#8216;sense&#8217;. It sometimes breaks down in
+a horrible, hopeless manner, as if giving way at the
+first step. The following ludicrous passage in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[331]</a></span>
+Congreve, intended to be particularly fine, contains
+an instance:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">And lo! Silence himself is here;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Methinks I see the midnight god appear.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In all his downy pomp array&#8217;d,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Behold the reverend shade.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>An ancient sigh he sits upon!!!</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose memory of sound is long since gone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And purposely annihilated for his throne!!!</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Ode on the singing of Mrs. Arabella Hunt.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>See also the would-be enthusiasm of Addison
+about music:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">For ever consecrate the <i>day</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To music and <i>Cecilia</i>;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Music, the greatest good that mortals know,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And all of heaven we have below,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Music can noble <small>HINTS</small> <i>impart!!!</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is observable that the unpoetic masters of ridicule
+are apt to make the most ridiculous mistakes,
+when they come to affect a strain higher than the
+one they are accustomed to. But no wonder.
+Their habits neutralize the enthusiasm it requires.</p>
+
+<p><i>Sweetness</i>, though not identical with smoothness,
+any more than feeling is with sound, always includes
+it; and smoothness is a thing so little to be
+regarded for its own sake, and indeed so worthless
+in poetry but for some taste of sweetness, that I have
+not thought necessary to mention it by itself;
+though such an all-in-all in versification was it
+regarded not a hundred years back, that Thomas
+Warton himself, an idolater of Spenser, ventured
+to wish the following line in the <i>Faerie Queene</i>,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And was admir&egrave;d much of fools, <i>w&ograve;men</i>, and boys&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">altered to</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And was admir&egrave;d much of women, fools, and boys&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">thus destroying the fine scornful emphasis on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[332]</a></span>
+first syllable of &#8216;women&#8217;! (an ungallant intimation,
+by the way, against the fair sex, very startling
+in this no less woman-loving than great poet). Any
+poetaster can be smooth. Smoothness abounds
+in all small poets, as sweetness does in the greater.
+Sweetness is the smoothness of grace and delicacy,&mdash;of
+the sympathy with the pleasing and lovely.
+Spenser is full of it,&mdash;Shakespeare&mdash;Beaumont and
+Fletcher&mdash;Coleridge. Of Spenser&#8217;s and Coleridge&#8217;s
+versification it is the prevailing characteristic. Its
+main secrets are a smooth progression between
+variety and sameness, and a voluptuous sense of
+the continuous,&mdash;&#8216;linked sweetness long drawn out&#8217;.
+Observe the first and last lines of the stanza in the
+<i>Faerie Queene</i>, describing a shepherd brushing away
+the gnats;&mdash;the open and the close <i>e&#8217;s</i> in the one,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">As g&egrave;ntle sh&egrave;pherd in sw&#275;&#275;t &#275;ventide&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">and the repetition of the word <i>oft</i>, and the fall from
+the vowel <i>a</i>, into the two <i>u&#8217;s</i> in the other,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She brusheth <i>oft</i>, and <i>oft</i> doth m&agrave;r their m&#363;rm&#365;rings.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">So in his description of two substances in the
+handling, both equally smooth:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Each smoother seems than each, and each than each seems smoother.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>An abundance of examples from his poetry
+will be found in the volume before us. His beauty
+revolves on itself with conscious loveliness. And
+Coleridge is worthy to be named with him, as the
+reader will see also, and has seen already. Let him
+take a sample meanwhile from the poem called the
+<i>Day Dream</i>! Observe both the variety and sameness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[333]</a></span>
+of the vowels, and the repetition of the soft
+consonants:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">My eyes make pictures when they&#8217;re shut:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I see a fountain, large and fair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A willow and a ruin&#8217;d hut,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And <i>thee</i> and <i>me</i> and Mary there.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>O Mary! make thy gentle lap our pillow;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Bend o&#8217;er us, like a bower, my beautiful green willow.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>By <i>Straightforwardness</i> is meant the flow of
+words, in their natural order, free alike from
+mere prose, and from those inversions to which bad
+poets recur in order to escape the charge of prose,
+but chiefly to accommodate their rhymes. In
+Shadwell&#8217;s play of <i>Psyche</i>, Venus gives the sisters
+of the heroine an answer, of which the following
+is the <i>entire</i> substance, literally, in so many words.
+The author had nothing better for her to say:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I receive your prayers with kindness, and will give
+success to your hopes. I have seen, with anger, mankind
+adore your sister&#8217;s beauty and deplore her scorn: which
+they shall do no more. For I&#8217;ll so resent their idolatry,
+as shall content your wishes to the full.</p></div>
+
+<p>Now in default of all imagination, fancy, and
+expression, how was the writer to turn these words
+into poetry or rhyme? Simply by diverting them
+from their natural order, and twisting the halves
+of the sentences each before the other.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">With kindness I your prayers receive,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And to your hopes success will give.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I have, with anger, seen mankind adore<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your sister&#8217;s beauty and her scorn deplore;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Which they shall do no more.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For their idolatry I&#8217;ll so resent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As shall your wishes to the full content!!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is just as if a man were to allow that there
+was no poetry in the words, &#8216;How do you find<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[334]</a></span>
+yourself?&#8217; &#8216;Very well, I thank you&#8217;; but to
+hold them inspired, if altered into</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Yourself how do you find?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Very well, you I thank.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is true, the best writers in Shadwell&#8217;s age were
+addicted to these inversions, partly for their own
+reasons, as far as rhyme was concerned, and partly
+because they held it to be writing in the classical
+and Virgilian manner. What has since been called
+Artificial Poetry was then flourishing, in contradistinction
+to Natural; or Poetry seen chiefly
+through art and books, and not in its first sources.
+But when the artificial poet partook of the natural,
+or, in other words, was a true poet after his kind,
+his best was always written in his most natural
+and straightforward manner. Hear Shadwell&#8217;s
+antagonist Dryden. Not a particle of inversion,
+beyond what is used for the sake of emphasis in
+common discourse, and this only in one line (the
+last but three), is to be found in his immortal
+character of the Duke of Buckingham:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A man so various, that he seemed to be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not one, but all mankind&#8217;s epitome:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stiff in opinions, <i>always in the wrong</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Was everything by starts, and nothing long;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But in the course of one revolving moon<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then all for women, rhyming, dancing, drinking,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Blest madman!</i> who could every hour employ<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>With something new to wish or to enjoy!</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Railing and praising were his usual themes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And both, to show his judgement, in extremes:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So over violent, or over civil,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>That every man with him was god or devil.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In squandering wealth was his peculiar art;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Nothing went unrewarded, but desert.</i><br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[335]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Beggar&#8217;d by fools, whom still he found too late,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>He had his jest, and they had his estate.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Inversion itself was often turned into a grace
+in these poets, and may be in others, by the power
+of being superior to it; using it only with a classical
+air, and as a help lying next to them, instead of
+a salvation which they are obliged to seek. In
+jesting passages also it sometimes gave the rhyme
+a turn agreeably wilful, or an appearance of choosing
+what lay in its way; as if a man should pick
+up a stone to throw at another&#8217;s head, where a less
+confident foot would have stumbled over it. Such
+is Dryden&#8217;s use of the word <i>might</i>&mdash;the mere sign
+of a tense&mdash;in his pretended ridicule of the monkish
+practice of rising to sing psalms in the night.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And much they griev&#8217;d to see so nigh their hall<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The bird that warn&#8217;d St. Peter of his fall;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That he should raise his mitred crest on high,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And clap his wings and call his family<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To sacred rites; and vex th&#8217; ethereal powers<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With midnight matins at uncivil hours;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nay more, his quiet neighbours should molest<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Just in the sweetness of their morning rest.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">(What a line full of &#8216;another doze&#8217; is that!)</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Beast of a bird!</i> supinely, when he <i>might</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lie snug and sleep, to rise before the light!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What if his dull forefathers used that cry?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Could he not let a bad example die?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I the more gladly quote instances like those of
+Dryden, to illustrate the points in question, because
+they are specimens of the very highest kind of
+writing in the heroic couplet upon subjects not
+heroical. As to prosaicalness in general, it is
+sometimes indulged in by young writers on the
+plea of its being natural; but this is a mere<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[336]</a></span>
+confusion of triviality with propriety, and is usually
+the result of indolence.</p>
+
+<p><i>Unsuperfluousness</i> is rather a matter of style
+in general, than of the sound and order of words:
+and yet versification is so much strengthened by
+it, and so much weakened by its opposite, that
+it could not but come within the category of its
+requisites. When superfluousness of words is not
+occasioned by overflowing animal spirits, as in
+Beaumont and Fletcher, or by the very genius of
+luxury, as in Spenser (in which cases it is enrichment
+as well as overflow), there is no worse sign for
+a poet altogether, except pure barrenness. Every
+word that could be taken away from a poem, unreferable
+to either of the above reasons for it, is
+a damage; and many such are death; for there
+is nothing that posterity seems so determined to
+resent as this want of respect for its time and
+trouble. The world is too rich in books to endure
+it. Even true poets have died of this Writer&#8217;s
+Evil. Trifling ones have survived, with scarcely
+any pretensions but the terseness of their trifles.
+What hope can remain for wordy mediocrity?
+Let the discerning reader take up any poem, pen in
+hand, for the purpose of discovering how many words
+he can strike out of it that give him no requisite
+ideas, no relevant ones that he cares for, and no
+reasons for the rhyme beyond its necessity, and he
+will see what blot and havoc he will make in many
+an admired production of its day,&mdash;what marks of
+its inevitable fate. Bulky authors in particular,
+however safe they may think themselves, would
+do well to consider what parts of their cargo they
+might dispense with in their proposed voyage down
+the gulfs of time; for many a gallant vessel, thought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[337]</a></span>
+indestructible in its age, has perished;&mdash;many
+a load of words, expected to be in eternal demand,
+gone to join the wrecks of self-love, or rotted in
+the warehouses of change and vicissitude. I have
+said the more on this point, because in an age
+when the true inspiration has undoubtedly been
+reawakened by Coleridge and his fellows, and we
+have so many new poets coming forward, it may be
+as well to give a general warning against that
+tendency to an accumulation and ostentation of
+<i>thoughts</i>, which is meant to be a refutation in full
+of the pretensions of all poetry less cogitabund,
+whatever may be the requirements of its class.
+Young writers should bear in mind, that even some
+of the very best materials for poetry are not poetry
+built; and that the smallest marble shrine, of
+exquisite workmanship, outvalues all that architect
+ever chipped away. Whatever can be so dispensed
+with is rubbish.</p>
+
+<p><i>Variety</i> in versification consists in whatsoever
+can be done for the prevention of monotony, by
+diversity of stops and cadences, distribution of
+emphasis, and retardation and acceleration of
+time; for the whole real secret of versification is
+a musical secret, and is not attainable to any vital
+effect, save by the ear of genius. All the mere
+knowledge of feet and numbers, of accent and
+quantity, will no more impart it, than a knowledge
+of the &#8216;Guide to Music&#8217; will make a Beethoven
+or a Paisiello. It is a matter of sensibility and
+imagination; of the beautiful in poetical passion,
+accompanied by musical; of the imperative
+necessity for a pause here, and a cadence there, and
+a quicker or slower utterance in this or that place,
+created by analogies of sound with sense, by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[338]</a></span>
+fluctuations of feeling, by the demands of the gods
+and graces that visit the poet&#8217;s harp, as the winds
+visit that of Aeolus. The same time and quantity
+which are occasioned by the spiritual part of this
+secret, thus become its formal ones,&mdash;not feet and
+syllables, long and short, iambics or trochees;
+which are the reduction of it to its <i>less</i> than dry
+bones. You might get, for instance, not only ten
+and eleven, but thirteen or fourteen syllables into
+a rhyming, as well as blank, heroical verse, if time
+and the feeling permitted; and in irregular measure
+this is often done; just as musicians put twenty
+notes in a bar instead of two, quavers instead of
+minims, according as the feeling they are expressing
+impels them to fill up the time with short and
+hurried notes, or with long; or as the choristers
+in a cathedral retard or precipitate the words of
+the chant, according as the quantity of its notes,
+and the colon which divides the verse of the psalm,
+conspire to demand it. Had the moderns borne
+this principle in mind when they settled the prevailing
+systems of verse, instead of learning them,
+as they appear to have done, from the first drawling
+and one-syllabled notation of the church hymns,
+we should have retained all the advantages of the
+more numerous versification of the ancients, without
+being compelled to fancy that there was no
+alternative for us between our syllabical uniformity
+and the hexameters or other special forms unsuited
+to our tongues. But to leave this question alone,
+we will present the reader with a few sufficing
+specimens of the difference between monotony and
+variety in versification, first from Pope, Dryden,
+and Milton, and next from Gay and Coleridge.
+The following is the boasted melody of the nevertheless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[339]</a></span>
+exquisite poet of the <i>Rape of the Lock</i>,&mdash;exquisite
+in his wit and fancy, though not in his
+numbers. The reader will observe that it is
+literally <i>see-saw</i>, like the rising and falling of
+a plank, with a light person at one end who is
+jerked up in the briefer time, and a heavier one
+who is set down more leisurely at the other. It
+is in the otherwise charming description of the
+heroine of that poem:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">On her white breast&mdash;a sparkling cross she wore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which Jews might kiss&mdash;and infidels adore;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her lively looks&mdash;a sprightly mind disclose,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Quick as her eyes&mdash;and as unfix&#8217;d as those;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Favours to none&mdash;to all she smiles extends,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oft she rejects&mdash;but never once offends;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bright as the sun&mdash;her eyes the gazers strike,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And like the sun&mdash;they shine on all alike;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet graceful ease&mdash;and sweetness void of pride,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Might hide her faults&mdash;if belles had faults to hide;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If to her share&mdash;some female errors fall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Look on her face&mdash;and you&#8217;ll forget them all.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Compare with this the description of Iphigenia
+in one of Dryden&#8217;s stories from Boccaccio:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It happen&#8217;d&mdash;on a summer&#8217;s holiday,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That to the greenwood shade&mdash;he took his way,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For Cymon shunn&#8217;d the church&mdash;and used not much to pray.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His quarter-staff&mdash;which he could ne&#8217;er forsake,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hung half before&mdash;and half behind his back;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He trudg&#8217;d along&mdash;not knowing what he sought,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And whistled as he went&mdash;for want of thought.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">By chance conducted&mdash;or by thirst constrain&#8217;d,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The deep recesses of a grove he gain&#8217;d:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where&mdash;in a plain defended by a wood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Crept through the matted grass&mdash;a crystal flood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By which&mdash;an alabaster fountain stood;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And on the margent of the fount was laid&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Attended by her slaves&mdash;a sleeping maid;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[340]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Like Dian and her nymphs&mdash;when, tir&#8217;d with sport,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To rest by cool Eurotas they resort.&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The dame herself&mdash;the goddess well express&#8217;d,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not more distinguished by her purple vest&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than by the charming features of the face&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And e&#8217;en in slumber&mdash;a superior grace:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her comely limbs&mdash;compos&#8217;d with decent care,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her body shaded&mdash;by a light cymar,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her bosom to the view&mdash;was only bare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where two beginning paps were scarcely spied&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For yet their places were but signified.&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The fanning wind upon her bosom blows&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To meet the fanning wind&mdash;the bosom rose;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The fanning wind&mdash;and purling stream&mdash;continue her repose.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For a further variety take, from the same
+author&#8217;s <i>Theodore and Honoria</i>, a passage in which
+the couplets are run one into the other, and all of
+it modulated, like the former, according to the
+feeling demanded by the occasion:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Whilst listening to the murmuring leaves he stood&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">More than a mile immers&#8217;d within the wood&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At once the wind was laid.|&mdash;The whispering sound<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was dumb.|&mdash;A rising earthquake rock&#8217;d the ground.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With deeper brown the grove was overspread&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A sudden horror seiz&#8217;d his giddy head&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And his ears tinkled&mdash;and his colour fled.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Nature was in alarm.&mdash;Some danger nigh<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Seem&#8217;d threaten&#8217;d&mdash;though unseen to mortal eye.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unus&#8217;d to fear&mdash;he summon&#8217;d all his soul,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And stood collected in himself&mdash;and whole:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not long.&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But for a crowning specimen of variety of pause
+and accent, apart from emotion, nothing can surpass
+the account, in <i>Paradise Lost</i>, of the Devil&#8217;s
+search for an accomplice:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">There was a pl&agrave;ce,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">N&ograve;w n&ograve;t&mdash;though S&igrave;n&mdash;not T&igrave;me&mdash;f&igrave;rst wro&ugrave;ght the ch&agrave;nge,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[341]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Where T&igrave;gris&mdash;at the foot of P&agrave;radise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into a g&ugrave;lf&mdash;sh&ograve;t under ground&mdash;till p&agrave;rt<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">R&ograve;se up a fo&ugrave;ntain by the Tr&egrave;e of L&igrave;fe.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>In</i> with the river sunk&mdash;and <i>w&igrave;th</i> it <i>r&ograve;se</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">S&agrave;tan&mdash;inv&ograve;lv&#8217;d in r&igrave;sing m&igrave;st&mdash;then so&ugrave;ght<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wh&egrave;re to lie h&igrave;d.&mdash;S&egrave;a he had search&#8217;d&mdash;and l&agrave;nd<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From Eden over P&ograve;ntus&mdash;and the p&ograve;ol<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mae&ograve;tis&mdash;<i>&ugrave;p</i> beyond the river <i>Ob</i>;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">D&ograve;wnward as f&agrave;r ant&agrave;rctic;&mdash;and in l&egrave;ngth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">W&egrave;st from Or&ograve;ntes&mdash;to the &ograve;cean b&agrave;rr&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At D&agrave;ri&euml;n&mdash;th&egrave;nce to the l&agrave;nd wh&egrave;re fl&ograve;ws<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">G&agrave;nges and Indus.&mdash;Th&ugrave;s the &ograve;rb he r&ograve;am&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With n&agrave;rrow s&egrave;arch;&mdash;and with insp&egrave;ction d&egrave;ep<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cons&igrave;der&#8217;d &egrave;very cr&egrave;ature&mdash;wh&igrave;ch of &agrave;ll<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">M&ograve;st opport&ugrave;ne m&igrave;ght s&egrave;rve his w&igrave;les&mdash;and fo&ugrave;nd<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The s&egrave;rpent&mdash;s&ugrave;btlest b&egrave;ast of all the fi&egrave;ld.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>If the reader cast his eye again over this passage,
+he will not find a verse in it which is not varied and
+harmonized in the most remarkable manner. Let
+him notice in particular that curious balancing of
+the lines in the sixth and tenth verses:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>In</i> with the river sunk, &amp;c.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">and</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Up</i> beyond the river <i>Ob</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It might, indeed, be objected to the versification
+of Milton, that it exhibits too constant a perfection
+of this kind. It sometimes forces upon us too
+great a sense of consciousness on the part of the
+composer. We miss the first sprightly runnings of
+verse,&mdash;the ease and sweetness of spontaneity.
+Milton, I think, also too often condenses weight
+into heaviness.</p>
+
+<p>Thus much concerning the chief of our two
+most popular measures. The other, called octo-syllabic,
+or the measure of eight syllables, offered
+such facilities for <i>namby-pamby</i>, that it had become
+a jest as early as the time of Shakespeare, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[342]</a></span>
+makes Touchstone call it the &#8216;butterwoman&#8217;s rate
+to market&#8217;, and the &#8216;very false gallop of verses&#8217;.
+It has been advocated, in opposition to the heroic
+measure, upon the ground that ten syllables lead
+a man into epithets and other superfluities, while
+eight syllables compress him into a sensible and
+pithy gentleman. But the heroic measure laughs
+at it. So far from compressing, it converts one line
+into two, and sacrifices everything to the quick
+and importunate return of the rhyme. With
+Dryden, compare Gay, even in the strength of
+Gay,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The wind was high, the window shakes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With sudden start the miser wakes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Along the silent room he stalks,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">(A miser never &#8216;stalks&#8217;; but a rhyme was desired
+for &#8216;walks&#8217;)</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Looks back, and trembles as he walks:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Each lock and every bolt he tries,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In every creek and corner pries;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then opes the chest with treasure stor&#8217;d,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And stands in rapture o&#8217;er his hoard;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">(&#8216;Hoard&#8217; and &#8216;treasure stor&#8217;d&#8217; are just made for
+one another)</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But now, with sudden qualms possess&#8217;d,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He wrings his hands, he beats his breast;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By conscience stung, he wildly stares,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thus his guilty soul declares.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">And so he denounces his gold, as miser never
+denounced it; and sighs, because</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Virtue resides on earth no more!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Coleridge saw the mistake which had been made
+with regard to this measure, and restored it to the
+beautiful freedom of which it was capable, by calling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[343]</a></span>
+to mind the liberties allowed its old musical professors
+the minstrels, and dividing it by <i>time</i> instead
+of <i>syllables</i>;&mdash;by the <i>beat of four</i> into which you
+might get as many syllables as you could, instead of
+allotting eight syllables to the poor time, whatever
+it might have to say. He varied it further with
+alternate rhymes and stanzas, with rests and
+omissions precisely analogous to those in music,
+and rendered it altogether worthy to utter the
+manifold thoughts and feelings of himself and his
+lady Christabel. He even ventures, with an
+exquisite sense of solemn strangeness and licence
+(for there is witchcraft going forward), to introduce
+a couplet of blank verse, itself as mystically and
+beautifully modulated as anything in the music of
+Gluck or Weber.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8217;Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the owls have awaken&#8217;d the crowing cock;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tu-whit!&mdash;Tu-whoo!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And hark, again! the crowing cock,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>How drowsily he crew.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sir Leoline, the baron rich,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From her kennel beneath the rock<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She maketh answer to the clock,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>F&ograve;ur f&#335;r th&#277; q&ugrave;art&#277;rs &#259;nd tw&egrave;lve f&#335;r th&#277; ho&ugrave;r,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ever and aye, by shine and shower,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sixteen short howls, not over loud:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some say, she sees my lady&#8217;s shroud.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Is the n&igrave;ght ch&igrave;lly and d&agrave;rk?</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>The n&igrave;ght is ch&igrave;lly, but n&ograve;t d&agrave;rk.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The thin grey cloud is spread on high,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It covers, but not hides, the sky.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The moon is behind, and at the full,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And yet she looks both small and dull.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The night is chilly, the cloud is grey;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">(These are not superfluities, but mysterious returns
+of importunate feeling)<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[344]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>&#8217;Tis a month before the month of May,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And the spring comes slowly up this way.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lovely lady, Christabel,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whom her father loves so well,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What makes her in the wood so late,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A furlong from the castle-gate?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She had dreams all yesternight<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of her own betroth&egrave;d knight;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And sh&egrave; &#301;n th&#277; midnight wood will pray<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the w&egrave;al &#335;f h&#277;r lover that&#8217;s far away.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She stole along, she nothing spoke,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sighs she heav&#8217;d were soft and low,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And nought was green upon the oak,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But moss and rarest mistletoe;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She kneels beneath the huge oak tree,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in silence prayeth she.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The lady sprang up suddenly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lovely lady, Christabel!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It moan&#8217;d as near as near can be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But what it is, she cannot tell.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the other side it seems to be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of th&#277; h&ugrave;ge, bro&agrave;d-bre&agrave;sted, &ograve;ld o&agrave;k tr&egrave;e.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The night is chill, the forest bare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">(This &#8216;bleak moaning&#8217; is a witch&#8217;s)</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There is not wind enough in the air<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To move away the ringlet curl<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the lovely lady&#8217;s cheek&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There is not wind enough to twirl<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>The &ograve;ne r&egrave;d l&egrave;af, the l&agrave;st &#335;f &#301;ts clan,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>That d&agrave;nc&#277;s &#259;s &ograve;ft&#277;n &#259;s d&agrave;nce it c&agrave;n,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>H&agrave;ng&#301;ng s&#335; l&igrave;ght and h&agrave;ng&#301;ng s&#335; h&igrave;gh,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>On th&#277; t&ograve;pmost tw&igrave;g th&#259;t lo&#335;ks &ugrave;p &#259;t th&#277; sky.</i><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Hush, beating heart of Christabel!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Jesu Maria, shield her well!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She folded her arms beneath her cloak,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And stole to the other side of the oak.<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">What sees she there?<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[345]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There she sees a damsel bright,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Drest in a robe of silken white,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That shadowy in the moonlight shone:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The neck that made that white robe wan,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her stately neck and arms were bare:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her blue-vein&#8217;d feet unsandall&#8217;d were;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And wildly glitter&#8217;d, here and there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The gems entangled in her hair.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I guess &#8217;twas <i>frightful</i> there to see<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>A lady so richly clad as she&mdash;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Beautiful exceedingly.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The principle of Variety in Uniformity is here
+worked out in a style &#8216;beyond the reach of art&#8217;.
+Everything is diversified according to the demand
+of the moment, of the sounds, the sights, the
+emotions; the very uniformity of the outline is
+gently varied; and yet we feel that <i>the whole is
+one and of the same character</i>, the single and sweet
+unconsciousness of the heroine making all the rest
+seem more conscious, and ghastly, and expectant.
+It is thus that <i>versification itself becomes part of the
+sentiment of a poem</i>, and vindicates the pains that
+have been taken to show its importance. I know
+of no very fine versification unaccompanied with
+fine poetry; no poetry of a mean order accompanied
+with verse of the highest.</p>
+
+<p>As to Rhyme, which might be thought too
+insignificant to mention, it is not at all so. The
+universal consent of modern Europe, and of the
+East in all ages, has made it one of the musical
+beauties of verse for all poetry but epic and
+dramatic, and even for the former with Southern
+Europe,&mdash;a sustainment for the enthusiasm, and
+a demand to enjoy. The mastery of it consists in
+never writing it for its own sake, or at least never
+appearing to do so; in knowing how to vary it,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[346]</a></span>
+to give it novelty, to render it more or less strong,
+to divide it (when not in couplets) at the proper
+intervals, to repeat it many times where luxury
+or animal spirits demand it (see an instance in
+Titania&#8217;s speech to the Fairies), to impress an
+affecting or startling remark with it, and to make
+it, in comic poetry, a new and surprising addition
+to the jest.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Large was his bounty and his soul sincere,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Heav&#8217;n did a recompense as largely send;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He gave to misery all he had, <i>a tear</i>;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He gain&#8217;d from heav&#8217;n (&#8217;twas all he wish&#8217;d) <i>a friend</i>.<br /></span>
+<span class="i16">Gray&#8217;s <i>Elegy</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The fops are proud of scandal; for they cry<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At every lewd, low character, &#8216;That&#8217;s <i>I</i>&#8217;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Dryden&#8217;s <i>Prologue to the Pilgrim</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">What makes all doctrines plain and clear?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>About two hundred pounds a-year.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And that which was proved true before,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Prove false again? <i>Two hundred more.</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i14"><i>Hudibras.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Compound for sins they are <i>inclin&#8217;d to</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By damning those they have <i>no mind to</i>.<br /></span>
+<span class="i16"><i>Id.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&mdash;&mdash;Stor&#8217;d with deletery <i>med&#8217;cines</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which whosoever took is <i>dead since</i>.<br /></span>
+<span class="i16"><i>Id.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Sometimes it is a grace in a master like Butler
+to force his rhyme, thus showing a laughing wilful
+power over the most stubborn materials:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i13">Win<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The women, and make them draw in<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The men, as Indians with a <i>f&egrave;male</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tame elephant inveigle <i>the</i> male.<br /></span>
+<span class="i14"><i>Hudibras.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He made an instrument to know<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If the moon shines at full or no;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That would, as soon as e&#8217;er she <i>shone, straight</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whether &#8217;twere day or night <i>demonstrate</i>;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tell what her diameter to an <i>inch is</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And prove that she&#8217;s not made of <i>green cheese</i>.<br /></span>
+<span class="i16"><i>Id.</i><br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[347]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Pronounce it, by all means, <i>grinches</i>, to make the
+joke more wilful. The happiest triple rhyme,
+perhaps, that ever was written, is in <i>Don Juan</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But oh! ye lords of ladies <i>intellectual</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Inform us truly,&mdash;haven&#8217;t they <i>hen-peck&#8217;d you all</i>?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">The sweepingness of the assumption completes the
+flowing breadth of effect.</p>
+
+<p>Dryden confessed that a rhyme often gave him
+a thought. Probably the happy word &#8216;sprung&#8217;
+in the following passage from Ben Jonson was
+suggested by it; but then the poet must have had
+the feeling in him.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">&mdash;Let our trumpets sound,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And cleave both air and ground<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With beating of our drums.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let every lyre be strung,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Harp, lute, theorbo, <i>sprung</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>With touch of dainty thumbs</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Boileau&#8217;s trick for appearing to rhyme naturally
+was to compose the second line of his couplet first!
+which gives one the crowning idea of the &#8216;artificial
+school of poetry&#8217;. Perhaps the most perfect
+master of rhyme, the easiest and most abundant,
+was the greatest writer of comedy that the world
+has seen,&mdash;Moli&egrave;re.</p>
+
+<p>If a young reader should ask, after all, What is
+the quickest way of knowing bad poets from good,
+the best poets from the next best, and so on? the
+answer is, the only and twofold way: first, the
+perusal of the best poets with the greatest attention;
+and, second, the cultivation of that love of
+truth and beauty which made them what they are.
+Every true reader of poetry partakes a more than
+ordinary portion of the poetic nature; and no one
+can be completely such, who does not love, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[348]</a></span>
+take an interest in, everything that interests the
+poet, from the firmament to the daisy,&mdash;from
+the highest heart of man to the most pitiable of
+the low. It is a good practice to read with pen in
+hand, marking what is liked or doubted. It rivets
+the attention, realizes the greatest amount of enjoyment,
+and facilitates reference. It enables the
+reader also, from time to time, to see what progress
+he makes with his own mind, and how it grows up
+towards the stature of its exalter.</p>
+
+<p>If the same person should ask, What class of
+poetry is the highest? I should say, undoubtedly,
+the Epic; for it includes the drama, with narration
+besides; or the speaking and action of the characters,
+with the speaking of the poet himself, whose
+utmost address is taxed to relate all well for so long
+a time, particularly in the passages least sustained
+by enthusiasm. Whether this class has included
+the greatest poet, is another question still under
+trial; for Shakespeare perplexes all such verdicts,
+even when the claimant is Homer; though, if
+a judgement may be drawn from his early narratives
+(<i>Venus and Adonis</i>, and the <i>Rape of Lucrece</i>), it is to
+be doubted whether even Shakespeare could have
+told a story like Homer, owing to that incessant
+activity and superfoetation of thought, a little less
+of which might be occasionally desired even in his
+plays;&mdash;if it were possible, once possessing anything
+of his, to wish it away. Next to Homer and
+Shakespeare come such narrators as the less
+universal, but still intenser Dante; Milton, with
+his dignified imagination; the universal, profoundly
+simple Chaucer; and luxuriant, remote Spenser&mdash;immortal
+child in poetry&#8217;s most poetic solitudes:
+then the great second-rate dramatists; unless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[349]</a></span>
+those who are better acquainted with Greek tragedy
+than I am, demand a place for them before Chaucer:
+then the airy yet robust universality of Ariosto;
+the hearty, out-of-door nature of Theocritus, also
+a universalist; the finest lyrical poets (who only
+take short flights, compared with the narrators);
+the purely contemplative poets who have more
+thought than feeling; the descriptive, satirical,
+didactic, epigrammatic. It is to be borne in mind,
+however, that the first poet of an inferior class may
+be superior to followers in the train of a higher one,
+though the superiority is by no means to be taken
+for granted; otherwise Pope would be superior to
+Fletcher, and Butler to Pope. Imagination, teeming
+with action and character, makes the greatest
+poets; feeling and thought the next; fancy (by
+itself) the next; wit the last. Thought by itself
+makes no poet at all; for the mere conclusions of
+the understanding can at best be only so many
+intellectual matters of fact. Feeling, even destitute
+of conscious thought, stands a far better poetical
+chance; feeling being a sort of thought without
+the process of thinking,&mdash;a grasper of the truth
+without seeing it. And what is very remarkable,
+feeling seldom makes the blunders that thought
+does. An idle distinction has been made between
+taste and judgement. Taste is the very maker of
+judgement. Put an artificial fruit in your mouth,
+or only handle it, and you will soon perceive the
+difference between judging from taste or tact, and
+judging from the abstract figment called judgement.
+The latter does but throw you into guesses
+and doubts. Hence the conceits that astonish
+us in the gravest, and even subtlest, thinkers,
+whose taste is not proportionate to their mental<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[350]</a></span>
+perceptions; men like Donne, for instance; who,
+apart from accidental personal impressions, seem to
+look at nothing as it really is, but only as to what
+may be thought of it. Hence, on the other hand,
+the delightfulness of those poets who never violate
+truth of feeling, whether in things real or imaginary;
+who are always consistent with their object and
+its requirements; and who run the great round of
+nature, not to perplex and be perplexed, but to
+make themselves and us happy. And luckily,
+delightfulness is not incompatible with greatness,
+willing soever as men may be in their present
+imperfect state to set the power to subjugate above
+the power to please. Truth, of any great kind
+whatsoever, makes great writing. This is the
+reason why such poets as Ariosto, though not writing
+with a constant detail of thought and feeling
+like Dante, are justly considered great as well as
+delightful. Their greatness proves itself by the
+same truth of nature, and sustained power, though
+in a different way. Their action is not so crowded
+and weighty; their sphere has more territories less
+fertile; but it has enchantments of its own, which
+excess of thought would spoil,&mdash;luxuries, laughing
+graces, animal spirits; and not to recognize the
+beauty and greatness of these, treated as they treat
+them, is simply to be defective in sympathy.
+Every planet is not Mars or Saturn. There is also
+Venus and Mercury. There is one genius of the
+south, and another of the north, and others uniting
+both. The reader who is too thoughtless or too
+sensitive to like intensity of any sort, and he who
+is too thoughtful or too dull to like anything but
+the greatest possible stimulus of reflection or passion,
+are equally wanting in complexional fitness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[351]</a></span>
+for a thorough enjoyment of books. Ariosto occasionally
+says as fine things as Dante, and Spenser as
+Shakespeare; but the business of both is to enjoy;
+and in order to partake their enjoyment to its full
+extent, you must feel what poetry is in the general
+as well as the particular, must be aware that there
+are different songs of the spheres, some fuller of
+notes, and others of a sustained delight; and as
+the former keep you perpetually alive to thought or
+passion, so from the latter you receive a constant
+harmonious sense of truth and beauty, more agreeable
+perhaps on the whole, though less exciting.
+Ariosto, for instance, does not <i>tell a story</i> with the
+brevity and concentrated passion of Dante; every
+sentence is not so full of matter, nor the style so
+removed from the indifference of prose; yet you
+are charmed with a truth of another sort, equally
+characteristic of the writer, equally drawn from
+nature and substituting a healthy sense of enjoyment
+for intenser emotion. Exclusiveness of liking
+for this or that mode of truth, only shows, either
+that a reader&#8217;s perceptions are limited, or that he
+would sacrifice truth itself to his favourite form of
+it. Sir Walter Raleigh, who was as trenchant
+with his pen as his sword, hailed the <i>Faerie Queene</i>
+of his friend Spenser in verses in which he said that
+&#8216;Petrarch&#8217; was thenceforward to be no more
+heard of; and that in all English poetry, there was
+nothing he counted &#8216;of any price&#8217; but the effusions
+of the new author. Yet Petrarch is still living;
+Chaucer was not abolished by Sir Walter; and
+Shakespeare is thought somewhat valuable. A
+botanist might as well have said, that myrtles and
+oaks were to disappear, because acacias had come
+up. It is with the poet&#8217;s creations, as with nature&#8217;s,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[352]</a></span>
+great or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever
+their amount, can be worthily shaped into
+verse, and answer to some demand for it in our
+hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether in
+productions grand and beautiful as some great
+event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no bigger
+and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch
+of violets; whether in Homer&#8217;s epic or Gray&#8217;s
+<i>Elegy</i>, in the enchanted gardens of Ariosto and
+Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the <i>Schoolmistress</i>
+of Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage.
+Not to know and feel this, is to be deficient
+in the universality of Nature herself, who is a
+poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale,
+and who calls upon us to admire all her productions;
+not indeed with the same degree of admiration, but
+with no refusal of it, except to defect.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot draw this essay towards its conclusion
+better than with three memorable words of Milton;
+who has said, that poetry, in comparison with
+science, is &#8216;simple, sensuous, and passionate&#8217;. By
+simple, he means unperplexed and self-evident;
+by sensuous, genial and full of imagery; by
+passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware
+that different constructions have been put on some
+of these words; but the context seems to me to
+necessitate those before us. I quote, however, not
+from the original, but from an extract in the
+<i>Remarks on Paradise Lost</i> by Richardson.</p>
+
+<p>What the poet has to cultivate above all things
+is love and truth;&mdash;what he has to avoid, like
+poison, is the fleeting and the false. He will get no
+good by proposing to be &#8216;in earnest at the moment&#8217;.
+His earnestness must be innate and habitual;
+born with him, and felt to be his most precious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[353]</a></span>
+inheritance. &#8216;I expect neither profit nor general
+fame by my writings,&#8217; says Coleridge, in the
+Preface to his Poems; &#8216;and I consider myself as
+having been amply repaid without either. Poetry
+has been to me its &#8220;<i>own exceeding great reward</i>&#8221;;
+it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and
+refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude;
+and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover
+the good and the beautiful in all that meets
+and surrounds me.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;Poetry&#8217;, says Shelley, &#8216;lifts the veil from the
+hidden beauty of the world, <i>and makes familiar
+objects be as if they were not familiar</i>. It reproduces
+all that it represents; and the impersonations
+clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in
+the minds of those who have once contemplated
+them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content
+which extends itself over all thoughts and
+actions with which it co-exists. The great secret
+of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature,
+and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
+which exists in thought, action, or person, not
+our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine
+intensely and comprehensively; he must put
+himself in the place of another, and of many others:
+the pains and pleasures of his species must become
+his own. The great instrument of moral good is
+imagination; and poetry administers to the effect
+by acting upon the cause.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>I would not willingly say anything after perorations
+like these; but as treatises on poetry may
+chance to have auditors who think themselves
+called upon to vindicate the superiority of what is
+termed useful knowledge, it may be as well to add,
+that if the poet may be allowed to pique himself on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[354]</a></span>
+any one thing more than another, compared with
+those who undervalue him, it is on that power of
+undervaluing nobody, and no attainments different
+from his own, which is given him by the very
+faculty of imagination they despise. The greater
+includes the less. They do not see that their inability
+to comprehend him argues the smaller
+capacity. No man recognizes the worth of utility
+more than the poet: he only desires that the meaning
+of the term may not come short of its greatness,
+and exclude the noblest necessities of his fellow-creatures.
+He is quite as much pleased, for instance,
+with the facilities for rapid conveyance
+afforded him by the railroad, as the dullest confiner
+of its advantages to that single idea, or as the
+greatest two-idea&#8217;d man who varies that single idea
+with hugging himself on his &#8216;buttons&#8217; or his good
+dinner. But he sees also the beauty of the country
+through which he passes, of the towns, of the heavens,
+of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming
+along like a magic horse, of the affections that are
+carrying, perhaps, half the passengers on their
+journey, nay, of those of the great two-idea&#8217;d man;
+and, beyond all this, he discerns the incalculable
+amount of good, and knowledge, and refinement,
+and mutual consideration, which this wonderful
+invention is fitted to circulate over the globe,
+perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and
+certainly to the diffusion of millions of enjoyments.</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;And a button-maker, after all, invented it!&#8217;
+cries our friend.</p>
+
+<p>Pardon me&mdash;it was a nobleman. A button-maker
+may be a very excellent, and a very poetical
+man too, and yet not have been the first man
+visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[355]</a></span>
+combination of water and fire. It was a nobleman
+who first thought of this most poetical bit of
+science. It was a nobleman who first thought of
+it&mdash;a captain who first tried it&mdash;and a button-maker
+who perfected it. And he who put the
+nobleman on such thoughts was the great philosopher,
+Bacon, who said that poetry had &#8216;something
+divine in it&#8217;, and was necessary to the
+satisfaction of the human mind.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> <i>Passio</i>, suffering in a good sense,&mdash;ardent subjection of
+one&#8217;s-self to emotion.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> throes?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> welters,&mdash;throws himself about.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> dwelling.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> Leigh Hunt&#8217;s <i>Imagination and Fancy, or Selections
+from the English Poets</i>, 1844.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> Pray let not the reader consent to read this first half of
+the line in any manner less marked and peremptory. It is
+a striking instance of the beauty of that &#8216;acceleration and
+retardation of true verse&#8217; which Coleridge speaks of.
+There is to be a hurry on the words <i>as the</i>, and a passionate
+emphasis and passing stop on the word <i>god</i>; and so of the
+next three words.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="MATTHEW_ARNOLD" id="MATTHEW_ARNOLD"></a>MATTHEW ARNOLD<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[356]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1822-1888</h3>
+
+<h3>THE CHOICE OF SUBJECTS IN POETRY</h3>
+
+<h4>[Preface to &#8216;Poems&#8217;, 1853]</h4>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> two small volumes of Poems, published
+anonymously, one in 1849, the other in 1852,
+many of the Poems which compose the present
+volume have already appeared. The rest are now
+published for the first time.</p>
+
+<p>I have, in the present collection, omitted the
+Poem from which the volume published in 1852
+took its title. I have done so, not because the
+subject of it was a Sicilian Greek born between
+two and three thousand years ago, although
+many persons would think this a sufficient reason.
+Neither have I done so because I had, in my own
+opinion, failed in the delineation which I intended
+to effect. I intended to delineate the feelings of
+one of the last of the Greek religious philosophers,
+one of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus, having
+survived his fellows, living on into a time when
+the habits of Greek thought and feeling had begun
+fast to change, character to dwindle, the influence
+of the Sophists to prevail. Into the feelings of
+a man so situated there entered much that we
+are accustomed to consider as exclusively modern;
+how much, the fragments of Empedocles himself
+which remain to us are sufficient at least to indicate.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[357]</a></span>
+What those who are familiar only with the great
+monuments of early Greek genius suppose to be
+its exclusive characteristics, have disappeared; the
+calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity
+have disappeared: the dialogue of the mind with
+itself has commenced; modern problems have
+presented themselves; we hear already the doubts,
+we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of
+Faust.</p>
+
+<p>The representation of such a man&#8217;s feelings
+must be interesting, if consistently drawn. We
+all naturally take pleasure, says Aristotle, in any
+imitation or representation whatever: this is the
+basis of our love of Poetry: and we take pleasure
+in them, he adds, because all knowledge is naturally
+agreeable to us; not to the philosopher only,
+but to mankind at large. Every representation
+therefore which is consistently drawn may be
+supposed to be interesting, inasmuch as it gratifies
+this natural interest in knowledge of all kinds.
+What is <i>not</i> interesting, is that which does not
+add to our knowledge of any kind; that which is
+vaguely conceived and loosely drawn; a representation
+which is general, indeterminate, and
+faint, instead of being particular, precise, and firm.</p>
+
+<p>Any accurate representation may therefore be
+expected to be interesting; but, if the representation
+be a poetical one, more than this is demanded.
+It is demanded, not only that it shall interest, but
+also that it shall inspirit and rejoice the reader:
+that it shall convey a charm, and infuse delight.
+For the Muses, as Hesiod says, were born that
+they might be &#8216;a forgetfulness of evils, and a truce
+from cares&#8217;; and it is not enough that the Poet
+should add to the knowledge of men, it is required<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[358]</a></span>
+of him also that he should add to their happiness.
+&#8216;All Art&#8217;, says Schiller, &#8216;is dedicated to Joy, and
+there is no higher and no more serious problem,
+than how to make men happy. The right Art is
+that alone, which creates the highest enjoyment.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>A poetical work, therefore, is not yet justified
+when it has been shown to be an accurate, and therefore
+interesting, representation; it has to be shown
+also that it is a representation from which men
+can derive enjoyment. In presence of the most
+tragic circumstances, represented in a work of Art,
+the feeling of enjoyment, as is well known, may
+still subsist: the representation of the most utter
+calamity, of the liveliest anguish, is not sufficient to
+destroy it: the more tragic the situation, the deeper
+becomes the enjoyment; and the situation is more
+tragic in proportion as it becomes more terrible.</p>
+
+<p>What then are the situations, from the representation
+of which, though accurate, no poetical
+enjoyment can be derived? They are those in
+which the suffering finds no vent in action; in
+which a continuous state of mental distress is
+prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance;
+in which there is everything to be endured,
+nothing to be done. In such situations there is
+inevitably something morbid, in the description
+of them something monotonous. When they
+occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic;
+the representation of them in poetry is painful also.</p>
+
+<p>To this class of situations, poetically faulty as
+it appears to me, that of Empedocles, as I have
+endeavoured to represent him, belongs; and I
+have therefore excluded the Poem from the
+present collection.</p>
+
+<p>And why, it may be asked, have I entered into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[359]</a></span>
+this explanation respecting a matter so unimportant
+as the admission or exclusion of the Poem in
+question? I have done so, because I was anxious
+to avow that the sole reason for its exclusion was
+that which has been stated above; and that it
+has not been excluded in deference to the opinion
+which many critics of the present day appear to
+entertain against subjects chosen from distant
+times and countries: against the choice, in short,
+of any subjects but modern ones.</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;The Poet,&#8217; it is said, and by an intelligent
+critic, &#8216;the Poet who would really fix the public
+attention must leave the exhausted past, and
+draw his subjects from matters of present import,
+and <i>therefore</i> both of interest and novelty.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>Now this view I believe to be completely false.
+It is worth examining, inasmuch as it is a fair
+sample of a class of critical dicta everywhere
+current at the present day, having a philosophical
+form and air, but no real basis in fact; and which
+are calculated to vitiate the judgement of readers
+of poetry, while they exert, so far as they are
+adopted, a misleading influence on the practice of
+those who write it.</p>
+
+<p>What are the eternal objects of Poetry, among
+all nations and at all times? They are actions;
+human actions; possessing an inherent interest
+in themselves, and which are to be communicated
+in an interesting manner by the art of the Poet.
+Vainly will the latter imagine that he has everything
+in his own power; that he can make an intrinsically
+inferior action equally delightful with a more
+excellent one by his treatment of it: he may
+indeed compel us to admire his skill, but his work
+will possess, within itself, an incurable defect.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[360]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Poet, then, has in the first place to select
+an excellent action; and what actions are the
+most excellent? Those, certainly, which most
+powerfully appeal to the great primary human
+affections: to those elementary feelings which
+subsist permanently in the race, and which are
+independent of time. These feelings are permanent
+and the same; that which interests them is
+permanent and the same also. The modernness
+or antiquity of an action, therefore, has nothing
+to do with its fitness for poetical representation;
+this depends upon its inherent qualities. To the
+elementary part of our nature, to our passions,
+that which is great and passionate is eternally
+interesting; and interesting solely in proportion
+to its greatness and to its passion. A great human
+action of a thousand years ago is more interesting
+to it than a smaller human action of to-day, even
+though upon the representation of this last the
+most consummate skill may have been expended,
+and though it has the advantage of appealing by
+its modern language, familiar manners, and contemporary
+allusions, to all our transient feelings
+and interests. These, however, have no right to
+demand of a poetical work that it shall satisfy
+them; their claims are to be directed elsewhere.
+Poetical works belong to the domain of our
+permanent passions: let them interest these, and
+the voice of all subordinate claims upon them is
+at once silenced.</p>
+
+<p>Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido&mdash;what
+modern poem presents personages as interesting,
+even to us moderns, as these personages of an
+&#8216;exhausted past&#8217;? We have the domestic epic
+dealing with the details of modern life which pass<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[361]</a></span>
+daily under our eyes; we have poems representing
+modern personages in contact with the problems
+of modern life, moral, intellectual, and social;
+these works have been produced by poets the
+most distinguished of their nation and time; yet
+I fearlessly assert that <i>Hermann and Dorothea</i>,
+<i>Childe Harold</i>, <i>Jocelyn</i>, <i>The Excursion</i>, leave the
+reader cold in comparison with the effect produced
+upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the
+<i>Orestea</i>, or by the episode of Dido. And why is
+this? Simply because in the three latter cases
+the action is greater, the personages nobler, the
+situations more intense: and this is the true basis
+of the interest in a poetical work, and this alone.</p>
+
+<p>It may be urged, however, that past actions
+may be interesting in themselves, but that they
+are not to be adopted by the modern Poet, because
+it is impossible for him to have them clearly
+present to his own mind, and he cannot therefore
+feel them deeply, nor represent them forcibly.
+But this is not necessarily the case. The externals
+of a past action, indeed, he cannot know with the
+precision of a contemporary; but his business is
+with its essentials. The outward man of Oedipus
+or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the
+ceremonies of their courts, he cannot accurately
+figure to himself; but neither do they essentially
+concern him. His business is with their inward
+man; with their feelings and behaviour in certain
+tragic situations, which engage their passions as
+men; these have in them nothing local and
+casual; they are as accessible to the modern
+Poet as to a contemporary.</p>
+
+<p>The date of an action, then, signifies nothing:
+the action itself, its selection and construction,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[362]</a></span>
+this is what is all-important. This the Greeks
+understood far more clearly than we do. The
+radical difference between their poetical theory
+and ours consists, as it appears to me, in this:
+that, with them, the poetical character of the
+action in itself, and the conduct of it, was the first
+consideration; with us, attention is fixed mainly
+on the value of the separate thoughts and images
+which occur in the treatment of an action. They
+regarded the whole; we regard the parts. With
+them, the action predominated over the expression
+of it; with us, the expression predominates over
+the action. Not that they failed in expression,
+or were inattentive to it; on the contrary, they
+are the highest models of expression, the unapproached
+masters of the <i>grand style</i>: but their
+expression is so excellent because it is so admirably
+kept in its right degree of prominence; because it
+is so simple and so well subordinated; because it
+draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the
+matter which it conveys. For what reason was the
+Greek tragic poet confined to so limited a range
+of subjects? Because there are so few actions
+which unite in themselves, in the highest degree,
+the conditions of excellence: and it was not
+thought that on any but an excellent subject
+could an excellent Poem be constructed. A few
+actions, therefore, eminently adapted for tragedy,
+maintained almost exclusive possession of the
+Greek tragic stage; their significance appeared
+inexhaustible; they were as permanent problems,
+perpetually offered to the genius of every fresh
+poet. This too is the reason of what appears to
+us moderns a certain baldness of expression in
+Greek tragedy; of the triviality with which we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[363]</a></span>
+often reproach the remarks of the Chorus, where
+it takes part in the dialogue: that the action
+itself, the situation of Orestes, or Merope, or
+Alcmaeon, was to stand the central point of
+interest, unforgotten, absorbing, principal; that
+no accessories were for a moment to distract the
+spectator&#8217;s attention from this; that the tone of
+the parts was to be perpetually kept down, in
+order not to impair the grandiose effect of the whole.
+The terrible old mythic story on which the drama
+was founded stood, before he entered the theatre,
+traced in its bare outlines upon the spectator&#8217;s
+mind; it stood in his memory, as a group of
+statuary, faintly seen, at the end of a long and
+dark vista: then came the Poet, embodying outlines,
+developing situations, not a word wasted, not
+a sentiment capriciously thrown in; stroke upon
+stroke, the drama proceeded: the light deepened
+upon the group; more and more it revealed itself
+to the riveted gaze of the spectator: until at last,
+when the final words were spoken, it stood before
+him in broad sunlight, a model of immortal beauty.</p>
+
+<p>This was what a Greek critic demanded; this
+was what a Greek poet endeavoured to effect.
+It signified nothing to what time an action belonged;
+we do not find that the <i>Persae</i> occupied a particularly
+high rank among the dramas of Aeschylus, because
+it represented a matter of contemporary interest:
+this was not what a cultivated Athenian required;
+he required that the permanent elements of his
+nature should be moved; and dramas of which
+the action, though taken from a long-distant
+mythic time, yet was calculated to accomplish this
+in a higher degree than that of the <i>Persae</i>, stood
+higher in his estimation accordingly. The Greeks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[364]</a></span>
+felt, no doubt, with their exquisite sagacity of taste,
+that an action of present times was too near them,
+too much mixed up with what was accidental
+and passing, to form a sufficiently grand, detached,
+and self-subsistent object for a tragic poem: such
+objects belonged to the domain of the comic poet,
+and of the lighter kinds of poetry. For the more
+serious kinds, for <i>pragmatic</i> poetry, to use an excellent
+expression of Polybius, they were more difficult and
+severe in the range of subjects which they permitted.
+Their theory and practice alike, the admirable
+treatise of Aristotle, and the unrivalled works of
+their poets, exclaim with a thousand tongues&mdash;&#8216;All
+depends upon the subject; choose a fitting
+action, penetrate yourself with the feeling of its
+situations; this done, everything else will follow.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>But for all kinds of poetry alike there was one
+point on which they were rigidly exacting; the
+adaptability of the subject to the kind of poetry
+selected, and the careful construction of the poem.</p>
+
+<p>How different a way of thinking from this is ours!
+We can hardly at the present day understand what
+Menander meant, when he told a man who inquired
+as to the progress of his comedy that he had finished
+it, not having yet written a single line, because
+he had constructed the action of it in his mind.
+A modern critic would have assured him that the
+merit of his piece depended on the brilliant things
+which arose under his pen as he went along. We
+have poems which seem to exist merely for the
+sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake
+of producing any total impression. We have critics
+who seem to direct their attention merely to
+detached expressions, to the language about the
+action, not to the action itself. I verily think that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[365]</a></span>
+the majority of them do not in their hearts believe
+that there is such a thing as a total-impression to
+be derived from a poem at all, or to be demanded
+from a poet; they think the term a commonplace
+of metaphysical criticism. They will permit the
+Poet to select any action he pleases, and to suffer
+that action to go as it will, provided he gratifies
+them with occasional bursts of fine writing, and
+with a shower of isolated thoughts and images.
+That is, they permit him to leave their poetical
+sense ungratified, provided that he gratifies their
+rhetorical sense and their curiosity. Of his neglecting
+to gratify these, there is little danger; he needs
+rather to be warned against the danger of attempting
+to gratify these alone; he needs rather to be
+perpetually reminded to prefer his action to everything
+else; so to treat this, as to permit its inherent
+excellences to develop themselves, without interruption
+from the intrusion of his personal peculiarities:
+most fortunate when he most entirely succeeds
+in effacing himself, and in enabling a noble action
+to subsist as it did in nature.</p>
+
+<p>But the modern critic not only permits a false
+practice; he absolutely prescribes false aims.&mdash;&#8216;A
+true allegory of the state of one&#8217;s own mind in
+a representative history,&#8217; the Poet is told, &#8216;is
+perhaps the highest thing that one can attempt in
+the way of poetry.&#8217;&mdash;And accordingly he attempts it.
+An allegory of the state of one&#8217;s own mind, the
+highest problem of an art which imitates actions!
+No assuredly, it is not, it never can be so: no great
+poetical work has ever been produced with such
+an aim. <i>Faust</i> itself, in which something of
+the kind is attempted, wonderful passages as it
+contains, and in spite of the unsurpassed beauty of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[366]</a></span>
+the scenes which relate to Margaret, <i>Faust</i> itself,
+judged as a whole, and judged strictly as a poetical
+work, is defective: its illustrious author, the
+greatest poet of modern times, the greatest critic of
+all times, would have been the first to acknowledge
+it; he only defended his work, indeed, by asserting
+it to be &#8216;something incommensurable&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>The confusion of the present times is great, the
+multitude of voices counselling different things
+bewildering, the number of existing works capable
+of attracting a young writer&#8217;s attention and of
+becoming his models, immense: what he wants is
+a hand to guide him through the confusion, a voice
+to prescribe to him the aim which he should keep in
+view, and to explain to him that the value of the
+literary works which offer themselves to his attention
+is relative to their power of helping him forward on
+his road towards this aim. Such a guide the English
+writer at the present day will nowhere find. Failing
+this, all that can be looked for, all indeed that can
+be desired, is, that his attention should be fixed on
+excellent models; that he may reproduce, at any
+rate, something of their excellence, by penetrating
+himself with their works and by catching their
+spirit, if he cannot be taught to produce what is
+excellent independently.</p>
+
+<p>Foremost among these models for the English
+writer stands Shakespeare: a name the greatest
+perhaps of all poetical names; a name never to
+be mentioned without reverence. I will venture,
+however, to express a doubt, whether the influence
+of his works, excellent and fruitful for the readers
+of poetry, for the great majority, has been of
+unmixed advantage to the writers of it. Shakespeare
+indeed chose excellent subjects; the world could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[367]</a></span>
+afford no better than Macbeth, or Romeo and Juliet,
+or Othello: he had no theory respecting the
+necessity of choosing subjects of present import, or
+the paramount interest attaching to allegories of
+the state of one&#8217;s own mind; like all great poets,
+he knew well what constituted a poetical action;
+like them, wherever he found such an action, he
+took it; like them, too, he found his best in past
+times. But to these general characteristics of all
+great poets, he added a special one of his own;
+a gift, namely, of happy, abundant, and ingenious
+expression, eminent and unrivalled: so eminent
+as irresistibly to strike the attention first in him,
+and even to throw into comparative shade his other
+excellences as a poet. Here has been the mischief.
+These other excellences were his fundamental
+excellences <i>as a poet</i>; what distinguishes the artist
+from the mere amateur, says Goethe, is <i>Architectonic&egrave;</i>
+in the highest sense; that power of execution,
+which creates, forms, and constitutes: not the
+profoundness of single thoughts, not the richness of
+imagery, not the abundance of illustration. But
+these attractive accessories of a poetical work being
+more easily seized than the spirit of the whole, and
+these accessories being possessed by Shakespeare in
+an unequalled degree, a young writer having recourse
+to Shakespeare as his model runs great risk of being
+vanquished and absorbed by them, and, in consequence,
+of reproducing, according to the measure
+of his power, these, and these alone. Of this
+preponderating quality of Shakespeare&#8217;s genius,
+accordingly, almost the whole of modern English
+poetry has, it appears to me, felt the influence.
+To the exclusive attention on the part of his
+imitators to this it is in a great degree owing,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[368]</a></span>
+that of the majority of modern poetical works the details
+alone are valuable, the composition worthless.
+In reading them one is perpetually reminded of that
+terrible sentence on a modern French poet&mdash;<i>il dit tout
+ce qu&#8217;il veut, mais malheureusement il n&#8217;a rien &agrave; dire</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Let me give an instance of what I mean. I will
+take it from the works of the very chief among
+those who seem to have been formed in the school
+of Shakespeare: of one whose exquisite genius and
+pathetic death render him for ever interesting.
+I will take the poem of <i>Isabella, or the Pot of Basil</i>,
+by Keats. I choose this rather than the <i>Endymion</i>,
+because the latter work (which a modern critic
+has classed with the <i>Faerie Queene</i>!), although
+undoubtedly there blows through it the breath of
+genius, is yet as a whole so utterly incoherent, as
+not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all.
+The poem of <i>Isabella</i>, then, is a perfect treasure-house
+of graceful and felicitous words and images:
+almost in every stanza there occurs one of those
+vivid and picturesque turns of expression, by which
+the object is made to flash upon the eye of the
+mind, and which thrill the reader with a sudden
+delight. This one short poem contains, perhaps,
+a greater number of happy single expressions which
+one could quote than all the extant tragedies of
+Sophocles. But the action, the story? The action
+in itself is an excellent one; but so feebly is it
+conceived by the Poet, so loosely constructed, that
+the effect produced by it, in and for itself, is
+absolutely null. Let the reader, after he has
+finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story
+in the <i>Decameron</i>: he will then feel how pregnant
+and interesting the same action has become in the
+hands of a great artist, who above all things<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[369]</a></span>
+delineates his object; who subordinates expression
+to that which it is designed to express.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that the imitators of Shakespeare,
+fixing their attention on his wonderful gift of
+expression, have directed their imitation to this,
+neglecting his other excellences. These excellences,
+the fundamental excellences of poetical art, Shakespeare
+no doubt possessed them&mdash;possessed many
+of them in a splendid degree; but it may perhaps
+be doubted whether even he himself did not sometimes
+give scope to his faculty of expression to the
+prejudice of a higher poetical duty. For we must
+never forget that Shakespeare is the great poet he is
+from his skill in discerning and firmly conceiving an
+excellent action, from his power of intensely feeling
+a situation, of intimately associating himself with
+a character; not from his gift of expression, which
+rather even leads him astray, degenerating sometimes
+into a fondness for curiosity of expression,
+into an irritability of fancy, which seems to make
+it impossible for him to say a thing plainly, even
+when the press of the action demands the very
+directest language, or its level character the very
+simplest. Mr. Hallam, than whom it is impossible
+to find a saner and more judicious critic, has had
+the courage (for at the present day it needs courage)
+to remark, how extremely and faultily difficult
+Shakespeare&#8217;s language often is. It is so: you
+may find main scenes in some of his greatest
+tragedies, <i>King Lear</i> for instance, where the language
+is so artificial, so curiously tortured, and so difficult,
+that every speech has to be read two or three
+times before its meaning can be comprehended.
+This overcuriousness of expression is indeed but
+the excessive employment of a wonderful gift&mdash;of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[370]</a></span>
+the power of saying a thing in a happier way than
+any other man; nevertheless, it is carried so far
+that one understands what M. Guizot meant, when
+he said that Shakespeare appears in his language to
+have tried all styles except that of simplicity. He
+has not the severe and scrupulous self-restraint of
+the ancients, partly, no doubt, because he had a far
+less cultivated and exacting audience: he has
+indeed a far wider range than they had, a far richer
+fertility of thought; in this respect he rises above
+them: in his strong conception of his subject, in
+the genuine way in which he is penetrated with it,
+he resembles them, and is unlike the moderns: but
+in the accurate limitation of it, the conscientious
+rejection of superfluities, the simple and rigorous
+development of it from the first line of his work to
+the last, he falls below them, and comes nearer to
+the moderns. In his chief works, besides what he
+has of his own, he has the elementary soundness of
+the ancients; he has their important action and
+their large and broad manner: but he has not
+their purity of method. He is therefore a less safe
+model; for what he has of his own is personal, and
+inseparable from his own rich nature; it may be
+imitated and exaggerated, it cannot be learned or
+applied as an art; he is above all suggestive; more
+valuable, therefore, to young writers as men than
+as artists. But clearness of arrangement, rigour of
+development, simplicity of style&mdash;these may to
+a certain extent be learned: and these may, I am
+convinced, be learned best from the ancients, who,
+although infinitely less suggestive than Shakespeare,
+are thus, to the artist, more instructive.</p>
+
+<p>What then, it will be asked, are the ancients to
+be our sole models? the ancients with their comparatively<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[371]</a></span>
+narrow range of experience, and their
+widely different circumstances? Not, certainly,
+that which is narrow in the ancients, nor that in
+which we can no longer sympathize. An action
+like the action of the <i>Antigone</i> of Sophocles, which
+turns upon the conflict between the heroine&#8217;s duty
+to her brother&#8217;s corpse and that to the laws of her
+country, is no longer one in which it is possible that
+we should feel a deep interest. I am speaking too,
+it will be remembered, not of the best sources of
+intellectual stimulus for the general reader, but of
+the best models of instruction for the individual
+writer. This last may certainly learn of the ancients,
+better than anywhere else, three things which it
+is vitally important for him to know:&mdash;the all-importance
+of the choice of a subject; the necessity
+of accurate construction; and the subordinate
+character of expression. He will learn from them
+how unspeakably superior is the effect of the one
+moral impression left by a great action treated as
+a whole, to the effect produced by the most striking
+single thought or by the happiest image. As he
+penetrates into the spirit of the great classical works,
+as he becomes gradually aware of their intense significance,
+their noble simplicity, and their calm pathos,
+he will be convinced that it is this effect, unity
+and profoundness of moral impression, at which the
+ancient Poets aimed; that it is this which constitutes
+the grandeur of their works, and which
+makes them immortal. He will desire to direct his
+own efforts towards producing the same effect.
+Above all, he will deliver himself from the jargon
+of modern criticism, and escape the danger of producing
+poetical works conceived in the spirit of the
+passing time, and which partake of its transitoriness.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[372]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The present age makes great claims upon us: we
+owe it service, it will not be satisfied without our
+admiration. I know not how it is, but their
+commerce with the ancients appears to me to
+produce, in those who constantly practise it,
+a steadying and composing effect upon their
+judgement, not of literary works only, but of men
+and events in general. They are like persons who
+have had a very weighty and impressive experience;
+they are more truly than others under the empire of
+facts, and more independent of the language current
+among those with whom they live. They wish
+neither to applaud nor to revile their age: they
+wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and
+whether this is what they want. What they want,
+they know very well; they want to educe and
+cultivate what is best and noblest in themselves:
+they know, too, that this is no easy task&mdash;&#967;&#945;&#955;&#949;&#960;&#8056;&#957;,
+as Pittacus said, &#967;&#945;&#955;&#949;&#960;&#8056;&#957; &#7956;&#963;&#952;&#955;&#8056;&#957; &#7956;&#956;&#956;&#949;&#957;&#945;&#953;&mdash;and
+they ask themselves sincerely whether their age
+and its literature can assist them in the attempt.
+If they are endeavouring to practise any art, they
+remember the plain and simple proceedings of the
+old artists, who attained their grand results by
+penetrating themselves with some noble and
+significant action, not by inflating themselves
+with a belief in the pre-eminent importance and
+greatness of their own times. They do not talk of
+their mission, nor of interpreting their age, nor of
+the coming Poet; all this, they know, is the mere
+delirium of vanity; their business is not to praise
+their age, but to afford to the men who live in it the
+highest pleasure which they are capable of feeling.
+If asked to afford this by means of subjects drawn
+from the age itself, they ask what special fitness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[373]</a></span>
+the present age has for supplying them: they are
+told that it is an era of progress, an age commissioned
+to carry out the great ideas of industrial development
+and social amelioration. They reply that with all
+this they can do nothing; that the elements they
+need for the exercise of their art are great actions,
+calculated powerfully and delightfully to affect
+what is permanent in the human soul; that so far
+as the present age can supply such actions, they
+will gladly make use of them; but that an age
+wanting in moral grandeur can with difficulty
+supply such, and an age of spiritual discomfort
+with difficulty be powerfully and delightfully
+affected by them.</p>
+
+<p>A host of voices will indignantly rejoin that the
+present age is inferior to the past neither in moral
+grandeur nor in spiritual health. He who possesses
+the discipline I speak of will content himself with
+remembering the judgements passed upon the
+present age, in this respect, by the two men, the
+one of strongest head, the other of widest culture,
+whom it has produced; by Goethe and by Niebuhr.
+It will be sufficient for him that he knows the
+opinions held by these two great men respecting
+the present age and its literature; and that he
+feels assured in his own mind that their aims and
+demands upon life were such as he would wish, at
+any rate, his own to be; and their judgement as
+to what is impeding and disabling such as he
+may safely follow. He will not, however, maintain
+a hostile attitude towards the false pretensions of
+his age; he will content himself with not being
+overwhelmed by them. He will esteem himself
+fortunate if he can succeed in banishing from his
+mind all feelings of contradiction, and irritation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[374]</a></span>,
+and impatience; in order to delight himself with
+the contemplation of some noble action of a heroic
+time, and to enable others, through his representation
+of it, to delight in it also.</p>
+
+<p>I am far indeed from making any claim, for
+myself, that I possess this discipline; or for the
+following Poems, that they breathe its spirit. But
+I say, that in the sincere endeavour to learn and
+practise, amid the bewildering confusion of our
+times, what is sound and true in poetical art,
+I seemed to myself to find the only sure guidance,
+the only solid footing, among the ancients. They,
+at any rate, knew what they wanted in Art, and we
+do not. It is this uncertainty which is disheartening,
+and not hostile criticism. How often have I felt
+this when reading words of disparagement or of
+cavil: that it is the uncertainty as to what is really
+to be aimed at which makes our difficulty, not the
+dissatisfaction of the critic, who himself suffers
+from the same uncertainty. <i>Non me tua fervida
+terrent Dicta; Dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis.</i></p>
+
+<p>Two kinds of <i>dilettanti</i>, says Goethe, there are in
+poetry: he who neglects the indispensable mechanical
+part, and thinks he has done enough if he shows
+spirituality and feeling; and he who seeks to arrive
+at poetry merely by mechanism, in which he can
+acquire an artisan&#8217;s readiness, and is without soul
+and matter. And he adds, that the first does most
+harm to Art, and the last to himself. If we must
+be <i>dilettanti</i>: if it is impossible for us, under the
+circumstances amidst which we live, to think
+clearly, to feel nobly, and to delineate firmly: if
+we cannot attain to the mastery of the great artists&mdash;let
+us, at least, have so much respect for our Art
+as to prefer it to ourselves: let us not bewilder<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[375]</a></span>
+our successors: let us transmit to them the practice
+of Poetry, with its boundaries and wholesome
+regulative laws, under which excellent works may
+again, perhaps, at some future time, be produced,
+not yet fallen into oblivion through our neglect,
+not yet condemned and cancelled by the influence
+of their eternal enemy, Caprice.</p>
+
+
+<h3 style="padding-top: 1em">ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION</h3>
+
+<h3>(1854)</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I have</span> allowed the Preface to the former edition
+of these Poems to stand almost without change,
+because I still believe it to be, in the main, true.
+I must not, however, be supposed insensible to the
+force of much that has been alleged against portions
+of it, or unaware that it contains many things
+incompletely stated, many things which need
+limitation. It leaves, too, untouched the question,
+how far, and in what manner, the opinions there
+expressed respecting the choice of subjects apply to
+lyric poetry; that region of the poetical field which
+is chiefly cultivated at present. But neither have
+I time now to supply these deficiencies, nor is this
+the proper place for attempting it: on one or two
+points alone I wish to offer, in the briefest possible
+way, some explanation.</p>
+
+<p>An objection has been ably urged to the classing
+together, as subjects equally belonging to a past
+time, Oedipus and Macbeth. And it is no doubt
+true that to Shakespeare, standing on the verge of
+the Middle Ages, the epoch of Macbeth was more
+familiar than that of Oedipus. But I was speaking
+of actions as they presented themselves to us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[376]</a></span>
+moderns: and it will hardly be said that the
+European mind, since Voltaire, has much more
+affinity with the times of Macbeth than with those
+of Oedipus. As moderns, it seems to me, we have
+no longer any direct affinity with the circumstances
+and feelings of either; as individuals, we are
+attracted towards this or that personage, we have
+a capacity for imagining him, irrespective of his
+times, solely according to a law of personal sympathy;
+and those subjects for which we feel this personal
+attraction most strongly, we may hope to treat
+successfully. Alcestis or Joan of Arc, Charlemagne
+or Agamemnon&mdash;one of these is not really nearer
+to us now than another; each can be made present
+only by an act of poetic imagination: but this man&#8217;s
+imagination has an affinity for one of them, and that
+man&#8217;s for another.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that I wish to limit the Poet, in
+his choice of subjects to the period of Greek and
+Roman antiquity: but it is not so: I only counsel
+him to choose for his subjects great actions, without
+regarding to what time they belong. Nor do I deny
+that the poetic faculty can and does manifest itself
+in treating the most trifling action, the most
+hopeless subject. But it is a pity that power
+should be wasted; and that the Poet should be
+compelled to impart interest and force to his subject,
+instead of receiving them from it, and thereby
+doubling his impressiveness. There is, it has been
+excellently said, an immortal strength in the stories
+of great actions: the most gifted poet, then, may
+well be glad to supplement with it that mortal
+weakness, which, in presence of the vast spectacle
+of life and the world, he must for ever feel to be his
+individual portion.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[377]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Again, with respect to the study of the classical
+writers of antiquity: it has been said that we
+should emulate rather than imitate them. I make
+no objection: all I say is, let us study them. They
+can help to cure us of what is, it seems to me, the
+great vice of our intellect, manifesting itself in our
+incredible vagaries in literature, in art, in religion,
+in morals; namely, that it is <i>fantastic</i>, and wants
+<i>sanity</i>. Sanity&mdash;that is the great virtue of the
+ancient literature: the want of that is the great
+defect of the modern, in spite of all its variety and
+power. It is impossible to read carefully the great
+ancients, without losing something of our caprice
+and eccentricity; and to emulate them we must at
+least read them.</p>
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="JOHN_RUSKIN" id="JOHN_RUSKIN"></a>JOHN RUSKIN<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[378]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1819-1900</h3>
+
+<h3>OF THE PATHETIC FALLACY</h3>
+
+<h4>[<i>Modern Painters</i>, vol. iii, pt. 4, 1856]</h4>
+
+
+<p>&sect; 1. <span class="smcap">German</span> dulness, and English affectation,
+have of late much multiplied among us the use of
+two of the most objectionable words that were ever
+coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysicians&mdash;namely,
+&#8216;Objective&#8217; and &#8216;Subjective&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>No words can be more exquisitely, and in all
+points, useless; and I merely speak of them that
+I may, at once and for ever, get them out of my way,
+and out of my reader&#8217;s. But to get that done, they
+must be explained.</p>
+
+<p>The word &#8216;Blue&#8217;, say certain philosophers, means
+the sensation of colour which the human eye receives
+in looking at the open sky, or at a bell gentian.</p>
+
+<p>Now, say they farther, as this sensation can only
+be felt when the eye is turned to the object, and as,
+therefore, no such sensation is produced by the
+object when nobody looks at it, therefore the thing,
+when it is not looked at, is not blue; and thus
+(say they) there are many qualities of things which
+depend as much on something else as on themselves.
+To be sweet, a thing must have a taster; it is only
+sweet while it is being tasted, and if the tongue had
+not the capacity of taste, then the sugar would not
+have the quality of sweetness.</p>
+
+<p>And then they agree that the qualities of things
+which thus depend upon our perception of them,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[379]</a></span>
+and upon our human nature as affected by them,
+shall be called Subjective; and the qualities of
+things which they always have, irrespective of any
+other nature, as roundness or squareness, shall be
+called Objective.</p>
+
+<p>From these ingenious views the step is very easy
+to a farther opinion, that it does not much matter
+what things are in themselves, but only what they
+are to us; and that the only real truth of them is
+their appearance to, or effect upon, us. From which
+position, with a hearty desire for mystification, and
+much egotism, selfishness, shallowness, and impertinence,
+a philosopher may easily go so far as to
+believe, and say, that everything in the world
+depends upon his seeing or thinking of it, and that
+nothing, therefore, exists, but what he sees or
+thinks of.</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 2. Now, to get rid of all these ambiguities and
+troublesome words at once, be it observed that the
+word &#8216;Blue&#8217; does <i>not</i> mean the <i>sensation</i> caused by
+a gentian on the human eye; but it means the
+<i>power</i> of producing that sensation; and this power
+is always there, in the thing, whether we are there
+to experience it or not, and would remain there though
+there were not left a man on the face of the earth.
+Precisely in the same way gunpowder has a power
+of exploding. It will not explode if you put no
+match to it. But it has always the power of so
+exploding, and is therefore called an explosive
+compound, which it very positively and assuredly is,
+whatever philosophy may say to the contrary.</p>
+
+<p>In like manner, a gentian does not produce the
+sensation of blueness if you don&#8217;t look at it. But
+it has always the power of doing so; its particles
+being everlastingly so arranged by its Maker.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[380]</a></span>
+And, therefore, the gentian and the sky are always
+verily blue, whatever philosophy may say to the
+contrary; and if you do not see them blue when
+you look at them, it is not their fault but yours.</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 3. Hence I would say to these philosophers:
+If, instead of using the sonorous phrase, &#8216;It is
+objectively so,&#8217; you will use the plain old phrase,
+&#8216;It <i>is</i> so;&#8217; and if instead of the sonorous phrase,
+&#8216;It is subjectively so,&#8217; you will say, in plain old
+English, &#8216;It does so,&#8217; or &#8216;It seems so to me;&#8217; you
+will, on the whole, be more intelligible to your
+fellow-creatures: and besides, if you find that
+a thing which generally &#8216;does so&#8217; to other people
+(as a gentian looks blue to most men), does <i>not</i> so
+to you, on any particular occasion, you will not fall
+into the impertinence of saying, that the thing is
+not so, or did not so, but you will say simply (what
+you will be all the better for speedily finding out),
+that something is the matter with you. If you find
+that you cannot explode the gunpowder, you will
+not declare that all gunpowder is subjective, and
+all explosion imaginary, but you will simply suspect
+and declare yourself to be an ill-made match.
+Which, on the whole, though there may be a distant
+chance of a mistake about it, is, nevertheless, the
+wisest conclusion you can come to until farther
+experiment.</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 4. Now, therefore, putting these tiresome and
+absurd words quite out of our way, we may go on
+at our ease to examine the point in question&mdash;namely,
+the difference between the ordinary, proper,
+and true appearances of things to us; and the
+extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are
+under the influence of emotion, or contemplative
+fancy; false appearances, I say, as being entirely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[381]</a></span>
+unconnected with any real power or character in
+the object, and only imputed to it by us.</p>
+
+<p>For instance&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The
+crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its
+yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we
+enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that
+it is anything else than a plain crocus?</p>
+
+<p>It is an important question. For, throughout our
+past reasonings about art, we have always found
+that nothing could be good, or useful, or ultimately
+pleasurable, which was untrue. But here is something
+pleasurable in written poetry which is nevertheless
+<i>un</i>true. And what is more, if we think
+over our favourite poetry, we shall find it full of
+this kind of fallacy, and that we like it all the more
+for being so.</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 5. It will appear also, on consideration of the
+matter, that this fallacy is of two principal kinds.
+Either, as in this case of the crocus, it is the fallacy
+of wilful fancy, which involves no real expectation
+that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused
+by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for
+the time, more or less irrational. Of the cheating of
+the fancy we shall have to speak presently; but,
+in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of
+the other error, that which the mind admits when
+affected strongly by emotion. Thus, for instance,
+in Alton Locke&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">They rowed her in across the rolling foam&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The cruel, crawling foam.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[382]</a></span>
+The state of mind which attributes to it these
+characters of a living creature is one in which the
+reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings
+have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness
+in all our impressions of external things, which
+I would generally characterize as the &#8216;Pathetic
+Fallacy&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 6. Now we are in the habit of considering this
+fallacy as eminently a character of poetical description,
+and the temper of mind in which we allow it
+as one eminently poetical, because passionate.
+But, I believe, if we look well into the matter, that
+we shall find the greatest poets do not often admit
+this kind of falseness&mdash;that it is only the second
+order of poets who much delight in it.<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[383]</a></span></p>
+<p>Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling
+from the bank of Acheron &#8216;as dead leaves flutter
+from a bough&#8217;, he gives the most perfect image possible
+of their utter lightness, feebleness, passiveness,
+and scattering agony of despair, without, however,
+for an instant losing his own clear perception that
+<i>these</i> are souls, and <i>those</i> are leaves; he makes no
+confusion of one with the other. But when
+Coleridge speaks of</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The one red leaf, the last of its clan,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That dances as often as dance it can,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea
+about the leaf: he fancies a life in it, and will,
+which there are not; confuses its powerlessness
+with choice, its fading death with merriment, and
+the wind that shakes it with music. Here, however,
+there is some beauty, even in the morbid passage;
+but take an instance in Homer and Pope. Without
+the knowledge of Ulysses, Elpenor, his youngest
+follower, has fallen from an upper chamber in the
+Circean palace, and has been left dead, unmissed by
+his leader, or companions, in the haste of their
+departure. They cross the sea to the Cimmerian
+land; and Ulysses summons the shades from
+Tartarus. The first which appears is that of the
+lost Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the
+spirit of bitter and terrified lightness which is seen
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[384]</a></span>in Hamlet,<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> addresses the spirit with the simple,
+startled words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Elpenor! How camest thou under the shadowy darkness?
+Hast thou come faster on foot than I in my black ship?</p></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Which Pope renders thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O, say, what angry power Elpenor led<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To glide in shades, and wander with the dead?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here,
+either in the nimbleness of the sail, or the laziness
+of the wind! And yet how is it that these conceits
+are so painful now, when they have been pleasant
+to us in the other instances?</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 7. For a very simple reason. They are not
+a <i>pathetic</i> fallacy at all, for they are put into the
+mouth of the wrong passion&mdash;a passion which never
+could possibly have spoken them&mdash;agonized curiosity.
+Ulysses wants to know the facts of the matter; and
+the very last thing his mind could do at the moment
+would be to pause, or suggest in anywise what was
+<i>not</i> a fact. The delay in the first three lines, and
+conceit in the last, jar upon us instantly, like the most
+frightful discord in music. No poet of true imaginative
+power could possibly have written the passage.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[385]</a></span></p><p>Therefore, we see that the spirit of truth must
+guide us in some sort, even in our enjoyment of
+fallacy. Coleridge&#8217;s fallacy has no discord in it,
+but Pope&#8217;s has set our teeth on edge. Without
+farther questioning, I will endeavour to state the
+main bearings of this matter.</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 8. The temperament which admits the pathetic
+fallacy, is, as I said above, that of a mind and body
+in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is
+before them or upon them; borne away, or overclouded,
+or over-dazzled by emotion; and it is
+a more or less noble state, according to the force of
+the emotion which has induced it. For it is no
+credit to a man that he is not morbid or inaccurate
+in his perceptions, when he has no strength of
+feeling to warp them; and it is in general a sign of
+higher capacity and stand in the ranks of being,
+that the emotions should be strong enough to
+vanquish, partly, the intellect, and make it believe
+what they choose. But it is still a grander condition
+when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough
+to assert its rule against, or together with, the
+utmost efforts of the passions; and the whole man
+stands in an iron glow, white hot, perhaps, but still
+strong, and in no wise evaporating; even if he melts,
+losing none of his weight.</p>
+
+<p>So, then, we have the three ranks: the man who
+perceives rightly, because he does not feel, and to
+whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose,
+because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the
+man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and
+to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose:
+a star, or a sun, or a fairy&#8217;s shield, or a forsaken
+maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who
+perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[386]</a></span>
+whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than
+itself&mdash;a little flower, apprehended in the very plain
+and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever
+the associations and passions may be, that crowd
+around it. And, in general, these three classes
+may be rated in comparative order, as the men who
+are not poets at all, and the poets of the second
+order, and the poets of the first; only however
+great a man may be, there are always some subjects
+which <i>ought</i> to throw him off his balance; some,
+by which his poor human capacity of thought
+should be conquered, and brought into the inaccurate
+and vague state of perception, so that the language
+of the highest inspiration becomes broken, obscure,
+and wild in metaphor, resembling that of the
+weaker man, overborne by weaker things.</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 9. And thus, in full, there are four classes: the
+men who feel nothing, and therefore see truly; the
+men who feel strongly, think weakly, and see
+untruly (second order of poets); the men who feel
+strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order
+of poets); and the men who, strong as human
+creatures can be, are yet submitted to influences
+stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly,
+because what they see is inconceivably above
+them. This last is the usual condition of prophetic
+inspiration.</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 10. I separate these classes, in order that their
+character may be clearly understood; but of course
+they are united each to the other by imperceptible
+transitions, and the same mind, according to the
+influences to which it is subjected, passes at different
+times into the various states. Still, the difference
+between the great and less man is, on the whole,
+chiefly in this point of <i>alterability</i>. That is to say,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[387]</a></span>
+the one knows too much, and perceives and feels
+too much of the past and future, and of all things
+beside and around that which immediately affects
+him, to be in anywise shaken by it. His mind is
+made up; his thoughts have an accustomed
+current; his ways are steadfast; it is not this or
+that new sight which will at once unbalance him.
+He is tender to impression at the surface, like a rock
+with deep moss upon it; but there is too much
+mass of him to be moved. The smaller man, with
+the same degree of sensibility, is at once carried off
+his feet; he wants to do something he did not
+want to do before; he views all the universe in
+a new light through his tears; he is gay or enthusiastic,
+melancholy or passionate, as things come and
+go to him. Therefore the high creative poet might
+even be thought, to a great extent, impassive (as
+shallow people think Dante stern), receiving indeed
+all feelings to the full, but having a great centre of
+reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene,
+and watches the feeling, as it were, from far off.</p>
+
+<p>Dante, in his most intense moods, has entire
+command of himself, and can look around calmly,
+at all moments, for the image or the word that will
+best tell what he sees to the upper or lower world.
+But Keats and Tennyson, and the poets of the
+second order, are generally themselves subdued by
+the feelings under which they write, or, at least, write
+as choosing to be so, and therefore admit certain
+expressions and modes of thought which are in
+some sort diseased or false.</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 11. Now so long as we see that the <i>feeling</i> is
+true, we pardon, or are even pleased by, the confessed
+fallacy of sight which it induces: we are pleased,
+for instance, with those lines of Kingsley&#8217;s, above<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[388]</a></span>
+quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam,
+but because they faithfully describe sorrow. But
+the moment the mind of the speaker becomes cold,
+that moment every such expression becomes untrue,
+as being for ever untrue in the external facts. And
+there is no greater baseness in literature than the
+habit of using these metaphorical expressions in
+cold blood. An inspired writer, in full impetuosity
+of passion, may speak wisely and truly of &#8216;raging
+waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame&#8217;;
+but it is only the basest writer who cannot speak of
+the sea without talking of &#8216;raging waves&#8217;, &#8216;remorseless
+floods&#8217;, &#8216;ravenous billows&#8217;, &amp;c.; and it is one of
+the signs of the highest power in a writer to check
+all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes
+fixed firmly on the <i>pure fact</i>, out of which if any
+feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must
+be a true one.</p>
+
+<p>To keep to the waves, I forget who it is who
+represents a man in despair, desiring that his body
+may be cast into the sea,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Whose changing mound, and foam that passed away,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Might mock the eye that questioned where I lay.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Observe, there is not a single false, or even
+overcharged, expression. &#8216;Mound&#8217; of the sea wave
+is perfectly simple and true; &#8216;changing&#8217; is as
+familiar as may be; &#8216;foam that passed away&#8217;,
+strictly literal; and the whole line descriptive of
+the reality with a degree of accuracy which I know
+not any other verse, in the range of poetry, that
+altogether equals. For most people have not
+a distinct idea of the clumsiness and massiveness of
+a large wave. The word &#8216;wave&#8217; is used too generally
+of ripples and breakers, and bendings in light<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[389]</a></span>
+drapery or grass: it does not by itself convey
+a perfect image. But the word &#8216;mound&#8217; is heavy,
+large, dark, definite; there is no mistaking the kind
+of wave meant, nor missing the sight of it. Then
+the term &#8216;changing&#8217; has a peculiar force also.
+Most people think of waves as rising and falling.
+But if they look at the sea carefully, they will
+perceive that the waves do not rise and fall. They
+change. Change both place and form, but they do
+not fall; one wave goes on, and on, and still on;
+now lower, now higher, now tossing its mane like
+a horse, now building itself together like a wall, now
+shaking, now steady, but still the same wave, till
+at last it seems struck by something, and changes,
+one knows not how,&mdash;becomes another wave.</p>
+
+<p>The close of the line insists on this image, and
+paints it still more perfectly,&mdash;&#8216;foam that passed
+away&#8217;. Not merely melting, disappearing, but
+passing on, out of sight, on the career of the wave.
+Then, having put the absolute ocean fact as far as
+he may before our eyes, the poet leaves us to feel
+about it as we may, and to trace for ourselves the
+opposite fact,&mdash;the image of the green mounds that
+do not change, and the white and written stones
+that do not pass away; and thence to follow out
+also the associated images of the calm life with the
+quiet grave, and the despairing life with the fading
+foam:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Let no man move his bones.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">As for Samaria, her king is out off like the foam upon the water.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But nothing of this is actually told or pointed out,
+and the expressions, as they stand, are perfectly
+severe and accurate, utterly uninfluenced by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[390]</a></span>
+firmly governed emotion of the writer. Even the
+word &#8216;mock&#8217; is hardly an exception, as it may
+stand merely for &#8216;deceive&#8217; or &#8216;defeat&#8217;, without
+implying any impersonation of the waves.</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 12. It may be well, perhaps, to give one or two
+more instances to show the peculiar dignity possessed
+by all passages which thus limit their expression
+to the pure fact, and leave the hearer to gather
+what he can from it. Here is a notable one from
+the Iliad. Helen, looking from the Scaean gate of
+Troy over the Grecian host, and telling Priam the
+names of its captains, says at last:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I see all the other dark-eyed Greeks; but two I cannot
+see,&mdash;Castor and Pollux,&mdash;whom one mother bore with
+me. Have they not followed from fair Lacedaemon, or
+have they indeed come in their sea-wandering ships, but
+now will not enter into the battle of men, fearing the shame
+and the scorn that is in Me?</p></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Then Homer:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>So she spoke. But them, already, the life-giving earth
+possessed, there in Lacedaemon, in the dear fatherland.</p></div>
+
+<p>Note, here, the high poetical truth carried to the
+extreme. The poet has to speak of the earth in
+sadness, but he will not let that sadness affect or
+change his thoughts of it. No; though Castor and
+Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our mother still,
+fruitful, life-giving. These are the facts of the thing.
+I see nothing else than these. Make what you will
+of them.</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 13. Take another very notable instance from
+Casimir de la Vigne&#8217;s terrible ballad, <i>La Toilette
+de Constance</i>. I must quote a few lines out of it
+here and there, to enable the reader who has not
+the book by him, to understand its close.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[391]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">Vite, Anna, vite; au miroir<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Plus vite, Anna. L&#8217;heure s&#8217;avance,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Et je vais au bal ce soir<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Chez l&#8217;ambassadeur de France.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Y pensez-vous, ils sont fan&eacute;s, ces n&#339;uds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ils sont d&#8217;hier, mon Dieu, comme tout passe!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Que du r&eacute;seau qui retient mes cheveux<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Les glands d&#8217;azur retombent avec gr&acirc;ce.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Plus haut! Plus bas! Vous ne comprenez rien!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Que sur mon front ce saphir &eacute;tincelle:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Vous me piquez, maladroite. Ah, c&#8217;est bien,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Bien,&mdash;ch&egrave;re Anna! Je t&#8217;aime, je suis belle.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Celui qu&#8217;en vain je voudrais oublier<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">(Anna, ma robe) il y sera, j&#8217;espere.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(Ah, fi! profane, est-ce l&agrave; mon collier?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Quoi! ces grains d&#8217;or b&eacute;nits par le Saint-P&egrave;re!)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Il y sera; Dieu, s&#8217;il pressait ma main,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">En y pensant, &agrave; peine je respire;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">P&egrave;re Anselmo doit m&#8217;entendre demain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Comment ferai-je, Anna, pour tout lui dire?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">Vite un coup d&#8217;&#339;il au miroir,<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Le dernier. &mdash;&mdash;J&#8217;ai l&#8217;assurance<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Qu&#8217;on va m&#8217;adorer ce soir<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Chez l&#8217;ambassadeur de France.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Pr&egrave;s du foyer, Constance s&#8217;admirait.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Dieu! sur sa robe il vole une &eacute;tincelle!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Au feu! Courez! Quand l&#8217;espoir l&#8217;enivrait,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Tout perdre ainsi! Quoi! Mourir,&mdash;et si belle!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">L&#8217;horrible feu ronge avec volupt&eacute;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ses bras, son sein, et l&#8217;entoure, et s&#8217;&eacute;l&egrave;ve,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Et sans piti&eacute; d&eacute;vore sa beaut&eacute;,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ses dix-huit ans, h&eacute;las, et son doux r&ecirc;ve!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">Adieu, bal, plaisir, amour!<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">On disait, Pauvre Constance!<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Et on dansait, jusqu&#8217;au jour,<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Chez l&#8217;ambassadeur de France.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yes, that is the fact of it. Right or wrong, the
+poet does not say. What you may think about it,
+he does not know. He has nothing to do with that.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[392]</a></span>
+There lie the ashes of the dead girl in her chamber.
+There they danced, till the morning, at the Ambassador&#8217;s
+of France. Make what you will of it.</p>
+
+<p>If the reader will look through the ballad, of
+which I have quoted only about the third part, he
+will find that there is not, from beginning to end
+of it, a single poetical (so called) expression, except
+in one stanza. The girl speaks as simple prose as
+may be; there is not a word she would not have
+actually used as she was dressing. The poet stands
+by, impassive as a statue, recording her words
+just as they come. At last the doom seizes her, and
+in the very presence of death, for an instant, his
+own emotions conquer him. He records no longer
+the facts only, but the facts as they seem to him.
+The fire gnaws with <i>voluptuousness&mdash;without pity</i>.
+It is soon past. The fate is fixed for ever; and he
+retires into his pale and crystalline atmosphere of
+truth. He closes all with the calm veracity,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">They said, &#8216;Poor Constance!&#8217;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&sect; 14. Now in this there is the exact type of the
+consummate poetical temperament. For, be it
+clearly and constantly remembered, that the
+greatness of a poet depends upon the two faculties,
+acuteness of feeling, and command of it. A poet is
+great, first in proportion to the strength of his passion,
+and then, that strength being granted, in proportion
+to his government of it; there being, however,
+always a point beyond which it would be inhuman
+and monstrous if he pushed this government, and,
+therefore, a point at which all feverish and wild
+fancy becomes just and true. Thus the destruction
+of the kingdom of Assyria cannot be contemplated
+firmly by a prophet of Israel. The fact is too great,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[393]</a></span>
+too wonderful. It overthrows him, dashes him into
+a confused element of dreams. All the world is,
+to his stunned thought, full of strange voices.
+&#8216;Yea, the fir-trees rejoice at thee, and the cedars
+of Lebanon, saying, &#8220;Since thou art gone down to
+the grave, no feller is come up against us.&#8221;&#8217; So,
+still more, the thought of the presence of Deity
+cannot be borne without this great astonishment.
+&#8216;The mountains and the hills shall break forth
+before you into singing, and all the trees of the field
+shall clap their hands.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 15. But by how much this feeling is noble when
+it is justified by the strength of its cause, by so
+much it is ignoble when there is not cause enough
+for it; and beyond all other ignobleness is the mere
+affectation of it, in hardness of heart. Simply bad
+writing may almost always, as above noticed, be
+known by its adoption of these fanciful metaphorical
+expressions, as a sort of current coin; yet there is
+even a worse, at least a more harmful, condition of
+writing than this, in which such expressions are not
+ignorantly and feelinglessly caught up, but, by
+some master, skilful in handling, yet insincere,
+deliberately wrought out with chill and studied
+fancy; as if we should try to make an old lava
+stream look red-hot again, by covering it with dead
+leaves, or white-hot, with hoar-frost.</p>
+
+<p>When Young is lost in veneration, as he dwells on
+the character of a truly good and holy man, he
+permits himself for a moment to be overborne by
+the feeling so far as to exclaim:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Where shall I find him? angels, tell me where.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You know him; he is near you; point him out.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall I see glories beaming from his brow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or trace his footsteps by the rising flowers?<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[394]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>This emotion has a worthy cause, and is thus true
+and right. But now hear the cold-hearted Pope say
+to a shepherd girl:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Where&#8217;er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And winds shall waft it to the powers above.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But would you sing, and rival Orpheus&#8217; strain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The wondering forests soon should dance again;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The moving mountains hear the powerful call,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And headlong streams hang, listening, in their fall.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is not, nor could it for a moment be mistaken
+for, the language of passion. It is simple falsehood,
+uttered by hypocrisy; definite absurdity, rooted
+in affectation, and coldly asserted in the teeth of
+nature and fact. Passion will indeed go far in
+deceiving itself; but it must be a strong passion,
+not the simple wish of a lover to tempt his mistress
+to sing. Compare a very closely parallel passage
+in Wordsworth, in which the lover has lost his
+mistress:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Three years had Barbara in her grave been laid,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When thus his moan he made:&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Oh move, thou cottage, from behind yon oak,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or let the ancient tree uprooted lie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That in some other way yon smoke<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">May mount into the sky.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If still behind yon pine-tree&#8217;s ragged bough,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Headlong, the waterfall must come,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, let it, then, be dumb&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Be anything, sweet stream, but that which thou art now.&#8217;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here is a cottage to be moved, if not a mountain,
+and a waterfall to be silent, if it is not to hang
+listening: but with what different relation to the
+mind that contemplates them! Here, in the
+extremity of its agony, the soul cries out wildly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[395]</a></span>
+for relief, which at the same moment it partly
+knows to be impossible, but partly believes possible,
+in a vague impression that a miracle <i>might</i> be wrought
+to give relief even to a less sore distress,&mdash;that nature
+is kind, and God is kind, and that grief is strong:
+it knows not well what <i>is</i> possible to such grief.
+To silence a stream, to move a cottage wall,&mdash;one
+might think it could do as much as that!</p>
+
+<p>&sect; 16. I believe these instances are enough to
+illustrate the main point I insist upon respecting
+the pathetic fallacy,&mdash;that so far as it <i>is</i> a fallacy,
+it is always the sign of a morbid state of mind, and
+comparatively of a weak one. Even in the most
+inspired prophet it is a sign of the incapacity of his
+human sight or thought to bear what has been
+revealed to it. In ordinary poetry, if it is found in
+the thoughts of the poet himself, it is at once a sign
+of his belonging to the inferior school; if in the
+thoughts of the characters imagined by him, it is
+right or wrong according to the genuineness of the
+emotion from which it springs; always, however,
+implying necessarily <i>some</i> degree of weakness in the
+character.</p>
+
+<p>Take two most exquisite instances from master
+hands. The Jessy of Shenstone, and the Ellen of
+Wordsworth, have both been betrayed and deserted.
+Jessy, in the course of her most touching complaint,
+says:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">If through the garden&#8217;s flowery tribes I stray,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where bloom the jasmines that could once allure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Hope not to find delight in us,&#8217; they say,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">&#8216;For we are spotless, Jessy; we are pure.&#8217;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Compare with this some of the words of Ellen:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Ah, why,&#8217; said Ellen, sighing to herself,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Why do not words, and kiss, and solemn pledge,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[396]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">And nature, that is kind in woman&#8217;s breast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And reason, that in man is wise and good,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And fear of Him who is a righteous Judge,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why do not these prevail for human life,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To keep two hearts together, that began<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their springtime with one love, and that have need<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of mutual pity and forgiveness, sweet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To grant, or be received; while that poor bird&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O, come and hear him! Thou who hast to me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Been faithless, hear him;&mdash;though a lowly creature,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One of God&#8217;s simple children, that yet know not<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Universal Parent, <i>how</i> he sings!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As if he wished the firmament of heaven<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Should listen, and give back to him the voice<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of his triumphant constancy and love.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The proclamation that he makes, how far<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His darkness doth transcend our fickle light.&#8217;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">The perfection of both these passages, as far as
+regards truth and tenderness of imagination in the
+two poets, is quite insuperable. But, of the two
+characters imagined, Jessy is weaker than Ellen,
+exactly in so far as something appears to her to be
+in nature which is not. The flowers do not really reproach
+her. God meant them to comfort her, not to
+taunt her; they would do so if she saw them rightly.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen, on the other hand, is quite above the
+slightest erring emotion. There is not the barest
+film of fallacy in all her thoughts. She reasons as
+calmly as if she did not feel. And, although the
+singing of the bird suggests to her the idea of its
+desiring to be heard in heaven, she does not for an
+instant admit any veracity in the thought. &#8216;As if,&#8217;
+she says,&mdash;&#8216;I know he means nothing of the kind;
+but it does verily seem as if.&#8217; The reader will find,
+by examining the rest of the poem, that Ellen&#8217;s
+character is throughout consistent in this clear
+though passionate strength.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[397]</a></span></p>
+<p>It is, I hope, now made clear to the reader in all
+respects that the pathetic fallacy is powerful only
+so far as it is pathetic, feeble so far as it is fallacious,
+and, therefore, that the dominion of Truth is entire,
+over this, as over every other natural and just state
+of the human mind.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> I admit two orders of poets, but no third; and by these
+two orders I mean the Creative (Shakespeare, Homer,
+Dante), and Reflective or Perceptive (Wordsworth, Keats,
+Tennyson). But both of these must be <i>first</i>-rate in their
+range, though their range is different; and with poetry
+second-rate in <i>quality</i> no one ought to be allowed to trouble
+mankind. There is quite enough of the best,&mdash;much more
+than we can ever read or enjoy in the length of a life; and
+it is a literal wrong or sin in any person to encumber us with
+inferior work. I have no patience with apologies made by
+young pseudo-poets, &#8216;that they believe there is <i>some</i> good
+in what they have written: that they hope to do better in
+time,&#8217; &amp;c. <i>Some</i> good! If there is not <i>all</i> good, there is
+no good. If they ever hope to do better, why do they
+trouble us now? Let them rather courageously burn all
+they have done, and wait for the better days. There are
+few men, ordinarily educated, who in moments of strong
+feeling could not strike out a poetical thought, and afterwards
+polish it so as to be presentable. But men of sense
+know better than so to waste their time; and those who
+sincerely love poetry, know the touch of the master&#8217;s hand
+on the chords too well to fumble among them after him.
+Nay, more than this; all inferior poetry is an injury to the
+good, inasmuch as it takes away the freshness of rhymes,
+blunders upon and gives a wretched commonalty to good
+thoughts; and, in general, adds to the weight of human
+weariness in a most woful and culpable manner. There
+are few thoughts likely to come across ordinary men, which
+have not already been expressed by greater men in the best
+possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, more noble
+thing to remember and point out the perfect words, than
+to invent poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily
+the world.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> &#8216;Well said, old mole! can&#8217;st work i&#8217; the ground so fast?&#8217;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> It is worth while comparing the way a similar question
+is put by the exquisite sincerity of Keats:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">He wept, and his bright tears<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Went trickling down the golden bow he held.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thus, with half-shut, suffused eyes, he stood;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While from beneath some cumb&#8217;rous boughs hard by,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With solemn step, an awful goddess came.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And there was purport in her looks for him,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which he with eager guess began to read:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Perplexed the while, melodiously he said,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8216;<i>How cam&#8217;st thou over the unfooted sea?</i>&#8217;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> I cannot quit this subject without giving two more
+instances, both exquisite, of the pathetic fallacy, which
+I have just come upon, in <i>Maud</i>:
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">For a great speculation had fail&#8217;d;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ever he mutter&#8217;d and madden&#8217;d, and ever wann&#8217;d with despair;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And out he walk&#8217;d, when the wind like a broken worldling wail&#8217;d,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the <i>flying gold of the ruin&#8217;d woodlands drove, thro&#8217; the air</i>.<br /></span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There has fallen a splendid tear<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From the passion-flower at the gate.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>The red rose cries, &#8216;She is near, she is near!&#8217;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>And the white rose weeps, &#8216;She is late.&#8217;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>The larkspur listens, &#8216;I hear, I hear!&#8217;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>And the lily whispers, &#8216;I wait.&#8217;</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="JOHN_STUART_MILL" id="JOHN_STUART_MILL"></a>JOHN STUART MILL<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[398]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1806-1873</h3>
+
+<h3>THOUGHTS ON POETRY AND ITS
+VARIETIES (1859)</h3>
+
+
+<h4 style="padding-top: 1em">I</h4>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> has often been asked, What is Poetry? And
+many and various are the answers which have been
+returned. The vulgarest of all&mdash;one with which
+no person possessed of the faculties to which Poetry
+addresses itself can ever have been satisfied&mdash;is
+that which confounds poetry with metrical composition:
+yet to this wretched mockery of a definition,
+many have been led back, by the failure of all
+their attempts to find any other that would distinguish
+what they have been accustomed to call
+poetry, from much which they have known only
+under other names.</p>
+
+<p>That, however, the word &#8216;poetry&#8217; imports something
+quite peculiar in its nature, something which
+may exist in what is called prose as well as in verse,
+something which does not even require the instrument
+of words, but can speak through the other
+audible symbols called musical sounds, and even
+through the visible ones which are the language
+of sculpture, painting, and architecture; all this,
+we believe, is and must be felt, though perhaps
+indistinctly, by all upon whom poetry in any of
+its shapes produces any impression beyond that of
+tickling the ear. The distinction between poetry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[399]</a></span>
+and what is not poetry, whether explained or not,
+is felt to be fundamental: and where every one
+feels a difference, a difference there must be. All
+other appearances may be fallacious, but the
+appearance of a difference is a real difference.
+Appearances too, like other things, must have
+a cause, and that which can cause anything, even
+an illusion, must be a reality. And hence, while
+a half-philosophy disdains the classifications and
+distinctions indicated by popular language, philosophy
+carried to its highest point frames new ones,
+but rarely sets aside the old, content with correcting
+and regularizing them. It cuts fresh channels for
+thought, but does not fill up such as it finds ready-made;
+it traces, on the contrary, more deeply,
+broadly, and distinctly, those into which the
+current has spontaneously flowed.</p>
+
+<p>Let us then attempt, in the way of modest
+inquiry, not to coerce and confine nature within
+the bounds of an arbitrary definition, but rather to
+find the boundaries which she herself has set, and
+erect a barrier round them; not calling mankind
+to account for having misapplied the word &#8216;poetry&#8217;,
+but attempting to clear up the conception which they
+already attach to it, and to bring forward as a distinct
+principle that which, as a vague feeling, has
+really guided them in their employment of the term.</p>
+
+<p>The object of poetry is confessedly to act upon
+the emotions; and therein is poetry sufficiently
+distinguished from what Wordsworth affirms to be
+its logical opposite, namely, not prose, but matter
+of fact or science. The one addresses itself to the
+belief, the other to the feelings. The one does its
+work by convincing or persuading, the other by
+moving. The one acts by presenting a proposition<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[400]</a></span>
+to the understanding, the other by offering interesting
+objects of contemplation to the sensibilities.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, leaves us very far from a definition
+of poetry. This distinguishes it from one thing,
+but we are bound to distinguish it from everything.
+To bring thoughts or images before the mind for the
+purpose of acting upon the emotions, does not
+belong to poetry alone. It is equally the province
+(for example) of the novelist: and yet the faculty
+of the poet and that of the novelist are as distinct
+as any other two faculties; as the faculties of the
+novelist and of the orator, or of the poet and the
+metaphysician. The two characters may be
+united, as characters the most disparate may; but
+they have no natural connexion.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the greatest poems are in the form of
+fictitious narratives, and in almost all good serious
+fictions there is true poetry. But there is a radical
+distinction between the interest felt in a story as
+such, and the interest excited by poetry; for the
+one is derived from incident, the other from the
+representation of feeling. In one, the source of
+the emotion excited is the exhibition of a state or
+states of human sensibility; in the other, of a series
+of states of mere outward circumstances. Now, all
+minds are capable of being affected more or less by
+representations of the latter kind, and all, or almost
+all, by those of the former; yet the two sources of
+interest correspond to two distinct, and (as respects
+their greatest development) mutually exclusive,
+characters of mind.</p>
+
+<p>At what age is the passion for a story, for almost
+any kind of story, merely as a story, the most
+intense? In childhood. But that also is the age
+at which poetry, even of the simplest description, is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[401]</a></span>
+least relished and least understood; because the
+feelings with which it is especially conversant are
+yet undeveloped, and not having been even in the
+slightest degree experienced, cannot be sympathized
+with. In what stage of the progress of society,
+again, is story-telling most valued, and the story-teller
+in greatest request and honour?&mdash;In a rude
+state like that of the Tartars and Arabs at this day,
+and of almost all nations in the earliest ages. But
+in this state of society there is little poetry except
+ballads, which are mostly narrative, that is, essentially
+stories, and derive their principal interest
+from the incidents. Considered as poetry, they are
+of the lowest and most elementary kind: the
+feelings depicted, or rather indicated, are the
+simplest our nature has; such joys and griefs as
+the immediate pressure of some outward event excites
+in rude minds, which live wholly immersed
+in outward things, and have never, either from
+choice or a force they could not resist, turned themselves
+to the contemplation of the world within.
+Passing now from childhood, and from the childhood
+of society, to the grown-up men and women
+of this most grown-up and unchildlike age&mdash;the
+minds and hearts of greatest depth and elevation
+are commonly those which take greatest delight
+in poetry; the shallowest and emptiest, on the
+contrary, are, at all events, not those least addicted
+to novel-reading. This accords, too, with all
+analogous experience of human nature. The sort
+of persons whom not merely in books but in their
+lives, we find perpetually engaged in hunting for
+excitement from without, are invariably those who
+do not possess, either in the vigour of their intellectual
+powers or in the depth of their sensibilities,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[402]</a></span>
+that which would enable them to find ample excitement
+nearer home. The most idle and frivolous
+persons take a natural delight in fictitious narrative;
+the excitement it affords is of the kind which comes
+from without. Such persons are rarely lovers of
+poetry, though they may fancy themselves so,
+because they relish novels in verse. But poetry,
+which is the delineation of the deeper and more
+secret workings of human emotion, is interesting
+only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt,
+or whose imagination it stirs up to conceive what
+they could feel, or what they might have been able
+to feel, had their outward circumstances been
+different.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry, when it is really such, is truth; and
+fiction also, if it is good for anything, is truth: but
+they are different truths. The truth of poetry is
+to paint the human soul truly: the truth of fiction
+is to give a true picture of life. The two kinds of
+knowledge are different, and come by different ways,
+come mostly to different persons. Great poets are
+often proverbially ignorant of life. What they
+know has come by observation of themselves; they
+have found within them one highly delicate and
+sensitive specimen of human nature, on which the
+laws of emotion are written in large characters,
+such as can be read off without much study.
+Other knowledge of mankind, such as comes to
+men of the world by outward experience, is not
+indispensable to them as poets: but to the novelist
+such knowledge is all in all; he has to describe
+outward things, not the inward man; actions and
+events, not feelings; and it will not do for him to be
+numbered among those who, as Madame Roland
+said of Brissot, know man but not <i>men</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[403]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All this is no bar to the possibility of combining
+both elements, poetry and narrative or incident, in
+the same work, and calling it either a novel or
+a poem; but so may red and white combine on the
+same human features, or on the same canvas.
+There is one order of composition which requires
+the union of poetry and incident, each in its highest
+kind&mdash;the dramatic. Even there the two elements
+are perfectly distinguishable, and may exist of
+unequal quality, and in the most various proportion.
+The incidents of a dramatic poem may be
+scanty and ineffective, though the delineation of
+passion and character may be of the highest order;
+as in Goethe&#8217;s admirable <i>Torquato Tasso</i>; or again,
+the story as a mere story may be well got up for
+effect, as is the case with some of the most trashy
+productions of the Minerva press: it may even
+be, what those are not, a coherent and probable
+series of events, though there be scarcely a feeling
+exhibited which is not represented falsely, or in
+a manner absolutely commonplace. The combination
+of the two excellences is what renders
+Shakespeare so generally acceptable, each sort of
+readers finding in him what is suitable to their
+faculties. To the many he is great as a story-teller,
+to the few as a poet.</p>
+
+<p>In limiting poetry to the delineation of states of
+feeling, and denying the name where nothing is
+delineated but outward objects, we may be thought
+to have done what we promised to avoid&mdash;to have
+not found, but made a definition, in opposition to
+the usage of language, since it is established by
+common consent that there is a poetry called
+descriptive. We deny the charge. Description
+is not poetry because there is descriptive poetry,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[404]</a></span>
+no more than science is poetry because there is
+such a thing as a didactic poem. But an object
+which admits of being described, or a truth which
+may fill a place in a scientific treatise, may also
+furnish an occasion for the generation of poetry,
+which we thereupon choose to call descriptive or
+didactic. The poetry is not in the object itself, nor
+in the scientific truth itself, but in the state of mind
+in which the one and the other may be contemplated.
+The mere delineation of the dimensions
+and colours of external objects is not poetry, no
+more than a geometrical ground-plan of St. Peter&#8217;s
+or Westminster Abbey is painting. Descriptive
+poetry consists, no doubt, in description, but in
+description of things as they appear, not as they
+are; and it paints them not in their bare and natural
+lineaments, but seen through the medium and
+arrayed in the colours of the imagination set in
+action by the feelings. If a poet describes a lion,
+he does not describe him as a naturalist would, nor
+even as a traveller would, who was intent upon
+stating the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
+but the truth. He describes him by imagery, that
+is, by suggesting the most striking likenesses and
+contrasts which might occur to a mind contemplating
+the lion, in the state of awe, wonder, or
+terror, which the spectacle naturally excites, or is,
+on the occasion, supposed to excite. Now this is
+describing the lion professedly, but the state of
+excitement of the spectator really. The lion may
+be described falsely or with exaggeration, and the
+poetry be all the better; but if the human emotion
+be not painted with scrupulous truth, the poetry
+is bad poetry, i. e. is not poetry at all, but a failure.</p>
+
+<p>Thus far our progress towards a clear view of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[405]</a></span>
+essentials of poetry has brought us very close to the
+last two attempts at a definition of poetry which we
+happen to have seen in print, both of them by poets
+and men of genius. The one is by Ebenezer
+Elliott, the author of <i>Corn-Law Rhymes</i>, and other
+poems of still greater merit. &#8216;Poetry&#8217;, says he,
+&#8216;is impassioned truth.&#8217; The other is by a writer
+in <i>Blackwood&#8217;s Magazine</i>, and comes, we think,
+still nearer the mark. He defines poetry, &#8216;man&#8217;s
+thoughts tinged by his feelings&#8217;. There is in
+either definition a near approximation to what
+we are in search of. Every truth which a human
+being can enunciate, every thought, even every
+outward impression, which can enter into his consciousness,
+may become poetry when shown
+through any impassioned medium, when invested
+with the colouring of joy, or grief, or pity, or
+affection, or admiration, or reverence, or awe, or
+even hatred or terror: and, unless so coloured,
+nothing, be it as interesting as it may, is poetry.
+But both these definitions fail to discriminate
+between poetry and eloquence. Eloquence, as well
+as poetry, is impassioned truth; eloquence, as well
+as poetry, is thoughts coloured by the feelings.
+Yet common apprehension and philosophic criticism
+alike recognize a distinction between the two:
+there is much that every one would call eloquence,
+which no one would think of classing as poetry.
+A question will sometimes arise, whether some
+particular author is a poet; and those who maintain
+the negative commonly allow that, though not
+a poet, he is a highly eloquent writer. The distinction
+between poetry and eloquence appears to
+us to be equally fundamental with the distinction
+between poetry and narrative, or between poetry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[406]</a></span>
+and description, while it is still farther from having
+been satisfactorily cleared up than either of the
+others.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression
+or utterance of feeling. But if we may be
+excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence
+is <i>heard</i>, poetry is <i>over</i>heard. Eloquence
+supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry
+appears to us to lie in the poet&#8217;s utter unconsciousness
+of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing
+itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and embodying
+itself in symbols which are the nearest possible
+representations of the feeling in the exact shape in
+which it exists in the poet&#8217;s mind. Eloquence is
+feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting
+their sympathy, or endeavouring to influence their
+belief or move them to passion or to action.</p>
+
+<p>All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy. It may
+be said that poetry which is printed on hot-pressed
+paper and sold at a bookseller&#8217;s shop, is a soliloquy
+in full dress, and on the stage. It is so; but there
+is nothing absurd in the idea of such a mode of
+soliloquizing. What we have said to ourselves, we
+may tell to others afterwards; what we have said
+or done in solitude, we may voluntarily reproduce
+when we know that other eyes are upon us. But
+no trace of consciousness that any eyes are upon us
+must be visible in the work itself. The actor
+knows that there is an audience present; but if he
+act as though he knew it, he acts ill. A poet may
+write poetry not only with the intention of printing
+it, but for the express purpose of being paid for it;
+that it should <i>be</i> poetry, being written under such
+influences, is less probable; not, however, impossible;
+but no otherwise possible than if he can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[407]</a></span>
+succeed in excluding from his work every vestige
+of such lookings-forth into the outward and every-day
+world, and can express his emotions exactly
+as he has felt them in solitude, or as he is conscious
+that he should feel them though they were to
+remain for ever unuttered, or (at the lowest) as
+he knows that others feel them in similar circumstances
+of solitude. But when he turns round and
+addresses himself to another person; when the act
+of utterance is not itself the end, but a means to an
+end,&mdash;viz. by the feelings he himself expresses, to
+work upon the feelings, or upon the belief, or the
+will, of another,&mdash;when the expression of his
+emotions, or of his thoughts tinged by his emotions,
+is tinged also by that purpose, by that desire of
+making an impression upon another mind, then it
+ceases to be poetry, and becomes eloquence.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry, accordingly, is the natural fruit of solitude
+and meditation; eloquence, of intercourse
+with the world. The persons who have most
+feeling of their own, if intellectual culture has given
+them a language in which to express it, have the
+highest faculty of poetry; those who best understand
+the feelings of others, are the most eloquent.
+The persons, and the nations, who commonly excel
+in poetry, are those whose character and tastes
+render them least dependent upon the applause, or
+sympathy, or concurrence of the world in general.
+Those to whom that applause, that sympathy, that
+concurrence are most necessary, generally excel
+most in eloquence. And hence, perhaps, the
+French, who are the least poetical of all great and
+intellectual nations, are among the most eloquent:
+the French, also, being the most sociable, the
+vainest, and the least self-dependent.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[408]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If the above be, as we believe, the true theory
+of the distinction commonly admitted between
+eloquence and poetry; or even though it be not so,
+yet if, as we cannot doubt, the distinction above
+stated be a real bona fide distinction, it will be
+found to hold, not merely in the language of words,
+but in all other language, and to intersect the whole
+domain of art.</p>
+
+<p>Take, for example, music: we shall find in that
+art, so peculiarly the expression of passion, two perfectly
+distinct styles; one of which may be called
+the poetry, the other the oratory of music. This
+difference, being seized, would put an end to much
+musical sectarianism. There has been much contention
+whether the music of the modern Italian
+school, that of Rossini and his successors, be impassioned
+or not. Without doubt, the passion it
+expresses is not the musing, meditative tenderness,
+or pathos, or grief of Mozart or Beethoven. Yet
+it is passion, but garrulous passion&mdash;the passion
+which pours itself into other ears; and therein the
+better calculated for dramatic effect, having
+a natural adaptation for dialogue. Mozart also is
+great in musical oratory; but his most touching
+compositions are in the opposite style&mdash;that of
+soliloquy. Who can imagine &#8216;Dove sono&#8217; <i>heard</i>?
+We imagine it <i>over</i>heard.</p>
+
+<p>Purely pathetic music commonly partakes of
+soliloquy. The soul is absorbed in its distress, and
+though there may be bystanders, it is not thinking
+of them. When the mind is looking within, and
+not without, its state does not often or rapidly vary;
+and hence the even, uninterrupted flow, approaching
+almost to monotony, which a good reader, or
+a good singer, will give to words or music of a pensive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[409]</a></span>
+or melancholy cast. But grief taking the form of
+a prayer, or of a complaint, becomes oratorical; no
+longer low, and even, and subdued, it assumes
+a more emphatic rhythm, a more rapidly returning
+accent; instead of a few slow equal notes, following
+one after another at regular intervals, it crowds note
+upon note, and often assumes a hurry and bustle like
+joy. Those who are familiar with some of the best
+of Rossini&#8217;s serious compositions, such as the air
+&#8216;Tu che i miseri conforti&#8217;, in the opera of <i>Tancredi</i>,
+or the duet &#8216;Ebben per mia memoria&#8217;, in <i>La Gazza
+Ladra</i>, will at once understand and feel our meaning.
+Both are highly tragic and passionate; the passion
+of both is that of oratory, not poetry. The like
+may be said of that most moving invocation in
+Beethoven&#8217;s <i>Fidelio</i>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Komm, Hoffnung, lass das letzte Stern<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Der M&uuml;de nicht erbleichen;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">in which Madame Schr&ouml;der Devrient exhibited such
+consummate powers of pathetic expression. How
+different from Winter&#8217;s beautiful &#8216;Paga fui&#8217;, the
+very soul of melancholy exhaling itself in solitude;
+fuller of meaning, and, therefore, more profoundly
+poetical than the words for which it was composed&mdash;for
+it seems to express not simple melancholy, but
+the melancholy of remorse.</p>
+
+<p>If, from vocal music, we now pass to instrumental,
+we may have a specimen of musical oratory
+in any fine military symphony or march: while
+the poetry of music seems to have attained its consummation
+in Beethoven&#8217;s Overture to Egmont, so
+wonderful in its mixed expression of grandeur and
+melancholy.</p>
+
+<p>In the arts which speak to the eye, the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[410]</a></span>
+distinctions will be found to hold, not only between
+poetry and oratory, but between poetry, oratory,
+narrative, and simple imitation or description.</p>
+
+<p>Pure description is exemplified in a mere portrait
+or a mere landscape&mdash;productions of art, it is true,
+but of the mechanical rather than of the fine arts,
+being works of simple imitation, not creation. We
+say, a mere portrait, or a mere landscape, because
+it is possible for a portrait or a landscape, without
+ceasing to be such, to be also a picture; like
+Turner&#8217;s landscapes, and the great portraits by
+Titian or Vandyke.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever in painting or sculpture expresses
+human feeling&mdash;or character, which is only a certain
+state of feeling grown habitual&mdash;may be called,
+according to circumstances, the poetry, or the
+eloquence, of the painter&#8217;s or the sculptor&#8217;s art:
+the poetry, if the feeling declares itself by such signs
+as escape from us when we are unconscious of being
+seen; the oratory, if the signs are those we use for
+the purpose of voluntary communication.</p>
+
+<p>The narrative style answers to what is called historical
+painting, which it is the fashion among connoisseurs
+to treat as the climax of the pictorial art.
+That it is the most difficult branch of the art we do
+not doubt, because, in its perfection, it includes the
+perfection of all the other branches: as in like
+manner an epic poem, though in so far as it is epic
+(i. e. narrative) it is not poetry at all, is yet esteemed
+the greatest effort of poetic genius, because there is
+no kind whatever of poetry which may not appropriately
+find a place in it. But an historical picture
+as such, that is, as the representation of an incident,
+must necessarily, as it seems to us, be poor and
+ineffective. The narrative powers of painting are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[411]</a></span>
+extremely limited. Scarcely any picture, scarcely
+even any series of pictures, tells its own story without
+the aid of an interpreter. But it is the single
+figures which, to us, are the great charm even of an
+historical picture. It is in these that the power of
+the art is really seen. In the attempt to narrate,
+visible and permanent signs are too far behind the
+fugitive audible ones, which follow so fast one after
+another, while the faces and figures in a narrative
+picture, even though they be Titian&#8217;s, stand still.
+Who would not prefer one Virgin and Child of
+Raphael, to all the pictures which Rubens, with his
+fat, frouzy Dutch Venuses, ever painted? Though
+Rubens, besides excelling almost every one in his
+mastery over the mechanical parts of his art, often
+shows real genius in <i>grouping</i> his figures, the
+peculiar problem of historical painting. But then,
+who, except a mere student of drawing and colouring,
+ever cared to look twice at any of the figures
+themselves? The power of painting lies in poetry,
+of which Rubens had not the slightest tincture&mdash;not
+in narrative, wherein he might have excelled.</p>
+
+<p>The single figures, however, in an historical
+picture, are rather the eloquence of painting than
+the poetry: they mostly (unless they are quite out
+of place in the picture) express the feelings of one
+person as modified by the presence of others.
+Accordingly the minds whose bent leads them rather
+to eloquence than to poetry, rush to historical
+painting. The French painters, for instance, seldom
+attempt, because they could make nothing of,
+single heads, like those glorious ones of the Italian
+masters, with which they might feed themselves
+day after day in their own Louvre. They must
+all be historical; and they are, almost to a man,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[412]</a></span>
+attitudinizers. If we wished to give any young
+artist the most impressive warning our imagination
+could devise against that kind of vice in the pictorial,
+which corresponds to rant in the histrionic
+art, we would advise him to walk once up and once
+down the gallery of the Luxembourg. Every figure
+in French painting or statuary seems to be showing
+itself off before spectators; they are not poetical,
+but in the worst style of corrupted eloquence.</p>
+
+
+<h4 style="padding-top: 1em">II</h4>
+
+<p><i>Nascitur Poeta</i> is a maxim of classical antiquity,
+which has passed to these latter days with less
+questioning than most of the doctrines of that early
+age. When it originated, the human faculties were
+occupied, fortunately for posterity, less in examining
+how the works of genius are created, than in
+creating them: and the adage, probably, had no
+higher source than the tendency common among
+mankind to consider all power which is not visibly
+the effect of practice, all skill which is not capable
+of being reduced to mechanical rules, as the result
+of a peculiar gift. Yet this aphorism, born in the
+infancy of psychology, will perhaps be found, now
+when that science is in its adolescence, to be as true
+as an epigram ever is, that is, to contain some truth:
+truth, however, which has been so compressed and
+bent out of shape, in order to tie it up into so small
+a knot of only two words that it requires an almost
+infinite amount of unrolling and laying straight,
+before it will resume its just proportions.</p>
+
+<p>We are not now intending to remark upon the
+grosser misapplications of this ancient maxim,
+which have engendered so many races of poetasters.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[413]</a></span>
+The days are gone by when every raw youth whose
+borrowed phantasies have set themselves to a borrowed
+tune, mistaking, as Coleridge says, an ardent
+desire of poetic reputation for poetic genius, while
+unable to disguise from himself that he had taken
+no means whereby he might <i>become</i> a poet, could
+fancy himself a born one. Those who would reap
+without sowing, and gain the victory without
+fighting the battle, are ambitious now of another
+sort of distinction, and are born novelists, or public
+speakers, not poets. And the wiser thinkers understand
+and acknowledge that poetic excellence is
+subject to the same necessary conditions with any
+other mental endowment; and that to no one of
+the spiritual benefactors of mankind is a higher
+or a more assiduous intellectual culture needful
+than to the poet. It is true, he possesses this advantage
+over others who use the &#8216;instrument of words&#8217;,
+that, of the truths which he utters, a larger proportion
+are derived from personal consciousness, and
+a smaller from philosophic investigation. But the
+power itself of discriminating between what really
+is consciousness, and what is only a process of
+inference completed in a single instant&mdash;and the
+capacity of distinguishing whether that of which
+the mind is conscious be an eternal truth, or but
+a dream&mdash;are among the last results of the most
+matured and perfect intellect. Not to mention,
+that the poet, no more than any other person who
+writes, confines himself altogether to intuitive
+truths, nor has any means of communicating even
+these but by words, every one of which derives all
+its power of conveying a meaning, from a whole
+host of acquired notions, and facts learnt by study
+and experience.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[414]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, it seems undeniable in point of
+fact, and consistent with the principles of a sound
+metaphysics, that there are poetic <i>natures</i>. There
+is a mental and physical constitution or temperament,
+peculiarly fitted for poetry. This temperament
+will not of itself make a poet, no more than the
+soil will the fruit; and as good fruit may be raised
+by culture from indifferent soils, so may good poetry
+from naturally unpoetical minds. But the poetry
+of one who is a poet by nature, will be clearly and
+broadly distinguishable from the poetry of mere
+culture. It may not be truer; it may not be more
+useful; but it will be different: fewer will appreciate
+it, even though many should affect to do so;
+but in those few it will find a keener sympathy, and
+will yield them a deeper enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p>One may write genuine poetry, and not be a
+poet; for whosoever writes out truly any human
+feeling, writes poetry. All persons, even the most
+unimaginative, in moments of strong emotion,
+speak poetry; and hence the drama is poetry, which
+else were always prose, except when a poet is one of
+the characters. What <i>is</i> poetry, but the thoughts and
+words in which emotion spontaneously embodies
+itself? As there are few who are not, at least for
+some moments and in some situations, capable of
+some strong feeling, poetry is natural to most
+persons at some period of their lives. And any one
+whose feelings are genuine, though but of the
+average strength,&mdash;if he be not diverted by uncongenial
+thoughts or occupations from the indulgence
+of them, and if he acquire by culture, as all persons
+may, the faculty of delineating them correctly,&mdash;has
+it in his power to be a poet, so far as a life
+passed in writing unquestionable poetry may be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[415]</a></span>
+considered to confer that title. But <i>ought</i> it to do
+so? Yes, perhaps, in a collection of &#8216;British
+Poets&#8217;. But &#8216;poet&#8217; is the name also of a variety
+of man, not solely of the author of a particular
+variety of book: now, to have written whole
+volumes of real poetry is possible to almost all
+kinds of characters, and implies no greater peculiarity
+of mental construction, than to be the author
+of a history, or a novel.</p>
+
+<p>Whom, then, shall we call poets? Those who
+are so constituted, that emotions are the links of
+association by which their ideas, both sensuous and
+spiritual, are connected together. This constitution
+belongs (within certain limits) to all in whom
+poetry is a pervading principle. In all others,
+poetry is something extraneous and superinduced:
+something out of themselves, foreign to the habitual
+course of their every-day lives and characters;
+a world to which they may make occasional visits,
+but where they are sojourners, not dwellers, and
+which, when out of it, or even when in it, they
+think of, peradventure, but as a phantom-world,
+a place of <i>ignes fatui</i> and spectral illusions. Those
+only who have the peculiarity of association which
+we have mentioned, and which is a natural though
+not a universal consequence of intense sensibility,
+instead of seeming not themselves when they are
+uttering poetry, scarcely seem themselves when
+uttering anything to which poetry is foreign. Whatever
+be the thing which they are contemplating, if
+it be capable of connecting itself with their emotions,
+the aspect under which it first and most naturally
+paints itself to them, is its poetic aspect. The poet
+of culture sees his object in prose, and describes it in
+poetry; the poet of nature actually sees it in poetry.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[416]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This point is perhaps worth some little illustration;
+the rather, as metaphysicians (the ultimate
+arbiters of all philosophical criticism), while they
+have busied themselves for two thousand years,
+more or less, about the few <i>universal</i> laws of human
+nature, have strangely neglected the analysis of its
+<i>diversities</i>. Of these, none lie deeper or reach
+further than the varieties which difference of nature
+and of education makes in what may be termed the
+habitual bond of association. In a mind entirely
+uncultivated, which is also without any strong
+feelings, objects whether of sense or of intellect
+arrange themselves in the mere casual order in
+which they have been seen, heard, or otherwise
+perceived. Persons of this sort may be said to
+think chronologically. If they remember a fact,
+it is by reason of a fortuitous coincidence with some
+trifling incident or circumstance which took place
+at the very time. If they have a story to tell, or
+testimony to deliver in a witness-box, their narrative
+must follow the exact order in which the events
+took place: <i>dodge</i> them, and the thread of association
+is broken; they cannot go on. Their associations,
+to use the language of philosophers, are
+chiefly of the successive, not the synchronous kind,
+and whether successive or synchronous, are mostly
+casual.</p>
+
+<p>To the man of science, again, or of business,
+objects group themselves according to the artificial
+classifications which the understanding has voluntarily
+made for the convenience of thought or of
+practice. But where any of the impressions are
+vivid and intense, the associations into which
+these enter are the ruling ones: it being a well-known
+law of association, that the stronger a feeling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[417]</a></span>
+is, the more quickly and strongly it associates itself
+with any other object or feeling. Where, therefore,
+nature has given strong feelings, and education
+has not created factitious tendencies stronger than
+the natural ones, the prevailing associations will be
+those which connect objects and ideas with emotions,
+and with each other through the intervention
+of emotions. Thoughts and images will be linked
+together, according to the similarity of the feelings
+which cling to them. A thought will introduce
+a thought by first introducing a feeling which is
+allied with it. At the centre of each group of
+thoughts or images will be found a feeling; and
+the thoughts or images will be there only because
+the feeling was there. The combinations which the
+mind puts together, the pictures which it paints,
+the wholes which Imagination constructs out of the
+materials supplied by Fancy, will be indebted to
+some dominant <i>feeling</i>, not as in other natures to
+a dominant <i>thought</i>, for their unity and consistency
+of character, for what distinguishes them from
+incoherencies.</p>
+
+<p>The difference, then, between the poetry of
+a poet, and the poetry of a cultivated but not
+naturally poetic mind, is, that in the latter, with
+however bright a halo of feeling the thought may
+be surrounded and glorified, the thought itself is
+always the conspicuous object; while the poetry
+of a poet is Feeling itself, employing Thought only
+as the medium of its expression. In the one, feeling
+waits upon thought; in the other, thought upon
+feeling. The one writer has a distinct aim, common
+to him with any other didactic author; he
+desires to convey the thought, and he conveys it
+clothed in the feelings which it excites in himself,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[418]</a></span>
+or which he deems most appropriate to it. The
+other merely pours forth the overflowing of his
+feelings; and all the thoughts which those feelings
+suggest are floated promiscuously along the stream.</p>
+
+<p>It may assist in rendering our meaning intelligible,
+if we illustrate it by a parallel between the
+two English authors of our own day who have
+produced the greatest quantity of true and enduring
+poetry, Wordsworth and Shelley. Apter instances
+could not be wished for; the one might be
+cited as the type, the <i>exemplar</i>, of what the poetry
+of culture may accomplish: the other as perhaps
+the most striking example ever known of the poetic
+temperament. How different, accordingly, is the
+poetry of these two great writers! In Wordsworth,
+the poetry is almost always the mere
+setting of a thought. The thought may be more
+valuable than the setting, or it may be less valuable,
+but there can be no question as to which was first
+in his mind: what he is impressed with, and what
+he is anxious to impress, is some proposition, more
+or less distinctly conceived; some truth, or something
+which he deems such. He lets the thought
+dwell in his mind, till it excites, as is the nature of
+thought, other thoughts, and also such feelings as
+the measure of his sensibility is adequate to supply.
+Among these thoughts and feelings, had he chosen
+a different walk of authorship (and there are many
+in which he might equally have excelled), he would
+probably have made a different selection of media
+for enforcing the parent thought: his habits, however,
+being those of poetic composition, he selects in
+preference the strongest feelings, and the thoughts
+with which most of feeling is naturally or habitually
+connected. His poetry, therefore, may be defined<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[419]</a></span>
+to be, his thoughts, coloured by, and impressing
+themselves by means of, emotions. Such poetry,
+Wordsworth has occupied a long life in producing.
+And well and wisely has he so done. Criticisms,
+no doubt, may be made occasionally both upon the
+thoughts themselves, and upon the skill he has
+demonstrated in the choice of his media: for an
+affair of skill and study, in the most rigorous sense,
+it evidently was. But he has not laboured in
+vain; he has exercised, and continues to exercise,
+a powerful, and mostly a highly beneficial influence
+over the formation and growth of not a few of the
+most cultivated and vigorous of the youthful minds
+of our time, over whose heads poetry of the opposite
+description would have flown, for want of an
+original organization, physical or mental, in sympathy
+with it.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, Wordsworth&#8217;s poetry is
+never bounding, never ebullient; has little even of
+the appearance of spontaneousness: the well is
+never so full that it overflows. There is an air of
+calm deliberateness about all he writes, which is
+not characteristic of the poetic temperament: his
+poetry seems one thing, himself another; he seems
+to be poetical because he wills to be so, not because
+he cannot help it: did he will to dismiss poetry,
+he need never again, it might almost seem, have
+a poetical thought. He never seems <i>possessed</i> by
+any feeling; no emotion seems ever so strong as to
+have entire sway, for the time being, over the
+current of his thoughts. He never, even for the
+space of a few stanzas, appears entirely given up
+to exultation, or grief, or pity, or love, or admiration,
+or devotion, or even animal spirits. He now
+and then, though seldom, attempts to write as if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[420]</a></span>
+he were: and never, we think, without leaving an
+impression of poverty: as the brook which on
+nearly level ground quite fills its banks, appears but
+a thread when running rapidly down a precipitous
+declivity. He has feeling enough to form a decent,
+graceful, even beautiful decoration to a thought
+which is in itself interesting and moving; but not
+so much as suffices to stir up the soul by mere
+sympathy with itself in its simplest manifestation,
+nor enough to summon up that array of &#8216;thoughts
+of power&#8217; which in a richly stored mind always
+attends the call of really intense feeling. It is for
+this reason, doubtless, that the genius of Wordsworth
+is essentially unlyrical. Lyric poetry, as it
+was the earliest kind, is also, if the view we are now
+taking of poetry be correct, more eminently and
+peculiarly poetry than any other: it is the poetry
+most natural to a really poetic temperament, and
+least capable of being successfully imitated by one
+not so endowed by nature.</p>
+
+<p>Shelley is the very reverse of all this. Where
+Wordsworth is strong, he is weak; where Wordsworth
+is weak, he is strong. Culture, that culture
+by which Wordsworth has reared from his own
+inward nature the richest harvest ever brought
+forth by a soil of so little depth, is precisely what
+was wanting to Shelley: or let us rather say, he had
+not, at the period of his deplorably early death,
+reached sufficiently far in that intellectual progression
+of which he was capable, and which, if it
+has done so much for greatly inferior natures, might
+have made of him the most perfect, as he was
+already the most gifted of our poets. For him,
+voluntary mental discipline had done little: the
+vividness of his emotions and of his sensations had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[421]</a></span>
+done all. He seldom follows up an idea; it starts
+into life, summons from the fairy-land of his inexhaustible
+fancy some three or four bold images,
+then vanishes, and straight he is off on the wings of
+some casual association into quite another sphere.
+He had scarcely yet acquired the consecutiveness
+of thought necessary for a long poem; his more
+ambitious compositions too often resemble the
+scattered fragments of a mirror; colours brilliant
+as life, single images without end, but no picture.
+It is only when under the overruling influence of
+some one state of feeling, either actually experienced,
+or summoned up in the vividness of reality
+by a fervid imagination, that he writes as a great
+poet; unity of feeling being to him the harmonizing
+principle which a central idea is to minds of another
+class, and supplying the coherency and consistency
+which would else have been wanting. Thus it is in
+many of his smaller, and especially his lyrical
+poems. They are obviously written to exhale,
+perhaps to relieve, a state of feeling, or of conception
+of feeling, almost oppressive from its vividness.
+The thoughts and imagery are suggested by the
+feeling, and are such as it finds unsought. The
+state of feeling may be either of soul or of sense, or
+oftener (might we not say invariably?) of both:
+for the poetic temperament is usually, perhaps
+always, accompanied by exquisite senses. The
+exciting cause may be either an object or an idea.
+But whatever of sensation enters into the feeling,
+must not be local, or consciously organic; it is
+a condition of the whole frame, not of a part only.
+Like the state of sensation produced by a fine
+climate, or indeed like all strongly pleasurable or
+painful sensations in an impassioned nature, it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[422]</a></span>
+pervades the entire nervous system. States of
+feeling, whether sensuous or spiritual, which thus
+possess the whole being, are the fountains of that
+which we have called the poetry of poets; and
+which is little else than a pouring forth of the
+thoughts and images that pass across the mind while
+some permanent state of feeling is occupying it.</p>
+
+<p>To the same original fineness of organization,
+Shelley was doubtless indebted for another of his
+rarest gifts, that exuberance of imagery, which when
+unrepressed, as in many of his poems it is, amounts
+to a fault. The susceptibility of his nervous system,
+which made his emotions intense, made also
+the impressions of his external senses deep and
+clear; and agreeably to the law of association by
+which, as already remarked, the strongest impressions
+are those which associate themselves the most
+easily and strongly, these vivid sensations were
+readily recalled to mind by all objects or thoughts
+which had co-existed with them, and by all feelings
+which in any degree resembled them. Never did
+a fancy so teem with sensuous imagery as Shelley&#8217;s.
+Wordsworth economizes an image, and detains it
+until he has distilled all the poetry out of it, and it
+will not yield a drop more: Shelley lavishes his
+with a profusion which is unconscious because it is
+inexhaustible.</p>
+
+<p>If, then, the maxim <i>Nascitur poeta</i> mean, either
+that the power of producing poetical compositions
+is a peculiar faculty which the poet brings into the
+world with him, which grows with his growth like
+any of his bodily powers, and is as independent of
+culture as his height, and his complexion; or that
+any natural peculiarity whatever is implied in
+producing poetry, real poetry, and in any quantity&mdash;such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[423]</a></span>
+poetry too, as, to the majority of educated
+and intelligent readers, shall appear quite as good
+as, or even better than, any other; in either sense
+the doctrine is false. And nevertheless, there <i>is</i>
+poetry which could not emanate but from a mental
+and physical constitution peculiar, not in the kind,
+but in the degree of its susceptibility: a constitution
+which makes its possessor capable of
+greater happiness than mankind in general, and
+also of greater unhappiness; and because greater,
+so also more various. And such poetry, to all who
+know enough of nature to own it as being in nature,
+is much more poetry, is poetry in a far higher sense,
+than any other; since the common element of all
+poetry, that which constitutes poetry, human feeling,
+enters far more largely into this than into the
+poetry of culture. Not only because the natures
+which we have called poetical, really feel more, and
+consequently have more feeling to express; but
+because, the capacity of feeling being so great,
+feeling, when excited and not voluntarily resisted,
+seizes the helm of their thoughts, and the succession
+of ideas and images becomes the mere utterance of
+an emotion; not, as in other natures, the emotion
+a mere ornamental colouring of the thought.</p>
+
+<p>Ordinary education and the ordinary course of
+life are constantly at work counteracting this
+quality of mind, and substituting habits more suitable
+to their own ends: if instead of substituting
+they were content to superadd, there would be
+nothing to complain of. But when will education
+consist, not in repressing any mental faculty or
+power, from the uncontrolled action of which danger
+is apprehended, but in training up to its proper
+strength the corrective and antagonist power?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[424]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In whomsoever the quality which we have described
+exists, and is not stifled, that person is
+a poet. Doubtless he is a greater poet in proportion
+as the fineness of his perceptions, whether of sense
+or of internal consciousness, furnishes him with an
+ampler supply of lovely images&mdash;the vigour and
+richness of his intellect, with a greater abundance
+of moving thoughts. For it is through these
+thoughts and images that the feeling speaks, and
+through their impressiveness that it impresses
+itself, and finds response in other hearts; and from
+these media of transmitting it (contrary to the laws
+of physical nature) increase of intensity is reflected
+back upon the feeling itself. But all these it is
+possible to have, and not be a poet; they are mere
+materials, which the poet shares in common with
+other people. What constitutes the poet is not
+the imagery nor the thoughts, nor even the feelings,
+but the law according to which they are called up.
+He is a poet, not because he has ideas of any
+particular kind, but because the succession of big
+ideas is subordinate to the course of his emotions.</p>
+
+<p>Many who have never acknowledged this in
+theory, bear testimony to it in their particular
+judgements. In listening to an oration, or reading
+a written discourse not professedly poetical, when
+do we begin to feel that the speaker or author is
+putting off the character of the orator or the prose
+writer, and is passing into the poet? Not when
+he begins to show strong feeling; <i>then</i> we merely
+say, he is in earnest, he feels what he says; still
+less when he expresses himself in imagery; then,
+unless illustration be manifestly his sole object, we
+are apt to say, this is affectation. It is when the
+feeling (instead of passing away, or, if it continue,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[425]</a></span>
+letting the train of thoughts run on exactly as they
+would have done if there were no influence at work
+but the mere intellect) becomes itself the originator
+of another train of association, which expels or
+blends with the former; when (for example) either
+his words, or the mode of their arrangement, are
+such as we spontaneously use only when in a state
+of excitement, proving that the mind is at least as
+much occupied by a passive state of its own feelings,
+as by the desire of attaining the premeditated end
+which the discourse has in view.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a></p>
+
+<p>Our judgements of authors who lay actual claim
+to the title of poets, follow the same principle.
+Whenever, after a writer&#8217;s meaning is fully understood,
+it is still matter of reasoning and discussion
+whether he is a poet or not, he will be found to be
+wanting in the characteristic peculiarity of association
+so often adverted to. When, on the contrary,
+after reading or hearing one or two passages, we
+instinctively and without hesitation cry out, &#8216;This
+is a poet&#8217;, the probability is, that the passages are
+strongly marked with this peculiar quality. And
+we may add that in such case, a critic who, not
+having sufficient feeling to respond to the poetry, is
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[426]</a></span>also without sufficient philosophy to understand it
+though he feel it not, will be apt to pronounce, not
+&#8216;this is prose&#8217;, but &#8216;this is exaggeration&#8217;, &#8216;this is
+mysticism&#8217;, or, &#8216;this is nonsense&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>Although a philosopher cannot, by culture, make
+himself, in the peculiar sense in which we now use
+the term, a poet, unless at least he have that peculiarity
+of nature which would probably have made
+poetry his earliest pursuit; a poet may always, by
+culture, make himself a philosopher. The poetic
+laws of association are by no means incompatible
+with the more ordinary laws; are by no means such
+as <i>must</i> have their course, even though a deliberate
+purpose require their suspension. If the peculiarities
+of the poetic temperament were uncontrollable
+in any poet, they might be supposed so in
+Shelley; yet how powerfully, in the <i>Cenci</i>, does he
+coerce and restrain all the characteristic qualities
+of his genius; what severe simplicity, in place of
+his usual barbaric splendour; how rigidly does he
+keep the feelings and the imagery in subordination
+to the thought.</p>
+
+<p>The investigation of nature requires no habits or
+qualities of mind, but such as may always be
+acquired by industry and mental activity. Because
+at one time the mind may be so given up to a state
+of feeling, that the succession of its ideas is determined
+by the present enjoyment or suffering which
+pervades it, this is no reason but that in the calm
+retirement of study, when under no peculiar excitement
+either of the outward or of the inward
+sense, it may form any combinations, or pursue any
+trains of ideas, which are most conducive to the
+purposes of philosophic inquiry; and may, while
+in that state, form deliberate convictions, from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[427]</a></span>
+which no excitement will afterwards make it
+swerve. Might we not go even further than this?
+We shall not pause to ask whether it be not a misunderstanding
+of the nature of passionate feeling to
+imagine that it is inconsistent with calmness;
+whether they who so deem of it, do not mistake
+passion in the militant or antagonistic state, for
+the type of passion universally; do not confound
+passion struggling towards an outward object, with
+passion brooding over itself. But without entering
+into this deeper investigation; that capacity of
+strong feeling, which is supposed necessarily to disturb
+the judgement, is also the material out of
+which all <i>motives</i> are made; the motives, consequently,
+which lead human beings to the pursuit of
+truth. The greater the individual&#8217;s capability of
+happiness and of misery, the stronger interest has
+that individual in arriving at truth; and when once
+that interest is felt, an impassioned nature is sure
+to pursue this, as to pursue any other object, with
+greater ardour; for energy of character is commonly
+the offspring of strong feeling. If, therefore,
+the most impassioned natures do not ripen into the
+most powerful intellects, it is always from defect of
+culture, or something wrong in the circumstances by
+which the being has originally or successively been
+surrounded. Undoubtedly strong feelings require
+a strong intellect to carry them, as more sail requires
+more ballast: and when, from neglect, or
+bad education, that strength is wanting, no wonder
+if the grandest and swiftest vessels make the most
+utter wreck.</p>
+
+<p>Where, as in some of our older poets, a poetic
+nature has been united with logical and scientific
+culture, the peculiarity of association arising from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[428]</a></span>
+the finer nature so perpetually alternates with
+the associations attainable by commoner natures
+trained to high perfection, that its own particular
+law is not so conspicuously characteristic of the
+result produced, as in a poet like Shelley, to whom
+systematic intellectual culture, in a measure proportioned
+to the intensity of his own nature,
+has been wanting. Whether the superiority will
+naturally be on the side of the philosopher-poet or
+of the mere poet&mdash;whether the writings of the one
+ought, as a whole, to be truer, and their influence
+more beneficent, than those of the other&mdash;is
+too obvious in principle to need statement: it
+would be absurd to doubt whether two endowments
+are better than one; whether truth is more certainly
+arrived at by two processes, verifying and
+correcting each other, than by one alone. Unfortunately,
+in practice the matter is not quite so
+simple; there the question often is, which is least
+prejudicial to the intellect, uncultivation or malcultivation.
+For, as long as education consists
+chiefly of the mere inculcation of traditional
+opinions, many of which, from the mere fact that
+the human intellect has not yet reached perfection,
+must necessarily be false; so long as even those
+who are best taught, are rather taught to know the
+thoughts of others than to think, it is not always
+clear that the poet of acquired ideas has the advantage
+over him whose feeling has been his sole
+teacher. For the depth and durability of wrong
+as well as of right impressions is proportional to
+the fineness of the material; and they who have
+the greatest capacity of natural feeling are generally
+those whose artificial feelings are the strongest.
+Hence, doubtless, among other reasons, it is, that in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[429]</a></span>
+an age of revolutions in opinion, the co-temporary
+poets, those at least who deserve the name, those
+who have any individuality of character, if they are
+not before their age, are almost sure to be behind it.
+An observation curiously verified all over Europe
+in the present century. Nor let it be thought disparaging.
+However urgent may be the necessity
+for a breaking up of old modes of belief, the most
+strong-minded and discerning, next to those who
+head the movement, are generally those who bring
+up the rear of it.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> And this, we may remark by the way, seems to point to
+the true theory of poetic diction; and to suggest the true
+answer to as much as is erroneous of Wordsworth&#8217;s celebrated
+doctrine on that subject. For on the one hand, <i>all</i>
+language which is the natural expression of feeling, is really
+poetical, and will be felt as such, apart from conventional
+associations; but on the other, whenever intellectual
+culture has afforded a choice between several modes of
+expressing the same emotion, the stronger the feeling is,
+the more naturally and certainly will it prefer the language
+which is most peculiarly appropriated to itself, and kept
+sacred from the contact of more vulgar objects of contemplation.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="WALTER_BAGEHOT" id="WALTER_BAGEHOT"></a>WALTER BAGEHOT<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[430]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1826-1877</h3>
+
+<h3>WORDSWORTH, TENNYSON, AND BROWNING<br />
+
+<small>OR</small><br />
+
+PURE, ORNATE, AND GROTESQUE ART IN<br />
+ENGLISH POETRY (1864)</h3>
+
+<h4><i>Enoch Arden, &amp;c.</i> By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L.,<br />
+Poet Laureate.<br />
+
+<i>Dramatis Personae.</i> By Robert Browning.</h4>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> couple these two books together, not because
+of their likeness, for they are as dissimilar as books
+can be, nor on account of the eminence of their
+authors, for in general two great authors are too
+much for one essay, but because they are the best
+possible illustration of something we have to say
+upon poetical art&mdash;because they may give to it life
+and freshness. The accident of contemporaneous
+publication has here brought together two books,
+very characteristic of modern art, and we want to
+show how they are characteristic.</p>
+
+<p>Neither English poetry nor English criticism
+have ever recovered the <i>eruption</i> which they both
+made at the beginning of this century into the
+fashionable world. The poems of Lord Byron
+were received with an avidity that resembles our
+present avidity for sensation novels, and were
+read by a class which at present reads little but
+such novels. Old men who remember those days
+may be heard to say, &#8216;We hear nothing of poetry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[431]</a></span>
+nowadays; it seems quite down.&#8217; And &#8216;down&#8217;
+it certainly is, if for poetry it be a descent to be
+no longer the favourite excitement of the more
+frivolous part of the &#8216;upper&#8217; world. That
+stimulating poetry is now little read. A stray
+schoolboy may still be detected in a wild admiration
+for the <i>Giaour</i> or the <i>Corsair</i> (and it is suitable
+to his age, and he should not be reproached for it),
+but the <i>real</i> posterity&mdash;the quiet students of a past
+literature&mdash;never read them or think of them.
+A line or two linger in the memory; a few telling
+strokes of occasional and felicitous energy are
+quoted, but this is all. As wholes, these exaggerated
+stories were worthless; they taught nothing,
+and, therefore, they are forgotten. If nowadays
+a dismal poet were, like Byron, to lament the
+fact of his birth, and to hint that he was too good
+for the world, the <i>Saturday Review</i> would say that
+&#8216;they doubted if he <i>was</i> too good; that a sulky
+poet was a questionable addition to a tolerable
+world; that he need not have been born, as far
+as they were concerned.&#8217; Doubtless, there is
+much in Byron besides his dismal exaggeration,
+but it was that exaggeration which made &#8216;the
+sensation&#8217;, which gave him a wild moment of
+dangerous fame. As so often happens, the cause
+of his momentary fashion is the cause also of his
+lasting oblivion. Moore&#8217;s former reputation was
+less excessive, yet it has not been more permanent.
+The prettiness of a few songs preserves the memory
+of his name, but as a poet to <i>read</i> he is forgotten.
+There is nothing to read in him; no exquisite
+thought, no sublime feeling, no consummate
+description of true character. Almost the sole
+result of the poetry of that time is the harm which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[432]</a></span>
+it has done. It degraded for a time the whole
+character of the art. It said by practice, by
+a most efficient and successful practice, that it
+was the aim, the <i>duty</i> of poets, to catch the
+attention of the passing, the fashionable, the busy
+world. If a poem &#8216;fell dead&#8217;, it was nothing; it
+was composed to please the &#8216;London&#8217; of the year,
+and if that London did not like it, why, it had
+failed. It fixed upon the minds of a whole
+generation, it engraved in popular memory and
+tradition, a vague conviction that poetry is but
+one of the many <i>amusements</i> for the light classes,
+for the lighter hours of all classes. The mere
+notion, the bare idea, that poetry is a deep thing,
+a teaching thing, the most surely and wisely
+elevating of human things, is even now to the
+coarse public mind nearly unknown.</p>
+
+<p>As was the fate of poetry, so inevitably was that
+of criticism. The science that expounds which
+poetry is good and which is bad is dependent for
+its popular reputation on the popular estimate of
+poetry itself. The critics of that day had <i>a</i> day,
+which is more than can be said for some since;
+they professed to tell the fashionable world in
+what books it would find new pleasure, and
+therefore they were read by the fashionable world.
+Byron counted the critic and poet equal. The
+<i>Edinburgh Review</i> penetrated among the young,
+and into places of female resort where it does not
+go now. As people ask, &#8216;Have you read <i>Henry
+Dunbar</i>? and what do you think of it?&#8217; so they
+then asked, &#8216;Have you read the <i>Giaour</i>? and
+what do you think of it?&#8217; Lord Jeffrey, a shrewd
+judge of the world, employed himself in telling it
+what to think; not so much what it ought to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[433]</a></span>
+think, as what at bottom it did think, and so by
+dexterous sympathy with current society he gained
+contemporary fame and power. Such fame no
+critic must hope for now. His articles will not
+penetrate where the poems themselves do not
+penetrate. When poetry was noisy, criticism was
+loud; now poetry is a still small voice, and
+criticism must be smaller and stiller. As the
+function of such criticism was limited so was its
+subject. For the great and (as time now proves)
+the <i>permanent</i> part of the poetry of his time&mdash;for
+Shelley and for Wordsworth&mdash;Lord Jeffrey had
+but one word. He said<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> &#8216;It won&#8217;t do&#8217;. And it
+will not do to amuse a drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>The doctrine that poetry is a light amusement
+for idle hours, a metrical species of sensational
+novel, has not indeed been without gainsayers
+wildly popular. Thirty years ago, Mr. Carlyle
+most rudely contradicted it. But perhaps this is
+about all that he has done. He has denied, but
+he has not disproved. He has contradicted the
+floating paganism, but he has not founded the
+deep religion. All about and around us a <i>faith</i> in
+poetry struggles to be extricated, but it is not
+extricated. Some day, at the touch of the true
+word, the whole confusion will by magic cease;
+the broken and shapeless notions cohere and
+crystallize into a bright and true theory. But
+this cannot be yet.</p>
+
+<p>But though no complete theory of the poetic
+art as yet be possible for us, though perhaps only
+our children&#8217;s children will be able to speak on
+this subject with the assured confidence which
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[434]</a></span>belongs to accepted truth, yet something of some
+certainty may be stated on the easier elements,
+and something that will throw light on these two
+new books. But it will be necessary to assign
+reasons, and the assigning of reasons is a dry task.
+Years ago, when criticism only tried to show how
+poetry could be made a good amusement, it was
+not impossible that criticism itself should be
+amusing. But now it must at least be serious, for
+we believe that poetry is a serious and a deep
+thing.</p>
+
+<p>There should be a word in the language of literary
+art to express what the word &#8216;picturesque&#8217; expresses
+for the fine arts. <i>Picturesque</i> means fit to
+be put into a picture; we want a word <i>literatesque</i>,
+&#8216;fit to be put into a book.&#8217; An artist goes through
+a hundred different country scenes, rich with
+beauties, charms, and merits, but he does not
+paint any of them. He leaves them alone; he
+idles on till he finds the hundred-and-first&mdash;a scene
+which many observers would not think much of,
+but which <i>he</i> knows by virtue of his art will look
+well on canvas, and this he paints and preserves.
+Susceptible observers, though not artists, feel this
+quality too; they say of a scene, &#8216;How picturesque!&#8217;
+meaning by this a quality distinct from
+that of beauty, or sublimity, or grandeur&mdash;meaning
+to speak not only of the scene as it is in itself, but
+also of its fitness for imitation by art; meaning
+not only that it is good, but that its goodness is
+such as ought to be transferred to paper; meaning
+not simply that it fascinates, but also that its
+fascination is such as ought to be copied by man.
+A fine and insensible instinct has put language to
+this subtle use; it expresses an idea without which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[435]</a></span>
+fine art criticism could not go on, and it is very
+natural that the language of pictorial should be
+better supplied with words than that of literary
+criticism, for the eye was used before the mind,
+and language embodies primitive sensuous ideas,
+long ere it expresses, or need express, abstract and
+literary ones.</p>
+
+<p>The reason why a landscape is &#8216;picturesque&#8217; is
+often said to be that such landscape represents an
+&#8216;idea&#8217;. But this explanation, though in the minds
+of some who use it it is near akin to the truth, fails
+to explain that truth to those who did not know it
+before; the Word &#8216;idea,&#8217; is so often used in these
+subjects when people do not know anything else
+to say; it represents so often a kind of intellectual
+insolvency, when philosophers are at their wits&#8217;
+end, that shrewd people will never readily on any
+occasion give it credit for meaning anything.
+A wise explainer must, therefore, look out for
+other words to convey what he has to say.
+<i>Landscapes</i>, like everything else in nature, divide
+themselves as we look at them into a sort of rude
+classification. We go down a river, for example,
+and we see a hundred landscapes on both sides of
+it, resembling one another in much, yet differing
+in something; with trees here, and a farmhouse
+there, and shadows on one side, and a deep pool
+far on; a collection of circumstances most familiar
+in themselves, but making a perpetual novelty by
+the magic of their various combinations. We travel
+so for miles and hours, and then we come to a
+scene which also has these various circumstances
+and adjuncts, but which combines them best,
+which makes the best whole of them, which shows
+them in their best proportion at a single glance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[436]</a></span>
+before the eye. Then we say, &#8216;This is the place
+to paint the river; this is the picturesque point!&#8217;
+Or, if not artists or critics of art, we feel without
+analysis or examination that somehow this bend or
+sweep of the river, shall, in future, <i>be the river to us</i>:
+that it is the image of it which we will retain in
+our mind&#8217;s eye, by which we will remember it,
+which we will call up when we want to describe or
+think of it. Some fine countries, some beautiful
+rivers, have not this picturesque quality: they
+give us elements of beauty, but they do not combine
+them together; we go on for a time delighted,
+but <i>after</i> a time somehow we get wearied; we feel
+that we are taking in nothing and learning nothing;
+we get no collected image before our mind; we see
+the accidents and circumstances of that sort of
+scenery, but the summary scene we do not see;
+we find <i>disjecta membra</i>, but no form; various and
+many and faulty approximations are displayed
+in succession; but the absolute perfection in that
+country or river&#8217;s scenery&mdash;its <i>type</i>&mdash;is withheld:
+We go away from such places in part delighted,
+but in part baffled; we have been puzzled by
+pretty things; we have beheld a hundred different
+inconsistent specimens of the same sort of beauty;
+but the rememberable idea, the full development,
+the characteristic individuality of it, we have not
+seen.</p>
+
+<p>We find the same sort of quality in all parts of
+painting. We see a portrait of a person we know,
+and we say, &#8216;It is like&mdash;yes, like, of course, but
+it is not <i>the man</i>;&#8217; we feel it could not be any one
+else, but still, somehow it fails to bring home to
+us the individual as we know him to be. <i>He</i> is not
+there. An accumulation of features like his are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[437]</a></span>
+painted, but his essence is not painted; an
+approximation more or less excellent is given, but
+the characteristic expression, the <i>typical</i> form, of
+the man is withheld.</p>
+
+<p>Literature&mdash;the painting of words&mdash;has the same
+quality but wants the analogous word. The word
+&#8216;<i>literatesque</i>,&#8217; would mean, if we possessed it, that
+perfect combination in the <i>subject-matter</i> of literature,
+which suits the <i>art</i> of literature. We often
+meet people, and say of them, sometimes meaning
+well and sometimes ill, &#8216;How well so-and-so
+would do in a book!&#8217; Such people are by no
+means the best people; but they are the most
+effective people&mdash;the most rememberable people.
+Frequently when we first know them, we like
+them because they explain to us so much of our
+experience; we have known many people &#8216;like
+that,&#8217; in one way or another, but we did not seem
+to understand them; they were nothing to us,
+for their traits were indistinct; we forgot them,
+for they <i>hitched</i> on to nothing, and we could not
+classify them; but when we see the <i>type</i> of the
+genus, at once we seem to comprehend its character;
+the inferior specimens are explained by the perfect
+embodiment; the approximations are definable
+when we know the ideal to which they draw near.
+There are an infinite number of classes of human
+beings, but in each of these classes there is a distinctive
+type which, if we could expand it out in words,
+would define the class. We cannot expand it in
+formal terms any more than a landscape or
+a species of landscapes; but we have an art, an
+art of words, which can draw it. Travellers and
+others often bring home, in addition to their long
+journals&mdash;which though so living to them, are so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[438]</a></span>
+dead, so inanimate, so undescriptive to all else&mdash;a
+pen-and-ink sketch, rudely done very likely, but
+which, perhaps, even the more for the blots and
+strokes, gives a distinct notion, an emphatic
+image, to all who see it. They say at once, &#8216;<i>Now</i>
+we know the sort of thing&#8217;. The sketch has <i>hit</i> the
+mind. True literature does the same. It describes
+sorts, varieties, and permutations, by delineating
+the type of each sort, the ideal of each variety, the
+central, the marking trait of each permutation.</p>
+
+<p>On this account, the greatest artists of the
+world have ever shown an enthusiasm for reality.
+To care for notions and abstractions; to philosophize;
+to reason out conclusions; to care for
+schemes of thought, are signs in the artistic mind
+of secondary excellence. A Schiller, a Euripides,
+a Ben Jonson, cares for <i>ideas</i>&mdash;for the parings of
+the intellect, and the distillation of the mind;
+a Shakespeare, a Homer, a Goethe, finds his
+mental occupation, the true home of his natural
+thoughts, in the real world&mdash;&#8216;which is the world
+of all of us&#8217;&mdash;where the face of nature, the moving
+masses of men and women, are ever changing, ever
+multiplying, ever mixing one with the other. The
+reason is plain&mdash;the business of the poet, of the
+artist, is with <i>types</i>; and those types are mirrored
+in reality. As a painter must not only have a
+hand to execute, but an eye to distinguish&mdash;as he
+must go here and then there through the real world
+to catch the picturesque man, the picturesque
+scene, which is to live on his canvas&mdash;so the poet
+must find in that reality, the <i>literatesque</i> man, the
+<i>literatesque</i> scene which nature intends for him,
+and which will live in his page. Even in reality he
+will not find this type complete, or the characteristics<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[439]</a></span>
+perfect; but there, at least, he will find
+<i>something</i>, some hint, some intimation, some
+suggestion; whereas, in the stagnant home of his
+own thoughts he will find nothing pure, nothing <i>as it
+is</i>, nothing which does not bear his own mark, which
+is not somehow altered by a mixture with himself.</p>
+
+<p>The first conversation of Goethe and Schiller
+illustrates this conception of the poet&#8217;s art.
+Goethe was at that time prejudiced against
+Schiller, we must remember, partly from what
+he considered the <i>outrages</i> of the <i>Robbers</i>, partly
+because of the philosophy of Kant. Schiller&#8217;s
+&#8216;Essay on <i>Grace and Dignity</i>&#8217;, he tells us, &#8216;was
+yet less of a kind to reconcile me. The philosophy
+of Kant, which exalts the dignity of mind so
+highly, while appearing to restrict it, Schiller had
+joyfully embraced: it unfolded the extraordinary
+qualities which Nature had implanted in him;
+and in the lively feeling of freedom and self-direction,
+he showed himself unthankful to the
+Great Mother, who surely had not acted like
+a step-dame towards him. Instead of viewing her
+as self-subsisting, as producing with a living force,
+and according to appointed laws, alike the highest
+and the lowest of her works, he took her up under
+the aspect of some empirical native qualities of
+the human mind. Certain harsh passages I could
+even directly apply to myself: they exhibited
+my confession of faith in a false light; and I felt
+that if written without particular attention to me
+they were still worse; for in that case, the vast
+chasm which lay between us, gaped but so much
+the more distinctly.&#8217; After a casual meeting at
+a Society for Natural History, they walked home
+and Goethe proceeds:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[440]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&#8216;We reached his house; the talk induced me
+to go in. I then expounded to him, with as much
+vivacity as possible, the <i>Metamorphosis of Plants</i>,
+drawing out on paper, with many characteristic
+strokes, a symbolic Plant for him, as I proceeded.
+He heard and saw all this, with much interest and
+distinct comprehension; but when I had done,
+he shook his head and said: &#8216;This is no experiment,
+this is an idea.&#8217; I stopped with some degree of
+irritation; for the point which separated us was
+most luminously marked by this expression. The
+opinions in <i>Dignity and Grace</i>, again occurred to
+me; the old grudge was just awakening; but
+I smothered it, and merely said: &#8220;I was happy to
+find that I had got ideas without knowing it, nay
+that I saw them before my eyes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;Schiller had much more prudence and dexterity
+of management than I; he was also thinking of
+his periodical the <i>Horen</i>, about this time, and of
+course rather wished to attract than repel me.
+Accordingly he answered me like an accomplished
+Kantite; and as my stiff-necked Realism gave
+occasion to many contradictions, much battling
+took place between us, and at last a truce, in
+which neither party would consent to yield the
+victory, but each held himself invincible. Positions
+like the following grieved me to the very soul:
+<i>How can there ever be an experiment, that shall
+correspond with an idea? The specific quality of
+an idea is, that no experiment can reach it or agree
+with it.</i> Yet if he held as an idea, the same thing
+which I looked upon as an experiment; there must
+certainly, I thought, be some community between
+us, some ground whereon both of us might meet!&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>With Goethe&#8217;s natural history, or with Kant&#8217;s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[441]</a></span>
+philosophy, we have here no concern, but we can
+combine the expressions of the two great poets
+into a nearly complete description of poetry.
+The &#8216;symbolic plant&#8217; is the <i>type</i> of which we
+speak, the ideal at which inferior specimens aim,
+the class-characteristic in which they all share,
+but which none shows forth fully: Goethe was
+right in searching for this in reality and nature;
+Schiller was right in saying that it was an &#8216;idea&#8217;,
+a transcending notion to which approximations
+could be found in experience, but only approximations&mdash;which
+could not be found there itself.
+Goethe, as a poet, rightly felt the primary necessity
+of outward suggestion and experience; Schiller as
+a philosopher, rightly felt its imperfection.</p>
+
+<p>But in these delicate matters, it is easy to
+misapprehend. There is, undoubtedly, a sort of
+poetry which is produced as it were out of the
+author&#8217;s mind. The description of the poet&#8217;s own
+moods and feelings is a common sort of poetry&mdash;perhaps
+the commonest sort. But the peculiarity
+of such cases is, that the poet does not describe
+himself <i>as</i> himself: autobiography is not his object;
+he takes himself as a specimen of human nature; he
+describes, not himself, but a distillation of himself:
+he takes such of his moods as are most characteristic,
+as most typify certain moods of certain men, or
+certain moods of all men; he chooses preponderant
+feelings of special sorts of men, or occasional
+feelings of men of all sorts; but with whatever
+other difference and diversity, the essence is that
+such self-describing poets describe what is <i>in</i>
+them, but not <i>peculiar</i> to them,&mdash;what is generic,
+not what is special and individual. Gray&#8217;s <i>Elegy</i>
+describes a mood which Gray felt more than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[442]</a></span>
+other men, but which most others, perhaps all
+others, feel too. It is more popular, perhaps, than
+any English poem, because that sort of feeling is
+the most diffused of high feelings, and because
+Gray added to a singular nicety of fancy an
+habitual proneness to a <i>contemplative</i>&mdash;a discerning
+but unbiassed&mdash;meditation on death and on life.
+Other poets cannot hope for such success: a subject,
+so popular, so grave, so wise, and yet so suitable
+to the writer&#8217;s nature is hardly to be found.
+But the same ideal, the same unautobiographical
+character is to be found in the writings of meaner
+men. Take sonnets of Hartley Coleridge, for
+example:</p>
+
+
+<h5 class="poemtitle"><span style="font-size: 120%; padding-left: 2.5em">I</span><br />
+
+TO A FRIEND</h5>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When we were idlers with the loitering rills,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The need of human love we little noted:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Our love was nature; and the peace that floated<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That, wisely doating, ask&#8217;d not why it doated,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But now I find, how dear thou wert to me;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That man is more than half of nature&#8217;s treasure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of that fair Beauty which no eye can see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of that sweet music which no ear can measure;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And now the streams may sing for others&#8217; pleasure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The hills sleep on in their eternity.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<h5 class="poemtitle"><span style="font-size: 120%; padding-left: 2.5em">II</span><br />
+
+TO THE SAME</h5>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In the great city we are met again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where many souls there are, that breathe and die,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Scarce knowing more of nature&#8217;s potency,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than what they learn from heat, or cold, or rain;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[443]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">The sad vicissitude of weary pain;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For busy man is lord of ear and eye,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And what hath nature, but the vast, void sky,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the thronged river toiling to the main?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh! say not so, for she shall have her part<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In every smile, in every tear that falls,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And she shall hide her in the secret heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where love persuades, and sterner duty calls:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But worse it were than death, or sorrow&#8217;s smart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To live without a friend within these walls.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<h5 class="poemtitle"><span style="font-size: 120%; padding-left: 2.5em">III</span><br />
+TO THE SAME</h5>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">We parted on the mountains, as two streams<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From one clear spring pursue their several ways;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thy fleet course hath been through many a maze,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In foreign lands, where silvery Padus gleams<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To that delicious sky, whose glowing beams<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Brightened the tresses that old Poets praise;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where Petrarch&#8217;s patient love, and artful lays,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Ariosto&#8217;s song of many themes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Moved the soft air. But I, a lazy brook,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As close pent up within my native dell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Have crept along from nook to shady nook,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where flowrets blow, and whispering Naiads dwell.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet now we meet, that parted were so wide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O&#8217;er rough and smooth to travel side by side.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The contrast of instructive and enviable locomotion
+with refining but instructive meditation
+is not special and peculiar to these two, but general
+and universal. It was set down by Hartley
+Coleridge because he was the most meditative and
+refining of men.</p>
+
+<p>What sort of literatesque types are fit to be
+described in the sort of literature called poetry, is
+a matter on which much might be written.
+Mr. Arnold, some years since, put forth a theory
+that the art of poetry could only delineate <i>great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[444]</a></span>
+actions</i>. But though, rightly interpreted and
+understood&mdash;using the word action so as to include
+high and sound activity in contemplation&mdash;this
+definition may suit the highest poetry, it certainly
+cannot be stretched to include many inferior sorts
+and even many good sorts. Nobody in their
+senses would describe Gray&#8217;s <i>Elegy</i> as the
+delineation of a &#8216;great action&#8217;; some kinds of
+mental contemplation may be energetic enough
+to deserve this name, but Gray would have been
+frightened at the very word. He loved scholar-like
+calm and quiet inaction; his very greatness
+depended on his <i>not</i> acting, on his &#8216;wise passiveness,&#8217;
+on his indulging the grave idleness which so well
+appreciates so much of human life. But the best
+answer&mdash;the <i>reductio ad absurdum</i>&mdash;of Mr. Arnold&#8217;s
+doctrine, is the mutilation which it has caused
+him to make of his own writings. It has forbidden
+him, he tells us, to reprint <i>Empedocles</i>&mdash;a poem
+undoubtedly containing defects and even excesses,
+but containing also these lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And yet what days were those, Parmenides!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When we were young, when we could number friends<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In all the Italian cities like ourselves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When with elated hearts we join&#8217;d your train,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ye Sun-born virgins! on the road of Truth.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor outward things were clos&#8217;d and dead to us,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But we receiv&#8217;d the shock of mighty thoughts<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On simple minds with a pure natural joy;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And if the sacred load oppress&#8217;d our brain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We had the power to feel the pressure eas&#8217;d.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the delightful commerce of the world.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We had not lost our balance then, nor grown<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thought&#8217;s slaves and dead to every natural joy.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The smallest thing could give us pleasure then&mdash;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[445]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">The sports of the country people;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A flute note from the woods;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sunset over the sea:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Seed-time and harvest;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The reapers in the corn;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The vinedresser in his vineyard;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The village-girl at her wheel.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fullness of life and power of feeling, ye<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who dwell on a firm basis of content.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But he who has outliv&#8217;d his prosperous days,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But he, whose youth fell on a different world<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From that on which his exil&#8217;d age is thrown;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose mind was fed on other food, was train&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By other rules than are in vogue to-day;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose habit of thought is fix&#8217;d, who will not change,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But in a world he loves not must subsist<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In ceaseless opposition, be the guard<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of his own breast, fetter&#8217;d to what he guards,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That the world win no mastery over him;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who has no minute&#8217;s breathing space allow&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Joy and the outward world must die to him<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As they are dead to me.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>What freak of criticism can induce a man who
+has written such poetry as this, to discard it, and
+say it is not poetry? Mr. Arnold is privileged to
+speak of his own poems, but no other critic could
+speak so and not be laughed at.</p>
+
+<p>We are disposed to believe that no very sharp
+definition can be given&mdash;at least in the present
+state of the critical art&mdash;of the boundary line
+between poetry and other sorts of imaginative
+delineation. Between the undoubted dominions
+of the two kinds there is a debateable land;
+everybody is agreed that the <i>Oedipus at Colonus</i>
+<i>is</i> poetry: every one is agreed that the wonderful
+appearance of Mrs. Veal is <i>not</i> poetry. But the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[446]</a></span>
+exact line which separates grave novels in verse
+like <i>Aylmer&#8217;s Field</i> or <i>Enoch Arden</i>, from grave
+novels not in verse like <i>Silas Marner</i> or <i>Adam
+Bede</i>, we own we cannot draw with any confidence.
+Nor, perhaps, is it very important; whether a
+narrative is thrown into verse or not certainly
+depends in part on the taste of the age, and in part
+on its mechanical helps. Verse is the only
+mechanical help to the memory in rude times, and
+there is little writing till a cheap something is
+found to write upon, and a cheap something to
+write with. Poetry&mdash;verse at least&mdash;is the
+literature of <i>all work</i> in early ages; it is only
+later ages which write in what <i>they</i> think a natural
+and simple prose. There are other casual influences
+in the matter too; but they are not material now.
+We need only say here that poetry, because it has
+a more marked rhythm than prose, must be more
+intense in meaning and more concise in style than
+prose. People expect a &#8216;marked rhythm&#8217; to
+imply something worth marking; if it fails to do
+so they are disappointed. They are displeased at
+the visible waste of a powerful instrument; they
+call it &#8216;doggerel,&#8217; and rightly call it, for the
+metrical expression of full thought and eager
+feeling&mdash;the burst of metre&mdash;incident to high
+imagination, should not be wasted on petty
+matters which prose does as well,&mdash;which it does
+better&mdash;which it suits by its very limpness and
+weakness, whose small changes it follows more
+easily, and to whose lowest details it can fully
+and without effort degrade itself. Verse, too,
+should be <i>more concise</i>, for long-continued rhythm
+tends to jade the mind, just as brief rhythm
+tends to attract the attention. Poetry should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[447]</a></span>
+be memorable and emphatic, intense, and <i>soon
+over</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The great divisions of poetry, and of all other
+literary art, arise from the different modes in
+which these <i>types</i>&mdash;these characteristic men, these
+characteristic feelings&mdash;may be variously described.
+There are three principal modes which we shall
+attempt to describe&mdash;the <i>pure</i>, which is sometimes,
+but not very wisely, called the classical; the <i>ornate</i>,
+which is also unwisely called romantic; and the
+<i>grotesque</i>, which might be called the mediaeval.
+We will describe the nature of these a little.
+Criticism we know must be brief&mdash;not, like poetry,
+because its charm is too intense to be sustained&mdash;but
+on the contrary, because its interest is too weak
+to be prolonged; but elementary criticism, if an
+evil, is a necessary evil; a little while spent among
+the simple principles of art is the first condition,
+the absolute pre-requisite, for surely apprehending
+and wisely judging the complete embodiments and
+miscellaneous forms of actual literature.</p>
+
+<p>The definition of <i>pure</i> literature is that it
+describes the type in its simplicity, we mean, with
+the exact amount of accessory circumstance which
+is necessary to bring it before the mind in finished
+perfection, and <i>no more</i> than that amount. The
+<i>type</i> needs some accessories from its nature&mdash;a
+picturesque landscape does not consist wholly
+of picturesque features. There is a setting of
+surroundings&mdash;as the Americans would say, of
+<i>fixings</i>&mdash;without which the reality is not itself.
+By a traditional mode of speech, as soon as we
+see a picture in which a complete effect is produced
+by detail so rare and so harmonized as to escape
+us, we say &#8216;how classical&#8217;. The whole which is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[448]</a></span>
+to be seen appears at once and through the detail,
+but the detail itself is not seen: we do not think
+of that which gives us the idea; we are absorbed
+in the idea itself. Just so in literature the pure
+art is that which works with the fewest strokes;
+the fewest, that is, for its purpose, for its aim
+is to call up and bring home to men an idea, a
+form, a character, and if that idea be twisted, that
+form be involved, that character perplexed, many
+strokes of literary art will be needful. Pure art
+does not mutilate its object: it represents it as
+fully as is possible with the slightest effort which
+is possible: it shrinks from no needful circumstances,
+as little as it inserts any which are
+needless. The precise peculiarity is not merely
+that no incidental circumstance is inserted which
+does not tell on the main design: no art is fit to
+be called <i>art</i> which permits a stroke to be put in
+without an object; but that only the minimum
+of such circumstance is inserted at all. The form
+is sometimes said to be bare, the accessories are
+sometimes said to be invisible, because the
+appendages are so choice that the shape only is
+perceived.</p>
+
+<p>The English literature undoubtedly contains
+much impure literature; impure in its style if
+not in its meaning: but it also contains one
+great, one nearly perfect, model of the pure style
+in the literary expression of typical <i>sentiment</i>;
+and one not perfect, but gigantic and close
+approximation to perfection in the pure delineation
+of objective character. Wordsworth, perhaps,
+comes as near to choice purity of style in sentiment
+as is possible; Milton, with exceptions and
+conditions to be explained, approaches perfection<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[449]</a></span>
+by the strenuous purity with which he depicts
+character.</p>
+
+<p>A wit once said, that &#8216;<i>pretty</i> women had more
+features than <i>beautiful</i> women&#8217;, and though the
+expression may be criticized, the meaning is correct.
+Pretty women seem to have a great number of
+attractive points, each of which attracts your
+attention, and each one of which you remember
+afterwards; yet these points have not <i>grown
+together</i>, their features have not linked themselves
+into a single inseparable whole. But a beautiful
+woman is a whole as she is; you no more take
+her to pieces than a Greek statue; she is not an
+aggregate of divisible charms, she is a charm in
+herself. Such ever is the dividing test of pure art;
+if you catch yourself admiring its details, it is
+defective; you ought to think of it as a single
+whole which you must remember, which you
+must admire, which somehow subdues you while
+you admire it, which is a &#8216;possession&#8217; to you &#8216;for
+ever&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>Of course no individual poem embodies this
+ideal perfectly; of course every human word
+and phrase has its imperfections, and if we choose
+an instance to illustrate that ideal, the instance
+has scarcely a fair chance. By contrasting it
+with the ideal we suggest its imperfections; by
+protruding it as an example, we turn on its
+defectiveness the microscope of criticism. Yet
+these two sonnets of Wordsworth may be fitly
+read in this place, not because they are quite
+without faults, or because they are the very best
+examples of their kind of style; but because they
+are <i>luminous</i> examples; the compactness of the
+sonnet and the gravity of the sentiment, hedging in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[450]</a></span>
+the thoughts, restraining the fancy, and helping to
+maintain a singleness of expression:</p>
+
+
+<h5 class="poemtitle">THE TROSACHS.</h5>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There&#8217;s not a nook within this solemn Pass,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But were an apt Confessional for one<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Taught by his summer spent; his autumn gone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That Life is but a tale of morning grass<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Feed it &#8217;mid Nature&#8217;s old felicities,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Untouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy guest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If from a golden perch of aspen spray<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(October&#8217;s workmanship to rival May)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That moral teaches by a heaven-taught lay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<h5 class="poemtitle" style="padding-left: 10%; padding-top: 1em">COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPT. 3, 1802</h5>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Earth has not anything to show more fair:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dull would he be of soul who could pass by<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A sight so touching in its majesty:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This city now doth, like a garment, wear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The beauty of the morning; silent, bare.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Open unto the fields and to the sky;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All bright and open in the smokeless air.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never did sun more beautifully steep<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ne&#8217;er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The river glideth at his own sweet will:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all that mighty heart is lying still!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Instances of barer style than this may easily
+be found, instances of colder style&mdash;few better
+instances of purer style. Not a single expression
+(the invocation in the concluding couplet of the
+second sonnet perhaps excepted) can be spared,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[451]</a></span>
+yet not a single expression rivets the attention.
+If, indeed, we take out the phrase&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The city now doth like a garment wear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The beauty of the morning,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">and the description of the brilliant yellow of
+autumn&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">October&#8217;s workmanship to rival May,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">they have independent value, but they are not
+noticed in the sonnet when we read it through;
+they fall into place there, and being in their place
+are not seen. The great subjects of the two
+sonnets, the religious aspect of beautiful but
+grave nature&mdash;the religious aspect of a city about
+to awaken and be alive, are the only ideas left in
+our mind. To Wordsworth has been vouchsafed
+the last grace of the self-denying artist; you
+think neither of him nor his style, but you cannot
+help thinking of&mdash;you <i>must</i> recall&mdash;the exact
+phrase, the <i>very</i> sentiment he wished.</p>
+
+<p>Milton&#8217;s purity is more eager. In the most
+exciting parts of Wordsworth&mdash;and these sonnets
+are not very exciting&mdash;you always feel, you never
+forget, that what you have before you is the
+excitement of a recluse. There is nothing of the
+stir of life; nothing of the <i>brawl</i> of the world.
+But Milton though always a scholar by trade,
+though solitary in old age, was through life intent
+on great affairs, lived close to great scenes, watched
+a revolution, and if not an actor in it, was at least
+secretary to the actors. He was familiar&mdash;by
+daily experience and habitual sympathy&mdash;with
+the earnest debate of arduous questions, on which
+the life and death of the speakers certainly
+depended, on which the weal or woe of the country<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[452]</a></span>
+perhaps depended. He knew how profoundly the
+individual character of the speakers&mdash;their inner
+and real nature&mdash;modifies their opinion on such
+questions; he knew how surely that nature will
+appear in the expression of them. This great
+experience, fashioned by a fine imagination, gives
+to the debate of Satanic Council in Pandaemonium
+its reality and its life. It is a debate in the Long
+Parliament, and though the <i>theme</i> of <i>Paradise
+Lost</i> obliged Milton to side with the monarchical
+element in the universe, his old habits are often
+too much for him; and his real sympathy&mdash;the
+impetus and energy of his nature&mdash;side with the
+rebellious element. For the purposes of art this
+is much better&mdash;of a court, a poet can make but
+little; of a heaven he can make very little, but
+of a courtly heaven, such as Milton conceived, he
+can make nothing at all. The idea of a court and
+the idea of a heaven are so radically different,
+that a distinct combination of them is always
+grotesque and often ludicrous. <i>Paradise Lost</i>, as
+a whole, is radically tainted by a vicious principle.
+It professes to justify the ways of God to man, to
+account for sin and death, and it tells you that the
+whole originated in a political event; in a court
+squabble as to a particular act of patronage and
+the due or undue promotion of an eldest son. Satan
+may have been wrong, but on Milton&#8217;s theory he
+had an <i>arguable</i> case at least. There was something
+arbitrary in the promotion; there were little
+symptoms of a job; in <i>Paradise Lost</i> it is always
+clear that the devils are the weaker, but it is never
+clear that the angels are the better. Milton&#8217;s
+sympathy and his imagination slip back to the
+Puritan rebels whom he loved, and desert the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[453]</a></span>
+courtly angels whom he could not love although he
+praised. There is no wonder that Milton&#8217;s hell is
+better than his heaven, for he hated officials and
+he loved rebels, for he employs his genius below,
+and accumulates his pedantry above. On the
+great debate in Pandaemonium all his genius is
+concentrated. The question is very practical; it
+is, &#8216;What are we devils to do, now we have lost
+heaven?&#8217; Satan who presides over and manipulates
+the assembly; Moloch</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">the fiercest spirit<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That fought in Heaven, now fiercer by despair,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">who wants to fight again; Belial, &#8216;the man of
+the world&#8217;, who does not want to fight any more;
+Mammon, who is for commencing an industrial
+career; Beelzebub, the official statesman,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">deep on his front engraven<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Deliberation sat and Public care,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">who, at Satan&#8217;s instance, proposes the invasion of
+earth&mdash;are as distinct as so many statues. Even
+Belial, &#8216;the man of the world&#8217;, the sort of man with
+whom Milton had least sympathy, is perfectly
+painted. An inferior artist would have made the
+actor who &#8216;counselled ignoble ease and peaceful
+sloth&#8217;, a degraded and ugly creature; but Milton
+knew better. He knew that low notions require
+a better garb than high notions. Human nature is
+not a high thing, but at least it has a high idea of
+itself; it will not accept mean maxims, unless they
+are gilded and made beautiful. A prophet in
+goatskin may cry, &#8216;Repent, repent&#8217;, but it takes
+&#8216;purple and fine linen&#8217; to be able to say, &#8216;Continue
+in your sins&#8217;. The world vanquishes with its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[454]</a></span>
+speciousness and its show, and the orator who is
+to persuade men to worldliness must have a share
+in them. Milton well knew this; after the warlike
+speech of the fierce Moloch he introduces a brighter
+and a more graceful spirit:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He ended frowning, and his look denounced<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Desp&#8217;rate revenge, and battle dangerous<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To less than Gods. On th&#8217; other side up rose<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Belial, in act more graceful and humane:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seem&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For dignity composed and high exploit:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But all was false and hollow, though his tongue<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dropt manna, and could make the worse appear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The better reason, to perplex and dash<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tim&#8217;rous and slothful: yet he pleased the ear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And with persuasive accent thus began:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He does not begin like a man with a strong case,
+but like a man with a weak case; he knows that
+the pride of human nature is irritated by mean
+advice, and though he may probably persuade men
+to <i>take</i> it, he must carefully apologise for <i>giving</i> it.
+Here, as elsewhere, though the formal address is
+to devils, the real address is to men: to the human
+nature which we know, not to the fictitious demonic
+nature we do not know:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I should be much for open war, O Peers!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As not behind in hate, if what was urged<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Main reason to persuade immediate war,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ominous conjecture on the whole success:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When he who most excels in fact of arms,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In what he counsels and in what excels<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And utter dissolution, as the scope<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of all his aim, after some dire revenge.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">First, what revenge? The tow&#8217;rs of Heav&#8217;n are fill&#8217;d<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[455]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">With armed watch, that render all access<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Impregnable; oft on the bord&#8217;ring deep<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Encamp their legions, or with obscure wing<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Scout far and wide into the realm of night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Scorning surprise. Or could we break our way<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By force, and at our heels all hell should rise<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With blackest insurrection, to confound<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Heav&#8217;n&#8217;s purest light, yet our great Enemy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All incorruptible, would on his throne<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sit unpolluted, and th&#8217; ethereal mould<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Incapable of stain would soon expel<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her mischief, and purge oft the baser fire<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Victorious. Thus repulsed, our final hope<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is flat despair. We must exasperate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Th&#8217; Almighty Victor to spend all his rage,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And that must end us: that must be our cure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To be no more? Sad cure; for who would lose,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Though full of pain, this intellectual being,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Those thoughts that wander through eternity,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To perish rather, swallow&#8217;d up and lost<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the wide womb of uncreated night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Devoid of sense and motion? And who knows,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let this be good, whether our angry Foe<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Can give it, or will ever? How he can<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is doubtful; that he never will is sure.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Belike through impotence, or unaware,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To give his enemies their wish, and end<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Them in his anger, whom his anger saves<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To punish endless? Wherefore cease we then?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Say they who counsel war, we are decreed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Reserved, and destined, to eternal woe;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What can we suffer worse? Is this then worst,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?<br /></span>
+
+<p class="dotted2">&nbsp;</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noin">And so on.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Pitt knew this speech by heart, and Lord
+Macaulay has called it incomparable; and these
+judges of the oratorical art have well decided.
+A mean foreign policy cannot be better defended.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[456]</a></span>
+Its sensibleness is effectually explained, and its
+tameness as much as possible disguised.</p>
+
+<p>But we have not here to do with the excellence
+of Belial&#8217;s policy, but with the excellence of his
+speech; and with that speech in a peculiar manner.
+This speech, taken with the few lines of description
+with which Milton introduces them, embody, in
+as short a space as possible, with as much perfection
+as possible, the delineation of the type of character
+common at all times, dangerous in many times,
+sure to come to the surface in moments of difficulty,
+and never more dangerous than then. As Milton
+describes, it is one among several <i>typical</i> characters
+which will ever have their place in great councils,
+which will ever be heard at important decisions,
+which are part of the characteristic and inalienable
+whole of this statesmanlike world. The debate in
+Pandaemonium is a debate among these typical
+characters at the greatest conceivable crisis, and
+with adjuncts of solemnity which no other situation
+could rival. It is the greatest <i>classical</i> triumph,
+the highest achievement of the pure <i>style</i> in
+English literature; it is the greatest description
+of the highest and most typical characters with
+the most choice circumstances and in the fewest
+words.</p>
+
+<p>It is not unremarkable that we should find in
+Milton and in <i>Paradise Lost</i> the best specimen of
+pure style. He was schoolmaster in a pedantic age,
+and there is nothing so unclassical&mdash;nothing so
+impure in style&mdash;as pedantry. The out-of-door
+conversational life of Athens was as opposed to
+bookish scholasticism as a life can be. The most
+perfect books have been written not by those who
+thought much of books, but by those who thought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[457]</a></span>
+little, by those who were under the restraint of
+a sensitive talking world, to which books had
+contributed something, and a various eager life
+the rest. Milton is generally unclassical in spirit
+where he is learned, and naturally, because the
+purest poets do not overlay their conceptions
+with book knowledge, and the classical poets,
+having in comparison no books, were under little
+temptation to impair the purity of their style by
+the accumulation of their research. Over and
+above this, there is in Milton, and a little in
+Wordsworth also, one defect which is in the
+highest degree faulty and unclassical, which mars
+the effect and impairs the perfection of the pure
+style. There is a want of <i>spontaneity</i>, and a sense
+of effort. It has been happily said that Plato&#8217;s
+words must have <i>grown</i> into their places. No one
+would say so of Milton or even of Wordsworth.
+About both of them there is a taint of duty;
+a vicious sense of the good man&#8217;s task. Things
+seem right where they are, but they seem to be
+put where they are. <i>Flexibility</i> is essential to the
+consummate perfection of the pure style because
+the sensation of the poet&#8217;s efforts carries away
+our thoughts from his achievements. We are
+admiring his labours when we should be enjoying
+his words. But this is a defect in those two writers,
+not a defect in pure art. Of course it is more
+difficult to write in few words than to write in
+many; to take the best adjuncts, and those only,
+for what you have to say, instead of using all
+which comes to hand; it <i>is</i> an additional labour if
+you write verses in a morning, to spend the rest of
+the day in <i>choosing</i>, or making those verses fewer.
+But a perfect artist in the pure style is as effortless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[458]</a></span>
+and as natural as in any style, perhaps is more so.
+Take the well-known lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There was a little lawny islet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By anemone and violet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Like mosaic, paven:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And its roof was flowers and leaves<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which the summer&#8217;s breath enweaves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where nor sun, nor showers, nor breeze,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pierce the pines and tallest trees,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Each a gem engraven;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Girt by many an azure wave<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With which the clouds and mountains pave<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A lake&#8217;s blue chasm.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Shelley had many merits and many defects.
+This is not the place for a complete or indeed for
+<i>any</i> estimate of him. But one excellence is most
+evident. His words are as flexible as any words;
+the rhythm of some modulating air seems to move
+them into their place without a struggle by the
+poet and almost without his knowledge. This is
+the perfection of pure art, to embody typical
+conceptions in the choicest, the fewest accidents,
+to embody them so that each of these accidents
+may produce its full effect, and so to embody
+them without effort.</p>
+
+<p>The extreme opposite to this pure art is what
+may be called ornate art. This species of art
+aims also at giving a delineation of the typical
+idea in its perfection and its fullness, but it aims
+at so doing in a manner most different. It wishes
+to surround the type with the greatest number of
+circumstances which it will <i>bear</i>. It works not by
+choice and selection, but by accumulation and
+aggregation. The idea is not, as in the pure style,
+presented with the least clothing which it will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[459]</a></span>
+endure, but with the richest and most involved
+clothing that it will admit.</p>
+
+<p>We are fortunate in not having to hunt out of
+past literature an illustrative specimen of the
+ornate style. Mr. Tennyson has just given one
+admirable in itself, and most characteristic of the
+defects and the merits of this style. The story of
+Enoch Arden, as he has enhanced and presented
+it, is a rich and splendid composite of imagery
+and illustration. Yet how simple that story is in
+itself. A sailor who sells fish, breaks his leg, gets
+dismal, gives up selling fish, goes to sea, is wrecked
+on a desert island, stays there some years, on his
+return finds his wife married to a miller, speaks to
+a landlady on the subject, and dies. Told in the
+pure and simple, the unadorned and classical style,
+this story would not have taken three pages, but
+Mr. Tennyson has been able to make it the
+principal&mdash;the largest tale in his new volume.
+He has done so only by giving to every event
+and incident in the volume an accompanying
+commentary. He tells a great deal about the
+torrid zone which a rough sailor like Enoch Arden
+certainly would not have perceived; and he gives
+to the fishing village, to which all the characters
+belong, a softness and a fascination which such
+villages scarcely possess in reality.</p>
+
+<p>The description of the tropical island on which
+the sailor is thrown, is an absolute model of
+adorned art:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The slender coco&#8217;s drooping crown of plumes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lightning flash of insect and of bird,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lustre of the long convolvuluses<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[460]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">That coil&#8217;d around the stately stems, and ran<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ev&#8217;n to the limit of the land, the glows<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And glories of the broad belt of the world,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All these he saw; but what he fain had seen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He could not see, the kindly human face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The league-long roller thundering on the reef,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The moving whisper of huge trees that branch&#8217;d<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And blossom&#8217;d in the zenith, or the sweep<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As down the shore he ranged, or all day long<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A shipwreck&#8217;d sailor, waiting for a sail:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No sail from day to day, but every day<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Among the palms and ferns and precipices;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The blaze upon the waters to the east;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The blaze upon his island overhead;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The blaze upon the waters to the west;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The scarlet shafts of sunrise&mdash;but no sail.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">No expressive circumstance can be added to this
+description, no enhancing detail suggested. A much
+less happy instance is the description of Enoch&#8217;s
+life before he sailed:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or often journeying landward; for in truth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Enoch&#8217;s white horse, and Enoch&#8217;s ocean spoil<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In ocean-smelling osier, and his face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rough-redden&#8217;d with a thousand winter gales,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not only to the market-cross were known,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But in the leafy lanes behind the down,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And peacock yew-tree of the lonely Hall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose Friday fare was Enoch&#8217;s ministering.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">So much has not often been made of selling fish.</p>
+
+<p>The essence of ornate art is in this manner to
+accumulate round the typical object, everything<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[461]</a></span>
+which can be said about it, every associated
+thought that can be connected with it without
+impairing the essence of the delineation.</p>
+
+<p>The first defect which strikes a student of
+ornate art&mdash;the first which arrests the mere
+reader of it&mdash;is what is called a want of simplicity.
+Nothing is described as it is, everything has about
+it an atmosphere of <i>something else</i>. The combined
+and associated thoughts, though they set off and
+heighten particular ideas and aspects of the
+central conception, yet complicate it: a simple
+thing&mdash;&#8216;a daisy by the river&#8217;s brim&#8217;&mdash;is never
+left by itself, something else is put with it;
+something not more connected with it than &#8216;lion-whelp&#8217;
+and the &#8216;peacock yew-tree&#8217; are with the
+&#8216;fresh fish for sale&#8217; that Enoch carries past them.
+Even in the highest cases ornate art leaves upon
+a cultured and delicate taste, the conviction that
+it is not the highest art, that it is somehow
+excessive and over-rich, that it is not chaste in
+itself or chastening to the mind that sees it&mdash;that
+it is in an unexplained manner unsatisfactory,
+&#8216;a thing in which we feel there is some hidden
+want!&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>That want is a want of &#8216;definition&#8217;. We must
+all know landscapes, river landscapes especially,
+which are in the highest sense beautiful, which
+when we first see them give us a delicate pleasure;
+which in some&mdash;and these the best cases&mdash;give
+even a gentle sense of surprise that such things
+should be so beautiful, and yet when we come to
+live in them, to spend even a few hours in them,
+we seem stifled and oppressed. On the other hand
+there are people to whom the sea-shore is a companion,
+an exhilaration; and not so much for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[462]</a></span>
+brawl of the shore as for the <i>limited</i> vastness, the
+finite infinite of the ocean as they see it. Such
+people often come home braced and nerved, and
+if they spoke out the truth, would have only to say,
+&#8216;We have seen the horizon line&#8217;; if they were let
+alone indeed, they would gaze on it hour after
+hour, so great to them is the fascination, so full
+the sustaining calm, which they gain from that
+union of form and greatness. To a very inferior
+extent, but still, perhaps, to an extent which most
+people understand better, a common arch will
+have the same effect. A bridge completes a river
+landscape; if of the old and many-arched sort it
+regulates by a long series of defined forms the
+vague outline of wood and river which before had
+nothing to measure it; if of the new scientific
+sort it introduces still more strictly a geometrical
+element; it stiffens the scenery which was before
+too soft, too delicate, too vegetable. Just such
+is the effect of pure style in literary art. It calms
+by conciseness; while the ornate style leaves on
+the mind a mist of beauty, an excess of fascination,
+a complication of charm, the pure style leaves
+behind it the simple, defined, measured idea, as it
+is, and by itself. That which is chaste chastens;
+there is a poised energy&mdash;a state half thrill, and
+half tranquillity&mdash;which pure art gives, which no
+other can give; a pleasure justified as well as
+felt; an ennobled satisfaction at what ought to
+satisfy us, and must ennoble us.</p>
+
+<p>Ornate art is to pure art what a painted statue
+is to an unpainted. It is impossible to deny that
+a touch of colour <i>does</i> bring out certain parts, does
+convey certain expressions, does heighten certain
+features, but it leaves on the work as a whole,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[463]</a></span>
+a want, as we say, &#8216;of something&#8217;; a want of that
+inseparable chasteness which clings to simple
+sculpture, an impairing predominance of alluring
+details which impairs our satisfaction with our
+own satisfaction; which makes us doubt whether
+a higher being than ourselves will be satisfied even
+though we are so. In the very same manner,
+though the <i>rouge</i> of ornate literature excites our
+eye, it also impairs our confidence.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Arnold has justly observed that this self-justifying,
+self-<i>proving</i> purity of style, is commoner
+in ancient literature than in modern literature,
+and also that Shakespeare is not a great or an
+unmixed example of it. No one can say that he
+is. His works are full of undergrowth, are full of
+complexity, are not models of style; except by
+a miracle nothing in the Elizabethan age could be
+a model of style; the restraining taste of that age
+was feebler and more mistaken than that of any
+other equally great age. Shakespeare&#8217;s mind so
+teemed with creation that he required the most
+just, most forcible, most constant restraint from
+without. He most needed to be guided of poets,
+and he was the least and worst guided. As a whole
+no one can call his works finished models of the
+pure style, or of any style. But he has many
+passages of the most pure style, passages which
+could be easily cited if space served. And we
+must remember that the task which Shakespeare
+undertook was the most difficult which any poet
+has ever attempted, and that it is a task in which
+after a million efforts every other poet has failed.
+The Elizabethan drama&mdash;as Shakespeare has immortalized
+it&mdash;undertakes to delineate in five
+acts, under stage restrictions, and in mere dialogue,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[464]</a></span>
+a whole list of dramatis personae, a set of characters
+enough for a modern novel, and with the distinctness
+of a modern novel. Shakespeare is not content to
+give two or three great characters in solitude and
+in dignity, like the classical dramatists; he
+wishes to give a whole <i>party</i> of characters in the
+play of life, and according to the nature of each.
+He would &#8216;hold the mirror up to nature&#8217;, not to
+catch a monarch in a tragic posture, but a whole
+group of characters engaged in many actions,
+intent on many purposes, thinking many thoughts.
+There is life enough, there is action enough, in
+single plays of Shakespeare to set up an ancient
+dramatist for a long career. And Shakespeare
+succeeded. His characters, taken <i>en masse</i>, and
+as a whole, are as well-known as any novelist&#8217;s
+characters; cultivated men know all about them,
+as young ladies know all about Mr. Trollope&#8217;s
+novels. But no other dramatist has succeeded in
+such an aim. No one else&#8217;s characters are staple
+people in English literature, hereditary people
+whom every one knows all about in every generation.
+The contemporary dramatists, Beaumont
+and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, &amp;c., had many
+merits, some of them were great men. But a critic
+must say of them the worst thing he has to say;
+&#8216;they were men who failed in their characteristic
+aim;&#8217; they attempted to describe numerous sets
+of complicated characters, and they failed. No
+one of such characters, or hardly one, lives in
+common memory; the Faustus of Marlowe,
+a really great idea, is not remembered. They
+undertook to write what they could not write,
+five acts full of real characters, and in consequence,
+the fine individual things they conceived are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465">[465]</a></span>
+forgotten by the mixed multitude, and known
+only to a few of the few. Of the Spanish theatre
+we cannot speak; but there are no such characters
+in any French tragedy: the whole aim of that
+tragedy forbade it. Goethe has added to literature
+a few great characters; he may be said almost to
+have added to literature the idea of &#8216;intellectual
+creation&#8217;,&mdash;the idea of describing great characters
+through the intellect; but he has not added to
+the common stock what Shakespeare added, a
+new <i>multitude</i> of men and women; and these not
+in simple attitudes, but amid the most complex
+parts of life, with all their various natures roused,
+mixed, and strained. The severest art must have
+allowed many details, much overflowing circumstance
+to a poet who undertook to describe what
+almost defies description. Pure art would have
+<i>commanded</i> him to use details lavishly, for only
+by a multiplicity of such could the required effect
+have been at all produced. Shakespeare could
+accomplish it, for his mind was a <i>spring</i>, an
+inexhaustible fountain of human nature, and it
+is no wonder that being compelled by the task
+of his time to let the fullness of his nature overflow,
+he sometimes let it overflow too much, and
+covered with erroneous conceits and superfluous
+images characters and conceptions which would
+have been far more justly, far more effectually,
+delineated with conciseness and simplicity. But
+there is an infinity of pure art <i>in</i> Shakespeare,
+although there is a great deal else also.</p>
+
+<p>It will be said, if ornate art be as you say, an
+inferior species or art, why should it ever be used?
+If pure art be the best sort of art, why should it
+not always be used?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_466" id="Page_466">[466]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The reason is this: literary art, as we just now
+explained, is concerned with literatesque characters
+in literatesque situations; and the <i>best</i> art is
+concerned with the <i>most</i> literatesque characters in
+the <i>most</i> literatesque situations. Such are the
+subjects of pure art; it embodies with the fewest
+touches, and under the most select and choice
+circumstances, the highest conceptions; but it
+does not follow that only the best subjects are to
+be treated by art, and then only in the very best
+way. Human nature could not endure such
+a critical commandment as that, and it would be
+an erroneous criticism which gave it. <i>Any</i> literatesque
+character may be described in literature
+under <i>any</i> circumstances which exhibit its literatesqueness.</p>
+
+<p>The essence of pure art consists in its describing
+what is as it is, and this is very well for what can
+bear it, but there are many inferior things which
+will not bear it, and which nevertheless ought to
+be described in books. A certain kind of literature
+deals with illusions, and this kind of literature
+has given a colouring to the name romantic.
+A man of rare genius, and even of poetical genius,
+has gone so far as to make these illusions the true
+subject of poetry&mdash;almost the sole subject.
+&#8216;Without,&#8217; says Father Newman, of one of his
+characters, &#8216;being himself a poet, he was in the
+season of poetry, in the sweet spring-time, when
+the year is most beautiful because it is new.
+Novelty was beauty to a heart so open and cheerful
+as his; not only because it was novelty, and had
+its proper charm as such, but because when we
+first see things, we see them in a gay confusion,
+which is a principal element of the poetical.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[467]</a></span>
+As time goes on, and we number and sort and
+measure things,&mdash;as we gain views,&mdash;we advance
+towards philosophy and truth, but we recede from
+poetry.</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;When we ourselves were young, we once on
+a time walked on a hot summer-day from Oxford
+to Newington&mdash;a dull road, as any one who has
+gone it knows; yet it was new to us; and we
+protest to you, reader, believe it or not, laugh or
+not, as you will, to us it seemed on that occasion
+quite touchingly beautiful; and a soft melancholy
+came over us, of which the shadows fall even now,
+when we look back upon that dusty, weary
+journey. And why? because every object which
+met us was unknown and full of mystery. A tree
+or two in the distance seemed the beginning of
+a great wood, or park, stretching endlessly;
+a hill implied a vale beyond, with that vale&#8217;s
+history; the bye-lanes, with their green hedges,
+wound on and vanished, yet were not lost to the
+imagination. Such was our first journey; but
+when we had gone it several times, the mind
+refused to act, the scene ceased to enchant, stern
+reality alone remained; and we thought it one
+of the most tiresome, odious roads we ever had
+occasion to traverse.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>That is to say, that the function of the poet is to
+introduce a &#8216;gay confusion&#8217;, a rich medley which
+does not exist in the actual world&mdash;which perhaps
+could not exist in any world&mdash;but which would
+seem pretty if it did exist. Everyone who reads
+<i>Enoch Arden</i> will perceive that this notion of all
+poetry is exactly applicable to this one poem.
+Whatever be made of Enoch&#8217;s &#8216;Ocean spoil in
+ocean-smelling osier,&#8217; of the &#8216;portal-warding lion-whelp,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_468" id="Page_468">[468]</a></span>
+and peacock yew-tree&#8217;, every one knows
+that in himself Enoch could not have been
+charming. People who sell fish about the country
+(and that is what he did, though Mr. Tennyson
+won&#8217;t speak out, and wraps it up) never are
+beautiful. As Enoch was and must be coarse, in
+itself the poem must depend for its charm on a &#8216;gay
+confusion&#8217;&mdash;on a splendid accumulation of impossible
+accessories.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Tennyson knows this better than many of us&mdash;he
+knows the country world; he has proved it
+that no one living knows it better; he has painted
+with pure art&mdash;with art which describes what is
+a race perhaps more refined, more delicate, more
+conscientious, than the sailor&mdash;the &#8216;Northern
+Farmer&#8217;, and we all know what a splendid, what
+a living thing, he has made of it. He could, if he
+only would, have given us the ideal sailor in like
+manner&mdash;the ideal of the natural sailor we mean&mdash;the
+characteristic present man as he lives and is.
+But this he has not chosen. He has endeavoured
+to describe an exceptional sailor, at an exceptionally
+refined port, performing a graceful act, an act of
+relinquishment. And with this task before him,
+his profound taste taught him that ornate art was
+a necessary medium&mdash;was the sole effectual
+instrument&mdash;for his purpose. It was necessary
+for him if possible to abstract the mind from
+reality, to induce us <i>not</i> to conceive or think of
+sailors as they are while we are reading of his
+sailors, but to think of what a person who did not
+know might fancy sailors to be. A casual traveller
+on the sea-shore, with the sensitive mood and the
+romantic imagination Mr. Newman has described,
+might fancy, would fancy, a seafaring village to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_469" id="Page_469">[469]</a></span>
+be like that. Accordingly, Mr. Tennyson has made
+it his aim to call off the stress of fancy from real
+life, to occupy it otherwise, to bury it with pretty
+accessories; to engage it on the &#8216;peacock yew-tree&#8217;,
+and the &#8216;portal-warding lion-whelp&#8217;. Nothing,
+too, can be more splendid than the description
+of the tropics as Mr. Tennyson delineates them,
+but a sailor would not have felt the tropics in
+that manner. The beauties of nature would not
+have so much occupied him. He would have
+known little of the scarlet shafts of sunrise and
+nothing of the long convolvuluses. As in <i>Robinson
+Crusoe</i>, his own petty contrivances and his small
+ailments would have been the principal subject
+to him. &#8216;For three years&#8217;, he might have said,
+&#8216;my back was bad, and then I put two pegs into
+a piece of drift wood and so made a chair, and
+after that it pleased God to send me a chill.&#8217;
+In real life his piety would scarcely have gone
+beyond that.</p>
+
+<p>It will indeed be said, that though the sailor had
+no words for, and even no explicit consciousness of
+the splendid details of the torrid zone, yet that he
+had, notwithstanding, a dim latent inexpressible
+conception of them: though he could not speak
+of them or describe them, yet they were much
+to him. And doubtless such is the case. Rude
+people are impressed by what is beautiful&mdash;deeply
+impressed&mdash;though they could not describe what
+they see, or what they feel. But what is absurd
+in Mr. Tennyson&#8217;s description&mdash;absurd when we
+abstract it from the gorgeous additions and
+ornaments with which Mr. Tennyson distracts us&mdash;is,
+that his hero feels nothing else but these
+great splendours. We hear nothing of the physical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_470" id="Page_470">[470]</a></span>
+ailments, the rough devices, the low superstitions,
+which really would have been the <i>first</i> things, the
+favourite and principal occupations of his mind.
+Just so when he gets home he <i>may</i> have had such
+fine sentiments, though it is odd, and he <i>may</i> have
+spoken of them to his landlady, though that is
+odder still&mdash;but it is incredible that his whole
+mind should be made up of fine sentiments. Beside
+those sweet feelings, if he had them, there must have
+been many more obvious, more prosaic, and some
+perhaps more healthy. Mr. Tennyson has shown
+a profound judgement in distracting us as he does.
+He has given us a classic delineation of the
+&#8216;Northern Farmer&#8217; with no ornament at all&mdash;as
+bare a thing as can be&mdash;because he then wanted
+to describe a true type of real men: he has given
+us a sailor crowded all over with ornament and
+illustration, because he then wanted to describe
+an unreal type of fancied men, not sailors as
+they are, but sailors as they might be wished.</p>
+
+<p>Another prominent element in <i>Enoch Arden</i>
+is yet more suitable to, yet more requires the aid
+of, ornate art. Mr. Tennyson undertook to deal
+with <i>half belief</i>. The presentiments which Annie
+feels are exactly of that sort which everybody
+has felt, and which every one has half believed&mdash;which
+hardly any one has more than half believed.
+Almost every one, it has been said, would be angry
+if any one else reported that he believed in ghosts;
+yet hardly any one, when thinking by himself,
+wholly disbelieves them. Just so such presentiments
+as Mr. Tennyson depicts, impress the inner
+mind so much that the outer mind&mdash;the rational
+understanding&mdash;hardly likes to consider them
+nicely or to discuss them sceptically. For these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[471]</a></span>
+dubious themes an ornate or complex style is
+needful. Classical art speaks out what it has to
+say plainly and simply. Pure style cannot hesitate;
+it describes in concisest outline what is, as
+it is. If a poet really believes in presentiments
+he can speak out in pure style. One who could
+have been a poet&mdash;one of the few in any age of
+whom one can say certainly that they could have
+been, and have not been&mdash;has spoken thus:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When Heaven sends sorrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Warnings go first,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Lest it should burst<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With stunning might<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">On souls too bright<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To fear the morrow.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Can science bear us<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To the hid springs<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of human things?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Why may not dream,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or thought&#8217;s day-gleam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Startle, yet cheer us?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Are such thoughts fetters,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">While faith disowns<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Dread of earth&#8217;s tones,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Recks but Heaven&#8217;s call,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And on the wall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Reads but Heaven&#8217;s letters?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But if a poet is not sure whether presentiments
+are true or not true; if he wishes to leave his
+readers in doubt; if he wishes an atmosphere of
+indistinct illusion and of moving shadow, he must
+use the romantic style, the style of miscellaneous
+adjunct, the style &#8216;which shirks, not meets&#8217; your
+intellect, the style which as you are scrutinizing
+disappears.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[472]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Nor is this all, or even the principal lesson,
+which <i>Enoch Arden</i> may suggest to us, of the
+use of ornate art. That art is the appropriate art
+for an <i>unpleasing type</i>. Many of the characters of
+real life, if brought distinctly, prominently, and
+plainly before the mind, as they really are, if
+shown in their inner nature, their actual essence,
+are doubtless very unpleasant. They would be
+horrid to meet and horrid to think of. We fear it
+must be owned that Enoch Arden is this kind
+of person. A dirty sailor who did <i>not</i> go home to
+his wife is not an agreeable being: a varnish must
+be put on him to make him shine. It is true that
+he acts rightly; that he is very good. But such
+is human nature that it finds a little tameness in
+mere morality. Mere virtue belongs to a charity
+school-girl, and has a taint of the catechism.
+All of us feel this, though most of us are too timid,
+too scrupulous, too anxious about the virtue of
+others, to speak out. We are ashamed of our
+nature in this respect, but it is not the less our
+nature. And if we look deeper into the matter
+there are many reasons why we should not be
+ashamed of it. The soul of man, and as we
+necessarily believe of beings greater than man,
+has many parts beside its moral part. It has an
+intellectual part, an artistic part, even a religious
+part, in which mere morals have no share. In
+Shakespeare or Goethe, even in Newton or
+Archimedes, there is much which will not be cut
+down to the shape of the commandments. They
+have thoughts, feelings, hopes&mdash;immortal thoughts
+and hopes&mdash;which have influenced the life of men,
+and the souls of men, ever since their age, but
+which the &#8216;whole duty of man&#8217;, the ethical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[473]</a></span>
+compendium, does not recognize. Nothing is
+more unpleasant than a virtuous person with
+a mean mind. A highly developed moral nature
+joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an
+undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited
+religious nature, is of necessity repulsive. It
+represents a bit of human nature&mdash;a good bit, of
+course, but a bit only&mdash;in disproportionate, unnatural,
+and revolting prominence; and, therefore,
+unless an artist use delicate care, we are offended.
+The dismal act of a squalid man needed many
+condiments to make it pleasant, and therefore
+Mr. Tennyson was right to mix them subtly and to
+use them freely.</p>
+
+<p>A mere act of self-denial can indeed scarcely be
+pleasant upon paper. An heroic struggle with an
+external adversary, even though it end in a defeat,
+may easily be made attractive. Human nature
+likes to see itself look grand, and it looks grand
+when it is making a brave struggle with foreign
+foes. But it does not look grand when it is divided
+against itself. An excellent person striving with
+temptation is a very admirable being in reality,
+but he is not a pleasant being in description.
+We hope he will win and overcome his temptation,
+but we feel that he would be a more interesting
+being, a higher being, if he had not felt that
+temptation so much. The poet must make the
+struggle great in order to make the self-denial
+virtuous, and if the struggle be too great, we are
+apt to feel some mixture of contempt. The internal
+metaphysics of a divided nature are but an inferior
+subject for art, and if they are to be made attractive,
+much else must be combined with them. If the
+excellence of <i>Hamlet</i> had depended on the ethical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[474]</a></span>
+qualities of Hamlet, it would not have been the
+masterpiece of our literature. He acts virtuously
+of course, and kills the people he ought to kill, but
+Shakespeare knew that such goodness would not
+much interest the pit. He made him a handsome
+prince, and a puzzling meditative character;
+these secular qualities relieve his moral excellence,
+and so he becomes &#8216;nice&#8217;. In proportion as an
+artist has to deal with types essentially imperfect,
+he must disguise their imperfections; he must
+accumulate around them as many first-rate
+accessories as may make his readers forget that
+they are themselves second-rate. The sudden
+<i>millionaires</i> of the present day hope to disguise
+their social defects by buying old places, and
+hiding among aristocratic furniture; just so
+a great artist who has to deal with characters
+artistically imperfect will use an ornate style,
+will fit them into a scene where there is much else
+to look at.</p>
+
+<p>For these reasons ornate art is within the limits
+as legitimate as pure art. It does what pure art
+could not do. The very excellence of pure art
+confines its employment. Precisely because it
+gives the best things by themselves and exactly
+as they are, it fails when it is necessary to describe
+inferior things among other things, with a list of
+enhancements and a crowd of accompaniments
+that in reality do not belong to it. Illusion, half
+belief, unpleasant types, imperfect types, are as
+much the proper sphere of ornate art, as an inferior
+landscape is the proper sphere for the true efficacy
+of moonlight. A really great landscape needs
+sunlight and bears sunlight; but moonlight is an
+equalizer of beauties; it gives a romantic unreality<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_475" id="Page_475">[475]</a></span>
+to what will not stand the bare truth. And just so
+does romantic art.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, a third kind of art which
+differs from these on the point in which they
+most resemble one another. Ornate art and pure
+art have this in common, that they paint the types
+of literature in as good perfection as they can.
+Ornate art, indeed, uses undue disguises and unreal
+enhancements; it does not confine itself to the best
+types; on the contrary it is its office to make the best
+of imperfect types and lame approximations; but
+ornate art, as much as pure art, catches its subject
+in the best light it can, takes the most developed
+aspect of it which it can find, and throws upon it
+the most congruous colours it can use. But
+grotesque art does just the contrary. It takes
+the type, so to say, <i>in difficulties</i>. It gives a
+representation of it in its minimum development,
+amid the circumstances least favourable to it,
+just while it is struggling with obstacles, just
+where it is encumbered with incongruities. It
+deals, to use the language of science, not with
+normal types but with abnormal specimens; to
+use the language of old philosophy, not with what
+nature is striving to be, but with what by some
+lapse she has happened to become.</p>
+
+<p>This art works by contrast. It enables you to
+see, it makes you see, the perfect type by painting
+the opposite deviation. It shows you what ought
+to be by what ought not to be, when complete it
+reminds you of the perfect image, by showing you
+the distorted and imperfect image. Of this art
+we possess in the present generation one prolific
+master. Mr. Browning is an artist working by
+incongruity. Possibly hardly one of his most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_476" id="Page_476">[476]</a></span>
+considerable efforts can be found which is not
+great because of its odd mixture. He puts together
+things which no one else would have put together,
+and produces on our minds a result which no one
+else would have produced, or tried to produce.
+His admirers may not like all we may have to say
+of him. But in our way we too are among his
+admirers. No one ever read him without seeing
+not only his great ability but his great <i>mind</i>. He
+not only possesses superficial useable talents, but
+the strong something, the inner secret something
+which uses them and controls them; he is great,
+not in mere accomplishments, but in himself.
+He has applied a hard strong intellect to real life;
+he has applied the same intellect to the problems
+of his age. He has striven to know what <i>is</i>: he
+has endeavoured not to be cheated by counterfeits,
+not to be infatuated with illusions. His heart is
+in what he says. He has battered his brain against
+his creed till he believes it. He has accomplishments
+too, the more effective because they are mixed.
+He is at once a student of mysticism, and a citizen
+of the world. He brings to the club sofa distinct
+visions of old creeds, intense images of strange
+thoughts: he takes to the bookish student tidings
+of wild Bohemia, and little traces of the <i>demi-monde</i>.
+He puts down what is good for the naughty and
+what is naughty for the good. Over women his
+easier writings exercise that imperious power
+which belongs to the writings of a great man of
+the world upon such matters. He knows women, and
+therefore they wish to know him. If we blame
+many of Browning&#8217;s efforts, it is in the interest of
+art, and not from a wish to hurt or degrade him.</p>
+
+<p>If we wanted to illustrate the nature of grotesque<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[477]</a></span>
+art by an exaggerated instance we should have
+selected a poem which the chance of late publication
+brings us in this new volume. Mr. Browning
+has undertaken to describe what may be called <i>mind
+in difficulties</i>&mdash;mind set to make out the universe
+under the worst and hardest circumstances. He
+takes &#8216;Caliban&#8217;, not perhaps exactly Shakespeare&#8217;s
+Caliban, but an analogous and worse creature;
+a strong thinking power, but a nasty creature&mdash;a
+gross animal, uncontrolled and unelevated by
+any feeling of religion or duty. The delineation
+of him will show that Mr. Browning does not wish
+to take undue advantage of his readers by a choice
+of nice subjects.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8217;Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Flat on his belly in the pit&#8217;s much mire,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And feels about his spine small eft-things course,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And while above his head a pompion-plant,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And now a flower drops with a bee inside,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch:<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This pleasant creature proceeds to give his idea
+of the origin of the Universe, and it is as follows.
+Caliban speaks in the third person, and is of
+opinion that the maker of the Universe took to
+making it on account of his personal discomfort:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Thinketh, He dwelleth i&#8217; the cold o&#8217; the moon.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But not the stars: the stars came otherwise;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Also this isle, what lives, and grows thereon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_478" id="Page_478">[478]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He hated that He cannot change His cold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor cure its ache. &#8217;Hath spied an icy fish<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That longed to &#8217;scape the rock-stream where she lived,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O&#8217; the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A crystal spike &#8217;twixt two warm walls of wave;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Only she ever sickened, found repulse<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At the other kind of water, not her life,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o&#8217; the sun)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in her old bounds buried her despair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yon auk, one fire-eye, in a ball of foam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And says a plain word when she finds her prize,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">About their hole&mdash;He made all these and more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It may seem perhaps to most readers that these
+lines are very difficult, and that they are unpleasant.
+And so they are. We quote them to illustrate, not
+the <i>success</i> of grotesque art, but the <i>nature</i> of
+grotesque art. It shows the end at which this
+species of art aims, and if it fails, it is from over-boldness
+in the choice of a subject by the artist,
+or from the defects of its execution. A thinking
+faculty more in difficulties&mdash;a great type,&mdash;an
+inquisitive, searching intellect under more disagreeable
+conditions, with worse helps, more likely
+to find falsehood, less likely to find truth, can
+scarcely be imagined. Nor is the mere description<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_479" id="Page_479">[479]</a></span>
+of the thought at all bad: on the contrary, if we
+closely examine it, it is very clever. Hardly
+any one could have amassed so many ideas at once
+nasty and suitable. But scarcely any readers&mdash;any
+casual readers&mdash;who are not of the sect of
+Mr. Browning&#8217;s admirers will be able to examine
+it enough to appreciate it. From a defect, partly
+of subject, and partly of style, many of Mr. Browning&#8217;s
+works make a demand upon the reader&#8217;s
+zeal and sense of duty to which the nature of
+most readers is unequal. They have on the turf
+the convenient expression &#8216;staying power&#8217;: some
+horses can hold on and others cannot. But hardly
+any reader not of especial and peculiar nature
+can hold on through such composition. There
+is not enough of &#8216;staying power&#8217; in human nature.
+One of his greatest admirers once owned to us that
+he seldom or never began a new poem without
+looking on in advance, and foreseeing with caution
+what length of intellectual adventure he was about
+to commence. Whoever will work hard at such
+poems will find much mind in them: they are
+a sort of quarry of ideas, but whoever goes there
+will find these ideas in such a jagged, ugly, useless
+shape that he can hardly bear them.</p>
+
+<p>We are not judging Mr. Browning simply from
+a hasty recent production. All poets are liable to
+misconceptions, and if such a piece as <i>Caliban
+upon Setebos</i> were an isolated error, a venial and
+particular exception, we should have given it no
+prominence. We have put it forward because it
+just elucidates both our subject and the characteristics
+of Mr. Browning. But many other of his
+best known pieces do so almost equally; what
+several of his devotees think his best piece is quite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_480" id="Page_480">[480]</a></span>
+enough illustrative for anything we want. It
+appears that on Holy Cross day at Rome the Jews
+were obliged to listen to a Christian sermon in
+the hope of their conversion, though this is,
+according to Mr. Browning, what they really said
+when they came away:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Blessedest Thursday&#8217;s the fat of the week,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stinking and savoury, smug and gruff,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Take the church-road, for the bell&#8217;s due chime<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gives us the summons&mdash;&#8217;t is sermon-time.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Boh, here&#8217;s Barnabas! Job, that&#8217;s you?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Up stumps Solomon&mdash;bustling too?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shame, man! greedy beyond your years<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To handsel the bishop&#8217;s shaving-shears?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fair play&#8217;s a jewel! leave friends in the lurch?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stand on a line ere you start for the church.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Higgledy, piggledy, packed we lie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And buzz for the bishop&mdash;here he comes.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">And after similar nice remarks for a church, the
+edified congregation concludes:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But now, while the scapegoats leave our flock,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the rest sit silent and count the clock,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Since forced to muse the appointed time<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On these precious facts and truths sublime,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let us fitly employ it, under our breath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In saying Ben Ezra&#8217;s Song of Death.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Called sons and sons&#8217; sons to his side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And spoke, &#8216;This world has been harsh and strange;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Something is wrong: there needeth a change.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But what, or where? at the last, or first?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In one point only we sinned, at worst.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_481" id="Page_481">[481]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And again in his border see Israel set.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When Judah beholds Jerusalem,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The stranger-seed shall be joined to them:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To Jacob&#8217;s House shall the Gentiles cleave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Ay, the children of the chosen race<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall carry and bring them to their place:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blame<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o&#8217;er<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The oppressor triumph for evermore?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;God spoke, and gave us the word to keep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bade never fold the hands nor sleep<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8217;Mid a faithless world,&mdash;at watch and ward,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till Christ at the end relieve our guard.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By His servant Moses the watch was set:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Though near upon cock-crow, we keep it yet.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid-watch came,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By the starlight, naming a dubious Name!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And if, too heavy with sleep&mdash;too rash<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With fear&mdash;O Thou, if that martyr-gash<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fell on Thee coming to take Thine own,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But, the judgement over, join sides with us!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thine too is the cause! and not more Thine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;We withstood Christ then? be mindful how<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At least we withstand Barabbas now!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To have called these&mdash;Christians, had we dared!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let defiance to them pay mistrust of Thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Rome make amends for Calvary!<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_482" id="Page_482">[482]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;By the torture, prolonged from age to age,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By the infamy, Israel&#8217;s heritage,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By the Ghetto&#8217;s plague, by the garb&#8217;s disgrace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By the badge of shame, by the felon&#8217;s place,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the summons to Christian fellowship,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;We boast our proof that at least the Jew<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Would wrest Christ&#8217;s name from the Devil&#8217;s crew.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thy face took never so deep a shade<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But we fought them in it, God our aid!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">South, East, and on to the Pleasant Land!&#8217;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is very natural that a poet whose wishes
+incline, or whose genius conducts him to a grotesque
+art, should be attracted towards mediaeval
+subjects. There is no age whose legends are
+so full of grotesque subjects, and no age where
+real life was so fit to suggest them. Then, more
+than at any other time, good principles have been
+under great hardships. The vestiges of ancient civilization,
+the germs of modern civilization, the little
+remains of what had been, the small beginnings
+of what is, were buried under a cumbrous mass of
+barbarism and cruelty. Good elements hidden in
+horrid accompaniments are the special theme of
+grotesque art, and these mediaeval life and legends
+afford more copiously than could have been furnished
+before Christianity gave its new elements
+of good, or since modern civilization has removed
+some few at least of the old elements of destruction.
+A <i>buried</i> life like the spiritual mediaeval was
+Mr. Browning&#8217;s natural element, and he was right
+to be attracted by it. His mistake has been, that
+he has not made it pleasant; that he has forced
+his art to topics on which no one could charm, or
+on which he, at any rate, could not; that on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_483" id="Page_483">[483]</a></span>
+these occasions and in these poems he has failed in
+fascinating men and women of sane taste.</p>
+
+<p>We say &#8216;sane&#8217; because there is a most formidable
+and estimable <i>insane</i> taste. The will has great
+though indirect power over the taste, just as it
+has over the belief. There are some horrid beliefs
+from which human nature revolts, from which at
+first it shrinks, to which, at first, no effort can
+force it. But if we fix the mind upon them they
+have a power over us just because of their natural
+offensiveness. They are like the sight of human
+blood: experienced soldiers tell us that at first
+men are sickened by the smell and newness of
+blood almost to death and fainting, but that as
+soon as they harden their hearts and stiffen their
+minds, as soon as they <i>will</i> bear it, then comes an
+appetite for slaughter, a tendency to gloat on
+carnage, to love blood, at least for the moment,
+with a deep eager love. It is a principle that if
+we put down a healthy instinctive aversion, nature
+avenges herself by creating an unhealthy insane
+attraction. For this reason the most earnest
+truth-seeking men fall into the worst delusions;
+they will not let their mind alone; they force it
+towards some ugly thing, which a crotchet of
+argument, a conceit of intellect recommends, and
+nature punishes their disregard of her warning by
+subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so
+the most industrious critics get the most admiration.
+They think it unjust to rest in their instinctive
+natural horror: they overcome it, and angry
+nature gives them over to ugly poems and marries
+them to detestable stanzas.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Browning possibly, and some of the worst
+of Mr. Browning&#8217;s admirers certainly, will say that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_484" id="Page_484">[484]</a></span>
+these grotesque objects exist in real life, and
+therefore they ought to be, at least may be,
+described in art. But though pleasure is not the
+end of poetry, pleasing is a condition of poetry.
+An exceptional monstrosity of horrid ugliness
+cannot be made pleasing, except it be made to
+suggest&mdash;to recall&mdash;the perfection, the beauty,
+from which it is a deviation. Perhaps in extreme
+cases no art is equal to this; but then such self-imposed
+problems should not be worked by the
+artist; these out-of-the-way and detestable subjects
+should be let alone by him. It is rather
+characteristic of Mr. Browning to neglect this
+rule. He is the most of a realist, and the least
+of an idealist of any poet we know. He evidently
+sympathizes with some part at least of Bishop
+Blougram&#8217;s apology. Anyhow this world exists.
+&#8216;There <i>is</i> good wine&mdash;there <i>are</i> pretty women&mdash;there
+<i>are</i> comfortable benefices&mdash;there <i>is</i> money,
+and it is pleasant to spend it. Accept the creed
+of your age and you get these, reject that creed and
+you lose them. And for what do you lose them?
+For a fancy creed of your own, which no one else
+will accept, which hardly any one will call a &#8220;creed&#8221;,
+which most people will consider a sort of unbelief.&#8217;
+Again, Mr. Browning evidently loves what we
+may call the realism, the grotesque realism, of
+orthodox christianity. Many parts of it in which
+great divines have felt keen difficulties are quite
+pleasant to him. He must <i>see</i> his religion, he must
+nave an &#8216;object-lesson&#8217; in believing. He must
+have a creed that will <i>take</i>, which wins and holds
+the miscellaneous world, which stout men will heed,
+which nice women will adore. The spare moments
+of solitary religion&mdash;the &#8216;obdurate questionings&#8217;,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_485" id="Page_485">[485]</a></span>
+the high &#8216;instincts&#8217;, the &#8216;first affections&#8217;, the
+&#8216;shadowy recollections&#8217;,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">Which, do they what they may,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are yet the fountain-light of all our day&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">the great but vague faith&mdash;the unutterable tenets
+seem to him worthless, visionary; they are not
+enough immersed in matter; they move about
+&#8216;in worlds not realized&#8217;. We wish he could be
+tried like the prophet once; he would have found
+God in the earthquake and the storm; he could
+have deciphered from them a bracing and a rough
+religion: he would have known that crude men
+and ignorant women felt them too, and he would
+accordingly have trusted them; but he would
+have distrusted and disregarded the &#8216;still small
+voice&#8217;; he would have said it was &#8216;fancy&#8217;&mdash;a
+thing you thought you heard to-day, but were not
+sure you had heard to-morrow: he would call it a
+nice illusion, an immaterial prettiness; he would
+ask triumphantly &#8216;How are you to get the mass of
+men to heed this little thing?&#8217; he would have persevered
+and insisted &#8216;<i>My wife</i> does not hear it&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>But although a suspicion of beauty, and a taste
+for ugly reality, have led Mr. Browning to exaggerate
+the functions, and to caricature the nature of
+grotesque art, we own or rather we maintain that
+he has given many excellent specimens of that art
+within its proper boundaries and limits. Take an
+example, his picture of what we may call the
+<i>bourgeois</i> nature in <i>difficulties</i>; in the utmost
+difficulty, in contact with magic and the supernatural.
+He has made of it something homely,
+comic, true; reminding us of what <i>bourgeois</i>
+nature really is. By showing us the type under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_486" id="Page_486">[486]</a></span>
+abnormal conditions, he reminds us of the type
+under its best and most satisfactory conditions&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Hamelin Town&#8217;s in Brunswick,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">By famous Hanover city;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The river Weser, deep and wide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Washes its walls on the southern side;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A pleasanter spot you never spied;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But, when begins my ditty,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Almost five hundred years ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To see the townsfolk suffer so<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From vermin was a pity.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Rats!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And bit the babies in the cradles,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ate the cheeses out of the vats,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And licked the soup from the cook&#8217;s own ladles,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Split open the kegs of salted sprats,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Made nests inside men&#8217;s Sunday hats,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And even spoiled the women&#8217;s chats<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">By drowning their speaking<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With shrieking and squeaking<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In fifty different sharps and flats.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">At last the people in a body<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To the Town Hall came flocking:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8216;&#8217;Tis clear&#8217;, cried they, &#8216;our Mayor&#8217;s a noddy;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And as for our Corporation&mdash;shocking<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To think we buy gowns lined with ermine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For dolts that can&#8217;t or won&#8217;t determine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What&#8217;s best to rid us of our vermin!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You hope, because you&#8217;re old and obese,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To find in the furry civic robe ease?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rouse up, Sirs! Give your brains a racking<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To find the remedy we&#8217;re lacking,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or, sure as fate, we&#8217;ll send you packing!&#8217;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At this the Mayor and Corporation<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Quaked with a mighty consternation.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A person of musical abilities proposes to extricate
+the civic dignitaries from the difficulty, and they
+promise him a thousand guilders if he does.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_487" id="Page_487">[487]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Into the street the Piper stept,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Smiling first a little smile,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As if he knew what magic slept<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In his quiet pipe the while;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then, like a musical adept,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And green and blue his sharp eye twinkled<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You heard as if an army muttered;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the muttering grew to a grumbling;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cooking tails and pricking whiskers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Families by tens and dozens,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Followed the Piper for their lives.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From street to street he piped advancing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And step for step they followed dancing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Until they came to the river Weser,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wherein all plunged and perished!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;Save one who, stout as Julius C&aelig;sar,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Swam across and lived to carry<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(As he, the manuscript he cherished)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To Rat-land home his commentary:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which was, &#8216;At the first shrill notes of the pipe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And putting apples, wondrous ripe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into a cider-press&#8217;s gripe:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And a moving away of pickle-tub boards,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And a drawing the corks of train-oil flasks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And it seemed as if a voice<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is breathed) called out, &#8220;Oh rats, rejoice!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So, munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!&#8221;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_488" id="Page_488">[488]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">All ready staved, like a great sun shone<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Glorious scarce an inch before me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Just as methought it said, &#8220;Come, bore me!&#8221;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;I found the Weser rolling o&#8217;er me.&#8217;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You should have heard the Hamelin people<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ringing the bells till they rocked the steeple.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Go&#8217;, cried the Mayor, &#8216;and get long poles,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Poke out the nests and block up the holes!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Consult with carpenters and builders,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And leave in our town not even a trace<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the rats!&#8217;&mdash;when suddenly, up the face<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the Piper perked in the market-place,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With a &#8216;First, if you please, my thousand guilders!&#8217;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A thousand guilders! The Mayor looked blue;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So did the Corporation too.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For council dinners made rare havoc<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And half the money would replenish<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their cellar&#8217;s biggest butt with Rhenish.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To pay this sum to a wandering fellow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With a gipsy coat of red and yellow!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Beside,&#8217; quoth the Mayor with a knowing wink,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8216;Our business was done at the river&#8217;s brink;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We saw with our eyes the vermin sink,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And what&#8217;s dead can&#8217;t come to life, I think.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So, friend, we&#8217;re not the folks to shrink<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the duty of giving you something for drink,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And a matter of money to put in your poke;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But as for the guilders, what we spoke<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of them, as you very well know, was in joke.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Besides, our losses have made us thrifty.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!&#8217;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The piper&#8217;s face fell, and he cried,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8216;No trifling! I can&#8217;t wait, beside!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I&#8217;ve promised to visit by dinner time<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bagdat, and accept the prime<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the Head-Cook&#8217;s pottage, all he&#8217;s rich in,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For having left, in the Caliph&#8217;s kitchen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of a nest of scorpions no survivor&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With him I proved no bargain-driver,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With you, don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ll bate a stiver!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And folks who put me in a passion<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">May find me pipe to another fashion.&#8217;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_489" id="Page_489">[489]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8216;How?&#8217; cried the Mayor, &#8216;d&#8217;ye think I&#8217;ll brook<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Being worse treated than a Cook?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Insulted by a lazy ribald<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With idle pipe and vesture piebald?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Blow your pipe there till you burst!&#8217;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Once more he stept into the street<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And to his lips again<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And ere he blew three notes (such sweet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Soft notes as yet musician&#8217;s cunning<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Never gave the enraptured air)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There was a rustling, that seemed like a bustling<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Out came the children running.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All the little boys and girls,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tripping and skipping ran merrily after<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.<br /></span>
+</div>
+
+<p class="dotted2">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And I must not omit to say<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That in Transylvania there&#8217;s a tribe<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of alien people that ascribe<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The outlandish ways and dress<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On which their neighbours lay such stress,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To their fathers and mothers having risen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Out of some subterraneous prison<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into which they were trepanned<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Long time ago in a mighty band<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But how or why, they don&#8217;t understand.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Something more we had to say of Mr. Browning,
+but we must stop. It is singularly characteristic
+of this age that the poems which rise to the surface
+should be examples of ornate art, and grotesque
+art, not of pure art. We live in the realm of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_490" id="Page_490">[490]</a></span>
+<i>half</i> educated. The number of readers grows daily,
+but the quality of readers does not improve rapidly.
+The middle class is scattered, headless; it is well-meaning
+but aimless; wishing to be wise, but
+ignorant how to be wise. The aristocracy of England
+never was a literary aristocracy, never even
+in the days of its full power, of its unquestioned
+predominance, did it guide&mdash;did it even seriously
+try to guide&mdash;the taste of England. Without
+guidance young men and tired men are thrown
+amongst a mass of books; they have to choose
+which they like; many of them would much like
+to improve their culture, to chasten their taste,
+if they knew how. But left to themselves they
+take, not pure art, but showy art; not that which
+permanently relieves the eye and makes it happy
+whenever it looks, and as long as it looks, but
+<i>glaring</i> art which catches and arrests the eye for
+a moment, but which in the end fatigues it. But
+before the wholesome remedy of nature&mdash;the
+fatigue&mdash;arrives, the hasty reader has passed on to
+some new excitement, which in its turn stimulates
+for an instant, and then is passed by for ever.
+These conditions are not favourable to the due
+appreciation of pure art&mdash;of that art which must
+be known before it is admired&mdash;which must have
+fastened irrevocably on the brain before you
+appreciate it&mdash;which you must love ere it will
+seem worthy of your love. Women too, whose
+voice in literature counts as well as that of men&mdash;and
+in a light literature counts for more than that
+of men&mdash;women, such as we know them, such as
+they are likely to be, ever prefer a delicate unreality
+to a true or firm art. A dressy literature,
+an exaggerated literature seem to be fated to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_491" id="Page_491">[491]</a></span>
+us. These are our curses, as other times had
+theirs.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">And yet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Think not the living times forget,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ages of heroes fought and fell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That Homer in the end might tell;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O&#8217;er grovelling generations past<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upstood the Gothic fane at last;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And countless hearts in countless years<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rude laughter and unmeaning tears;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The pure perfection of her dome.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Others I doubt not, if not we,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The issue of our toils shall see;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And (they forgotten and unknown)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Young children gather as their own<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The harvest that the dead had sown.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> The first words in Lord Jeffrey&#8217;s celebrated review of
+the <i>Excursion</i> were, &#8216;This will never do.&#8217;</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="WALTER_HORATIO_PATER" id="WALTER_HORATIO_PATER"></a>WALTER HORATIO PATER<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_492" id="Page_492">[492]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1839-1894</h3>
+
+<h3>COLERIDGE&#8217;S WRITINGS (1866)</h3>
+
+<h4><i>Conversations, Letters, and Recollections of S.&nbsp;T. Coleridge.</i>
+Edited by <span class="smcap">Thomas Allsop</span>. London. 1864.</h4>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Forms</span> of intellectual and spiritual culture often
+exercise their subtlest and most artful charm when
+life is already passing from them. Searching and
+irresistible as are the changes of the human spirit
+on its way to perfection, there is yet so much
+elasticity of temper that what must pass away
+sooner or later is not disengaged all at once even
+from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by
+one law of development evolves ideas, moralities,
+modes of inward life, and represses them in turn,
+has in this way provided that the earlier growth
+should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit
+the whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity
+of life. Then comes the spectacle of the
+reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined
+by the antagonism of the new. That current of
+new life chastens them as they contend against it.
+Weaker minds do not perceive the change; clearer
+minds abandon themselves to it. To feel the
+change everywhere, yet not to abandon oneself to
+it, is a situation of difficulty and contention. Communicating
+in this way to the passing stage of
+culture the charm of what is chastened, high-strung,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_493" id="Page_493">[493]</a></span>
+athletic, they yet detach the highest minds from
+the past by pressing home its difficulties and finally
+proving it impossible. Such is the charm of
+Julian, of St. Louis, perhaps of Luther; in the
+narrower compass of modern times, of Dr. Newman
+and Lacordaire; it is also the peculiar charm of
+Coleridge.</p>
+
+<p>Modern thought is distinguished from ancient
+by its cultivation of the &#8216;relative&#8217; spirit in place of
+the &#8216;absolute&#8217;. Ancient philosophy sought to
+arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix
+thought in a necessary formula, and types of life
+in a classification by &#8216;kinds&#8217; or <i>genera</i>. To the
+modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known
+except relatively under conditions. An ancient
+philosopher indeed started a philosophy of the
+relative, but only as an enigma. So the germs of
+almost all philosophical ideas were enfolded in the
+mind of antiquity, and fecundated one by one in
+after ages by the external influences of art, religion,
+culture in the natural sciences, belonging to a particular
+generation, which suddenly becomes preoccupied
+by a formula or theory, not so much new
+as penetrated by a new meaning and expressiveness.
+So the idea of &#8216;the relative&#8217; has been
+fecundated in modern times by the influence of
+the sciences of observation. These sciences reveal
+types of life evanescing into each other by inexpressible
+refinements of change. Things pass into
+their opposites by accumulation of undefinable
+quantities. The growth of those sciences consists
+in a continual analysis of facts of rough and general
+observation into groups of facts more precise and
+minute. A faculty for truth is a power of distinguishing
+and fixing delicate and fugitive details.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_494" id="Page_494">[494]</a></span>
+The moral world is ever in contact with the physical;
+the relative spirit has invaded moral philosophy
+from the ground of the inductive science.
+There it has started a new analysis of the relations
+of body and mind, good and evil, freedom and
+necessity. Hard and abstract moralities are yielding
+to a more exact estimate of the subtlety and
+complexity of our life. Always, as an organism
+increases in perfection the conditions of its life
+become more complex. Man is the most complex
+of the products of nature. Character merges into
+temperament; the nervous system refines itself
+into intellect. His physical organism is played
+upon not only by the physical conditions about it,
+but by remote laws of inheritance, the vibrations
+of long past acts reaching him in the midst of the
+new order of things in which he lives. When we
+have estimated these conditions he is not yet simple
+and isolated; for the mind of the race, the character
+of the age, sway him this way or that through the
+medium of language and ideas. It seems as if the
+most opposite statements about him were alike
+true; he is so receptive, all the influences of the
+world and of society ceaselessly playing upon him,
+so that every hour in his life is unique, changed
+altogether by a stray word, or glance, or touch.
+The truth of these relations experience gives us;
+not the truth of eternal outlines effected once for all,
+but a world of fine gradations and subtly linked
+conditions, shifting intricately as we ourselves
+change; and bids us by constant clearing of the
+organs of observation and perfecting of analysis
+to make what we can of these. To the intellect, to
+the critical spirit, these subtleties of effect are more
+precious than anything else. What is lost in precision<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_495" id="Page_495">[495]</a></span>
+of form is gained in intricacy of expression.
+To suppose that what is called &#8216;ontology&#8217; is what
+the speculative instinct seeks, is the misconception
+of a backward school of logicians. Who would
+change the colour or curve of a roseleaf for that
+&#959;&#8016;&#963;&#8055;&#945; &#7936;&#967;&#961;&#8061;&#956;&#945;&#964;&#959;&#962;, &#7936;&#963;&#967;&#951;&#956;&#8049;&#964;&#953;&#963;&#964;&#959;&#962;, &#7936;&#957;&#945;&#966;&#8053;&#962;. A transcendentalism
+that makes what is abstract more
+excellent than what is concrete has nothing akin to
+the leading philosophies of the world. The true
+illustration of the speculative temper is not the
+Hindoo, lost to sense, understanding, individuality;
+but such an one as Goethe, to whom every moment
+of life brought its share of experimental,
+individual knowledge, by whom no touch of the
+world of form, colour, and passion was disregarded.</p>
+
+<p>The literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested
+struggle against the application of the relative
+spirit to moral and religious questions. Everywhere
+he is restlessly scheming to apprehend the
+absolute; to affirm it effectively; to get it acknowledged.
+Coleridge failed in that attempt, happily
+even for him, for it was a struggle against the
+increasing life of the mind itself. The real loss
+was, that this controversial interest betrayed him
+into a direction which was not for him the path
+of the highest intellectual success; a direction in
+which his artistic talent could never find the conditions
+of its perfection. Still, there is so much
+witchery about his poems, that it is as a poet that
+he will most probably be permanently remembered.
+How did his choice of a controversial interest, his
+determination to affirm the absolute, weaken or
+modify his poetical gift?</p>
+
+<p>In 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the composition<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_496" id="Page_496">[496]</a></span>
+of a volume of poems&mdash;the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>.
+What Wordsworth then wrote is already vibrant
+with that blithe <i>&eacute;lan</i> which carried him to final
+happiness and self-possession. In Coleridge we
+feel already that faintness and obscure dejection
+which cling like some contagious damp to all his
+writings. Wordsworth was to be distinguished by
+a joyful and penetrative conviction of the existence
+of certain latent affinities between nature and the
+human mind, which reciprocally gild the mind and
+nature with a kind of &#8216;heavenly alchemy&#8217;:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">... My voice proclaims<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How exquisitely the individual mind<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(And the progressive powers perhaps no less<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the whole species) to the external world<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is fitted:&mdash;and how exquisitely, too,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The external world is fitted to the mind:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the creation, by no lower name<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Can it be called, which they with blended might<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Accomplish.<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken
+dreaming over the aspects and transitions of nature,
+a reflective, but altogether unformulated, analysis
+of them.</p>
+
+<p>There are in Coleridge&#8217;s poems expressions of
+this conviction as deep as Wordsworth&#8217;s. But
+Coleridge could never have abandoned himself to
+the dream as Wordsworth did, because the first
+condition of such abandonment is an unvexed
+quietness of heart. No one can read the <i>Lines
+composed above Tintern</i> without feeling how
+potent the physical element was among the conditions
+of Wordsworth&#8217;s genius:&mdash;&#8216;felt in the
+blood and felt along the heart,&#8217;&mdash;&#8216;My whole life
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_497" id="Page_497">[497]</a></span>I have lived in quiet thought.&#8217; The stimulus
+which most artists require from nature he can
+renounce. He leaves the ready-made glory of the
+Swiss mountains to reflect a glory on a mouldering
+leaf. He loves best to watch the floating thistledown,
+because of its hint at an unseen life in the
+air. Coleridge&#8217;s temperament, &#7936;&#949;&#8054; &#7952;&#957; &#963;&#966;&#959;&#948;&#961;&#8119; &#8000;&#961;&#8051;&#958;&#949;&#953;,
+with its faintness, its grieved dejection,
+could never have been like that.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">My genial spirits fail<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">And what can these avail<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">It were a vain endeavour,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Though I should gaze for ever<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On that green light that lingers in the west:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I may not hope from outward forms to win<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The passion and the life whose fountains are within.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is that flawless temperament in Wordsworth
+which keeps his conviction of a latent intelligence
+in nature within the limits of sentiment or instinct,
+and confines it, to those delicate and subdued
+shades of expression which perfect art allows. In
+sadder dispositions, that is in the majority of cases,
+where such a conviction has existed, it has stiffened
+into a formula, it has frozen into a scientific or
+pseudo-scientific theory. For the perception of
+those affinities brings one so near the absorbing
+speculative problems of life&mdash;optimism, the proportion
+of man to his place in nature, his prospects
+in relation to it&mdash;that it ever tends to become
+theory through their contagion. Even in Goethe,
+who has brilliantly handled the subject in his
+lyrics entitled <i>Gott und Welt</i>, it becomes something
+stiffer than poetry; it is tempered by the
+&#8216;pale cast&#8217; of his technical knowledge of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_498" id="Page_498">[498]</a></span>
+nature of colours, of anatomy, of the metamorphosis
+of plants.</p>
+
+<p>That, however, which had only a limited power
+over Coleridge as sentiment, entirely possessed
+him as a philosophical idea. We shall see in what
+follows how deep its power was, how it pursued him
+everywhere, and seemed to him to interpret every
+question. Wordsworth&#8217;s poetry is an optimism;
+it says man&#8217;s relation to the world is, and may be
+seen by man to be, a perfect relation; but it is
+an optimism that begins and ends in an abiding
+instinct. Coleridge accepts the same optimism as
+a philosophical idea, but an idea is relative to an
+intellectual assent; sometimes it seems a better
+expression of facts, sometimes a worse, as the
+understanding weighs it in the logical balances.
+And so it is not a permanent consolation. It is
+only in the rarer moments of intellectual warmth
+and sunlight that it is entirely credible. In less
+exhilarating moments that perfect relation of man
+and nature seems to shift and fail; that is, the
+philosophical idea ceases to be realizable; and
+with Coleridge its place is not supplied, as with
+Wordsworth, by the corresponding sentiment or
+instinct.</p>
+
+<p>What in Wordsworth is a sentiment or instinct,
+is in Coleridge a philosophical idea. In other
+words, Coleridge&#8217;s talent is a more intellectual one
+than Wordsworth&#8217;s, more dramatic, more self-conscious.
+Wordsworth&#8217;s talent, deeply reflective
+as it is, because its base is an instinct, is deficient
+in self-knowledge. Possessed by the rumours and
+voices of the haunted country, the borders of
+which he has passed alone, he never thinks of
+withdrawing from it to look down upon it from one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_499" id="Page_499">[499]</a></span>
+of the central heights of human life. His power
+absorbs him, not he it; he cannot turn it round or
+get without it; he does not estimate its general
+relation to life. But Coleridge, just because the
+essence of his talent is the intuition of an idea,
+commands his talent. He not only feels with
+Wordsworth the expression of mind in nature, but
+he can project that feeling outside him, reduce it to
+a psychological law, define its relation to other
+elements of culture, place it in a complete view
+of life.</p>
+
+<p>And in some such activity as that, varied as his
+wide learning, in a many-sided dramatic kind of
+poetry, assigning its place and value to every mode
+of the inward life, seems to have been for Coleridge
+the original path of artistic success. But in order
+to follow that path one must hold ideas loosely in
+the relative spirit, not seek to stereotype any one
+of the many modes of that life; one must acknowledge
+that the mind is ever greater than its own
+products, devote ideas to the service of art rather
+than of &#947;&#957;&#8182;&#963;&#953;&#962;, not disquiet oneself about the
+absolute. Perhaps Coleridge is more interesting
+because he did not follow this path. Repressing
+his artistic interest and voluntarily discolouring
+his own work, he turned to console and strengthen
+the human mind, vulgarized or dejected, as he
+believed, by the acquisition of new knowledge
+about itself in the <i>&eacute;claircissement</i> of the eighteenth
+century.</p>
+
+<p>What the reader of our own generation will least
+find in Coleridge&#8217;s prose writings is the excitement
+of the literary sense. And yet in those grey
+volumes we have the production of one who made
+way ever by a charm, the charm of voice, of aspect,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_500" id="Page_500">[500]</a></span>
+of language, above all, by the intellectual charm of
+new, moving, luminous ideas. Perhaps the chief
+offence in Coleridge is an excess of seriousness,
+a seriousness that arises not from any moral
+principle, but from a misconception of the perfect
+manner. There is a certain shade of levity and
+unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth
+century, which marks complete culture in the
+handling of abstract questions. The humanist,
+he who possesses that complete culture, does not
+&#8216;weep&#8217; over the failure of &#8216;a theory of the quantification
+of the predicate&#8217;, nor &#8216;shriek&#8217; over the fall
+of a philosophical formula. A kind of humour
+is one of the conditions of the true mental attitude
+in the criticism of past stages of thought. Humanity
+cannot afford to be too serious about them, any
+more than a man of good sense can afford to be too
+serious in looking back upon his own childhood.
+Plato, whom Coleridge claims as the first of his
+spiritual ancestors, Plato, as we remember him,
+a true humanist, with Petrarch and Goethe and
+M. Renan, holds his theories lightly, glances with
+a blithe and na&iuml;ve inconsequence from one view to
+another, not anticipating the burden of meaning
+&#8216;views&#8217; will one day have for humanity. In
+reading him one feels how lately it was that Croesus
+thought it a paradox to say that external prosperity
+was not necessarily happiness. But on
+Coleridge lies the whole weight of the sad reflection
+that has since come into the world, with which for
+us the air is full, which the children in the market-place
+repeat to each other. Even his language
+is forced and broken, lest some saving formula
+should be lost&mdash;&#8216;distinctities&#8217;, &#8216;enucleation&#8217;,
+&#8216;pentad of operative Christianity&#8217;&mdash;he has a whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_501" id="Page_501">[501]</a></span>
+vocabulary of such phrases, and expects to turn the
+tide of human thought by fixing the sense of such
+expressions as &#8216;reason&#8217;, &#8216;understanding&#8217;, &#8216;idea&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>Again, he has not the jealousy of the true artist
+in excluding all associations that have no charm
+or colour or gladness in them; everywhere he
+allows the impress of an inferior theological
+literature; he is often prolix and importunate
+about most indifferent heroes&mdash;Sir Alexander Ball,
+Dr. Bell, even Dr. Bowyer, the coarse pedant of the
+Blue-coat School. And the source of all this is
+closely connected with the source of his literary
+activity. For Coleridge had chosen as the mark of
+his literary egotism a kind of intellectual <i>tour de
+force</i>&mdash;to found a religious philosophy, to do something
+with the &#8216;idea&#8217; in spite of the essential nature
+of the &#8216;idea&#8217;. And therefore all is fictitious from
+the beginning. He had determined, that which
+is humdrum, insipid, which the human spirit has
+done with, shall yet stimulate and inspire. What
+he produced symbolizes this purpose&mdash;the mass
+of it <i>ennuyant</i>, depressing: the <i>Aids to Reflection</i>,
+for instance, with Archbishop Leighton&#8217;s vague
+pieties all twisted into the jargon of a spiritualistic
+philosophy. But sometimes &#8216;the pulse of the
+God&#8217;s blood&#8217; does transmute it, kindling here and
+there a spot that begins to live; as in that beautiful
+fragment at the end of the <i>Church and State</i>, or
+in the distilled and concentrated beauty of such
+a passage as this:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of
+human life, is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants.
+On its ridges the common sun is born and departs. From
+them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. By
+the many, even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_502" id="Page_502">[502]</a></span>
+the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are
+too often hidden by mists and clouds from uncultivated
+swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate.
+To the multitude below these vapours appear now as the
+dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude
+with impunity; and now all a-glow, with colours not their
+own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness
+and power. But in all ages there have been a few who,
+measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet
+of their furthest inaccessible falls, have learned that the
+sources must be far higher and far inward; a few who,
+even in the level streams, have detected elements which
+neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains
+contained or could supply.</p>
+
+<p class="sig"><i>Biographia Literaria.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>&#8216;I was driven from life in motion to life in
+thought and sensation.&#8217; So Coleridge sums up his
+childhood with its delicacy, its sensitiveness, and
+passion. From his tenth to his eighteenth year
+he was at a rough school in London. Speaking of
+this time, he says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my
+birthplace and family, Providence, it has often occurred
+to me, gave me the first intimation that it was my lot, and
+that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life
+a detached individual, a <i>terrae filius</i>, who was to ask love
+or service of no one on any more specific relation than that
+of being a man, and as such to take my chance for the free
+charities of humanity.<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Even his fine external nature was for years
+repressed, wronged, driven inward&mdash;&#8216;at fourteen
+I was in a continual state of low fever.&#8217; He
+becomes a dreamer, an eager student, but without
+ambition.</p>
+
+<p>This depressed boy is nevertheless, on the spiritual
+side, the child of a noble house. At twenty-five he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_503" id="Page_503">[503]</a></span>is exercising a wonderful charm, and has defined for
+himself a peculiar line of intellectual activity. He
+had left Cambridge without a degree, a Unitarian.
+Unable to take orders, he determined through
+Southey&#8217;s influence to devote himself to literature.
+When he left Cambridge there was a prejudice
+against him which has given occasion to certain
+suspicions. Those who knew him best discredit
+these suspicions. What is certain is that he was
+subject to fits of violent, sometimes fantastic,
+despondency. He retired to Stowey, in Somersetshire,
+to study poetry and philosophy. In 1797
+his poetical gift was in full flower; he wrote
+<i>Kubla Khan</i>, the first part of <i>Christabel</i>, and <i>The
+Ancient Mariner</i>. His literary success grew in
+spite of opposition. He had a strange attractive
+gift of conversation, or rather of monologue, as De
+Stael said, full of <i>bizarrerie</i>, with the rapid alternations
+of a dream, and here and there a sudden
+summons into a world strange to the hearer,
+abounding with images drawn from a sort of
+divided, imperfect life, as of one to whom the
+external world penetrated only in part, and, blended
+with all this, passages of the deepest obscurity,
+precious only for their musical cadence, the echo
+in Coleridge of the eloquence of the older English
+writers, of whom he was so ardent a lover. All
+through this brilliant course we may discern the
+power of the Asiatic temperament, of that voluptuousness
+which is perhaps connected with his
+appreciation of the intimacy, the almost mystical
+<i>rapport</i>, between man and nature. &#8216;I am much
+better&#8217;, he writes, &#8216;and my new and tender health
+is all over me like a voluptuous feeling.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>And whatever fame, or charm, or life-inspiring<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_504" id="Page_504">[504]</a></span>
+gift he has had is the vibration of the interest he
+excited then, the propulsion into years that
+clouded his early promise of that first buoyant,
+irresistible self-assertion: so great is even the
+indirect power of a sincere effort towards the ideal
+life, of even a temporary escape of the spirit from
+routine. Perhaps the surest sign of his election&mdash;that
+he was indeed, on the spiritual side, the child
+of a noble house&mdash;is that story of the Pantisocratic
+scheme, which at this distance looks so grotesque.
+In his enthusiasm for the French Revolution, the
+old communistic dream with its appeal to nature
+(perhaps a little theatrical), touched him, as it had
+touched Rousseau, Saint-Pierre, and Chateaubriand.
+He had married one, his affection for whom seems
+to have been only a passing feeling; with her and
+a few friends he was to found a communistic settlement
+on the banks of the Susquehannah&mdash;&#8216;the
+name was pretty and metrical.&#8217; It was one of
+Coleridge&#8217;s lightest dreams; but also one which
+could only have passed through the liberal air of his
+earlier life. The later years of the French Revolution,
+which for us have discredited all such dreams,
+deprived him of that youthfulness which is the
+preservative element in a literary talent.</p>
+
+<p>In 1798, he visited Germany. A beautiful fragment
+of this period remains, describing a spring
+excursion to the Brocken. His excitement still
+vibrates in it. Love, all joyful states of mind, are
+self-expressive; they loosen the tongue, they fill
+the thoughts with sensuous images, they harmonize
+one with the world of sight. We hear of the &#8216;rich
+graciousness and courtesy&#8217; of Coleridge&#8217;s manner,
+of the white and delicate skin, the abundant black
+hair, the full, almost animal lips, that whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_505" id="Page_505">[505]</a></span>
+physiognomy of the dreamer already touched with
+fanaticism. One says of the text of one of his
+Unitarian sermons, &#8216;his voice rose like a stream of
+rich distilled perfumes&#8217;; another, &#8216;he talks like
+an angel, and does&mdash;nothing.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, he had designed an intellectual novelty
+in the shape of a religious philosophy. Socinian
+theology and the philosophy of Hartley had become
+distasteful. &#8216;Whatever is against right reason,
+that no faith can oblige us to believe.&#8217; Coleridge
+quotes these words from Jeremy Taylor. And yet
+ever since the dawn of the Renaissance, had subsisted
+a conflict between reason and faith. From
+the first, indeed, the Christian religion had affirmed
+the existence of such a conflict, and had even based
+its plea upon its own weakness in it. In face of the
+classical culture, with its deep wide-struck roots in
+the world as it permanently exists, St. Paul asserted
+the claims of that which could not appeal with
+success to any genuinely human principle. Paradox
+as it was, that was the strength of the new spirit;
+for how much is there at all times in humanity
+which cannot appeal with success for encouragement
+or tolerance to any genuinely human principle.
+In the Middle Ages it might seem that faith
+had reconciled itself to philosophy; the Catholic
+church was the leader of the world&#8217;s life as well as
+of the spirit&#8217;s. Looking closer we see that the conflict
+is still latent there; the supremacy of faith is
+only a part of the worship of sorrow and weakness
+which marks the age. The weak are no longer
+merely a majority, they are all Europe. It is not
+that faith has become one with reason; but
+a strange winter, a strange suspension of life, has
+passed over the classical culture which is only the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_506" id="Page_506">[506]</a></span>
+human reason in its most trenchant form. Glimpse
+after glimpse, as that pagan culture awoke to life,
+the conflict was felt once more. It is at the court
+of Frederick II that the Renaissance first becomes
+discernible as an actual power in European society.
+How definite and unmistakable is the attitude of
+faith towards that! Ever since the Reformation
+all phases of theology had been imperfect philosophies&mdash;that
+is, in which there was a religious
+<i>arri&egrave;re pens&eacute;e</i>; philosophies which could never be
+in the ascendant in a sincerely scientific sphere.
+The two elements had never really mixed. Writers
+so different as Locke and Taylor have each his
+liberal philosophy, and each has his defence of the
+orthodox belief; but, also, each has a divided
+mind; we wonder how the two elements could
+have existed side by side; brought together in
+a single mind, but unable to fuse in it, they reveal
+their radical contrariety. The Catholic church
+and humanity are two powers that divide the
+intellect and spirit of man. On the Catholic side
+is faith, rigidly logical as Ultramontanism, with
+a proportion of the facts of life, that is, all that is
+despairing in life coming naturally under its
+formula. On the side of humanity is all that is
+desirable in the world, all that is sympathetic
+with its laws, and succeeds through that sympathy.
+Doubtless, for the individual, there are a thousand
+intermediate shades of opinion, a thousand resting-places
+for the religious spirit; still, &#964;&#8056; &#948;&#953;&#959;&#961;&#8055;&#950;&#949;&#953;&#957; &#959;&#8016;&#954; &#7956;&#963;&#964;&#953; &#964;&#8182;&#957; &#960;&#959;&#955;&#955;&#8182;&#957;,
+fine distinctions are not for
+the majority; and this makes time eventually
+a dogmatist, working out the opposition in its
+most trenchant form, and fixing the horns of the
+dilemma; until, in the present day, we have on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_507" id="Page_507">[507]</a></span>
+one side Pius IX, the true descendant of the
+fisherman, issuing the Encyclical, pleading the old
+promise against the world with a special kind of
+justice; and on the other side, the irresistible
+modern culture, which, as religious men often
+remind us, is only Christian accidentally.</p>
+
+<p>The peculiar temper of Coleridge&#8217;s intellect made
+the idea of reconciling this conflict very seductive.
+With a true speculative talent he united a false
+kind of subtlety and the full share of vanity.
+A dexterous intellectual <i>tour de force</i> has always an
+independent charm; and therefore it is well for
+the cause of truth that the directness, sincerity,
+and naturalness of things are beyond a certain
+limit sacrificed in vain to a factitious interest.
+A method so forced as that of Coleridge&#8217;s religious
+philosophy is from the first doomed to be insipid,
+so soon as the temporary interest or taste or
+curiosity it was designed to meet has passed away.
+Then, as to the manner of such books as the <i>Aids
+to Reflection</i>, or <i>The Friend</i>:&mdash;These books came
+from one whose vocation was in the world of
+art; and yet, perhaps, of all books that have been
+influential in modern times, they are farthest from
+the classical form&mdash;bundles of notes&mdash;the original
+matter inseparably mixed up with that borrowed
+from others&mdash;the whole, just that mere preparation
+for an artistic effect which the finished artist would
+be careful one day to destroy. Here, again, we
+have a trait profoundly characteristic of Coleridge.
+He often attempts to reduce a phase of thought,
+subtle and exquisite, to conditions too rough for it.
+He uses a purely speculative gift in direct moral
+edification. Scientific truth is something fugitive,
+relative, full of fine gradations; he tries to fix it in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_508" id="Page_508">[508]</a></span>
+absolute formulas. The <i>Aids to Reflection</i>, or <i>The
+Friend</i>, is an effort to propagate the volatile spirit
+of conversation into the less ethereal fabric of
+a written book; and it is only here and there that
+the poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really lifted
+by the spirit.</p>
+
+<p>At forty-two, we find Coleridge saying in a
+letter:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I feel with an intensity unfathomable by words my utter
+nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness in and for
+myself. I have learned what a sin is against an infinite,
+imperishable being such as is the soul of man. The consolations,
+at least the sensible sweetness of hope, I do not
+possess. On the contrary, the temptation which I have
+constantly to fight up against is a fear that, if annihilation
+and the possibility of heaven were offered to my choice,
+I should choose the former.</p></div>
+
+<p>What was the cause of this change? That is
+precisely the point on which, after all the gossip
+there has been, we are still ignorant. At times
+Coleridge&#8217;s opium excesses were great; but what
+led to those excesses must not be left out of account.
+From boyhood he had a tendency to low fever,
+betrayed by his constant appetite for bathing and
+swimming, which he indulged even when a physician
+had opposed it. In 1803, he went to Malta
+as secretary to the English Governor. His daughter
+suspects that the source of the evil was there, that
+for one of his constitution the climate of Malta
+was deadly. At all events, when he returned, the
+charm of those five wonderful years had failed at
+the source.</p>
+
+<p>De Quincey said of him, &#8216;he wanted better
+bread than can be made with wheat.&#8217; Lamb said
+of him that from boyhood he had &#8216;hungered for
+eternity&#8217;. Henceforth those are the two notes of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_509" id="Page_509">[509]</a></span>
+his life. From this time we must look for no more
+true literary talent in him. His style becomes
+greyer and greyer, his thoughts <i>outr&eacute;</i>, exaggerated,
+a kind of credulity or superstition exercised upon
+abstract words. Like Clifford, in Hawthorne&#8217;s
+beautiful romance&mdash;the born Epicurean, who by
+some strange wrong has passed the best of his days
+in a prison&mdash;he is the victim of a division of the
+will, often showing itself in trivial things: he
+could never choose on which side of the garden path
+he would walk. In 1803, he wrote a poem on
+&#8216;The Pains of Sleep&#8217;. That unrest increased.
+Mr. Gillman tells us &#8216;he had long been greatly
+afflicted with nightmare, and when residing with
+us was frequently aroused from this painful sleep
+by any one of the family who might hear him&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>That faintness and continual dissolution had its
+own consumptive refinements, and even brought,
+as to the &#8216;Beautiful Soul&#8217; in <i>Wilhelm Meister</i>,
+a faint religious ecstasy&mdash;that &#8216;singing in the sails&#8217;
+which is not of the breeze. Here, again, is a note
+of Coleridge&#8217;s:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8216;In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as
+at yonder moon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane,
+I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical
+language for something within me that already and for ever
+exists, than observing anything new. Even when that
+latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling,
+as if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten
+or hidden truth of my inner nature.&#8217; Then, &#8216;while
+I was preparing the pen to write this remark, I lost the
+train of thought which had led me to it.&#8217;</p></div>
+
+<p>What a distemper of the eye of the mind!
+What an almost bodily distemper there is in that!</p>
+
+<p>Coleridge&#8217;s intellectual sorrows were many;
+but he had one singular intellectual happiness.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_510" id="Page_510">[510]</a></span>
+With an inborn taste for transcendental philosophy
+he lived just at the time when that philosophy took
+an immense spring in Germany, and connected
+itself with a brilliant literary movement. He had
+the luck to light upon it in its freshness, and introduce
+it to his countrymen. What an opportunity
+for one reared on the colourless English philosophies,
+but who feels an irresistible attraction
+towards metaphysical synthesis! How rare are
+such occasions of intellectual contentment! This
+transcendental philosophy, chiefly as systematized
+by Schelling, Coleridge applies, with an eager, unwearied
+subtlety, to the questions of theology and
+art-criticism. It is in his theory of art-criticism
+that he comes nearest to true and important
+principles; that is the least fugitive part of his
+work. Let us take this first; here we shall most
+clearly apprehend his main principle.</p>
+
+<p>What, then, is the essence of this criticism? On
+the whole it may be described as an attempt to
+reclaim the world of art as a world of fixed laws&mdash;to
+show that the creative activity of genius and the
+simplest act of thought are but higher and lower
+products of the laws of a universal logic. Criticism,
+feeling its own unsuccess in dealing with the
+greater works of art, has sometimes made too
+much of those dark and capricious suggestions of
+genius which even the intellect possessed by them
+is unable to track or recall. It has seemed due to
+their half-sacred character to look for no link
+between the process by which they were produced
+and the slighter processes of the mind. Coleridge
+assumes that the highest phases of thought must be
+more, not less, than the lower, subjects of law.</p>
+
+<p>With this interest, in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_511" id="Page_511">[511]</a></span>
+he refines Schelling&#8217;s &#8216;Philosophy of Nature&#8217; into
+a theory of art. &#8216;Es giebt kein Plagiat in der
+Philosophie&#8217; says Heine, alluding to the charge
+brought against Schelling of unacknowledged
+borrowing from Bruno, and certainly that which
+is common to Coleridge and Schelling is of far
+earlier origin than the Renaissance. Schellingism,
+the &#8216;Philosophy of Nature&#8217;, is indeed a constant
+tradition in the history of thought; it embodies
+a permanent type of the speculative temper.
+That mode of conceiving nature as a mirror or
+reflex of the intelligence of man may be traced
+up to the first beginnings of Greek speculation.
+There are two ways of envisaging those aspects
+of nature which appear to bear the impress of
+reason or intelligence. There is the deist&#8217;s way,
+which regards them merely as marks of design,
+which separates the informing mind from nature,
+as the mechanist from the machine; and there is
+the pantheistic way, which identifies the two,
+which regards nature itself as the living energy of
+an intelligence of the same kind as, but vaster
+than, the human. Greek philosophy, finding indications
+of mind everywhere, dwelling exclusively
+in its observations on that which is general or
+formal, on that which modern criticism regards as
+the modification of things by the mind of the
+observer, adopts the latter, or pantheistic way,
+through the influence of the previous mythological
+period. Mythology begins in the early necessities
+of language, of which it is a kind of accident. But
+at a later period its essence changes; it becomes
+what it was not at its birth, the servant of a genuine
+poetic interest, a kind of <i>vivification</i> of nature.
+Played upon by those accidents of language, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_512" id="Page_512">[512]</a></span>
+Greek mind becomes possessed by the conception
+of nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to the
+mind of man. This unfixed poetical prepossession,
+reduced to an abstract form, petrified into an idea,
+is the conception which gives a unity of aim to
+Greek philosophy. Step by step it works out the
+substance of the Hegelian formula: &#8216;Was ist, das
+ist vern&uuml;nftig; was vern&uuml;nftig ist, das ist&#8217;&mdash;&#8216;Whatever
+is, is according to reason; whatever is
+according to reason, that is.&#8217; A science of which
+that could be the formula is still but an intellectual
+aspiration; the formula of true science is different.
+Experience, which has gradually saddened the
+earth&#8217;s colour, stiffened its motions, withdrawn
+from it some blithe and debonair presence, has
+moderated our demands upon science. The positive
+method makes very little account of marks of intelligence
+in nature; in its wider view of phenomena
+it sees that those incidents are a minority,
+and may rank as happy coincidences; it absorbs
+them in the simpler conception of law. But the
+suspicion of a mind latent in nature, struggling for
+release and intercourse with the intellect of man
+through true ideas, has never ceased to haunt a certain
+class of minds. Started again and again in
+successive periods by enthusiasts on the antique
+pattern, in each case the thought has seemed paler
+and more evanescent amidst the growing consistency
+and sharpness of outline of other and more
+positive forms of knowledge. Still, wherever
+a speculative instinct has been united with extreme
+inwardness of temperament, as in Jakob B&ouml;hme,
+there the old Greek conception, like some seed
+floating in the air, has taken root and sprung up
+anew. Coleridge, thrust inward upon himself,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_513" id="Page_513">[513]</a></span>
+driven from &#8216;life in thought and sensation&#8217; to life
+in thought only, feels in that dark London school
+a thread of the Greek mind vibrating strangely
+in him. At fifteen he is discoursing on Plotinus,
+and has translated the hymns of Synesius. So in
+later years he reflects from Schelling the flitting
+tradition. He conceives a subtle co-ordination
+between the ideas of the mind and the laws of the
+natural world. Science is to be attained, not by
+observation, analysis, generalization, but by the
+evolution or recovery of those ideas from within,
+by a sort of &#7936;&#957;&#8049;&#956;&#957;&#951;&#963;&#953;&#962;, every group of observed
+facts remaining an enigma until the appropriate
+idea is struck upon them from the mind of Newton
+or Cuvier, the genius in whom sympathy with the
+universal reason is entire. Next he supposes that
+this reason or intelligence in nature gradually
+becomes reflective&mdash;self-conscious. He fancies he
+can track through all the simpler orders of life
+fragments of an eloquent prophecy about the
+human mind. He regards the whole of nature as
+a development of higher forms out of the lower,
+through shade after shade of systematic change.
+The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the axes
+of a crystal form, the trance-like life of plants, the
+animal troubled by strange irritabilities, are stages
+which anticipate consciousness. All through that
+increasing stir of life this was forming itself; each
+stage in its unsatisfied susceptibilities seeming to
+be drawn out of its own limits by the more pronounced
+current of life on its confines, the &#8216;shadow
+of approaching humanity&#8217; gradually deepening,
+the latent intelligence working to the surface.
+At this point the law of development does not
+lose itself in caprice; rather it becomes more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_514" id="Page_514">[514]</a></span>
+constraining and incisive. From the lowest to the
+highest acts of intelligence, there is another range of
+refining shades. Gradually the mind concentrates
+itself, frees itself from the limits of the particular,
+the individual, attains a strange power of modifying
+and centralizing what it receives from without
+according to an inward ideal. At last, in imaginative
+genius, ideas become effective; the intelligence
+of nature, with all its elements connected and
+justified, is clearly reflected; and the interpretation
+of its latent purposes is fixed in works of art.</p>
+
+<p>In this fanciful and bizarre attempt to rationalize
+art, to range it under the dominion of law, there is
+still a gap to be filled up. What is that common
+law of the mind, of which a work of art and the
+slighter acts of thought are alike products? Here
+Coleridge weaves in Kant&#8217;s fine-spun theory of the
+transformation of sense into perception. What
+every theory of perception has to explain is that
+associative power which gathers isolated sensible
+qualities into the objects of the world about us.
+Sense, without an associative power, would be
+only a threadlike stream of colours, sounds, odours&mdash;each
+struck upon one for a moment, and then
+withdrawn. The basis of this association may be
+represented as a material one, a kind of many-coloured
+&#8216;etching&#8217; on the brain. Hartley has
+dexterously handled this hypothesis. The charm
+of his &#8216;theory of vibrations&#8217; is the vivid image
+it presents to the fancy. How large an element
+in a speculative talent is the command of these
+happy images! Coleridge, by a finer effort of the
+same kind, a greater delicacy of fancy, detects all
+sorts of slips, transitions, breaks of continuity in
+Hartley&#8217;s glancing cobweb. Coleridge, with Kant,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_515" id="Page_515">[515]</a></span>
+regards all association as effected by a power
+within, to which he gives a fanciful Greek name.<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a>
+In an act of perception there is the matter which
+sense presents, colour, tone, feeling; but also
+a form or mould, such as space, unity, causation,
+suggested from within. In these forms we arrest
+and frame the many attributes of sense. It is like
+that simple chemical phenomenon where two
+colourless fluids uniting reflect a full colour.
+Neither matter nor form can be perceived asunder;
+they unite into the many-coloured image of life.
+This theory has not been able to bear a loyal
+induction. Even if it were true, how little it would
+tell us; how it attenuates fact! There, again,
+the charm is all in the clear image; the image of the
+artist combining a few elementary colours, curves,
+sounds into a new whole. Well, this power of
+association, of concentrating many elements of
+sense in an object of perception, is refined and
+deepened into the creative acts of imagination.</p>
+
+<p>We of the modern ages have become so familiarized
+with the greater works of art that we are little
+sensitive of the act of creation in them; they do
+not impress us as a new presence in the world.
+Only sometimes in productions which realize immediately
+a profound emotion and enforce a change
+in taste, such as <i>Werther</i> or <i>Emile</i>, we are actual
+witnesses of the moulding of an unforeseen type by
+some new principle of association. By imagination,
+the distinction between which and fancy is so
+thrust upon his readers, Coleridge means a vigorous
+act of association, which, by simplifying and restraining
+their natural expression to an artificial
+order, refines and perfects the types of human
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_516" id="Page_516">[516]</a></span>passion. It represents the excitements of the
+human kind, but reflected in a new manner,
+&#8216;excitement itself imitating order.&#8217; &#8216;Originally
+the offspring of passion,&#8217; he somewhere says, &#8216;but
+now the adopted children of power.&#8217; So far there
+is nothing new or distinctive; every one who can
+receive from a poem or picture a total impression
+will admit so much. What makes the view distinctive
+in Coleridge are the Schellingistic associations
+with which he colours it, that faint glamour
+of the philosophy of nature which was ever influencing
+his thoughts. That suggested the idea
+of a subtly winding parallel, a &#8216;rapport&#8217; in every
+detail, between the human mind and the world
+without it, laws of nature being so many transformed
+ideas. Conversely, the ideas of the human
+mind would be only transformed laws. Genius
+would be in a literal sense an exquisitely purged
+sympathy with nature. Those associative conceptions
+of the imagination, those unforeseen types
+of passion, would come, not so much of the artifice
+and invention of the understanding, as from self-surrender
+to the suggestions of nature; they
+would be evolved by the stir of nature itself
+realizing the highest reach of its latent intelligence;
+they would have a kind of antecedent necessity to
+rise at some time to the surface of the human
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>It is natural that Shakespeare should be the
+idol of all such criticism, whether in England or
+Germany. The first effect in Shakespeare is that of
+capricious detail, of the waywardness that plays
+with the parts careless of the impression of the
+whole. But beyond there is the constraining unity
+of effect, the uneffaceable impression, of <i>Hamlet</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_517" id="Page_517">[517]</a></span>
+or <i>Macbeth</i>. His hand moving freely is curved
+round by some law of gravitation from within;
+that is, there is the most constraining unity in
+the most abundant variety. Coleridge exaggerates
+this unity into something like the unity of a natural
+organism, the associative act that effected it into
+something closely akin to the primitive power of
+nature itself. &#8216;In the Shakespearian drama&#8217;, he
+says, &#8216;there is a vitality which grows and evolves
+itself from within.&#8217; Again:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the
+germ from within by the imaginative power according to
+the idea. For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an
+idea in mind to a law in nature. They are correlatives
+which suppose each other.</p></div>
+
+<p>Again:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The organic form is innate; it shapes, as it develops,
+itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one
+and the same with the perfection of its outward form.
+Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime
+genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally
+inexhaustible in forms; each exterior is the physiognomy
+of the being within, and even such is the appropriate excellence
+of Shakespeare, himself a nature humanized, a genial
+understanding, directing self-consciously a power and an
+implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.</p></div>
+
+<p>There &#8216;the absolute&#8217; has been affirmed in the
+sphere of art; and thought begins to congeal.
+Coleridge has not only overstrained the elasticity
+of his hypothesis, but has also obscured the true
+interest of art. For, after all, the artist has become
+something almost mechanical; instead of being
+the most luminous and self-possessed phase of
+consciousness, the associative act itself looks like
+some organic process of assimilation. The work of
+art is sometimes likened to the living organism.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_518" id="Page_518">[518]</a></span>
+That expresses the impression of a self-delighting,
+independent life which a finished work of art gives
+us; it does not express the process by which that
+work was produced. Here there is no blind ferment
+of lifeless elements to realize a type. By
+exquisite analysis the artist attains clearness of
+idea, then, by many stages of refining, clearness of
+expression. He moves slowly over his work,
+calculating the tenderest tone, and restraining the
+subtlest curve, never letting his hand or fancy
+move at large, gradually refining flaccid spaces
+to the higher degree of expressiveness. Culture,
+at least, values even in transcendent works of art
+the power of the understanding in them, their
+logical process of construction, the spectacle of
+supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.</p>
+
+<p>Coleridge&#8217;s criticism may well be remembered as
+part of the long pleading of German culture for the
+things &#8216;behind the veil&#8217;. It recalls us from the
+work of art to the mind of the artist; and, after
+all, this is what is infinitely precious, and the work
+of art only as the index of it. Still, that is only
+the narrower side of a complete criticism. Perhaps
+it is true, as some one says in Lessing&#8217;s <i>Emilie
+Galotti</i>, that, if Michael Angelo had been born
+without hands, he would still have been the greatest
+of artists. But we must admit the truth also of
+an opposite view: &#8216;In morals as in art&#8217;, says
+M. Renan, &#8216;the word is nothing&mdash;the fact is everything.
+The idea which lurks under a picture of
+Raphael is a slight matter; it is the picture itself
+only that counts.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>What constitutes an artistic gift is, first of all,
+a natural susceptibility to moments of strange
+excitement, in which the colours freshen upon our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_519" id="Page_519">[519]</a></span>
+thread bare world, and the routine of things about
+us is broken by a novel and happier synthesis.
+These are moments into which other minds may be
+made to enter, but which they cannot originate.
+This susceptibility is the element of genius in an
+artistic gift. Secondly, there is what may be
+called the talent of projection, of throwing these
+happy moments into an external concrete form&mdash;a
+statue, or play, or picture. That projection is
+of all degrees of completeness; its facility and
+transparence are modified by the circumstances of
+the individual, his culture, and his age. When it is
+perfectly transparent, the work is classical. Compare
+the power of projection in Mr. Browning&#8217;s
+<i>Sordello</i>, with that power in the <i>Sorrows of
+Werther</i>. These two elements determine the two
+chief aims of criticism. First, it has to classify
+those initiative moments according to the amount
+of interest excited in them, to estimate their comparative
+acceptability, their comparative power of
+giving joy to those who undergo them. Secondly,
+it has to test, by a study of the artistic product
+itself, in connexion with the intellectual and
+spiritual condition of its age, the completeness of
+the projection. These two aims form the positive,
+or concrete, side of criticism; their direction is not
+towards a metaphysical definition of the universal
+element in an artistic effort, but towards a subtle
+gradation of the shades of difference between one
+artistic gift and another. This side of criticism
+is infinitely varied; and it is what French culture
+more often achieves than the German.</p>
+
+<p>Coleridge has not achieved this side in an equal
+degree with the other; and this want is not supplied
+by the <i>Literary Remains</i>, which contain his studies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_520" id="Page_520">[520]</a></span>
+on Shakespeare. There we have a repetition, not
+an application, of the absolute formula. Coleridge
+is like one who sees in a picture only the rules of
+perspective, and is always trying to simplify even
+those. Thus: &#8216;Where there is no humour, but
+only wit, or the like, there is no growth from within.&#8217;
+&#8216;What is beauty&#8217;? he asks. &#8216;It is the unity of
+the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse.&#8217; So
+of Dante: &#8216;There is a total impression of infinity;
+the wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in
+an inner feeling of totality and absolute being.&#8217;
+Again, of the <i>Paradise Lost</i>: &#8216;It has the totality
+of the poem as distinguished from the <i>ab ovo</i> birth
+and parentage or straight line of history.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>That exaggerated inwardness is barren. Here,
+too, Coleridge&#8217;s thoughts require to be thawed, to
+be set in motion. He is admirable in the detection,
+the analysis, and statement of a few of the highest
+general laws of art-production. But he withdraws
+us too far from what we can see, hear, and
+feel. Doubtless, the idea, the intellectual element,
+is the spirit and life of art. Still, art is the triumph
+of the senses and the emotions; and the senses and
+the emotions must not be cheated of their triumph
+after all. That strange and beautiful psychology
+which he employs, with its evanescent delicacies,
+has not sufficient corporeity. Again, one feels that
+the discussion about Hartley, meeting us in the way,
+throws a tone of insecurity over the critical theory
+which it introduces. Its only effect is to win for
+the terms in which that criticism is expressed, the
+associations of one side in a metaphysical controversy.</p>
+
+<p>The vagueness and fluidity of Coleridge&#8217;s theological
+opinions have been exaggerated through an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_521" id="Page_521">[521]</a></span>
+illusion, which has arisen from the occasional form
+in which they have reached us. Criticism, then,
+has to methodize and focus them. They may be
+arranged under three heads; the general principles
+of supernaturalism, orthodox dogmas, the interpretation
+of Scripture. With regard to the first
+and second, Coleridge ranks as a Conservative
+thinker; but his principles of Scriptural interpretation
+resemble Lessing&#8217;s; they entitle him to be
+regarded as the founder of the modern liberal
+school of English theology. By supernaturalism
+is meant the theory of a divine person in immediate
+communication with the human mind, dealing
+with it out of that order of nature which includes
+man&#8217;s body and his ordinary trains of thought,
+according to fixed laws, which the theologian sums
+up in the doctrines of &#8216;grace&#8217; and &#8216;sin&#8217;. Of this
+supernaturalism, the <i>Aids to Reflection</i> attempts
+to give a metaphysical proof. The first necessity
+of the argument is to prove that religion, with its
+supposed experiences of grace and sin, and the
+realities of a world above the world of sense, is the
+fulfilment of the constitution of every man, or,
+in the language of the &#8216;philosophy of nature&#8217;, is
+part of the &#8216;idea&#8217; of man; so that, when those
+experiences are absent, all the rest of his nature
+is unexplained, like some enigmatical fragment,
+the construction and working of which we cannot
+surmise. According to Schelling&#8217;s principle,
+the explanation of every phase of life is to be
+sought in that next above it. This axiom is
+applied to three supposed stages of man&#8217;s reflective
+life: Prudence, Morality, Religion. Prudence, by
+which Coleridge means something like Bentham&#8217;s
+&#8216;enlightened principle of self-preservation&#8217;, is, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_522" id="Page_522">[522]</a></span>
+says, an inexplicable instinct, a blind motion in the
+dark, until it is expanded into morality. Morality,
+again, is but a groundless prepossession until transformed
+into a religious recognition of a spiritual
+world, until, as Coleridge says in his rich figurative
+language, &#8216;like the main feeder into some majestic
+lake, rich with hidden springs of its own, it flows
+into, and becomes one with, the spiritual life.&#8217; A
+spiritual life, then, being the fulfilment of human
+nature, implied, if we see clearly, in those instincts
+which enable one to live on from day to day, is
+part of the &#8216;idea&#8217; of man.</p>
+
+<p>The second necessity of the argument is to prove
+that &#8216;the idea&#8217;, according to the principle of the
+&#8216;philosophy of nature&#8217;, is an infallible index of the
+actual condition of the world without us. Here
+Coleridge introduces an analogy:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In the world, we see everywhere evidences of a unity,
+which the component parts are so far from explaining, that
+they necessarily presuppose it as the cause and condition
+of their existing as those parts, or even of their existing at
+all. This antecedent unity, or cause and principle of each
+union, it has, since the time of Bacon and Kepler, been
+customary to call a law. This crocus for instance; or any
+other flower the reader may have before his sight, or choose
+to bring before his fancy; that the root, stem, leaves, petals,
+&amp;c., cohere to one plant is owing to an antecedent power or
+principle in the seed which existed before a single particle
+of the matters that constitute the size and visibility of the
+crocus had been attracted from the surrounding soil, air,
+and moisture. Shall we turn to the seed? there, too, the
+same necessity meets us: an antecedent unity must here,
+too, be supposed. Analyse the seeds with the finest tools,
+and let the solar microscope come in aid of your senses,
+what do you find?&mdash;means and instruments; a wondrous
+fairy tale of nature, magazines of food, stores of various
+sorts, pipes, spiracles, defences; a house of many chambers,
+and the owner and inhabitant invisible.</p>
+
+<p class="sig"><i>Aids to Reflection.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Nature, that is, works by what we may call<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_523" id="Page_523">[523]</a></span>
+&#8216;intact ideas&#8217;. It co-ordinates every part of the
+crocus to all the other parts; one stage of its
+growth to the whole process; and having framed
+its organism to assimilate certain external elements,
+it does not cheat it of those elements, soil, air,
+moisture. Well, if the &#8216;idea&#8217; of man is to be
+intact, he must be enveloped in a supernatural
+world; and nature always works by intact ideas.
+The spiritual life is the highest development of the
+idea of man; there must be a supernatural world
+corresponding to it.</p>
+
+<p>One finds, it is hard to say how many, difficulties
+in drawing Coleridge&#8217;s conclusion. To mention
+only one of them&mdash;the argument looks too like the
+exploded doctrine of final causes. Of course the
+crocus would not live unless the conditions of its
+life were supplied. The flower is made for soil, air,
+moisture, and it has them; just as man&#8217;s senses
+are made for a sensible world, and we have the
+sensible world. But give the flower the power of
+dreaming, nourish it on its own reveries, put man&#8217;s
+wild hunger of heart and susceptibility to <i>ennui</i> in
+it, and what indication of the laws of the world
+without it, would be afforded by its longing to
+break its bonds?</p>
+
+<p>In theology people are content with analogies,
+probabilities, with the empty schemes of arguments
+for which the data are still lacking; arguments, the
+rejection of which Coleridge tells us implies &#8216;an
+evil heart of unbelief&#8217;, but of which we might as
+truly say that they derive all their consistency
+from the peculiar atmosphere of the mind which
+receives them. Such arguments are received in
+theology because what chains men to a religion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_524" id="Page_524">[524]</a></span>
+is not its claim on their reason, their hopes or fears,
+but the glow it affords to the world, its &#8216;beau
+ideal&#8217;. Coleridge thinks that if we reject the
+supernatural, the spiritual element in life will
+evaporate also, that we shall have to accept a life
+with narrow horizons, without disinterestedness,
+harshly cut off from the springs of life in the past.
+But what is this spiritual element? It is the
+passion for inward perfection, with its sorrows, its
+aspirations, its joy. These mental states are the
+delicacies of the higher morality of the few, of
+Augustine, of the author of the &#8216;Imitation&#8217;, of
+Francis de Sales; in their essence they are only
+the permanent characteristics of the higher life.
+Augustine, or the author of the &#8216;Imitation&#8217;,
+agreeably to the culture of their age, had expressed
+them in the terms of a metaphysical theory, and
+expanded them into what theologians call the
+doctrines of grace and sin, the fluctuations of the
+union of the soul with its unseen friend. The life
+of those who are capable of a passion for perfection
+still produces the same mental states; but that
+religious expression of them is no longer congruous
+with the culture of the age. Still, all inward life
+works itself out in a few simple forms, and culture
+cannot go very far before the religious graces reappear
+in it in a subtilized intellectual shape.
+There are aspects of the religious character which
+have an artistic worth distinct from their religious
+import. Longing, a chastened temper, spiritual
+joy, are precious states of mind, not because they
+are part of man&#8217;s duty or because God has commanded
+them, still less because they are means of
+obtaining a reward, but because like culture itself
+they are remote, refined, intense, existing only by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_525" id="Page_525">[525]</a></span>
+the triumph of a few over a dead world of routine
+in which there is no lifting of the soul at all. If
+there is no other world, art in its own interest must
+cherish such characteristics as beautiful spectacles.
+Stephen&#8217;s face, &#8216;like the face of an angel,&#8217; has
+a worth of its own, even if the opened heaven is but
+a dream.</p>
+
+<p>Our culture, then, is not supreme, our intellectual
+life is incomplete, we fail of the intellectual throne,
+if we have no inward longing, inward chastening,
+inward joy. Religious belief, the craving for objects
+of belief, may be refined out of our hearts, but they
+must leave their sacred perfume, their spiritual sweetness
+behind. This law of the highest intellectual life
+has sometimes seemed hard to understand. Those
+who maintain the claims of the older and narrower
+forms of religious life against the claims of culture
+are often embarrassed at finding the intellectual
+life heated through with the very graces to which
+they would sacrifice it. How often in the higher
+class of theological writings&mdash;writings which really
+spring from an original religious genius, such as
+those of Dr. Newman&mdash;does the modern aspirant
+to perfect culture seem to find the expression of the
+inmost delicacies of his own life, the same yet
+different! The spiritualities of the Christian life
+have often drawn men on, little by little, into the
+broader spiritualities of systems opposed to it&mdash;pantheism,
+or positivism, or a philosophy of indifference.
+Many in our own generation, through religion,
+have become dead to religion. How often do we
+have to look for some feature of the ancient religious
+life, not in a modern saint, but in a modern
+artist or philosopher! For those who have passed
+out of Christianity, perhaps its most precious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_526" id="Page_526">[526]</a></span>
+souvenir is the ideal of a transcendental disinterestedness.
+Where shall we look for this ideal?
+In Spinoza; or perhaps in Bentham or in Austin.</p>
+
+<p>Some of those who have wished to save supernaturalism&mdash;as,
+for instance, Theodore Parker&mdash;have
+rejected more or less entirely the dogmas of
+the Church. Coleridge&#8217;s instinct is truer than
+theirs; the two classes of principles are logically
+connected. It was in defence of the dogmas of
+the Church that Coleridge elaborated his unhappy
+crotchet of the diversity of the reason from the
+understanding. The weakness of these dogmas
+had ever been, not so much a failure of the authority
+of Scripture or tradition in their favour, as their
+conflict with the reason that they were words
+rather than conceptions. That analysis of words
+and conceptions which in modern philosophy has
+been a principle of continual rejuvenescence with
+Descartes and Berkeley, as well as with Bacon and
+Locke, had desolated the field of scholastic theology.
+It is the rationality of the dogmas of that theology
+that Coleridge had a taste for proving.</p>
+
+<p>Of course they conflicted with the understanding,
+with the common daylight of the mind, but then
+might there not be some mental faculty higher than
+the understanding? The history of philosophy
+supplied many authorities for this opinion. Then,
+according to the &#8216;philosophy of nature&#8217;, science
+and art are both grounded upon the &#8216;ideas&#8217; of
+genius, which are a kind of intuition, which are
+their own evidence. Again, this philosophy was
+always saying the ideas of the mind must be true,
+must correspond to reality; and what an aid to
+faith is that, if one is not too nice in distinguishing
+between ideas and mere convictions, or prejudices,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_527" id="Page_527">[527]</a></span>
+or habitual views, or safe opinions! Kant also
+had made a distinction between the reason and the
+understanding. True, this harsh division of mental
+faculties is exactly what is most sterile in Kant, the
+essential tendency of the German school of thought
+being to show that the mind always acts <i>en masse</i>.
+Kant had defined two senses of reason as opposed
+to the understanding. First, there was the
+&#8216;speculative reason&#8217;, with its &#8216;three categories of
+totality&#8217;, God, the soul, and the universe&mdash;three
+mental forms which might give a sort of unity to
+science, but to which no actual intuition corresponded.
+The tendency of this part of Kant&#8217;s
+critique is to destroy the rational groundwork of
+theism. Then there was the &#8216;practical reason&#8217;,
+on the relation of which to the &#8216;speculative&#8217;, we may
+listen to Heinrich Heine:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8216;After the tragedy comes the farce. [The tragedy is
+Kant&#8217;s destructive criticism of the speculative reason.]
+So far Immanuel Kant has been playing the relentless
+philosopher; he has laid siege to heaven.&#8217; Heine goes on
+with some violence to describe the havoc Kant has made
+of the orthodox belief: &#8216;Old Lampe,<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a> with the umbrella
+under his arm, stands looking on much disturbed, perspiration
+and tears of sorrow running down his cheeks. Then
+Immanuel Kant grows pitiful, and shows that he is not only
+a great philosopher but also a good man. He considers
+a little; and then, half in good nature, half in irony, he says,
+&#8220;Old Lampe must have a god, otherwise the poor man will
+not be happy; but man ought to be happy in this life,
+the practical reason says that; let the practical reason
+stand surety for the existence of a god; it is all the same
+to me.&#8221; Following this argument, Kant distinguishes
+between the theoretical and the practical reason, and, with
+the practical reason for a magic wand, he brings to life the
+dead body of deism, which the theoretical reason had
+slain.&#8217;</p></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_528" id="Page_528">[528]</a></span></p>
+<p>Coleridge first confused the speculative reason
+with the practical, and then exaggerated the variety
+and the sphere of their combined functions. Then
+he has given no consistent definition of the reason.
+It is &#8216;the power of universal and necessary convictions&#8217;;
+it is &#8216;the knowledge of the laws of
+the whole considered as one&#8217;; it is &#8216;the science of
+all as a whole&#8217;. Again, the understanding is &#8216;the
+faculty judging according to sense&#8217;, or &#8216;the
+faculty of means to mediate ends&#8217;; and so on.
+The conception floating in his mind seems to have
+been a really valuable one; that, namely, of a distinction
+between an organ of adequate and an
+organ of inadequate ideas. But when we find him
+casting about for a definition, not precisely determining
+the functions of the reason, making long
+preparations for the &#8216;deduction&#8217; of the faculty, as
+in the third column of <i>The Friend</i>, but never
+actually starting, we suspect that the reason is
+a discovery in psychology which Coleridge has
+a good will to make, and that is all; that he has
+got no farther than the old vague desire to escape
+from the limitations of thought by some extraordinary
+mystical faculty. Some of the clergy
+eagerly welcomed the supposed discovery. In
+their difficulties they had often appealed in the old
+simple way to sentiment and emotion as of higher
+authority than the understanding, and on the
+whole had had to get on with very little philosophy.
+Like M. Jourdain, they were amazed to find that
+they had been all the time appealing to the reason;
+now they might actually go out to meet the enemy.
+Orthodoxy might be cured by a hair of the dog that
+had bitten it.</p>
+
+<p>Theology is a great house, scored all over with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_529" id="Page_529">[529]</a></span>
+hieroglyphics by perished hands. When we
+decipher one of these hieroglyphics, we find in it
+the statement of a mistaken opinion; but knowledge
+has crept onward since the hand dropped
+from the wall; we no longer entertain the opinion,
+and we can trace the origin of the mistake. Dogmas
+are precious as memorials of a class of sincere
+and beautiful spirits, who in a past age of humanity
+struggled with many tears, if not for true knowledge,
+yet for a noble and elevated happiness.
+That struggle is the substance, the dogma only its
+shadowy expression; received traditionally in an
+altered age, it is the shadow of a shadow, a mere
+&#964;&#961;&#8055;&#964;&#959;&#957; &#949;&#7988;&#948;&#969;&#955;&#959;&#957;, twice removed from substance
+and reality. The true method then in the treatment
+of dogmatic theology must be historical.
+Englishmen are gradually finding out how much
+that method has done since the beginning of modern
+criticism by the hands of such writers as Baur.
+Coleridge had many of the elements of this method:
+learning, inwardness, a subtle psychology, a dramatic
+power of sympathy with modes of thought
+other than his own. Often in carrying out his own
+method he gives the true historical origin of a
+dogma, but, with a strange dullness of the historical
+sense, he regards this as a reason for the existence
+of the dogma now, not merely as reason for its
+having existed in the past. Those historical
+elements he could not envisage in the historical
+method, because this method is only one of the
+applications, the most fruitful of them all, of the
+relative spirit.</p>
+
+<p>After Coleridge&#8217;s death, seven letters of his on
+the inspiration of Scripture were published, under
+the title of <i>Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_530" id="Page_530">[530]</a></span>
+This little book has done more than any other of
+Coleridge&#8217;s writings to discredit his name with the
+orthodox. The frequent occurrence in it of the
+word &#8216;bibliolatry&#8217;, borrowed from Lessing, would
+sufficiently account for this pious hatred. From
+bibliolatry Coleridge was saved by the spiritualism,
+which, in questions less simple than that of the
+infallibility of Scripture, was so retarding to his
+culture. Bibliolators may remember that one
+who committed a kind of intellectual suicide by
+catching at any appearance of a fixed and absolute
+authority, never dreamed of resting on the authority
+of a book. His Schellingistic notion of the possibility
+of absolute knowledge, of knowing God, of
+a light within every man which might discover
+to him the doctrines of Christianity, tended to
+depreciate historical testimony, perhaps historical
+realism altogether. Scripture is a legitimate sphere
+for the understanding. He says, indeed, that there
+is more in the Bible that &#8216;finds&#8217; him than he has
+experienced in all other books put together. But
+still, &#8216;There is a Light higher than all, even the
+Word that was in the beginning. If between this
+Word and the written letter I shall anywhere seem
+to myself to find a discrepance, I will not conclude
+that such there actually is; nor on the other hand
+will I fall under the condemnation of them that
+would lie for God, but seek as I may, be thankful
+for what I have&mdash;and wait.&#8217; Coleridge is the
+inaugurator of that <i>via media</i> of Scriptural criticism
+which makes much of saving the word &#8216;inspiration&#8217;,
+while it attenuates its meaning; which supposes
+a sort of modified inspiration residing in the whole,
+not in the several parts. &#8216;The Scriptures were
+not dictated by an infallible intelligence;&#8217; nor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_531" id="Page_531">[531]</a></span>
+&#8216;the writers each and all divinely informed as well
+as inspired&#8217;. &#8216;They refer to other documents, and
+in all points express themselves as sober-minded
+and veracious writers under ordinary circumstances
+are known to do.&#8217; To make the Bible itself &#8216;the
+subject of a special article of faith, is an unnecessary
+and useless abstraction&#8217;.</p>
+
+<p>His judgement on the popular view of inspiration
+is severe. It is borrowed from the Cabbalists;
+it &#8216;petrifies at once the whole body of Holy Writ,
+with all its harmonies and symmetrical gradations;&mdash;turns
+it at once into a colossal Memnon&#8217;s head,
+a hollow passage for a voice, a voice that mocks
+the voices of many men, and speaks in their
+names, and yet is but one voice and the same;&mdash;and
+no man uttered it and never in a human heart
+was it conceived&#8217;. He presses very hard on the
+tricks of the &#8216;routiniers of desk and pulpit&#8217;;
+forced and fantastic interpretations; &#8216;the strange&mdash;in
+all other writings unexampled&mdash;practice of
+bringing together into logical dependency detached
+sentences from books composed at the distance of
+centuries, nay, sometimes a millennium, from each
+other, under different dispensations, and for different
+objects.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>Certainly he is much farther from bibliolatry
+than from the perfect freedom of the humanist
+interpreters. Still he has not freed himself from
+the notion of a sacred canon; he cannot regard the
+books of Scripture simply as fruits of the human
+spirit; his criticism is not entirely disinterested.
+The difficulties he finds are chiefly the supposed
+immoralities of Scripture; just those difficulties
+which fade away before the modern or relative
+spirit, which in the moral world, as in the physical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_532" id="Page_532">[532]</a></span>
+traces everywhere change, growth, development.
+Of historical difficulties, of those deeper moral
+difficulties which arise, for instance, from a consideration
+of the constitutional unveracity of the
+Oriental mind, he has no suspicion. He thinks
+that no book of the New Testament was composed
+so late as <small>A.D.</small> 120.</p>
+
+<p>Coleridge&#8217;s undeveloped opinions would be
+hardly worth stating except for the warning they
+afford against retarding compromises. In reading
+these letters one never doubts what Coleridge tells
+us of himself: &#8216;that he loved truth with an indescribable
+awe,&#8217; or, as he beautifully says, &#8216;that
+he would creep towards the light, even if the light
+had made its way through a rent in the wall of the
+temple.&#8217; And yet there is something sad in reading
+them by the light which twenty-five years have
+thrown back upon them. Taken as a whole, they
+contain a fallacy which a very ardent lover of truth
+might have detected.</p>
+
+<p>The Bible is not to judge the spirit, but the spirit
+the Bible. The Bible is to be treated as a literary
+product. Well, but that is a conditional, not an
+absolute principle&mdash;that is not, if we regard it
+sincerely, a delivery of judgement, but only a suspension
+of it. If we are true to the spirit of that,
+we must wait patiently the complete result of
+modern criticism. Coleridge states that the
+authority of Scripture is on its trial&mdash;that at
+present it is not known to be an absolute resting-place;
+and then, instead of leaving that to aid in
+the formation of a fearless spirit, the spirit which,
+for instance, would accept the results of M. Renan&#8217;s
+investigations, he turns it into a false security by
+anticipating the judgement of an undeveloped<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_533" id="Page_533">[533]</a></span>
+criticism. Twenty-five years of that criticism
+have gone by, and have hardly verified the
+anticipation.</p>
+
+<p>The man of science asks, Are absolute principles
+attainable? What are the limits of knowledge?
+The answer he receives from science itself is not
+ambiguous. What the moralist asks is, Shall we
+gain or lose by surrendering human life to the
+relative spirit? Experience answers, that the
+dominant tendency of life is to turn ascertained
+truth into a dead letter&mdash;to make us all the
+phlegmatic servants of routine. The relative
+spirit, by dwelling constantly on the more fugitive
+conditions or circumstances of things, breaking
+through a thousand rough and brutal classifications,
+and giving elasticity to inflexible principles,
+begets an intellectual finesse, of which the ethical
+result is a delicate and tender justness in the criticism
+of human life. Who would gain more than
+Coleridge by criticism in such a spirit? We know
+how his life has appeared when judged by absolute
+standards. We see him trying to apprehend the
+absolute, to stereotype one form of faith, to attain,
+as he says, &#8216;fixed principles&#8217; in politics, morals,
+and religion; to fix one mode of life as the essence
+of life, refusing to see the parts as parts only; and
+all the time his own pathetic history pleads for
+a more elastic moral philosophy than his, and
+cries out against every formula less living and
+flexible than life itself.</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;From his childhood he hungered for eternity.&#8217;
+After all, that is the incontestable claim of Coleridge.
+The perfect flower of any elementary type of life
+must always be precious to humanity, and Coleridge
+is the perfect flower of the romantic type. More<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_534" id="Page_534">[534]</a></span>
+than Childe Harold, more than Werther, more
+than Ren&eacute;, Coleridge, by what he did, what he was,
+and what he failed to do, represents that inexhaustible
+discontent, languor, and home-sickness,
+the chords of which ring all through our modern
+literature. Criticism may still discuss the claims
+of classical and romantic art, or literature, or
+sentiment; and perhaps one day we may come to
+forget the horizon, with full knowledge to be content
+with what is here and now; and that is the
+essence of classical feeling. But by us of the
+present moment, by us for whom the Greek spirit,
+with its engaging naturalness, simple, chastened,
+debonair,&#964;&#961;&#965;&#966;&#8134;&#962;, &#7937;&#946;&#961;&#8057;&#964;&#951;&#964;&#959;&#962;, &#967;&#955;&#953;&#948;&#8134;&#962;, &#967;&#945;&#961;&#8055;&#964;&#969;&#957;, &#7985;&#956;&#8051;&#961;&#959;&#965; &#960;&#8057;&#952;&#959;&#965; &#960;&#945;&#964;&#8053;&#961;,
+is itself the Sangraal of an endless
+pilgrimage, Coleridge, with his passion for the
+absolute, for something fixed where all is moving,
+his faintness, his broken memory, his intellectual
+disquiet, may still be ranked among the interpreters
+of one of the constituent elements of our
+life.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> Preface to the <i>Excursion</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> Biographical Supplement to <i>Biographia Literaria</i>,
+chap. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> Esemplastic.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> The servant who attended Kant in his walks.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h2><a name="RALPH_WALDO_EMERSON" id="RALPH_WALDO_EMERSON"></a>RALPH WALDO EMERSON<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_535" id="Page_535">[535]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1803-1882</h3>
+
+<h3>SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET. 1850.</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Great</span> men are more distinguished by range and
+extent than by originality. If we require the
+originality which consists in weaving, like a spider,
+their web from their own bowels; in finding clay,
+and making bricks, and building the house; no
+great men are original. Nor does valuable originality
+consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
+is in the press of knights, and the thick of events;
+and, seeing what men want, and sharing their
+desire, he adds the needful length of sight and of
+arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest
+genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no
+rattlebrain, saying what comes uppermost, and,
+because he says everything, saying, at last, something
+good; but a heart in unison with his time
+and country. There is nothing whimsical and
+fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad
+earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions,
+and pointed with the most determined aim which
+any man or class knows of in his times.</p>
+
+<p>The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals,
+and will not have any individual great, except
+through the general. There is no choice to genius.
+A great man does not wake up on some fine morning,
+and say, &#8216;I am full of life, I will go to sea, and
+find an Antarctic continent: to-day I will square<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_536" id="Page_536">[536]</a></span>
+the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new
+food for man: I have a new architecture in my
+mind: I foresee a new mechanic power:&#8217; no, but
+he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and
+events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities
+of his contemporaries. He stands where all the
+eyes of men look one way, and their hands all
+point in the direction in which he should go. The
+church has reared him amidst rites and pomps,
+and he carries out the advice which her music gave
+him, and builds a cathedral needed by her chants
+and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates
+him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters
+the instruction. He finds two counties groping to
+bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of production
+to the place of consumption, and he hits
+on a railroad. Every master has found his material
+collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with
+his people, and in his love of the materials he
+wrought in. What an economy of power! and
+what a compensation for the shortness of life!
+All is done to his hand. The world has brought
+him thus far on his way. The human race has
+gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows,
+and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets,
+artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he
+enters into their labours. Choose any other thing,
+out of the line of tendency, out of the national
+feeling and history, and he would have all to do
+for himself; his powers would be expended in the
+first preparations. Great genial power, one would
+almost say, consists in not being original at all;
+in being altogether receptive; in letting the world
+do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass
+unobstructed through the mind.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_537" id="Page_537">[537]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare&#8217;s youth fell in a time when the
+English people were importunate for dramatic
+entertainments. The court took offence easily at
+political allusions, and attempted to suppress
+them. The Puritans, a growing and energetic
+party, and the religious among the Anglican church,
+would suppress them. But the people wanted them.
+Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extemporaneous
+enclosures at country fairs, were the ready
+theatres of strolling players. The people had
+tasted this new joy; and, as we could not hope
+to suppress newspapers now,&mdash;no, not by the
+strongest party,&mdash;neither then could king, prelate,
+or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ,
+which was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture,
+punch, and library, at the same time. Probably
+king, prelate, and puritan, all found their own
+account in it. It had become, by all causes, a
+national interest,&mdash;by no means conspicuous, so
+that some great scholar would have thought of
+treating it in an English history,&mdash;but not a whit
+less considerable, because it was cheap, and of no
+account, like a baker&#8217;s shop. The best proof of its
+vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly
+broke into this field: Kyd, Marlowe, Greene,
+Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood,
+Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont,
+and Fletcher.</p>
+
+<p>The secure possession, by the stage, of the public
+mind, is of the first importance to the poet who
+works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments.
+Here is audience and expectation prepared. In
+the case of Shakespeare, there is much more. At
+the time when he left Stratford, and went up to
+London, a great body of stage-plays, of all dates<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_538" id="Page_538">[538]</a></span>
+and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in
+turn produced on the boards. Here is the Tale
+of Troy, which the audience will bear hearing some
+part of every week; the Death of Julius C&aelig;sar,
+and other stories out of Plutarch, which they never
+tire of; a shelf full of English history, from the
+chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the royal
+Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string
+of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish
+voyages, which all the London prentices know.
+All the mass has been treated, with more or less
+skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has
+the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now
+no longer possible to say who wrote them first.
+They have been the property of the Theatre so
+long, and so many rising geniuses have enlarged
+or altered them, inserting a speech, or a whole
+Scene, or adding a song, that no man can any
+longer claim copyright in this work of numbers.
+Happily, no man wishes to. They are not yet
+desired in that way. We have few readers, many
+spectators and hearers. They had best lie where
+they are.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare, in common with his comrades,
+esteemed the mass of old plays, waste stock, in
+which any experiment could be freely tried. Had
+the <i>prestige</i> which hedges about a modern tragedy
+existed, nothing could have been done. The rude
+warm blood of the living England circulated in
+the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which
+he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The
+poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which
+he may work, and which, again, may restrain his
+art within the due temperance. It holds him to
+the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_539" id="Page_539">[539]</a></span>
+and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand,
+leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the
+audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet
+owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the
+temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in Greece, grew
+up in subordination to architecture. It was the
+ornament of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief
+carved on pediments, then the relief became bolder,
+and a head or arm was projected from the wall,
+the groups being still arranged with reference
+to the building, which serves also as a frame to
+hold the figures; and when, at last, the greatest
+freedom of style and treatment was reached, the
+prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a
+certain calmness and continence in the statue.
+As soon as the statue was begun for itself, and
+with no reference to the temple or palace, the art
+began to decline; freak, extravagance, and exhibition,
+took the place of the old temperance. This
+balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture,
+the perilous irritability of poetic talent
+found in the accumulated dramatic materials to
+which the people were already wonted, and which
+had a certain excellence which no single genius,
+however extraordinary, could hope to create.</p>
+
+<p>In point of fact, it appears that Shakespeare did
+owe debts in all directions, and was able to use
+whatever he found; and the amount of indebtedness
+may be inferred from Malone&#8217;s laborious computations
+in regard to the First, Second, and Third
+parts of <i>Henry VI</i>, in which, &#8216;out of 6043 lines,
+1771 were written by some author preceding
+Shakespeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation
+laid by his predecessors; and 1899 were entirely
+his own.&#8217; And the proceeding investigation hardly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_540" id="Page_540">[540]</a></span>
+leaves a single drama of his absolute invention.
+Malone&#8217;s sentence is an important piece of external
+history. In <i>Henry VIII</i>, I think I see plainly the
+cropping out of the original rock on which his own
+finer stratum was laid. The first play was written
+by a superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear.
+I can mark his lines, and know well their cadence.
+See Wolsey&#8217;s soliloquy, and the following scene
+with Cromwell, where,&mdash;instead of the metre of
+Shakespeare, whose secret is, that the thought
+constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense
+will best bring out the rhythm,&mdash;here the lines are
+constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even
+a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play contains,
+through all its length, unmistakable traits of
+Shakespeare&#8217;s hand, and some passages, as the
+account of the coronation, are like autographs.
+What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth
+is in the bad rhythm.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a
+better fable than any invention can. If he lost
+any credit of design, he augmented his resources;
+and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality
+was not so much pressed. There was no
+literature for the million. The universal reading,
+the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet,
+who appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his
+sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating.
+Every intellectual jewel, every flower of sentiment,
+it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he
+comes to value his memory equally with his invention.
+He is therefore little solicitous whence his
+thoughts have been derived; whether through
+translation, whether through tradition, whether
+by travel in distant countries, whether by inspiration;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_541" id="Page_541">[541]</a></span>
+from whatever source, they are equally
+welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he
+borrows very near home. Other men say wise
+things as well as he; only they say a good many
+foolish things, and do not know when they have
+spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true
+stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he finds
+it. Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps;
+of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was
+their wit. And they are librarians and historiographers,
+as well as poets. Each romancer was
+heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales of the
+world,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Presenting Thebes&#8217; and Pelops&#8217; line,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the tale of Troy divine.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all
+our early literature; and, more recently, not only
+Pope and Dryden have been beholden to him, but,
+in the whole society of English writers, a large
+unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is
+charmed with the opulence which feeds so many
+pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.
+Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through
+Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di Colonna,
+whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in
+turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid,
+and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the
+Proven&ccedil;al poets are his benefactors: the <i>Romaunt
+of the Rose</i> is only judicious translation from
+William of Lorris and John of Meun: <i>Troilus and
+Creseide</i>, from Lollius of Urbino: <i>The Cock and
+the Fox</i>, from the <i>Lais</i> of Marie: <i>The House of
+Fame</i>, from the French or Italian: and poor
+Gower he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_542" id="Page_542">[542]</a></span>
+stone-quarry, out of which to build his house. He
+steals by this apology; that what he takes has no
+worth where he finds it, and the greatest where he
+leaves it. It has come to be practically a sort of
+rule in literature, that a man, having once shown
+himself capable of original writing, is entitled
+thenceforth to steal from the writings of others
+at discretion. Thought is the property of him who
+can entertain it; and of him who can adequately
+place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use
+of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we have
+learned what to do with them, they become our
+own.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker
+is retrospective. The learned member of the
+legislature at Westminster or at Washington,
+speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the
+constituency, and the now invisible channels by
+which the senator is made aware of their wishes,
+the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by
+correspondence or conversation, are feeding him
+with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates, and it
+will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of
+something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert
+Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau
+think for thousands; and so there were fountains
+all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from
+which they drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions,
+proverbs,&mdash;all perished,&mdash;which, if seen,
+would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard
+speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched
+by any companion? The appeal is to
+the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last
+in his breast a Delphi whereof to ask concerning
+any thought or thing, whether it be verily so, yea<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_543" id="Page_543">[543]</a></span>
+or nay? and to have answer, and to rely on that?
+All the debts which such a man could contract to
+other wit, would never disturb his consciousness
+of originality: for the ministrations of books, and
+of other minds, are a whiff of smoke to that most
+private reality with which he has conversed.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to see that what is best written or done
+by genius, in the world, was no man&#8217;s work, but
+came by wide social labour, when a thousand
+wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our
+English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the
+strength and music of the English language. But
+it was not made by one man, or at one time; but
+centuries and churches brought it to perfection;
+There never was a time when there was not some
+translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its
+energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of
+ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and
+forms of the Catholic church,&mdash;these collected, too,
+in long periods, from the prayers and meditations
+of every saint and sacred writer, all over the world.
+Grotius makes the like remark in respect to the
+Lord&#8217;s Prayer, that the single clauses of which it
+is composed were already in use, in the time of
+Christ, in the rabbinical forms. He picked out
+the grains of gold. The nervous language of the
+Common Law, the impressive forms of our courts,
+and the precision and substantial truth of the
+legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the
+sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived
+in the countries where these laws govern. The
+translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being
+translation on translation. There never was a
+time when there was none. All the truly idiomatic
+and national phrases are kept, and all others<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_544" id="Page_544">[544]</a></span>
+successively picked out, and thrown away. Something
+like the same process had gone on, long
+before, with the originals of these books. The
+world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas,
+&AElig;sop&#8217;s Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad,
+Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work
+of single men. In the composition of such works,
+the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason,
+the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop,
+all think for us. Every book supplies its time with
+one good word; every municipal law, every trade,
+every folly of the day, and the generic catholic
+genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his
+originality to the originality of all, stands with the
+next age as the recorder and embodiment of his
+own.</p>
+
+<p>We have to thank the researches of antiquaries,
+and the Shakespeare Society, for ascertaining the
+steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries
+celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the
+final detachment from the church, and the completion
+of secular plays, from <i>Ferrex and Porrex</i>,
+and <i>Gammer Gurton&#8217;s Needle</i>, down to the possession
+of the stage by the very pieces which Shakespeare
+altered, remodelled, and finally made his
+own. Elated with success, and piqued by the
+growing interest of the problem, they have left no
+bookstall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened,
+no file of old yellow accounts to decompose in
+damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover
+whether the boy Shakespeare poached or not,
+whether he held horses at the theatre door, whether
+he kept school, and why he left in his will only his
+second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.</p>
+
+<p>There is somewhat touching in the madness with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_545" id="Page_545">[545]</a></span>
+which the passing age mischooses the object on
+which all candles shine, and all eyes are turned;
+the care with which it registers every trifle touching
+Queen Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes,
+Leicesters, Burleighs, and Buckinghams; and lets
+pass without a single valuable note the founder of
+another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor
+dynasty to be remembered,&mdash;the man who carries
+the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which
+feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost
+people of the world are now for some ages to be
+nourished, and minds to receive this and not
+another bias. A popular player,&mdash;nobody suspected
+he was the poet of the human race; and the secret
+was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual
+men, as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon,
+who took the inventory of the human understanding
+for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben
+Jonson, though we have strained his few words
+of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the
+elastic fame whose first vibrations he was attempting.
+He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded
+to him generous, and esteemed himself, out
+of all question, the better poet of the two.</p>
+
+<p>If it need wit to know wit, according to the
+proverb, Shakespeare&#8217;s time should be capable
+of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born
+four years after Shakespeare, and died twenty-three
+years after him; and I find, among his
+correspondents and acquaintances, the following
+persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir
+Philip Sidney, Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir
+Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane,
+Izaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley,
+Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_546" id="Page_546">[546]</a></span>
+Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi,
+Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of
+his having communicated, without enumerating
+many others, whom doubtless he saw,&mdash;Shakespeare,
+Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two
+Herberts, Marlowe, Chapman, and the rest. Since
+the constellation of great men who appeared in
+Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never
+any such society; yet their genius failed them to
+find out the best head in the universe. Our poet&#8217;s
+mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the
+mountain near. It took a century to make it suspected;
+and not until two centuries had passed,
+after his death, did any criticism which we think
+adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to
+write the history of Shakespeare till now; for he
+is the father of German literature: it was on the
+introduction of Shakespeare into German, by
+Lessing, and the translation of his works by
+Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of
+German literature was most intimately connected.
+It was not until the nineteenth century, whose
+speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that
+the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering
+readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought
+are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon
+beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our ears
+are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge
+and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed
+our convictions with any adequate fidelity; but
+there is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation
+of his superlative power and beauty, which, like
+Christianity, qualifies the period.</p>
+
+<p>The Shakespeare Society have inquired in all
+directions, advertised the missing facts, offered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_547" id="Page_547">[547]</a></span>
+money for any information that will lead to proof;
+and with what result? Beside some important
+illustration of the history of the English stage, to
+which I have adverted, they have gleaned a few
+facts touching the property, and dealings in regard
+to property, of the poet. It appears that, from
+year to year, he owned a larger share in the
+Blackfriars Theatre: its wardrobe and other
+appurtenances were his; that he bought an estate
+in his native village, with his earnings, as writer
+and shareholder; that he lived in the best house
+in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbours with
+their commissions in London, as of borrowing
+money, and the like; that he was a veritable
+farmer. About the time when he was writing
+<i>Macbeth</i>, he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court
+of Stratford, for thirty-five shillings, ten
+pence, for corn delivered to him at different times;
+and, in all respects, appears as a good husband,
+with no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He
+was a good-natured sort of man, an actor and
+shareholder in the theatre, not in any striking
+manner distinguished from other actors and
+managers. I admit the importance of this information.
+It was well worth the pains that have
+been taken to procure it.</p>
+
+<p>But whatever scraps of information concerning
+his condition these researches may have rescued,
+they can shed no light upon that infinite invention
+which is the concealed magnet of his attraction
+for us. We are very clumsy writers of history.
+We tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birthplace,
+schooling, schoolmates, earning of money,
+marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death;
+and when we have come to an end of this gossip,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_548" id="Page_548">[548]</a></span>
+no ray of relation appears between it and the
+goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped
+at random into the <i>Modern Plutarch</i> and read any
+other life there, it would have fitted the poems
+as well. It is the essence of poetry to spring, like
+the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible,
+to abolish the past, and refuse all history.
+Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier have wasted
+their oil. The famed theatres, Covent Garden,
+Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont, have vainly
+assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and
+Macready dedicate their lives to this genius; him
+they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The
+genius knows them not. The recitation begins;
+one golden word leaps out immortal from all this
+painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with
+invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I
+remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a
+famed performer, the pride of the English stage;
+and all I then heard, and all I now remember, of
+the tragedian, was that in which the tragedian
+had no part; simply, Hamlet&#8217;s question to the
+ghost:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">What may this mean,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Revisit&#8217;st thus the glimpses of the moon?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">That imagination which dilates the closet he
+writes in to the world&#8217;s dimension, crowds it with
+agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces the
+big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These
+tricks of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the
+green-room. Can any biography shed light on the
+localities into which the <i>Midsummer Night&#8217;s
+Dream</i> admits me? Did Shakespeare confide to
+any notary or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_549" id="Page_549">[549]</a></span>
+in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate
+creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of
+Scone Castle, the moonlight of Portia&#8217;s villa, &#8216;the
+antres vast and desarts idle&#8217; of Othello&#8217;s captivity,&mdash;where
+is the third cousin, or grand-nephew,
+the chancellor&#8217;s file of accounts, or private letter,
+that has kept one word of those transcendent
+secrets? In fine, in this drama, as in all great
+works of art,&mdash;in the Cyclopean architecture of
+Egypt and India; in the Phidian sculpture; the
+Gothic minsters; the Italian painting; the
+Ballads of Spain and Scotland;&mdash;the Genius draws
+up the ladder after him, when the creative age
+goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new age,
+which sees the works, and asks in vain for a
+history.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare;
+and even he can tell nothing, except to the
+Shakespeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive
+and sympathetic hour. He cannot step
+from off his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his
+inspirations. Read the antique documents extricated,
+analysed, and compared by the assiduous
+Dyce and Collier; and now read one of those
+skyey sentences,&mdash;aerolites,&mdash;which seem to have
+fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience,
+but the man within the breast, has accepted
+as words of fate; and tell me if they match; if
+the former account in any manner for the latter;
+or which gives the most historical insight into
+the man.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, though our external history is so meagre,
+yet with Shakespeare for biographer, instead of
+Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the information
+which is material, that which describes character<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_550" id="Page_550">[550]</a></span>
+and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet
+the man and deal with him, would most import
+us to know. We have his recorded convictions on
+those questions which knock for answer at every
+heart,&mdash;on life and death, on love, on wealth and
+poverty, on the prizes of life, and the ways whereby
+we come at them; on the characters of men, and
+the influences, occult and open, which affect their
+fortunes; and on those mysterious and demoniacal
+powers which defy our science, and which yet
+interweave their malice and their gift in our
+brightest hours. Who ever read the volume of the
+Sonnets, without finding that the poet had there
+revealed, under masks that are no masks to the
+intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the
+confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible,
+and, at the same time, the most intellectual of
+men? What trait of his private mind has he
+hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his
+ample pictures of the gentleman and the king,
+what forms and humanities pleased him; his
+delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality,
+in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let
+Antonio the merchant, answer for his great heart.
+So far from Shakespeare&#8217;s being the least known,
+he is the one person, in all modern history, known
+to us. What point of morals, of manners, of
+economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of
+the conduct of life, has he not settled? What
+mystery has he not signified his knowledge of?
+What office, or function, or district of man&#8217;s work,
+has he not remembered? What king has he not
+taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What
+maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy?
+What lover has he not outloved? What sage has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_551" id="Page_551">[551]</a></span>
+he not outseen? What gentleman has he not
+instructed in the rudeness of his behaviour?</p>
+
+<p>Some able and appreciating critics think no
+criticism on Shakespeare valuable, that does not
+rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is
+falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think
+as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but
+still think it secondary. He was a full man, who
+liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and
+images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next
+at hand. Had he been less, we should have had
+to consider how well he filled his place, how good
+a dramatist he was, and he is the best in the world.
+But it turns out, that what he has to say is of that
+weight as to withdraw some attention from the
+vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history
+is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and
+prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into
+proverbs; so that the occasion which gave the
+saint&#8217;s meaning the form of a conversation, or of
+a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial, compared
+with the universality of its application. So
+it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of
+life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music:
+he wrote the text of modern life; the text of
+manners: he drew the man of England and
+Europe; the father of the man in America: he
+drew the man, and described the day, and what is
+done in it; he read the hearts of men and women,
+their probity, and their second thought, and wiles;
+the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which
+virtues and vices slide into their contraries: he
+could divide the mother&#8217;s part from the father&#8217;s
+part in the face of the child, or draw the fine
+demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_552" id="Page_552">[552]</a></span>
+laws of repression which make the police of nature;
+and all the sweets and all the terrors of human lot
+lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the landscape
+lies on the eye. And the importance of this
+wisdom of life sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic,
+out of notice. &#8217;Tis like making a question concerning
+the paper on which a king&#8217;s message is written.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare is as much out of the category of
+eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He
+is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably.
+A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato&#8217;s
+brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare&#8217;s.
+We are still out of doors. For executive
+faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No
+man can imagine it better. He was the farthest
+reach of subtlety compatible with an individual
+self,&mdash;the subtilest of authors, and only just within
+the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom
+of life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and
+of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his
+legend with form and sentiments, as if they were
+people who had lived under his roof; and few real
+men have left such distinct characters as these
+fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet as
+it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him into
+an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An
+omnipresent humanity co-ordinates all his faculties.
+Give a man of talents a story to tell, and
+his partiality will presently appear. He has certain
+observations, opinions, topics, which have some
+accidental prominence, and which he disposes all
+to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves that
+other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing,
+but his fitness and strength. But Shakespeare has
+no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_553" id="Page_553">[553]</a></span>
+duly given; no veins, no curiosities: no cow-painter,
+no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he
+has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells
+greatly; the small, subordinately. He is wise
+without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as
+nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain
+slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she
+floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do
+the one as the other. This makes that equality of
+power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs;
+a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous
+of the perception of other readers.</p>
+
+<p>This power of expression, or of transferring the
+inmost truth of things into music and verse, makes
+him the type of the poet, and has added a new
+problem to metaphysics. This is that which
+throws him into natural history, as a main production
+of the globe, and as announcing new eras
+and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his
+poetry without loss or blur; he could paint the
+fine with precision, the great with compass; the
+tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any
+distortion or favour. He carried his powerful
+execution into minute details, to a hair point;
+finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he
+draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature&#8217;s,
+will bear the scrutiny of the solar microscope.</p>
+
+<p>In short, he is the chief example to prove that
+more or less of production, more or fewer pictures,
+is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make
+one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one
+flower etch its image on his plate of iodine;
+and then proceeds at leisure to etch a million.
+There are always objects; but there was never
+representation. Here is perfect representation, at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_554" id="Page_554">[554]</a></span>
+last; and now let the world of figures sit for their
+portraits. No recipe can be given for the making
+of a Shakespeare; but the possibility of the
+translation of things into song is demonstrated.</p>
+
+<p>His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece.
+The sonnets, though their excellence is lost in the
+splendour of the dramas, are as inimitable as they;
+and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of the
+piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable
+person, so is this a speech of poetic beings, and any
+clause as unproducible now as a whole poem.</p>
+
+<p>Though the speeches in the plays, and single
+lines, have a beauty which tempts the ear to pause
+on them for their euphuism, yet the sentence is so
+loaded with meaning, and so linked with its foregoers
+and followers, that the logician is satisfied.
+His means are as admirable as his ends; every
+subordinate invention, by which he helps himself
+to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem
+too. He is not reduced to dismount and walk,
+because his horses are running off with him in
+some distant direction: he always rides.</p>
+
+<p>The finest poetry was first experience: but the
+thought has suffered a transformation since it was
+an experience. Cultivated men often attain a good
+degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy to
+read, through their poems, their personal history:
+any one acquainted with parties can name every
+figure: this is Andrew, and that is Rachel. The
+sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with
+wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the poet&#8217;s mind,
+the fact has gone quite over into the new element
+of thought, and has lost all that is exuvial. This
+generosity abides with Shakespeare. We say, from
+the truth and closeness of his pictures, that he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_555" id="Page_555">[555]</a></span>
+knows the lesson by heart. Yet there is not a trace
+of egotism.</p>
+
+<p>One more royal trait properly belongs to the
+poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no
+man can be a poet,&mdash;for beauty is his aim. He loves
+virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace: he
+delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the
+lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the
+spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe.
+Epicurus relates that poetry hath such charms
+that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake
+of them. And the true bards have been noted for
+their firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies in
+sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi
+says, &#8216;It was rumoured abroad that I was penitent;
+but what had I to do with repentance?&#8217; Not less
+sovereign and cheerful,&mdash;much more sovereign and
+cheerful, is the tone of Shakespeare. His name
+suggests joy and emancipation to the heart of
+men. If he should appear in any company of
+human souls, who would not march in his troop?
+He touches nothing that does not borrow health
+and longevity from his festal style.</p>
+
+
+<p class="newsection">And now, how stands the account of man with
+this bard and benefactor, when in solitude, shutting
+our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we seek
+to strike the balance? Solitude has austere lessons;
+it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets;
+and it weighs Shakespeare also, and finds him to
+share the halfness and imperfection of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the
+splendour of meaning that plays over the visible
+world; knew that a tree had another use than for
+apples, and corn another than for meal, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_556" id="Page_556">[556]</a></span>
+ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that
+these things bore a second and finer harvest to the
+mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying
+in all their natural history a certain mute
+commentary on human life. Shakespeare employed
+them as colours to compose his picture. He rested
+in their beauty; and never took the step which
+seemed inevitable to such genius, namely, to
+explore the virtue which resides in these symbols,
+and imparts this power,&mdash;What is that which they
+themselves say? He converted the elements,
+which waited on his command, into entertainments.
+He was master of the revels to mankind.
+Is it not as if one should have, through majestic
+powers of science, the comets given into his hand,
+or the planets and their moons, and should draw
+them from their orbits to glare with the municipal
+fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all
+towns, &#8216;very superior pyrotechny this evening!&#8217;
+Are the agents of nature, and the power to understand
+them, worth no more than a street serenade,
+or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again
+the trumpet-text in the Koran,&mdash;&#8216;The heavens
+and the earth, and all that is between them, think
+ye we have created them in jest?&#8217; As long as the
+question is of talent and mental power, the world
+of men has not his equal to show. But when the
+question is to life, and its materials, and its auxiliaries,
+how does he profit me? What does it
+signify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer
+Night&#8217;s Dream, or a Winter Evening&#8217;s Tale: what
+signifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian
+verdict of the Shakespeare Societies comes to
+mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I
+cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_557" id="Page_557">[557]</a></span>
+men have led lives in some sort of keeping
+with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast.
+Had he been less, had he reached only the
+common measure of great authors, of Bacon,
+Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the fact
+in the twilight of human fate: but, that this man
+of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new
+and larger subject than had ever existed, and
+planted the standard of humanity some furlongs
+forward into Chaos,&mdash;that he should not be wise for
+himself,&mdash;it must even go into the world&#8217;s history,
+that the best poet led an obscure and profane life,
+using his genius for the public amusement.</p>
+
+<p>Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite,
+German, and Swede, beheld the same objects:
+they also saw through them that which was contained.
+And to what purpose? The beauty
+straightway vanished; they read commandments,
+all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation,
+a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and
+life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim&#8217;s progress,
+a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories
+of Adam&#8217;s fall and curse, behind us; with
+doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires before
+us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the
+listener sank in them.</p>
+
+<p>It must be conceded that these are half-views of
+half-men. The world still wants its poet-priest, a
+reconciler, who shall not trifle with Shakespeare
+the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg
+the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and
+act, with equal inspiration. For knowledge will
+brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful
+than private affection; and love is compatible
+with universal wisdom.</p>
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="JAMES_RUSSELL_LOWELL" id="JAMES_RUSSELL_LOWELL"></a>JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_558" id="Page_558">[558]</a></span></h2>
+
+<h3>1819-1891</h3>
+
+<h3>WORDSWORTH (1875)</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A generation</span> has now passed away since
+Wordsworth was laid with the family in the churchyard
+at Grasmere. Perhaps it is hardly yet time
+to take a perfectly impartial measure of his value as
+a poet. To do this is especially hard for those who
+are old enough to remember the last shot which the
+foe was sullenly firing in that long war of critics
+which began when he published his manifesto as
+Pretender, and which came to a pause rather than
+end when they flung up their caps with the rest
+at his final coronation. Something of the intensity
+of the <i>odium theologicum</i> (if indeed the <i>aestheticum</i>
+be not in these days the more bitter of the two)
+entered into the conflict. The Wordsworthians
+were a sect, who, if they had the enthusiasm, had
+also not a little of the exclusiveness and partiality
+to which sects are liable. The verses of the master
+had for them the virtue of religious canticles
+stimulant of zeal and not amenable to the ordinary
+tests of cold-blooded criticism. Like the hymns
+of the Huguenots and Covenanters, they were songs
+of battle no less than of worship, and the combined
+ardours of conviction and conflict lent them a fire
+that was not naturally their own. As we read
+them now, that virtue of the moment is gone out of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_559" id="Page_559">[559]</a></span>
+them, and whatever of Dr. Wattsiness there is gives
+us a slight shock of disenchantment. It is something
+like the difference between the <i>Marseillaise</i> sung by
+armed propagandists on the edge of battle, or by
+Brissotins in the tumbrel, and the words of it read
+coolly in the closet, or recited with the factitious
+frenzy of Th&eacute;r&egrave;se. It was natural in the early days
+of Wordsworth&#8217;s career to dwell most fondly on
+those profounder qualities to appreciate which
+settled in some sort the measure of a man&#8217;s right
+to judge of poetry at all. But now we must admit
+the shortcomings, the failures, the defects, as no
+less essential elements in forming a sound judgement
+as to whether the seer and artist were so united
+in him as to justify the claim first put in by himself
+and afterwards maintained by his sect to a place
+beside the few great poets who exalt men&#8217;s minds,
+and give a right direction and safe outlet to their
+passions through the imagination, while insensibly
+helping them toward balance of character and
+serenity of judgement by stimulating their sense of
+proportion, form, and the nice adjustment of
+means to ends. In none of our poets has the
+constant propulsion of an unbending will, and the
+concentration of exclusive, if I must not say somewhat
+narrow, sympathies done so much to make
+the original endowment of nature effective, and in
+none accordingly does the biography throw so
+much light on the works, or enter so largely into
+their composition as an element whether of power
+or of weakness. Wordsworth never saw, and
+I think never wished to see, beyond the limits
+of his own consciousness and experience. He early
+conceived himself to be, and through life was confirmed
+by circumstances in the faith that he was,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_560" id="Page_560">[560]</a></span>
+a &#8216;dedicated spirit&#8217;,<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> a state of mind likely to
+further an intense but at the same time one-sided
+development of the intellectual powers. The
+solitude in which the greater part of his mature life
+was passed, while it doubtless ministered to the
+passionate intensity of his musings upon man and
+nature, was, it may be suspected, harmful to him
+as an artist, by depriving him of any standard of
+proportion outside himself by which to test the
+comparative value of his thoughts, and by rendering
+him more and more incapable of that urbanity
+of mind which could be gained only by commerce
+with men more nearly on his own level, and which
+gives tone without lessening individuality. Wordsworth
+never quite saw the distinction between the
+eccentric and the original. For what we call
+originality seems not so much anything peculiar,
+much less anything odd, but that quality in a man
+which touches human nature at most points of its
+circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness
+of our own powers by recalling and confirming
+our own unvalued sensations and perceptions, gives
+classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings,
+and adequate utterance to our own stammering
+conceptions or emotions. The poet&#8217;s office is to
+be a Voice, not of one crying in the wilderness to
+a knot of already magnetized acolytes, but singing
+amid the throng of men, and lifting their common
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_561" id="Page_561">[561]</a></span>aspirations and sympathies (so first clearly revealed
+to themselves) on the wings of his song to a purer
+ether and a wider reach of view. We cannot, if we
+would, read the poetry of Wordsworth as mere
+poetry; at every other page we find ourselves
+entangled in a problem of aesthetics. The world-old
+question of matter and form, of whether nectar
+<i>is</i> of precisely the same flavour when served to us
+from a Grecian chalice or from any jug of ruder
+pottery, comes up for decision anew. The Teutonic
+nature has always shown a sturdy preference of
+the solid bone with a marrow of nutritious moral
+to any shadow of the same on the flowing mirror
+of sense. Wordsworth never lets us long forget
+the deeply rooted stock from which he sprang,&mdash;<i>vien
+ben d&agrave; lui</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p class="newsection">William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth
+in Cumberland on the 7th of April, 1770, the
+second of five children. His father was John
+Wordsworth, an attorney-at-law, and agent of Sir
+James Lowther, afterwards first Earl of Lonsdale.
+His mother was Anne Cookson, the daughter of
+a mercer in Penrith. His paternal ancestors had
+been settled immemorially at Penistone in Yorkshire,
+whence his grandfather had emigrated to
+Westmorland. His mother, a woman of piety
+and wisdom, died in March 1778, being then in
+her thirty-second year. His father, who never
+entirely cast off the depression occasioned by her
+death, survived her but five years, dying in
+December 1783, when William was not quite
+fourteen years old.</p>
+
+<p>The poet&#8217;s early childhood was passed partly
+at Cockermouth, and partly with his maternal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_562" id="Page_562">[562]</a></span>
+grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher appears
+to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone&#8217;s
+Schoolmistress, who practised the memory
+of her pupils, teaching them chiefly by rote, and not
+endeavouring to cultivate their reasoning faculties,
+a process by which children are apt to be converted
+from natural logicians into impertinent sophists.
+Among his schoolmates here was Mary Hutchinson,
+who afterwards became his wife.</p>
+
+<p>In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by
+Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, in the year
+1585, at Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawkshead
+is a small market-town in the vale of Esthwaite,
+about a third of a mile north-west of the lake.
+Here Wordsworth passed nine years, among a people
+of simple habits and scenery of a sweet and pastoral
+dignity. His earliest intimacies were with the
+mountains, lakes, and streams of his native district,
+and the associations with which his mind was
+stored during its most impressible period were
+noble and pure. The boys were boarded among
+the dames of the village, thus enjoying a freedom
+from scholastic restraints, which could be nothing
+but beneficial in a place where the temptations were
+only to sports that hardened the body, while they
+fostered a love of nature in the spirit and habits of
+observation in the mind. Wordsworth&#8217;s ordinary
+amusements here were hunting and fishing, rowing,
+skating, and long walks around the lake and
+among the hills, with an occasional scamper on
+horseback.<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> His life as a schoolboy was favourable
+also to his poetic development, in being
+identified with that of the people among whom he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_563" id="Page_563">[563]</a></span>lived. Among men of simple habits, and where
+there are small diversities of condition, the feelings
+and passions are displayed with less restraint, and
+the young poet grew acquainted with that primal
+human basis of character where the Muse finds firm
+foothold, and to which he ever afterward cleared
+his way through all the overlying drift of conventionalism.
+The dalesmen were a primitive and
+hardy race who kept alive the traditions and often
+the habits of a more picturesque time. A common
+level of interests and social standing fostered unconventional
+ways of thought and speech, and friendly
+human sympathies. Solitude induced reflection,
+a reliance of the mind on its own resources, and
+individuality of character. Where everybody
+knew everybody, and everybody&#8217;s father had
+known everybody&#8217;s father, the interest of man in
+man was not likely to become a matter of cold
+hearsay and distant report. When death knocked
+at any door in the hamlet, there was an echo from
+every fireside, and a wedding dropped its white
+flowers at every threshold. There was not a grave
+in the churchyard but had its story; not a crag or
+glen or aged tree untouched with some ideal hue of
+legend. It was here that Wordsworth learned that
+homely humanity which gives such depth and
+sincerity to his poems. Travel, society, culture,
+nothing could obliterate the deep trace of that early
+training which enables him to speak directly to the
+primitive instincts of man. He was apprenticed
+early to the difficult art of being himself.</p>
+
+<p>At school he wrote some task-verses on subjects
+imposed by the master, and also some voluntaries
+of his own, equally undistinguished by any peculiar
+merit. But he seems to have made up his mind as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_564" id="Page_564">[564]</a></span>
+early as in his fourteenth year to become a poet.<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a>
+&#8216;It is recorded&#8217;, says his biographer vaguely, &#8216;that
+the poet&#8217;s father set him very early to learn portions
+of the best English poets by heart, so that at an
+early age he could repeat large portions of Shakespeare,
+Milton, and Spenser.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>The great event of Wordsworth&#8217;s schooldays was
+the death of his father, who left what may be
+called a hypothetical estate, consisting chiefly of
+claims upon the first Earl of Lonsdale, the payment
+of which, though their justice was acknowledged,
+that nobleman contrived in some unexplained way
+to elude so long as he lived. In October 1787 he
+left school for St. John&#8217;s College, Cambridge. He
+was already, we are told, a fair Latin scholar, and
+had made some progress in mathematics. The
+earliest books we hear of his reading were <i>Don
+Quixote</i>, <i>Gil Blas</i>, <i>Gulliver&#8217;s Travels</i>, and the <i>Tale
+of a Tub</i>; but at school he had also become
+familiar with the works of some English poets,
+particularly Goldsmith and Gray, of whose poems
+he had learned many by heart. What is more to
+the purpose, he had become, without knowing it,
+a lover of Nature in all her moods, and the same
+mental necessities of a solitary life which compel
+men to an interest in the transitory phenomena
+of scenery, had made him also studious of the
+movements of his own mind, and the mutual interaction
+and dependence of the external and internal
+universe.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless his early orphanage was not without
+its effect in confirming a character naturally impatient
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_565" id="Page_565">[565]</a></span>of control, and his mind, left to itself,
+clothed itself with an indigenous growth, which
+grew fairly and freely, unstinted by the shadow of
+exotic plantations. It has become a truism, that
+remarkable persons have remarkable mothers;
+but perhaps this is chiefly true of such as have
+made themselves distinguished by their industry,
+and by the assiduous cultivation of faculties in
+themselves of only an average quality. It is rather
+to be noted how little is known of the parentage of
+men of the first magnitude, how often they seem in
+some sort foundlings, and how early an apparently
+adverse destiny begins the culture of those who are
+to encounter and master great intellectual or
+spiritual experiences.</p>
+
+<p>Of his disposition as a child little is known, but
+that little is characteristic. He himself tells us
+that he was &#8216;stiff, moody, and of violent temper&#8217;.
+His mother said of him that he was the only one
+of her children about whom she felt any anxiety,&mdash;for
+she was sure that he would be remarkable for
+good or evil. Once, in resentment at some fancied
+injury, he resolved to kill himself, but his heart
+failed him. I suspect that few boys of passionate
+temperament have escaped these momentary suggestions
+of despairing helplessness. &#8216;On another
+occasion,&#8217; he says, &#8216;while I was at my grandfather&#8217;s
+house at Penrith, along with my eldest
+brother Richard, we were whipping tops together
+in the long drawing-room, on which the carpet was
+only laid down on particular occasions. The walls
+were hung round with family pictures, and I said to
+my brother, &#8220;Dare you strike your whip through
+that old lady&#8217;s petticoat?&#8221; He replied, &#8220;No, I
+won&#8217;t.&#8221; &#8220;Then,&#8221; said I, &#8220;here goes,&#8221; and I struck<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_566" id="Page_566">[566]</a></span>
+my lash through her hooped petticoat, for which,
+no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was properly
+punished. But, possibly from some want of judgement
+in punishments inflicted, I had become perverse
+and obstinate in defying chastisement, and
+rather proud of it than otherwise.&#8217; This last
+anecdote is as happily typical as a bit of Greek
+mythology which always prefigured the lives of
+heroes in the stories of their childhood. Just so do
+we find him afterward striking his defiant lash
+through the hooped petticoat of the artificial style
+of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the punishment
+of the Reviewers.</p>
+
+<p>Of his college life the chief record is to be found
+in <i>The Prelude</i>. He did not distinguish himself as
+a scholar, and if his life had any incidents, they were
+of that interior kind which rarely appear in biography,
+though they may be of controlling influence
+upon the life. He speaks of reading Chaucer,
+Spenser, and Milton while at Cambridge,<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> but no
+reflection from them is visible in his earliest
+published poems. The greater part of his vacations
+was spent in his native Lake-country, where
+his only sister, Dorothy, was the companion of
+his rambles. She was a woman of large natural
+endowments, chiefly of the receptive kind, and had
+much to do with the formation and tendency of the
+poet&#8217;s mind. It was she who called forth the shyer
+sensibilities of his nature, and taught an originally
+harsh and austere imagination to surround itself
+with fancy and feeling, as the rock fringes itself
+with a sun-spray of ferns. She was his first public,
+and belonged to that class of prophetically appreciative
+temperaments whose apparent office it is to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_567" id="Page_567">[567]</a></span>cheer the early solitude of original minds with
+messages from the future. Through the greater
+part of his life she continued to be a kind of poetical
+conscience to him.</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth&#8217;s last college vacation was spent in
+a foot journey upon the Continent (1790). In
+January 1791 he took his degree of B.A., and left
+Cambridge. During the summer of this year he
+visited Wales, and, after declining to enter upon
+holy orders under the plea that he was not of age
+for ordination, went over to France in November,
+and remained during the winter at Orleans. Here
+he became intimate with the republican General
+Beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations he
+ardently sympathized. In the spring of 1792
+he was at Blois, and returned thence to Orleans,
+which he finally quitted in October for Paris. He
+remained here as long as he could with safety, and
+at the close of the year went back to England, thus,
+perhaps, escaping the fate which soon after overtook
+his friends the Brissotins.</p>
+
+<p>As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be called
+a fortunate one, not less so in the training and
+expansion of his faculties was this period of his stay
+in France. Born and reared in a country where the
+homely and familiar nestles confidingly amid the
+most savage and sublime forms of nature, he had
+experienced whatever impulses the creative faculty
+can receive from mountain and cloud and the voices
+of winds and waters, but he had known man only
+as an actor in fireside histories and tragedies, for
+which the hamlet supplied an ample stage. In
+France he first felt the authentic beat of a nation&#8217;s
+heart; he was a spectator at one of those dramas
+where the terrible footfall of the Eumenides is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_568" id="Page_568">[568]</a></span>
+heard nearer and nearer in the pauses of the action;
+and he saw man such as he can only be when he is
+vibrated by the orgasm of a national emotion. He
+sympathized with the hopes of France and of mankind
+deeply, as was fitting in a young man and
+a poet; and if his faith in the gregarious advancement
+of men was afterward shaken, he only held
+the more firmly by his belief in the individual, and
+his reverence for the human as something quite
+apart from the popular and above it. Wordsworth
+has been unwisely blamed, as if he had been recreant
+to the liberal instincts of his youth. But it was
+inevitable that a genius so regulated and metrical
+as his, a mind which always compensated itself for
+its artistic radicalism by an involuntary leaning
+toward external respectability, should recoil from
+whatever was convulsionary and destructive in
+politics, and above all in religion. He reads the
+poems of Wordsworth without understanding, who
+does not find in them the noblest incentives to faith
+in man and the grandeur of his destiny, founded
+always upon that personal dignity and virtue, the
+capacity for whose attainment alone makes universal
+liberty possible and assures its permanence.
+He was to make men better by opening to them
+the sources of an inalterable well-being; to make
+them free, in a sense higher than political, by showing
+them that these sources are within them, and
+that no contrivance of man can permanently emancipate
+narrow natures and depraved minds. His
+politics were always those of a poet, circling in the
+larger orbit of causes and principles, careless of the
+transitory oscillation of events.</p>
+
+<p>The change in his point of view (if change there
+was) certainly was complete soon after his return<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_569" id="Page_569">[569]</a></span>
+from France, and was perhaps due in part to the
+influence of Burke.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Against all systems built on abstract rights,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of institutes and laws hallowed by time;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Declares the vital power of social ties<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Endeared by custom; and with high disdain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Exploding upstart theory, insists<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon the allegiance to which men are born.<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">... Could a youth, and one<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In ancient story versed, whose breast had heaved<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Under the weight of classic eloquence,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired?<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He had seen the French for a dozen years eagerly
+busy in tearing up whatever had roots in the past,
+replacing the venerable trunks of tradition and
+orderly growth with liberty-poles, then striving
+vainly to piece together the fibres they had broken,
+and to reproduce artificially that sense of permanence
+and continuity which is the main safeguard
+of vigorous self-consciousness in a nation.
+He became a Tory through intellectual conviction,
+retaining, I suspect, to the last, a certain radicalism
+of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells us
+that in 1809 Sir George Beaumont said to him
+and Wilkie, &#8216;Wordsworth may perhaps walk in; if
+he do, I caution you both against his terrific democratic
+notions&#8217;; and it must have been many years
+later that Wordsworth himself told Crabb Robinson,
+&#8216;I have no respect whatever for Whigs, but I have
+a great deal of the Chartist in me&#8217;. In 1802, during
+his tour in Scotland, he travelled on Sundays as on
+the other days of the week. He afterwards became
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_570" id="Page_570">[570]</a></span>a theoretical churchgoer. &#8216;Wordsworth defended
+earnestly the Church establishment. He even said
+he would shed his blood for it. Nor was he disconcerted
+by a laugh raised against him on account
+of his having confessed that he knew not when he
+had been in a church in his own country. &#8220;All our
+ministers are so vile,&#8221; said he. The mischief of
+allowing the clergy to depend on the caprice of the
+multitude he thought more than outweighed all the
+evils of an establishment.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>In December 1792 Wordsworth had returned to
+England, and in the following year published
+<i>Descriptive Sketches</i> and the <i>Evening Walk</i>. He
+did this, as he says in one of his letters, to show
+that, although he had gained no honours at the
+University, he <i>could</i> do something. They met
+with no great success, and he afterward corrected
+them so much as to destroy all their interest as
+juvenile productions, without communicating to
+them any of the merits of maturity. In commenting,
+sixty years afterward, on a couplet in one of
+these poems,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">he says: &#8216;This is feebly and imperfectly expressed,
+but I recollect distinctly the very spot where this
+first struck me.... The moment was important
+in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness
+of the infinite variety of natural appearances
+which had been unnoticed by the poets of any
+age or country, so far as I was acquainted with
+them, and I made a resolution to supply in some
+degree the deficiency.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>It is plain that Wordsworth&#8217;s memory was playing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_571" id="Page_571">[571]</a></span>
+him a trick here, misled by that instinct (it may
+almost be called) of consistency which leads men
+first to desire that their lives should have been
+without break or seam, and then to believe that
+they have been such. The more distant ranges
+of perspective are apt to run together in retrospection.
+How far could Wordsworth at fourteen have
+been acquainted with the poets of all ages and
+countries,&mdash;he who to his dying day could not
+endure to read Goethe and knew nothing of
+Calderon? It seems to me rather that the earliest
+influence traceable in him is that of Goldsmith, and
+later of Cowper, and it is, perhaps, some slight indication
+of its having already begun that his first
+volume of <i>Descriptive Sketches</i> (1793) was put
+forth by Johnson, who was Cowper&#8217;s publisher.
+By and by the powerful impress of Burns is seen
+both in the topics of his verse and the form of his
+expression. But whatever their ultimate effect
+upon his style, certain it is that his juvenile poems
+were clothed in the conventional habit of the
+eighteenth century. &#8216;The first verses from which
+he remembered to have received great pleasure
+were Miss Carter&#8217;s <i>Poem on Spring</i>, a poem in the
+six-line stanza which he was particularly fond
+of and had composed much in,&mdash;for example,
+<i>Ruth</i>.&#8217; This is noteworthy, for Wordsworth&#8217;s
+lyric range, especially so far as tune is concerned,
+was always narrow. His sense of melody was
+painfully dull, and some of his lighter effusions, as
+he would have called them, are almost ludicrously
+wanting in grace of movement. We cannot expect
+in a modern poet the thrush-like improvisation,
+the impulsively bewitching cadences, that charm
+us in our Elizabethan drama and whose last warble<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_572" id="Page_572">[572]</a></span>
+died with Herrick; but Shelley, Tennyson, and
+Browning have shown that the simple pathos of
+their music was not irrecoverable, even if the artless
+poignancy of their phrase be gone beyond recall.
+We feel this lack in Wordsworth all the more keenly
+if we compare such verses as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Like an army defeated<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The snow hath retreated<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And now doth fare ill<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the top of the bare hill,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">with Goethe&#8217;s exquisite <i>Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh</i>,
+in which the lines (as if shaken down by a momentary
+breeze of emotion) drop lingeringly one after
+another like blossoms upon turf.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Evening Walk</i> and <i>Descriptive Sketches</i> show
+plainly the prevailing influence of Goldsmith, both
+in the turn of thought and the mechanism of
+the verse. They lack altogether the temperance
+of tone and judgement in selection which have
+made the <i>Traveller</i> and the <i>Deserted Village</i> perhaps
+the most truly classical poems in the language.
+They bear here and there, however, the unmistakable
+stamp of the maturer Wordsworth, not only
+in a certain blunt realism, but in the intensity and
+truth of picturesque epithet. Of this realism,
+from which Wordsworth never wholly freed himself,
+the following verses may suffice as a specimen.
+After describing the fate of a chamois-hunter killed
+by falling from a crag, his fancy goes back to the
+bereaved wife and son:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Passing his father&#8217;s bones in future days,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Start at the reliques of that very thigh<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On which so oft he prattled when a boy.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_573" id="Page_573">[573]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">In these poems there is plenty of that &#8216;poetic
+diction&#8217; against which Wordsworth was to lead the
+revolt nine years later.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">To wet the peak&#8217;s impracticable sides<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He opens of his feet the sanguine tides,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Both of these passages have disappeared from the
+revised edition, as well as some curious outbursts
+of that motiveless despair which Byron made
+fashionable not long after. Nor are there wanting
+touches of fleshliness which strike us oddly as
+coming from Wordsworth.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rest near their little plots of oaten glade,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To throw the &#8216;sultry ray&#8217; of young Desire;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Accordant to the cheek&#8217;s unquiet glow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Those shadowy breasts in love&#8217;s soft light arrayed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And rising by the moon of passion swayed.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">The political tone is also mildened in the revision,
+as where he changes &#8216;despotcourts&#8217; into &#8216;tyranny&#8217;.
+One of the alterations is interesting. In the
+<i>Evening Walk</i> he had originally written</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And bids her soldier come her wars to share<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Asleep on Minden&#8217;s charnel hill afar.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">An erratum at the end directs us to correct the
+second verse, thus:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Asleep on Bunker&#8217;s charnel hill afar.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for
+making the owl a bodeful bird. He had himself
+done so in the <i>Evening Walk</i>, and corrects his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_574" id="Page_574">[574]</a></span>
+epithets to suit his later judgement, putting &#8216;gladsome&#8217;
+for &#8216;boding&#8217;, and replacing</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The tremulous sob of the complaining owl<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">by</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The sportive outcry of the mocking owl.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much
+changed in the revision as to make the dates
+appended to them a misleading anachronism. But
+there is one truly Wordsworthian passage which
+already gives us a glimpse of that passion with
+which he was the first to irradiate descriptive
+poetry and which sets him on a level with Turner.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#8217;Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All day the floods a deepening murmur pour:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dark is the region as with coming night;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But what a sudden burst of overpowering light!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Glances the fire-clad eagle&#8217;s wheeling form;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The wood-crowned cliffs that o&#8217;er the lake recline;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The West that burns like one dilated sun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where in a mighty crucible expire<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Wordsworth has made only one change in these
+verses, and that for the worse, by substituting
+&#8216;glorious&#8217; (which was already implied in &#8216;glances&#8217;
+and &#8216;fire-clad&#8217;) for &#8216;wheeling&#8217;. In later life he
+would have found it hard to forgive the man who
+should have made cliffs recline over a lake. On
+the whole, what strikes us as most prophetic in
+these poems is their want of continuity, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_575" id="Page_575">[575]</a></span>
+purple patches of true poetry on a texture of
+unmistakable prose; perhaps we might add the
+incongruous clothing of prose thoughts in the
+ceremonial robes of poesy.</p>
+
+<p>During the same year (1793) he wrote, but did
+not publish, a political tract, in which he avowed
+himself opposed to monarchy and to the hereditary
+principle, and desirous of a republic, if it could be
+had without a revolution. He probably continued
+to be all his life in favour of that ideal republic
+&#8216;which never was on land or sea&#8217;, but fortunately
+he gave up politics that he might devote himself
+to his own nobler calling, to which politics are
+subordinate, and for which he found freedom
+enough in England as it was. Dr. Wordsworth
+admits that his uncle&#8217;s opinions were democratical
+so late as 1802. I suspect that they remained so in
+an esoteric way to the end of his days. He had
+himself suffered by the arbitrary selfishness of
+a great landholder, and he was born and bred in
+a part of England where there is a greater social
+equality than elsewhere. The look and manner of
+the Cumberland people especially are such as recall
+very vividly to a New-Englander the associations
+of fifty years ago, ere the change from New England
+to New Ireland had begun. But meanwhile, Want,
+which makes no distinctions of Monarchist or
+Republican, was pressing upon him. The debt due
+to his father&#8217;s estate had not been paid, and
+Wordsworth was one of those rare idealists who
+esteem it the first duty of a friend of humanity to
+live for, and not on, his neighbour. He at first
+proposed establishing a periodical journal to be
+called <i>The Philanthropist</i>, but luckily went no
+further with it, for the receipts from an organ of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_576" id="Page_576">[576]</a></span>
+opinion which professed republicanism, and at the
+same time discountenanced the plans of all existing
+or defunct republicans, would have been necessarily
+scanty. There being no appearance of any
+demand, present or prospective, for philanthropists,
+he tried to get employment as correspondent of
+a newspaper. Here also it was impossible that he
+should succeed; he was too great to be merged in
+the editorial We, and had too well defined a private
+opinion on all subjects to be able to express that
+average of public opinion which constitutes able
+editorials. But so it is that to the prophet in the
+wilderness the birds of ill omen are already on the
+wing with food from heaven; and while Wordsworth&#8217;s
+relatives were getting impatient at what
+they considered his waste of time, while one thought
+he had gifts enough to make a good parson, and
+another lamented the rare attorney that was lost
+in him, the prescient muse guided the hand of
+Raisley Calvert while he wrote the poet&#8217;s name in
+his will for a legacy of &pound;900. By the death of
+Calvert, in 1795, this timely help came to Wordsworth
+at the turning-point of his life, and made it
+honest for him to write poems that will never die,
+instead of theatrical critiques as ephemeral as
+play-bills, or leaders that led only to oblivion.</p>
+
+<p>In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his
+sister took up their abode at Racedown Lodge, near
+Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. Here nearly two years
+were passed, chiefly in the study of poetry, and
+Wordsworth to some extent recovered from the
+fierce disappointment of his political dreams, and
+regained that equable tenor of mind which alone
+is consistent with a healthy productiveness. Here
+Coleridge, who had contrived to see something<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_577" id="Page_577">[577]</a></span>
+more in the <i>Descriptive Sketches</i> than the public
+had discovered there, first made his acquaintance.
+The sympathy and appreciation of an intellect
+like Coleridge&#8217;s supplied him with that external
+motive to activity which is the chief use of popularity,
+and justified to him his opinion of his own
+powers. It was now that the tragedy of <i>The
+Borderers</i> was for the most part written, and that
+plan of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> suggested which gave
+Wordsworth a clue to lead him out of the metaphysical
+labyrinth in which he was entangled. It
+was agreed between the two young friends, that
+Wordsworth was to be a philosophic poet, and, by
+a good fortune uncommon to such conspiracies,
+Nature had already consented to the arrangement.
+In July 1797, the two Wordsworths removed to
+Allfoxden in Somersetshire, that they might be
+near Coleridge, who in the meanwhile had married
+and settled himself at Nether Stowey. In November
+<i>The Borderers</i> was finished, and Wordsworth went
+up to London with his sister to offer it for the stage.
+The good Genius of the poet again interposing, the
+play was decisively rejected, and Wordsworth went
+back to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first
+tragi-comedy so common to young authors.</p>
+
+<p>The play has fine passages, but is as unreal as
+<i>Jane Eyre</i>. It shares with many of Wordsworth&#8217;s
+narrative poems the defect of being written to
+illustrate an abstract moral theory, so that the
+overbearing thesis is continually thrusting the
+poetry to the wall. Applied to the drama, such
+predestination makes all the personages puppets
+and disenables them for being characters. Wordsworth
+seems to have felt this when he published
+<i>The Borderers</i> in 1842, and says in a note that it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_578" id="Page_578">[578]</a></span>
+was &#8216;at first written ... without any view to its
+exhibition upon the stage&#8217;. But he was mistaken.
+The contemporaneous letters of Coleridge to Cottle
+show that he was long in giving up the hope of
+getting it accepted by some theatrical manager.</p>
+
+<p>He now applied himself to the preparation of the
+first volume of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> for the press, and
+it was published toward the close of 1798. The
+book, which contained also <i>The Ancient Mariner</i>
+of Coleridge, attracted little notice, and that in
+great part contemptuous. When Mr. Cottle, the
+publisher, shortly after sold his copyrights to
+Mr. Longman, that of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> was
+reckoned at <i>zero</i>, and it was at last given up to the
+authors. A few persons were not wanting, however,
+who discovered the dawn-streaks of a new
+day in that light which the critical fire-brigade
+thought to extinguish with a few contemptuous
+spurts of cold water.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Byron describes himself as waking one
+morning and finding himself famous, and it is quite
+an ordinary fact, that a blaze may be made with
+a little saltpetre that will be stared at by thousands
+who would have thought the sunrise tedious. If
+we may believe his biographer, Wordsworth might
+have said that he awoke and found himself infamous,
+for the publication of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>
+undoubtedly raised him to the distinction of being
+the least popular poet in England. Parnassus has
+two peaks; the one where improvising poets cluster;
+the other where the singer of deep secrets sits alone,&mdash;a
+peak veiled sometimes from the whole morning
+of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke of
+kitchen fires, only to glow the more consciously at
+sunset, and after nightfall to crown itself with imperishable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_579" id="Page_579">[579]</a></span>
+stars. Wordsworth had that self-trust
+which in the man of genius is sublime, and in the
+man of talent insufferable. It mattered not to
+him though all the reviewers had been in a chorus
+of laughter or conspiracy of silence behind him.
+He went quietly over to Germany to write more
+Lyrical Ballads, and to begin a poem on the growth
+of his own mind, at a time when there were only two
+men in the world (himself and Coleridge) who were
+aware that he had one, or at least one anywise
+differing from those mechanically uniform ones
+which are stuck drearily, side by side, in the great
+pin-paper of society.</p>
+
+<p>In Germany Wordsworth dined in company
+with Klopstock, and after dinner they had
+a conversation, of which Wordsworth took notes.
+The respectable old poet, who was passing the
+evening of his days by the chimney-corner, Darby
+and Joan like, with his respectable Muse, seems
+to have been rather bewildered by the apparition
+of a living genius. The record is of value now
+chiefly for the insight it gives us into Wordsworth&#8217;s
+mind. Among other things he said, &#8216;that it was
+the province of a great poet to raise people up to
+his own level, not to descend to theirs&#8217;,&mdash;memorable
+words, the more memorable that a literary
+life of sixty years was in keeping with them.</p>
+
+<p>It would be instructive to know what were
+Wordsworth&#8217;s studies during his winter in Goslar.
+De Quincey&#8217;s statement is mere conjecture. It
+may be guessed fairly enough that he would seek
+an entrance to the German language by the easy
+path of the ballad, a course likely to confirm him
+in his theories as to the language of poetry. The
+Spinozism with which he has been not unjustly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_580" id="Page_580">[580]</a></span>
+charged was certainly not due to any German
+influence, for it appears unmistakably in the
+<i>Lines composed at Tintern Abbey</i> in July 1798.
+It is more likely to have been derived from his
+talks with Coleridge in 1797. When Emerson
+visited him in 1833, he spoke with loathing of
+<i>Wilhelm Meister</i>, a part of which he had read
+in Carlyle&#8217;s translation apparently. There was
+some affectation in this, it should seem, for he had
+read Smollett. On the whole, it may be fairly
+concluded that the help of Germany in the
+development of his genius may be reckoned as
+very small, though there is certainly a marked
+resemblance both in form and sentiment between
+some of his earlier lyrics and those of Goethe.
+His poem of the <i>Thorn</i>, though vastly more imaginative,
+may have been suggested by B&uuml;rger&#8217;s
+<i>Pfarrer&#8217;s Tochter von Taubenhain</i>. The little grave
+<i>drei Spannen lang</i>, in its conscientious measurement,
+certainly recalls a famous couplet in the English
+poem.</p>
+
+<p>After spending the winter at Goslar, Wordsworth
+and his sister returned to England in the spring
+of 1799, and settled at Grasmere in Westmorland.
+In 1800, the first edition of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>
+being exhausted, it was republished with the
+addition of another volume, Mr. Longman paying
+&pound;100 for the copyright of two editions. The book
+passed to a second edition in 1802, and to a third
+in 1805. Wordsworth sent a copy of it, with a
+manly letter, to Mr. Fox, particularly recommending
+to his attention the poems <i>Michael</i> and
+<i>The Brothers</i>, as displaying the strength and
+permanence among a simple and rural population
+of those domestic affections which were certain to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_581" id="Page_581">[581]</a></span>
+decay gradually under the influence of manufactories
+and poor-houses. Mr. Fox wrote a civil acknowledgement,
+saying that his favourites among the
+poems were <i>Harry Gill</i>, <i>We are Seven</i>, <i>The Mad
+Mother</i>, and <i>The Idiot</i>, but that he was prepossessed
+against the use of blank verse for simple
+subjects. Any political significance in the poems
+he was apparently unable to see. To this second
+edition Wordsworth prefixed an argumentative
+Preface, in which he nailed to the door of the
+cathedral of English song the critical theses which
+he was to maintain against all comers in his poetry
+and his life. It was a new thing for an author to
+undertake to show the goodness of his verses by
+the logic and learning of his prose; but Wordsworth
+carried to the reform of poetry all that fervour and
+faith which had lost their political object, and it
+is another proof of the sincerity and greatness of
+his mind, and of that heroic simplicity which is
+their concomitant, that he could do so calmly
+what was sure to seem ludicrous to the greater
+number of his readers. Fifty years have since
+demonstrated that the true judgement of one man
+outweighs any counterpoise of false judgement,
+and that the faith of mankind is guided to a man
+only by a well-founded faith in himself. To this
+<i>Defensio</i> Wordsworth afterward added a supplement,
+and the two form a treatise of permanent
+value for philosophic statement and decorous
+English. Their only ill effect has been, that they
+have encouraged many otherwise deserving young
+men to set a Sibylline value on their verses in
+proportion as they were unsaleable. The strength
+of an argument for self-reliance drawn from the
+example of a great man depends wholly on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_582" id="Page_582">[582]</a></span>
+greatness of him who uses it; such arguments
+being like coats of mail, which, though they serve
+the strong against arrow-flights and lance-thrusts,
+may only suffocate the weak or sink him the sooner
+in the waters of oblivion.</p>
+
+<p>An advertisement prefixed to the <i>Lyrical
+Ballads</i>, as originally published in one volume,
+warned the reader that &#8216;they were written chiefly
+with a view to ascertain how far <i>the language of
+conversation in the middle and lower classes</i> of
+society is adapted to the purposes of poetic
+pleasure&#8217;. In his preface to the second edition, in
+two volumes, Wordsworth already found himself
+forced to shift his ground a little (perhaps in
+deference to the wider view and finer sense of
+Coleridge), and now says of the former volume
+that &#8216;it was published as an experiment which,
+I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain how
+far, by fitting to metrical arrangement, <i>a selection
+of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation</i>,
+that sort of pleasure and that quantity of
+pleasure may be imparted which a poet may
+<i>rationally endeavour</i> to impart&#8217;. Here is evidence
+of a retreat towards a safer position, though
+Wordsworth seems to have remained unconvinced
+at heart, and for many years longer clung obstinately
+to the passages of bald prose into which
+his original theory had betrayed him. In 1815
+his opinions had undergone a still further change,
+and an assiduous study of the qualities of his own
+mind and of his own poetic method (the two subjects
+in which alone he was ever a thorough
+scholar) had convinced him that poetry was in no
+sense that appeal to the understanding which is
+implied by the words &#8216;rationally endeavour to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_583" id="Page_583">[583]</a></span>
+impart&#8217;. In the preface of that year he says,
+&#8216;The observations prefixed to that portion of these
+volumes which was published many years ago
+under the title of <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> have so little of
+special application to the greater part of the present
+enlarged and diversified collection, that they could
+not with propriety stand as an introduction to it.&#8217;
+It is a pity that he could not have become an
+earlier convert to Coleridge&#8217;s pithy definition,
+that &#8216;prose was words in their best order, and
+poetry the <i>best</i> words in the best order&#8217;. But
+idealization was something that Wordsworth was
+obliged to learn painfully. It did not come to him
+naturally as to Spenser and Shelley and to Coleridge
+in his higher moods. Moreover, it was in the
+too frequent choice of subjects incapable of being
+idealized without a manifest jar between theme
+and treatment that Wordsworth&#8217;s great mistake
+lay. For example, in <i>The Blind Highland Boy</i> he
+had originally the following stanzas:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Strong is the current, but be mild,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ye waves, and spare the helpless child!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If ye in anger fret or chafe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A bee-hive would be ship as safe<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As that in which he sails.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But say, what was it? Thought of fear!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Well may ye tremble when ye hear!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;A household tub like one of those<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which women use to wash their clothes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">This carried the blind boy.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In endeavouring to get rid of the downright
+vulgarity of phrase in the last stanza, Wordsworth
+invents an impossible tortoise-shell, and thus robs
+his story of the reality which alone gave it a living
+interest. Any extemporized raft would have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_584" id="Page_584">[584]</a></span>
+floated the boy down to immortality. But Wordsworth
+never quite learned the distinction between
+Fact, which suffocates the Muse, and Truth, which
+is the very breath of her nostrils. Study and self-culture
+did much for him, but they never quite
+satisfied him that he was capable of making a
+mistake. He yielded silently to friendly remonstrance
+on certain points, and gave up, for example,
+the ludicrous exactness of</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I&#8217;ve measured it from side to side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8217;Tis three feet long and two feet wide.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and
+to his dying day he could never quite shake off
+that habit of over-minute detail which renders
+the narratives of uncultivated people so tedious,
+and sometimes so distasteful. <i>Simon Lee</i>, after
+his latest revision, still contains verses like these:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And he is lean and he is sick;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His body, dwindled and awry,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rests upon ankles swollen and thick;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His legs are thin and dry;<br /></span>
+</div>
+
+<p class="dotted2" style="margin-left: 5%">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Few months of life he has in store,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As he to you will tell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For still, the more he works, the more<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Do his weak ankles swell,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">which are not only prose, but <i>bad</i> prose, and moreover
+guilty of the same fault for which Wordsworth
+condemned Dr. Johnson&#8217;s famous parody on the
+ballad-style,&mdash;that their &#8216;<i>matter</i> is contemptible&#8217;.
+The sonorousness of conviction with which Wordsworth
+sometimes gives utterance to commonplaces
+of thought and trivialities of sentiment has a ludicrous
+effect on the profane and even on the faithful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_585" id="Page_585">[585]</a></span>
+in unguarded moments. We are reminded of a
+passage in <i>The Excursion</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">List! I heard<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From yon huge breast of rock <i>a solemn bleat</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Sent forth as if it were the mountain&#8217;s voice</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with
+Lamb began, and was thenceforward never interrupted.
+He continued to live at Grasmere, conscientiously
+diligent in the composition of poems,
+secure of finding the materials of glory within and
+around him; for his genius taught him that
+inspiration is no product of a foreign shore, and
+that no adventurer ever found it, though he
+wandered as long as Ulysses. Meanwhile the
+appreciation of the best minds and the gratitude
+of the purest hearts gradually centred more and
+more towards him. In 1802 he made a short visit
+to France, in company with Miss Wordsworth, and
+soon after his return to England was married to
+Mary Hutchinson, on the 4th of October of the
+same year. Of the good fortune of this marriage
+no other proof is needed than the purity and
+serenity of his poems, and its record is to be sought
+nowhere else.</p>
+
+<p>On the 18th of June, 1803, his first child, John,
+was born, and on the 14th of August of the same
+year he set out with his sister on a foot journey
+into Scotland. Coleridge was their companion
+during a part of this excursion, of which Miss
+Wordsworth kept a full diary. In Scotland he
+made the acquaintance of Scott, who recited to
+him a part of the <i>Lay of the Last Minstrel</i>, then in
+manuscript. The travellers returned to Grasmere
+on the 25th of September. It was during this year<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_586" id="Page_586">[586]</a></span>
+that Wordsworth&#8217;s intimacy with the excellent
+Sir George Beaumont began. Sir George was an
+amateur painter of considerable merit, and his
+friendship was undoubtedly of service to Wordsworth
+in making him familiar with the laws of a
+sister art and thus contributing to enlarge the
+sympathies of his criticism, the tendency of which
+was toward too great exclusiveness. Sir George
+Beaumont, dying in 1827, did not forgo his regard
+for the poet, but contrived to hold his affection in
+mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of &pound;100, to
+defray the charges of a yearly journey.</p>
+
+<p>In March 1805, the poet&#8217;s brother, John, lost his
+life by the shipwreck of the <i>Abergavenny</i> East-Indiaman,
+of which he was captain. He was a man
+of great purity and integrity, and sacrificed himself
+to his sense of duty by refusing to leave the
+ship till it was impossible to save him. Wordsworth
+was deeply attached to him, and felt such
+grief at his death as only solitary natures like his
+are capable of, though mitigated by a sense of the
+heroism which was the cause of it. The need of
+mental activity as affording an outlet to intense
+emotion may account for the great productiveness
+of this and the following year. He now completed
+<i>The Prelude</i>, wrote <i>The Waggoner</i>, and increased
+the number of his smaller poems enough to fill
+two volumes, which were published in 1807.</p>
+
+<p>This collection, which contained some of the
+most beautiful of his shorter pieces, and among
+others the incomparable <i>Odes</i> to Duty and on
+Immortality, did not reach a second edition till
+1815. The reviewers had another laugh, and rival
+poets pillaged while they scoffed, particularly
+Byron, among whose verses a bit of Wordsworth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_587" id="Page_587">[587]</a></span>
+showed as incongruously as a sacred vestment on
+the back of some buccaneering plunderer of an
+abbey. There was a general combination to put
+him down, but on the other hand there was a
+powerful party in his favour, consisting of William
+Wordsworth. He not only continued in good
+heart himself, but, reversing the order usual on
+such occasions, kept up the spirits of his friends.</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth passed the winter of 1806-7 in a
+house of Sir George Beaumont&#8217;s, at Coleorton in
+Leicestershire, the cottage at Grasmere having
+become too small for his increased family. On
+his return to the Vale of Grasmere he rented the
+house at Allan Bank, where he lived three years.
+During this period he appears to have written very
+little poetry, for which his biographer assigns as
+a primary reason the smokiness of the Allan Bank
+chimneys. This will hardly account for the failure
+of the summer crop, especially as Wordsworth
+composed chiefly in the open air. It did not
+prevent him from writing a pamphlet upon the
+Convention of Cintra, which was published too
+late to attract much attention, though Lamb says
+that its effect upon him was like that which one of
+Milton&#8217;s tracts might have had upon a contemporary.
+It was at Allan Bank that Coleridge
+dictated <i>The Friend</i>, and Wordsworth contributed
+to it two essays, one in answer to a letter of
+Mathetes (Professor Wilson), and the other on
+Epitaphs, republished in the Notes to <i>The
+Excursion</i>. Here also he wrote his <i>Description
+of the Scenery of the Lakes</i>. Perhaps a truer
+explanation of the comparative silence of Wordsworth&#8217;s
+Muse during these years is to be found in
+the intense interest which he took in current events,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_588" id="Page_588">[588]</a></span>
+whose variety, picturesqueness, and historical
+significance were enough to absorb all the energies
+of his imagination.</p>
+
+<p>In the spring of 1811 Wordsworth removed to
+the Parsonage at Grasmere. Here he remained
+two years, and here he had his second intimate
+experience of sorrow in the loss of two of his
+children, Catharine and Thomas, one of whom
+died 4th June, and the other 1st December, 1812.
+Early in 1813 he bought Rydal Mount, and, having
+removed thither, changed his abode no more during
+the rest of his life. In March of this year he was
+appointed Distributor of Stamps for the county of
+Westmorland, an office whose receipts rendered
+him independent, and whose business he was able
+to do by deputy, thus leaving him ample leisure
+for nobler duties. De Quincey speaks of this
+appointment as an instance of the remarkable
+good luck which waited upon Wordsworth through
+his whole life. In our view it is only another
+illustration of that scripture which describes the
+righteous as never forsaken. Good luck is the
+willing handmaid of upright, energetic character,
+and conscientious observance of duty. Wordsworth
+owed his nomination to the friendly exertions of
+the Earl of Lonsdale, who desired to atone as far
+as might be for the injustice of the first Earl, and
+who respected the honesty of the man more than
+he appreciated the originality of the poet. The
+Collectorship at Whitehaven (a more lucrative
+office) was afterwards offered to Wordsworth, and
+declined. He had enough for independence, and
+wished nothing more. Still later, on the death of
+the Stamp-Distributor for Cumberland, a part of
+that district was annexed to Westmorland, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_589" id="Page_589">[589]</a></span>
+Wordsworth&#8217;s income was raised to something
+more than &pound;1,000 a year.</p>
+
+<p>In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland,
+visiting Yarrow in company with the Ettrick
+Shepherd. During this year <i>The Excursion</i> was
+published, in an edition of five hundred copies,
+which supplied the demand for six years. Another
+edition of the same number of copies was published
+in 1827, and not exhausted till 1834. In 1815
+<i>The White Doe of Rylstone</i> appeared, and in
+1816 <i>A Letter to a Friend of Burns</i>, in which
+Wordsworth gives his opinion upon the limits to
+be observed by the biographers of literary men.
+It contains many valuable suggestions, but allows
+hardly scope enough for personal details, to which
+he was constitutionally indifferent. Nearly the
+same date may be ascribed to a rhymed translation
+of the first three books of the <i>Aeneid</i>, a specimen of
+which was printed in the Cambridge <i>Philological
+Museum</i> (1832). In 1819 <i>Peter Bell</i>, written twenty
+years before, was published, and, perhaps in
+consequence of the ridicule of the reviewers, found
+a more rapid sale than any of his previous volumes.
+<i>The Waggoner</i>, printed in the same year, was less
+successful. His next publication was the volume
+of <i>Sonnets on the river Duddon</i>, with some
+miscellaneous poems, 1820. A tour on the
+Continent in 1820 furnished the subjects for
+another collection, published in 1822. This was
+followed in the same year by the volume of
+<i>Ecclesiastical Sketches</i>. His subsequent publications
+were <i>Yarrow Revisited</i>, 1835, and the tragedy of
+<i>The Borderers</i>, 1842.</p>
+
+<p>During all these years his fame was increasing
+slowly but steadily, and his age gathered to itself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_590" id="Page_590">[590]</a></span>
+the reverence and the troops of friends which his
+poems and the nobly simple life reflected in them
+deserved. Public honours followed private appreciation.
+In 1838 the University of Dublin conferred
+upon him the degree of D.C.L. In 1839 Oxford
+did the same, and the reception of the poet (now
+in his seventieth year) at the University was
+enthusiastic. In 1842 he resigned his office of
+Stamp-Distributor, and Sir Robert Peel had the
+honour of putting him upon the civil list for a pension
+of &pound;300. In 1843 he was appointed Laureate, with
+the express understanding that it was a tribute of
+respect, involving no duties except such as might
+be self-imposed. His only official production was
+an Ode for the installation of Prince Albert as
+Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. His
+life was prolonged yet seven years, almost, it should
+seem, that he might receive that honour which he
+had truly conquered for himself by the unflinching
+bravery of a literary life of half a century,
+unparalleled for the scorn with which its labours
+were received, and the victorious acknowledgement
+which at last crowned them. Surviving nearly
+all his contemporaries, he had, if ever any man had,
+a foretaste of immortality, enjoying in a sort his
+own posthumous renown, for the hardy slowness
+of its growth gave a safe pledge of its durability.
+He died on the 23rd of April, 1850, the anniversary
+of the death of Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p>We have thus briefly sketched the life of
+Wordsworth,&mdash;a life uneventful even for a man of
+letters; a life like that of an oak, of quiet self-development,
+throwing out stronger roots toward
+the side whence the prevailing storm-blasts blow,
+and of tougher fibre in proportion to the rocky<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_591" id="Page_591">[591]</a></span>
+nature of the soil in which it grows. The life and
+growth of his mind, and the influences which shaped
+it, are to be looked for, even more than is the case
+with most poets, in his works, for he deliberately
+recorded them there.</p>
+
+<p>Of his personal characteristics little is related.
+He was somewhat above the middle height, but,
+according to De Quincey, of indifferent figure, the
+shoulders being narrow and drooping. His finest
+feature was the eye, which was grey and full of
+spiritual light. Leigh Hunt says: &#8216;I never beheld
+eyes that looked so inspired, so supernatural.
+They were like fires, half burning, half smouldering,
+with a sort of acrid fixture of regard. One might
+imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes.&#8217;
+Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and
+Haydon that he had none of form. The best
+likeness of him, in De Quincey&#8217;s judgement, is
+the portrait of Milton prefixed to Richardson&#8217;s
+notes on <i>Paradise Lost</i>. He was active in his
+habits, composing in the open air, and generally
+dictating his poems. His daily life was regular,
+simple, and frugal; his manners were dignified and
+kindly; and in his letters and recorded conversations
+it is remarkable how little that was personal
+entered into his judgement of contemporaries.</p>
+
+<p>The true rank of Wordsworth among poets is,
+perhaps, not even yet to be fairly estimated, so
+hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of judgement
+uninflamed by the tumult of partisanship which
+besets the doors.</p>
+
+<p>Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great
+poet, at a time when the artificial school of poetry
+was enthroned with all the authority of long
+succession and undisputed legitimacy, it was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_592" id="Page_592">[592]</a></span>
+almost inevitable that Wordsworth, who, both by
+nature and judgement was a rebel against the
+existing order, should become a partisan. Unfortunately,
+he became not only the partisan of
+a system, but of William Wordsworth as its
+representative. Right in general principle, he
+thus necessarily became wrong in particulars.
+Justly convinced that greatness only achieves its
+ends by implicitly obeying its own instincts, he
+perhaps reduced the following his instincts too
+much to a system, mistook his own resentments
+for the promptings of his natural genius, and,
+compelling principle to the measure of his own
+temperament or even of the controversial exigency
+of the moment, fell sometimes into the error of
+making naturalness itself artificial. If a poet
+resolve to be original, it will end commonly in his
+being merely peculiar.</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth himself departed more and more in
+practice, as he grew older, from the theories which
+he had laid down in his prefaces;<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> but those
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_593" id="Page_593">[593]</a></span>theories undoubtedly had a great effect in retarding
+the growth of his fame. He had carefully constructed
+a pair of spectacles through which his earlier poems
+were to be studied, and the public insisted on
+looking through them at his mature works, and were
+consequently unable to see fairly what required
+a different focus. He forced his readers to come to
+his poetry with a certain amount of conscious
+preparation, and thus gave them beforehand the
+impression of something like mechanical artifice,
+and deprived them of the contented repose of
+implicit faith. To the child a watch seems to be
+a living creature; but Wordsworth would not
+let his readers be children, and did injustice to
+himself by giving them an uneasy doubt whether
+creations which really throbbed with the very
+heart&#8217;s-blood of genius, and were alive with nature&#8217;s
+life of life, were not contrivances of wheels and
+springs. A naturalness which we are told to expect
+has lost the crowning grace of nature. The men
+who walked in Cornelius Agrippa&#8217;s visionary
+gardens had probably no more pleasurable
+emotion than that of a shallow wonder, or an
+equally shallow self-satisfaction in thinking they
+had hit upon the secret of the thaumaturgy; but
+to a tree that has grown as God willed we come
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_594" id="Page_594">[594]</a></span>without a theory and with no botanical predilections,
+enjoying it simply and thankfully; or the Imagination
+recreates for us its past summers and winters,
+the birds that have nested and sung in it, the sheep
+that have clustered in its shade, the winds that have
+visited it, the cloud-bergs that have drifted over it,
+and the snows that have ermined it in winter.
+The Imagination is a faculty that flouts at
+foreordination, and Wordsworth seemed to do all
+he could to cheat his readers of her company by
+laying out paths with a peremptory <i>Do not step off
+the gravel!</i> at the opening of each, and preparing
+pitfalls for every conceivable emotion, with guide-boards
+to tell each when and where it must be
+caught.</p>
+
+<p>But if these things stood in the way of immediate
+appreciation, he had another theory which interferes
+more seriously with the total and permanent
+effect of his poems. He was theoretically determined
+not only to be a philosophic poet, but to be a <i>great</i>
+philosophic poet, and to this end he must produce
+an epic. Leaving aside the question whether the
+epic be obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether
+the history of a single man&#8217;s mind is universal
+enough in its interest to furnish all the requirements
+of the epic machinery, and it may be more than
+doubted whether a poet&#8217;s philosophy be ordinary
+metaphysics, divisible into chapter and section.
+It is rather something which is more energetic in
+a word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts
+unclose themselves instinctively at its simple <i>Open
+sesame!</i> while they would stand firm against the
+reading of the whole body of philosophy. In point
+of fact, the one element of greatness which <i>The
+Excursion</i> possesses indisputably is heaviness. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_595" id="Page_595">[595]</a></span>
+is only the episodes that are universally read, and
+the effect of these is diluted by the connecting
+and accompanying lectures on metaphysics.
+Wordsworth had his epic mould to fill, and, like
+Benvenuto Cellini in casting his Perseus, was
+forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal,
+lest it should run short. Separated from the rest,
+the episodes are perfect poems in their kind, and
+without example in the language.</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong
+minds, was a good critic of the substance of poetry,
+but somewhat niggardly in the allowance he made
+for those subsidiary qualities which make it the
+charmer of leisure and the employment of minds
+without definite object. It may be doubted,
+indeed, whether he set much store by any contemporary
+writing but his own, and whether he did
+not look upon poetry too exclusively as an exercise
+rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the
+imagination. He says of himself, speaking of his
+youth:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i13">In fine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I was a better judge of thoughts than words,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Misled in estimating words, not only<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By common inexperience of youth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But by the trade in classic niceties,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From languages that want the living voice<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To carry meaning to the natural heart;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To tell us what is passion, what is truth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What reason, what simplicity and sense.<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Though he here speaks in the preterite tense,
+this was always true of him, and his thought seems
+often to lean upon a word too weak to bear its
+weight. No reader of adequate insight can help
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_596" id="Page_596">[596]</a></span>regretting that he did not earlier give himself to
+&#8216;the trade of classic niceties&#8217;. It was precisely
+this which gives to the blank-verse of Landor the
+severe dignity and reserved force which alone
+among later poets recall the tune of Milton, and
+to which Wordsworth never attained. Indeed,
+Wordsworth&#8217;s blank-verse (though the passion be
+profounder) is always essentially that of Cowper.
+They were alike also in their love of outward
+nature and of simple things. The main difference
+between them is one of scenery rather than of
+sentiment, between the lifelong familiar of the
+mountains and the dweller on the plain.</p>
+
+<p>It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the
+very highest powers of the poetic mind were
+associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse
+and commonplace. It is in the understanding
+(always prosaic) that the great golden veins of his
+imagination are imbedded. He wrote too much
+to write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes-army
+of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand,
+that march safely down to posterity. He set
+tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the same
+as trying to make Jove&#8217;s eagle do the service of
+a clucking hen. Throughout <i>The Prelude</i> and <i>The
+Excursion</i> he seems striving to bind the wizard
+Imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition,
+and to have forgotten the potent spell-word which
+would make the particles cohere. There is an
+arenaceous quality in the style which makes
+progress wearisome. Yet with what splendours
+as of mountain-sunsets are we rewarded! what
+golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching
+heavenward with angels ascending and descending!
+what haunting harmonies hover around us deep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_597" id="Page_597">[597]</a></span>
+and eternal like the undying baritone of the sea!
+and if we are compelled to fare through sands and
+desert wildernesses, how often do we not hear airy
+shapes that syllable our names with a startling
+personal appeal to our highest consciousness and
+our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for in vain
+in any other poet!</p>
+
+<p>Take from Wordsworth all which an honest
+criticism cannot but allow, and what is left will
+show how truly great he was. He had no humour,
+no dramatic power, and his temperament was
+of that dry and juiceless quality, that in all his
+published correspondence you shall not find
+a letter, but only essays. If we consider carefully
+where he was most successful, we shall find that
+it was not so much in description of natural scenery,
+or delineation of character, as in vivid expression
+of the effect produced by external objects and
+events upon his own mind, and of the shape and
+hue (perhaps momentary) which they in turn took
+from his mood or temperament. His finest
+passages are always monologues. He had a fondness
+for particulars, and there are parts of his
+poems which remind us of local histories in the
+undue relative importance given to trivial matters.
+He was the historian of Wordsworthshire. This
+power of particularization (for it is as truly
+a power as generalization) is what gives such vigour
+and greatness to single lines and sentiments of
+Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single
+thought or sentiment. It was this that made him
+so fond of the sonnet. That sequestered nook
+forced upon him the limits which his fecundity
+(if I may not say his garrulity) was never self-denying
+enough to impose on itself. It suits his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_598" id="Page_598">[598]</a></span>
+solitary and meditative temper, and it was there
+that Lamb (an admirable judge of what was
+permanent in literature) liked him best. Its
+narrow bounds, but fourteen paces from end to
+end, turn into a virtue his too common fault of
+giving undue prominence to every passing emotion.
+He excels in monologue, and the law of the sonnet
+tempers monologue with mercy. In <i>The Excursion</i>
+we are driven to the subterfuge of a French
+verdict of extenuating circumstances. His mind
+had not that reach and elemental movement of
+Milton&#8217;s, which, like the trade-wind, gathered to
+itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from
+every quarter; some deep with silks and spicery,
+some brooding over the silent thunders of their
+battailous armaments, but all swept forward in
+their destined track, over the long billows of his
+verse, every inch of canvas strained by the unifying
+breath of their common epic impulse. It was an
+organ that Milton mastered, mighty in compass,
+capable equally of the trumpet&#8217;s ardours or the slim
+delicacy of the flute, and sometimes it bursts
+forth in great crashes through his prose, as if he
+touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil.
+If Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to
+his lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly for
+his appropriate instrument, the pastoral reed.
+And it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream,
+but that which Apollo breathed through, tending
+the flocks of Admetus,&mdash;that which Pan endowed
+with every melody of the visible universe,&mdash;the
+same in which the soul of the despairing nymph
+took refuge and gifted with her dual nature,&mdash;so
+that ever and anon, amid the notes of human joy
+or sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_599" id="Page_599">[599]</a></span>
+almost awful tone, thrilling us into dim consciousness
+of a forgotten divinity.</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth&#8217;s absolute want of humour, while it
+no doubt confirmed his self-confidence by making
+him insensible both to the comical incongruity
+into which he was often led by his earlier theory
+concerning the language of poetry and to the not
+unnatural ridicule called forth by it, seems to
+have been indicative of a certain dullness of
+perception in other directions.<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> We cannot help
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_600" id="Page_600">[600]</a></span>feeling that the material of his nature was essentially
+prose, which, in his inspired moments, he had the
+power of transmuting, but which, whenever the
+inspiration failed or was factitious, remained
+obstinately leaden. The normal condition of
+many poets would seem to approach that temperature
+to which Wordsworth&#8217;s mind could be raised
+only by the white heat of profoundly inward
+passion. And in proportion to the intensity
+needful to make his nature thoroughly aglow is
+the very high quality of his best verses. They
+seem rather the productions of nature than of man,
+and have the lastingness of such, delighting our
+age with the same startle of newness and beauty
+that pleased our youth. Is it his thought?
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_601" id="Page_601">[601]</a></span>It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond.
+Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions
+of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed
+for ever in immutable grace the most evanescent
+and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks
+on the remotest shores of being. But this
+intensity of mood which insures high quality is by
+its very nature incapable of prolongation, and
+Wordsworth, in endeavouring it, falls more below
+himself, and is, more even than many poets his
+inferiors in imaginative quality, a poet of passages.
+Indeed, one cannot help having the feeling sometimes
+that the poem is there for the sake of these
+passages, rather than that these are the natural
+jets and elations of a mind energized by the
+rapidity of its own motion. In other words, the
+happy couplet or gracious image seems not to
+spring from the inspiration of the poem conceived
+as a whole, but rather to have dropped of itself
+into the mind of the poet in one of his rambles, who
+then, in a less rapt mood, has patiently built up
+around it a setting of verse too often ungraceful
+in form and of a material whose cheapness may
+cast a doubt on the priceless quality of the gem it
+encumbers.<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> During the most happily productive
+period of his life, Wordsworth was impatient of
+what may be called the mechanical portion of his
+art. His wife and sister seem from the first to
+have been his scribes. In later years, he had
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_602" id="Page_602">[602]</a></span>learned and often insisted on the truth that poetry
+was an art no less than a gift, and corrected his
+poems in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment.
+But he certainly had more of the vision than of the
+faculty divine, and was always a little numb on
+the side of form and proportion. Perhaps his best
+poem in these respects is the <i>Laodamia</i>, and it is
+not uninstructive to learn from his own lips that
+&#8216;it cost him more trouble than almost anything of
+equal length he had ever written&#8217;. His longer
+poems (miscalled epical) have no more intimate
+bond of union than their more or less immediate
+relation to his own personality. Of character
+other than his own he had but a faint conception,
+and all the personages of <i>The Excursion</i> that
+are not Wordsworth are the merest shadows of
+himself upon mist, for his self-concentrated nature
+was incapable of projecting itself into the consciousness
+of other men and seeing the springs of action
+at their source in the recesses of individual
+character. The best parts of these longer poems
+are bursts of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers
+were always clumsy at the <i>callida junctura</i>. The
+stream of narration is sluggish, if varied by times
+with pleasing reflections (<i>viridesque placido aequore
+sylvas</i>); we are forced to do our own rowing, and
+only when the current is hemmed in by some
+narrow gorge of the poet&#8217;s personal consciousness
+do we feel ourselves snatched along on the smooth
+but impetuous rush of unmistakable inspiration.
+The fact that what is precious in Wordsworth&#8217;s
+poetry was (more truly even than with some
+greater poets than he) a gift rather than an
+achievement should always be borne in mind in
+taking the measure of his power. I know not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_603" id="Page_603">[603]</a></span>
+whether to call it height or depth, this peculiarity
+of his, but it certainly endows those parts of his
+work which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian
+with an unexpectedness and impressiveness of
+originality such as we feel in the presence of Nature
+herself. He seems to have been half conscious of
+this, and recited his own poems to all comers with
+an enthusiasm of wondering admiration that
+would have been profoundly comic but for its
+simple sincerity and for the fact that William
+Wordsworth, Esquire, of Rydal Mount, was one
+person, and the William Wordsworth whom he so
+heartily reverenced quite another. We recognize
+two voices in him, as Stephano did in Caliban.
+There are Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch. If the
+prophet cease from dictating, the amanuensis,
+rather than be idle, employs his pen in jotting
+down some anecdotes of his master, how he one
+day went out and saw an old woman, and the
+next day did <i>not</i>, and so came home and dictated
+some verses on this ominous phenomenon, and
+how another day he saw a cow. These marginal
+annotations have been carelessly taken up into the
+text, have been religiously held by the pious to be
+orthodox scripture, and by dexterous exegesis have
+been made to yield deeply oracular meanings.
+Presently the real prophet takes up the word
+again and speaks as one divinely inspired, the
+Voice of a higher and invisible power. Wordsworth&#8217;s
+better utterances have the bare sincerity, the
+absolute abstraction from time and place, the
+immunity from decay, that belong to the grand
+simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more his
+own than ours and every man&#8217;s, the word of the
+inalterable Mind. This gift of his was naturally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_604" id="Page_604">[604]</a></span>
+very much a matter of temperament, and accordingly
+by far the greater part of his finer product
+belongs to the period of his prime, ere Time had
+set his lumpish foot on the pedal that deadens the
+nerves of animal sensibility.<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> He did not grow as
+those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant.
+One of the most delightful fancies of
+the Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is the poet Albert,
+who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly
+idealizing hand, does his best afterwards to look
+like it. Many of Wordsworth&#8217;s later poems seem
+like rather unsuccessful efforts to resemble his
+former self. They would never, as Sir John
+Harington says of poetry, &#8216;keep a child from play
+and an old man from the chimney-corner&#8217;.<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a></p>
+
+<p>Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted
+a junior counsel who was arguing certain obvious
+points of law at needless length, by saying, &#8216;Brother
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_605" id="Page_605">[605]</a></span>Jones, there are <i>some</i> things which a Supreme Court
+of the United States sitting in equity may be
+presumed to know.&#8217; Wordsworth has this fault
+of enforcing and restating obvious points till the
+reader feels as if his own intelligence were somewhat
+underrated. He is over-conscientious in giving us
+full measure, and once profoundly absorbed in the
+sound of his own voice, he knows not when to stop.
+If he feel himself flagging, he has a droll way of
+keeping the floor, as it were, by asking himself
+a series of questions sometimes not needing, and
+often incapable of answer. There are three stanzas
+of such near the close of the First Part of <i>Peter
+Bell</i>, where Peter first catches a glimpse of the
+dead body in the water, all happily incongruous,
+and ending with one which reaches the height of
+comicality:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Is it a fiend that to a stake<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of fire his desperate self is tethering?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In solitary ward or cell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ten thousand miles from all his brethren?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">The same want of humour which made him
+insensible to incongruity may perhaps account also
+for the singular unconsciousness of disproportion
+which so often strikes us in his poetry. For
+example, a little farther on in <i>Peter Bell</i> we find:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Now</i>&mdash;like a tempest-shattered bark<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in a moment to the verge<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is lifted of a foaming surge&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Full suddenly the Ass doth rise!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">And one cannot help thinking that the similes of
+the huge stone, the sea-beast, and the cloud, noble<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_606" id="Page_606">[606]</a></span>
+as they are in themselves, are somewhat too lofty
+for the service to which they are put.<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a></p>
+
+<p>The movement of Wordsworth&#8217;s mind was too slow
+and his mood too meditative for narrative poetry.
+He values his own thoughts and reflections too
+much to sacrifice the least of them to the interests
+of his story. Moreover, it is never action that
+interests him, but the subtle motives that lead
+to or hinder it. <i>The Waggoner</i> involuntarily
+suggests a comparison with <i>Tam O&#8217;Shanter</i>,
+infinitely to its own disadvantage. <i>Peter Bell</i>,
+full though it be of profound touches and subtle
+analysis, is lumbering and disjointed. Even Lamb
+was forced to confess that he did not like it.
+<i>The White Doe</i>, the most Wordsworthian of them
+all in the best meaning of the epithet, is also only
+the more truly so for being diffuse and reluctant.
+What charms in Wordsworth and will charm
+for ever is the</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">Happy tone<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of meditation slipping in between<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The beauty coming and the beauty gone.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their
+words to the tune of our own feelings and fancies,
+in the charm of their manner, indefinable as the
+sympathetic grace of woman, <i>are</i> everything to us
+without our being able to say that they are much
+in themselves. They rather narcotize than fortify.
+Wordsworth must subject our mood to his own
+before he admits us to his intimacy; but, once
+admitted, it is for life, and we find ourselves in his
+debt, not for what he has been to us in our hours
+of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_607" id="Page_607">[607]</a></span>a reinforcement of faltering purpose and personal
+independence of character. His system of a Nature-cure,
+first professed by Dr. Jean Jacques and
+continued by Cowper, certainly breaks down as
+a whole. The Solitary of <i>The Excursion</i>, who
+has not been cured of his scepticism by living
+among the medicinal mountains, is, so far as we
+can see, equally proof against the lectures of
+Pedlar and Parson. Wordsworth apparently felt
+that this would be so, and accordingly never saw
+his way clear to finishing the poem. But the
+treatment, whether a panacea or not, is certainly
+wholesome inasmuch as it inculcates abstinence,
+exercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure,
+indeed, that the Nature-cure theory does not tend
+to foster in constitutions less vigorous than
+Wordsworth&#8217;s what Milton would call a fugitive
+and cloistered virtue at a dear expense of manlier
+qualities. The ancients and our own Elizabethans,
+ere spiritual megrims had become fashionable,
+perhaps made more out of life by taking a frank
+delight in its action and passion and by grappling
+with the facts of this world, rather than muddling
+themselves over the insoluble problems of another.
+If they had not discovered the picturesque, as we
+understand it, they found surprisingly fine scenery
+in man and his destiny, and would have seen
+something ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the
+spectacle of a grown man running to hide his head
+in the apron of the Mighty Mother whenever he
+had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in the
+tussle for existence.</p>
+
+<p>But when, as I have said, our impartiality has
+made all those qualifications and deductions against
+which even the greatest poet may not plead his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_608" id="Page_608">[608]</a></span>
+privilege, what is left to Wordsworth is enough to
+justify his fame. Even where his genius is wrapped
+in clouds, the unconquerable lightning of imagination
+struggles through, flashing out unexpected
+vistas, and illuminating the humdrum pathway
+of our daily thought with a radiance of momentary
+consciousness that seems like a revelation. If it
+be the most delightful function of the poet to set
+our lives to music, yet perhaps he will be even
+more sure of our maturer gratitude if he do his
+part also as moralist and philosopher to purify
+and enlighten; if he define and encourage our
+vacillating perceptions of duty; if he piece
+together our fragmentary apprehensions of our
+own life and that larger life whose unconscious
+instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits
+of our dissected map of experience a coherent
+chart. In the great poets there is an exquisite
+sensibility both of soul and sense that sympathizes
+like gossamer sea-moss with every movement of
+the element in which it floats, but which is rooted
+on the solid rock of our common sympathies.
+Wordsworth shows less of this finer feminine fibre
+of organization than one or two of his contemporaries,
+notably than Coleridge or Shelley; but
+he was a masculine thinker, and in his more
+characteristic poems there is always a kernel of
+firm conclusion from far-reaching principles that
+stimulates thought and challenges meditation.
+Groping in the dark passages of life, we come upon
+some axiom of his, as it were a wall that gives us
+our bearings and enables us to find an outlet.
+Compared with Goethe we feel that he lacks that
+serene impartiality of mind which results from
+breadth of culture; nay, he seems narrow, insular,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_609" id="Page_609">[609]</a></span>
+almost provincial. He reminds us of those saints
+of Dante who gather brightness by revolving on
+their own axis. But through this very limitation
+of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the
+impressiveness which results from eagerness of
+personal conviction. If we read Wordsworth
+through, as I have just done, we find ourselves
+changing our mind about him at every other page,
+so uneven is he. If we read our favourite poems
+or passages only, he will seem uniformly great.
+And even as regards <i>The Excursion</i> we should
+remember how few long poems will bear consecutive
+reading. For my part I know of but one,&mdash;the
+<i>Odyssey</i>.</p>
+
+<p>None of our great poets can be called popular in
+any exact sense of the word, for the highest poetry
+deals with thoughts and emotions which inhabit,
+like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that
+shore between our abiding divine and our fluctuating
+human nature, rooted in the one, but living in the
+other, seldom laid bare, and otherwise visible only
+at exceptional moments of entire calm and
+clearness. Of no other poet except Shakespeare
+have so many phrases become household words as
+of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more
+epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth
+belongs the nobler praise of having defined for us,
+and given us for a daily possession, those faint
+and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose
+gentle ministry with our baser nature the hurry
+and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be
+conscious. He has won for himself a secure
+immortality by a depth of intuition which makes
+only the best minds at their best hours worthy, or
+indeed capable, of his companionship, and by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_610" id="Page_610">[610]</a></span>
+a homely sincerity of human sympathy which
+reaches the humblest heart. Our language owes
+him gratitude for the habitual purity and abstinence
+of his style, and we who speak it, for having
+emboldened us to take delight in simple things,
+and to trust ourselves to our own instincts. And
+he hath his reward. It needs not to bid</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To rare Beaumont, and learned Beaumont lie<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A little nearer Spenser;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">for there is no fear of crowding in that little
+society with whom he is now enrolled as fifth in
+the succession of the great English Poets.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> In the <i>Prelude</i> he attributes this consecration to a sunrise
+seen (during a college vacation) as he walked homeward
+from some village festival where he had danced all night:
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Were then made for me; bond unknown to me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A dedicated Spirit.&mdash;Book IV.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> <i>Prelude</i>, Book II.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a>
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I to the muses have been bound,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These fourteen years, by strong indentures.<br /></span>
+<span class="i13"><i>Idiot Boy</i> (1798).</span></div>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> <i>Prelude</i>, Book III.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> <i>Prelude</i>, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring
+to a still earlier date.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> How far he swung backward toward the school under
+whose influence he grew up, and toward the style against
+which he had protested so vigorously, a few examples will
+show. The advocate of the language of common life has
+a verse in his <i>Thanksgiving Ode</i> which, if one met with it
+by itself, he would think the achievement of some later
+copyist of Pope:
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">While the <i>tubed engine</i> [the organ] feels the inspiring blast.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">And in <i>The Italian Itinerant</i> and <i>The Swiss Goatherd</i> we
+find a thermometer or barometer called
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">The well-wrought scale<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose sentient tube instructs to time<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A purpose to a fickle clime.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Still worse in the <i>Eclipse of the Sun</i>, 1821:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">High on her speculative tower<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stood Science, waiting for the hour<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When Sol was destined to endure<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That darkening.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">So in <i>The Excursion</i>,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The cold March wind raised in her tender throat<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Viewless obstructions.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> <i>Prelude</i>, Book VI.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency
+than when he thought it needful to rewrite the
+ballad of Helen of Kirconnel,&mdash;a poem hardly to be
+matched in any language for swiftness of movement and
+savage sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering compression
+is masterly. Compare:
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Curst be the heart that thought the thought,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And curst the hand that fired the shot,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When in my arms burd Helen dropt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That died to succour me!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O, think ye not my heart was sair<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When my love dropt down and spake na mair?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">Compare this with,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That through his brain are travelling,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, starting up, to Bruce&#8217;s heart<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">He launched a deadly javelin:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fair Ellen saw it when it came,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, <i>stepping forth to meet the same</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Did with her body cover<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Youth, her chosen lover.<br /></span></div>
+
+<p class="dotted2">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And Bruce (<i>as soon as he had slain</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>The Gordon</i>) sailed away to Spain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And fought with rage incessant<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Against the Moorish Crescent.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>These are surely the versos of an attorney&#8217;s clerk &#8216;penning
+a stanza when he should engross&#8217;. It will be noticed
+that Wordsworth here also departs from his earlier theory
+of the language of poetry by substituting a javelin for
+a bullet as less modern and familiar. Had he written</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And Gordon never gave a hint,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But, having somewhat picked his flint,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let fly the fatal bullet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That killed that lovely pullet,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the
+rest. He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the
+<i>Ancient Mariner</i> in the second edition of the <i>Lyrical
+Ballads</i>: &#8216;The poem of my friend has indeed great defects;
+first, that the principal person has no distinct character,
+either in his profession of mariner, or as a human being who,
+having been long under the control of supernatural impressions,
+might be supposed himself to partake of something
+supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is
+continually acted upon; thirdly, that the events, having
+no necessary connexion, do not produce each other; and
+lastly, that the imagery is somewhat laboriously accumulated.&#8217;
+Here is an indictment, to be sure, and drawn,
+plainly enough, by the attorney&#8217;s clerk aforenamed. One
+would think that the strange charm of Coleridge&#8217;s most
+truly original poems lay in this very emancipation from
+the laws of cause and effect.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a>
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A hundred times when, roving high and low,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I have been harassed with the toil of verse,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Much pains and little progress, and at once<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some lovely Image in the song rose up,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea.<br /></span>
+<span class="i13"><i>Prelude</i>, Book IV.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> His best poetry was written when he was under the
+immediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have
+felt this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes
+when he speaks of &#8216;those who have been so well pleased
+that I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless
+rills into <i>their</i> main stream&#8217; (<i>Letters, Conversations, and
+Recollections of S.&nbsp;T.&nbsp;C.</i>, vol. i, pp. 5-6). Wordsworth
+found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of
+the participles in Shakespeare&#8217;s line about bees:
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The singing masons building roofs of gold.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noin">This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have
+written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the
+repetition was in harmony with the continued note of
+the singers&#8217; (Leigh Hunt&#8217;s <i>Autobiography</i>). Wordsworth
+writes to Crabb Robinson in 1837, &#8216;My ear is susceptible
+to the clashing of sounds almost to disease.&#8217; One cannot
+help thinking that his training in these niceties was begun
+by Coleridge.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> In the Preface to his translation of the <i>Orlando Furioso</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> In <i>Resolution and Independence</i>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of English Critical Essays, by Various
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diff --git a/31283.txt b/31283.txt
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/31283.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of English Critical Essays, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: English Critical Essays
+       Nineteenth Century
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Edmund D. Jones
+
+Release Date: February 15, 2010 [EBook #31283]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH CRITICAL ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Irma Spehar and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                         The World's Classics
+
+
+                                 CCVI
+
+                        ENGLISH CRITICAL ESSAYS
+                          NINETEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+                                OXFORD
+                           UNIVERSITY PRESS
+                      LONDON: AMEN HOUSE, E.C. 4
+                       EDINBURGH GLASGOW LEIPZIG
+                      COPENHAGEN NEW YORK TORONTO
+                       MELBOURNE CAPETOWN BOMBAY
+                       CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI
+                           HUMPHREY MILFORD
+                           PUBLISHER TO THE
+                              UNIVERSITY
+
+
+
+
+                        ENGLISH CRITICAL ESSAYS
+                          NINETEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+                        SELECTED AND EDITED BY
+                            EDMUND D. JONES
+
+
+                        OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+                       LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
+
+
+_The present selection of English Critical Essays (Nineteenth Century)
+was first published in 'The World's Classics' in 1916 and reprinted in
+                   1919, 1920, 1921, 1924 and 1928._
+
+
+   PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD
+               BY JOHN JOHNSON PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+
+Legend for reading accented characters:
+
+  [)a]--a with a breve above
+  [)e]--e with a breve above
+  [)i]--i with a breve above
+  [)o]--o with a breve above
+  [)u]--u with a breve above
+  [=e]--e with a macron above
+  [=u]--u with a macron above
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The essays here brought together are meant to illustrate English
+literary criticism during the nineteenth century. A companion volume
+representative of Renaissance and Neo-classic criticism will, it is
+hoped, be issued at a future date. Meanwhile this volume may well go
+forth alone. For the nineteenth century forms an epoch in English
+literature whose beginnings are more clearly defined than those of
+most literary epochs. The publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ in
+1798, and of Wordsworth's Preface to the second edition in 1800, show
+the Romantic Movement grown conscious and deliberate, with results
+that have coloured the whole stream of English poetry and criticism
+ever since.
+
+The greater part of the present collection deals with general
+principles rather than with criticisms of individual books or authors.
+The nineteenth century, having discarded the dogmas and 'rules' of
+Neo-classicism, had perforce to investigate afresh the Theory of
+Poetry, and though no systematic treatment of the subject in all its
+bearings appeared, some valuable contributions were made, the most
+notable of which came from the poets themselves.
+
+The extracts from the _Biographia Literaria_ are placed next to the
+Wordsworthian doctrines which they criticize; otherwise the
+arrangement of the essays is chronological.
+
+American criticism is represented--inadequately, but, it is hoped, not
+unworthily--by the last two essays.
+
+In the preparation of this volume I have received much valuable help
+from Mr. J. C. Smith, which I now gratefully acknowledge.
+
+                                              EDMUND D. JONES.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                 PAGE
+WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850
+  Poetry and Poetic Diction. (1800)                                1
+
+SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1772-1834
+  Wordsworth's Theory of Diction. (1817)                          40
+  Metrical Composition. (1817)                                    57
+
+WILLIAM BLAKE, 1757-1827
+  The Canterbury Pilgrims. (1809)                                 85
+
+CHARLES LAMB, 1775-1834
+  On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference
+  to their Fitness for Stage Representation. (1811)               95
+
+PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1792-1822
+  A Defence of Poetry. (1821)                                    120
+
+WILLIAM HAZLITT, 1778-1830
+  My First Acquaintance with Poets. (1823)                       164
+
+JOHN KEBLE, 1792-1866
+  Sacred Poetry. (1825)                                          191
+
+JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, 1801-1890
+  Poetry with reference to Aristotle's Poetics. (1829)           223
+
+THOMAS CARLYLE, 1795-1881
+  The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakespeare. (1840)                   254
+
+JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT, 1784-1859
+  An Answer to the Question: What is Poetry? (1844)              300
+
+MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1822-1888
+  The Choice of Subjects in Poetry. (1853)                       356
+
+JOHN RUSKIN, 1819-1900
+  Of the Pathetic Fallacy. (1856)                                378
+
+JOHN STUART MILL, 1806-1873
+  Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties. (1833, revised 1859)     398
+
+WALTER BAGEHOT, 1826-1877
+  Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate and
+  Grotesque Art in English Poetry. (1864)                        430
+
+WALTER HORATIO PATER, 1839-1894
+  Coleridge's Writings. (1866)                                   492
+
+RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1803-1882
+  Shakespeare; or, the Poet. (1850)                              535
+
+JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 1819-1891
+  Wordsworth. (1875)                                             558
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
+
+1770-1850
+
+POETRY AND POETIC DICTION
+
+[Preface to the Second Edition of _Lyrical Ballads_, 1800]
+
+
+The first Volume of these Poems has already been submitted to general
+perusal. It was published, as an experiment, which, I hoped, might be
+of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement
+a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation,
+that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted,
+which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart.
+
+I had formed no very inaccurate estimate of the probable effect of
+those Poems: I flattered myself that they who should be pleased with
+them would read them with more than common pleasure: and, on the other
+hand, I was well aware, that by those who should dislike them, they
+would be read with more than common dislike. The result has differed
+from my expectation in this only, that a greater number have been
+pleased than I ventured to hope I should please.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Several of my Friends are anxious for the success of these Poems, from
+a belief, that, if the views with which they were composed were
+indeed realized, a class of Poetry would be produced, well adapted to
+interest mankind permanently, and not unimportant in the quality, and
+in the multiplicity of its moral relations: and on this account they
+have advised me to prefix a systematic defence of the theory upon
+which the Poems were written. But I was unwilling to undertake the
+task, knowing that on this occasion the Reader would look coldly upon
+my arguments, since I might be suspected of having been principally
+influenced by the selfish and foolish hope of _reasoning_ him into an
+approbation of these particular Poems: and I was still more unwilling
+to undertake the task, because, adequately to display the opinions,
+and fully to enforce the arguments, would require a space wholly
+disproportionate to a preface. For, to treat the subject with the
+clearness and coherence of which it is susceptible, it would be
+necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public
+taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy
+or depraved; which, again, could not be determined, without pointing
+out in what manner language and the human mind act and re-act on each
+other, and without retracing the revolutions, not of literature alone,
+but likewise of society itself. I have therefore altogether declined
+to enter regularly upon this defence; yet I am sensible, that there
+would be something like impropriety in abruptly obtruding upon the
+Public, without a few words of introduction, Poems so materially
+different from those upon which general approbation is at present
+bestowed.
+
+It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a
+formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of
+association; that he not only thus apprises the Reader that certain
+classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that
+others will be carefully excluded. This exponent or symbol held forth
+by metrical language must in different eras of literature have excited
+very different expectations: for example, in the age of Catullus,
+Terence, and Lucretius, and that of Statius or Claudian; and in our
+own country, in the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, and
+that of Donne and Cowley, or Dryden, or Pope. I will not take upon me
+to determine the exact import of the promise which, by the act of
+writing in verse, an Author in the present day makes to his reader:
+but it will undoubtedly appear to many persons that I have not
+fulfilled the terms of an engagement thus voluntarily contracted. They
+who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of
+many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its
+conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings
+of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and
+will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts
+can be permitted to assume that title. I hope therefore the reader
+will not censure me for attempting to state what I have proposed to
+myself to perform; and also (as far as the limits of a preface will
+permit) to explain some of the chief reasons which have determined me
+in the choice of my purpose: that at least he may be spared any
+unpleasant feeling of disappointment, and that I myself may be
+protected from one of the most dishonourable accusations which can be
+brought against an Author; namely, that of an indolence which
+prevents him from endeavouring to ascertain what is his duty, or, when
+his duty is ascertained, prevents him from performing it.
+
+The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose
+incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe
+them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language
+really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a
+certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be
+presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above
+all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in
+them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature:
+chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a
+state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen,
+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. 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 influence of social vanity, they convey their
+feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions.
+Accordingly, such a language, 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 separate themselves from the sympathies of
+men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in
+order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of
+their own creation.[1]
+
+    [1] It is worth while here to observe, that the affecting
+    parts of Chaucer are almost always expressed in language pure
+    and universally intelligible even to this day.
+
+I cannot, however, be insensible to the present outcry against the
+triviality and meanness, both of thought and language, which some of
+my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical
+compositions; and I acknowledge that this defect, where it exists, is
+more dishonourable to the Writer's own character than false refinement
+or arbitrary innovation, though I should contend at the same time,
+that it is far less pernicious in the sum of its consequences. From
+such verses the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at
+least by one mark of difference, that each of them has a worthy
+_purpose_. Not that I always began to write with a distinct purpose
+formally conceived; but habits of meditation have, I trust, so
+prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descriptions of such
+objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry
+along with them a _purpose_. If this opinion be erroneous, I can have
+little right to the name of a Poet. For all good poetry is the
+spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true,
+Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any
+variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than
+usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. For our
+continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our
+thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past
+feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general
+representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to
+men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings
+will be connected with important subjects, till at length, if we be
+originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind will be
+produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of
+those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such
+a nature, and in such connexion with each other, that the
+understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree
+enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified.
+
+It has been said that each of these poems has a purpose. Another
+circumstance must be mentioned which distinguishes these Poems from
+the popular Poetry of the day; it is this, that the feeling therein
+developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the
+action and situation to the feeling.
+
+A sense of false modesty shall not prevent me from asserting, that the
+Reader's attention is pointed to this mark of distinction, far less
+for the sake of these particular Poems than from the general
+importance of the subject. The subject is indeed important! For the
+human mind is capable of being excited without the application of
+gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception
+of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not
+further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion
+as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that
+to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best
+services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this
+service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day.
+For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting
+with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind,
+and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state
+of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the
+great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing
+accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their
+occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the
+rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency
+of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the
+country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder
+writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are
+driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German
+Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.--When
+I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am
+almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble endeavour made in these
+volumes to counteract it; and, reflecting upon the magnitude of the
+general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy,
+had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible
+qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the
+great and permanent objects that act upon it, which are equally
+inherent and indestructible; and were there not added to this
+impression a belief, that the time is approaching when the evil will
+be systematically opposed, by men of greater powers, and with far more
+distinguished success.
+
+Having dwelt thus long on the subjects and aim of these Poems, I shall
+request the Reader's permission to apprise him of a few circumstances
+relating to their _style_, in order, among other reasons, that he may
+not censure me for not having performed what I never attempted. The
+Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur
+in these volumes; and are utterly rejected, as an ordinary device to
+elevate the style, and raise it above prose. My purpose was to
+imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt the very language of men;
+and assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular
+part of that language. They are, indeed, a figure of speech
+occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such;
+but have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechanical device of
+style, or as a family language which Writers in metre seem to lay
+claim to by prescription. I have wished to keep the Reader in the
+company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall
+interest him. Others who pursue a different track will interest him
+likewise; I do not interfere with their claim, but wish to prefer a
+claim of my own. There will also be found in these volumes little of
+what is usually called poetic diction; as much pains has been taken to
+avoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it; this has been done for
+the reason already alleged, to bring my language near to the language
+of men; and further, because the pleasure which I have proposed to
+myself to impart, is of a kind very different from that which is
+supposed by many persons to be the proper object of poetry. Without
+being culpably particular, I do not know how to give my Reader a more
+exact notion of the style in which it was my wish and intention to
+write, than by informing him that I have at all times endeavoured to
+look steadily at my subject; consequently, there is I hope in these
+Poems little falsehood of description, and my ideas are expressed in
+language fitted to their respective importance. Something must have
+been gained by this practice, as it is friendly to one property of all
+good poetry, namely, good sense: but it has necessarily cut me off
+from a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from
+father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of
+Poets. I have also thought it expedient to restrict myself still
+further, having abstained from the use of many expressions, in
+themselves proper and beautiful, but which have been foolishly
+repeated by bad Poets, till such feelings of disgust are connected
+with them as it is scarcely possible by any art of association to
+overpower.
+
+If in a poem there should be found a series of lines, or even a single
+line, in which the language, though naturally arranged, and according
+to the strict laws of metre, does not differ from that of prose, there
+is a numerous class of critics, who, when they stumble upon these
+prosaisms, as they call them, imagine that they have made a notable
+discovery, and exult over the Poet as over a man ignorant of his own
+profession. Now these men would establish a canon of criticism which
+the Reader will conclude he must utterly reject, if he wishes to be
+pleased with these volumes. And it would be a most easy task to prove
+to him, 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. To illustrate the subject in a
+general manner, I will here adduce a short composition of Gray, who
+was at the head of those who, by their reasonings, have attempted to
+widen the space of separation betwixt Prose and Metrical composition,
+and was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure
+of his own poetic diction.
+
+    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_.
+
+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.
+
+By the foregoing quotation it has been shown that the language of
+Prose may yet be well adapted to Poetry; and it was previously
+asserted, that a large portion of the language of every good poem can
+in no respect differ from that of good Prose. We will go further. It
+may be safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any
+_essential_ difference between the language of prose and metrical
+composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and
+Painting, and, accordingly, we call them Sisters: but where shall we
+find bonds of connexion sufficiently strict to typify the affinity
+betwixt metrical and prose composition? They both speak by and to the
+same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said
+to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and almost
+identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry[2] sheds
+no tears 'such as Angels weep', but natural and human tears; she can
+boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from
+those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of
+them both.
+
+    [2] I here use the word 'Poetry' (though against my own
+    judgement) as opposed to the word Prose, and synonymous with
+    metrical composition. But much confusion has been introduced
+    into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose,
+    instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of
+    Fact, or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is
+    Metre; nor is this, in truth, a _strict_ antithesis, because
+    lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing
+    prose, that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them, even
+    were it desirable.
+
+If it be affirmed that rhyme and metrical arrangement of themselves
+constitute a distinction which overturns what has just been said on
+the strict affinity of metrical language with that of prose, and paves
+the way for other artificial distinctions which the mind voluntarily
+admits, I answer that the language of such Poetry as is here
+recommended is, as far as is possible, a selection of the language
+really spoken by men; that this selection, wherever it is made with
+true taste and feeling, will of itself form a distinction far greater
+than would at first be imagined, and will entirely separate the
+composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life; and, if
+metre be superadded thereto, I believe that a dissimilitude will be
+produced altogether sufficient for the gratification of a rational
+mind. What other distinction would we have? Whence is it to come? And
+where is it to exist? Not, surely, where the Poet speaks through the
+mouths of his characters: it cannot be necessary here, either for
+elevation of style, or any of its supposed ornaments: for, if the
+Poet's subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit
+occasion, lead him to passions the language of which, if selected
+truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated,
+and alive with metaphors and figures. I forbear to speak of an
+incongruity which would shock the intelligent Reader, should the Poet
+interweave any foreign splendour of his own with that which the
+passion naturally suggests: it is sufficient to say that such addition
+is unnecessary. And, surely, it is more probable that those passages,
+which with propriety abound with metaphors and figures, will have
+their due effect, if, upon other occasions where the passions are of a
+milder character, the style also be subdued and temperate.
+
+But, as the pleasure which I hope to give by the Poems now presented
+to the Reader must depend entirely on just notions upon this subject,
+and, as it is in itself of high importance to our taste and moral
+feelings, I cannot content myself with these detached remarks. And if,
+in what I am about to say, it shall appear to some that my labour is
+unnecessary, and that I am like a man fighting a battle without
+enemies, such persons may be reminded, that, whatever be the language
+outwardly holden by men, a practical faith in the opinions which I am
+wishing to establish is almost unknown. If my conclusions are
+admitted, and carried as far as they must be carried if admitted at
+all, our judgements concerning the works of the greatest Poets both
+ancient and modern will be far different from what they are at
+present, both when we praise, and when we censure: and our moral
+feelings influencing and influenced by these judgements will, I
+believe, be corrected and purified.
+
+Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, let me ask, what is
+meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address
+himself? And what language is to be expected from him?--He is a man
+speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively
+sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater
+knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are
+supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own
+passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the
+spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar
+volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe,
+and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To
+these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than
+other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of
+conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the
+same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts
+of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more
+nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything
+which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are
+accustomed to feel in themselves:--whence, and from practice, he has
+acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks
+and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his
+own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him
+without immediate external excitement.
+
+But whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest
+Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt that the language which it
+will suggest to him, must often, in liveliness and truth, fall short
+of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual
+pressure of those passions, certain shadows of which the Poet thus
+produces, or feels to be produced, in himself.
+
+However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of
+a Poet, it is obvious, that while he describes and imitates passions,
+his employment is in some degree mechanical, compared with the freedom
+and power of real and substantial action and suffering. So that it
+will be the wish of the Poet to bring his feelings near to those of
+the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of
+time, perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even
+confound and identify his own feelings with theirs; modifying only the
+language which is thus suggested to him by a consideration that he
+describes for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure. Here,
+then, he will apply the principle of selection which has been already
+insisted upon. He will depend upon this for removing what would
+otherwise be painful or disgusting in the passion; he will feel that
+there is no necessity to trick out or to elevate nature: and, the more
+industriously he applies this principle, the deeper will be his faith
+that no words, which _his_ fancy or imagination can suggest, will be
+to be compared with those which are the emanations of reality and
+truth.
+
+But it may be said by those who do not object to the general spirit
+of these remarks, that, as it is impossible for the Poet to produce
+upon all occasions language as exquisitely fitted for the passion as
+that which the real passion itself suggests, it is proper that he
+should consider himself as in the situation of a translator, who does
+not scruple to substitute excellencies of another kind for those which
+are unattainable by him; and endeavours occasionally to surpass his
+original, in order to make some amends for the general inferiority to
+which he feels that he must submit. But this would be to encourage
+idleness and unmanly despair. Further, it is the language of men who
+speak of what they do not understand; who talk of Poetry as of a
+matter of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse with us as
+gravely about a _taste_ for Poetry, as they express it, as if it were
+a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or
+Sherry. Aristotle, I have been told, has said, that Poetry is the most
+philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not
+individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon
+external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth
+which is its own testimony, which gives competence and confidence to
+the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same
+tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature. The obstacles which
+stand in the way of the fidelity of the Biographer and Historian, and
+of their consequent utility, are incalculably greater than those which
+are to be encountered by the Poet who comprehends the dignity of his
+art. The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, the necessity
+of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that
+information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a
+physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as
+a Man. Except this one restriction, there is no object standing
+between the Poet and the image of things; between this, and the
+Biographer and Historian, there are a thousand.
+
+Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered
+as a degradation of the Poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an
+acknowledgement of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgement the
+more sincere, because not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and
+easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it
+is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand
+elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and
+lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but what is propagated by
+pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathize
+with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried
+on by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that
+is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular
+facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by
+pleasure alone. The Man of science, the Chemist and Mathematician,
+whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with,
+know and feel this. However painful may be the objects with which the
+Anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels that his knowledge is
+pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge. What then
+does the Poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as
+acting and re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite
+complexity of pain and pleasure; he considers man in his own nature
+and in his ordinary life as contemplating this with a certain quantity
+of immediate knowledge, with certain convictions, intuitions, and
+deductions, which from habit acquire the quality of intuitions; he
+considers him as looking upon this complex scene of ideas and
+sensations, and finding everywhere objects that immediately excite in
+him sympathies which, from the necessities of his nature, are
+accompanied by an overbalance of enjoyment.
+
+To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these
+sympathies in which, without any other discipline than that of our
+daily life, we are fitted to take delight, the Poet principally
+directs his attention. He considers man and nature as essentially
+adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of
+the fairest and most interesting properties of nature. And thus the
+Poet, prompted by this feeling of pleasure, which accompanies him
+through the whole course of his studies, converses with general
+nature, with affections akin to those, which, through labour and
+length of time, the Man of science has raised up in himself, by
+conversing with those particular parts of nature which are the objects
+of his studies. The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of science
+is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary
+part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the
+other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us,
+and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our
+fellow-beings. The Man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown
+benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet,
+singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in
+the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion.
+Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the
+impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.
+Emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of
+man, 'that he looks before and after.' He is the rock of defence for
+human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him
+relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of
+language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently
+gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds
+together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as
+it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of
+the Poet's thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man
+are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever
+he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings.
+Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge--it is as immortal as
+the heart of man. If the labours of Men of science should ever create
+any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in
+the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then
+no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the
+Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he
+will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects
+of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the
+Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art
+as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come
+when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under
+which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective
+sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying
+and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now
+called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as
+it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine
+spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus
+produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.--It is
+not, then, to be supposed that any one, who holds that sublime notion
+of Poetry which I have attempted to convey, will break in upon the
+sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and accidental
+ornaments, and endeavour to excite admiration of himself by arts, the
+necessity of which must manifestly depend upon the assumed meanness of
+his subject.
+
+What has been thus far said applies to Poetry in general; but
+especially to those parts of composition where the Poet speaks through
+the mouths of his characters; and upon this point it appears to
+authorize the conclusion that there are few persons of good sense, who
+would not allow that the dramatic parts of composition are defective,
+in proportion as they deviate from the real language of nature, and
+are coloured by a diction of the Poet's own, either peculiar to him as
+an individual Poet or belonging simply to Poets in general; to a body
+of men who, from the circumstance of their compositions being in
+metre, it is expected will employ a particular language.
+
+It is not, then, in the dramatic parts of composition that we look
+for this distinction of language; but still it may be proper and
+necessary where the Poet speaks to us in his own person and character.
+To this I answer by referring the Reader to the description before
+given of a Poet. Among the qualities there enumerated as principally
+conducing to form a Poet, is implied nothing differing in kind from
+other men, but only in degree. The sum of what was said is, that the
+Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness
+to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater
+power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him
+in that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the
+general passions and thoughts and feelings of men. And with what are
+they connected? Undoubtedly with our moral sentiments and animal
+sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the
+operations of the elements, and the appearances of the visible
+universe; with storm and sunshine, with the revolutions of the
+seasons, with cold and heat, with loss of friends and kindred, with
+injuries and resentments, gratitude and hope, with fear and sorrow.
+These, and the like, are the sensations and objects which the Poet
+describes, as they are the sensations of other men, and the objects
+which interest them. The Poet thinks and feels in the spirit of human
+passions. How, then, can his language differ in any material degree
+from that of all other men who feel vividly and see clearly? It might
+be _proved_ that it is impossible. But supposing that this were not
+the case, the Poet might then be allowed to use a peculiar language
+when expressing his feelings for his own gratification, or that of
+men like himself. But Poets do not write for Poets alone, but for men.
+Unless therefore we are advocates for that admiration which subsists
+upon ignorance, and that pleasure which arises from hearing what we do
+not understand, the Poet must descend from this supposed height; and,
+in order to excite rational sympathy, he must express himself as other
+men express themselves. To this it may be added, that while he is only
+selecting from the real language of men, or, which amounts to the same
+thing, composing accurately in the spirit of such selection, he is
+treading upon safe ground, and we know what we are to expect from him.
+Our feelings are the same with respect to metre; for, as it may be
+proper to remind the Reader, the distinction of metre is regular and
+uniform, and not, like that which is 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; whereas, in the
+other, the metre obeys certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader both
+willingly submit because they are certain, and because no interference
+is made by them with the passion, but such as the concurring testimony
+of ages has shown to heighten and improve the pleasure which co-exists
+with it.
+
+It will now be proper to answer an obvious question, namely, Why,
+professing these opinions, have I written in verse? To this, in
+addition to such answer as is included in what has been already said,
+I reply, in the first place, Because, however I may have restricted
+myself, there is still left open to me what confessedly constitutes
+the most valuable object of all writing, whether in prose or verse;
+the great and universal passions of men, the most general and
+interesting of their occupations, and the entire world of nature
+before me--to supply endless combinations of forms and imagery. Now,
+supposing for a moment that whatever is interesting in these objects
+may be as vividly described in prose, why should I be condemned for
+attempting to superadd to such description the charm which, by the
+consent of all nations, is acknowledged to exist in metrical language?
+To this, by such as are yet unconvinced, it may be answered that a
+very small part of the pleasure given by Poetry depends upon the
+metre, and that it is injudicious to write in metre, unless it be
+accompanied with the other artificial distinctions of style with which
+metre is usually accompanied, and that, by such deviation, more will
+be lost from the shock which will thereby be given to the Reader's
+associations than will be counterbalanced by any pleasure which he can
+derive from the general power of numbers. In answer to those who still
+contend for the necessity of accompanying metre with certain
+appropriate colours of style in order to the accomplishment of its
+appropriate end, and who also, in my opinion, greatly underrate the
+power of metre in itself, it might, perhaps, as far as relates to
+these Volumes, have been almost sufficient to observe, that poems are
+extant, written upon more humble subjects, and in a still more naked
+and simple style, which have continued to give pleasure from
+generation to generation. Now, if nakedness and simplicity be a
+defect, the fact here mentioned affords a strong presumption that
+poems somewhat less naked and simple are capable of affording pleasure
+at the present day; and, what I wished _chiefly_ to attempt, at
+present, was to justify myself for having written under the impression
+of this belief.
+
+But various causes might be pointed out why, when the style is manly,
+and the subject of some importance, words metrically arranged will
+long continue to impart such a pleasure to mankind as he who proves
+the extent of that pleasure will be desirous to impart. The end of
+Poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of
+pleasure; but, by the supposition, excitement is an unusual and
+irregular state of the mind; ideas and feelings do not, in that state,
+succeed each other in accustomed order. If the words, however, by
+which this excitement is produced be in themselves powerful, or the
+images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with
+them, there is some danger that the excitement may be carried beyond
+its proper bounds. Now the co-presence of something regular, something
+to which the mind has been accustomed in various moods and in a less
+excited state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and
+restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling, and of
+feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with the passion. This
+is unquestionably true; and hence, though the opinion will at first
+appear paradoxical, from the tendency of metre to divest language, in
+a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of
+half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole
+composition, there can be little doubt but that more pathetic
+situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater
+proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical
+composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose. The metre of the old
+ballads is very artless; yet they contain many passages which would
+illustrate this opinion; and, I hope, if the following Poems be
+attentively perused, similar instances will be found in them. This
+opinion may be further illustrated by appealing to the Reader's own
+experience of the reluctance with which he comes to the re-perusal of
+the distressful parts of _Clarissa Harlowe_, or the _Gamester_; while
+Shakespeare's writings, in the most pathetic scenes, never act upon
+us, as pathetic, beyond the bounds of pleasure--an effect which, in a
+much greater degree than might at first be imagined, is to be ascribed
+to small, but continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise
+from the metrical arrangement.--On the other hand (what it must be
+allowed will much more frequently happen) if the Poet's words should
+be incommensurate with the passion, and inadequate to raise the Reader
+to a height of desirable excitement, then (unless the Poet's choice of
+his metre has been grossly injudicious), in the feelings of pleasure
+which the Reader has been accustomed to connect with metre in general,
+and in the feeling, whether cheerful or melancholy, which he has been
+accustomed to connect with that particular movement of metre, there
+will be found something which will greatly contribute to impart
+passion to the words, and to effect the complex end which the Poet
+proposes to himself.
+
+If I had undertaken a SYSTEMATIC defence of the theory here
+maintained, it would have been my duty to develop the various causes
+upon which the pleasure received from metrical language depends. Among
+the chief of these causes is to be reckoned a principle which must be
+well known to those who have made any of the Arts the object of
+accurate reflection; namely, the pleasure which the mind derives from
+the perception of similitude in dissimilitude. This principle is the
+great spring of the activity of our minds, and their chief feeder.
+From this principle the direction of the sexual appetite, and all the
+passions connected with it, take their origin: it is the life of our
+ordinary conversation; and upon the accuracy with which similitude in
+dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude are perceived, depend
+our taste and our moral feelings. It would not be a useless employment
+to apply this principle to the consideration of metre, and to show
+that metre is hence enabled to afford much pleasure, and to point out
+in what manner that pleasure is produced. But my limits will not
+permit me to enter upon this subject, and I must content myself with a
+general summary.
+
+I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
+feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
+tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of
+reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion,
+kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is
+gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In
+this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood
+similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind,
+and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by various
+pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are
+voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of
+enjoyment. If Nature be thus cautious to preserve in a state of
+enjoyment a being so employed, the Poet ought to profit by the lesson
+held forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that, whatever
+passions he communicates to his Reader, those passions, if his
+Reader's mind be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied with
+an overbalance of pleasure. Now the music of harmonious metrical
+language, the sense of difficulty overcome, and the blind association
+of pleasure which has been previously received from works of rhyme or
+metre of the same or similar construction, an indistinct perception
+perpetually renewed of language closely resembling that of real life,
+and yet, in the circumstance of metre, differing from it so
+widely--all these imperceptibly make up a complex feeling of delight,
+which is of the most important use in tempering the painful feeling
+always found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper
+passions. This effect is always produced in pathetic and impassioned
+poetry; while, in lighter compositions, the ease and gracefulness with
+which the Poet manages his numbers are themselves confessedly a
+principal source of the gratification of the Reader. All that it is
+_necessary_ to say, however, upon this subject, may be effected by
+affirming, what few persons will deny, that, of two descriptions,
+either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well
+executed, the one in prose and the other in verse, the verse will be
+read a hundred times where the prose is read once.
+
+Having thus explained a few of my reasons for writing in verse, and
+why I have chosen subjects from common life, and endeavoured to bring
+my language near to the real language of men, if I have been too
+minute in pleading my own cause, I have at the same time been treating
+a subject of general interest; and for this reason a few words shall
+be added with reference solely to these particular poems, and to some
+defects which will probably be found in them. I am sensible that my
+associations must have sometimes been particular instead of general,
+and that, consequently, giving to things a false importance, I may
+have sometimes written upon unworthy subjects; but I am less
+apprehensive on this account, than that my language may frequently
+have suffered from those arbitrary connexions of feelings and ideas
+with particular words and phrases, from which no man can altogether
+protect himself. Hence I have no doubt, that, in some instances,
+feelings, even of the ludicrous, may be given to my Readers by
+expressions which appeared to me tender and pathetic. Such faulty
+expressions, were I convinced they were faulty at present, and that
+they must necessarily continue to be so, I would willingly take all
+reasonable pains to correct. But it is dangerous to make these
+alterations on the simple authority of a few individuals, or even of
+certain classes of men; for where the understanding of an Author is
+not convinced, or his feelings altered, this cannot be done without
+great injury to himself: for his own feelings are his stay and
+support; and, if he set them aside in one instance, he may be induced
+to repeat this act till his mind shall lose all confidence in itself,
+and become utterly debilitated. To this it may be added, that the
+critic ought never to forget that he is himself exposed to the same
+errors as the Poet, and, perhaps, in a much greater degree: for there
+can be no presumption in saying of most readers, that it is not
+probable they will be so well acquainted with the various stages of
+meaning through which words have passed, or with the fickleness or
+stability of the relations of particular ideas to each other; and,
+above all, since they are so much less interested in the subject, they
+may decide lightly and carelessly.
+
+Long as the Reader has been detained, I hope he will permit me to
+caution him against a mode of false criticism which has been applied
+to Poetry, in which the language closely resembles that of life and
+nature. Such verses have been triumphed over in parodies, of which Dr.
+Johnson's stanza is a fair specimen:--
+
+    I put my hat upon my head
+    And walked into the Strand,
+    And there I met another man
+    Whose hat was in his hand.
+
+Immediately under these lines let us place one of the most
+justly-admired stanzas of the 'Babes in the Wood.'
+
+    These pretty Babes with hand in hand
+    Went wandering up and down;
+    But never more they saw the Man
+    Approaching from the Town.
+
+In both these stanzas the words, and the order of the words, in no
+respect differ from the most unimpassioned conversation. There are
+words in both, for example, 'the Strand', and 'the Town', connected
+with none but the most familiar ideas; yet the one stanza we admit as
+admirable, and the other as a fair example of the superlatively
+contemptible. Whence arises this difference? Not from the metre, not
+from the language, not from the order of the words; but the _matter_
+expressed in Dr. Johnson's stanza is contemptible. The proper method
+of treating trivial and simple verses, to which Dr. Johnson's stanza
+would be a fair parallelism, is not to say, this is a bad kind of
+poetry, or, this is not poetry; but, this wants sense; it is neither
+interesting in itself, nor can _lead_ to anything interesting; the
+images neither originate in that sane state of feeling, which arises
+out of thought, nor can excite thought or feeling in the Reader. This
+is the only sensible manner of dealing with such verses. Why trouble
+yourself about the species till you have previously decided upon the
+genus? Why take pains to prove that an ape is not a Newton, when it is
+self-evident that he is not a man?
+
+One request I must make of my reader, which is, that in judging these
+Poems he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by
+reflection upon what will probably be the judgement of others. How
+common is it to hear a person say, I myself do not object to this
+style of composition, or this or that expression, but, to such and
+such classes of people it will appear mean or ludicrous! This mode of
+criticism, so destructive of all sound unadulterated judgement, is
+almost universal: let the Reader then abide, independently, by his own
+feelings, and, if he finds himself affected, let him not suffer such
+conjectures to interfere with his pleasure.
+
+If an Author, by any single composition, has impressed us with respect
+for his talents, it is useful to consider this as affording a
+presumption, that on other occasions where we have been displeased,
+he, nevertheless, may not have written ill or absurdly; and further,
+to give him so much credit for this one composition as may induce us
+to review what has displeased us, with more care than we should
+otherwise have bestowed upon it. This is not only an act of justice,
+but, in our decisions upon poetry especially, may conduce, in a high
+degree, to the improvement of our own taste; for an _accurate_ taste
+in poetry, and in all the other arts, as Sir Joshua Reynolds has
+observed, is an _acquired_ talent, which can only be produced by
+thought and a long-continued intercourse with the best models of
+composition. This is mentioned, not with so ridiculous a purpose as to
+prevent the most inexperienced Reader from judging for himself, (I
+have already said that I wish him to judge for himself;) but merely to
+temper the rashness of decision, and to suggest, that, if Poetry be a
+subject on which much time has not been bestowed, the judgement may be
+erroneous; and that, in many cases, it necessarily will be so.
+
+Nothing would, I know, have so effectually contributed to further the
+end which I have in view, as to have shown of what kind the pleasure
+is, and how that pleasure is produced, which is confessedly produced
+by metrical composition essentially different from that which I have
+here endeavoured to recommend: for the Reader will say that he has
+been pleased by such composition; and what more can be done for him?
+The power of any art is limited; and he will suspect, that, if it be
+proposed to furnish him with new friends, that can be only upon
+condition of his abandoning his old friends. Besides, as I have said,
+the Reader is himself conscious of the pleasure which he has received
+from such composition, composition to which he has peculiarly attached
+the endearing name of Poetry; and all men feel an habitual gratitude,
+and something of an honourable bigotry, for the objects which have
+long continued to please them: we not only wish to be pleased, but to
+be pleased in that particular way in which we have Been accustomed to
+be pleased. There is in these feelings enough to resist a host of
+arguments; and I should be the less able to combat them successfully,
+as I am willing to allow, that, in order entirely to enjoy the Poetry
+which I am recommending, it would be necessary to give up much of what
+is ordinarily enjoyed. But, would my limits have permitted me to point
+out how this pleasure is produced, many obstacles might have been
+removed, and the Reader assisted in perceiving that the powers of
+language are not so limited as he may suppose; and that it is possible
+for poetry to give other enjoyments, of a purer, more lasting, and
+more exquisite nature. This part of the subject has not been
+altogether neglected, but it has not been so much my present aim to
+prove, that the interest excited by some other kinds of poetry is less
+vivid, and less worthy of the nobler powers of the mind, as to offer
+reasons for presuming, that if my purpose were fulfilled, a species of
+poetry would be produced, which is genuine poetry; in its nature well
+adapted to interest mankind permanently, and likewise important in
+the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations.
+
+From what has been said, and from a perusal of the Poems, the Reader
+will be able clearly to perceive the object which I had in view: he
+will determine how far it has been attained; and, what is a much more
+important question, whether it be worth attaining: and upon the
+decision of these two questions will rest my claim to the approbation
+of the Public.
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+ON POETIC DICTION
+
+Perhaps, as I have no right to expect that attentive perusal, without
+which, confined, as I have been, to the narrow limits of a preface, my
+meaning cannot be thoroughly understood, I am anxious to give an exact
+notion of the sense in which the phrase poetic diction has been used;
+and for this purpose, a few words shall here be added, concerning the
+origin and characteristics of the phraseology, which I have condemned
+under that name.
+
+The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited
+by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully
+as they did, their language was daring, and figurative. In succeeding
+times, Poets, and Men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the
+influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect
+without being animated by the same passion, set themselves to a
+mechanical adoption of these figures of speech, and made use of them,
+sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them to
+feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connexion
+whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differing
+materially from the real language of men in _any situation_. The
+Reader or Hearer of this distorted language found himself in a
+perturbed and unusual state of mind: when affected by the genuine
+language of passion he had been in a perturbed and unusual state of
+mind also: in both cases he was willing that his common judgement and
+understanding should be laid asleep, and he had no instinctive and
+infallible perception of the true to make him reject the false; the
+one served as a passport for the other. The emotion was in both cases
+delightful, and no wonder if he confounded the one with the other, and
+believed them both to be produced by the same, or similar causes.
+Besides, the Poet spake to him in the character of a man to be looked
+up to, a man of genius and authority. Thus, and from a variety of
+other causes, this distorted language was received with admiration;
+and Poets, it is probable, who had before contented themselves for the
+most part with misapplying only expressions which at first had been
+dictated by real passion, carried the abuse still further, and
+introduced phrases composed apparently in the spirit of the original
+figurative language of passion, yet altogether of their own invention,
+and characterized by various degrees of wanton deviation from good
+sense and nature.
+
+It is indeed true, that the language of the earliest Poets was felt to
+differ materially from ordinary language, because it was the language
+of extraordinary occasions; but it was really spoken by men, language
+which the Poet himself had uttered when he had been affected by the
+events which he described, or which he had heard uttered by those
+around him. To this language it is probable that metre of some sort or
+other was early superadded. This separated the genuine language of
+Poetry still further from common life, so that whoever read or heard
+the poems of these earliest Poets felt himself moved in a way in which
+he had not been accustomed to be moved in real life, and by causes
+manifestly different from those which acted upon him in real life.
+This was the great temptation to all the corruptions which have
+followed: under the protection of this feeling succeeding Poets
+constructed a phraseology which had one thing, it is true, in common
+with the genuine language of poetry, namely, that it was not heard in
+ordinary conversation; that it was unusual. But the first Poets, as I
+have said, spake a language which, though unusual, was still the
+language of men. This circumstance, however, was disregarded by their
+successors; they found that they could please by easier means: they
+became proud of modes of expression which they themselves had
+invented, and which were uttered only by themselves. In process of
+time metre became a symbol or promise of this unusual language, and
+whoever took upon him to write in metre, according as he possessed
+more or less of true poetic genius, introduced less or more of this
+adulterated phraseology into his compositions, and the true and the
+false were inseparably interwoven until, the taste of men becoming
+gradually perverted, this language was received as a natural language:
+and at length, by the influence of books upon men, did to a certain
+degree really become so. Abuses of this kind were imported from one
+nation to another, and with the progress of refinement this diction
+became daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight the plain
+humanities of nature by a motley masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses,
+hieroglyphics, and enigmas.
+
+It would not be uninteresting to point out the causes of the pleasure
+given by this extravagant and absurd diction. It depends upon a great
+variety of causes, but upon none, perhaps, more than its influence in
+impressing a notion of the peculiarity and exaltation of the Poet's
+character, and in flattering the Reader's self-love by bringing him
+nearer to a sympathy with that character; an effect which is
+accomplished by unsettling ordinary habits of thinking, and thus
+assisting the Reader to approach to that perturbed and dizzy state of
+mind in which if he does not find himself, he imagines that he is
+_balked_ of a peculiar enjoyment which poetry can and ought to bestow.
+
+The sonnet quoted from Gray, in the Preface, except the lines printed
+in Italics, consists of little else but this diction, though not of
+the worst kind; and indeed, if one may be permitted to say so, it is
+far too common in the best writers both ancient and modern. Perhaps in
+no way, by positive example, could more easily be given a notion of
+what I mean by the phrase _poetic diction_ than by referring to a
+comparison between the metrical paraphrase which we have of passages
+in the Old and New Testament, and those passages as they exist in our
+common Translation. See Pope's 'Messiah' throughout; Prior's 'Did
+sweeter sounds adorn my flowing tongue,' &c. &c. 'Though I speak with
+the tongues of men and of angels,' &c. &c. 1 Corinthians, chap. xiii.
+By way of immediate example take the following of Dr. Johnson:--
+
+    Turn on the prudent Ant thy heedless eyes,
+    Observe her labours, Sluggard, and be wise;
+    No stern command, no monitory voice,
+    Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice;
+    Yet, timely provident, she hastes away
+    To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day;
+    When fruitful Summer loads the teeming plain,
+    She crops the harvest, and she stores the grain.
+    How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours,
+    Unnerve thy vigour, and enchain thy powers?
+    While artful shades thy downy couch enclose,
+    And soft solicitation courts repose,
+    Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight,
+    Year chases year with unremitted flight,
+    Till Want now following, fraudulent and slow,
+    Shall spring to seize thee, like an ambush'd foe.
+
+From this hubbub of words pass to the original. 'Go to the Ant, thou
+Sluggard, consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide,
+overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth
+her food in the harvest. How long wilt thou sleep, O Sluggard? when
+wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little
+slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. So shall thy poverty
+come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.' Proverbs,
+chap. vi.
+
+One more quotation, and I have done. It is from Cowper's _Verses
+supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk_:
+
+    Religion! what treasure untold
+    Resides in that heavenly word!
+    More precious than silver and gold,
+    Or all that this earth can afford.
+    But the sound of the church-going bell
+    These valleys and rocks never heard,
+    Ne'er sighed at the sound of a knell,
+    Or smiled when a sabbath appeared.
+    Ye winds, that have made me your sport,
+    Convey to this desolate shore
+    Some cordial endearing report
+    Of a land I must visit no more.
+    My Friends, do they now and then send
+    A wish or a thought after me?
+    O tell me I yet have a friend,
+    Though a friend I am never to see.
+
+This passage is quoted as an instance of three different styles of
+composition. The first four lines are poorly expressed; some Critics
+would call the language prosaic; the fact is, it would be bad prose,
+so bad, that it is scarcely worse in metre. The epithet 'church-going'
+applied to a bell, and that by so chaste a writer as Cowper, is an
+instance of the strange abuses which Poets have introduced into their
+language, till they and their Readers take them as matters of course,
+if they do not single them out expressly as objects of admiration. The
+two lines 'Ne'er sighed at the sound', &c., are, in my opinion, an
+instance of the language of passion wrested from its proper use, and,
+from the mere circumstance of the composition being in metre, applied
+upon an occasion that does not justify such violent expressions; and I
+should condemn the passage, though perhaps few Readers will agree with
+me, as vicious poetic diction. The last stanza is throughout admirably
+expressed: it would be equally good whether in prose or verse, except
+that the Reader has an exquisite pleasure in seeing such natural
+language so naturally connected with metre. The beauty of this stanza
+tempts me to conclude with a principle which ought never to be lost
+sight of, and which has been my chief guide in all I have
+said,--namely, that in works of _imagination and sentiment_, for of
+these only have I been treating, in proportion as ideas and feelings
+are valuable, whether the composition be in prose or in verse, they
+require and exact one and the same language. Metre is but adventitious
+to composition, and the phraseology for which that passport is
+necessary, even where it may be graceful at all, will be little valued
+by the judicious.
+
+
+
+
+SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
+
+1772-1834
+
+WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF DICTION
+
+[_Biographia Literaria_, chap. xvii, 1817]
+
+
+As far 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 connexion 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 pleasureable 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, yet as a rule it is 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_, &c., 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 hymnbook. To the latter cause, indeed, which is so far accidental,
+that it is the blessing of particular countries and a particular age,
+not the product of particular places or employments, the poet owes the
+show of probability, that his personages might really feel, think, and
+talk with any tolerable resemblance to his representation. It is an
+excellent remark of Dr. Henry More's that 'a man of confined
+education, but of good parts, by constant reading of the Bible will
+naturally form a more winning and commanding rhetoric than those that
+are learned: the intermixture of tongues and of artificial phrases
+debasing their style'.
+
+It is, moreover, to be considered that to the formation of healthy
+feelings, and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not
+less formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture. I am
+convinced, that for the human soul to prosper in rustic life a certain
+vantage-ground is pre-requisite. 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 beforehand 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_, 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, summon'd 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 liv'd he, until his eightieth year was pass'd.
+    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 chearful spirits he had breath'd
+    The common air; the hills, which he so oft
+    Had climb'd with vigorous steps; which had impress'd
+    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 sav'd,
+    Had fed or shelter'd, 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 pleasureable feeling of blind love.
+    The pleasure which there is in life itself.
+
+On the other hand, in the poems which are pitched at a lower note, as
+the _Harry Gill_, _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 a 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 judgement. 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 has 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 Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_ alone prevents me from
+extending the remark even to dramatic poetry, if indeed even the Nurse
+itself 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;[3] the seven
+last lines of the tenth;[4] 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.
+
+    [3]
+
+        I've measured it from side to side;
+        'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.
+
+    [4]
+
+        Nay, rack your brain--'tis all in vain,
+        I'll tell you every thing I know;
+        But to the Thorn, and to the Pond
+        Which is a little step beyond,
+        I wish that you would go:
+        Perhaps, when you are at the place,
+        You something of her tale may trace.
+
+        I'll give you the best help I can:
+        Before you up the mountain go,
+        Up to the dreary mountain-top,
+        I'll tell you all I know.
+        'Tis now some two-and-twenty years
+        Since she (her name is Martha Ray)
+        Gave, with a maiden's true good will,
+        Her company to Stephen Hill;
+        And she was blithe and gay,
+        And she was happy, happy still
+        Whene'er she thought of Stephen Hill.
+
+        And they had fix'd the wedding-day,
+        The morning that must wed them both;
+        But Stephen to another maid
+        Had sworn another oath;
+        And, with this other maid, to church
+        Unthinking Stephen went--
+        Poor Martha! on that woeful day
+        A pang of pitiless dismay
+        Into her soul was sent;
+        A fire was kindled in her breast,
+        Which might not burn itself to rest.
+
+        They say, full six months after this,
+        While yet the summer leaves were green,
+        She to the mountain-top would go,
+        And there was often seen.
+        'Tis said a child was in her womb,
+        As now to any eye was plain;
+        She was with child, and she was mad;
+        Yet often she was sober sad
+        From her exceeding pain.
+        Oh me! ten thousand times I'd rather
+        That he had died, that cruel father!
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+           *       *       *       *       *
+           *       *       *       *       *
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+        Last Christmas when we talked of this,
+        Old farmer Simpson did maintain,
+        That in her womb the infant wrought
+        About its mother's heart, and brought
+        Her senses back again:
+        And, when at last her time drew near,
+        Her looks were calm, her senses clear.
+
+        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:
+        And if a child was born or no,
+        There's no one that could ever tell;
+        And if 'twas born alive or dead,
+        There's no one knows, as I have said:
+        But some remember well,
+        That Martha Ray about this time
+        Would up the mountain often climb.
+
+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 is 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 connexions 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_' (i. e.
+men in low and rustic life) '_I propose 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 from that, which every
+well-educated gentleman would wish to write, and (with due allowance
+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 so 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 exciseman, 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 everywhere in parts, and
+nowhere 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 connexions 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._
+
+
+METRICAL COMPOSITION
+
+[_Biographia Literaria_, chap. xviii, 1817]
+
+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 judgement? 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 seem'd, 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,' &c.,
+&c. 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 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 any one 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 contradistinction 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's, 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 (i. e. the formal construction, or architecture, of
+the words and phrases) is essentially different from that of prose.
+Now the burthen of the proof lies with the oppugner, not with the
+supporters of the common belief. Mr. Wordsworth, 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 newborn 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 judgement, 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 gilly-flowers, 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, ev'n 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 ruder 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 staircase, 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
+pleasureable 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 swallowed 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
+proportionately combined.
+
+The reference to _The Children in the Wood_ by no means satisfies my
+judgement. 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 _Piers Plowman_, 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 [Greek: 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_, _The 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 judgement, 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),
+
+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 superadded
+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 readers' 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 rekindled, 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
+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 _Faerie Queene_?
+
+    By this the northern wagoner had set
+    His sevenfold teme behind the steadfast 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 are:
+    And chearful chanticleer with his note shrill
+    Had warned once that Phoebus' fiery carre
+    In haste was climbing up the easterne hill,
+    Full envious that night so long his roome did fill.
+
+                                 Book I, Can. 2, St. 2.
+
+    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.
+
+                                 Book I, Can. 5, St. 2.
+
+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 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 blamable
+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 show
+    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 intermixt 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.
+
+                                 Book I, St. vii, viii, and ix.
+
+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 these species of diction, may be seen in Lamb's
+_Dramatic Specimens_, &c., 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[5] 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.
+
+    [5] 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 good morning, 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 in 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:
+    viz. 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 connexion 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.
+
+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 voluntary and
+uniform, and not, like that produced by (what is 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
+judgement 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 connexion. 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 called 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 [Greek:
+morphosis], not [Greek: poiesis]. 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 ev'ry thing! Who, where we offspring took,
+    Our way 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 show my story in thy eternal book, &c.
+
+As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of
+unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudo-poesy,
+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 connexions 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-controling 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 produce
+neither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation
+consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxtaposition 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 contexture 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.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM BLAKE
+
+1757-1827
+
+THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS (1809)
+
+SIR GEFFREY CHAUCER AND THE NINE-AND-TWENTY PILGRIMS ON THEIR JOURNEY
+TO CANTERBURY[6]
+
+    [6] From _A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures_.
+
+
+The time chosen is early morning, before sunrise, when the jolly
+company are just quitting the Tabarde Inn. The Knight and Squire with
+the Squire's Yeoman lead the Procession; next follow the youthful
+Abbess, her Nun, and three Priests; her greyhounds attend her:
+
+    Of small hounds had she that she fed
+    With roast flesh, milk, and wastel bread.
+
+Next follow the Friar and Monk; then the Tapiser, the Pardoner, and
+the Sompnour and Manciple. After these 'Our Host', who occupies the
+centre of the cavalcade, directs them to the Knight as the person who
+would be likely to commence their task of each telling a tale in their
+order. After the Host follow the Shipman, the Haberdasher, the Dyer,
+the Franklin, the Physician, the Ploughman, the Lawyer, the Poor
+Parson, the Merchant, the Wife of Bath, the Miller, the Cook, the
+Oxford Scholar, Chaucer himself; and the Reeve comes as Chaucer has
+described:
+
+    And ever he rode hinderest of the rout.
+
+These last are issuing from the gateway of the Inn the Cook and the
+Wife of Bath are both taking their morning's draught of comfort.
+Spectators stand at the gateway of the Inn, and are composed of an old
+Man, a Woman, and Children.
+
+The Landscape is an eastward view of the country, from the Tabarde Inn
+in Southwark, as it may be supposed to have appeared in Chaucer's
+time, interspersed with cottages and villages. The first beams of the
+Sun are seen above the horizon; some buildings and spires indicate the
+situation of the Great City. The Inn is a Gothic building, which
+Thynne in his Glossary says was the lodging of the Abbot of Hyde, by
+Winchester. On the Inn is inscribed its title, and a proper advantage
+is taken of this circumstance to describe the subject of the Picture.
+The words written over the gateway of the Inn are as follow: 'The
+Tabarde Inn, by Henry Baillie, the lodgynge-house for Pilgrims who
+journey to Saint Thomas's Shrine at Canterbury.'
+
+The characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims are the characters which compose
+all ages and nations. As one age falls, another rises, different to
+mortal sight, but to immortals only the same; for we see the same
+characters repeated again and again, in animals, vegetables, minerals,
+and in men. Nothing new occurs in identical existence; Accident ever
+varies, Substance can never suffer change nor decay.
+
+Of Chaucer's characters, as described in his _Canterbury Tales_, some
+of the names or titles are altered by time, but the characters
+themselves for ever remain unaltered; and consequently they are the
+physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which
+Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. I have known
+multitudes of those who would have been monks in the age of monkery,
+who in this deistical age are deists. As Newton numbered the stars,
+and as Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes
+of men.
+
+The Painter has consequently varied the heads and forms of his
+personages into all Nature's varieties; the horses he has also varied
+to accord to their riders; the costume is correct according to
+authentic monuments.
+
+The Knight and Squire with the Squire's Yeoman lead the Procession, as
+Chaucer has also placed them first in his Prologue. The Knight is a
+true Hero, a good, great and wise man; his whole-length portrait on
+horseback, as written by Chaucer, cannot be surpassed. He has spent
+his life in the field, has ever been a conqueror, and is that species
+of character which in every age stands as the guardian of man against
+the oppressor. His son is like him, with the germ of perhaps greater
+perfection still, as he blends literature and the arts with his
+warlike studies. Their dress and their horses are of the first rate,
+without ostentation, and with all the true grandeur that unaffected
+simplicity when in high rank always displays. The Squire's Yeoman is
+also a great character, a man perfectly knowing in his profession:
+
+    And in his hand he bare a mighty bow.
+
+Chaucer describes here a mighty man, one who in war is the worthy
+attendant on noble heroes.
+
+The Prioress follows these with her female Chaplain:
+
+    Another Nonne also with her had she,
+    That was her Chaplaine, and Priests three.
+
+This Lady is described also as of the first rank, rich and honoured.
+She has certain peculiarities and little delicate affectations, not
+unbecoming in her, being accompanied with what is truly grand and
+really polite; her person and face Chaucer has described with
+minuteness; it is very elegant, and was the beauty of our ancestors
+till after Elizabeth's time, when voluptuousness and folly began to be
+accounted beautiful.
+
+Her companion and her three Priests were no doubt all perfectly
+delineated in those parts of Chaucer's work which are now lost; we
+ought to suppose them suitable attendants on rank and fashion.
+
+The Monk follows these with the Friar. The Painter has also grouped
+with these the Pardoner and the Sompnour and the Manciple, and has
+here also introduced one of the rich citizens of London--characters
+likely to ride in company, all being above the common rank in life, or
+attendants on those who were so.
+
+For the Monk is described by Chaucer, as a man of the first rank in
+society, noble, rich, and expensively attended; he is a leader of the
+age, with certain humorous accompaniments in his character, that do
+not degrade, but render him an object of dignified mirth, but also
+with other accompaniments not so respectable.
+
+The Friar is a character of a mixed kind:
+
+    A friar there was, a wanton and a merry;
+
+but in his office he is said to be a 'full solemn man'; eloquent,
+amorous, witty and satirical; young, handsome and rich; he is a
+complete rogue, with constitutional gaiety enough to make him a
+master of all the pleasures of the world:
+
+    His neck was white as the flour de lis,
+    Thereto strong he was as a champioun.
+
+It is necessary here to speak of Chaucer's own character, that I may
+set certain mistaken critics right in their conception of the humour
+and fun that occur on the journey. Chaucer is himself the great
+poetical observer of men, who in every age is born to record and
+eternize its acts. This he does as a master, as a father and superior,
+who looks down on their little follies from the Emperor to the Miller,
+sometimes with severity, oftener with joke and sport.
+
+Accordingly Chaucer has made his Monk a great tragedian, one who
+studied poetical art. So much so that the generous Knight is, in the
+compassionate dictates of his soul, compelled to cry out:
+
+    'Ho,' quoth the Knyght, 'good Sir, no more of this;
+    That ye have said is right ynough, I wis,
+    And mokell more; for little heaviness
+    Is right enough for much folk, as I guesse.
+    I say, for me, it is a great disease,
+    Whereas men have been in wealth and ease,
+    To heare of their sudden fall, alas!
+    And the contrary is joy and solas.'
+
+The Monk's definition of tragedy in the proem to his tale is worth
+repeating:
+
+    Tragedie is to tell a certain story,
+    As old books us maken memory,
+    Of hem that stood in great prosperity,
+    And be fallen out of high degree,
+    Into miserie, and ended wretchedly.
+
+Though a man of luxury, pride and pleasure, he is a master of art and
+learning, though affecting to despise it. Those who can think that
+the proud huntsman and noble housekeeper, Chaucer's Monk, is intended
+for a buffoon or burlesque character, know little of Chaucer.
+
+For the Host who follows this group, and holds the centre of the
+cavalcade, is a first-rate character, and his jokes are no trifles;
+they are always, though uttered with audacity, and equally free with
+the Lord and the Peasant--they are always substantially and weightily
+expressive of knowledge and experience; Henry Baillie, the keeper of
+the greatest Inn of the greatest City, for such was the Tabarde Inn in
+Southwark near London, our Host, was also a leader of the age.
+
+By way of illustration I instance Shakespeare's Witches in _Macbeth_.
+Those who dress them for the stage, consider them as wretched old
+women, and not, as Shakespeare intended, the Goddesses of Destiny;
+this shows how Chaucer has been misunderstood in his sublime work.
+Shakespeare's Fairies also are the rulers of the vegetable world, and
+so are Chaucer's; let them be so considered, and then the poet will be
+understood, and not else.
+
+But I have omitted to speak of a very prominent character, the
+Pardoner, the Age's Knave, who always commands and domineers over the
+high and low vulgar. This man is sent in every age for a rod and
+scourge, and for a blight, for a trial of men, to divide the classes
+of men; he is in the most holy sanctuary, and he is suffered by
+Providence for wise ends, and has also his great use, and his grand
+leading destiny.
+
+His companion the Sompnour is also a Devil of the first magnitude,
+grand, terrific, rich, and honoured in the rank of which he holds the
+destiny. The uses to society are perhaps equal of the Devil and of the
+Angel; their sublimity who can dispute?
+
+    In daunger had he at his own gise,
+    The young girls of his diocese,
+    And he knew well their counsel, &c.
+
+The principal figure in the next group is the Good Parson; an Apostle,
+a real Messenger of Heaven, sent in every age for its light and its
+warmth. This man is beloved and venerated by all, and neglected by
+all: he serves all, and is served by none. He is, according to
+Christ's definition, the greatest of his age: yet he is a Poor Parson
+of a town. Read Chaucer's description of the Good Parson, and bow the
+head and the knee to Him, Who in every age sends us such a burning and
+a shining light. Search, O ye rich and powerful, for these men and
+obey their counsel; then shall the golden age return. But alas! you
+will not easily distinguish him from the Friar or the Pardoner; they
+also are 'full solemn men', and their counsel you will continue to
+follow.
+
+I have placed by his side the Sergeant-at-Lawe, who appears delighted
+to ride in his company, and between him and his brother the Ploughman;
+as I wish men of law would always ride with them, and take their
+counsel, especially in all difficult points. Chaucer's Lawyer is a
+character of great venerableness, a Judge and a real master of the
+jurisprudence of his age.
+
+The Doctor of Physic is in this group; and the Franklin, the
+voluptuous country gentleman, contrasted with the Physician, and, on
+his other hand, with two Citizens of London. Chaucer's characters
+live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage; we all pass
+on, each sustaining one of these characters; nor can a child be born
+who is not one or other of these characters of Chaucer. The Doctor of
+Physic is described as the first of his profession, perfect, learned,
+completely Master and Doctor in his art. Thus the reader will observe
+that Chaucer makes every one of his characters perfect in his kind;
+every one is an Antique Statue, the image of a class and not of an
+imperfect individual.
+
+This group also would furnish substantial matter, on which volumes
+might be written. The Franklin is one who keeps open table, who is the
+genius of eating and drinking, the Bacchus; as the Doctor of Physic is
+the Aesculapius, the Host is the Silenus, the Squire is the Apollo,
+the Miller is the Hercules, &c. Chaucer's characters are a description
+of the eternal Principles that exist in all ages. The Franklin is
+voluptuousness itself, most nobly portrayed:
+
+    It snewed in his house of meat and drink.
+
+The Ploughman is simplicity itself, with wisdom and strength for its
+stamina. Chaucer has divided the ancient character of Hercules between
+his Miller and his Ploughman. Benevolence is the Ploughman's great
+characteristic; he is thin with excessive labour, and not with old age
+as some have supposed:
+
+    He would thresh, and thereto dike and delve,
+    For Christe's sake, for every poore wight,
+    Withouten hire, if it lay in his might.
+
+Visions of these eternal principles or characters of human life appear
+to poets in all ages; the Grecian gods were the ancient Cherubim of
+Phoenicia; but the Greeks, and since them the Moderns, have neglected
+to subdue the gods of Priam. These gods are visions of the eternal
+attributes, or divine names, which, when erected into gods, become
+destructive to humanity. They ought to be the servants, and not the
+masters of man or of society. They ought to be made to sacrifice to
+man, and not man compelled to sacrifice to them; for, when separated
+from man or humanity, who is Jesus the Saviour, the Vine of Eternity?
+They are thieves and rebels, they are destroyers.
+
+The Ploughman of Chaucer is Hercules in his supreme Eternal State,
+divested of his Spectrous Shadow, which is the Miller, a terrible
+fellow, such as exists in all times and places for the trial of men,
+to astonish every neighbourhood with brutal strength and courage, to
+get rich and powerful, to curb the pride of Man.
+
+The Reeve and the Manciple are two characters of the most consummate
+worldly wisdom. The Shipman, or Sailor, is a similar genius of
+Ulyssean art, but with the highest courage superadded.
+
+The Citizens and their Cook are each leaders of a class. Chaucer has
+been somehow made to number four citizens, which would make his whole
+company, himself included, thirty-one. But he says there was but
+nine-and-twenty in his company:
+
+    Full nine and twenty in a company.
+
+The Webbe, or Weaver, and the Tapiser, or Tapestry Weaver, appear to
+me to be the same person; but this is only an opinion, for 'full nine
+and twenty' may signify one more or less. But I daresay that Chaucer
+wrote 'A Webbe Dyer', that is a Cloth Dyer:
+
+    A Webbe Dyer and a Tapiser.
+
+The Merchant cannot be one of the Three Citizens, as his dress is
+different, and his character is more marked, whereas Chaucer says of
+his rich citizens:
+
+    All were yclothed in o liverie.
+
+The characters of Women Chaucer has divided into two classes, the Lady
+Prioress and the Wife of Bath. Are not these leaders of the ages of
+men? The Lady Prioress in some ages predominates; and in some the Wife
+of Bath, in whose character Chaucer has been equally minute and exact;
+because she is also a scourge and a blight. I shall say no more of
+her, nor expose what Chaucer has left hidden; let the young reader
+study what he has said of her: it is useful as a scarecrow. There are
+of such characters born too many for the peace of the world.
+
+I come at length to the Clerk of Oxenford. This character varies from
+that of Chaucer, as the contemplative philosopher varies from the
+poetical genius. There are always these two classes of learned sages,
+the poetical and the philosophical. The Painter has put them side by
+side, as if the youthful clerk had put himself under the tuition of
+the mature poet. Let the Philosopher always be the servant and scholar
+of Inspiration, and all will be happy.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES LAMB
+
+1775-1834
+
+ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE,
+
+CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS FOR STAGE REPRESENTATION
+(1811)
+
+
+Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the
+affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen
+before, and which upon examination proved to be a whole-length of the
+celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would not go so far with some good
+Catholics abroad as to shut players altogether out of consecrated
+ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction
+of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of
+the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed under this
+harlequin figure the following lines:
+
+    To paint fair Nature, by divine command,
+    Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,
+    A Shakespeare rose: then, to expand his fame
+    Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
+    Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,
+    The Actor's genius bade them breathe anew;
+    Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,
+    Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day:
+    And till Eternity with power sublime
+    Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,
+    Shakespeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,
+    And earth irradiate with a beam divine.
+
+It would be an insult to my readers' understandings to attempt
+anything like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and
+nonsense. But the reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder, how,
+from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own, it should have
+been the fashion to compliment every performer in his turn, that has
+had the luck to please the town in any of the great characters of
+Shakespeare, with the notion of possessing a _mind congenial with the
+poet's_: how people should come thus unaccountably to confound the
+power of originating poetical images and conceptions with the faculty
+of being able to read or recite the same when put into words;[7] or
+what connexion that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man,
+which a great dramatic poet possesses, has with those low tricks upon
+the eye and ear, which a player by observing a few general effects,
+which some common passion, as grief, anger, &c. usually has upon the
+gestures and exterior, can so easily compass. To know the internal
+workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for
+instance, the _when_ and the _why_ and the _how far_ they should be
+moved; to what pitch a passion is becoming; to give the reins and to
+pull in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the
+slackening is most graceful; seems to demand a reach of intellect of a
+vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare
+imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or
+gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most lively and
+emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all
+but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief,
+generally; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it
+differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the
+actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye
+(without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible
+sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which
+we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow
+apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are
+apt not only to sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay
+to the actor, but even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner,
+the actor with the character which he represents. It is difficult for
+a frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person
+and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality
+thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion incidental alone to
+unlettered persons, who, not possessing the advantage of reading, are
+necessarily dependent upon the stage-player for all the pleasure which
+they can receive from the drama, and to whom the very idea of _what an
+author is_ cannot be made comprehensible without some pain and
+perplexity of mind: the error is one from which persons otherwise not
+meanly lettered, find it almost impossible to extricate themselves.
+
+    [7] It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in
+    _dramatic_ recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who
+    reads Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a
+    great poet and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davies,
+    the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the _Paradise
+    Lost_ better than any man in England in his day (though I
+    cannot help thinking there must be some mistake in this
+    tradition), was therefore, by his intimate friends, set upon
+    a level with Milton.
+
+Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of
+satisfaction which I received some years back from seeing for the
+first time a tragedy of Shakespeare performed, in which these two
+great performers sustained the principal parts. It seemed to embody
+and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape.
+But dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure,
+this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our
+cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and
+brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have
+let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.
+
+How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions
+thus crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing
+actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness
+with which we turn to those plays of Shakespeare which have escaped
+being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the same
+writer which have happily been left out in performance. How far the
+very custom of hearing anything _spouted_, withers and blows upon a
+fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from _Henry the Fifth_,
+&c. which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to
+be found in _Enfield Speakers_, and such kind of books. I confess
+myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in
+_Hamlet_, beginning 'To be or not to be', or to tell whether it be
+good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by
+declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place
+and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a
+perfect dead member.
+
+It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the
+plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage,
+than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished
+excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in
+them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye,
+and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.
+
+The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of
+passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more
+hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously
+possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons
+talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner
+talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular
+upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are
+here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this war
+of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed round
+such 'intellectual prize-fighters'. Talking is the direct object of
+the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in Shakespeare
+above all, how obvious it is, that the form of _speaking_, whether it
+be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly
+artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of
+that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a
+character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at _in that
+form of composition_ by any gift short of intuition. We do here as we
+do with novels written in the _epistolary form_. How many
+improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with
+in _Clarissa_ and other books, for the sake of the delight which that
+form upon the whole gives us.
+
+But the practice of stage representation reduces everything to a
+controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous
+blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must
+play the orator. The love-dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those
+silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night; the more intimate and
+sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus
+with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so delightful
+in the reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in
+Paradise
+
+                            As beseem'd
+    Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league
+    Alone:
+
+by the inherent fault of stage representation, how are these things
+sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large
+assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come
+drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though
+nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed
+at the spectators, who are to judge of her endearments and her returns
+of love.
+
+The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of
+Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest
+ambition to distinguish themselves. The length of the part may be one
+of their reasons. But for the character itself, we find it in a play,
+and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic representation.
+The play itself abounds in maxims and reflections beyond any other,
+and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle for conveying moral
+instruction. But Hamlet himself--what does he suffer meanwhile by
+being dragged forth as a public schoolmaster, to give lectures to the
+crowd! Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are transactions
+between himself and his moral sense, they are the effusions of his
+solitary musings, which he retires to holes and corners and the most
+sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth; or rather, they are the
+silent meditations with which his bosom is bursting, reduced to _words_
+for the sake of the reader, who must else remain ignorant of what is
+passing there. These profound sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring
+ruminations, which the tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and
+chambers, how can they be represented by a gesticulating actor, who
+comes and mouths them out before an audience, making four hundred
+people his confidants at once? I say not that it is the fault of the
+actor so to do; he must pronounce them _ore rotundo_, he must
+accompany them with his eye, he must insinuate them into his auditory
+by some trick of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails. _He must be
+thinking all the while of his appearance, because he knows that all
+the while the spectators are judging of it._ And this is the way to
+represent the shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet.
+
+It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity of
+thought and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who otherwise
+would never earn it for themselves by reading, and the intellectual
+acquisition gained this way may, for aught I know, be inestimable; but
+I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet
+is made another thing by being acted. I have heard much of the wonders
+which Garrick performed in this part; but as I never saw him, I must
+have leave to doubt whether the representation of such a character
+came within the province of his art. Those who tell me of him, speak
+of his eye, of the magic of his eye, and of his commanding voice:
+physical properties, vastly desirable in an actor, and without which
+he can never insinuate meaning into an auditory,--but what have they
+to do with Hamlet? what have they to do with intellect? In fact, the
+things aimed at in theatrical representation, are to arrest the
+spectator's eye upon the form and the gesture, and so to gain a more
+favourable hearing to what is spoken: it is not what the character is,
+but how he looks; not what he says, but how he speaks it. I see no
+reason to think that if the play of _Hamlet_ were written over again
+by some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the
+story, but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine
+features of Shakespeare, his stupendous intellect; and only taking
+care to give us enough of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo
+were never at a loss to furnish; I see not how the effect could be
+much different upon an audience, nor how the actor has it in his power
+to represent Shakespeare to us differently from his representation of
+Banks or Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful accomplished prince,
+and must be gracefully personated; he might be puzzled in his mind,
+wavering in his conduct, seemingly-cruel to Ophelia, he might see a
+ghost, and start at it, and address it kindly when he found it to be
+his father; all this in the poorest and most homely language of the
+servilest creeper after nature that ever consulted the palate of an
+audience; without troubling Shakespeare for the matter: and I see not
+but there would be room for all the power which an actor has, to
+display itself. All the passions and changes of passion might remain:
+for those are much less difficult to write or act than is thought, it
+is a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising or falling a note or
+two in the voice, a whisper with a significant foreboding look to
+announce its approach, and so contagious the counterfeit appearance of
+any emotion is, that let the words be what they will, the look and
+tone shall carry it off and make it pass for deep skill in the
+passions.
+
+It is common for people to talk of Shakespeare's plays being _so
+natural_; that everybody can understand him. They are natural indeed,
+they are grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies
+out of the reach of most of us. You shall hear the same persons say
+that George Barnwell is very natural, and Othello is very natural,
+that they are both very deep; and to them they are the same kind of
+thing. At the one they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of
+young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commit _a trifling
+peccadillo_, the murder of an uncle or so, that is all, and so comes
+to an untimely end, which is _so moving_; and at the other, because a
+blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white wife: and the
+odds are that ninety-nine out of a hundred would willingly behold the
+same catastrophe happen to both the heroes, and have thought the rope
+more due to Othello than to Barnwell. For of the texture of Othello's
+mind, the inward construction marvellously laid open with all its
+strengths and weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human
+misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love,
+they see no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their
+pennies a-piece to look through the man's telescope in Leicester-fields,
+see into the inward plot and topography of the moon. Some dim thing or
+other they see, they see an actor personating a passion, of grief, or
+anger, for instance, and they recognize it as a copy of the usual
+external effects of such passions; for at least as being true to _that
+symbol of the emotion which passes current at the theatre for it_, for
+it is often no more than that: but of the grounds of the passion, its
+correspondence to a great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy
+object of tragedy,--that common auditors know any thing of this, or
+can have any such notions dinned into them by the mere strength of an
+actor's lungs,--that apprehensions foreign to them should be thus
+infused into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand how
+it can be possible.
+
+We talk of Shakespeare's admirable observation of life, when we should
+feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day
+characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own
+mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very 'sphere
+of humanity', he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of
+which every one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our
+natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he
+positively creates in us, for nothing more than indigenous faculties
+of our own minds which only waited the action of corresponding virtues
+in him to return a full and clear echo of the same.
+
+To return to Hamlet.--Among the distinguishing features of that
+wonderful character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) is that
+soreness of mind which makes him treat the intrusions of Polonius
+with harshness, and that asperity which he puts on in his interviews
+with Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind (if they be not mixed
+in the latter case with a profound artifice of love, to alienate
+Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind for the
+breaking off of that loving intercourse, which can no longer find a
+place amidst business so serious as that which he has to do) are parts
+of his character, which to reconcile with our admiration of Hamlet,
+the most patient consideration of his situation is no more than
+necessary; they are what we _forgive afterwards_, and explain by the
+whole of his character, but _at the time_ they are harsh and
+unpleasant. Yet such is the actor's necessity of giving strong blows
+to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this character,
+who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous
+features,--these temporary deformities in the character. They make him
+express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his
+gentility, and which no explanation can render palatable; they make
+him show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia's father,--contempt
+in its very grossest and most hateful form; but they get applause by
+it: it is natural, people say; that is, the words are scornful, and
+the actor expresses scorn, and that they can judge of: but why so much
+scorn, and of that sort, they never think of asking.
+
+So to Ophelia.--All the Hamlets that I have ever seen, rant and rave
+at her as if she had committed some great crime, and the audience are
+highly pleased, because the words of the part are satirical, and they
+are enforced by the strongest expression of satirical indignation of
+which the face and voice are capable. But then, whether Hamlet is
+likely to have put on such brutal appearances to a lady whom he loved
+so dearly, is never thought on. The truth is, that in all such deep
+affections as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia, there is a
+stock of _supererogatory love_, (if I may venture to use the
+expression) which in any great grief of heart, especially where that
+which preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, confers a kind of
+indulgence upon the grieved party to express itself, even to its
+heart's dearest object, in the language of a temporary alienation; but
+it is not alienation, it is a distraction purely, and so it always
+makes itself to be felt by that object: it is not anger, but grief
+assuming the appearance of anger,--love awkwardly counterfeiting hate,
+as sweet countenances when they try to frown: but such sternness and
+fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to show, is no counterfeit, but the
+real face of absolute aversion,--of irreconcilable alienation. It may
+be said he puts on the madman; but then he should only so far put on
+this counterfeit lunacy as his own real distraction will give him
+leave; that is, incompletely, imperfectly; not in that confirmed
+practised way, like a master of his art, or, as Dame Quickly would
+say, 'like one of those harlotry players.'
+
+I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure which
+Shakespeare's plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to
+differ from that which the audience receive from those of other
+writers; and, _they being in themselves essentially so different from
+all others_, I must conclude that there is something in the nature of
+acting which levels all distinctions. And in fact, who does not speak
+indifferently of the _Gamester_ and of _Macbeth_ as fine stage
+performances, and praise the Mrs. Beverley in the same way as the Lady
+Macbeth of Mrs. S.? Belvidera, and Calista, and Isabella, and
+Euphrasia, are they less liked than Imogen, or than Juliet, or than
+Desdemona? Are they not spoken of and remembered in the same way? Is
+not the female performer as great (as they call it) in one as in the
+other? Did not Garrick shine, and was not he ambitious of shining in
+every drawling tragedy that his wretched day produced,--the
+productions of the Hills and the Murphys and the Browns,--and shall he
+have that honour to dwell in our minds for ever as an inseparable
+concomitant with Shakespeare? A kindred mind! O who can read that
+affecting sonnet of Shakespeare which alludes to his profession as a
+player:
+
+    Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
+    The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
+    That did not better for my life provide
+    Than public means which public custom breeds--
+    Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
+    And almost thence my nature is subdued
+    To what it works in, like the dyer's hand--
+
+Or that other confession:
+
+    Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
+    And made myself a motley to thy view,
+    Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear--
+
+Who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness in our sweet
+Shakespeare, and dream of any congeniality between him and one that,
+by every tradition of him, appears to have been as mere a player as
+ever existed; to have had his mind tainted with the lowest players'
+vices,--envy and jealousy, and miserable cravings after applause; one
+who in the exercise of his profession was jealous even of the
+women-performers that stood in his way; a manager full of managerial
+tricks and stratagems and finesse: that any resemblance should be
+dreamed of between him and Shakespeare,--Shakespeare who, in the
+plenitude and consciousness of his own powers, could with that noble
+modesty, which we can neither imitate nor appreciate, express himself
+thus of his own sense of his own defects:
+
+    Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
+    Featur'd like him, like him with friends possest;
+    Desiring _this man's art, and that man's scope_.
+
+I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being an admirer
+of Shakespeare. A true lover of his excellences he certainly was not;
+for would any true lover of them have admitted into his matchless
+scenes such ribald trash as Tate and Cibber, and the rest of them,
+that
+
+    With their darkness durst affront his light,
+
+have foisted into the acting plays of Shakespeare? I believe it
+impossible that he could have had a proper reverence for Shakespeare,
+and have condescended to go through that interpolated scene in Richard
+the Third, in which Richard tries to break his wife's heart by telling
+her he loves another woman, and says, 'if she survives this she is
+immortal.' Yet I doubt not he delivered this vulgar stuff with as much
+anxiety of emphasis as any of the genuine parts; and for acting, it is
+as well calculated as any. But we have seen the part of Richard lately
+produce great fame to an actor by his manner of playing it, and it
+lets us into the secret of acting, and of popular judgements of
+Shakespeare derived from acting. Not one of the spectators who have
+witnessed Mr. C.'s exertions in that part, but has come away with a
+proper conviction that Richard is a very wicked man, and kills little
+children in their beds, with something like the pleasure which the
+giants and ogres in children's books are represented to have taken in
+that practice; moreover, that he is very close and shrewd and devilish
+cunning, for you could see that by his eye.
+
+But is in fact this the impression we have in reading the Richard of
+Shakespeare? Do we feel anything like disgust, as we do at that
+butcher-like representation of him that passes for him on the stage? A
+horror at his crimes blends with the effect which we feel, but how is
+it qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich intellect which he
+displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast
+knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry of his part,--not an
+atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of acting it.
+Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are prominent
+and staring; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty genius,
+the man of vast capacity,--the profound, the witty, accomplished
+Richard?
+
+The truth is, the Characters of Shakespeare are so much the objects of
+meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions,
+that while we are reading any of his great criminal characters,--Macbeth,
+Richard, even Iago,--we think not so much of the crimes which they
+commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual
+activity, which prompts them to overleap those moral fences. Barnwell
+is a wretched murderer; there is a certain fitness between his neck
+and the rope; he is the legitimate heir to the gallows; nobody who
+thinks at all can think of any alleviating circumstances in his case
+to make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an instance from the
+higher tragedy, what else but a mere assassin is Glenalvon! Do we
+think of anything but of the crime which he commits, and the rack
+which he deserves? That is all which we really think about him.
+Whereas in corresponding characters in Shakespeare so little do the
+actions comparatively affect us, that while the impulses, the inner
+mind in all its perverted greatness, solely seems real and is
+exclusively attended to, the crime is comparatively nothing. But when
+we see these things represented, the acts which they do are
+comparatively everything, their impulses nothing. The state of sublime
+emotion into which we are elevated by those images of night and horror
+which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with which he
+entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to
+murder Duncan,--when we no longer read it in a book, when we have
+given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses
+over seeing, and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes
+actually preparing to commit a murder, if the acting be true and
+impressive, as I have witnessed it in Mr. K.'s performance of that
+part, the painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to
+prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing
+semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally
+destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where the
+deed doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence:
+it rather seems to belong to history,--to something past and
+inevitable, if it has anything to do with time at all. The sublime
+images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to our minds in the
+reading.
+
+So to see Lear acted--to see an old man tottering about the stage with
+a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy
+night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want
+to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling
+which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of
+Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they
+mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to
+represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to
+represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan
+of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures.
+The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in
+intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano:
+they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his
+mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare.
+This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on;
+even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but
+corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we
+read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,--we are in his mind, we are
+sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and
+storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty
+irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes
+of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth,
+at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks,
+or tones, to do with that sublime identification of his age with that
+of the _heavens themselves_, when in his reproaches to them for
+conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that 'they
+themselves are old'. What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What
+has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is
+beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and
+stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough
+that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has
+put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his
+followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about
+more easily. A happy ending!--as if the living martyrdom that Lear had
+gone through,--the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair
+dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If
+he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's
+burden after, why all this pudder and preparation,--why torment us
+with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of
+getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over
+again his misused station,--as if at his years, and with his
+experience, anything was left but to die.
+
+Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how
+many dramatic personages are there in Shakespeare, which though more
+tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some
+circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be
+shown to our bodily eye. Othello for instance. Nothing can be more
+soothing, more flattering to the nobler parts of our natures, than to
+read of a young Venetian lady of highest extraction, through the force
+of love and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying aside
+every consideration of kindred, and country, and colour, and wedding
+with _a coal-black Moor_--(for such he is represented, in the
+imperfect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those
+days, compared with our own, or in compliance with popular notions,
+though the Moors are now well enough known to be by many shades less
+unworthy of a white woman's fancy)--it is the perfect triumph of
+virtue over accidents, of the imagination over the senses. She sees
+Othello's colour in his mind. But upon the stage, when the imagination
+is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor
+unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello played,
+whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in his
+colour; whether he did not find something extremely revolting in the
+courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and whether
+the actual sight of the thing did not over-weigh all that beautiful
+compromise which we make in reading;--and the reason it should do so
+is obvious, because there is just so much reality presented to our
+senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with not enough of
+belief in the internal motives--all that which is unseen--to overpower
+and reconcile the first and obvious prejudices.[8] What we see upon a
+stage is body and bodily action; what we are conscious of in reading
+is almost exclusively the mind, and its movements: and this I think
+may sufficiently account for the very different sort of delight with
+which the same play so often affects us in the reading and the seeing.
+
+    [8] The error of supposing that because Othello's colour does
+    not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in
+    the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam
+    and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do in the
+    poem. But in the poem we for a while have Paradisaical senses
+    given us, which vanish when we see a man and his wife without
+    clothes in the picture. The painters themselves feel this, as
+    is apparent by the awkward shifts they have recourse to, to
+    make them look not quite naked; by a sort of prophetic
+    anachronism, antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So in
+    the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes; in the
+    seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own.
+
+It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters in
+Shakespeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet
+something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination, to
+admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering a
+change and a diminution,--that still stronger the objection must lie
+against representing another line of characters, which Shakespeare has
+introduced to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his
+scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to
+common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist.
+When we read the incantations of those terrible beings the Witches in
+_Macbeth_, though some of the ingredients of their hellish composition
+savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other than the most
+serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound
+as Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence? We
+might as well laugh under a consciousness of the principle of Evil
+himself being truly and really present with us. But attempt to bring
+these beings on to a stage, and you turn them instantly into so many
+old women, that men and children are to laugh at. Contrary to the old
+saying, that 'seeing is believing', the sight actually destroys the
+faith; and the mirth in which we indulge at their expense, when we see
+these creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of indemnification
+which we make to ourselves for the terror which they put us in when
+reading made them an object of belief,--when we surrendered up our
+reason to the poet, as children, to their nurses and their elders; and
+we laugh at our fears, as children who thought they saw something in
+the dark, triumph when the bringing in of a candle discovers the
+vanity of their fears. For this exposure of supernatural agents upon a
+stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose their own delusiveness.
+It is the solitary taper and the book that generates a faith in these
+terrors: a ghost by chandelier light, and in good company, deceives no
+spectators,--a ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his human
+dimensions made out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted house, and
+a well-dressed audience, shall arm the most nervous child against any
+apprehensions: as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles
+with his impenetrable armour over it, 'Bully Dawson would have fought
+the devil with such advantages.'
+
+Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture
+which Dryden has thrown into the _Tempest_: doubtless without some
+such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have sate
+out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet
+courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the _Tempest_ of
+Shakespeare at all a subject for stage representation? It is one thing
+to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we are
+reading it; but to have a conjurer brought before us in his
+conjuring-gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself and
+some hundred of favoured spectators before the curtain are supposed to
+see, involves such a quantity of the _hateful incredible_, that all
+our reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such
+gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish
+and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they
+cannot even be painted,--they can only be believed. But the elaborate
+and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands,
+in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. That
+which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life
+of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties,
+positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A
+parlour or a drawing-room,--a library opening into a garden,--a garden
+with an alcove in it,--a street, or the piazza of Covent Garden, does
+well enough in a scene; we are content to give as much credit to it as
+it demands; or rather, we think little about it,--it is little more
+than reading at the top of a page, 'Scene, a Garden;' we do not
+imagine ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of
+familiar objects. But to think by the help of painted trees and
+caverns, which we know to be painted, to transport our minds to
+Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell;[9] or by the aid of a
+fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us
+believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the isle was
+full:--the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his
+musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind his apparatus,
+to make us believe that we do indeed hear the chrystal spheres ring
+out that chime, which if it were to inwrap our fancy long, Milton
+thinks,
+
+    Time would run back and fetch the age of gold,
+    And speckled vanity
+    Would sicken soon and die,
+    And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould;
+    Yea Hell itself would pass away,
+    And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day.
+
+The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more
+impossible to be shown on a stage, than the Enchanted Isle, with its
+no less interesting and innocent first settlers.
+
+    [9] It will be said these things are done in pictures. But
+    pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a
+    world of itself, but in scene-painting there is the attempt
+    to deceive; and there is the discordancy, never to be got
+    over, between painted scenes and real people.
+
+The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the Dresses,
+which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last
+time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of
+garment which he varied--the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish
+priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity
+of the public eye, require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish
+monarch was fairly a counterpart to that which our king wears when he
+goes to the Parliament-house,--just so full and cumbersome, and set
+out with ermine and pearls. And if things must be represented, I see
+not what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what robe are we
+conscious of? Some dim images of royalty--a crown and sceptre, may
+float before our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of it? Do we
+see in our mind's eye what Webb or any other robe-maker could pattern?
+This is the inevitable consequence of imitating everything, to make
+all things natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine
+abstraction. It presents to the fancy just so much of external
+appearances as to make us feel that we are among flesh and blood,
+while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is
+employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character.
+But in acting, scenery, dress, the most contemptible things, call upon
+us to judge of their naturalness.
+
+Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure which we
+take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with that quiet
+delight which we find in the reading of it, to the different feelings
+with which a reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine
+poem. The accursed critical habit,--the being called upon to judge and
+pronounce, must make it quite a different thing to the former. In
+seeing these plays acted, we are affected just as judges. When Hamlet
+compares the two pictures of Gertrude's first and second husband, who
+wants to see the pictures? But in the acting, a miniature must be
+lugged out; which we know not to be the picture, but only to show how
+finely a miniature may be represented. This showing of everything,
+levels all things: it makes tricks, bows, and curtesies, of
+importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than by the
+manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene in
+_Macbeth_: it is as much remembered as any of her thrilling tones or
+impressive looks. But does such a trifle as this enter into the
+imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful scene? Does not
+the mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can? Does it care about
+the gracefulness of the doing it? But by acting, and judging of
+acting, all these non-essentials are raised into an importance,
+injurious to the main interest of the play.
+
+I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakespeare. It
+would be no very difficult task to extend the inquiry to his comedies;
+and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest, are
+equally incompatible with stage representation. The length to which
+this essay has run, will make it, I am afraid, sufficiently
+distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without going any deeper
+into the subject at present.
+
+
+
+
+PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
+
+1792-1822
+
+A DEFENCE OF POETRY (1821)
+
+
+According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action,
+which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered
+as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another,
+however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts
+so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as
+from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the
+principle of its own integrity. The one is the [Greek: to poiein], or
+the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects those forms which
+are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the
+[Greek: to logizein], or principle of analysis, and its action regards
+the relations of things, simply as relations; considering thoughts,
+not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations
+which conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of
+quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value
+of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects
+the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is
+to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the
+spirit, as the shadow to the substance.
+
+Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of
+the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is
+an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions
+are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an
+Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody.
+But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within
+all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and
+produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of
+the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite
+them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions
+of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even
+as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A
+child at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and
+motions; and every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact
+relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions
+which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression;
+and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so
+the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration
+of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. In
+relation to the objects which delight a child, these expressions are,
+what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to
+ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in
+him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and
+gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the
+image of the combined effect of those objects, and of his apprehension
+of them. Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures,
+next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an
+additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of
+expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts, become at
+once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture,
+the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony. The social
+sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements, society
+results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human
+beings coexist; the future is contained within the present, as the
+plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast,
+mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable of affording
+the motives according to which the will of a social being is
+determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute
+pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in
+reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in the
+infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and
+actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions
+represented by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that
+from which it proceeds. But let us dismiss those more general
+considerations which might involve an inquiry into the principles of
+society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the
+imagination is expressed upon its forms.
+
+In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural
+objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain
+rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they observe
+not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the
+song, in the combinations of language, in the series of their
+imitations of natural objects. For there is a certain order or rhythm
+belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation, from
+which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer
+pleasure than from any other: the sense of an approximation to this
+order has been called taste by modern writers. Every man in the
+infancy of art observes an order which approximates more or less
+closely to that from which this highest delight results: but the
+diversity is not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations should be
+sensible, except in those instances where the predominance of this
+faculty of approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted
+to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its cause) is
+very great. Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most
+universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the
+manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon
+their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of
+reduplication from that community. Their language is vitally
+metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of
+things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which
+represent them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of
+thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new
+poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been
+thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of
+human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said by
+Lord Bacon to be 'the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the
+various subjects of the world';[10] and he considers the faculty
+which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all
+knowledge. In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a
+poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to
+apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists
+in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception,
+and secondly between perception and expression. Every original
+language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem:
+the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are
+the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of
+the creations of poetry.
+
+    [10] _De Augment. Scient._, cap. i, lib. iii.
+
+But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order,
+are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and
+architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of
+laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts
+of life, and the teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with the
+beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of
+the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original
+religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like
+Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the
+circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were
+called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets:
+a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he
+not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those
+laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he
+beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of
+the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to
+be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell
+the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the
+pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of
+prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet
+participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as
+relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The
+grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference
+of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect
+to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses
+of Aeschylus, and the book of _Job_, and Dante's _Paradise_, would
+afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the
+limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of
+sculpture, painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive.
+
+Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are
+all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry
+by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of
+the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those
+arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are
+created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the
+invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of
+language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and
+passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and
+delicate combinations, than colour, form, or motion, and is more
+plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the
+creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and
+has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments,
+and conditions of art, have relations among each other, which limit
+and interpose between conception and expression. The former is as a
+mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the
+light of which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame of
+sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of
+the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of
+those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their
+thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of
+the term; as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal
+effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders
+of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to
+exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a
+question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of
+the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with
+that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets, any
+excess will remain.
+
+We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that
+art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of the
+faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle still
+narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and
+unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is
+inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
+
+Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and
+towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of
+those relations has always been found connected with a perception of
+the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets
+has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of
+sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less
+indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words
+themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity
+of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that
+you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as
+seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a
+poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no
+flower--and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.
+
+An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the
+language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music,
+produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony
+and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should
+accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the
+harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed
+convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such
+composition as includes much action: but every great poet must
+inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact
+structure of his peculiar versification. The distinction between poets
+and prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction between
+philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was essentially a
+poet--the truth and splendour of his imagery, and the melody of his
+language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He
+rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because
+he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and
+action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which
+would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his
+style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his periods, but with
+little success. Lord Bacon was a poet.[11] His language has a sweet
+and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the
+almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it
+is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the
+reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the
+universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the
+authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as
+they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent
+analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth;
+but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in
+themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music.
+Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of
+rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less
+capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who
+have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine
+ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest
+power.
+
+    [11] See the _Filum Labyrinthi_, and the Essay on Death
+    particularly.
+
+A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There
+is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a
+catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion than time,
+place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of
+actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as
+existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all
+other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period
+of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again
+recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of
+a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible
+varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use
+of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should
+invest them, augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new and
+wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence
+epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the
+poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which
+obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a
+mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
+
+The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as
+a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be considered as a whole,
+though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated
+portions: a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable
+thought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy,
+were poets; and although the plan of these writers, especially that of
+Livy, restrained them from developing this faculty in its highest
+degree, they made copious and ample amends for their subjection, by
+filling all the interstices of their subjects with living images.
+
+Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed to
+estimate its effects upon society.
+
+Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it
+falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its
+delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor
+their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it
+acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above
+consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations to
+contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the
+strength and splendour of their union. Even in modern times, no living
+poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the jury which sits in
+judgement upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be
+composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the
+selectest of the wise of many generations. A poet is a nightingale,
+who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet
+sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen
+musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not
+whence or why. The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the
+delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that social system
+which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has
+reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human
+character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were
+awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and
+Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and
+persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in
+these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have
+been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely
+impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation
+they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor
+let it be objected, that these characters are remote from moral
+perfection, and that they can by no means be considered as edifying
+patterns for general imitation. Every epoch, under names more or less
+specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked idol
+of the worship of a semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit is the veiled
+image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate.
+But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as a temporary
+dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without
+concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or
+dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he
+may the ancient armour or the modern uniform around his body; whilst
+it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty
+of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental
+vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to
+the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in
+which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express
+themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets
+of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their
+conceptions in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful
+whether the alloy of costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper
+this planetary music for mortal ears.
+
+The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a
+misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral
+improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry
+has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and
+domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men
+hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one
+another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and
+enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand
+unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the
+hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they
+were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the
+impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the
+minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that
+gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and
+actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or
+a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with
+the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.
+A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;
+he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the
+pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great
+instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to
+the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference
+of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new
+delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their
+own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and
+interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens
+the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same
+manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill
+to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually
+those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which
+participate in neither. By this assumption of the inferior office of
+interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit
+himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory in a participation in
+the cause. There was little danger that Homer, or any of the eternal
+poets, should have so far misunderstood themselves as to have
+abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the
+poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan,
+Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect
+of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in
+which they compel us to advert to this purpose.
+
+Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the
+dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously
+with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the
+poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture,
+philosophy, and, we may add, the forms of civil life. For although the
+scheme of Athenian society was deformed by many imperfections which
+the poetry existing in chivalry and Christianity has erased from the
+habits and institutions of modern Europe; yet never at any other
+period has so much energy, beauty, and virtue, been developed; never
+was blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined and rendered
+subject to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the
+dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during the century which
+preceded the death of Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of
+our species have we records and fragments stamped so visibly with the
+image of the divinity in man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in
+action, or in language, which has rendered this epoch memorable above
+all others, and the storehouse of examples to everlasting time. For
+written poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other
+arts, and it is an idle inquiry to demand which gave and which
+received the light, which all, as from a common focus, have scattered
+over the darkest periods of succeeding time. We know no more of cause
+and effect than a constant conjunction of events: poetry is ever found
+to co-exist with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and
+perfection of man. I appeal to what has already been established to
+distinguish between the cause and the effect.
+
+It was at the period here adverted to, that the drama had its birth;
+and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those
+few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved to
+us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was understood or
+practised according to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For
+the Athenians employed language, action, music, painting, the dance,
+and religious institutions, to produce a common effect in the
+representation of the highest idealisms of passion and of power; each
+division in the art was made perfect in its kind by artists of the
+most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful proportion
+and unity one towards the other. On the modern stage a few only of the
+elements capable of expressing the image of the poet's conception are
+employed at once. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music
+and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the
+fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. Religious
+institution has indeed been usually banished from the stage. Our
+system of divesting the actor's face of a mask, on which the many
+expressions appropriated to his dramatic character might be moulded
+into one permanent and unchanging expression, is favourable only to a
+partial and inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a
+monologue, where all the attention may be directed to some great
+master of ideal mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy with
+tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is
+undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should
+be as in _King Lear_, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the
+intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favour
+of _King Lear_ against the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ or the _Agamemnon_, or,
+if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unless the
+intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter,
+should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. _King Lear_, if it
+can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect
+specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world; in spite of the
+narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected by the ignorance of
+the philosophy of the drama which has prevailed in modern Europe.
+Calderon, in his religious _Autos_, has attempted to fulfil some of
+the high conditions of dramatic representation neglected by
+Shakespeare; such as the establishing a relation between the drama and
+religion, and the accommodating them to music and dancing; but he
+omits the observation of conditions still more important, and more is
+lost than gained by the substitution of the rigidly-defined and
+ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the living
+impersonations of the truth of human passion.
+
+But I digress.--The connexion of scenic exhibitions with the
+improvement or corruption of the manners of men, has been universally
+recognized: in other words, the presence or absence of poetry in its
+most perfect and universal form, has been found to be connected with
+good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has been
+imputed to the drama as an effect, begins, when the poetry employed in
+its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners whether the
+periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not
+corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and
+effect.
+
+The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its
+perfection, ever co-existed with the moral and intellectual greatness
+of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in
+which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of
+circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which
+every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires,
+and would become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains
+and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the
+capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are
+strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted
+calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into
+the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror
+and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence
+of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its
+wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their
+choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for
+censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
+Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon
+that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express
+poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the
+brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from
+the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with
+majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it
+with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.
+
+But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with
+that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great
+masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of
+the kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood, or a weak
+attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as
+moral truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries
+of some gross vice or weakness, with which the author, in common with
+his auditors, are infected. Hence what has been called the classical
+and domestic drama. Addison's _Cato_ is a specimen of the one; and
+would it were not superfluous to cite examples of the other! To such
+purposes poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of
+lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would
+contain it. And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this
+nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment
+and passion, which, divested of imagination, are other names for
+caprice and appetite. The period in our own history of the grossest
+degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in
+which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the
+triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone
+illuminating an age unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating
+principle pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry
+ceases to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality:
+wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph,
+instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt, succeed to
+sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which
+is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the
+very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a
+monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth new
+food, which it devours in secret.
+
+The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of
+expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other,
+the connexion of poetry and social good is more observable in the
+drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable that the
+highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the
+highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction
+of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a
+corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain
+the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli says of political
+institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should
+arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. And this
+is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all
+language, institution and form, require not only to be produced but to
+be sustained: the office and character of a poet participates in the
+divine nature as regards providence, no less than as regards creation.
+
+Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of the
+Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols of the
+extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. The
+bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of
+Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most glorious
+reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious; like the odour of the
+tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of
+sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale
+of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field,
+and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own, which endows
+the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic
+and erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that
+softness in statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners
+and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer.
+Nor is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to
+which this want of harmony is to be imputed. An equal sensibility to
+the influence of the senses and the affections is to be found in the
+writings of Homer and Sophocles: the former, especially, has clothed
+sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. Their
+superiority over these succeeding writers consists in the presence of
+those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not
+in the absence of those which are connected with the external: their
+incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. It
+is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which
+their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets,
+but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with
+any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Had
+that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to
+pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an
+imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved. For
+the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to
+pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the
+imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself
+thence as a paralysing venom, through the affections into the very
+appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense
+survives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses
+itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its
+voice is heard, like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from the
+world. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable
+of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of
+whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil
+time. It will readily be confessed that those among the luxurious
+citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were delighted with the poems
+of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensual than the remnant of
+their tribe. But corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of
+human society before poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that
+chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through
+the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from
+a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once
+connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. It is the faculty
+which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of
+social renovation. And let us not circumscribe the effects of the
+bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of
+those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of
+those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated
+portions: those who are more finely organized, or born in a happier
+age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem, which all
+poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up
+since the beginning of the world.
+
+The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient
+Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have
+been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans appear
+to have considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the
+selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have abstained from
+creating in measured language, sculpture, music, or architecture,
+anything which might bear a particular relation to their own
+condition, whilst it should bear a general one to the universal
+constitution of the world. But we judge from partial evidence, and we
+judge perhaps partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all
+great poets, have been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil
+in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen delicacy of expressions of
+the latter, are as a mist of light which conceal from us the intense
+and exceeding truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct
+with poetry. Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great
+writers of the Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of
+Greece. The institutions also, and the religion of Rome were less
+poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the
+substance. Hence poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than
+accompany, the perfection of political and domestic society. The true
+poetry of Rome lived in its institutions; for whatever of beautiful,
+true, and majestic, they contained, could have sprung only from the
+faculty which creates the order in which they consist. The life of
+Camillus, the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in
+their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls: the refusal of the
+republic to make peace with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were
+not the consequences of a refined calculation of the probable personal
+advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life,
+to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal
+dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it
+out of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire,
+and the reward everliving fame. These things are not the less poetry
+_quia carent vate sacro_. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem
+written by Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired
+rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their
+harmony.
+
+At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the
+circle of its revolutions. And the world would have fallen into utter
+anarchy and darkness, but that, there were found poets among the
+authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and
+religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before
+conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, become as
+generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. It is foreign to
+the present purpose to touch upon the evil produced by these systems:
+except that we protest, on the ground of the principles already
+established, that no portion of it can be attributed to the poetry
+they contain.
+
+It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and
+Isaiah, had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his
+disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers
+of this extraordinary person, are all instinct with the most vivid
+poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a
+certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinions founded
+upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which Plato had
+distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis, and
+became the object of the worship of the civilized world. Here it is to
+be confessed that 'Light seems to thicken', and
+
+          The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
+    Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
+    And night's black agents to their preys do rouse.
+
+But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of
+this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing
+itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its
+yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen to the music,
+unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind,
+nourishing its everlasting course with strength and swiftness.
+
+The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and
+institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived
+the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and
+victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and
+opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to
+the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations.
+Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the
+extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress of
+despotism and superstition. Men, from causes too intricate to be here
+discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will had
+become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of
+the will of others; lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud,
+characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of
+_creating_ in form, language, or institution. The moral anomalies of
+such a state of society are not justly to be charged upon any class of
+events immediately connected with them, and those events are most
+entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it most
+expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannot distinguish
+words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies have been
+incorporated into our popular religion.
+
+It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry
+of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest themselves.
+The principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in
+his _Republic_, as the theoretical rule of the mode in which the
+materials of pleasure and of power, produced by the common skill and
+labour of human beings, ought to be distributed among them. The
+limitations of this rule were asserted by him to be determined only by
+the sensibility of each, or the utility to result to all. Plato,
+following the doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral
+and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past,
+the present, and the future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged
+the sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and
+Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression
+of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The
+incorporation of the Celtic nations with the exhausted population of
+the south, impressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in
+their mythology and institutions. The result was a sum of the action
+and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed
+as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other without
+incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The
+abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of
+women from a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were
+among the consequences of these events.
+
+The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest
+political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. The
+freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a
+religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if
+the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and
+motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers; so that earth
+became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar
+appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and
+a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this
+creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language
+was the instrument of their art: 'Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo
+scrisse.' The Provencal Trouveurs, or inventors, preceded Petrarch,
+whose verses are as spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted
+fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love. It is
+impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of that beauty
+which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explain how the
+gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these sacred
+emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and wise, and lift
+them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self. Dante
+understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. His
+_Vita Nuova_ is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and
+language: it is the idealized history of that period, and those
+intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis of
+Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her
+loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to
+the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination of
+modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed the judgement
+of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the 'Divine Drama',
+in the measure of the admiration which they accord to the Hell,
+Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting
+love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the
+ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of
+the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns of
+society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and
+superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare,
+Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age,
+have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in
+the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force.
+The true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which human
+kind is distributed, has become less misunderstood; and if the error
+which confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two
+sexes has been partially recognized in the opinions and institutions
+of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which
+chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets.
+
+The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the
+stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world. The
+distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton
+have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these
+great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a
+difficult question to determine how far they were conscious of the
+distinction which must have subsisted in their minds between their own
+creeds and that of the people. Dante at least appears to wish to mark
+the full extent of it by placing Riphaeus, whom Virgil calls
+_iustissimus unus_, in Paradise, and observing a most heretical
+caprice in his distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton's
+poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system,
+of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief
+popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the
+character of Satan as expressed in _Paradise Lost_. It is a mistake to
+suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular
+personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a
+sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an
+enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not
+to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles
+his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his
+conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far
+superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he
+has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to
+one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most
+horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of
+inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the
+alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has
+so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a
+violation) as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his
+God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is
+the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton's genius. He
+mingled as it were the elements of human nature as colours upon a
+single pallet, and arranged them in the composition of his great
+picture according to the laws of epic truth; that is, according to the
+laws of that principle by which a series of actions of the external
+universe and of intelligent and ethical beings is calculated to excite
+the sympathy of succeeding generations of mankind. The _Divina
+Commedia_ and _Paradise Lost_ have conferred upon modern mythology a
+systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more
+superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon
+the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the
+religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it
+will have been stamped with the eternity of genius.
+
+Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the
+second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and
+intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of
+the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it:
+developing itself in correspondence with their development. For
+Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the
+sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his genius,
+had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all
+that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their
+notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan,
+Statius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single condition of
+epic truth. Milton was the third epic poet. For if the title of epic
+in its highest sense be refused to the _Aeneid_, still less can it be
+conceded to the _Orlando Furioso_, the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the
+_Lusiad_, or the _Faerie Queene_.
+
+Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient religion
+of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their poetry probably
+in the same proportion as its forms survived in the unreformed worship
+of modern Europe. The one preceded and the other followed the
+Reformation at almost equal intervals. Dante was the first religious
+reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather in the rudeness and
+acrimony, than in the boldness of his censures of papal usurpation.
+Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a
+language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of
+inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator of those great spirits
+who presided over the resurrection of learning; the Lucifer of that
+starry flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from
+republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted
+world. His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a
+burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in
+the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with a lightning which has yet
+found no conductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first
+acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be
+undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A
+great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of
+wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all
+its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to
+share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever
+developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.
+
+The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and
+Boccaccio, was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture, and
+architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the
+superstructure of English literature is based upon the materials of
+Italian invention.
+
+But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of
+poetry and its influence on society. Be it enough to have pointed out
+the effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the word, upon
+their own and all succeeding times.
+
+But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners
+and mechanists, on another plea. It is admitted that the exercise of
+the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that that of
+reason is more useful. Let us examine as the grounds of this
+distinction, what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a
+general sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive and
+intelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it acquiesces.
+There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal and permanent;
+the other transitory and particular. Utility may either express the
+means of producing the former or the latter. In the former sense,
+whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the
+imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. But a narrower
+meaning may be assigned to the word utility, confining it to express
+that which banishes the importunity of the wants of our animal nature,
+the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing the grosser
+delusions of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of
+mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of
+personal advantage.
+
+Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have
+their appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of poets,
+and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life.
+They make space, and give time. Their exertions are of the highest
+value, so long as they confine their administration of the concerns of
+the inferior powers of our nature within the limits due to the
+superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions,
+let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced,
+the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. Whilst
+the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines labour,
+let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence
+with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not
+tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the
+extremes of luxury and want. They have exemplified the saying, 'To him
+that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little
+that he hath shall be taken away.' The rich have become richer, and
+the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven
+between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are
+the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the
+calculating faculty.
+
+It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the
+definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an
+inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature,
+the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of
+the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair
+itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the
+highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this
+principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure
+which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which
+is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in
+sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence the
+saying, 'It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the
+house of mirth.' Nor that this highest species of pleasure is
+necessarily linked with pain. The delight of love and friendship, the
+ecstasy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perception and
+still more of the creation of poetry, is often wholly unalloyed.
+
+The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true
+utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or
+poetical philosophers.
+
+The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau,[12] and
+their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are
+entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the
+degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would
+have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would
+have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men,
+women, and children, burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment
+have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the
+Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what
+would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante,
+Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor
+Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been
+born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of
+the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments
+of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of
+the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with
+its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of
+these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser
+sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the
+aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the
+direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.
+
+    [12] Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was
+    essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere
+    reasoners.
+
+We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how
+to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical
+knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the
+produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought,
+is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes.
+There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in
+morals, government, and political economy, or at least, what is wiser
+and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let '_I dare
+not_ wait upon _I would_, like the poor cat in the adage.' We want the
+creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous
+impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our
+calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can
+digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the
+limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of
+the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the
+internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself
+a slave. To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree
+disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the
+basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention
+for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation of the
+inequality of mankind? From what other cause has it arisen that the
+discoveries which should have lightened, have added a weight to the
+curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which
+money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
+
+The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold; by one it creates
+new materials of knowledge and power and pleasure; by the other it
+engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according
+to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and
+the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than
+at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating
+principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed
+the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of
+human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which
+animates it.
+
+Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
+circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science,
+and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time
+the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from
+which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if
+blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren
+world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of
+life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all
+things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture
+of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded
+beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue,
+love, patriotism, friendship--what were the scenery of this beautiful
+universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of
+the grave--and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not
+ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the
+owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not
+like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination
+of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest
+poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal,
+which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to
+transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour
+of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
+conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its
+approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its
+original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness
+of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on
+the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been
+communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original
+conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present
+day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of
+poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay
+recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than
+a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial
+connexion of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture
+of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the
+limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived the
+_Paradise Lost_ as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have
+his own authority also for the muse having 'dictated' to him the
+'unpremeditated song'. And let this be an answer to those who would
+allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the
+_Orlando Furioso_. Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic
+is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is
+still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great
+statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in
+the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in
+formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the
+gradations, or the media of the process.
+
+Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
+and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and
+feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding
+our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing
+unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that
+even in the desire and regret they leave, there cannot but be
+pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is
+as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own;
+but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the
+coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled
+sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are
+experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and
+the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them
+is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love,
+patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such emotions;
+and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a
+universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits
+of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they
+combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a
+trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the
+enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced
+these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past.
+Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the
+world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the
+interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form,
+sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to
+those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is no portal
+of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into
+the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of
+the divinity in man.
+
+Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that
+which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most
+deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure,
+eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all
+irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every
+form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous
+sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret
+alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from
+death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world,
+and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of
+its forms.
+
+All things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation to the
+percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a
+heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse which
+binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions.
+And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's
+dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a
+being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to
+which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe
+of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our
+inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder
+of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to
+imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has
+been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted
+by reiteration. It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso: _Non
+merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta_.
+
+A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure,
+virtue and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best,
+the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, let time
+be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of
+human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest, the
+happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally
+incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most
+spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would
+look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men: and
+the exceptions, as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty
+in a high yet inferior degree, will be found on consideration to
+confine rather than destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop to the
+arbitration of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in our own
+persons the incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge, and
+executioner, let us decide without trial, testimony, or form, that
+certain motives of those who are 'there sitting where we dare not
+soar', are reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard,
+that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was
+a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a
+libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with
+this division of our subject to cite living poets, but posterity has
+done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors
+have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their
+sins 'were as scarlet, they are now white as snow': they have been
+washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time. Observe in
+what a ludicrous chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime
+have been confused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and
+poets; consider how little is, as it appears--or appears, as it is;
+look to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.
+
+Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that it
+is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and
+that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connexion with the
+consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine that these are
+the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when mental effects
+are experienced unsusceptible of being referred to them. The frequent
+recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose, may
+produce in the mind a habit of order and harmony correlative with its
+own nature and with its effects upon other minds. But in the intervals
+of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being durable, a poet
+becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences
+under which others habitually live. But as he is more delicately
+organized than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure, both his
+own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the
+one and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned to this
+difference. And he renders himself obnoxious to calumny, when he
+neglects to observe the circumstances under which these objects of
+universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves in one
+another's garments.
+
+But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus cruelty,
+envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil, have never
+formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of poets.
+
+I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down
+these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested to
+my mind, by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of
+observing the formality of a polemical reply; but if the view which
+they contain be just, they will be found to involve a refutation of
+the arguers against poetry, so far at least as regards the first
+division of the subject. I can readily conjecture what should have
+moved the gall of some learned and intelligent writers who quarrel
+with certain versifiers; I confess myself, like them, unwilling to be
+stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. Bavius and
+Maevius undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable persons. But
+it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than
+confound.
+
+The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its elements
+and principles; and it has been shown, as well as the narrow limits
+assigned them would permit, that what is called poetry, in a
+restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms of order
+and of beauty, according to which the materials of human life are
+susceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry in a universal
+sense.
+
+The second part[13] will have for its object an application of these
+principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, and a
+defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners and
+opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative and
+creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic
+development of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free
+development of the national will, has arisen as it were from a new
+birth. In spite of the low-thoughted envy which would undervalue
+contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual
+achievements, and we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass
+beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national
+struggle for civil and religious liberty. The most unfailing herald,
+companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a
+beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such
+periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and
+receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and
+nature. The persons in whom this power resides may often, as far as
+regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent
+correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the
+ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet
+compelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their
+own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most
+celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the
+electric life which burns within their words. They measure the
+circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a
+comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves
+perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is
+less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the
+hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the
+gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words
+which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to
+battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved
+not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
+world.
+
+    [13] This was never written.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM HAZLITT
+
+1778-1830
+
+MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH POETS (1823)
+
+
+My father was a Dissenting Minister at Wem in Shropshire; and in the
+year 1798 (the figures that compose the date are to me like the
+'dreaded name of Demogorgon') Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury, to
+succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a Unitarian congregation
+there. He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he
+was to preach; and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the coach in a
+state of anxiety and expectation to look for the arrival of his
+successor, could find no one at all answering the description but a
+round-faced man in a short black coat (like a shooting-jacket) which
+hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who seemed to be talking
+at a great rate to his fellow-passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarce returned
+to give an account of his disappointment, when the round-faced man in
+black entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject, by beginning
+to talk. He did not cease while he stayed; nor has he since, that I
+know of. He held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense
+for three weeks that he remained there, 'fluttering the _proud
+Salopians_ like an eagle in a dove-cote'; and the Welsh mountains that
+skirt the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree to have
+heard no such mystic sounds since the days of
+
+    High-born Hoel's harp or soft Llewelyn's lay!
+
+As we passed along between Wem and Shrewsbury, and I eyed their blue
+tops seen through the wintry branches, or the red rustling leaves of
+the sturdy oak-trees by the road-side, a sound was in my ears as of a
+Siren's song; I was stunned, startled with it, as from deep sleep; but
+I had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my
+admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the
+light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun's rays glittering
+in the puddles of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate,
+helpless, like a worm by the way-side, crushed, bleeding, lifeless;
+but now, bursting from the deadly bands that 'bound them,
+
+    With Styx nine times round them,'
+
+my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch
+the golden light of other years. My soul has indeed remained in its
+original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and
+unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay,
+has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that
+my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length
+found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge. But this is
+not to my purpose.
+
+My father lived ten miles from Shrewsbury, and was in the habit of
+exchanging visits with Mr. Rowe, and with Mr. Jenkins of Whitchurch
+(nine miles farther on) according to the custom of Dissenting
+Ministers in each other's neighbourhood. A line of communication is
+thus established, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is
+kept alive, and nourishes its smouldering fire unquenchable, like the
+fires in the _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus, placed at different stations,
+that waited for ten long years to announce with their blazing pyramids
+the destruction of Troy. Coleridge had agreed to come over to see my
+father, according to the courtesy of the country, as Mr. Rowe's
+probable successor; but in the meantime I had gone to hear him preach
+the Sunday after his arrival. A poet and a philosopher getting up into
+a Unitarian pulpit to preach the Gospel, was a romance in these
+degenerate days, a sort of revival of the primitive spirit of
+Christianity, which was not to be resisted.
+
+It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to
+walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach.
+Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk
+as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798.
+_Il y a des impressions que ni le temps ni les circonstances peuvent
+effacer. Dusse-je vivre des siecles entiers, le doux temps de ma
+jeunesse ne peut renaitre pour moi, ni s'effacer jamais dans ma
+memoire._ When I got there, the organ was playing the 100th psalm,
+and, when it was done, Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text, 'And
+he went up into the mountain to pray, HIMSELF, ALONE.' As he gave out
+this text, his voice 'rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,'
+and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud,
+deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the
+sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that
+prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The
+idea of St. John came into mind, 'of one crying in the wilderness, who
+had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey.'
+The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying
+with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war; upon church and
+state--not their alliance, but their separation--on the spirit of the
+world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed
+to one another. He talked of those who had 'inscribed the cross of
+Christ on banners dripping with human gore.' He made a poetical and
+pastoral excursion,--and to show the fatal effects of war, drew a
+striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team
+afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, 'as though
+he should never be old,' and the same poor country-lad, crimped,
+kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned into a
+wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and
+pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the loathsome
+finery of the profession of blood.
+
+    Such were the notes our once-lov'd poet sung.
+
+And for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard
+the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together,
+Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of
+Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well
+satisfied. The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the
+sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the _good cause_;
+and the cold dank drops of dew that hung half-melted on the beard of
+the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them; for there
+was a spirit of hope and youth in all nature, that turned everything
+into good The face of nature had not then the brand of JUS DIVINUM on
+it:
+
+    Like to that sanguine flower inscrib'd with woe.
+
+On the Tuesday following, the half-inspired speaker came. I was called
+down into the room where he was, and went half-hoping, half-afraid. He
+received me very graciously, and I listened for a long time without
+uttering a word. I did not suffer in his opinion by my silence. 'For
+those two hours,' he afterwards was pleased to say, 'he was conversing
+with W. H.'s forehead!' His appearance was different from what I had
+anticipated from seeing him before. At a distance, and in the dim
+light of the chapel, there was to me a strange wildness in his aspect,
+a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the small-pox. His
+complexion was at that time clear, and even bright--
+
+    As are the children of yon azure sheen.
+
+His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with
+large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a
+sea with darkened lustre. 'A certain tender bloom his face
+o'erspread,' a purple tinge as we see it in the pale thoughtful
+complexions of the Spanish portrait-painters, Murillo and Velasquez.
+His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin
+good-humoured and round; but his nose, the rudder of the face, the
+index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing--like what he has done.
+It might seem that the genius of his face as from a height surveyed
+and projected him (with sufficient capacity and huge aspiration) into
+the world unknown of thought and imagination, with nothing to support
+or guide his veering purpose, as if Columbus had launched his
+adventurous course for the New World in a scallop, without oars or
+compass. So at least I comment on it after the event. Coleridge in his
+person was rather above the common size, inclining to the corpulent,
+or like Lord Hamlet, 'somewhat fat and pursy.' His hair (now, alas!
+grey) was then black and glossy as the raven's, and fell in smooth
+masses over his forehead. This long pendulous hair is peculiar to
+enthusiasts, to those whose minds tend heavenward; and is
+traditionally inseparable (though of a different colour) from the
+pictures of Christ. It ought to belong, as a character to all who
+preach _Christ crucified_, and Coleridge was at that time one of
+those!
+
+It was curious to observe the contrast between him and my father, who
+was a veteran in the cause, and then declining into the vale of years.
+He had been a poor Irish lad, carefully brought up by his parents, and
+sent to the University of Glasgow (where he studied under Adam Smith)
+to prepare him for his future destination. It was his mother's
+proudest wish to see her son a Dissenting Minister. So if we look back
+to past generations (as far as eye can reach) we see the same hopes,
+fears, wishes, followed by the same disappointments, throbbing in the
+human heart; and so we may see them (if we look forward) rising up for
+ever, and disappearing, like vapourish bubbles, in the human breast!
+After being tossed about from congregation to congregation in the
+heats of the Unitarian controversy, and squabbles about the American
+war, he had been relegated to an obscure village, where he was to
+spend the last thirty years of his life, far from the only converse
+that he loved, the talk about disputed texts of Scripture and the
+cause of civil and religious liberty. Here he passed his days,
+repining but resigned, in the study of the Bible, and the perusal of
+the Commentators--huge folios, not easily got through, one of which
+would outlast a winter! Why did he pore on these from morn to night
+(with the exception of a walk in the fields or a turn in the garden to
+gather broccoli-plants or kidney-beans of his own rearing, with no
+small degree of pride and pleasure)?--Here were 'no figures nor no
+fantasies,'--neither poetry nor philosophy--nothing to dazzle, nothing
+to excite modern curiosity; but to his lack-lustre eyes there
+appeared, within the pages of the ponderous, unwieldy, neglected
+tomes, the sacred name of JEHOVAH in Hebrew capitals: pressed down by
+the weight of the style, worn to the last fading thinness of the
+understanding, there were glimpses, glimmering notions of the
+patriarchal wanderings, with palm-trees hovering in the horizon, and
+processions of camels at the distance of three thousand years; there
+was Moses with the Burning Bush, the number of the Twelve Tribes,
+types, shadows, glosses on the law and the prophets; there were
+discussions (dull enough) on the age of Methuselah, a mighty
+speculation! there were outlines, rude guesses at the shape of Noah's
+Ark and at the riches of Solomon's Temple; questions as to the date of
+the creation, predictions of the end of all things; the great lapses
+of time, the strange mutations of the globe were unfolded with the
+voluminous leaf, as it turned over; and though the soul might slumber
+with an hieroglyphic veil of inscrutable mysteries drawn over it, yet
+it was in a slumber ill-exchanged for all the sharpened realities of
+sense, wit, fancy, or reason. My father's life was comparatively a
+dream; but it was a dream of infinity and eternity, of death, the
+resurrection, and a judgement to come!
+
+No two individuals were ever more unlike than were the host and his
+guest. A poet was to my father a sort of nondescript: yet whatever
+added grace to the Unitarian cause was to him welcome. He could hardly
+have been more surprised or pleased, if our visitor had worn wings.
+Indeed, his thoughts had wings; and as the silken sounds rustled round
+our little wainscoted parlour, my father threw back his spectacles
+over his forehead, his white hairs mixing with its sanguine hue; and a
+smile of delight beamed across his rugged cordial face, to think that
+Truth had found a new ally in Fancy![14] Besides, Coleridge seemed to
+take considerable notice of me, and that of itself was enough. He
+talked very familiarly, but agreeably, and glanced over a variety of
+subjects. At dinner-time he grew more animated, and dilated in a very
+edifying manner on Mary Wollstonecraft and Mackintosh. The last, he
+said, he considered (on my father's speaking of his _Vindiciae
+Gallicae_ as a capital performance) as a clever scholastic man--a
+master of the topics,--or as the ready warehouseman of letters, who
+knew exactly where to lay his hand on what he wanted, though the goods
+were not his own. He thought him no match for Burke, either in style
+or matter. Burke was a metaphysician, Mackintosh a mere logician.
+Burke was an orator (almost a poet) who reasoned in figures, because
+he had an eye for nature: Mackintosh, on the other hand, was a
+rhetorician, who had only an eye to commonplaces. On this I ventured
+to say that I had always entertained a great opinion of Burke, and
+that (as far as I could find) the speaking of him with contempt might
+be made the test of a vulgar democratical mind. This was the first
+observation I ever made to Coleridge, and he said it was a very just
+and striking one. I remember the leg of Welsh mutton and the turnips
+on the table that day had the finest flavour imaginable. Coleridge
+added that Mackintosh and Tom Wedgwood (of whom, however, he spoke
+highly) had expressed a very indifferent opinion of his friend Mr.
+Wordsworth, on which he remarked to them--'He strides on so far before
+you, that he dwindles in the distance!' Godwin had once boasted to him
+of having carried on an argument with Mackintosh for three hours with
+dubious success; Coleridge told him--'If there had been a man of
+genius in the room he would have settled the question in five
+minutes.' He asked me if I had ever seen Mary Wollstonecraft, and I
+said, I had once for a few moments, and that she seemed to me to turn
+off Godwin's objections to something she advanced with quite a
+playful, easy air. He replied, that 'this was only one instance of the
+ascendancy which people of imagination exercised over those of mere
+intellect.' He did not rate Godwin very high[15] (this was caprice or
+prejudice, real or affected) but he had a great idea of Mrs.
+Wollstonecraft's powers of conversation, none at all of her talent for
+book-making. We talked a little about Holcroft. He had been asked if
+he was not much struck _with_ him, and he said, he thought himself in
+more danger of being struck _by_ him. I complained that he would not
+let me get on at all, for he required a definition of every the
+commonest word, exclaiming, 'What do you mean by a _sensation_, Sir?
+What do you mean by an _idea_?' This, Coleridge said, was barricadoing
+the road to truth:--it was setting up a turnpike-gate at every step we
+took. I forget a great number of things, many more than I remember;
+but the day passed off pleasantly, and the next morning Mr. Coleridge
+was to return to Shrewsbury. When I came down to breakfast, I found
+that he had just received a letter from his friend, T. Wedgwood,
+making him an offer of 150_l._ a year if he chose to waive his present
+pursuit, and devote himself entirely to the study of poetry and
+philosophy. Coleridge seemed to make up his mind to close with this
+proposal in the act of tying on one of his shoes. It threw an
+additional damp on his departure. It took the wayward enthusiast quite
+from us to cast him into Deva's winding vales, or by the shores of old
+romance. Instead of living at ten miles' distance, of being the pastor
+of a Dissenting congregation at Shrewsbury, he was henceforth to
+inhabit the Hill of Parnassus, to be a Shepherd on the Delectable
+Mountains. Alas! I knew not the way thither, and felt very little
+gratitude for Mr. Wedgwood's bounty. I was presently relieved from
+this dilemma; for Mr. Coleridge, asking for a pen and ink, and going
+to a table to write something on a bit of card, advanced towards me
+with undulating step, and giving me the precious document, said that
+that was his address, _Mr. Coleridge, Nether-Stowey, Somersetshire_;
+and that he should be glad to see me there in a few weeks' time, and,
+if I chose, would come half-way to meet me. I was not less surprised
+than the shepherd-boy (this simile is to be found in _Cassandra_) when
+he sees a thunderbolt fall close at his feet. I stammered out my
+acknowledgements and acceptance of this offer (I thought Mr.
+Wedgwood's annuity a trifle to it) as well as I could; and this mighty
+business being settled, the poet-preacher took leave, and I
+accompanied him six miles on the road. It was a fine morning in the
+middle of winter, and he talked the whole way. The scholar in Chaucer
+is described as going
+
+    ----Sounding on his way.
+
+    [14] My father was one of those who mistook his talent after
+    all. He used to be very much dissatisfied that I preferred
+    his Letters to his Sermons. The last were forced and dry; the
+    first came naturally from him. For ease, half-plays on words,
+    and a supine, monkish, indolent pleasantry, I have never seen
+    them equalled.
+
+    [15] He complained in particular of the presumption of his
+    attempting to establish the future immortality of man,
+    'without' (as he said) 'knowing what Death was or what Life
+    was'--and the tone in which he pronounced these two words
+    seemed to convey a complete image of both.
+
+So Coleridge went on his. In digressing, in dilating, in passing from
+subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on
+ice. He told me in confidence (going along) that he should have
+preached two sermons before he accepted the situation at Shrewsbury,
+one on Infant Baptism, the other on the Lord's Supper, showing that he
+could not administer either, which would have effectually disqualified
+him for the object in view. I observed that he continually crossed me
+on the way by shifting from one side of the footpath to the other.
+This struck me as an odd movement; but I did not at that time connect
+it with any instability of purpose or involuntary change of principle,
+as I have done since. He seemed unable to keep on in a straight line.
+He spoke slightingly of Hume (whose Essay on Miracles he said was
+stolen from an objection started in one of South's Sermons--_Credat
+Judaeus Apella!_). I was not very much pleased at this account of
+Hume, for I had just been reading, with infinite relish, that
+completest of all metaphysical _choke-pears_, his _Treatise on Human
+Nature_, to which the _Essays_, in point of scholastic subtlety and
+close reasoning, are mere elegant trifling, light summer-reading.
+Coleridge even denied the excellence of Hume's general style, which I
+think betrayed a want of taste or candour. He however made me amends
+by the manner in which he spoke of Berkeley. He dwelt particularly on
+his _Essay on Vision_ as a masterpiece of analytical reasoning. So it
+undoubtedly is. He was exceedingly angry with Dr. Johnson for striking
+the stone with his foot, in allusion to this author's Theory of Matter
+and Spirit, and saying, 'Thus I confute him, Sir.' Coleridge drew a
+parallel (I don't know how he brought about the connexion) between
+Bishop Berkeley and Tom Paine. He said the one was an instance of a
+subtle, the other of an acute mind, than which no two things could be
+more distinct. The one was a shop-boy's quality, the other the
+characteristic of a philosopher. He considered Bishop Butler as a true
+philosopher, a profound and conscientious thinker, a genuine reader of
+nature and his own mind. He did not speak of his _Analogy_, but of his
+_Sermons at the Rolls' Chapel_, of which I had never heard. Coleridge
+somehow always contrived to prefer the _unknown_ to the _known_. In
+this instance he was right. The _Analogy_ is a tissue of sophistry, of
+wire-drawn, theological special-pleading; the _Sermons_ (with the
+Preface to them) are in a fine vein of deep, matured reflection, a
+candid appeal to our observation of human nature, without pedantry and
+without bias. I told Coleridge I had written a few remarks, and was
+sometimes foolish enough to believe that I had made a discovery on the
+same subject (the _Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind_)--and
+I tried to explain my view of it to Coleridge, who listened with great
+willingness, but I did not succeed in making myself understood. I sat
+down to the task shortly afterwards for the twentieth time, got new
+pens and paper, determined to make clear work of it, wrote a few
+meagre sentences in the skeleton style of a mathematical
+demonstration, stopped half-way down the second page; and, after
+trying in vain to pump up any words, images, notions, apprehensions,
+facts, or observations, from that gulf of abstraction in which I had
+plunged myself for four or five years preceding, gave up the attempt
+as labour in vain, and shed tears of helpless despondency on the blank
+unfinished paper. I can write fast enough now. Am I better than I was
+then? Oh no! One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being
+able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in
+the world. Would that I could go back to what I then was! Why can we
+not revive past times as we can revisit old places? If I had the
+quaint Muse of Sir Philip Sidney to assist me, I would write a _Sonnet
+to the Road between Wem and Shrewsbury_, and immortalize every step
+of it by some fond enigmatical conceit. I would swear that the very
+milestones had ears, and that Harmer-hill stooped with all its pines,
+to listen to a poet, as he passed! I remember but one other topic of
+discourse in this walk. He mentioned Paley, praised the naturalness
+and clearness of his style, but condemned his sentiments, thought him
+a mere time-serving casuist, and said that 'the fact of his work on
+Moral and Political Philosophy being made a text-book in our
+Universities was a disgrace to the national character.' We parted at
+the six-mile stone; and I returned homeward pensive but much pleased.
+I had met with unexpected notice from a person whom I believed to have
+been prejudiced against me. 'Kind and affable to me had been his
+condescension, and should be honoured ever with suitable regard.' He
+was the first poet I had known, and he certainly answered to that
+inspired name. I had heard a great deal of his powers of conversation,
+and was not disappointed. In fact, I never met with any thing at all
+like them, either before or since. I could easily credit the accounts
+which were circulated of his holding forth to a large party of ladies
+and gentlemen, an evening or two before, on the Berkeleian Theory,
+when he made the whole material universe look like a transparency of
+fine words; and another story (which I believe he has somewhere told
+himself) of his being asked to a party at Birmingham, of his smoking
+tobacco and going to sleep after dinner on a sofa, where the company
+found him to their no small surprise, which was increased to wonder
+when he started up of a sudden, and rubbing his eyes, looked about
+him, and launched into a three hours' description of the third
+heaven, of which he had had a dream, very different from Mr. Southey's
+Vision of Judgement, and also from that other Vision of Judgement,
+which Mr. Murray, the Secretary of the Bridge Street Junto, has taken
+into his especial keeping.
+
+On my way back, I had a sound in my ears, it was the voice of Fancy: I
+had a light before me, it was the face of Poetry. The one still
+lingers there, the other has not quitted my side! Coleridge in truth
+met me half-way on the ground of philosophy, or I should not have been
+won over to his imaginative creed. I had an uneasy, pleasurable
+sensation all the time, till I was to visit him. During those months
+the chill breath of winter gave me a welcoming; the vernal air was
+balm and inspiration to me. The golden sunsets, the silver star of
+evening, lighted me on my way to new hopes and prospects. _I was to
+visit Coleridge in the Spring._ This circumstance was never absent
+from my thoughts, and mingled with all my feelings. I wrote to him at
+the time proposed, and received an answer postponing my intended visit
+for a week or two, but very cordially urging me to complete my promise
+then. This delay did not damp, but rather increase my ardour. In the
+meantime I went to Llangollen Vale, by way of initiating myself in the
+mysteries of natural scenery; and I must say I was enchanted with it.
+I had been reading Coleridge's description of England, in his fine
+_Ode on the Departing Year_, and I applied it, _con amore_, to the
+objects before me. That valley was to me (in a manner) the cradle of a
+new existence: in the river that winds through it, my spirit was
+baptized in the waters of Helicon!
+
+I returned home, and soon after set out on my journey with unworn
+heart and untried feet. My way lay through Worcester and Gloucester,
+and by Upton, where I thought of Tom Jones and the adventure of the
+muff. I remember getting completely wet through one day, and stopping
+at an inn (I think it was at Tewkesbury) where I sat up all night to
+read _Paul and Virginia_. Sweet were the showers in early youth that
+drenched my body, and sweet the drops of pity that fell upon the books
+I read! I recollect a remark of Coleridge's upon this very book, that
+nothing could show the gross indelicacy of French manners and the
+entire corruption of their imagination more strongly than the
+behaviour of the heroine in the last fatal scene, who turns away from
+a person on board the sinking vessel, that offers to save her life,
+because he has thrown off his clothes to assist him in swimming. Was
+this a time to think of such a circumstance? I once hinted to
+Wordsworth, as we were sailing in his boat on Grasmere lake, that I
+thought he had borrowed the idea of his _Poems on the Naming of
+Places_ from the local inscriptions of the same kind in _Paul and
+Virginia_. He did not own the obligation, and stated some distinction
+without a difference, in defence of his claim to originality. And the
+slightest variation would be sufficient for this purpose in his mind;
+for whatever _he_ added or omitted would inevitably be worth all that
+any one else had done, and contain the marrow of the sentiment.--I was
+still two days before the time fixed for my arrival, for I had taken
+care to set out early enough. I stopped these two days at Bridgewater,
+and when I was tired of sauntering on the banks of its muddy river,
+returned to the inn, and read _Camilla_. So have I loitered my life
+away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing,
+thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one
+thing to make me happy; but wanting that, have wanted everything!
+
+I arrived, and was well received. The country about Nether Stowey is
+beautiful, green and hilly, and near the sea-shore. I saw it but the
+other day, after an interval of twenty years, from a hill near
+Taunton. How was the map of my life spread out before me, as the map
+of the country lay at my feet! In the afternoon, Coleridge took me
+over to All-Foxden, a romantic old family mansion of the St. Aubins,
+where Wordsworth lived. It was then in the possession of a friend of
+the poet's, who gave him the free use of it. Somehow that period (the
+time just after the French Revolution) was not a time when _nothing
+was given for nothing_. The mind opened, and a softness might be
+perceived coming over the heart of individuals, beneath 'the scales
+that fence' our self-interest. Wordsworth himself was from home, but
+his sister kept house, and set before us a frugal repast; and we had
+free access to her brother's poems, the _Lyrical Ballads_, which were
+still in manuscript, or in the form of _Sibylline Leaves_. I dipped
+into a few of these with great satisfaction, and with the faith of a
+novice. I slept that night in an old room with blue hangings, and
+covered with the round-faced family-portraits of the age of George I
+and II, and from the wooded declivity of the adjoining park that
+overlooked my window, at the dawn of day, could
+
+    ----hear the loud stag speak.
+
+In the outset of life (and particularly at this time I felt it so) our
+imagination has a body to it. We are in a state between sleeping and
+waking, and have indistinct but glorious glimpses of strange shapes,
+and there is always something to come better than what we see. As in
+our dreams the fullness of the blood gives warmth and reality to the
+coinage of the brain, so in youth our ideas are clothed, and fed, and
+pampered with our good spirits; we breathe thick with thoughtless
+happiness, the weight of future years presses on the strong pulses of
+the heart, and we repose with undisturbed faith in truth and good. As
+we advance, we exhaust our fund of enjoyment and of hope. We are no
+longer wrapped in _lamb's-wool_, lulled in Elysium. As we taste the
+pleasures of life, their spirit evaporates, the sense palls; and
+nothing is left but the phantoms, the lifeless shadows of what _has
+been_!
+
+That morning, as soon as breakfast was over, we strolled out into the
+park, and seating ourselves on the trunk of an old ash-tree that
+stretched along the ground, Coleridge read aloud with a sonorous and
+musical voice, the ballad of _Betty Foy_. I was not critically or
+sceptically inclined. I saw touches of truth and nature, and took the
+rest for granted. But in the _Thorn_, the _Mad Mother_, and the
+_Complaint of a Poor Indian Woman_, I felt that deeper power and
+pathos which have been since acknowledged,
+
+    In spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
+
+as the characteristics of this author; and the sense of a new style
+and a new spirit in poetry came over me. It had to me something of
+the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of
+the first welcome breath of Spring,
+
+    While yet the trembling year is unconfirmed.
+
+Coleridge and myself walked back to Stowey that evening, and his voice
+sounded high
+
+    Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
+    Fix'd fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,
+
+as we passed through echoing grove, by fairy stream or waterfall,
+gleaming in the summer moonlight! He lamented that Wordsworth was not
+prone enough to believe in the traditional superstitions of the place,
+and that there was a something corporeal, a _matter-of-fact-ness_, a
+clinging to the palpable, or often to the petty, in his poetry, in
+consequence. His genius was not a spirit that descended to him through
+the air; it sprung out of the ground like a flower, or unfolded itself
+from a green spray, on which the goldfinch sang. He said, however (if
+I remember right), that this objection must be confined to his
+descriptive pieces, that his philosophic poetry had a grand and
+comprehensive spirit in it, so that his soul seemed to inhabit the
+universe like a palace, and to discover truth by intuition, rather
+than by deduction. The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at
+Coleridge's cottage. I think I see him now. He answered in some degree
+to his friend's description of him, but was more gaunt and Don
+Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the _costume_ of
+that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped
+pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not
+unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe, worn pressure of
+thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw something
+in objects more than the outward appearance), an intense high narrow
+forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose and feeling,
+and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal
+at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of his
+face. Chantrey's bust wants the marking traits; but he was teased into
+making it regular and heavy: Haydon's head of him, introduced into the
+_Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem_, is the most like his drooping
+weight of thought and expression. He sat down and talked very
+naturally and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his
+voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the
+northern _burr_, like the crust on wine. He instantly began to make
+havoc of the half of a Cheshire cheese on the table, and said
+triumphantly that 'his marriage with experience had not been so
+productive as Mr. Southey's in teaching him a knowledge of the good
+things of this life.' He had been to see the _Castle Spectre_ by Monk
+Lewis, while at Bristol, and described it very well. He said 'it
+fitted the taste of the audience like a glove.' This _ad captandum_
+merit was, however, by no means a recommendation of it, according to
+the severe principles of the new school, which reject rather than
+court popular effect. Wordsworth, looking out of the low, latticed
+window, said, 'How beautifully the sun sets on that yellow bank!' I
+thought within myself, 'With what eyes these poets see nature!' and
+ever after, when I saw the sunset stream upon the objects facing it,
+conceived I had made a discovery, or thanked Mr. Wordsworth for
+having made one for me! We went over to All-Foxden again the day
+following, and Wordsworth read us the story of Peter Bell in the open
+air; and the comment made upon it by his face and voice was very
+different from that of some later critics! Whatever might be thought
+of the poem, 'his face was as a book where men might read strange
+matters,' and he announced the fate of his hero in prophetic tones.
+There is a _chaunt_ in the recitation both of Coleridge and
+Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the
+judgement. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual
+use of this ambiguous accompaniment. Coleridge's manner is more full,
+animated, and varied; Wordsworth's more equable, sustained, and
+internal. The one might be termed more _dramatic_, the other more
+_lyrical_. Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in
+walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling
+branches of a copse wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he
+could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot
+where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption.
+Returning that same evening, I got into a metaphysical argument with
+Wordsworth, while Coleridge was explaining the different notes of the
+nightingale to his sister, in which we neither of us succeeded in
+making ourselves perfectly clear and intelligible. Thus I passed three
+weeks at Nether Stowey and in the neighbourhood, generally devoting
+the afternoons to a delightful chat in an arbour made of bark by the
+poet's friend Tom Poole, sitting under two fine elm-trees, and
+listening to the bees humming round us, while we quaffed our _flip_.
+It was agreed, among other things, that we should make a jaunt down
+the Bristol Channel, as far as Lynton. We set off together on foot,
+Coleridge, John Chester, and I. This Chester was a native of Nether
+Stowey, one of those who were attracted to Coleridge's discourse as
+flies are to honey, or bees in swarming-time to the sound of a brass
+pan. He 'followed in the chace, like a dog who hunts, not like one
+that made up the cry.' He had on a brown cloth coat, boots, and
+corduroy breeches, was low in stature, bow-legged, had a drag in his
+walk like a drover, which he assisted by a hazel switch, and kept on a
+sort of trot by the side of Coleridge, like a running footman by a
+state coach, that he might not lose a syllable or sound, that fell
+from Coleridge's lips. He told me his private opinion, that Coleridge
+was a wonderful man. He scarcely opened his lips, much less offered an
+opinion the whole way: yet of the three, had I to choose during that
+journey, I would be John Chester. He afterwards followed Coleridge
+into Germany, where the Kantean philosophers were puzzled how to bring
+him under any of their categories. When he sat down at table with his
+idol, John's felicity was complete; Sir Walter Scott's, or Mr.
+Blackwood's, when they sat down at the same table with the King, was
+not more so. We passed Dunster on our right, a small town between the
+brow of a hill and the sea. I remember eyeing it wistfully as it lay
+below us: contrasted with the woody scene around, it looked as clear,
+as pure, as _embrowned_ and ideal as any landscape I have seen since,
+of Gaspar Poussin's or Domenichino's. We had a long day's march--(our
+feet kept time to the echoes of Coleridge's tongue)--through Minehead
+and by the Blue Anchor, and on to Lynton, which we did not reach till
+near midnight, and where we had some difficulty in making a lodgement.
+We, however, knocked the people of the house up at last, and we were
+repaid for our apprehensions and fatigue by some excellent rashers of
+fried bacon and eggs. The view in coming along had been splendid. We
+walked for miles and miles on dark brown heaths overlooking the
+channel, with the Welsh hills beyond, and at times descended into
+little sheltered valleys close by the sea-side, with a smuggler's face
+scowling by us, and then had to ascend conical hills with a path
+winding up through a coppice to a barren top, like a monk's shaven
+crown, from one of which I pointed out to Coleridge's notice the bare
+masts of a vessel on the very edge of the horizon, and within the
+red-orbed disk of the setting sun, like his own spectre-ship in the
+_Ancient Mariner_. At Lynton the character of the sea-coast becomes
+more marked and rugged. There is a place called the 'Valley of Rocks'
+(I suspect this was only the poetical name for it) bedded among
+precipices overhanging the sea, with rocky caverns beneath, into which
+the waves dash, and where the sea-gull for ever wheels its screaming
+flight. On the tops of these are huge stones thrown transverse, as if
+an earthquake had tossed them there, and behind these is a fretwork of
+perpendicular rocks, something like the 'Giant's Causeway'. A
+thunder-storm came on while we were at the inn, and Coleridge was
+running out bareheaded to enjoy the commotion of the elements in the
+'Valley of Rocks', but as if in spite, the clouds only muttered a few
+angry sounds, and let fall a few refreshing drops. Coleridge told me
+that he and Wordsworth were to have made this place the scene of a
+prose-tale, which was to have been in the manner of, but far superior
+to, the _Death of Abel_, but they had relinquished the design. In the
+morning of the second day, we breakfasted luxuriously in an
+old-fashioned parlour on tea, toast, eggs, and honey, in the very
+sight of the bee-hives from which it had been taken, and a garden full
+of thyme and wild flowers that had produced it. On this occasion
+Coleridge spoke of Virgil's _Georgics_, but not well. I do not think
+he had much feeling for the classical or elegant. It was in this room
+that we found a little worn-out copy of the _Seasons_, lying in a
+window-seat, on which Coleridge exclaimed, '_That_ is true fame!' He
+said Thomson was a great poet, rather than a good one; his style was
+as meretricious as his thoughts were natural. He spoke of Cowper as
+the best modern poet. He said the _Lyrical Ballads_ were an experiment
+about to be tried by him and Wordsworth, to see how far the public
+taste would endure poetry written in a more natural and simple style
+than had hitherto been attempted; totally discarding the artifices of
+poetical diction, and making use only of such words as had probably
+been common in the most ordinary language since the days of Henry II.
+Some comparison was introduced between Shakespeare and Milton. He said
+'he hardly knew which to prefer. Shakespeare appeared to him a mere
+stripling in the art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely
+more activity than Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man's
+estate; or if he had, he would not have been a man, but a monster.' He
+spoke with contempt of Gray, and with intolerance of Pope. He did not
+like the versification of the latter. He observed that 'the ears of
+these couplet-writers might be charged with having short memories,
+that could not retain the harmony of whole passages.' He thought
+little of Junius as a writer; he had a dislike of Dr. Johnson; and a
+much higher opinion of Burke as an orator and politician, than of Fox
+or Pitt. He however thought him very inferior in richness of style and
+imagery to some of our elder prose-writers, particularly Jeremy
+Taylor. He liked Richardson, but not Fielding; nor could I get him to
+enter into the merits of _Caleb Williams_.[16] In short, he was
+profound and discriminating with respect to those authors whom he
+liked, and where he gave his judgement fair play; capricious,
+perverse, and prejudiced in his antipathies and distastes. We loitered
+on the 'ribbed sea-sands', in such talk as this, a whole morning, and
+I recollect met with a curious sea-weed, of which John Chester told us
+the country name! A fisherman gave Coleridge an account of a boy that
+had been drowned the day before, and that they had tried to save him
+at the risk of their own lives. He said 'he did not know how it was
+that they ventured, but, Sir, we have a _nature_ towards one another.'
+This expression, Coleridge remarked to me, was a fine illustration of
+that theory of disinterestedness which I (in common with Butler) had
+adopted. I broached to him an argument of mine to prove that
+_likeness_ was not mere association of ideas. I said that the mark in
+the sand put one in mind of a man's foot, not because it was part of a
+former impression of a man's foot (for it was quite new) but because
+it was like the shape of a man's foot. He assented to the justness of
+this distinction (which I have explained at length elsewhere, for the
+benefit of the curious) and John Chester listened; not from any
+interest in the subject, but because he was astonished that I should
+be able to suggest anything to Coleridge that he did not already know.
+We returned on the third morning, and Coleridge remarked the silent
+cottage-smoke curling up the valleys where, a few evenings before, we
+had seen the lights gleaming through the dark.
+
+    [16] He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Raphael, and at
+    this time I had as little as he. He sometimes gives a
+    striking account at present of the Cartoons at Pisa by
+    Buffamalco and others; of one in particular, where Death is
+    seen in the air brandishing his scythe, and the great and
+    mighty of the earth shudder at his approach, while the
+    beggars and the wretched kneel to him as their deliverer. He
+    would, of course, understand so broad and fine a moral as
+    this at any time.
+
+In a day or two after we arrived at Stowey, we set out, I on my return
+home, and he for Germany. It was a Sunday morning, and he was to
+preach that day for Dr. Toulmin of Taunton. I asked him if he had
+prepared anything for the occasion? He said he had not even thought of
+the text, but should as soon as we parted. I did not go to hear
+him,--this was a fault,--but we met in the evening at Bridgewater. The
+next day we had a long day's walk to Bristol, and sat down, I
+recollect, by a well-side on the road, to cool ourselves and satisfy
+our thirst, when Coleridge repeated to me some descriptive lines of
+his tragedy of _Remorse_; which I must say became his mouth and that
+occasion better than they, some years after, did Mr. Elliston's and
+the Drury Lane boards,--
+
+    Oh memory! shield me from the world's poor strife,
+    And give those scenes thine everlasting life.
+
+I saw no more of him for a year or two, during which period he had
+been wandering in the Hartz Forest in Germany; and his return was
+cometary, meteorous, unlike his setting out. It was not till some time
+after that I knew his friends Lamb and Southey. The last always
+appears to me (as I first saw him) with a commonplace book under his
+arm, and the first with a _bon-mot_ in his mouth. It was at Godwin's
+that I met him with Holcroft and Coleridge, where they were disputing
+fiercely which was the best--_Man as he was, or man as he is to be_.
+'Give me', says Lamb, 'man as he is _not_ to be.' This saying was the
+beginning of a friendship between us, which I believe still
+continues.--Enough of this for the present.
+
+    But there is matter for another rhyme,
+    And I to this may add a second tale.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN KEBLE
+
+1792-1866
+
+SACRED POETRY (1825)
+
+_The Star in the East; with other Poems._ By Josiah Conder. London.
+1824.
+
+
+There are many circumstances about this little volume, which tend
+powerfully to disarm criticism. In the first place, it is, for the
+most part, of a _sacred_ character: taken up with those subjects which
+least of all admit, with propriety, either in the author or critic,
+the exercise of intellectual subtlety. For the _practical_ tendency,
+indeed, of such compositions, both are most deeply responsible; the
+author who publishes, and the critic who undertakes to recommend or to
+censure them. But if they appear to be written with any degree of
+sincerity and earnestness, we naturally shrink from treating them
+merely as literary efforts. To interrupt the current of a reader's
+sympathy in such a case, by critical objections, is not merely to
+deprive him of a little harmless pleasure, it is to disturb him almost
+in a devotional exercise. The most considerate reviewer, therefore, of
+a volume of sacred poetry, will think it a subject on which it is
+easier to say too much than too little.
+
+In the present instance, this consideration is enforced by the
+unpretending tone of the volume, which bears internal evidence, for
+the most part, of not having been written to meet the eye of the
+world. It is in vain to say that this claim on the critic's favour is
+nullified by publication. The author may give it up, and yet the work
+may retain it. We may still feel that we have no right to judge
+severely of what was not, at first, intended to come before our
+judgement at all. This of course applies only to those compositions,
+which indicate, by something within themselves, this freedom from the
+pretension of authorship. And such are most of those to which we are
+now bespeaking our readers' attention.
+
+_Most_ of them, we say, because the first poem in the volume, _The
+Star in the East_, is of a more ambitious and less pleasing character.
+Although in blank verse, it is, in fact, a lyrical effusion; an ode on
+the rapid progress and final triumph of the Gospel. It looks like the
+composition of a young man: harsh and turgid in parts, but
+interspersed with some rather beautiful touches. The opening lines are
+a fair specimen.
+
+    O to have heard th' unearthly symphonies,
+    Which o'er the starlight peace of Syrian skies
+    Came floating like a dream, that blessed night
+    When angel songs were heard by sinful men,
+    Hymning Messiah's advent! O to have watch'd
+    The night with those poor shepherds, whom, when first
+    The glory of the Lord shed sudden day--
+    Day without dawn, starting from midnight, day
+    Brighter than morning--on those lonely hills
+    Strange fear surpris'd--fear lost in wondering joy,
+    When from th' angelic multitude swell'd forth
+    The many-voiced consonance of praise:--
+    Glory in th' highest to God, and upon earth
+    Peace, towards men good will. But once before,
+    In such glad strains of joyous fellowship,
+    The silent earth was greeted by the heavens,
+    When at its first foundation they looked down
+    From their bright orbs, those heavenly ministries,
+    Hailing the new-born world with bursts of joy.
+
+Notwithstanding beauties scattered here and there, there is an effort
+and constrained stateliness in the poem, very different from the
+rapidity and simplicity of many of the shorter lyrics, which follow
+under the titles of Sacred and Domestic Poems. Such, for instance, as
+the Poor Man's Hymn
+
+    As much have I of worldly good
+      As e'er my master had:
+    I diet on as dainty food,
+      And am as richly clad,
+    Tho' plain my garb, though scant my board,
+    As Mary's Son and Nature's Lord.
+
+    The manger was his infant bed,
+      His home, the mountain-cave,
+    He had not where to lay his head,
+      He borrow'd even his grave.
+    Earth yielded him no resting spot,--
+    Her Maker, but she knew him not.
+
+    As much the world's good will I bear,
+      Its favours and applause,
+    As He, whose blessed name I bear,--
+      Hated without a cause,
+    Despis'd, rejected, mock'd by pride,
+    Betray'd, forsaken, crucified.
+
+    Why should I court my Master's foe?
+      Why should I fear its frown?
+    Why should I seek for rest below,
+      Or sigh for brief renown?--
+    A pilgrim to a better land,
+    An heir of joys at GOD's right hand?
+
+Or the following sweet lines on Home, which occur among the Domestic
+poems:
+
+    That is not home, where day by day
+    I wear the busy hours away.
+    That is not home, where lonely night
+    Prepares me for the toils of light--
+    'Tis hope, and joy, and memory, give
+    A home in which the heart can live--
+    These walls no lingering hopes endear,
+    No fond remembrance chains me here,
+    Cheerless I heave the lonely sigh--
+    Eliza, canst thou tell me why?
+    'Tis where thou art is home to me,
+    And home without thee cannot be.
+
+    There are who strangely love to roam,
+    And find in wildest haunts their home;
+    And some in halls of lordly state,
+    Who yet are homeless, desolate.
+    The sailor's home is on the main,
+    The warrior's, on the tented plain,
+    The maiden's, in her bower of rest,
+    The infant's, on his mother's breast--
+    But where thou art is home to me,
+    And home without thee cannot be.
+
+    There is no home in halls of pride,
+    They are too high, and cold, and wide.
+    No home is by the wanderer found:
+    'Tis not in place: it hath no bound.
+    It is a circling atmosphere
+    Investing all the heart holds dear;--
+    A law of strange attractive force,
+    That holds the feelings in their course;
+
+    It is a presence undefin'd,
+    O'er-shadowing the conscious mind,
+    Where love and duty sweetly blend
+    To consecrate the name of friend;--
+    Where'er thou art is home to me,
+    And home without thee cannot be.
+
+    My love, forgive the anxious sigh--
+    I hear the moments rushing by,
+    And think that life is fleeting fast,
+    That youth with us will soon be past.
+    Oh! when will time, consenting, give
+    The home in which my heart can live?
+    There shall the past and future meet,
+    And o'er our couch, in union sweet,
+    Extend their cherub wings, and shower
+    Bright influence on the present hour,
+    Oh! when shall Israel's mystic guide,
+    The pillar'd cloud, our steps decide,
+    Then, resting, spread its guardian shade,
+    To bless the home which love hath made?
+    Daily, my love, shall thence arise
+    Our hearts' united sacrifice;
+    And home indeed a home will be,
+    Thus consecrate and shar'd with thee.
+
+We will add one more specimen of the same kind, which forms a natural
+and pleasing appendix to the preceding lines.
+
+    Louise! you wept, that morn of gladness
+      Which made your Brother blest;
+    And tears of half-reproachful sadness
+      Fell on the Bridegroom's vest:
+    Yet, pearly tears were those, to gem
+    A Sister's bridal diadem.
+
+    No words could half so well have spoken,
+      What thus was deeply shown
+    By Nature's simplest, dearest token,
+      How much was then my own;
+    Endearing her for whom they fell,
+    And Thee, for having loved so well.
+
+    But now no more--nor let a Brother,
+      Louise, regretful see,
+    That still 'tis sorrow to another,
+      That he should happy be.
+    Those were, I trust, the only tears
+    That day shall cost through coming years.
+
+    Smile with us. Happy and light-hearted,
+      We three the time will while.
+    And, when sometimes a season parted,
+      Still think of us, and smile.
+    But come to us in gloomy weather;
+    We'll weep, when we must weep, together.
+
+Now, what is the reason of the great difference between these extracts
+and that from the _Star in the East_?--a difference which the earlier
+date of the latter, so far from accounting for, only makes the more
+extraordinary. In some instances, the interval of time is very short,
+but at all events more effort and turgidness might have been expected
+in the earlier poems, more simplicity and care and a more subdued tone
+in the later. We suspect a reason, which both poets and poetical
+readers are too apt to leave out of sight. There is a want of _truth_
+in the _Star in the East_--not that the author is otherwise than quite
+in earnest--but his earnestness seems rather an artificial glow, to
+which he has been worked up by reading and conversation of a
+particular cast, than the overflowing warmth of his own natural
+feelings, kindled by circumstances in which he was himself placed. In
+a word, when he writes of the success of the Bible Society, and the
+supposed amelioration of the world in consequence, he writes from
+report and fancy only; but when he speaks of a happy home, of kindly
+affections, of the comforts which piety can administer in
+disappointment and sorrow; either we are greatly mistaken, or he
+speaks from real and present experience. The poetical result is what
+the reader has seen:
+
+        ----mens onus reponit, et peregrino
+    Labore fessi venimus Larem ad nostrum--
+
+We turn gladly from our fairy voyage round the world to refresh
+ourselves with a picture, which we feel to be drawn from the life, of
+a happy and innocent fireside. Nor is it, in the slightest degree,
+derogatory to an author's talent to say that he has failed,
+comparatively, on that subject of which he must have known
+comparatively little.
+
+Let us here pause a moment to explain what is meant when we speak of
+such prospects as are above alluded to, being shadowy and unreal in
+respect of what is matter of experience. It is not that we doubt the
+tenor of the Scripture, regarding the final conversion of the whole
+world, or that we close our eyes to the wonderful arrangements, if the
+expression may be used, which Divine Providence seems everywhere
+making, with a view to that great consummation. One circumstance, in
+particular, arrests our attention, as pervading the whole of modern
+history, but gradually standing out in a stronger light as the view
+draws nearer our own times: we mean the rapid increase of colonization
+_from Christian nations only_. So that the larger half of the globe,
+and what in the nature of things will soon become the more populous,
+is already, in profession, Christian. The event, therefore, is
+unquestionable: but experience, we fear, will hardly warrant the
+exulting anticipations, which our author, in common with many of whose
+sincerity there is no reason to doubt, has raised upon it. It is but
+too conceivable that the whole world may become nominally Christian,
+yet the face of things may be very little changed for the better. And
+any view of the progress of the gospel, whether in verse or in prose,
+which leaves out this possibility, is so far wanting in truth, and in
+that depth of thought which is as necessary to the higher kinds of
+poetical beauty as to philosophy or theology itself.
+
+This, however, is too solemn and comprehensive a subject to be lightly
+or hastily spoken of. It is enough to have glanced at it, as
+accounting, in some measure, for the general failure of modern poets
+in their attempts to describe the predicted triumph of the gospel in
+the latter days.
+
+To return to the sacred and domestic poems, thus advantageously
+distinguished from that which gives name to the volume. Affection,
+whether heavenly or earthly, is the simplest idea that can be; and in
+the graceful and harmonious expression of it lies the principal beauty
+of these poems. In the descriptive parts, and in the development of
+abstract sentiment, there is more of effort, and occasionally
+something very like affectation: approaching, in one instance (the
+_Nightingale_,) far nearer than we could wish, to the most vicious of
+all styles, the style of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his miserable followers.
+
+Now, these are just the sort of merit and the sort of defect, which
+one might naturally expect to find united; the very simplicity of
+attachment, which qualifies the mind for sacred or domestic poetry,
+making its movements awkward and constrained, when scenes are to be
+described, or thoughts unravelled of more complication and less
+immediate interest. This is the rather to be observed, as many other
+sacred poets have become less generally pleasing and useful, than they
+otherwise would have been, from this very circumstance. The simple and
+touching devoutness of many of Bishop Ken's lyrical effusions has been
+unregarded, because of the ungraceful contrivances, and heavy movement
+of his narrative. The same may be said, in our own times, of some
+parts of Montgomery's writings. His bursts of sacred poetry, compared
+with his _Greenland_, remind us of a person singing enchantingly by
+ear, but becoming languid and powerless the moment he sits down to a
+note-book.
+
+Such writers, it is obvious, do not sufficiently trust to the command
+which the simple expression of their feelings would obtain over their
+readers. They think it must be relieved with something of more variety
+and imagery, to which they work themselves up with laborious, and
+therefore necessarily unsuccessful, efforts. The model for correcting
+their error is to be found in the inspired volume. We can, in general,
+be but incompetent judges of this, because we have been used to it
+from our boyhood. But let us suppose a person, whose ideas of poetry
+were entirely gathered from modern compositions, taking up the Psalms
+for the first time. Among many other remarkable differences, he would
+surely be impressed with the sacred writer's total carelessness about
+originality, and what is technically called _effect_. He would say,
+'This is something better than merely attractive poetry; it is
+absolute and divine truth.' The same remark ought to be suggested by
+all sacred hymns; and it is, indeed, greatly to be lamented, that such
+writers as we have just mentioned should have ever lost sight of
+it--should have had so little confidence in the power of simplicity,
+and have condescended so largely to the laborious refinements of the
+profane Muse.
+
+To put the same truth in a light somewhat different; it is required,
+we apprehend, in all poets, but particularly in sacred poets, that
+they should seem to write with a view of unburthening their minds, and
+not for the sake of writing; for love of the subject, not of the
+employment. The distinction is very striking in descriptive poetry.
+Compare the landscapes of Cowper with those of Burns. There is, if we
+mistake not, the same sort of difference between them, as in the
+conversation of two persons on scenery, the one originally an
+enthusiast in his love of the works of nature, the other driven, by
+disappointment or weariness, to solace himself with them as he might.
+It is a contrast which every one must have observed, when such topics
+come under discussion in society; and those who think it worth while,
+may find abundant illustration of it in the writings of this
+unfortunate but illustrious pair. The one all overflowing with the
+love of nature, and indicating, at every turn, that whatever his lot
+in life, he could not have been happy without her. The other visibly
+and wisely soothing himself, but not without effort, by attending to
+rural objects, in default of some more congenial happiness, of which
+he had almost come to despair. The latter, in consequence, laboriously
+sketching every object that came in his way: the other, in one or two
+rapid lines, which operate, as it were, like a magician's spell,
+presenting to the fancy just that picture, which was wanted to put the
+reader's mind in unison with the writer's. We would quote, as an
+instance, the description of Evening in the Fourth Book of the _Task_:
+
+    Come Ev'ning, once again, season of peace;
+    Return, sweet Ev'ning, and continue long!
+    Methinks I see thee in the streaking west
+    With matron-step slow-moving, while the night
+    Treads on thy sweeping train; one hand employ'd
+    In letting fall the curtain of repose
+    On bird and beast, the other charg'd for man
+    With sweet oblivion of the cares of day:
+    Not sumptuously adorn'd, nor needing aid,
+    Like homely-featur'd night, of clust'ring gems;
+    A star or two, just twinkling on thy brow,
+    Suffices thee; save that the moon is thine
+    No less than her's, not worn indeed on high
+    With ostentatious pageantry, but set
+    With modest grandeur in thy purple zone,
+    Resplendent less, but of an ampler round.
+    Come then, and thou shalt find thy vot'ry calm,
+    Or make me so. Composure is thy gift.
+
+And we would set over against it that purely pastoral chant:
+
+    Now rosy May comes in wi' flowers
+    To deck her gay, green spreading bowers;
+    And now comes in my happy hours,
+      To wander wi' my Davie.
+        Meet me on the warlock knowe,
+          Dainty Davie, dainty Davie,
+        There I'll spend the day wi' you,
+          My ain dear dainty Davie.
+
+    The crystal waters round us fa',
+    The merry birds are lovers a',
+    The scented breezes round us blaw,
+      A wandering wi' my Davie.
+        Meet me, &c.
+
+    When purple morning starts the hare
+    To steal upon her early fare,
+    Then thro' the dews I will repair,
+      To meet my faithful Davie.
+        Meet me, &c.
+
+    When day, expiring in the west,
+    The curtain draws o' nature's rest,
+    I flee to his arms I lo'e best,
+      And that's my ain dear Davie.
+        Meet me, &c.
+
+There is surely no need to explain how this instinctive attachment to
+his subject is especially requisite in the sacred poet. If even the
+description of material objects is found to languish without it, much
+more will it be looked for when the best and highest of all affections
+is to be expressed and communicated to others. The nobler and worthier
+the object, the greater our disappointment to find it approached with
+anything like languor or constraint.
+
+We must just mention one more quality, which may seem, upon
+consideration, essential to perfection in this kind: viz. that the
+feelings the writer expresses should appear to be specimens of his
+general tone of thought, not sudden bursts and mere flashes of
+goodness. Wordsworth's beautiful description of the Stock-dove might
+not unaptly be applied to him. He should sing
+
+                   'of love with silence blending,
+    Slow to begin, yet never ending,
+    Of serious faith and inward glee'.
+
+Some may, perhaps, object to this, as a dull and languid strain of
+sentiment. But before we yield to their censures we would inquire of
+them what style they consider, themselves, as most appropriate to
+similar subjects in a kindred art. If grave, simple, sustained
+melodies--if tones of deep but subdued emotion are what our minds
+naturally suggest to us upon the mention of sacred _music_--why should
+there not be something analogous, a kind of plain chant, in sacred
+_poetry_ also? fervent, yet sober; awful, but engaging; neither wild
+and passionate, nor light and airy; but such as we may with submission
+presume to be the most acceptable offering in its kind, as being
+indeed the truest expression of the best state of the affections. To
+many, perhaps to most, men, a tone of more violent emotion may sound
+at first more attractive. But before we _indulge_ such a preference,
+we should do well to consider, whether it is quite agreeable to that
+spirit, which alone can make us worthy readers of sacred poetry.
+'[Greek: Entheon he poiesis]', it is true; there must be rapture and
+inspiration, but these will naturally differ in their character as the
+powers do from whom they proceed. The worshippers of Baal may be rude
+and frantic in their cries and gestures; but the true Prophet,
+speaking to or of the true GOD, is all dignity and calmness.
+
+If then, in addition to the ordinary difficulties of poetry, all these
+things are essential to the success of the Christian lyrist--if what
+he sets before us must be true in substance, and in manner marked by a
+noble simplicity and confidence in that truth, by a sincere attachment
+to it, and entire familiarity with it--then we need not wonder that so
+few should have become eminent in this branch of their art, nor need
+we have recourse to the disheartening and unsatisfactory solutions
+which are sometimes given of that circumstance.
+
+     'Contemplative piety,' says Dr. Johnson, 'or the intercourse
+     between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man,
+     admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the
+     merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than
+     poetry can confer.'[17]
+
+    [17] _Life of Waller._
+
+The sentiment is not uncommon among serious, but somewhat fearful,
+believers; and though we believe it erroneous, we desire to treat it
+not only with tenderness, but with reverence. They start at the very
+mention of sacred poetry, as though poetry were in its essence a
+profane amusement. It is, unquestionably, by far the safer extreme to
+be too much afraid of venturing with the imagination upon sacred
+ground. Yet, if it be an error, and a practical error, it may be worth
+while cautiously to examine the grounds of it. In the generality,
+perhaps, it is not so much a deliberate opinion, as a prejudice
+against the use of the art, arising out of its abuse. But the great
+writer just referred to has endeavoured to establish it by direct
+reasoning. He argues the point, first, from the nature of poetry, and
+afterwards from that of devotion.
+
+     The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by
+     producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The
+     topics of devotion are few.
+
+It is to be hoped that many men's experience will refute the latter
+part of this statement. How can the topics of devotion be few, when we
+are taught to make every part of life, every scene in nature, an
+occasion--in other words, a topic--of devotion? It might as well be
+said that connubial love is an unfit subject for poetry, as being
+incapable of novelty, because, after all, it is only ringing the
+changes upon one simple affection, which every one understands. The
+novelty there consists, not in the original topic, but in continually
+bringing ordinary things, by happy strokes of natural ingenuity, into
+new associations with the ruling passion.
+
+    There's not a bonny flower that springs
+      By fountain, shaw, or green;
+    There's not a bonnie bird that sings
+      But minds me of my Jean.
+
+Why need we fear to extend this most beautiful and natural sentiment
+to 'the intercourse between the human soul and its Maker', possessing,
+as we do, the very highest warrant for the analogy which subsists
+between conjugal and divine love?
+
+Novelty, therefore, sufficient for all the purposes of poetry, we may
+have on sacred subjects. Let us pass to the next objection.
+
+     Poetry pleases by exhibiting an idea more grateful to the
+     mind than things themselves afford. This effect proceeds
+     from the display of those parts of nature which attract,
+     and the concealment of those which repel, the imagination;
+     but religion must be shown as it is; suppression and
+     addition equally corrupt it; and, such as it is, it is known
+     already.
+
+A fallacy may be apprehended in both parts of this statement. There
+are, surely, real landscapes which delight the mind as sincerely and
+intensely as the most perfect description could; and there are family
+groups which give a more exquisite sensation of domestic happiness
+than anything in Milton, or even Shakespeare. It is partly by
+association with these, the treasures of the memory, and not
+altogether by mere excitement of the imagination, that Poetry does her
+work. By the same rule sacred pictures and sacred songs cannot fail to
+gratify the mind which is at all exercised in devotion; recalling, as
+they will, whatever of highest perfection in that way she can remember
+in herself, or has learned of others.
+
+Then again, it is not the religious doctrine itself, so much as the
+effect of it upon the human mind and heart, which the sacred poet has
+to describe. What is said of suppression and addition may be true
+enough with regard to the former, but is evidently incorrect when
+applied to the latter: it being an acknowledged difficulty in all
+devotional writings, and not in devotional verse only, to keep clear
+of the extreme of languor on the one hand, and debasing rapture on the
+other. This requires a delicacy in the perception and enunciation of
+truth, of which the most earnest believer may be altogether destitute.
+And since, probably, no man's condition, in regard to eternal things,
+is exactly like that of any other man, and yet it is the business of
+the sacred poet to sympathize with all, his store of subjects is
+clearly inexhaustible, and his powers of discrimination--in other
+words, of suppression and addition--are kept in continual exercise.
+
+Nor is he, by any means, so straitly limited in the other and more
+difficult branch of his art, the exhibition of religious doctrine
+itself, as is supposed in the following statement:
+
+     Whatever is great, desirable, or tremendous, is comprised in
+     the name of the Supreme Being. Omnipotence cannot be
+     exalted; infinity cannot be amplified; perfection cannot be
+     improved.
+
+True: all perfection is implied in the name of GOD; and so all the
+beauties and luxuries of spring are comprised in that one word. But is
+it not the very office of poetry to develop and display the
+particulars of such complex ideas? in such a way, for example, as the
+idea of GOD'S omnipresence is developed in the 139th Psalm? and thus
+detaining the mind for a while, to force or help her to think steadily
+on truths which she would hurry unprofitably over, how strictly soever
+they may be implied in the language which she uses. It is really
+surprising that this great and acute critic did not perceive that the
+objection applies as strongly against any kind of composition of which
+the Divine Nature is the subject, as against devotional poems.
+
+We forbear to press the consideration that, even if the objection were
+allowed in respect of natural religion, it would not hold against the
+devotional compositions of a Christian; the object of whose worship
+has condescended also to become the object of description, affection,
+and sympathy, in the literal sense of these words. But this is,
+perhaps, too solemn and awful an argument for this place; and
+therefore we pass on to the concluding statement of the passage under
+consideration, in which the writer turns his view downwards, and
+argues against sacred poetry from the nature of man, as he had before
+from the nature of GOD.
+
+     The employments of pious meditation are faith, thanksgiving,
+     repentance and supplication. Faith, invariably uniform,
+     cannot be invested by fancy with decorations. Thanksgiving,
+     the most joyful of all holy effusions, yet addressed to a
+     Being without passions, is confined to a few modes, and is
+     to be felt rather than expressed.
+
+What we have said of the variation of the devout affections, as they
+exist in various persons, is sufficient, we apprehend, to answer this.
+But the rest of the paragraph requires some additional reflection:
+
+     Repentance, trembling in the presence of the Judge, is not
+     at leisure for cadences and epithets.
+
+This is rather invidiously put, and looks as if the author had not
+entire confidence in the truth of what he was saying. Indeed, it may
+very well be questioned; since many of the more refined passions, it
+is certain, naturally express themselves in poetical language. But
+repentance is not merely a passion, nor is its only office to tremble
+in the presence of the Judge. So far from it, that one great business
+of sacred poetry, as of sacred music, is to quiet and sober the
+feelings of the penitent--to make his compunction as much of 'a
+reasonable service' as possible.
+
+To proceed:
+
+     Supplication of man to man may diffuse itself through many
+     topics of persuasion: but supplication to God can only cry
+     for mercy.
+
+Certainly, this would be true, if the abstract nature of the Deity
+were alone considered. But if we turn to the sacred volume, which
+corrects so many of our erring anticipations, we there find that,
+whether in condescension to our infirmities, or for other wise
+purposes, we are furnished with inspired precedents for addressing
+ourselves to God in all the various tones, and by all the various
+topics, which we should use to a good and wise man standing in the
+highest and nearest relation to us. This is so palpably the case
+throughout the scriptures, that it is quite surprising how a person of
+so much serious thought as Dr. Johnson could have failed to recollect
+it when arguing on the subject of prayer. In fact, there is a simple
+test, by which, perhaps, the whole of his reasoning on Sacred Poetry
+might be fairly and decisively tried. Let the reader, as he goes over
+it, bear in mind the Psalms of David, and consider whether every one
+of his statements and arguments is not there practically refuted.
+
+It is not, then, because sacred subjects are peculiarly unapt for
+poetry, that so few sacred poets are popular. We have already glanced
+at some of the causes to which we attribute it--we ought to add
+another, which strikes us as important. Let us consider how the case
+stands with regard to books of devotion in _prose_.
+
+We may own it reluctantly, but must it not be owned? that if two new
+publications meet the eye at once, of which no more is known than that
+the one is what is familiarly called _a good book_, the other a work
+of mere literature, nine readers out of ten will take up the second
+rather than the first? If this be allowed, whatever accounts for it
+will contribute to account also for the comparative failure of
+devotional poetry. For this sort of coldness and languor in the reader
+must act upon the author in more ways than one. The large class who
+write for money or applause will of course be carried, by the tide of
+popularity, towards some other subject. Men of more sincere minds,
+either from true or false delicacy, will have little heart to expose
+their retired thoughts to the risk of mockery or neglect; and if they
+do venture, will be checked every moment, like an eager but bashful
+musician before a strange audience, not knowing how far the reader's
+feelings will harmonize with their own. This leaves the field open, in
+a great measure, to harder or more enthusiastic spirits; who offending
+continually, in their several ways, against delicacy, the one by
+wildness, the other by coarseness, aggravate the evil which they
+wished to cure; till the sacred subject itself comes at last to bear
+the blame due to the indifference of the reader and the indiscretion
+of the writer.
+
+Such, we apprehend, would be a probable account of the condition of
+sacred poetry, in a country where religion was coldly acknowledged,
+and literature earnestly pursued. How far the description may apply to
+England and English literature, in their various changes since the
+Reformation--how far it may hold true of our own times--is an inquiry
+which would lead us too far at present; but it is surely worth
+considering. It goes deeper than any question of mere literary
+curiosity. It is a sort of test of the genuineness of those
+pretensions, which many of us are, perhaps, too forward to advance, to
+a higher state of morality and piety, as well as knowledge and
+refinement, than has been known elsewhere or in other times.
+
+Those who, in spite of such difficulties, desire in earnest to do good
+by the poetical talent, which they may happen to possess, have only,
+as it should seem, the following alternative. Either they must veil,
+as it were, the sacredness of the subject--not necessarily by
+allegory, for it may be done in a thousand other ways--and so deceive
+the world of taste into devotional reading--
+
+    Succhi amari intanto ei beve,
+    E dall' inganno sua vita riceve--
+
+or else, directly avowing that their subject as well as purpose is
+devotion, they must be content with a smaller number of readers; a
+disadvantage, however, compensated by the fairer chance of doing good
+to each.
+
+It may be worth while to endeavour to trace this distinction, as
+exemplified in the most renowned of the sacred poets of England; and
+to glean from such a survey the best instruction we can, in the happy
+art of turning the most fascinating part of literature to the highest
+purposes of religion.
+
+We must premise that we limit the title of 'sacred poet' by excluding
+those who only devoted a small portion of their time and talent now
+and then, to sacred subjects. In all ages of our literary history it
+seems to have been considered almost as an essential part of a poet's
+duty to give up some pages to scriptural story, or to the praise of
+his Maker, how remote so ever from anything like religion the general
+strain of his writings might be. Witness the Lamentation of Mary
+Magdalene in the works of Chaucer, and the beautiful legend of Hew of
+Lincoln, which he has inserted in his Canterbury Tales; witness also
+the hymns of Ben Jonson. But these fragments alone will not entitle
+their authors to be enrolled among sacred poets. They indicate the
+taste of their age, rather than their own; a fact which may be thought
+to stand rather in painful contrast with the literary history of later
+days.
+
+There is another class likewise, of whom little need be said in this
+place; we mean those who composed, strictly and only, for the sake of
+unburthening their own minds, without any thought of publication. But
+as Chaucer's sacred effusions indicate chiefly the character of the
+times, so poems such as those we now allude to, mark only the turn of
+mind of the individual writers; and our present business is rather
+with that sort of poetry which combines both sorts of instruction;
+that, namely, which bears internal evidence of having been written by
+sincere men, with an intention of doing good, and with consideration
+of the taste of the age in which they lived.
+
+Recurring then to the distinction above laid down, between the direct
+and indirect modes of sacred poetry; at the head of the two classes,
+as the reader may perhaps have anticipated, we set the glorious names
+of Spenser and of Milton. The claim of Spenser to be considered as a
+sacred poet does by no means rest upon his hymns alone: although even
+those would be enough alone to embalm and consecrate the whole volume
+which contains them; as a splinter of the true cross is supposed by
+Catholic sailors to ensure the safety of the vessel. But whoever will
+attentively consider the _Faerie Queene_ itself, will find that it is,
+almost throughout, such as might have been expected from the author of
+those truly sacred hymns. It is a continual, deliberate endeavour to
+enlist the restless intellect and chivalrous feeling of an inquiring
+and romantic age, on the side of goodness and faith, of purity and
+justice.
+
+This position is to be made good, not solely or perhaps chiefly, yet
+with no small force, from the allegorical structure of the poem. Most
+of us, perhaps, are rather disposed to undervalue this contrivance;
+and even among the genuine admirers of Spenser, there are not a few
+who on purpose leave it out of their thoughts; finding, as they say,
+that it only embarrasses their enjoyment of the poetry. This is
+certainly far from reasonable: it is a relic of childish feeling, and
+mere love of amusement, which ill becomes any one who is old enough to
+appreciate the real beauties of Spenser. Yet it is so natural, so
+obviously to be expected, that we must suppose a scholar and
+philosopher (for such Spenser was, as well as a poet) to have been
+aware of it, and to have made up his mind to it, with all its
+disadvantages, for some strong reason or other. And what reason so
+likely as the hope of being seriously useful, both to himself and his
+readers?
+
+To _himself_, because the constant recurrence to his allegory would
+serve as a check upon a fancy otherwise too luxuriant, and would
+prevent him from indulging in such liberties as the Italian poets, in
+other respects his worthy masters, were too apt to take. The
+consequence is, that even in his freest passages, and those which one
+would most wish unwritten, Spenser is by no means a _seductive_ poet.
+Vice in him, however truly described, is always made contemptible or
+odious. The same may be said of Milton and Shakespeare; but Milton was
+of a cast of mind originally austere and rigorous. He looked on vice
+as a judge; Shakespeare, as a satirist. Spenser was far more indulgent
+than either, and acted therefore the more wisely in setting himself a
+rule, which should make it essential to the plan of his poem to be
+always recommending some virtue; and remind him, like a voice from
+heaven, that the place on which he was standing was holy ground.
+
+Then as to the benefit which the _readers_ of the _Faerie Queene_ may
+derive from its allegorical form; a good deal surely is to be gained
+from the mere habit of looking at things with a view to something
+beyond their qualities merely sensible; to their sacred and moral
+meaning, and to the high associations they were intended to create in
+us. Neither the works nor the word of God, neither poetry nor
+theology, can be duly comprehended without constant mental exercise of
+this kind. The comparison of the Old Testament with the New is nothing
+else from beginning to end. And without something of this sort,
+poetry, and all the other arts, would indeed be relaxing to the tone
+of the mind. The allegory obviates this ill effect, by serving as a
+frequent remembrancer of this higher application. Not that it is
+necessary to bend and strain everything into conformity with it; a
+little leaven, of the genuine kind, will go a good way towards
+leavening the whole lump. And so it is in the _Faerie Queene_; for one
+stanza of direct allegory there are perhaps fifty of poetical
+embellishment; and it is in these last, after all, that the chief
+moral excellency of the poem lies; as we are now about to show.
+
+But to be understood rightly, we would premise, that there is a
+disposition,--the very reverse of that which leads to parody and
+caricature,--which is common indeed to all generous minds, but is
+perhaps unrivalled in Spenser. As parody and caricature debase what is
+truly noble, by connecting it with low and ludicrous associations; so
+a mind, such as we are now speaking of, ennobles what of itself might
+seem trivial; its thoughts and language, on all occasions, taking a
+uniform and almost involuntary direction towards the best and highest
+things.
+
+This, however, is a subject which can be hardly comprehended without
+examples. The first which occurs to us is the passage which relates
+the origin of Belphoebe.
+
+    Her birth was of the womb of morning dew,
+    And her conception of the joyous prime,
+    And all her whole creation did her show
+    Pure and unspotted from all loathly crime
+    That is ingenerate in fleshly slime.
+    So was this Virgin born, so was she bred,
+    So was she trained up from time to time,
+    In all chaste virtue and true bounti-hed,
+    Till to her due perfection she was ripened.
+
+It is evident how high and sacred a subject was present to the poet's
+mind in composing this stanza; and any person who is well read in the
+Bible, with a clue like this may satisfy himself that all Spenser's
+writings are replete with similar tacit allusions to the language and
+the doctrines of sacred writ; allusions breathed, if we may so speak,
+rather than uttered, and much fitter to be silently considered, than
+to be dragged forward for quotation or minute criticism. Of course,
+the more numerous and natural such allusions are, the more entirely
+are we justified in the denomination we have ventured to bestow on
+their author, of a truly 'sacred' poet.
+
+It may be felt, as some derogation from this high character, what he
+has himself avowed--that much of his allegory has a turn designedly
+given it in honour of Queen Elizabeth; a turn which will be called
+courtly or adulatory according to the humour of the critic. But, in
+the first place, such was the custom of the times; it was adopted even
+in sermons by men whose sincerity it would be almost sacrilege to
+question. Then, the merits of Queen Elizabeth in respect of the
+Protestant cause were of that dazzling order, which might excuse a
+little poetical exuberance in her praise. And, what is very deserving
+of consideration, it is certain that the most gentle and generous
+spirits are commonly found laying themselves open to this charge of
+excessive compliment in addressing princes and patrons. Witness the
+high style adopted by the venerable Hooker, in speaking of this very
+Queen Elizabeth: 'Whose sacred power, matched with incomparable
+goodness of nature, hath hitherto been God's most happy instrument, by
+him miraculously kept for works of so miraculous preservation and
+safety unto others,' &c. Another instance of the same kind may be seen
+in Jeremy Taylor's dedication of his _Worthy Communicant_ to the
+Princess of Orange. Nor is it any wonder it should be so, since such
+men feel most ardently the blessing and benefit as well as the
+difficulty of whatever is right in persons of such exalted station;
+and are also most strongly tempted to bear their testimony against the
+illiberal and envious censures of the vulgar. All these things, duly
+weighed, may seem to leave little, if anything, in the panegyrical
+strains of this greatest of laureates, to be excused by the common
+infirmity of human nature; little to detract from our deliberate
+conviction that he was seriously guided, in the exercise of his art,
+by a sense of duty, and zeal for what is durably important.
+
+Spenser then was essentially a _sacred_ poet; but the delicacy and
+insinuating gentleness of his disposition were better fitted to the
+veiled than the direct mode of instruction. His was a mind which would
+have shrunk more from the chance of debasing a sacred subject by
+unhandsome treatment, than of incurring ridicule by what would be
+called unseasonable attempts to hallow things merely secular. It was
+natural therefore for him to choose not a scriptural story, but a tale
+of chivalry and romance; and the popular literature, and, in no small
+measure, the pageantry and manners of his time, would join to attract
+his efforts that way. In this way too he was enabled, with more
+propriety and grace, to introduce allusions, political or courtly, to
+subjects with which his readers were familiar; thus agreeably
+diversifying his allegory, and gratifying his affection for his
+friends and patrons, without the coarseness of direct compliment.
+
+In Milton, most evidently, a great difference was to be expected: both
+from his own character and from that of the times in which he lived.
+Religion was in those days the favourite topic of discussion; and it
+is indeed painful to reflect, how sadly it was polluted by
+intermixture with earthly passions: the most awful turns and most
+surprising miracles of the Jewish history being made to serve the base
+purposes of persons, of whom it is hard to say whether they were more
+successful in misleading others, or in deceiving themselves. It was an
+effort worthy of a manly and devout spirit to rescue religion from
+such degradation, by choosing a subject, which, being scriptural,
+would suit the habit of the times, yet, from its universal and eternal
+importance, would give least opportunity for debasing temporary
+application. Then it was the temper of the man always to speak out.
+He carried it to a faulty excess, as his prose works too amply
+demonstrate. The more unfashionable his moral was, the more he would
+have disdained to veil it: neither had he the shrinking delicacy of
+Spenser to keep him back, through fear of profaning things hallowed by
+an unworthy touch.
+
+Thus the great epic poem of our language came to be, avowedly, a
+sacred poem. One hardly dares to wish any thing other than it is in
+such a composition; yet it may be useful to point out in what respects
+the moral infirmity of the times, or of the author, has affected the
+work; so that we are occasionally tempted to regret even Milton's
+choice. But as the leading error of his mind appears to have been
+_intellectual_ pride, and as the leading fault of the generation with
+which he acted was unquestionably _spiritual_ pride, so the main
+defects of his poetry may probably be attributed to the same causes.
+
+There is a studious undervaluing of the female character, which may be
+most distinctly perceived by comparing the character of Eve with that
+of the Lady in Comus: the latter conceived, as we imagine, before the
+mind of the poet had become so deeply tainted with the fault here
+imputed to him. A remarkable instance of it is his describing Eve as
+unwilling, or unworthy, to discourse herself with the angel.
+
+            Such pleasure she reserved,
+    Adam relating; she sole auditress.--
+
+The sentiment may be natural enough, since the primaeval curse upon
+women: but does it not argue rather too strong a sense of her original
+inferiority, to put it into her mind before the fall?
+
+What again can be said for the reproachful and insulting tone, in
+which, more than once, the good angels are made to address the bad
+ones? or of the too attractive colours, in which, perhaps
+unconsciously, the poet has clothed the Author of Evil himself? It is
+a well-known complaint among many of the readers of _Paradise Lost_,
+that they can hardly keep themselves from sympathizing, in some sort,
+with Satan, as the hero of the poem. The most probable account of
+which surely is, that the author himself partook largely of the
+haughty and vindictive republican spirit which he has assigned to the
+character, and consequently, though perhaps unconsciously, drew the
+portrait with a peculiar zest.
+
+These blemishes are in part attributable to the times in which he
+lived: but there is another now to be mentioned, which cannot be so
+accounted for: we mean a want of purity and spirituality in his
+conceptions of Heaven and heavenly joys. His Paradise is a vision not
+to be surpassed; but his attempts to soar higher are embarrassed with
+too much of earth still clinging as it were to his wings. Remarks of
+this kind are in general best understood by comparison, and we invite
+our readers to compare Milton with Dante, in their descriptions of
+Heaven. The one as simple as possible in his imagery, producing
+intense effect by little more than various combinations of _three_
+leading ideas--light, motion, and music--as if he feared to introduce
+anything more gross and earthly, and would rather be censured, as
+doubtless he often is, for coldness and poverty of invention. Whereas
+Milton, with very little selection or refinement, transfers to the
+immediate neighbourhood of God's throne the imagery of Paradise and
+Earth. Indeed he seems himself to have been aware of something
+unsatisfactory in this, and has inserted into the mouth of an angel,
+a kind of apology for it:
+
+              Though what if earth
+    Be but the shadow of heav'n, and things therein
+    Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?
+
+These are blemishes, and sometimes almost tempt us to wish that even
+Milton had taken some subject not so immediately and avowedly
+connected with religion. But they do not affect his claim to be
+considered as the very lodestar and pattern of that class of sacred
+poets in England. As such we have here considered him next to Spenser;
+not that there were wanting others of the same order before him. In
+fact, most of the distinguished names in the poetical annals of
+Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I, might be included in the list. It
+may be enough just to recollect Drayton and Cowley, Herbert, Crashaw
+and Quarles.
+
+The mention of these latter names suggests the remark, how very
+desirable it is to encourage as indulgent and, if we may so term it,
+_catholic_ a spirit as may be, in poetical criticism. From having been
+over-praised in their own days, they are come now to be as much
+undervalued; yet their quaintness of manner and constrained imagery,
+adopted perhaps in compliance with the taste of their age, should
+hardly suffice to overbalance their sterling merits. We speak
+especially of Crashaw and Quarles: for Herbert is a name too venerable
+to be more than mentioned in our present discussion.
+
+After Milton, sacred poetry seems to have greatly declined, both in
+the number and merit of those who cultivated it. No other could be
+expected from the conflicting evils of those times: in which one party
+was used to brand everything sacred with the name of Puritanism, and
+the other to suspect every thing poetical of being contrary to
+morality and religion.
+
+Yet most of the great names of that age, especially among the
+Romanists, as Dryden, Pope, and before them Habington, continued to
+dedicate some of their poetry to religion. By their faith they were
+remote from the controversies which agitated the established church,
+and their devotion might indulge itself without incurring the
+suspicion of a fanatical spirit. Then the solemnity of their worship
+is fitted to inspire splendid and gorgeous strains, such as Dryden's
+paraphrase of the Veni Creator; and their own fallen fortunes in
+England, no less naturally, would fill them with a sense of decay very
+favourable to the plaintive tenderness of Habington and Crashaw.
+
+A feeling of this kind, joined to the effect of distressing languor
+and sickness, may be discerned, occasionally, in the writings of
+Bishop Ken; though he was far indeed from being a Romanist. We shall
+hardly find, in all ecclesiastical history, a greener spot than the
+later years of this courageous and affectionate pastor; persecuted
+alternately by both parties, and driven from his station in his
+declining age; yet singing on, with unabated cheerfulness, to the
+last. His poems are not popular, nor probably ever will be, for
+reasons already touched upon; but whoever in earnest loves his three
+well-known hymns, and knows how to value such unaffected strains of
+poetical devotion, will find his account, in turning over his four
+volumes, half narrative and half lyric, and all avowedly on sacred
+subjects; the narrative often cumbrous, and the lyric verse not seldom
+languid and redundant: yet all breathing such an angelic spirit,
+interspersed with such pure and bright touches of poetry, that such a
+reader as we have supposed will scarcely find it in his heart to
+criticize them.
+
+Between that time and ours, the form of sacred poetry which has
+succeeded best in attracting public attention, is the didactic: of
+which Davies in Queen Elizabeth's reign, Sir Richard Blackmore in King
+William's, Young in the middle, and Cowper in the close, of the last
+century, may fairly be taken as specimens, differing from each other
+according to the differences of their respective literary eras.
+Davies, with his Lucretian majesty (although he wants the moral pathos
+of the Roman poet), representing aptly enough the age of Elizabeth;
+Blackmore, with his easy paragraphs, the careless style of King
+Charles's days; Young, with his pointed sentences, transferring to
+graver subjects a good deal of the manner of Pope; and Cowper, with
+his agreeable but too unsparing descriptions, coming nearer to the
+present day, which appears, both in manners and in scenery, to delight
+in Dutch painting, rather than in what is more delicately classical.
+
+With regard to the indirect, and, perhaps, more effective, species of
+sacred poetry, we fear it must be acknowledged, to the shame of the
+last century, that there is hardly a single specimen of it (excepting,
+perhaps, Gray's Elegy, and possibly some of the most perfect of
+Collins's poems) which has obtained any celebrity. We except the
+writers of our own times, who do not fall within the scope of this
+inquiry.
+
+To Spenser, therefore, upon the whole, the English reader must revert,
+as being, pre-eminently, the sacred poet of his country: as most
+likely, in every way, to answer the purposes of his art; especially in
+an age of excitation and refinement, in which the gentler and more
+homely beauties, both of character and of scenery, are too apt to be
+despised: with passion and interest enough to attract the most ardent,
+and grace enough to win the most polished; yet by a silent preference
+everywhere inculcating the love of better and more enduring things;
+and so most exactly fulfilling what he has himself declared to be 'the
+general end of all his book'--'to fashion a gentleman, or noble
+person, in virtuous and gentle discipline': and going the straight way
+to the accomplishment of his own high-minded prayer:
+
+    That with the glory of so goodly sight,
+    The hearts of men, which fondly here admire
+    Fair-seeming shows, and feed on vain delight,
+    Transported with celestial desire
+    Of those fair forms, may lift themselves up higher,
+    And learn to love, with zealous humble duty,
+    Th' eternal fountain of that heavenly beauty.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
+
+1801-1890
+
+POETRY
+
+WITH REFERENCE TO ARISTOTLE'S POETICS (1829).
+
+_The Theatre of the Greeks; or the History, Literature, and Criticism
+of the Grecian Drama. With an original Treatise on the Principal
+Tragic and Comic Metres._ Second Edition. Cambridge. 1827.
+
+
+This work is well adapted for the purpose it has in view--the
+illustration of the Greek drama. It has been usual for the young
+student to engage in a perusal of this difficult branch of classical
+literature, with none of that previous preparation or collateral
+assistance which it pre-eminently requires. Not to mention his
+ordinary want of information as regards the history of the drama,
+which, though necessary to the full understanding the nature of that
+kind of poetry, may still seem too remotely connected with the
+existing Greek plays to be an actual deficiency; nor, again, his
+ignorance of the dramatic dialect and metres, which, without external
+helps, may possibly be overcome by minds of superior talent while
+engaged upon them; at least without some clear ideas of the usages of
+the ancient stage, the Greek dramas are but partially intelligible.
+The circumstances under which the representation was conducted, the
+form and general arrangements of the theatre, the respective offices
+and disposition of the actors, the nature and duties of the chorus,
+the proprieties of the scene itself, are essential subjects of
+information, yet they are generally neglected. The publication before
+us is a compilation of the most useful works or parts of works on the
+criticism, history, and antiquities of the drama; among which will be
+found extracts from Bentley's _Dissertation on the Epistles of
+Phalaris_ and from Schlegel's work on Dramatic Literature; the more
+important parts of Twining's Translation of Aristotle's _Poetics_, and
+critical remarks, by Dawes, Porson, Elmsley, Tate, and the writers in
+the _Museum Criticum_.
+
+If we were disposed to find fault with a useful work, we should
+describe it as over-liberal of condensed critical information. Such
+ample assistance is given to the student, that little is left to
+exercise his own personal thought and judgement. This is a fault of
+not a few publications of the present day, written for our
+universities. From a false estimate of the advantages of accurate
+scholarship, the reader is provided with a multitude of minute facts,
+which are useful to his mind, not when barely remembered, but chiefly
+when he has acquired them for himself. It is of comparatively trifling
+importance, whether the scholar knows the force of [Greek: ou me] or
+[Greek: alla gar]; but it may considerably improve his acumen or
+taste, to have gone through a process of observation, comparison, and
+induction, more or less original and independent of grammarians and
+critics. It is an officious aid which renders the acquisition of a
+language mechanical. Commentators are of service to stimulate the
+mind, and suggest thought; and though, when we view the wide field of
+criticism, it is impossible they should do more, yet, when that field
+is narrowed to the limit of academical success, there is a danger of
+their indulging indolence, or confirming the contracted views of
+dullness. These remarks are not so much directed against a valuable
+work like the present, the very perusal of which may be made an
+exercise for the mind, as against an especial fault of the age. The
+uses of knowledge in forming the intellectual and moral character, are
+too commonly overlooked; and the possession itself being viewed as a
+peculiar good, short ways are on all subjects excogitated for avoiding
+the labour of learning; whereas the very length and process of the
+journey is in many the chief, in all an important advantage.
+
+But, dismissing a train of thought which would soon lead us very far
+from the range of subjects which the _Theatre of the Greeks_
+introduces to our notice, we propose to offer some speculations of our
+own on Greek tragedy and poetry in general, founded on the doctrine of
+Aristotle as contained in the publication before us. A compilation of
+standard works, (and such in its general character is the _Greek
+Theatre_,) scarcely affords the occasion of lengthened criticism on
+itself; whereas it may be of use to the classical student to add some
+further illustrations of the subject which is the common basis of the
+works compiled.
+
+Aristotle considers the excellence of a tragedy to depend upon its
+_plot_--and, since a tragedy, as such, is obviously the exhibition of
+an _action_, no one can deny his statement to be abstractedly true.
+Accordingly he directs his principal attention to the economy of the
+fable; determines its range of subjects, delineates its proportions,
+traces its progress from a complication of incidents to their just
+and satisfactory arrangement, investigates the means of making a train
+of events striking or affecting, and shows how the exhibition of
+character may be made subservient to the purposes of the action. His
+treatise is throughout interesting and valuable. It is one thing,
+however, to form the beau ideal of a tragedy on scientific principles;
+another to point out the actual beauty of a particular school of
+dramatic composition. The Greek tragedians are not generally
+felicitous in the construction of their plots. Aristotle, then, rather
+tells us what tragedy should be, than what Greek tragedy really was.
+And this doubtless was the intention of the philosopher. Since,
+however, the Greek drama has obtained so extended and lasting a
+celebrity, and yet its excellence does not fall under the strict rules
+of the critical art, we should inquire in what it consists.
+
+That the charm of Greek tragedy does not ordinarily arise from
+scientific correctness of plot, is certain as a matter of fact. Seldom
+does any great interest arise from the action; which, instead of being
+progressive and sustained, is commonly either a mere necessary
+condition of the drama, or a convenience for the introduction of
+matter more important than itself. It is often stationary--often
+irregular--sometimes either wants or outlives the catastrophe. In the
+plays of Aeschylus it is always simple and inartificial--in four out
+of the seven there is hardly any plot at all;--and, though it is of
+more prominent importance in those of Sophocles, yet even here the
+_Oedipus at Colonus_ is a mere series of incidents, and the _Ajax_ a
+union of two separate tales; while in the _Philoctetes_, which is
+apparently busy, the circumstances of the action are but slightly
+connected with the _denouement_. The carelessness of Euripides in the
+construction of his plots is well known. The action then will be more
+justly viewed as the vehicle for introducing the personages of the
+drama, than as the principal object of the poet's art; it is not in
+the plot, but in the characters, sentiments, and diction, that the
+actual merit and poetry of the composition is placed. To show this to
+the satisfaction of the reader, would require a minuter investigation
+of details than our present purpose admits; yet a few instances in
+point may suggest others to the memory. E. g. in neither the _Oedipus
+Coloneus_ nor the _Philoctetes_, the two most beautiful plays of
+Sophocles, is the plot striking; but how exquisite is the delineation
+of the characters of Antigone and Oedipus, in the former tragedy,
+particularly in their interview with Polynices, and the various
+descriptions of the scene itself which the Chorus furnishes! In the
+_Philoctetes_, again, it is the contrast between the worldly wisdom of
+Ulysses, the inexperienced frankness of Neoptolemus, and the
+simplicity of the afflicted Philoctetes, which constitutes the
+principal charm of the drama. Or we may instance the spirit and nature
+displayed in the grouping of the characters in the _Prometheus_ which
+is almost without action;--the stubborn enemy of the new dynasty of
+gods; Oceanus trimming, as an accomplished politician, with the change
+of affairs; the single-hearted and generous Nereids; and Hermes the
+favourite and instrument of the usurping potentate. So again, the
+beauties of the _Thebae_ are almost independent of the plot;--it is
+the Chorus which imparts grace and interest to the actionless scene;
+and the speech of Antigone at the end, one of the most simply striking
+in any play, has, scientifically speaking, no place in the tragedy,
+which should already have been brought to its conclusion. Amid the
+multitude of the beauties of the irregular Euripides, it is obvious to
+notice the characters of Alcestis and the Clytemnestra of the
+_Electra_; the soliloquies of _Medea_; the picturesque situation of
+Ion, the minister of the Pythian temple; the opening scene of the
+_Orestes_; and the dialogues between Phaedra and her attendant in the
+_Hippolytus_, and the old man and Antigone in the _Phoenissae_;--passages
+which are either unconnected with the development of the plot, or of
+an importance superior to it. Thus the Greek drama, as a fact, was
+modelled on no scientific principle. It was a pure recreation of the
+imagination, revelling without object or meaning beyond its own
+exhibition. Gods, heroes, kings, and dames, enter and retire: they may
+have a good reason for appearing--they may have a very poor one;
+whatever it is, still we have no right to ask for it;--the question is
+impertinent. Let us listen to their harmonious and majestic
+language--to the voices of sorrow, joy, compassion, or religious
+emotion--to the animated odes of the chorus. Why interrupt so divine a
+display of poetical genius by inquiries degrading it to the level of
+every-day events, and implying incompleteness in the action till a
+catastrophe arrives? The very spirit of beauty breathes through every
+part of the composition. We may liken the Greek drama to the music of
+the Italian school; in which the wonder is, how so much richness of
+invention in detail can be accommodated to a style so simple and
+uniform. Each is the development of grace, fancy, pathos, and taste,
+in the respective media of representation and sound.
+
+However true then it may be, that one or two of the most celebrated
+dramas answer to the requisitions of Aristotle's doctrine, still for
+the most part, Greek Tragedy has its own distinct and peculiar praise,
+which must not be lessened by a criticism conducted on principles,
+whether correct or not, still leading to excellence of another
+character. This being, as we hope, shown, we shall be still bolder,
+and proceed to question even the sufficiency of the rules of Aristotle
+for the production of dramas of the highest order. These rules, it
+would appear, require a plot not merely natural and unaffected, as a
+vehicle of more poetical matter, but one laboured and complicated as
+the sole legitimate channel of tragic effect; and thus tend to
+withdraw the mind of the poet from the spontaneous exhibition of
+pathos or imagination, to a minute diligence in the formation of a
+plan. To explain our views on the subject, we will institute a short
+comparison between three tragedies, the _Agamemnon_, the _Oedipus_,
+and the _Bacchae_, one of each of the tragic poets, where, by
+reference to Aristotle's principles, we think it will be found that
+the most perfect in plot is not the most poetical.
+
+Of these the action of the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ is frequently instanced
+by the critic as a specimen of judgement and skill in the selection
+and combination of the incidents; and in this point of view it is
+truly a masterly composition. The clearness, precision, certainty,
+and vigour, with which the line of the action moves on to its
+termination, is admirable. The character of Oedipus too is finely
+drawn, and identified with the development of the action.
+
+The _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus presents us with the slow and difficult
+birth of a portentous secret--an event of old written in the resolves
+of destiny, a crime long meditated in the bosom of the human agents.
+The Chorus here has an importance altogether wanting in the Chorus of
+the _Oedipus_. They throw a pall of ancestral honour over the bier of
+the hereditary monarch, which would have been unbecoming in the case
+of the upstart king of Thebes. Till the arrival of Agamemnon, they
+occupy our attention, as the prophetic organ, not commissioned indeed
+but employed by heaven, to proclaim the impending horrors. Succeeding
+to the brief intimation of the watcher who opens the play, they seem
+oppressed with forebodings of woe and crime which they can neither
+justify nor analyse. The expression of their anxiety forms the stream
+in which the plot flows--every thing, even news of joy, takes a
+colouring from the depth of their gloom. On the arrival of the king,
+they retire before Cassandra, a more regularly commissioned
+prophetess; who, speaking first in figure, then in plain terms, only
+ceases that we may hear the voice of the betrayed monarch himself,
+informing us of the striking of the fatal blow. Here then the very
+simplicity of the fable constitutes its especial beauty. The death of
+Agamemnon is intimated at first--it is accomplished at last:
+throughout we find but the growing in volume and intensity of one and
+the same note--it is a working up of one musical ground, by fugue and
+imitation, into the richness of combined harmony. But we look in vain
+for the progressive and thickening incidents of the _Oedipus_.
+
+The action of the _Bacchae_ is also simple. It is the history of the
+reception of the worship of Bacchus in Thebes; who, first depriving
+Pentheus of his reason, and thereby drawing him on to his ruin,
+establishes his divinity. The interest of the scene arises from the
+gradual process by which the derangement of the Theban king is
+effected, which is powerfully and originally described. It would be
+comic, were it unconnected with religion. As it is, it exhibits the
+grave irony of a god triumphing over the impotent presumption of man,
+the sport and terrible mischievousness of an insulted deity. It is an
+exemplification of the adage, _quem deus vult perdere, prius
+dementat_. So delicately balanced is the action along the verge of the
+sublime and grotesque, that it is both solemn and humorous, without
+violence to the propriety of the composition: the mad and merry fire
+of the Chorus, the imbecile mirth of old Cadmus and Tiresias, and the
+infatuation of Pentheus, who is ultimately induced to dress himself in
+female garb to gain admittance among the Bacchae, are made to
+harmonize with the terrible catastrophe which concludes the life of
+the intruder. Perhaps the victim's first discovery of the disguised
+deity is the finest conception in this splendid drama. His madness
+enables him to discern the emblematic horns on the head of Bacchus,
+which were hid from him when in his sound mind; yet this discovery,
+instead of leading him to an acknowledgement of the divinity,
+provides him only with matter for a stupid and perplexed
+astonishment.
+
+    [Greek: kai tauros hemin prosthen hegeisthai dokeis,
+    kai so kerate krati prospephykenai.
+    all' e pot' estha ther; tetaurosai gar oun.][18]
+
+This play is on the whole the most favourable specimen of the genius
+of Euripides--not breathing the sweet composure, the melodious
+fullness, the majesty and grace of Sophocles; nor rudely and
+overpoweringly tragic as Aeschylus; but brilliant, versatile,
+imaginative, as well as deeply pathetic.
+
+    [18]
+
+        A Bull, thou seem'st to lead us; on thy head
+        Horns have grown forth: wast heretofore a beast?
+        For such thy semblance now.
+
+Here then are two dramas of extreme poetical power, but deficient in
+skilfulness of plot. Are they on that account to be rated below the
+_Oedipus_, which, in spite of its many beauties, has not even a share
+of the richness and sublimity of either?
+
+Aristotle, then, it must be allowed, treats dramatic composition more
+as an exhibition of ingenious workmanship, than as a free and
+unfettered effusion of genius. The inferior poem may, on his
+principle, be the better tragedy. He may indeed have intended solely
+to delineate the outward framework most suitable to the reception of
+the spirit of poetry, not to discuss the nature of poetry itself. If
+so, it cannot be denied that, the poetry being given equal in the two
+cases, the more perfect plot will merit the greater share of praise.
+And it may seem to agree with this view of his meaning, that he
+pronounces Euripides, in spite of the irregularity of his plots, to
+be, after all, the most tragic of the Greek dramatists, inasmuch (i.
+e.) as he excels in his appeal to those passions which the outward
+form of the drama merely subserves. Still there is surely too much
+stress laid by the philosopher upon the artificial part; which, after
+all, leads to negative, more than to positive excellence; and should
+rather be the natural and (so to say) unintentional result of the
+poet's feeling and imagination, than be separated from them as the
+direct object of his care. Perhaps it is hardly fair to judge of
+Aristotle's sentiments by the fragment of his work which has come down
+to us. Yet as his natural taste led him to delight in the explication
+of systems, and in those large and connected views which his vigorous
+talent for thinking through subjects supplied, we may be allowed to
+suspect him of entertaining too cold and formal conceptions of the
+nature of poetical composition, as if its beauties were less subtle
+and delicate than they really are. A word has power to convey a world
+of information to the imagination, and to act as a spell upon the
+feelings: there is no need of sustained fiction--often no room for
+it.[19] Some confirmation of the judgement we have ventured to pass on
+the greatest of analytical philosophers, is the account he gives of
+the source of poetical pleasure; which he almost identifies with a
+gratification of the reasoning faculty, placing it in the satisfaction
+derived from recognizing in fiction a resemblance to the realities of
+life--[Greek: symbainei theorountas manthanein kai syllogizesthai, ti
+hekaston.][20]
+
+    [19] The sudden inspiration, e. g. of the blind Oedipus, in
+    the second play bearing his name, by which he is enabled,
+    [Greek: athiktos hegeteros] ['without a guide'], to lead the
+    way to his place of death, in our judgement, produces more
+    poetical effect than all the skilful intricacy of the plot of
+    the _Tyrannus_. The latter excites an interest which scarcely
+    lasts beyond the first reading--the former _decies repetita
+    placebit_.
+
+    [20] In seeing the picture one is at the same time
+    learning,--gathering the meaning of things.
+
+But as we have treated, rather unceremoniously, a deservedly high
+authority, we will try to compensate for our rudeness, by illustrating
+his general doctrine of the nature of poetry, which we hold to be most
+true and philosophical.
+
+Poetry, according to Aristotle, is a representation of the ideal.
+Biography and history represent individual characters and actual
+facts; poetry, on the contrary, generalizing from the phenomena of
+nature and life, supplies us with pictures drawn not after an existing
+pattern, but after a creation of the mind. _Fidelity_ is the primary
+merit of biography and history; the essence of poetry is _fiction_.
+_Poesis nihil aliud est_ (says Bacon) _quam historiae imitatio ad
+placitum_. It delineates that perfection which the imagination
+suggests, and to which as a limit the present system of divine
+Providence actually tends. Moreover, by confining the attention to one
+series of events and scene of action, it bounds and finishes off the
+confused luxuriance of real nature; while, by a skilful adjustment of
+circumstances, it brings into sight the connexion of cause and effect,
+completes the dependence of the parts one on another, and harmonizes
+the proportions of the whole. It is then but the type and model of
+history or biography, if we may be allowed the comparison, bearing
+some resemblance to the abstract mathematical formula of physics,
+before it is modified by the contingencies of gravity and friction.
+Hence, while it recreates the imagination by the superhuman loveliness
+of its views, it provides a solace for the mind broken by the
+disappointments and sufferings of actual life; and becomes, moreover,
+the utterance of the inward emotions of a right moral feeling, seeking
+a purity and a truth which this world will not give.
+
+It follows that the poetical mind is one full of the eternal forms of
+beauty and perfection; these are its material of thought, its
+instrument and medium of observation--these colour each object to
+which it directs its view. It is called imaginative or creative, from
+the originality and independence of its modes of thinking, compared
+with the common-place and matter-of-fact conceptions of ordinary
+minds, which are fettered down to the particular and individual. At
+the same time it feels a natural sympathy with everything great and
+splendid in the physical and moral world; and selecting such from the
+mass of common phenomena, incorporates them, as it were, into the
+substance of its own creations. From living thus in a world of its
+own, it speaks the language of dignity, emotion, and refinement.
+Figure is its necessary medium of communication with man; for in the
+feebleness of ordinary words to express its ideas, and in the absence
+of terms of abstract perfection, the adoption of metaphorical language
+is the only poor means allowed it for imparting to others its intense
+feelings. A metrical garb has, in all languages, been appropriated to
+poetry--it is but the outward development of the music and harmony
+within. The verse, far from being a restraint on the true poet, is the
+suitable index of his sense, and is adopted by his free and deliberate
+choice.
+
+We shall presently show the applicability of our doctrine to the
+various departments of poetical composition; first, however, it will
+be right to volunteer an explanation which may save it from much
+misconception and objection. Let not our notion be thought arbitrarily
+to limit the number of poets, generally considered such. It will be
+found to lower particular works, or parts of works, rather than the
+writers themselves; sometimes to condemn only the vehicle in which the
+poetry is conveyed. There is an ambiguity in the word poetry, which is
+taken to signify both the talent itself, and the written composition
+which is the result of it. Thus there is an apparent, but no real
+contradiction, in saying a poem may be but partially poetical; in some
+passages more so than in others; and sometimes not poetical at all. We
+only maintain--not that writers forfeit the name of poet who fail at
+times to answer to our requisitions, but--that they are poets only so
+far forth and inasmuch as they do answer to them. We may grant, for
+instance, that the vulgarities of old Phoenix in the ninth _Iliad_, or
+of the nurse of Orestes in the _Choephoroe_, or perhaps of the
+grave-diggers in _Hamlet_, are in themselves unworthy of their
+respective authors, and refer them to the wantonness of exuberant
+genius; and yet maintain that the scenes in question contain much
+_incidental_ poetry. Now and then the lustre of the true metal catches
+the eye, redeeming whatever is unseemly and worthless in the rude ore;
+still the ore is not the metal. Nay sometimes, and not unfrequently in
+Shakespeare, the introduction of unpoetical matter may be necessary
+for the sake of relief, or as a vivid expression of recondite
+conceptions, and (as it were) to make friends with the reader's
+imagination. This necessity, however, cannot make the additions in
+themselves beautiful and pleasing. Sometimes, on the other hand, while
+we do not deny the incidental beauty of a poem, we are ashamed and
+indignant on witnessing the unworthy substance in which that beauty is
+imbedded. This remark applies strongly to the immoral compositions to
+which Lord Byron devoted his last years. Now to proceed with our
+proposed investigation.
+
+We will notice _descriptive poetry_ first. Empedocles wrote his
+physics in verse, and Oppian his history of animals. Neither were
+poets--the one was an historian of nature, the other a sort of
+biographer of brutes. Yet a poet may make natural history or
+philosophy the material of his composition. But under his hands they
+are no longer a bare collection of facts or principles, but are
+painted with a meaning, beauty, and harmonious order not their own.
+Thomson has sometimes been commended for the novelty and minuteness of
+his remarks upon nature. This is not the praise of a poet; whose
+office rather is to represent _known_ phenomena in a new connexion or
+medium. In _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ the poetical magician
+invests the commonest scenes of a country life with the hues, first of
+a mirthful, then of a pensive mind.[21] Pastoral poetry is a
+description of rustics, agriculture, and cattle, softened off and
+corrected from the rude health of nature. Virgil, and much more Pope
+and others, have run into the fault of colouring too highly;--instead
+of drawing generalized and ideal forms of _shepherds_, they have given
+us pictures of _gentlemen_ and _beaux_. Their composition may be
+poetry, but it is not pastoral poetry.
+
+    [21] It is the charm of the descriptive poetry of a religious
+    mind, that nature is viewed in a moral connexion. Ordinary
+    writers (e. g.) compare aged men to trees in autumn--a gifted
+    poet will reverse the metaphor. Thus:--
+
+        'How quiet shows the woodland scene!
+          Each flower and tree, its duty done,
+        Reposing in decay serene,
+          _Like weary men when age is won_,' &c.
+
+The difference between poetical and historical _narrative_ may be
+illustrated by the 'Tales Founded on Facts', generally of a religious
+character, so common in the present day, which we must not be thought
+to approve, because we use them for our purpose. The author finds in
+the circumstances of the case many particulars too trivial for public
+notice, or irrelevant to the main story, or partaking perhaps too much
+of the peculiarity of individual minds:--these he omits. He finds
+connected events separated from each other by time or place, or a
+course of action distributed among a multitude of agents; he limits
+the scene or duration of the tale, and dispenses with his host of
+characters by condensing the mass of incident and action in the
+history of a few. He compresses long controversies into a concise
+argument--and exhibits characters by dialogue--and (if such be his
+object) brings prominently forward the course of Divine Providence by
+a fit disposition of his materials. Thus he selects, combines,
+refines, colours--in fact, _poetizes_. His facts are no longer
+_actual_ but _ideal_--a tale _founded on_ facts is a tale _generalized
+from_ facts. The authors of _Peveril of the Peak_, and of _Brambletye
+House_, have given us their respective descriptions of the profligate
+times of Charles II. Both accounts are interesting, but for different
+reasons. That of the latter writer has the fidelity of history;
+Walter Scott's picture is the hideous reality unintentionally softened
+and decorated by the poetry of his own mind. Miss Edgeworth sometimes
+apologizes for certain incidents in her tales, by stating they took
+place 'by one of those strange chances which occur in life, but seem
+incredible when found in writing'. Such an excuse evinces a
+misconception of the principle of fiction, which, being the
+_perfection_ of the actual, prohibits the introduction of any such
+anomalies of experience. It is by a similar impropriety that painters
+sometimes introduce unusual sunsets, or other singular phenomena of
+lights and forms. Yet some of Miss Edgeworth's works contain much
+poetry of narrative. _Manoeuvring_ is perfect in its way--the plot and
+characters are natural, without being too real to be pleasing.
+
+_Character_ is made poetical by a like process. The writer draws
+indeed from experience; but unnatural peculiarities are laid aside,
+and harsh contrasts reconciled. If it be said, the fidelity of the
+imitation is often its greatest merit, we have only to reply, that in
+such cases the pleasure is not poetical, but consists in the mere
+recognition. All novels and tales which introduce real characters, are
+in the same degree unpoetical. Portrait-painting, to be poetical,
+should furnish an abstract representation of an individual; the
+abstraction being more rigid, inasmuch as the painting is confined to
+one point of time. The artist should draw independently of the
+accidents of attitude, dress, occasional feeling, and transient
+action. He should depict the general spirit of his subject--as if he
+were copying from memory, not from a few particular sittings. An
+ordinary painter will delineate with rigid fidelity, and will make a
+caricature. But the learned artist contrives so to temper his
+composition, as to sink all offensive peculiarities and hardnesses of
+individuality, without diminishing the striking effect of the
+likeness, or acquainting the casual spectator with the secret of his
+art. Miss Edgeworth's representations of the Irish character are
+actual, and not poetical--nor were they intended to be so. They are
+interesting, because they are faithful. If there is poetry about them,
+it exists in the personages themselves, not in her representation of
+them. She is only the accurate reporter in word of what was poetical
+in fact. Hence, moreover, when a deed or incident is striking in
+itself, a judicious writer is led to describe it in the most simple
+and colourless terms, his own being unnecessary; e. g. if the
+greatness of the action itself excites the imagination, or the depth
+of the suffering interests the feelings. In the usual phrase, the
+circumstances are left to 'speak for themselves'.
+
+Let it not be said that our doctrine is adverse to that individuality
+in the delineation of character, which is a principal charm of
+fiction. It is not necessary for the ideality of a composition to
+avoid those minuter shades of difference between man and man, which
+give to poetry its plausibility and life; but merely such violation of
+general nature, such improbabilities, wanderings, or coarsenesses, as
+interfere with the refined and delicate enjoyment of the imagination;
+which would have the elements of beauty extracted out of the confused
+multitude of ordinary actions and habits, and combined with
+consistency and ease. Nor does it exclude the introduction of
+imperfect or odious characters. The original conception of a weak or
+guilty mind may have its intrinsic beauty. And much more so, when it
+is connected with a tale which finally adjusts whatever is
+reprehensible in the personages themselves. Richard and Iago are
+subservient to the plot. Moral excellence of character may sometimes
+be even a fault. The Clytemnestra of Euripides is so interesting, that
+the divine vengeance, which is the main subject of the drama, seems
+almost unjust. Lady Macbeth, on the contrary, is the conception of one
+deeply learned in the poetical art. She is polluted with the most
+heinous crimes, and meets the fate she deserves. Yet there is nothing
+in the picture to offend the taste, and much to feed the imagination.
+Romeo and Juliet are too good for the termination to which the plot
+leads--so are Ophelia and the bride of Lammermoor. In these cases
+there is something inconsistent with correct beauty, and therefore
+unpoetical. We do not say the fault could be avoided without
+sacrificing more than would be gained; still it is a fault. It is
+scarcely possible for a poet satisfactorily to connect innocence with
+ultimate unhappiness, when the notion of a future life is excluded.
+Honours paid to the memory of the dead are some alleviation of the
+harshness. In his use of the doctrine of a future life, Southey is
+admirable. Other writers are content to conduct their heroes to
+temporal happiness--Southey refuses present comfort to his Ladurlad,
+Thalaba, and Roderick, but carries them on through suffering to
+another world. The death of his hero is the termination of the action;
+yet so little in two of them, at least, does this catastrophe excite
+sorrowful feelings, that some readers may be startled to be reminded
+of the fact. If a melancholy is thrown over the conclusion of the
+_Roderick_, it is from the peculiarities of the hero's previous
+history.
+
+Opinions, feelings, manners, and customs, are made poetical by the
+delicacy or splendour with which they are expressed. This is seen in
+the _ode_, _elegy_, _sonnet_, and _ballad_; in which a single idea
+perhaps, or familiar occurrence, is invested by the poet with pathos
+or dignity. The ballad of _Old Robin Gray_ will serve, for an
+instance, out of a multitude; again, Lord Byron's _Hebrew Melody_,
+beginning 'Were my bosom as false', &c.; or Cowper's _Lines on his
+Mother's Picture_; or Milman's 'Funeral Hymn' in the _Martyr of
+Antioch_; or Milton's _Sonnet on his Blindness_; or Bernard Barton's
+_Dream_. As picturesque specimens, we may name Campbell's _Battle of
+the Baltic_; or Joanna Baillie's _Chough and Crow_; and for the more
+exalted and splendid style, Gray's _Bard_; or Milton's _Hymn on the
+Nativity_; in which facts, with which every one is familiar, are made
+new by the colouring of a poetical imagination. It must all along be
+observed, that we are not adducing instances for their own sake; but
+in order to illustrate our general doctrine, and to show its
+applicability to those compositions which are, by universal consent,
+acknowledged to be poetical.
+
+The department of poetry we are now speaking of, is of much wider
+extent than might at first sight appear. It will include such
+moralizing and philosophical poems as Young's _Night Thoughts_, and
+Byron's _Childe Harold_.[22] There is much bad taste, at present, in
+the judgement passed on compositions of this kind. It is the fault of
+the day to mistake mere eloquence for poetry; whereas, in direct
+opposition to the conciseness and simplicity of the poet, the talent
+of the orator consists in making much of a single idea. '_Sic dicet
+ille ut verset saepe multis modis eandem et unam rem, ut haereat in
+eadem commoreturque sententia._' This is the great art of Cicero
+himself, who, whether he is engaged in statement, argument, or
+raillery, never ceases till he has exhausted the subject; going round
+about it, and placing it in every different light, yet without
+repetition to offend or weary the reader. This faculty seems to
+consist in the power of throwing off harmonious sentences, which,
+while they have a respectable proportion of meaning, yet are
+especially intended to charm the ear. In popular poems, common ideas
+are unfolded with copiousness, and set off in polished verse--and this
+is called poetry. In the _Pleasures of Hope_ we find this done with
+exquisite taste; but it is in his minor poems that the author's
+powerful and free poetical genius rises to its natural elevation. In
+_Childe Harold_, too, the writer is carried through his Spenserian
+stanza with the unweariness and equable fullness of accomplished
+eloquence; opening, illustrating, and heightening one idea, before he
+passes on to another. His composition is an extended funeral oration
+over buried joys and pleasures. His laments over Greece, Rome, and the
+fallen in various engagements, have quite the character of panegyrical
+orations; while by the very attempt to describe the celebrated
+buildings and sculptures of antiquity, he seems to confess that _they_
+are the poetical text, his the rhetorical comment. Still it is a work
+of splendid talent, though, as a whole, not of the highest poetical
+excellence. Juvenal is, perhaps, the only ancient author who
+habitually substitutes declamation for poetry.[23]
+
+    [22] We would here mention Rogers's _Italy_, if such a
+    cursory notice could convey our high opinion of its merit.
+
+    [23] The difference between oratory and poetry is well
+    illustrated by a passage in a recent tragedy.
+
+          _Col._ Joined! by what tie?
+
+          _Rien._ By hatred--
+        By danger--the two hands that tightest grasp
+        Each other--the two cords that soonest knit
+        A fast and stubborn tie; your true love knot
+        Is nothing to it. Faugh! the supple touch
+        Of pliant interest, or the dust of time,
+        Or the pin-point of temper, loose or rot
+        Or snap love's silken band. Fear and old hate,
+        They are sure weavers--they work for the storm,
+        The whirlwind, and the rocking surge; their knot
+        Endures till death.
+
+    The idea is good, and if expressed in a line or two, might
+    have been poetry--spread out into nine or ten lines, it
+    yields but a languid and ostentatious declamation.
+
+The _philosophy of mind_ may equally be made subservient to poetry, as
+the philosophy of nature. It is a common fault to mistake a mere
+knowledge of the heart for poetical talent. Our greatest masters have
+known better;--they have subjected metaphysics to their art. In
+_Hamlet_, _Macbeth_, _Richard_, and _Othello_, the philosophy of mind
+is but the material of the poet. These personages are ideal; they are
+effects of the contact of a given internal character with given
+outward circumstances, the results of combined conditions determining
+(so to say) a moral curve of original and inimitable properties.
+Philosophy is exhibited in the same subserviency to poetry in many
+parts of Crabbe's _Tales of the Hall_. In the writings of this author
+there is much to offend a refined taste; but at least in the work in
+question there is much of a highly poetical cast. It is a
+representation of the action and re-action of two minds upon each
+other and upon the world around them. Two brothers of different
+characters and fortunes, and strangers to each other, meet. Their
+habits of mind, the formation of those habits by external
+circumstances, their respective media of judgement, their points of
+mutual attraction and repulsion, the mental position of each in
+relation to a variety of trifling phenomena of every-day nature and
+life, are beautifully developed in a series of tales moulded into a
+connected narrative. We are tempted to single out the fourth book,
+which gives an account of the childhood and education of the younger
+brother, and which for variety of thought as well as fidelity of
+description is in our judgement beyond praise. The Waverley novels
+would afford us specimens of a similar excellence. One striking
+peculiarity of these tales is the author's practice of describing a
+group of characters bearing the same general features of mind, and
+placed in the same general circumstances; yet so contrasted with each
+other in minute differences of mental constitution, that each diverges
+from the common starting-place into a path peculiar to himself. The
+brotherhood of villains in _Kenilworth_, of knights in _Ivanhoe_, and
+of enthusiasts in _Old Mortality_ are instances of this. This bearing
+of character and plot on each other is not often found in Byron's
+poems. The Corsair is intended for a remarkable personage. We pass by
+the inconsistencies of his character, considered by itself. The grand
+fault is that, whether it be natural or not, we are obliged to accept
+the author's word for the fidelity of his portrait. We are told, not
+shown, what the hero was. There is nothing in the plot which results
+from his peculiar formation of mind. An every-day bravo might equally
+well have satisfied the requirements of the action. Childe Harold,
+again, if he is any thing, is a being professedly isolated from the
+world, and uninfluenced by it. One might as well draw Tityrus's stags
+grazing in the air, as a character of this kind; which yet, with more
+or less alteration, passes through successive editions in his other
+poems. Byron had very little versatility or elasticity of genius; he
+did not know how to make poetry out of existing materials. He declaims
+in his own way, and has the upper hand as long as he is allowed to go
+on; but, if interrogated on principles of nature and good sense, he is
+at once put out and brought to a stand. Yet his conception of
+Sardanapalus and Myrrha is fine and ideal, and in the style of
+excellence which we have just been admiring in Shakespeare and Scott.
+
+These illustrations of Aristotle's doctrine may suffice.
+
+Now let us proceed to a fresh position; which, as before, shall first
+be broadly stated, then modified and explained. How does originality
+differ from the poetical talent? Without affecting the accuracy of a
+definition, we may call the latter the originality of right moral
+feeling.
+
+Originality may perhaps be defined as the power of abstracting for
+oneself, and is in thought what strength of mind is in action. Our
+opinions are commonly derived from education and society. Common minds
+transmit as they receive, good and bad, true and false; minds of
+original talent feel a continual propensity to investigate subjects
+and strike out views for themselves;--so that even old and established
+truths do not escape modification and accidental change when subjected
+to this process of mental digestion. Even the style of original
+writers is stamped with the peculiarities of their minds. When
+originality is found apart from good sense, which more or less is
+frequently the case, it shows itself in paradox and rashness of
+sentiment, and eccentricity of outward conduct. Poetry, on the other
+hand, cannot be separated from its good sense, or taste, as it is
+called; which is one of its elements. It is originality energizing in
+the world of beauty; the originality of grace, purity, refinement, and
+feeling. We do not hesitate to say, that poetry is ultimately founded
+on correct moral perception;--that where there is no sound principle
+in exercise there will be no poetry, and that on the whole
+(originality being granted) in proportion to the standard of a
+writer's moral character, will his compositions vary in poetical
+excellence. This position, however, requires some explanation.[24]
+
+    [24] A living prelate, in his Academical Prelections, even
+    suggests the converse of our position--'_Neque enim facile
+    crediderim de eo qui semel hac imbutus fuerit disciplina, qui
+    in id tota mentis acie assuefactus fuerit incumbere, ut quid
+    sit in rebus decens, quid pulchrum, quid congruum, penitus
+    intueretur, quin idem harum rerum perpetuum amorem foveat, et
+    cum ab his studiis discesserit, etiam ad reliqua vitae
+    officia earum imaginem quasi animo infixam transferat._'
+
+Of course, then, we do not mean to imply that a poet must necessarily
+_display_ virtuous and religious feeling;--we are not speaking of the
+actual _material_ of poetry, but of its _sources_. A right moral state
+of heart is the formal and scientific condition of a poetical mind.
+Nor does it follow from our position that every poet must in fact be a
+man of consistent and practical principle; except so far as good
+feeling commonly produces or results from good practice. Burns was a
+man of inconsistent practice--still, it is known, of much really sound
+principle at bottom. Thus his acknowledged poetical talent is in no
+wise inconsistent with the truth of our doctrine, which will refer the
+beauty which exists in his compositions to the remains of a virtuous
+and diviner nature within him. Nay, further than this, our theory
+holds good even though it be shown that a bad man may write a poem. As
+motives short of the purest lead to actions intrinsically good, so
+frames of mind short of virtuous will produce a partial and limited
+poetry. But even where it is exhibited, the poetry of a vicious mind
+will be inconsistent and debased; i. e. so far only such, as the
+traces and shadows of holy truth still remain upon it. On the other
+hand, a right moral feeling places the mind in the very centre of that
+circle from which all the rays have their origin and range; whereas
+minds otherwise placed command but a portion of the whole circuit of
+poetry. Allowing for human infirmity and the varieties of opinion,
+Milton, Spenser, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Southey, may be considered,
+as far as their writings go, to approximate to this moral centre. The
+following are added as further illustrations of our meaning. Walter
+Scott's centre is chivalrous honour; Shakespeare exhibits the [Greek:
+ethos], the physiognomy of an unlearned and undisciplined piety; Homer
+the religion of nature and the heart, at times debased by polytheism.
+All these poets are religious:--the occasional irreligion of Virgil's
+poetry is painful to the admirers of his general taste and delicacy.
+Dryden's _Alexander's Feast_ is a magnificent composition, and has
+high poetical beauties; but to a delicate judgement there is something
+intrinsically unpoetical in the end to which it is devoted, the
+praises of revel and sensuality. It corresponds to a process of
+clever reasoning erected on an untrue foundation--the one is a
+fallacy, the other is out of taste. Lord Byron's _Manfred_ is in parts
+intensely poetical; yet the refined mind naturally shrinks from the
+spirit which here and there reveals itself, and the basis on which the
+fable is built. From a perusal of it we should infer, according to the
+above theory, that there was right and fine feeling in the poet's
+mind, but that the central and consistent character was wanting. From
+the history of his life we know this to be the fact. The connexion
+between want of the religious principle and want of poetical feeling,
+is seen in the instances of Hume and Gibbon; who had radically
+unpoetical minds. Rousseau is not an exception to our doctrine, for
+his heart was naturally religious. Lucretius too had much poetical
+talent; but his work evinces that his miserable philosophy was rather
+the result of a bewildered judgement than a corrupt heart.
+
+According to the above theory, revealed religion should be especially
+poetical--and it is so in fact. While its disclosures have an
+originality in them to engage the intellect, they have a beauty to
+satisfy the moral nature. It presents us with those ideal forms of
+excellence in which a poetical mind delights, and with which all grace
+and harmony are associated. It brings us into a new world--a world of
+overpowering interest, of the sublimest views, and the tenderest and
+purest feelings. The peculiar grace of mind of the New Testament
+writers is as striking as the actual effect produced upon the hearts
+of those who have imbibed their spirit. At present we are not
+concerned with the practical, but the poetical nature of revealed
+truth. With Christians a poetical view of things is a duty--we are bid
+to colour all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in
+every event, and a superhuman tendency. Even our friends around are
+invested with unearthly brightness--no longer imperfect men, but
+beings taken into divine favour, stamped with his seal, and in
+training for future happiness. It may be added that the virtues
+peculiarly Christian are especially poetical;--meekness, gentleness,
+compassion, contentment, modesty, not to mention the devotional
+virtues: whereas the ruder and more ordinary feelings are the
+instruments of rhetoric more justly than of poetry--anger,
+indignation, emulation, martial spirit, and love of independence.
+
+A few remarks on poetical composition, and we have done.--The art of
+composition is merely accessory to the poetical talent. But where that
+talent exists it necessarily gives its own character to the style, and
+renders it perfectly different from all others. As the poet's habits
+of mind lead to contemplation rather than communication with others,
+he is more or less obscure, according to the particular style of
+poetry he has adopted; less so, in epic or narrative and dramatic
+representation--more so, in odes and choruses. He will be obscure,
+moreover, from the depth of his feelings, which require a congenial
+reader to enter into them--and from their acuteness, which shrinks
+from any formal accuracy in the expression of them. And he will be
+obscure, not only from the carelessness of genius and from the
+originality of his conceptions, but (it may be) from natural
+deficiency in the power of clear and eloquent expression, which, we
+must repeat, is a talent distinct from poetry, though often mistaken
+for it.
+
+Dexterity in composition, or _eloquence_ as it may be called in a
+contracted sense of the word, is however manifestly more or less
+necessary in every branch of literature, though its elements may be
+different in each. _Poetical_ eloquence consists, first in the power
+of illustration--which the poet uses, not as the orator, voluntarily,
+for the sake of clearness or ornament; but almost by constraint, as
+the sole outlet and expression of intense inward feeling. The
+spontaneous power of comparison is in some poetical minds entirely
+wanting; these of course cannot show to advantage as poets.--Another
+talent necessary to composition is the power of unfolding the meaning
+in an orderly manner. A poetical mind is often too impatient to
+explain itself justly; it is overpowered by a rush of emotions, which
+sometimes want of power, sometimes the indolence of inward enjoyment
+prevents it from describing. Nothing is more difficult than to analyse
+the feelings of our own minds; and the power of doing so, whether
+natural or acquired, is clearly distinct from experiencing them. Yet,
+though distinct from the poetical talent, it is obviously necessary to
+its exhibition. Hence it is a common praise bestowed upon writers,
+that they express what we have often felt but could never describe.
+The power of arrangement, which is necessary for an extended poem, is
+a modification of the same talent;--being to poetry what method is to
+logic. Besides these qualifications, poetical compositions requires
+that command of language which is the mere effect of practice. The
+poet is a compositor; words are his types; he must have them within
+reach, and in unlimited abundance. Hence the need of careful labour to
+the accomplished poet--not in order that his diction may attract, but
+that language may be subjected to him. He studies the art of
+composition as we might learn dancing or elocution; not that we may
+move or speak according to rule, but that by the very exercise our
+voice and carriage may become so unembarrassed as to allow of our
+doing what we will with them.
+
+A talent for composition then is no essential part of poetry, though
+indispensable to its exhibition. Hence it would seem that attention to
+the language _for its own sake_ evidences not the true poet but the
+mere artist. Pope is said to have tuned our tongue. We certainly owe
+much to him--his diction is rich, musical, and expressive. Still he is
+not on this account a poet; he elaborated his composition for its own
+sake. If we give him poetical praise on this account, we may as
+appropriately bestow it on a tasteful cabinet-maker. This does not
+forbid us to ascribe the grace of his verse to an inward principle of
+poetry, which supplied him with archetypes of the beautiful and
+splendid to work by. But a similar internal gift must direct the skill
+of every fancy-artist who subserves the luxuries and elegancies of
+life. On the other hand, though Virgil is celebrated as a master of
+composition, yet his style is so identified with his conceptions, as
+their outward development, as to preclude the possibility of our
+viewing the one apart from the other. In Milton, again, the harmony of
+the verse is but the echo of the inward music which the thoughts of
+the poet breathe. In Moore's style the ornament continually outstrips
+the sense. Cowper and Walter Scott, on the other hand, are slovenly in
+their versification. Sophocles writes, on the whole, without studied
+attention to the style; but Euripides frequently affects a simplicity
+and prettiness which exposed him to the ridicule of the comic poets.
+Lastly, the style of Homer's poems is perfect in their particular
+department. It is free, manly, simple, perspicuous, energetic, and
+varied. It is the style of one who rhapsodized without deference to
+hearer or judge, in an age prior to the temptations which more or less
+prevailed over succeeding writers--before the theatre had degraded
+poetry into an exhibition, and criticism narrowed it into an art.
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS CARLYLE
+
+1795-1881
+
+THE HERO AS POET. DANTE; SHAKESPEARE (1840)
+
+
+The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old
+ages; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain
+rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific
+knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world
+vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in their loving
+wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with
+the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past. We are now to see
+our Hero in the less ambitious, but also less questionable, character
+of Poet; a character which does not pass. The Poet is a heroic figure
+belonging to all ages; whom all ages possess, when once he is
+produced, whom the newest age as the oldest may produce;--and will
+produce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul; in
+no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a Poet.
+
+Hero, Prophet, Poet,--many different names, in different times and
+places, do we give to Great Men; according to varieties we note in
+them, according to the sphere in which they have displayed themselves!
+We might give many more names, on this same principle. I will remark
+again, however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that the
+different _sphere_ constitutes the grand origin of such distinction;
+that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will,
+according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess,
+I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be _all_ sorts of
+men. The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas,
+would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic
+warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. I fancy
+there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator,
+Philosopher;--in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is
+all these. So too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that great
+glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears
+that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and
+touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and education
+led him thitherward. The grand fundamental character is that of Great
+Man; that the man be great. Napoleon has words in him which are like
+Austerlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth's Marshals are a kind of poetical
+men withal; the things Turenne says are full of sagacity and
+geniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The great heart, the clear
+deep-seeing eye: there it lies; no man whatever, in what province
+soever, can prosper at all without these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did
+diplomatic messages, it seems, quite well: one can easily believe it;
+they had done things a little harder than these! Burns, a gifted
+song-writer, might have made a still better Mirabeau. Shakespeare,--one
+knows not what _he_ could not have made, in the supreme degree.
+
+True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not make all
+great men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. Varieties
+of aptitude doubtless; but infinitely more of circumstance; and far
+oftenest it is the _latter_ only that are looked to. But it is as with
+common men in the learning of trades. You take any man, as yet a vague
+capability of a man, who could be any kind of craftsman; and make him
+into a smith, a carpenter, a mason: he is then and thenceforth that
+and nothing else. And if, as Addison complains, you sometimes see a
+street-porter staggering under his load on spindle-shanks, and near at
+hand a tailor with the frame of a Samson handling a bit of cloth and
+small Whitechapel needle,--it cannot be considered that aptitude of
+Nature alone has been consulted here either!--The Great Man also, to
+what shall he be bound apprentice? Given your Hero, is he to become
+Conqueror, King, Philosopher, Poet? It is an inexplicably complex
+controversial-calculation between the world and him! He will read the
+world and its laws; the world with its laws will be there to be read.
+What the world, on _this_ matter, shall permit and bid is, as we said,
+the most important fact about the world.--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them.
+In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; _Vates_ means
+both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well
+understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they
+are still the same; in this most important respect especially, That
+they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the
+Universe; what Goethe calls 'the open secret'. 'Which is the great
+secret?' asks one.--'The _open_ secret,'--open to all, seen by almost
+none! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, 'the
+Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom of
+Appearance,' as Fichte styles it; of which all Appearance, from the
+starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the Appearance of
+Man and his work, is but the _vesture_, the embodiment that renders it
+visible. This divine mystery _is_ in all times and in all places;
+veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked; and
+the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect, as the
+realized Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace
+matter,--as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some
+upholsterer had put together! It could do no good, at present, to
+_speak_ much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do
+not know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful
+pity;--a failure to live at all, if we live otherwise!
+
+But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the _Vates_,
+whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither
+to make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message;
+he is to reveal that to us,--that sacred mystery which he more than
+others lives ever present with. While others forget it, he knows
+it;--I might say, he has been driven to know it; without consent asked
+of _him_, he finds himself living in it, bound to live in it. Once
+more, here is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Belief; this man
+too could not help being a sincere man! Whosoever may live in the
+shows of things, it is for him a necessity of nature to live in the
+very fact of things. A man, once more, in earnest with the Universe,
+though all others were but toying with it. He is a _Vates_, first of
+all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet,
+participators in the 'open secret,' are one.
+
+With respect to their distinction again: The _Vates_ Prophet, we might
+say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good
+and Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the _Vates_ Poet on what the Germans
+call the aesthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may
+call a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are to
+love. But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot
+be disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye on what we are to love: how
+else shall he know what it is we are to do? The highest Voice ever
+heard on this Earth said withal, 'Consider the lilies of the field;
+they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was
+not arrayed like one of these.' A glance, that, into the deepest deep
+of Beauty. 'The lilies of the field,'--dressed finer than earthly
+princes, springing up there in the humble furrow-field; a beautiful
+_eye_ looking out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty! How
+could the rude Earth make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks
+and is, were not inwardly Beauty?--In this point of view, too, a
+saying of Goethe's, which has staggered several, may have meaning:
+'The Beautiful', he intimates, 'is higher than the Good; the Beautiful
+includes in it the Good.' The _true_ Beautiful; which however, I have
+said somewhere, 'differs from the _false_, as Heaven does from
+Vauxhall!' So much for the distinction and identity of Poet and
+Prophet.--
+
+In ancient and also in modern periods, we find a few Poets who are
+accounted perfect; whom it were a kind of treason to find fault with.
+This is noteworthy; this is right: yet in strictness it is only an
+illusion. At bottom, clearly enough, there is no perfect Poet! A vein
+of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether
+of Poetry. We are all poets when we _read_ a poem well. The
+'imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante,' is not that the same
+faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No one but Shakespeare can
+embody, out of Saxo Grammaticus, the story of _Hamlet_ as Shakespeare
+did: but every one models some kind of story out of it; every one
+embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Where
+there is no specific difference, as between round and square, all
+definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has _so_ much
+more of the poetic element developed in him as to have become
+noticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbours. World-Poets too,
+those whom we are to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics in
+the same way. One who rises _so_ far above the general level of Poets
+will, to such and such critics, seem a Universal Poet; as he ought to
+do. And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction. All Poets,
+all men, have some touches of the Universal; no man is wholly made of
+that. Most Poets are very soon forgotten: but not the noblest
+Shakespeare or Homer of them can be remembered _for ever_;--a day
+comes when he too is not!
+
+Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a difference between true
+Poetry and true Speech not Poetical: what is the difference? On this
+point many things have been written, especially by late German
+Critics, some of which are not very intelligible at first. They say,
+for example, that the Poet has an _infinitude_ in him; communicates an
+_Unendlichkeit_, a certain character of 'infinitude', to whatsoever he
+delineates. This, though not very precise, yet on so vague a matter is
+worth remembering: if well meditated, some meaning will gradually be
+found in it. For my own part, I find considerable meaning in the old
+vulgar distinction of Poetry being _metrical_, having music in it,
+being a Song. Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one might say
+this as soon as anything else: If your delineation be authentically
+_musical_, musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in
+all the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it,
+then it will be poetical; if not, not.--Musical: how much lies in
+that! A _musical_ thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated
+into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it,
+namely the _melody_ that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of
+coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be,
+here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious;
+naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who
+is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on
+us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the
+edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!
+
+Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of song in
+it: not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent;--the rhythm
+or _tune_ to which the people there _sing_ what they have to say!
+Accent is a kind of chanting; all men have accent of their
+own,--though they only _notice_ that of others. Observe too how all
+passionate language does of itself become musical,--with a finer music
+than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger
+becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehow
+the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but
+wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all
+things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they
+had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices
+and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call
+_musical Thought_. The Poet is he who _thinks_ in that manner. At
+bottom, it turns still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity
+and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you
+see musically; the heart of Nature _being_ everywhere music, if you
+can only reach it.
+
+The _Vates_ Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse of Nature, seems to
+hold a poor rank among us, in comparison with the _Vates_ Prophet; his
+function, and our esteem of him for his function, alike slight. The
+Hero taken as Divinity; the Hero taken as Prophet; then next the Hero
+taken only as Poet: does it not look as if our estimate of the Great
+Man, epoch after epoch, were continually diminishing? We take him
+first for a god, then for one god-inspired; and now in the next stage
+of it, his most miraculous word gains from us only the recognition
+that he is a Poet, beautiful verse-maker, man of genius, or
+such-like!--It looks so; but I persuade myself that intrinsically it
+is not so. If we consider well, it will perhaps appear that in man
+still there is the _same_ altogether peculiar admiration for the
+Heroic Gift, by what name soever called, that there at any time was.
+
+I should say, if we do not now reckon a Great Man literally divine, it
+is that our notions of God, of the supreme unattainable Fountain of
+Splendour, Wisdom and Heroism, are ever rising _higher_; not
+altogether that our reverence for these qualities, as manifested in
+our like, is getting lower. This is worth taking thought of. Sceptical
+Dilettantism, the curse of these ages, a curse which will not last for
+ever, does indeed in this the highest province of human things, as in
+all provinces, make sad work; and our reverence for great men, all
+crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is, comes out in poor plight,
+hardly recognizable. Men worship the shows of great men; the most
+disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship. The
+dreariest, fatallest faith; believing which, one would literally
+despair of human things. Nevertheless look, for example, at Napoleon!
+A Corsican lieutenant of artillery; that is the show of _him_: yet is
+he not obeyed, _worshipped_ after his sort, as all the Tiaraed and
+Diademed of the world put together could not be? High Duchesses, and
+ostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rustic, Burns;--a strange
+feeling dwelling in each that they never heard a man like this; that,
+on the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of these people it
+still dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited way of
+uttering it at present, that this rustic, with his black brows and
+flashing sun-eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears, is of
+a dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable with all others. Do
+not we feel it so? But now, were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triviality,
+and all that sorrowful brood, cast-out of us,--as, by God's blessing,
+they shall one day be; were faith in the shows of things entirely
+swept out, replaced by clear faith in the _things_, so that a man
+acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the other non-extant;
+what a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it!
+
+Nay here in these ages, such as they are, have we not two mere Poets,
+if not deified, yet we may say beatified? Shakespeare and Dante are
+Saints of Poetry; really, if we will think of it, _canonized_, so that
+it is impiety to meddle with them. The unguided instinct of the world,
+working across all these perverse impediments, has arrived at such
+result. Dante and Shakespeare are a peculiar Two. They dwell apart, in
+a kind of royal solitude; none equal, none second to them: in the
+general feeling of the world, a certain transcendentalism, a glory as
+of complete perfection, invests these two. They _are_ canonized,
+though no Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing it! Such, in spite of
+every perverting influence, in the most unheroic times, is still our
+indestructible reverence for heroism.--We will look a little at these
+Two, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakespeare: what little it is
+permitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet will most fitly arrange
+itself in that fashion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and his
+Book; yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as it
+were, irrecoverably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering,
+sorrowstricken man, not much note was taken of him while he lived; and
+the most of that has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes.
+It is five centuries since he ceased writing and living here. After
+all commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The
+Book;--and one might add that Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto,
+which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine,
+whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all faces
+that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, with
+the simple laurel wound round it; the deathless sorrow and pain, the
+known victory which is also deathless;--significant of the whole
+history of Dante! I think it is the mournfullest face that ever was
+painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face.
+There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle
+affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into sharp
+contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain. A soft
+ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as
+from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too,
+a silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of god-like disdain
+of the thing that is eating-out his heart,--as if it were withal a
+mean insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and
+strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and
+lifelong unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection all
+converted into indignation: an implacable indignation; slow, equable,
+silent, like that of a god! The eye too, it looks out as in a kind of
+_surprise_, a kind of inquiry, Why the world was of such a sort? This
+is Dante: so he looks, this 'voice of ten silent centuries', and sings
+us 'his mystic unfathomable song'.
+
+The little that we know of Dante's Life corresponds well enough with
+this Portrait and this Book. He was born at Florence, in the upper
+class of society, in the year 1265. His education was the best then
+going; much school-divinity, Aristotelean logic, some Latin
+classics,--no inconsiderable insight into certain provinces of things:
+and Dante, with his earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt,
+learned better than most all that was learnable. He has a clear
+cultivated understanding, and of great subtlety; this best fruit of
+education he had contrived to realize from these scholastics. He knows
+accurately and well what lies close to him; but, in such a time,
+without printed books or free intercourse, he could not know well what
+was distant: the small clear light, most luminous for what is near,
+breaks itself into singular _chiaroscuro_ striking on what is far off.
+This was Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he had gone
+through the usual destinies; been twice out campaigning as a soldier
+for the Florentine State, been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth
+year, by natural gradation of talent and service, become one of the
+Chief Magistrates of Florence. He had met in boyhood a certain
+Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl of his own age and rank,
+and grown-up thenceforth in partial sight of her, in some distant
+intercourse with her. All readers know his graceful affecting account
+of this; and then of their being parted; of her being wedded to
+another, and of her death soon after. She makes a great figure in
+Dante's Poem; seems to have made a great figure in his life. Of all
+beings it might seem as if she, held apart from him, far apart at last
+in the dim Eternity, were the only one he had ever with his whole
+strength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself was wedded; but
+it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy, the rigorous earnest
+man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make
+happy.
+
+We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with him
+as he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podesta, or whatsoever they
+call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbours,--and the world
+had wanted one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence
+would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb
+centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries
+(for there will be ten of them and more) had no _Divina Commedia_ to
+hear! We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for
+this Dante; and he, struggling like a man led towards death and
+crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give _him_ the choice of
+his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really happy,
+what was really miserable.
+
+In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or some
+other confused disturbances rose to such a height, that Dante, whose
+party had seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedly
+forth into banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and
+wandering. His property was all confiscated and more; he had the
+fiercest feeling that it was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight
+of God and man. He tried what was in him to get reinstated; tried even
+by warlike surprisal, with arms in his hand: but it would not do; bad
+only had become worse. There is a record, I believe, still extant in
+the Florence Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever caught, to be
+burnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands, they say: a very curious
+civic document. Another curious document, some considerable number of
+years later, is a Letter of Dante's to the Florentine Magistrates,
+written in answer to a milder proposal of theirs, that he should
+return on condition of apologizing and paying a fine. He answers, with
+fixed stern pride: 'If I cannot return without calling myself guilty,
+I will never return, _nunquam revertar_.'
+
+For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from patron
+to patron, from place to place; proving, in his own bitter words, 'How
+hard is the path, _Come e duro calle_.' The wretched are not cheerful
+company. Dante, poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, with
+his moody humours, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reports
+of him that being at Can della Scala's court, and blamed one day for
+his gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like way. Della
+Scala stood among his courtiers, with mimes and buffoons (_nebulones
+ac histriones_) making him heartily merry; when turning to Dante, he
+said: 'Is it not strange, now, that this poor fool should make himself
+so entertaining; while you, a wise man, sit there day after day, and
+have nothing to amuse us with at all?' Dante answered bitterly: 'No,
+not strange; your Highness is to recollect the Proverb, _Like to
+Like_;'--given the amuser, the amusee must also be given! Such a man,
+with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was not
+made to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be evident to him
+that he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit, in this
+earth. The earthly world had cast him forth, to wander, wander; no
+living heart to love him now; for his sore miseries there was no
+solace here.
+
+The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him;
+that awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with its
+Florences and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence
+thou shalt never see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt
+surely see! What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life
+altogether? ETERNITY: thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, art thou
+and all things bound! The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made
+its home more and more in that awful other world. Naturally his
+thoughts brooded on that, as on the one fact important for him. Bodied
+or bodiless, it is the one fact important for all men:--but to Dante,
+in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape; he
+no more doubted of that _Malebolge_ Pool, that it all lay there with
+its gloomy circles, with its _alti guai_, and that he himself should
+see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went
+thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in
+speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into 'mystic
+unfathomable song'; and this his _Divine Comedy_, the most remarkable
+of all modern Books, is the result.
+
+It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see,
+a proud thought for him at times, That he, here in exile, could do
+this work; that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him from
+doing it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that
+it was great; the greatest a man could do. 'If thou follow thy star,
+_Se tu segui tua stella_,'--so could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in
+his extreme need, still say to himself: 'Follow thou thy star, thou
+shalt not fail of a glorious heaven!' The labour of writing, we find,
+and indeed could know otherwise, was great and painful for him; he
+says, This Book, 'which has made me lean for many years.' Ah yes, it
+was won, all of it, with pain and sore toil,--not in sport, but in
+grim earnest. His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has been
+written, in many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his whole
+history, this Book. He died after finishing it; not yet very old, at
+the age of fifty-six;--broken-hearted rather, as is said. He lies
+buried in his death-city Ravenna: _Hic claudor Dantes patriis extorris
+ab oris_. The Florentines begged back his body, in a century after;
+the Ravenna people would not give it. 'Here am I Dante laid, shut out
+from my native shores.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it 'a mystic
+unfathomable Song'; and such is literally the character of it.
+Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a
+sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words,
+there is something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and
+soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song:
+we said before, it was the Heroic of Speech! All _old_ Poems, Homer's
+and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness,
+that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not _sung_ is properly no
+Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,--to the great
+injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most
+part! What we want to get at is the _thought_ the man had, if he had
+any: why should he twist it into jingle, if he _could_ speak it out
+plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion
+of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark,
+become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, that
+we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, and
+listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,--whose speech _is_ Song.
+Pretenders to this are many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is
+for most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business,
+that of reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be
+rhymed;--it ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what it
+was aiming at. I would advise all men who _can_ speak their thought,
+not to sing it; to understand that, in a serious time, among serious
+men, there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as we love
+the true song, and are charmed by it as by something divine, so shall
+we hate the false song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing
+hollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere and offensive thing.
+
+I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his _Divine Comedy_ that
+it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there
+is a _canto fermo_; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his
+simple _terza rima_, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along
+naturally with a sort of _lilt_. But I add, that it could not be
+otherwise; for the essence and material of the work are themselves
+rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes it
+musical;--go _deep_ enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward
+symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it,
+proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the
+character of music. The three kingdoms, _Inferno_, _Purgatorio_,
+_Paradiso_, look out on one another like compartments of a great
+edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern,
+solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the
+_sincerest_ of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the
+measure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts;
+and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people
+of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, '_Eccovi l'
+uom ch' e stato all' Inferno_, See, there is the man that was in
+Hell!' Ah, yes, he had been in Hell;--in Hell enough, in long severe
+sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been.
+Commedias that come-out _divine_ are not accomplished otherwise.
+Thought, true labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the
+daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;--true _effort_,
+in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought.
+In all ways we are 'to become perfect through _suffering_.'--But, as I
+say, no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has
+all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made
+him 'lean' for many years. Not the general whole only; every
+compartment of it is worked-out, with intense earnestness, into truth,
+into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each fits in its
+place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the
+soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the Middle Ages, rendered for
+ever rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense one:
+but a task which is _done_.
+
+Perhaps one would say, _intensity_, with the much that depends on it,
+is the prevailing character of Dante's genius. Dante does not come
+before us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and even
+sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but
+partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses,
+concentered itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great
+not because he is world-wide, but because he is world-deep. Through
+all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know
+nothing so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with the
+outermost development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has
+a great power of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents
+that and nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the
+Hall of Dite: _red_ pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glowing through the
+dim immensity of gloom;--so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and
+for ever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante. There is a
+brevity, an abrupt precision in him: Tacitus is not briefer, more
+condensed; and then in Dante it seems a natural condensation,
+spontaneous to the man. One smiting word; and then there is silence,
+nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than words. It is
+strange with what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the true likeness
+of a matter: cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the
+blustering giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke; it is 'as the sails
+sink, the mast being suddenly broken'. Or that poor Sordello, with the
+_cotto aspetto_, 'face _baked_', parched brown and lean; and the
+'fiery snow' that falls on them there, a 'fiery snow without wind',
+slow, deliberate, never-ending! Or the lids of those Tombs; square
+sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each with its Soul in
+torment; the lids laid open there; they are to be shut at the Day of
+Judgement, through Eternity. And how Farinata rises; and how
+Cavalcante falls--at hearing of his Son, and the past tense '_fue_!'
+The very movements in Dante have something brief; swift, decisive,
+almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius this sort
+of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent,
+passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent 'pale rages',
+speaks itself in these things.
+
+For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a
+man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is
+physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a
+likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of
+doing it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could
+not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it,
+unless he had, what we may call, _sympathized_ with it,--had sympathy
+in him to bestow on objects. He must have been _sincere_ about it too;
+sincere and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the
+likeness of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and
+trivial hearsay, about all objects. And indeed may we not say that
+intellect altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning what
+an object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may have will come
+out here. Is it even of business, a matter to be done? The gifted man
+is he who _sees_ the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as
+surplusage: it is his faculty too, the man of business's faculty, that
+he discern the true _likeness_, not the false superficial one, of the
+thing he has got to work in. And how much of _morality_ is in the kind
+of insight we get of anything; 'the eye seeing in all things what it
+brought with it the faculty of seeing!' To the mean eye all things are
+trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael,
+the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No
+most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the
+commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with
+him.
+
+Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness
+as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is everyway
+noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what
+qualities in that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of
+eternal black. A small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into
+our very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too: _della bella
+persona, che mi fu tolta_; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a
+solace that _he_ will never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these
+_alti guai_. And the racking winds, in that _aer bruno_, whirl them
+away again, to wail for ever!--Strange to think: Dante was the friend
+of this poor Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon
+the Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet
+also infinite rigour of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante
+discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his
+_Divine Comedy's_ being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel;
+putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth! I
+suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was in the heart of any
+man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity
+either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic,--sentimentality, or
+little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of
+Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like
+the wail of Aeolean harps, soft, soft; like a child's young
+heart;--and then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of
+his towards his Beatrice; their meeting together in the _Paradiso_;
+his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes, her that had been purified
+by death so long, separated from him so far:--one likens it to the
+gong of angels; it is among the purest utterances of affection,
+perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human soul.
+
+For the _intense_ Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the
+essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too
+as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity.
+Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of
+all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;--as indeed,
+what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love? '_A Dio
+spiacenti, ed a' nemici sui_, Hateful to God and to the enemies of
+God:' lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; '_Non
+ragionam di lor_, We will not speak of _them_, look only and pass.' Or
+think of this: 'They have not the _hope_ to die, _Non han speranza di
+morte_.' One day, it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of
+Dante, that he, wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full
+surely _die_; 'that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die.'
+Such words are in this man. For rigour, earnestness and depth, he is
+not to be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his parallel we must
+go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets there.
+
+I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the
+_Inferno_ to the two other parts of the Divine _Commedia_. Such
+preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and
+is like to be a transient feeling. The _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_,
+especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellent
+than it. It is a noble thing that _Purgatorio_, 'Mountain of
+Purification'; an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If Sin
+is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in
+Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act.
+It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The _tremolar dell' onde_,
+that 'trembling' of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of
+morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an
+altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company
+still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of daemons and reprobate
+is under foot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher,
+to the Throne of Mercy itself. 'Pray for me,' the denizens of that
+Mount of Pain all say to him. 'Tell my Giovanna to pray for me,' my
+daughter Giovanna; 'I think her mother loves me no more!' They toil
+painfully up by that winding steep, 'bent-down like corbels of a
+building,' some of them,--crushed together so 'for the sin of pride';
+yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons, they shall have reached
+the top, which is Heaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted
+in. The joy too of all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain
+shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises, when one soul has
+perfected repentance, and got its sin and misery left behind! I call
+all this a noble embodiment of a true noble thought.
+
+But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are
+indispensable to one another. The _Paradiso_, a kind of inarticulate
+music to me, is the redeeming side of the _Inferno_; the _Inferno_
+without it were untrue. All three make up the true Unseen World, as
+figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing for ever
+memorable, for ever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was
+perhaps delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as in
+this of Dante's; a man _sent_ to sing it, to keep it long memorable.
+Very notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of the every-day
+reality, into the Invisible one; and in the second or third stanza, we
+find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among
+things palpable, indubitable! To Dante they _were_ so; the real world,
+as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely
+higher Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as _preter_natural as
+the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit, but
+is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes
+it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say
+again, is the saving merit, now as always.
+
+Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic
+representation of his Belief about this Universe:--some Critic in a
+future age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased
+altogether to think as Dante did, may find this too all an 'Allegory',
+perhaps an idle Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of
+the soul of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge world-wide
+architectural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to
+be the two polar elements of this Creation, on which it all turns;
+that these two differ not by _preferability_ of one to the other, but
+by incompatibility absolute and infinite; that the one is excellent
+and high as light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehenna and
+the Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence, with
+everlasting Pity,--all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle Ages had
+it, is emblemed there. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged the other day,
+with what entire truth of purpose; how unconscious of any embleming!
+Hell, Purgatory, Paradise: these things were not fashioned as emblems;
+was there, in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of their
+being emblems! Were they not indubitable awful facts; the whole heart
+of man taking them for practically true, all Nature everywhere
+confirming them? So is it always in these things. Men do not believe
+an Allegory. The future Critic, whatever his new thought may be, who
+considers this of Dante to have been all got-up as an Allegory, will
+commit one sore mistake!--Paganism we recognized as a veracious
+expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards the
+Universe; veracious, true once, and still not without worth for us.
+But mark here the difference of Paganism and Christianism; one great
+difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the
+destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in
+this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law
+of Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a rude helpless utterance of
+the _first_ Thought of men,--the chief recognized virtue, Courage,
+Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, but
+for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect only!--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in a very
+strange way, found a voice. The _Divina Commedia_ is of Dante's
+writing; yet in truth _it_ belongs to ten Christian centuries, only
+the finishing of it is Dante's. So always. The craftsman there, the
+smith with that metal of his, with these tools, with these cunning
+methods,--how little of all he does is properly _his_ work! All past
+inventive men work there with him;--as indeed with all of us, in all
+things. Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the Thought they
+lived by stands here, in everlasting music. These sublime ideas of
+his, terrible and beautiful, are the fruit of the Christian Meditation
+of all the good men who had gone before him. Precious they; but also
+is not he precious? Much, had not he spoken, would have been dumb; not
+dead, yet living voiceless.
+
+On the whole, is it not an utterance, this mystic Song, at once of one
+of the greatest human souls, and of the highest thing that Europe had
+hitherto realized for itself? Christianism, as Dante sings it, is
+another than Paganism in the rude Norse mind; another than 'Bastard
+Christianism' half articulately spoken in the Arab desert, seven
+hundred years before!--The noblest _idea_ made _real_ hitherto among
+men, is sung, and emblemed forth abidingly, by one of the noblest men.
+In the one sense and in the other, are we not right glad to possess
+it? As I calculate, it may last yet for long thousands of years. For
+the thing that is uttered from the inmost parts of a man's soul,
+differs altogether from what is uttered by the outer part. The outer
+is of the day, under the empire of mode; the outer passes away, in
+swift endless changes; the inmost is the same yesterday, to-day, and
+for ever. True souls, in all generations of the world, who look on
+this Dante, will find a brotherhood in him; the deep sincerity of his
+thoughts, his woes and hopes, will speak likewise to their sincerity;
+they will feel that this Dante too was a brother. Napoleon in
+Saint-Helena is charmed with the genial veracity of old Homer. The
+oldest Hebrew Prophet, under a vesture the most diverse from ours,
+does yet, because he speaks from the heart of man, speak to all men's
+hearts. It is the one sole secret of continuing long memorable. Dante,
+for depth of sincerity, is like an antique Prophet too; his words,
+like theirs, come from his very heart. One need not wonder if it were
+predicted that his Poem might be the most enduring thing our Europe
+has yet made; for nothing so endures as a truly spoken word. All
+cathedrals, pontificalities, brass and stone, and outer arrangement
+never so lasting, are brief in comparison to an unfathomable
+heart-song like this: one feels as if it might survive, still of
+importance to men, when these had all sunk into new irrecognizable
+combinations, and had ceased individually to be. Europe has made much;
+great cities, great empires, encyclopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion
+and practice: but it has made little of the class of Dante's Thought.
+Homer yet _is_, veritably present face to face with every open soul of
+us; and Greece, where is _it_? Desolate for thousands of years; away,
+vanished; a bewildered heap of stones and rubbish, the life and
+existence of it all gone. Like a dream; like the dust of King
+Agamemnon! Greece was; Greece, except in the _words_ it spoke, is not.
+
+The uses of this Dante? We will not say much about his 'uses'. A human
+soul who has once got into that primal element of _Song_, and sung
+forth fitly somewhat therefrom, has worked in the _depths_ of our
+existence; feeding through long times the life-_roots_ of all
+excellent human things whatsoever,--in a way that 'utilities' will not
+succeed well in calculating! We will not estimate the Sun by the
+quantity of gas-light it saves us; Dante shall be invaluable, or of no
+value. One remark I may make: the contrast in this respect between the
+Hero-Poet and the Hero-Prophet. In a hundred years, Mahomet, as we
+saw, had his Arabians at Grenada and at Delhi; Dante's Italians seem
+to be yet very much where they were. Shall we say, then, Dante's
+effect on the world was small in comparison? Not so: his arena is far
+more restricted; but also it is far nobler, clearer;--perhaps not less
+but more important. Mahomet speaks to great masses of men, in the
+coarse dialect adapted to such; a dialect filled with inconsistencies,
+crudities, follies: on the great masses alone can he act, and there
+with good and with evil strangely blended. Dante speaks to the noble,
+the pure and great, in all times and places. Neither does he grow
+obsolete, as the other does. Dante burns as a pure star, fixed there
+in the firmament, at which the great and the high of all ages kindle
+themselves: he is the possession of all the chosen of the world for
+uncounted time. Dante, one calculates, may long survive Mahomet. In
+this way the balance may be made straight again.
+
+But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on the
+world by what _we_ can judge of their effect there, that a man and his
+work are measured. Effect? Influence? Utility? Let a man _do_ his
+work; the fruit of it is the care of Another than he. It will grow its
+own fruit; and whether embodied in Caliph Thrones and Arabian
+Conquests, so that it 'fills all Morning and Evening Newspapers', and
+all Histories, which are a kind of distilled Newspapers; or not
+embodied so at all;--what matters that? That is not the real fruit of
+it! The Arabian Caliph, in so far only as he did something, was
+something. If the great Cause of Man, and Man's work in God's Earth,
+got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph, then no matter how many
+scimitars he drew, how many gold piastres pocketed, and what uproar
+and blaring he made in this world,--_he_ was but a loud-sounding
+inanity and futility; at bottom, he _was_ not at all. Let us honour
+the great empire of _Silence_, once more! The boundless treasury which
+we do _not_ jingle in our pockets, or count up and present before men!
+It is perhaps, of all things, the usefulest for each of us to do, in
+these loud times.-- --
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically
+the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe,
+its Inner Life; so Shakespeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer
+Life of our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies,
+humours, ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at
+the world, men then had. As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece;
+so in Shakespeare and Dante, after thousands of years, what our Modern
+Europe was, in Faith and in Practice, will still be legible. Dante has
+given us the Faith or soul; Shakespeare, in a not less noble way, has
+given us the Practice or body. This latter also we were to have; a man
+was sent for it, the man Shakespeare. Just when that chivalry way of
+life had reached its last finish, and was on the point of breaking
+down into slow or swift dissolution, as we now see it everywhere, this
+other sovereign Poet, with his seeing eye, with his perennial singing
+voice, was sent to take note of it, to give long-enduring record of
+it. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce as the central fire of the world;
+Shakespeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as the Sun, the upper light of
+the world. Italy produced the one world-voice; we English had the
+honour of producing the other.
+
+Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man came to us.
+I think always, so great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is this
+Shakespeare, had the Warwickshire Squire not prosecuted him for
+deer-stealing, we had perhaps never heard of him as a Poet! The woods
+and skies, the rustic Life of Man in Stratford there, had been enough
+for this man! But indeed that strange outbudding of our whole English
+Existence, which we call the Elizabethan Era, did not it too come as
+of its own accord? The 'Tree Igdrasil' buds and withers by its own
+laws,--too deep for our scanning. Yet it does bud and wither, and
+every bough and leaf of it is there, by fixed eternal laws; not a Sir
+Thomas Lucy but comes at the hour fit for him. Curious, I say, and not
+sufficiently considered: how everything does co-operate with all; not
+a leaf rotting on the highway but is indissoluble portion of solar and
+stellar systems; no thought, word or act of man but has sprung withal
+out of all men, and works sooner or later, recognizably or
+irrecognizably, on all men! It is all a Tree: circulation of sap and
+influences, mutual communication of every minutest leaf with the
+lowest talon of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portion
+of the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the
+Kingdoms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread the highest
+Heaven!--
+
+In some sense it may be said that this glorious Elizabethan Era with
+its Shakespeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had
+preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle
+Ages. The Christian Faith, which was the theme of Dante's Song, had
+produced this Practical Life which Shakespeare was to sing. For
+Religion then, as it now and always is, was the soul of Practice; the
+primary vital fact in men's life. And remark here, as rather curious,
+that Middle-Age Catholicism was abolished, so far as Acts of
+Parliament could abolish it, before Shakespeare, the noblest product
+of it, made his appearance. He did make his appearance nevertheless.
+Nature at her own time, with Catholicism or what else might be
+necessary, sent him forth; taking small thought of Acts of Parliament.
+King-Henrys, Queen-Elizabeths go their way; and Nature too goes hers.
+Acts of Parliament, on the whole, are small, notwithstanding the noise
+they make. What Act of Parliament, debate at St. Stephens, on the
+hustings or elsewhere, was it that brought this Shakespeare into
+being? No dining at Freemasons' Tavern, opening subscription-lists,
+selling of shares, and infinite other jangling and true or false
+endeavouring! This Elizabethan Era, and all its nobleness and
+blessedness, came without proclamation, preparation of ours. Priceless
+Shakespeare was the free gift of Nature; given altogether
+silently;--received altogether silently, as if it had been a thing of
+little account. And yet, very literally, it is a priceless thing. One
+should look at that side of matters too.
+
+Of this Shakespeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a
+little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the
+best judgement not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is
+slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakespeare is the chief of
+all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world,
+has left record of himself in the way of literature. On the whole, I
+know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take
+all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth;
+placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so
+true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea! It has been said,
+that in the constructing of Shakespeare's Dramas there is, apart from
+all other 'faculties' as they are called, an understanding manifested,
+equal to that in Bacon's _Novum Organum_. That is true; and it is not
+a truth that strikes every one. It would become more apparent if we
+tried, any of us for himself, how, out of Shakespeare's dramatic
+materials, _we_ could fashion such a result! The built house seems all
+so fit,--everyway as it should be, as if it came there by its own law
+and the nature of things,--we forget the rude disorderly quarry it was
+shaped from. The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself
+had made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more perfect than any
+other man, we may call Shakespeare in this: he discerns, knows as by
+instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are, what
+his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory
+glance of insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illumination of
+the whole matter; it is a calmly _seeing_ eye; a great intellect, in
+short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will
+construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will
+give of it,--is the best measure you could get of what intellect is
+in the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent;
+which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true
+_beginning_, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task
+the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must _understand_
+the thing; according to the depth of his understanding, will the
+fitness of his answer be. You will try him so. Does like join itself
+to like; does the spirit of method stir in that confusion, so that its
+embroilment becomes order? Can the man say, _Fiat lux_, Let there be
+light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there, is _light_
+in himself, will he accomplish this.
+
+Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting,
+delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is
+great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is
+unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare.
+The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its
+inmost heart and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light
+before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative,
+we said: poetic creation, what is this too but _seeing_ the thing
+sufficiently? The _word_ that will describe the thing, follows of
+itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not
+Shakespeare's _morality_, his valour, candour, tolerance,
+truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can
+triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world!
+No _twisted_, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with
+its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly _level_ mirror;--that
+is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related to
+all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how
+this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an
+Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their
+round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. _Novum
+Organum_, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite
+secondary order; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. Among
+modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank.
+Goethe alone, since the days of Shakespeare, reminds me of it. Of him
+too you say that he _saw_ the object; you may say what he himself says
+of Shakespeare: 'His characters are like watches with dial-plates of
+transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the
+inward mechanism also is all visible.'
+
+The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things;
+what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in these
+often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye
+that something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? You
+can laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way or
+other genially relate yourself to them;--you can, at lowest, hold your
+peace about them, turn away your own and others' face from them, till
+the hour come for practically exterminating and extinguishing them! At
+bottom, it is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have
+intellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word; or
+failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write at
+all; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on
+accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents,--perhaps on
+his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his
+boyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart
+of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for what soever exists
+has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and
+exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of
+Nature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort
+soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, _See_. If
+you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together,
+jingling sensibilities against each other, and _name_ yourself a Poet;
+there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in
+action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old
+Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, 'But are
+ye sure he's _not a dunce_?' Why, really one might ask the same thing,
+in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider
+it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he's not a dunce? There is,
+in this world, no other entirely fatal person.
+
+For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a
+correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakespeare's faculty,
+I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all
+under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they
+were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect,
+imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a
+capital error. Then again, we hear of a man's 'intellectual nature',
+and of his 'moral nature', as if these again were divisible, and
+existed apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms
+of utterance; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to
+speak at all. But words ought not to harden into things for us. It
+seems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part,
+radically falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep for
+ever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but _names_; that
+man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is
+essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy,
+understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same
+Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other,
+physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know
+all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man,
+what is this but another _side_ of the one vital Force whereby he is
+and works? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see
+how a man would fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or
+want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he
+has formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes. He is _one_; and
+preaches the same Self abroad in all these ways.
+
+Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but,
+consider it,--without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a
+thoroughly immoral _man_ could not know anything at all! To know a
+thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first _love_ the thing,
+sympathize with it: that is, be _virtuously_ related to it. If he have
+not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the
+courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he
+know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge.
+Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the
+pusillanimous for ever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is
+mean, superficial, small; for the uses of the day merely.--But does
+not the very Fox know something of Nature? Exactly so: it knows where
+the geese lodge! The human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in the
+world, what more does he know but this and the like of this? Nay, it
+should be considered too, that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine
+_morality_, he could not even know where the geese were, or get at the
+geese! If he spent his time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his
+own misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so
+forth; and had not courage, promptitude, practicality, and other
+suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he would catch no geese. We may say
+of the Fox too, that his morality and insight are of the same
+dimensions; different faces of the same internal unity of vulpine
+life!--These things are worth stating; for the contrary of them acts
+with manifold very baleful perversion, in this time: what limitations,
+modifications they require, your own candour will supply.
+
+If I say, therefore, that Shakespeare is the greatest of Intellects, I
+have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's
+intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious
+intellect; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of.
+Novalis beautifully remarks of him, that those Dramas of his are
+Products of Nature too, deep as Nature herself. I find a great truth
+in this saying. Shakespeare's Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth
+of it is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows up from the
+deeps of Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of
+Nature. The latest generations of men will find new meanings in
+Shakespeare, new elucidations of their own human being; 'new harmonies
+with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later
+ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man.' This
+well deserves meditating. It is Nature's highest award to a true
+simple great soul, that he get thus to be _a part of herself_. Such a
+man's works, whatsoever he with utmost conscious exertion and
+forethought shall accomplish, grow up withal _un_consciously, from the
+unknown deeps in him;--as the oak-tree grows from the Earth's bosom,
+as the mountains and waters shape themselves; with a symmetry grounded
+on Nature's own laws, conformable to all Truth whatsoever. How much in
+Shakespeare lies hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles known to
+himself; much that was not known at all, not speakable at all: like
+_roots_, like sap and forces working underground! Speech is great; but
+Silence is greater.
+
+Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I will not
+blame Dante for his misery: it is as battle without victory; but true
+battle,--the first, indispensable thing. Yet I call Shakespeare
+greater than Dante, in that he fought truly, and did conquer. Doubt it
+not, he had his own sorrows: those _Sonnets_ of his will even testify
+expressly in what deep waters he had waded, and swum struggling for
+his life;--as what man like him ever failed to have to do? It seems to
+me a heedless notion, our common one, that he sat like a bird on the
+bough; and sang forth, free and offhand, never knowing the troubles of
+other men. Not so; with no man is it so. How could a man travel
+forward from rustic deer-poaching to such tragedy-writing, and not
+fall in with sorrows by the way? Or, still better, how could a man
+delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth, so many suffering heroic
+hearts, if his own heroic heart had never suffered?--And now, in
+contrast with all this, observe his mirthfulness, his genuine
+overflowing love of laughter! You would say, in no point does he
+_exaggerate_ but only in laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that
+pierce and burn, are to be found in Shakespeare; yet he is always in
+measure here; never what Johnson would remark as a specially 'good
+hater'. But his laughter seems to pour from him in floods; he heaps
+all manner of ridiculous nicknames on the butt he is bantering,
+tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of horse-play; you would say,
+roars and laughs. And then, if not always the finest, it is always a
+genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No
+man who _can_ laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these
+things. It is some poor character only _desiring_ to laugh, and have
+the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy; good
+laughter is not 'the crackling of thorns under the pot'. Even at
+stupidity and pretension this Shakespeare does not laugh otherwise
+than genially. Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts; and we
+dismiss them covered with explosions of laughter: but we like the poor
+fellows only the better for our laughing; and hope they will get on
+well there, and continue Presidents of the City-watch.--Such laughter,
+like sunshine on the deep sea, is very beautiful to me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have no room to speak of Shakespeare's individual works; though
+perhaps there is much still waiting to be said on that head. Had we,
+for instance, all his plays reviewed as _Hamlet_, in _Wilhelm
+Meister_, is! A thing which might, one day, be done. August Wilhelm
+Schlegel has a remark on his Historical Plays, _Henry Fifth_ and the
+others, which is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of National
+Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, said, he knew no English History but
+what he had learned from Shakespeare. There are really, if we look to
+it, few as memorable Histories. The great salient points are admirably
+seized; all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence; it
+is, as Schlegel says, _epic_;--as indeed all delineation by a great
+thinker will be. There are right beautiful things in those Pieces,
+which indeed together form one beautiful thing. That battle of
+Agincourt strikes me as one of the most perfect things, in its sort,
+we anywhere have of Shakespeare's. The description of the two hosts:
+the worn-out, jaded English; the dread hour, big with destiny, when
+the battle shall begin; and then that deathless valour: 'Ye good
+yeomen, whose limbs were made in England!' There is a noble Patriotism
+in it,--far other than the 'indifference' you sometimes hear ascribed
+to Shakespeare. A true English heart breathes, calm and strong,
+through the whole business; not boisterous, protrusive; all the better
+for that. There is a sound in it like the ring of steel. This man too
+had a right stroke in him, had it come to that!
+
+But I will say, of Shakespeare's works generally, that we have no full
+impress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His works
+are so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that
+was in him. All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory,
+imperfect, written under cramping circumstances; giving only here and
+there a note of the full utterance of the man. Passages there are that
+come upon you like splendour out of Heaven; bursts of radiance,
+illuminating the very heart of the thing: you say, 'That is _true_,
+spoken once and forever; wheresoever and whensoever there is an open
+human soul, that will be recognized as true!' Such bursts, however,
+make us feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant; that it is,
+in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakespeare had to write for
+the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could,
+into that and no other mould. It was with him, then, as it is with us
+all. No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his
+own free Thought before us; but his Thought as he could translate it
+into the stone that was given, with the tools that were given.
+_Disjecta membra_ are all that we find of any Poet, or of any man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakespeare may recognize that he
+too was a _Prophet_, in his way; of an insight analogous to the
+Prophetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to
+this man also divine; _un_speakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven:
+'We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!' That scroll in Westminster
+Abbey, which few read with understanding, is of the depth of any Seer.
+But the man sang; did not preach, except musically. We called Dante
+the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism. May we not call
+Shakespeare the still more melodious Priest of a _true_ Catholicism,
+the 'Universal Church' of the Future and of all times? No narrow
+superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or
+perversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousandfold
+hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let all men
+worship as they can! We may say without offence, that there rises a
+kind of universal Psalm out of this Shakespeare too; not unfit to make
+itself heard among the still more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony
+with these, if we understood them, but in unison!--I cannot call this
+Shakespeare a 'Sceptic', as some do; his indifference to the creeds
+and theological quarrels of his time misleading them. No: neither
+unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism; no sceptic,
+though he says little about his Faith. Such 'indifference' was the
+fruit of his greatness withal: his whole heart was in his own grand
+sphere of worship (we may call it such); these other controversies,
+vitally important to other men, were not vital to him.
+
+But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right glorious
+thing and set of things, this that Shakespeare has brought us? For
+myself, I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the fact
+of such a man being sent into this Earth. Is he not an eye to us all;
+a blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light?--And, at bottom, was it not
+perhaps far better that this Shakespeare, everyway an unconscious man,
+was _conscious_ of no Heavenly message? He did not feel, like Mahomet,
+because he saw into those internal Splendours, that he specially was
+the 'Prophet of God': and was he not greater than Mahomet in that?
+Greater; and also, if we compute strictly, as we did in Dante's case,
+more successful. It was intrinsically an error that notion of
+Mahomet's, of his supreme Prophethood; and has come down to us
+inextricably involved in error to this day; dragging along with it
+such a coil of fables, impurities, intolerances, as makes it a
+questionable step for me here and now to say, as I have done, that
+Mahomet was a true Speaker at all, and not rather an ambitious
+charlatan, perversity, and simulacrum, no Speaker, but a Babbler! Even
+in Arabia, as I compute, Mahomet will have exhausted himself and
+become obsolete, while this Shakespeare, this Dante may still be
+young;--while this Shakespeare may still pretend to be a Priest of
+Mankind, of Arabia as of other places, for unlimited periods to come!
+Compared with any speaker or singer one knows, even with Aeschylus or
+Homer, why should he not, for veracity and universality, last like
+them? He is _sincere_ as they; reaches deep down like them, to the
+universal and perennial. But as for Mahomet, I think it had been
+better for him _not_ to be so conscious! Alas, poor Mahomet; all that
+he was _conscious_ of was a mere error; a futility and triviality,--as
+indeed such ever is. The truly great in him too was the unconscious:
+that he was a wild Arab lion of the desert, and did speak out with
+that great thunder-voice of his, not by words which he _thought_ to be
+great, but by actions, by feelings, by a history which _were_ great!
+His Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity; we do not
+believe, like him, that God wrote that! The Great Man here too, as
+always, is a Force of Nature: whatsoever is truly great in him springs
+up from the _in_articulate deeps.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of
+a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of
+Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many
+thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account
+him a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;--on which point there
+were much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite of
+the sad state Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this Shakespeare
+has actually become among us. Which Englishman we ever made, in this
+land of ours, which million of Englishmen, would we not give up rather
+than the Stratford Peasant? There is no regiment of highest
+Dignitaries that we would sell him for. He is the grandest thing we
+have yet done. For our honour among foreign nations, as an ornament to
+our English Household, what item is there that we would not surrender
+rather than him? Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give up your
+Indian Empire or your Shakespeare, you English; never have had any
+Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakespeare? Really it were a
+grave question. Official persons would answer doubtless in official
+language; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer:
+Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakespeare!
+Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare
+does not go, he lasts for ever with us; we cannot give up our
+Shakespeare!
+
+Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely as a real,
+marketable, tangibly-useful possession. England, before long, this
+Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in
+America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there
+will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what
+is it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so
+that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike
+intercourse, helping one another? This is justly regarded as the
+greatest practical problem, the thing all manner of sovereignties and
+governments are here to accomplish: what is it that will accomplish
+this? Acts of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot.
+America is parted from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call it
+not fantastic, for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is an
+English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of
+Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakespeare, does not he shine,
+in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet
+strongest of rallying-signs; _in_destructible; really more valuable in
+that point of view, than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We
+can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a
+thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever,
+under what sort of Parish-Constable soever, English men and women are,
+they will say to one another: 'Yes, this Shakespeare is ours: we
+produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind
+with him.' The most common-sense politician, too, if he pleases, may
+think of that.
+
+Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate
+voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the
+heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered,
+scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity
+at all; yet the noble Italy is actually _one_: Italy produced its
+Dante: Italy can speak! The Czar of all the Russias, he is strong,
+with so many bayonets, Cossacks, and cannons: and does a great feat in
+keeping such a tract of Earth politically together; but he cannot yet
+speak. Something great in him, but it is a dumb greatness. He has had
+no voice of genius, to be heard of all men and times. He must learn to
+speak. He is a great dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and Cossacks
+will all have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante's voice is still
+audible. The Nation that has a Dante is bound together as no dumb
+Russia can be.--We must here end what we had to say of the
+_Hero-Poet_.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT
+
+1784-1859
+
+AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION
+
+WHAT IS POETRY? (1844)
+
+
+Poetry, strictly and artistically so called, that is to say,
+considered not merely as poetic feeling, which is more or less shared
+by all the world, but as the operation of that feeling, such as we see
+it in the poet's book, is the utterance of a passion for truth,
+beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by
+imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of
+variety in uniformity. Its means are whatever the universe contains;
+and its ends, pleasure and exaltation. Poetry stands between nature
+and convention, keeping alive among us the enjoyment of the external
+and the spiritual world: it has constituted the most enduring fame of
+nations; and, next to Love and Beauty, which are its parents, is the
+greatest proof to man of the pleasure to be found in all things, and
+of the probable riches of infinitude.
+
+Poetry is a passion,[25] because it seeks the deepest impressions; and
+because it must undergo, in order to convey, them.
+
+    [25] _Passio_, suffering in a good sense,--ardent subjection
+    of one's-self to emotion.
+
+It is a passion for truth, because without truth the impression would
+be false or defective.
+
+It is a passion for beauty, because its office is to exalt and refine
+by means of pleasure, and because beauty is nothing but the loveliest
+form of pleasure.
+
+It is a passion for power, because power is impression triumphant,
+whether over the poet, as desired by himself, or over the reader, as
+affected by the poet.
+
+It embodies and illustrates its impressions by imagination, or images
+of the objects of which it treats, and other images brought in to
+throw light on those objects, in order that it may enjoy and impart
+the feeling of their truth in its utmost conviction and affluence.
+
+It illustrates them by fancy, which is a lighter play of imagination,
+or the feeling of analogy coming short of seriousness, in order that
+it may laugh with what it loves, and show how it can decorate it with
+fairy ornament.
+
+It modulates what it utters, because in running the whole round of
+beauty it must needs include beauty of sound; and because, in the
+height of its enjoyment, it must show the perfection of its triumph,
+and make difficulty itself become part of its facility and joy.
+
+And lastly, Poetry shapes this modulation into uniformity for its
+outline, and variety for its parts, because it thus realizes the last
+idea of beauty itself, which includes the charm of diversity within
+the flowing round of habit and ease.
+
+Poetry is imaginative passion. The quickest and subtlest test of the
+possession of its essence is in expression; the variety of things to
+be expressed shows the amount of its resources; and the continuity of
+the song completes the evidence of its strength and greatness. He who
+has thought, feeling, expression, imagination, action, character, and
+continuity, all in the largest amount and highest degree, is the
+greatest poet.
+
+Poetry includes whatsoever of painting can be made visible to the
+mind's eye, and whatsoever of music can be conveyed by sound and
+proportion without singing or instrumentation. But it far surpasses
+those divine arts in suggestiveness, range, and intellectual
+wealth;--the first, in expression of thought, combination of images,
+and the triumph over space and time; the second, in all that can be
+done by speech, apart from the tones and modulations of pure sound.
+Painting and music, however, include all those portions of the gift of
+poetry that can be expressed and heightened by the visible and
+melodious. Painting, in a certain apparent manner, is things
+themselves; music, in a certain audible manner, is their very emotion
+and grace. Music and painting are proud to be related to poetry, and
+poetry loves and is proud of them.
+
+Poetry begins where matter of fact or of science ceases to be merely
+such, and to exhibit a further truth; that is to say, the connexion it
+has with the world of emotion, and its power to produce imaginative
+pleasure. Inquiring of a gardener, for instance, what flower it is we
+see yonder, he answers, 'a lily'. This is matter of fact. The botanist
+pronounces it to be of the order of 'Hexandria Monogynia'. This is
+matter of science. It is the 'lady' of the garden, says Spenser; and
+here we begin to have a poetical sense of its fairness and grace. It
+is
+
+    The plant and flower of _light_,
+
+says Ben Jonson; and poetry then shows us the beauty of the flower in
+all its mystery and splendour.
+
+If it be asked, how we know perceptions like these to be true, the
+answer is, by the fact of their existence--by the consent and delight
+of poetic readers. And as feeling is the earliest teacher, and
+perception the only final proof, of things the most demonstrable by
+science, so the remotest imaginations of the poets may often be found
+to have the closest connexion with matter of fact; perhaps might
+always be so, if the subtlety of our perceptions were a match for the
+causes of them. Consider this image of Ben Jonson's--of a lily being
+the flower of light. Light, undecomposed, is white; and as the lily is
+white, and light is white, and whiteness itself is nothing _but_
+light, the two things, so far, are not merely similar, but identical.
+A poet might add, by an analogy drawn from the connexion of light and
+colour, that there is a 'golden dawn' issuing out of the white lily,
+in the rich yellow of the stamens. I have no desire to push this
+similarity farther than it may be worth. Enough has been stated to
+show that, in poetical as in other analogies, 'the same feet of
+Nature', as Bacon says, may be seen 'treading in different paths'; and
+that the most scornful, that is to say, dullest disciple of fact,
+should be cautious how he betrays the shallowness of his philosophy by
+discerning no poetry in its depths.
+
+But the poet is far from dealing only with these subtle and analogical
+truths. Truth of every kind belongs to him, provided it can bud into
+any kind of beauty, or is capable of being illustrated and impressed
+by the poetic faculty. Nay, the simplest truth is often so beautiful
+and impressive of itself, that one of the greatest proofs of his
+genius consists in his leaving it to stand alone, illustrated by
+nothing but the light of its own tears or smiles, its own wonder,
+might, or playfulness. Hence the complete effect of many a simple
+passage in our old English ballads and romances, and of the passionate
+sincerity in general of the greatest early poets, such as Homer and
+Chaucer, who flourished before the existence of a 'literary world',
+and were not perplexed by a heap of notions and opinions, or by doubts
+how emotion ought to be expressed. The greatest of their successors
+never write equally to the purpose, except when they can dismiss
+everything from their minds but the like simple truth. In the
+beautiful poem of _Sir Eger, Sir Graham and Sir Gray-Steel_ (see it in
+Ellis's _Specimens_, or Laing's _Early Metrical Tales_), a knight
+thinks himself disgraced in the eyes of his mistress:--
+
+    Sir Eger said, 'If it be so,
+    Then wot I well I must forgo
+    Love-liking, and manhood, all clean!'
+    _The water rush'd out of his een!_
+
+Sir Gray-Steel is killed:
+
+    Gray-Steel into his death thus thraws[26]
+    He _walters[27] and the grass up draws;_
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    _A little while then lay he still
+    (Friends that him saw, liked full ill)
+    And bled into his armour bright._
+
+    [26] throes?
+
+    [27] welters,--throws himself about.
+
+The abode of Chaucer's _Reeve_, or Steward, in the _Canterbury Tales_,
+is painted in two lines, which nobody ever wished longer:
+
+    His wonning[28] was full fair upon an heath,
+    With greeny trees yshadowed was his place.
+
+    [28] dwelling.
+
+Every one knows the words of Lear, 'most _matter-of-fact_, most
+melancholy.'
+
+            Pray, do not mock me;
+    I am a very foolish fond old man,
+    Fourscore and upwards:
+    Not an hour more, nor less; and, to deal plainly
+    I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
+
+It is thus, by exquisite pertinence, melody, and the implied power of
+writing with exuberance, if need be, that beauty and truth become
+identical in poetry, and that pleasure, or at the very worst, a balm
+in our tears, is drawn out of pain.
+
+It is a great and rare thing, and shows a lovely imagination, when the
+poet can write a commentary, as it were, of his own, on such sufficing
+passages of nature, and be thanked for the addition. There is an
+instance of this kind in Warner, an old Elizabethan poet, than which I
+know nothing sweeter in the world. He is speaking of Fair Rosamond,
+and of a blow given her by Queen Eleanor.
+
+    With that she dash'd her on the lips,
+      _So dyed double red:
+    Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
+      Soft were those lips that bled._
+
+There are different kinds and degrees of imagination, some of them
+necessary to the formation of every true poet, and all of them
+possessed by the greatest. Perhaps they may be enumerated as
+follows:--First, that which presents to the mind any object or
+circumstance in every-day life; as when we imagine a man holding a
+sword, or looking out of a window;--Second, that which presents real,
+but not every-day circumstances; as King Alfred tending the loaves,
+or Sir Philip Sidney giving up the water to the dying soldier;--Third,
+that which combines character and events directly imitated from real
+life, with imitative realities of its own invention; as the probable
+parts of the histories of Priam and _Macbeth_, or what may be called
+natural fiction as distinguished from supernatural;--Fourth, that
+which conjures up things and events not to be found in nature; as
+Homer's gods, and Shakespeare's witches, enchanted horses and spears,
+Ariosto's hippogriff, &c.;--Fifth, that which, in order to illustrate
+or aggravate one image, introduces another; sometimes in simile, as
+when Homer compares Apollo descending in his wrath at noon-day to the
+coming of night-time: sometimes in metaphor, or simile comprised in a
+word, as in Milton's 'motes that _people_ the sunbeams'; sometimes in
+concentrating into a word the main history of any person or thing,
+past or even future, as in the 'starry Galileo' of Byron, and that
+ghastly foregone conclusion of the epithet 'murdered' applied to the
+yet living victim in Keats's story from Boccaccio,--
+
+    So the two brothers and their _murder'd_ man
+    Rode towards fair Florence;--
+
+sometimes in the attribution of a certain representative quality which
+makes one circumstance stand for others; as in Milton's grey-fly
+winding its '_sultry_ horn', which epithet contains the heat of a
+summer's day;--Sixth, that which reverses this process, and makes a
+variety of circumstances take colour from one, like nature seen with
+jaundiced or glad eyes, or under the influence of storm or sunshine;
+as when in _Lycidas_, or the Greek pastoral poets, the flowers and
+the flocks are made to sympathize with a man's death; or, in the
+Italian poet, the river flowing by the sleeping Angelica seems talking
+of love--
+
+    Parea che l'erba le fiorisse intorno,
+    _E d'amor ragionasse quella riva!_
+
+                    _Orlando Innamorato_, Canto iii.
+
+or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping Imogen by the very
+light in the chamber, and the reaction of her own beauty upon itself;
+or in the 'witch element' of the tragedy of _Macbeth_ and the May-day
+night of _Faust_;--Seventh, and last, that which by a single
+expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but
+surpasses in its effect the extremest force of the most particular
+description; as in that exquisite passage of Coleridge's _Christabel_,
+where the unsuspecting object of the witch's malignity is bidden to go
+to bed:
+
+    Quoth Christabel, So let it be!
+    And as the lady bade, did she.
+    Her gentle limbs did she undress,
+    _And lay down in her loveliness;--_
+
+a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music. The very
+smoothness and gentleness of the limbs is in the series of the letter
+_l's_.
+
+I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing that most lovely
+inclusion of physical beauty in moral, neither can I call to mind any
+instances of the imagination that turns accompaniments into
+accessories, superior to those I have alluded to. Of the class of
+comparison, one of the most touching (many a tear must it have drawn
+from parents and lovers) is in a stanza which has been copied into
+the _Friar of Orders Grey_, out of Beaumont and Fletcher:
+
+    Weep no more, lady, weep no more,
+      Thy sorrow is in vain;
+    _For violets pluck'd the sweetest showers
+      Will ne'er make grow again._
+
+And Shakespeare and Milton abound in the very grandest; such as
+Antony's likening his changing fortunes to the cloud-rack; Lear's
+appeal to the old age of the heavens; Satan's appearance in the
+horizon, like a fleet 'hanging in the clouds'; and the comparisons of
+him with the comet and the eclipse. Nor unworthy of this glorious
+company, for its extraordinary combination of delicacy and vastness,
+is that enchanting one of Shelley's in the _Adonais_:
+
+    Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
+    Stains the white radiance of eternity.
+
+I multiply these particulars in order to impress upon the reader's
+mind the great importance of imagination in all its phases, as a
+constituent part of the highest poetic faculty.
+
+The happiest instance I remember of imaginative metaphor, is
+Shakespeare's moonlight 'sleeping' on a bank; but half his poetry may
+be said to be made up of it, metaphor indeed being the common coin of
+discourse. Of imaginary creatures, none out of the pale of mythology
+and the East are equal, perhaps, in point of invention, to
+Shakespeare's Ariel and Caliban; though poetry may grudge to prose the
+discovery of a Winged Woman, especially such as she has been described
+by her inventor in the story of _Peter Wilkins_; and in point of
+treatment, the Mammon and Jealousy of Spenser, some of the monsters
+in Dante, particularly his Nimrod, his interchangements of creatures
+into one another, and (if I am not presumptuous in anticipating what I
+think will be the verdict of posterity) the Witch in Coleridge's
+_Christabel_, may rank even with the creations of Shakespeare. It may
+be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare had bile and nightmare enough
+in him to have thought of such detestable horrors as those of the
+interchanging adversaries (now serpent, now man), or even of the huge,
+half-blockish enormity of Nimrod,--in Scripture, the 'mighty hunter'
+and builder of the tower of Babel,--in Dante, a tower of a man in his
+own person, standing with some of his brother giants up to the middle
+in a pit in hell, blowing a horn to which a thunderclap is a whisper,
+and hallooing after Dante and his guide in the jargon of a lost
+tongue! The transformations are too odious to quote: but of the
+towering giant we cannot refuse ourselves the 'fearful joy' of a
+specimen. It was twilight, Dante tells us, and he and his guide Virgil
+were silently pacing through one of the dreariest regions of hell,
+when the sound of a tremendous horn made him turn all his attention to
+the spot from which it came. He there discovered through the dusk,
+what seemed to be the towers of a city. Those are no towers, said his
+guide; they are giants, standing up to the middle in one of these
+circular pits.
+
+    I look'd again; and as the eye makes out,
+    By little and little, what the mist conceal'd
+    In which, till clearing up, the sky was steep'd;
+    So, looming through the gross and darksome air,
+    As we drew nigh, those mighty bulks grew plain,
+    And error quitted me, and terror join'd:
+    For in like manner as all round its height
+    Montereggione crowns itself with towers,
+    So tower'd above the circuit of that pit,
+    Though but half out of it, and half within,
+    The horrible giants that fought Jove, and still
+    Are threaten'd when he thunders. As we near'd
+    The foremost, I discern'd his mighty face,
+    His shoulders, breast, and more than half his trunk,
+    With both the arms down hanging by the sides.
+    His face appear'd to me, in length and breadth,
+    Huge as St. Peter's pinnacle at Rome,
+    And of a like proportion all his bones.
+    He open'd, as we went, his dreadful mouth,
+    Fit for no sweeter psalmody; and shouted
+    After us, in the words of some strange tongue,
+    Rafel ma-ee amech zabee almee!--
+    'Dull wretch!' my leader cried, 'keep to thine horn,
+    And so vent better whatsoever rage
+    Or other passion stuff thee. Feel thy throat
+    And find the chain upon thee, thou confusion!
+    Lo! what a hoop is clench'd about thy gorge.'
+    Then turning to myself, he said, 'His howl
+    Is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he
+    Through whose ill thought it was that humankind
+    Were tongue-confounded. Pass him, and say nought:
+    For as he speaketh language known of none,
+    So none can speak save jargon to himself.'
+
+                       _Inferno_, Canto xxxi, ver. 34.
+
+Assuredly it could not have been easy to find a fiction so uncouthly
+terrible as this in the hypochondria of Hamlet. Even his father had
+evidently seen no such ghost in the other world. All his phantoms were
+in the world he had left. Timon, Lear, Richard, Brutus, Prospero,
+Macbeth himself, none of Shakespeare's men had, in fact, any thought
+but of the earth they lived on, whatever supernatural fancy crossed
+them. The thing fancied was still a thing of this world, 'in its habit
+as it lived,' or no remoter acquaintance than a witch or a fairy. Its
+lowest depths (unless Dante suggested them) were the cellars under the
+stage. Caliban himself is a cross-breed between a witch and a clown.
+No offence to Shakespeare; who was not bound to be the greatest of
+healthy poets, and to have every morbid inspiration besides. What he
+might have done, had he set his wits to compete with Dante, I know
+not: all I know is, that in the infernal line he did nothing like him;
+and it is not to be wished he had. It is far better that, as a higher,
+more universal, and more beneficent variety of the genus Poet, he
+should have been the happier man he was, and left us the plump cheeks
+on his monument, instead of the carking visage of the great, but
+over-serious, and comparatively one-sided Florentine. Even the
+imagination of Spenser, whom we take to have been a 'nervous
+gentleman' compared with Shakespeare, was visited with no such dreams
+as Dante. Or, if it was, he did not choose to make himself thinner (as
+Dante says _he_ did) with dwelling upon them. He had twenty visions of
+nymphs and bowers, to one of the mud of Tartarus. Chaucer, for all he
+was 'a man of this world' as well as the poets' world, and as great,
+perhaps a greater enemy of oppression than Dante, besides being one of
+the profoundest masters of pathos that ever lived, had not the heart
+to conclude the story of the famished father and his children, as
+finished by the inexorable anti-Pisan. But enough of Dante in this
+place. Hobbes, in order to daunt the reader from objecting to his
+friend Davenant's want of invention, says of these fabulous creations
+in general, in his letter prefixed to the poem of _Gondibert_, that
+'impenetrable armours, enchanted castles, invulnerable bodies, iron
+men, flying horses, and a thousand other such things, are easily
+feigned by them that dare'. These are girds at Spenser and Ariosto.
+But, with leave of Hobbes (who translated Homer as if on purpose to
+show what execrable verses could be written by a philosopher),
+enchanted castles and flying horses are not easily feigned as Ariosto
+and Spenser feigned them; and that just makes all the difference. For
+proof, see the accounts of Spenser's enchanted castle in Book the
+Third, Canto Twelfth, of the _Faerie Queene_; and let the reader of
+Italian open the _Orlando Furioso_ at its first introduction of the
+Hippogriff (Canto iii, st. 4), where Bradamante, coming to an inn,
+hears a great noise, and sees all the people looking up at something
+in the air; upon which, looking up herself, she sees a knight in
+shining armour riding towards the sunset upon a creature with
+variegated wings, and then dipping and disappearing among the hills.
+Chaucer's steed of brass, that was
+
+    So horsly and so quick of eye,
+
+is copied from the life. You might pat him and feel his brazen
+muscles. Hobbes, in objecting to what he thought childish, made a
+childish mistake. His criticism is just such as a boy might pique
+himself upon, who was educated on mechanical principles, and thought
+he had outgrown his Goody Two-shoes. With a wonderful dimness of
+discernment in poetic matters, considering his acuteness in others, he
+fancies he has settled the question by pronouncing such creations
+'impossible'! To the brazier they are impossible, no doubt; but not to
+the poet. Their possibility, if the poet wills it, is to be conceded;
+the problem is, the creature being given, how to square its actions
+with probability, according to the nature assumed of it. Hobbes did
+not see, that the skill and beauty of these fictions lay in bringing
+them within those very regions of truth and likelihood in which he
+thought they could not exist. Hence the serpent Python of Chaucer,
+
+    _Sleeping against the sun upon a day,_
+
+when Apollo slew him. Hence the chariot-drawing dolphins of Spenser,
+softly swimming along the shore lest they should hurt themselves
+against the stones and gravel. Hence Shakespeare's Ariel, living under
+blossoms, and riding at evening on the bat; and his domestic namesake
+in the _Rape of the Lock_ (the imagination of the drawing-room) saving
+a lady's petticoat from the coffee with his plumes, and directing
+atoms of snuff into a coxcomb's nose. In the _Orlando Furioso_ (Canto
+xv, st. 65) is a wild story of a cannibal necromancer, who laughs at
+being cut to pieces, coming together again like quicksilver, and
+picking up his head when it is cut off, sometimes by the hair,
+sometimes by the nose! This, which would be purely childish and
+ridiculous in the hands of an inferior poet, becomes interesting, nay
+grand, in Ariosto's, from the beauties of his style, and its
+conditional truth to nature. The monster has a fated hair on his
+head,--a single hair,--which must be taken from it before he can be
+killed. Decapitation itself is of no consequence, without that
+proviso. The Paladin Astolfo, who has fought this phenomenon on
+horseback, and succeeded in getting the head and galloping off with
+it, is therefore still at a loss what to be at. How is he to discover
+such a needle in such a bottle of hay? The trunk is spurring after him
+to recover it, and he seeks for some evidence of the hair in vain. At
+length he bethinks him of scalping the head. He does so; and the
+moment the operation arrives at the place of the hair, _the face of
+the head becomes pale, the eyes turn in their sockets_, and the
+lifeless pursuer tumbles from his horse.
+
+    Then grew the visage pale, and deadly wet;
+    The eyes turn'd in their sockets, drearily;
+    And all things show'd the villain's sun was set.
+    His trunk that was in chase, fell from its horse,
+    And giving the last shudder, was a corse.
+
+It is thus, and thus only, by making Nature his companion wherever he
+goes, even in the most supernatural region, that the poet, in the
+words of a very instructive phrase, takes the world along with him. It
+is true, he must not (as the Platonists would say) humanize weakly or
+mistakenly in that region; otherwise he runs the chance of forgetting
+to be true to the supernatural itself, and so betraying a want of
+imagination from that quarter. His nymphs will have no taste of their
+woods and waters; his gods and goddesses be only so many fair or
+frowning ladies and gentlemen, such as we see in ordinary paintings;
+he will be in no danger of having his angels likened to a sort of
+wild-fowl, as Rembrandt has made them in his Jacob's Dream. His
+Bacchuses will never remind us, like Titian's, of the force and fury,
+as well as of the graces, of wine. His Jupiter will reduce no females
+to ashes; his fairies be nothing fantastical; his gnomes not 'of the
+earth, earthy'. And this again will be wanting to Nature; for it will
+be wanting to the supernatural, as Nature would have made it, working
+in a supernatural direction. Nevertheless, the poet, even for
+imagination's sake, must not become a bigot to imaginative truth,
+dragging it down into the region of the mechanical and the limited,
+and losing sight of its paramount privilege, which is to make beauty,
+in a human sense, the lady and queen of the universe. He would gain
+nothing by making his ocean-nymphs mere fishy creatures, upon the plea
+that such only could live in the water: his wood-nymphs with faces of
+knotted oak; his angels without breath and song, because no lungs
+could exist between the earth's atmosphere and the empyrean. The
+Grecian tendency in this respect is safer than the Gothic; nay, more
+imaginative; for it enables us to imagine _beyond_ imagination, and to
+bring all things healthily round to their only present final ground of
+sympathy,--the human. When we go to heaven, we may idealize in a
+superhuman mode, and have altogether different notions of the
+beautiful; but till then we must be content with the loveliest
+capabilities of earth. The sea-nymphs of Greece were still beautiful
+women, though they lived in the water. The gills and fins of the
+ocean's natural inhabitants were confined to their lowest semi-human
+attendants; or if Triton himself was not quite human, it was because
+be represented the fiercer part of the vitality of the seas, as they
+did the fairer.
+
+To conclude this part of my subject, I will quote from the greatest of
+all narrative writers two passages;--one exemplifying the imagination
+which brings supernatural things to bear on earthly, without
+confounding them; the other, that which paints events and
+circumstances after real life. The first is where Achilles, who has
+long absented himself from the conflict between his countrymen and the
+Trojans, has had a message from heaven bidding him reappear in the
+enemy's sight, standing outside the camp-wall upon the trench, but
+doing nothing more; that is to say, taking no part in the fight. He is
+simply to be seen. The two armies down by the sea-side are contending
+which shall possess the body of Patroclus; and the mere sight of the
+dreadful Grecian chief--supernaturally indeed impressed upon them, in
+order that nothing may be wanting to the full effect of his courage
+and conduct upon courageous men--is to determine the question. We are
+to imagine a slope of ground towards the sea, in order to elevate the
+trench; the camp is solitary; the battle ('a dreadful roar of men,' as
+Homer calls it) is raging on the sea-shore; and the goddess Iris has
+just delivered her message, and disappeared.
+
+    But up Achilles rose, the lov'd of heaven;
+    And Pallas on his mighty shoulders cast
+    The shield of Jove; and round about his head
+    She put the glory of a golden mist,
+    From which there burnt a fiery-flaming light.
+    And as, when smoke goes heavenward from a town,
+    In some far island which its foes besiege,
+    Who all day long with dreadful martialness
+    Have pour'd from their own town; soon as the sun
+    Has set, thick lifted fires are visible,
+    Which, rushing upward, make a light in the sky,
+    And let the neighbours know, who may perhaps
+    Bring help across the sea; so from the head
+    Of great Achilles went up an effulgence.
+
+    Upon the trench he stood, without the wall,
+    But mix'd not with the Greeks, for he rever'd
+    His mother's word; and so, thus standing there,
+    He shouted; and Minerva, to his shout,
+    Added a dreadful cry; and there arose
+    Among the Trojans an unspeakable tumult.
+    And as the clear voice of a trumpet, blown
+    Against a town by spirit-withering foes,
+    So sprang the clear voice of Aeacides.
+    And when they heard the brazen cry, their hearts
+    All leap'd within them; and the proud-maned horses
+    Ran with the chariots round, for they foresaw
+    Calamity; and the charioteers were smitten,
+    When they beheld the ever-active fire
+    Upon the dreadful head of the great-minded one
+    Burning; for bright-eyed Pallas made it burn.
+    Thrice o'er the trench divine Achilles shouted;
+    And thrice the Trojans and their great allies
+    Roll'd back; and twelve of all their noblest men
+    Then perish'd, crush'd by their own arms and chariots.
+
+                                 _Iliad_, xviii. 203.
+
+Of course there is no further question about the body of Patroclus. It
+is drawn out of the press, and received by the awful hero with tears.
+
+The other passage is where Priam, kneeling before Achilles, and
+imploring him to give up the dead body of Hector, reminds him of his
+own father; who, whatever (says the poor old king) may be his troubles
+with his enemies, has the blessing of knowing that his son is still
+alive, and may daily hope to see him return. Achilles, in accordance
+with the strength and noble honesty of the passions in those times,
+weeps aloud himself at this appeal, feeling, says Homer, 'desire' for
+his father in his very 'limbs'. He joins in grief with the venerable
+sufferer, and can no longer withstand the look of 'his grey head and
+his grey _chin_'. Observe the exquisite introduction of this last
+word. It paints the touching fact of the chin's being imploringly
+thrown upward by the kneeling old man, and the very motion of his
+beard as he speaks.
+
+    So saying, Mercury vanished up to heaven:
+    And Priam then alighted from his chariot,
+    Leaving Idaeus with it, who remain'd
+    Holding the mules and horses; and the old man
+    Went straight indoors, where the belov'd of Jove
+    Achilles sat, and found him. In the room
+    Were others, but apart; and two alone,
+    The hero Automedon, and Alcimus,
+    A branch of Mars, stood by him. They had been
+    At meals, and had not yet remov'd the board.
+    Great Priam came, without their seeing him,
+    And kneeling down, he clasp'd Achilles' knees,
+    And kiss'd those terrible, homicidal hands,
+    Which had deprived him of so many sons.
+    And as a man who is press'd heavily
+    For having slain another, flies away
+    To foreign lands, and comes into the house
+    Of some great man, and is beheld with wonder,
+    So did Achilles wonder to see Priam;
+    And the rest wonder'd, looking at each other.
+    But Priam, praying to him, spoke these words:--
+    'God-like Achilles, think of thine own father!
+    To the same age have we both come, the same
+    Weak pass; and though the neighbouring chiefs may vex
+    Him also, and his borders find no help,
+    Yet when he hears that thou art still alive,
+    He gladdens inwardly, and daily hopes
+    To see his dear son coming back from Troy.
+    But I, bereav'd old Priam! I had once
+    Brave sons in Troy, and now I cannot say
+    That one is left me. Fifty children had I,
+    When the Greeks came; nineteen were of one womb;
+    The rest my women bore me in my house.
+    The knees of many of these fierce Mars has loosen'd;
+    And he who had no peer, Troy's prop and theirs,
+    Him hast thou kill'd now, fighting for his country,
+    Hector; and for his sake am I come here
+    To ransom him, bringing a countless ransom.
+    But thou, Achilles, fear the gods, and think
+    Of thine own father, and have mercy on me:
+    For I am much more wretched, and have borne
+    What never mortal bore, I think on earth,
+    To lift unto my lips the hand of him
+    Who slew my boys.'
+
+                He ceased; and there arose
+    Sharp longing in Achilles for his father;
+    And taking Priam by the hand, he gently
+    Put him away; for both shed tears to think
+    Of other times; the one most bitter ones
+    For Hector, and with wilful wretchedness
+    Lay right before Achilles: and the other,
+    For his own father now, and now his friend;
+    And the whole house might hear them as they moan'd.
+    But when divine Achilles had refresh'd
+    His soul with tears, and sharp desire had left
+    His heart and limbs, he got up from his throne,
+    And rais'd the old man by the hand, and took
+    Pity on his grey head and his grey chin.
+
+                                 _Iliad_, xxiv. 468.
+
+O lovely and immortal privilege of genius! that can stretch its hand
+out of the wastes of time, thousands of years back, and touch our
+eyelids with tears. In these passages there is not a word which a man
+of the most matter-of-fact understanding might not have written, _if
+he had thought of it_. But in poetry, feeling and imagination are
+necessary to the perception and presentation even of matters of fact.
+They, and they only, see what is proper to be told, and what to be
+kept back; what is pertinent, affecting, and essential. Without
+feeling, there is a want of delicacy and distinction; without
+imagination, there is no true embodiment. In poets, even good of their
+kind, but without a genius for narration, the action would have been
+encumbered or diverted with ingenious mistakes. The over-contemplative
+would have given us too many remarks; the over-lyrical, a style too
+much carried away; the over-fanciful, conceits and too many similes;
+the unimaginative, the facts without the feeling, and not even those.
+We should have been told nothing of the 'grey chin', of the house
+hearing them as they moaned, or of Achilles gently putting the old man
+aside; much less of that yearning for his father, which made the hero
+tremble in every limb. Writers without the greatest passion and power
+do not feel in this way, nor are capable of expressing the feeling;
+though there is enough sensibility and imagination all over the world
+to enable mankind to be moved by it, when the poet strikes his truth
+into their hearts.
+
+The reverse of imagination is exhibited in pure absence of ideas, in
+commonplaces, and, above all, in conventional metaphor, or such images
+and their phraseology as have become the common property of discourse
+and writing. Addison's _Cato_ is full of them.
+
+    Passion unpitied and successless love
+    _Plant daggers in my breast._
+
+    I've sounded my Numidians, man by man,
+    And find them _ripe for a revolt_.
+
+    The virtuous Marcia _towers above her sex_.
+
+Of the same kind is his 'courting the yoke'--'distracting my very
+heart'--'calling up all' one's 'father' in one's soul--'working every
+nerve'--'copying a bright example'; in short, the whole play, relieved
+now and then with a smart sentence or turn of words. The following is
+a pregnant example of plagiarism and weak writing. It is from another
+tragedy of Addison's time--the _Mariamne_ of Fenton:
+
+            Mariamne, _with superior charms_,
+    _Triumphs o'er reason_: in her look she _bears_
+    A paradise of ever-blooming sweets;
+    Fair as the first idea beauty _prints_
+    In the young lover's soul; a winning grace
+    Guides every gesture, and obsequious love
+    _Attends_ on all her steps.
+
+'Triumphing o'er reason' is an old acquaintance of everybody's.
+'Paradise in her look' is from the Italian poets through Dryden. 'Fair
+as the first idea', &c., is from Milton, spoilt;--'winning grace' and
+'steps' from Milton and Tibullus, both spoilt. Whenever beauties are
+stolen by such a writer, they are sure to be spoilt: just as when a
+great writer borrows, he improves.
+
+To come now to Fancy,--she is a younger sister of Imagination, without
+the other's weight of thought and feeling. Imagination indeed, purely
+so called, is all feeling; the feeling of the subtlest and most
+affecting analogies; the perception of sympathies in the natures of
+things, or in their popular attributes. Fancy is a sporting with their
+resemblance, real or supposed, and with airy and fantastical
+creations.
+
+    --Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid
+    Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
+    _And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane,
+    Be shook to air._
+
+                      _Troilus and Cressida_, Act iii, sc. 3.
+
+That is imagination;--the strong mind sympathizing with the strong
+beast, and the weak love identified with the weak dew-drop.
+
+                  Oh!--and I forsooth
+    In love! I that have been love's whip I
+    _A very beadle to a humorous sigh!--_
+    A domineering pedant o'er the boy,--
+    This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,
+    This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid,
+    _Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,
+    The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans_, &c.
+
+                      _Love's Labour's Lost_, Act iii, sc. 1.
+
+That is fancy;--a combination of images not in their nature connected,
+or brought together by the feeling, but by the will and pleasure; and
+having just enough hold of analogy to betray it into the hands of its
+smiling subjector.
+
+                        Silent icicles
+    _Quietly shining to the quiet moon._
+
+                      Coleridge's _Frost at Midnight_.
+
+That, again, is imagination;--analogical sympathy; and exquisite of
+its kind it is.
+
+     'You are now sailed _into the north of my lady's opinion_;
+     where you will hang _like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard_,
+     unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt.'
+
+                       _Twelfth Night_, Act iii, sc. 2.
+
+And that is fancy;--one image capriciously suggested by another, and
+but half connected with the subject of discourse; nay, half opposed to
+it; for in the gaiety of the speaker's animal spirits, the 'Dutchman's
+beard' is made to represent the lady!
+
+Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy to the
+comic. _Macbeth_, _Lear_, _Paradise Lost_, the poem of Dante, are full
+of imagination: the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ and the _Rape of the
+Lock_, of fancy: _Romeo and Juliet_, the _Tempest_, the _Faerie
+Queene_, and the _Orlando Furioso_, of both. The terms were formerly
+identical, or used as such; and neither is the best that might be
+found. The term Imagination is too confined: often too material. It
+presents too invariably the idea of a solid body;--of 'images' in the
+sense of the plaster-cast cry about the streets. Fancy, on the other
+hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual image or apparition
+([Greek: Phantasma], appearance, _phantom_), has rarely that freedom
+from visibility which is one of the highest privileges of
+imagination. Viola, in _Twelfth Night_, speaking of some beautiful
+music, says:
+
+    It gives a very echo to the seat
+    Where Love is throned.
+
+In this charming thought, fancy and imagination are combined; yet the
+fancy, the assumption of Love's sitting on a throne, is the image of a
+solid body; while the imagination, the sense of sympathy between the
+passion of love and impassioned music, presents us no image at all.
+Some new term is wanting to express the more spiritual sympathies of
+what is called Imagination.
+
+One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy; and like Melancholy,
+as Albert Durer has painted her, she looks out among the stars, and is
+busied with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the universe.
+Fancy turns her sister's wizard instruments into toys. She takes a
+telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and
+sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the
+child-like and sportive. She chases butterflies, while her sister
+takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of
+gallantries, of fashions; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and
+capricious; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings
+to the images of wit; and delights as much to people nature with
+smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies together,
+and make them strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not
+incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her
+company; always, in the case of the greatest poets; often in that of
+less, though with them she is the greater favourite. Spenser has great
+imagination and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton both also,
+the very greatest, but with imagination predominant; Chaucer, the
+strongest imagination of real life, beyond any writers but Homer,
+Dante, and Shakespeare, and in comic painting inferior to none; Pope
+has hardly any imagination, but he has a great deal of fancy;
+Coleridge little fancy, but imagination exquisite. Shakespeare alone,
+of all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal
+perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing [the Oberon-Titania
+scenes from the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_] will be found in the
+present volume.[29] See also his famous description of Queen Mab and
+her equipage, in _Romeo and Juliet_:
+
+    Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs;
+    The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers:
+    Her traces of the smallest spider's web;
+    Her collars of the moonshine's watery beams, &c.
+
+    [29] Leigh Hunt's _Imagination and Fancy, or Selections from
+    the English Poets_, 1844.
+
+That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As a small but pretty
+rival specimen, less known, take the description of a fairy palace
+from Drayton's _Nymphidia_:
+
+    This palace standeth in the air,
+    By necromancy placed there,
+    That it no tempest needs to fear,
+      Which way soe'er it blow it:
+    And somewhat southward tow'rd the noon,
+    Whence lies a way up to the moon,
+    And thence the fairy can as soon
+      Pass to the earth below it.
+    The walls of spiders' legs are made,
+    Well morticed and finely laid:
+    He was the master of his trade
+      It curiously that builded:
+    _The windows of the eyes of cats:_
+
+(because they see best at night)
+
+    And for the roof instead of slats
+    Is cover'd with the skins of bats,
+      _With moonshine that are gilded._
+
+Here also is a fairy bed, very delicate, from the same poet's _Muse's
+Elysium_:
+
+    Of leaves of roses, _white and red_,
+    Shall be the covering of the bed;
+    The curtains, vallens, tester all,
+    Shall be the flower imperial;
+    And for the fringe it all along
+    _With azure hare-bells shall be hung.
+    Of lilies shall the pillows be,
+    With down stuft of the butterfly._
+
+Of fancy, so full of gusto as to border on imagination, Sir John
+Suckling, in his _Ballad on a Wedding_, has given some of the most
+playful and charming specimens in the language. They glance like
+twinkles of the eye, or cherries bedewed:
+
+    _Her feet beneath her petticoat,
+    Like little mice stole in and out,
+      As if they fear'd the light:_
+    But oh! she dances such a way!
+    _No sun upon an Easter day_
+      Is half so fine a sight.
+
+It is very daring, and has a sort of playful grandeur, to compare a
+lady's dancing with the sun. But as the sun has it all to himself in
+the heavens, so she, in the blaze of her beauty, on earth. This is
+imagination fairly displacing fancy. The following has enchanted
+everybody:
+
+    Her lips were red, _and one was thin_
+    _Compared with that was next her chin,
+      Some bee had stung it newly._
+
+Every reader has stolen a kiss at that lip, gay or grave.
+
+With regard to the principle of Variety in Uniformity by which verse
+ought to be modulated, and oneness of impression diversely produced,
+it has been contended by some, that Poetry need not be written in
+verse at all; that prose is as good a medium, provided poetry be
+conveyed through it; and that to think otherwise is to confound letter
+with spirit, or form with essence. But the opinion is a prosaical
+mistake. Fitness and unfitness for _song_, or metrical excitement,
+just make all the difference between a poetical and prosaical subject;
+and the reason why verse is necessary to the form of poetry, is, that
+the perfection of poetical spirit demands it;--that the circle of its
+enthusiasm, beauty and power, is incomplete without it. I do not mean
+to say that a poet can never show himself a poet in prose; but that,
+being one, his desire and necessity will be to write in verse; and
+that, if he were unable to do so, he would not, and could not, deserve
+his title. Verse to the true poet is no clog. It is idly called a
+trammel and a difficulty. It is a help. It springs from the same
+enthusiasm as the rest of his impulses, and is necessary to their
+satisfaction and effect. Verse is no more a clog than the condition of
+rushing upward is a clog to fire, or than the roundness and order of
+the globe we live on is a clog to the freedom and variety that abound
+within its sphere. Verse is no dominator over the poet, except
+inasmuch as the bond is reciprocal, and the poet dominates over the
+verse. They are lovers, playfully challenging each other's rule, and
+delighted equally to rule and to obey. Verse is the final proof to the
+poet that his mastery over his art is complete. It is the shutting up
+of his powers in '_measureful_ content'; the answer of form to his
+spirit; of strength and ease to his guidance. It is the willing
+action, the proud and fiery happiness, of the winged steed on whose
+back he has vaulted,
+
+    To witch the world with wondrous horsemanship.
+
+Verse, in short, is that finishing, and rounding, and 'tuneful
+planetting' of the poet's creations, which is produced of necessity by
+the smooth tendencies of their energy or inward working, and the
+harmonious dance into which they are attracted round the orb of the
+beautiful. Poetry, in its complete sympathy with beauty, must, of
+necessity, leave no sense of the beautiful, and no power over its
+forms, unmanifested; and verse flows as inevitably from this condition
+of its integrity, as other laws of proportion do from any other kind
+of embodiment of beauty (say that of the human figure), however free
+and various the movements may be that play within their limits. What
+great poet ever wrote his poems in prose? or where is a good prose
+poem, of any length, to be found? The poetry of the Bible is
+understood to be in verse, in the original. Mr. Hazlitt has said a
+good word for those prose enlargements of some fine old song, which
+are known by the name of Ossian; and in passages they deserve what he
+said; but he judiciously abstained from saying anything about the
+form. Is Gesner's _Death of Abel_ a poem? or Hervey's _Meditations_?
+The _Pilgrim's Progress_ has been called one; and, undoubtedly, Bunyan
+had a genius which tended to make him a poet, and one of no mean
+order: and yet it was of as ungenerous and low a sort as was
+compatible with so lofty an affinity; and this is the reason why it
+stopped where it did. He had a craving after the beautiful, but not
+enough of it in himself to echo to its music. On the other hand, the
+possession of the beautiful will not be sufficient without force to
+utter it. The author of _Telemachus_ had a soul full of beauty and
+tenderness. He was not a man who, if he had had a wife and children,
+would have run away from them, as Bunyan's hero did, to get a place by
+himself in heaven. He was 'a little lower than the angels', like our
+own Bishop Jewells and Berkeleys; and yet he was no poet. He was too
+delicately, not to say feebly, absorbed in his devotions, to join in
+the energies of the seraphic choir.
+
+Every poet, then, is a versifier; every fine poet an excellent one;
+and he is the best whose verse exhibits the greatest amount of
+strength, sweetness, straightforwardness, unsuperfluousness,
+_variety_, and _oneness_;--oneness, that is to say, consistency, in
+the general impression, metrical and moral; and variety, or every
+pertinent diversity of tone and rhythm, in the process. _Strength_ is
+the muscle of verse, and shows itself in the number and force of the
+marked syllables; as,
+
+    Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds.
+
+                                 _Paradise Lost._
+
+    Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheav'd
+    His vastness.
+
+                                  _Id._
+
+    Blow winds and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
+    You cat[)a]r[)a]cts and hurricanoes, spout,
+    Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
+    You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
+    Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
+    Singe my white head! and thou, all-shaking thunder,
+    Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
+
+                                 _Lear._
+
+Unexpected locations of the accent double this force, and render it
+characteristic of passion and abruptness. And here comes into play the
+reader's corresponding fineness of ear, and his retardations and
+accelerations in accordance with those of the poet:
+
+                  Then in the keyhole turns
+    The intr[)i]c[)a]te wards, and every bolt and bar
+    Unfastens.--On [)a] s[)u]dd[)e]n open fly
+    W[)i]th [)i]mpetuous recoil and jarring sound
+    The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
+    Harsh thunder.
+
+                                 _Paradise Lost_, Book II.
+
+    Abom[)i]n[)a]bl[)e]--unutt[)e]r[)a]bl[)e]--and worse
+    Than fables yet have feigned.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+    Wall[)o]w[)i]ng [)u]nwi[)e]ldy--[)e]normous in their gait.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+Of unusual passionate accent, there is an exquisite specimen in the
+_Faerie Queene_, where Una is lamenting her desertion by the Red-Cross
+Knight:
+
+      But he, my lion, and my noble lord,
+      How does he find in cruel heart to hate
+      Her that him lov'd, and ever most ador'd
+    _As the god of my life?_[30] Why hath he me abhorr'd?
+
+    [30] Pray let not the reader consent to read this first half
+    of the line in any manner less marked and peremptory. It is a
+    striking instance of the beauty of that 'acceleration and
+    retardation of true verse' which Coleridge speaks of. There
+    is to be a hurry on the words _as the_, and a passionate
+    emphasis and passing stop on the word _god_; and so of the
+    next three words.
+
+The abuse of strength is harshness and heaviness; the reverse of it is
+weakness. There is a noble sentiment--it appears both in Daniel's and
+Sir John Beaumont's works, but is most probably the latter's,--which
+is a perfect outrage of strength in the sound of the words:
+
+    Only the firmest and the _constant'st_ hearts
+    God sets to act the _stout'st_ and hardest parts.
+
+_Stout'st_ and _constant'st_ for 'stoutest' and 'most constant'! It is
+as bad as the intentional crabbedness of the line in _Hudibras_:
+
+    He that hangs or _beats out's_ brains,
+    The devil's in him if _he_ feigns.
+
+_Beats out's brains_, for 'beats out his brains'. Of heaviness,
+Davenant's _Gondibert_ is a formidable specimen, almost throughout:
+
+    With silence (order's help, and mark of care)
+      They chide that noise which heedless youth affect;
+    Still course for use, for health they cleanness wear,
+      And save in well-fix'd arms, all niceness check'd.
+    They thought, those that, unarm'd, expos'd frail life,
+      But naked nature valiantly betray'd;
+    Who was, though naked, safe, till pride made strife,
+      But made defence must use, now danger's made.
+
+And so he goes digging and lumbering on, like a heavy preacher
+thumping the pulpit in italics, and spoiling many ingenious
+reflections.
+
+Weakness in versification is want of accent and emphasis. It generally
+accompanies prosaicalness, and is the consequence of weak thoughts,
+and of the affectation of a certain well-bred enthusiasm. The writings
+of the late Mr. Hayley were remarkable for it; and it abounds among
+the lyrical imitators of Cowley, and the whole of what is called our
+French school of poetry, when it aspired above its wit and 'sense'. It
+sometimes breaks down in a horrible, hopeless manner, as if giving way
+at the first step. The following ludicrous passage in Congreve,
+intended to be particularly fine, contains an instance:
+
+      And lo! Silence himself is here;
+    Methinks I see the midnight god appear.
+      In all his downy pomp array'd,
+        Behold the reverend shade.
+      _An ancient sigh he sits upon!!!_
+    Whose memory of sound is long since gone,
+    _And purposely annihilated for his throne!!!_
+
+                      _Ode on the singing of Mrs. Arabella Hunt._
+
+See also the would-be enthusiasm of Addison about music:
+
+        For ever consecrate the _day_
+        To music and _Cecilia_;
+    Music, the greatest good that mortals know,
+        And all of heaven we have below,
+        Music can noble HINTS _impart!!!_
+
+It is observable that the unpoetic masters of ridicule are apt to make
+the most ridiculous mistakes, when they come to affect a strain higher
+than the one they are accustomed to. But no wonder. Their habits
+neutralize the enthusiasm it requires.
+
+_Sweetness_, though not identical with smoothness, any more than
+feeling is with sound, always includes it; and smoothness is a thing
+so little to be regarded for its own sake, and indeed so worthless in
+poetry but for some taste of sweetness, that I have not thought
+necessary to mention it by itself; though such an all-in-all in
+versification was it regarded not a hundred years back, that Thomas
+Warton himself, an idolater of Spenser, ventured to wish the following
+line in the _Faerie Queene_,
+
+    And was admired much of fools, _women_, and boys--
+
+altered to
+
+    And was admired much of women, fools, and boys--
+
+thus destroying the fine scornful emphasis on the first syllable of
+'women'! (an ungallant intimation, by the way, against the fair sex,
+very startling in this no less woman-loving than great poet). Any
+poetaster can be smooth. Smoothness abounds in all small poets, as
+sweetness does in the greater. Sweetness is the smoothness of grace
+and delicacy,--of the sympathy with the pleasing and lovely. Spenser
+is full of it,--Shakespeare--Beaumont and Fletcher--Coleridge. Of
+Spenser's and Coleridge's versification it is the prevailing
+characteristic. Its main secrets are a smooth progression between
+variety and sameness, and a voluptuous sense of the continuous,--'linked
+sweetness long drawn out'. Observe the first and last lines of the
+stanza in the _Faerie Queene_, describing a shepherd brushing away the
+gnats;--the open and the close _e's_ in the one,
+
+    As gentle shepherd in sw[=e][=e]t [=e]ventide--
+
+and the repetition of the word _oft_, and the fall from the vowel _a_,
+into the two _u's_ in the other,--
+
+    She brusheth _oft_, and _oft_ doth mar their m[=u]rm[)u]rings.
+
+So in his description of two substances in the handling, both equally
+smooth:
+
+    _Each smoother seems than each, and each than each seems smoother._
+
+An abundance of examples from his poetry will be found in the volume
+before us. His beauty revolves on itself with conscious loveliness.
+And Coleridge is worthy to be named with him, as the reader will see
+also, and has seen already. Let him take a sample meanwhile from the
+poem called the _Day Dream_! Observe both the variety and sameness of
+the vowels, and the repetition of the soft consonants:
+
+    My eyes make pictures when they're shut:--
+      I see a fountain, large and fair,
+    A willow and a ruin'd hut,
+      And _thee_ and _me_ and Mary there.
+    _O Mary! make thy gentle lap our pillow;
+    Bend o'er us, like a bower, my beautiful green willow._
+
+By _Straightforwardness_ is meant the flow of words, in their natural
+order, free alike from mere prose, and from those inversions to which
+bad poets recur in order to escape the charge of prose, but chiefly to
+accommodate their rhymes. In Shadwell's play of _Psyche_, Venus gives
+the sisters of the heroine an answer, of which the following is the
+_entire_ substance, literally, in so many words. The author had
+nothing better for her to say:
+
+     I receive your prayers with kindness, and will give success
+     to your hopes. I have seen, with anger, mankind adore your
+     sister's beauty and deplore her scorn: which they shall do
+     no more. For I'll so resent their idolatry, as shall content
+     your wishes to the full.
+
+Now in default of all imagination, fancy, and expression, how was the
+writer to turn these words into poetry or rhyme? Simply by diverting
+them from their natural order, and twisting the halves of the
+sentences each before the other.
+
+      With kindness I your prayers receive,
+      And to your hopes success will give.
+    I have, with anger, seen mankind adore
+    Your sister's beauty and her scorn deplore;
+      Which they shall do no more.
+    For their idolatry I'll so resent,
+    As shall your wishes to the full content!!
+
+This is just as if a man were to allow that there was no poetry in the
+words, 'How do you find yourself?' 'Very well, I thank you'; but to
+hold them inspired, if altered into
+
+    Yourself how do you find?
+    Very well, you I thank.
+
+It is true, the best writers in Shadwell's age were addicted to these
+inversions, partly for their own reasons, as far as rhyme was
+concerned, and partly because they held it to be writing in the
+classical and Virgilian manner. What has since been called Artificial
+Poetry was then flourishing, in contradistinction to Natural; or
+Poetry seen chiefly through art and books, and not in its first
+sources. But when the artificial poet partook of the natural, or, in
+other words, was a true poet after his kind, his best was always
+written in his most natural and straightforward manner. Hear
+Shadwell's antagonist Dryden. Not a particle of inversion, beyond what
+is used for the sake of emphasis in common discourse, and this only in
+one line (the last but three), is to be found in his immortal
+character of the Duke of Buckingham:
+
+    A man so various, that he seemed to be
+    Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
+    Stiff in opinions, _always in the wrong_,
+    _Was everything by starts, and nothing long;_
+    But in the course of one revolving moon
+    Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:
+    Then all for women, rhyming, dancing, drinking,
+    _Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking._
+    _Blest madman!_ who could every hour employ
+    _With something new to wish or to enjoy!_
+    Railing and praising were his usual themes;
+    And both, to show his judgement, in extremes:
+    So over violent, or over civil,
+    _That every man with him was god or devil._
+    In squandering wealth was his peculiar art;
+    _Nothing went unrewarded, but desert._
+    Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late,
+    _He had his jest, and they had his estate._
+
+Inversion itself was often turned into a grace in these poets, and may
+be in others, by the power of being superior to it; using it only with
+a classical air, and as a help lying next to them, instead of a
+salvation which they are obliged to seek. In jesting passages also it
+sometimes gave the rhyme a turn agreeably wilful, or an appearance of
+choosing what lay in its way; as if a man should pick up a stone to
+throw at another's head, where a less confident foot would have
+stumbled over it. Such is Dryden's use of the word _might_--the mere
+sign of a tense--in his pretended ridicule of the monkish practice of
+rising to sing psalms in the night.
+
+    And much they griev'd to see so nigh their hall
+    The bird that warn'd St. Peter of his fall;
+    That he should raise his mitred crest on high,
+    And clap his wings and call his family
+    To sacred rites; and vex th' ethereal powers
+    With midnight matins at uncivil hours;
+    Nay more, his quiet neighbours should molest
+    _Just in the sweetness of their morning rest._
+
+(What a line full of 'another doze' is that!)
+
+    _Beast of a bird!_ supinely, when he _might_
+    Lie snug and sleep, to rise before the light!
+    What if his dull forefathers used that cry?
+    Could he not let a bad example die?
+
+I the more gladly quote instances like those of Dryden, to illustrate
+the points in question, because they are specimens of the very highest
+kind of writing in the heroic couplet upon subjects not heroical. As
+to prosaicalness in general, it is sometimes indulged in by young
+writers on the plea of its being natural; but this is a mere
+confusion of triviality with propriety, and is usually the result of
+indolence.
+
+_Unsuperfluousness_ is rather a matter of style in general, than of
+the sound and order of words: and yet versification is so much
+strengthened by it, and so much weakened by its opposite, that it
+could not but come within the category of its requisites. When
+superfluousness of words is not occasioned by overflowing animal
+spirits, as in Beaumont and Fletcher, or by the very genius of luxury,
+as in Spenser (in which cases it is enrichment as well as overflow),
+there is no worse sign for a poet altogether, except pure barrenness.
+Every word that could be taken away from a poem, unreferable to either
+of the above reasons for it, is a damage; and many such are death; for
+there is nothing that posterity seems so determined to resent as this
+want of respect for its time and trouble. The world is too rich in
+books to endure it. Even true poets have died of this Writer's Evil.
+Trifling ones have survived, with scarcely any pretensions but the
+terseness of their trifles. What hope can remain for wordy mediocrity?
+Let the discerning reader take up any poem, pen in hand, for the
+purpose of discovering how many words he can strike out of it that
+give him no requisite ideas, no relevant ones that he cares for, and
+no reasons for the rhyme beyond its necessity, and he will see what
+blot and havoc he will make in many an admired production of its
+day,--what marks of its inevitable fate. Bulky authors in particular,
+however safe they may think themselves, would do well to consider what
+parts of their cargo they might dispense with in their proposed voyage
+down the gulfs of time; for many a gallant vessel, thought
+indestructible in its age, has perished;--many a load of words,
+expected to be in eternal demand, gone to join the wrecks of
+self-love, or rotted in the warehouses of change and vicissitude. I
+have said the more on this point, because in an age when the true
+inspiration has undoubtedly been reawakened by Coleridge and his
+fellows, and we have so many new poets coming forward, it may be as
+well to give a general warning against that tendency to an
+accumulation and ostentation of _thoughts_, which is meant to be a
+refutation in full of the pretensions of all poetry less cogitabund,
+whatever may be the requirements of its class. Young writers should
+bear in mind, that even some of the very best materials for poetry are
+not poetry built; and that the smallest marble shrine, of exquisite
+workmanship, outvalues all that architect ever chipped away. Whatever
+can be so dispensed with is rubbish.
+
+_Variety_ in versification consists in whatsoever can be done for the
+prevention of monotony, by diversity of stops and cadences,
+distribution of emphasis, and retardation and acceleration of time;
+for the whole real secret of versification is a musical secret, and is
+not attainable to any vital effect, save by the ear of genius. All the
+mere knowledge of feet and numbers, of accent and quantity, will no
+more impart it, than a knowledge of the 'Guide to Music' will make a
+Beethoven or a Paisiello. It is a matter of sensibility and
+imagination; of the beautiful in poetical passion, accompanied by
+musical; of the imperative necessity for a pause here, and a cadence
+there, and a quicker or slower utterance in this or that place,
+created by analogies of sound with sense, by the fluctuations of
+feeling, by the demands of the gods and graces that visit the poet's
+harp, as the winds visit that of Aeolus. The same time and quantity
+which are occasioned by the spiritual part of this secret, thus become
+its formal ones,--not feet and syllables, long and short, iambics or
+trochees; which are the reduction of it to its _less_ than dry bones.
+You might get, for instance, not only ten and eleven, but thirteen or
+fourteen syllables into a rhyming, as well as blank, heroical verse,
+if time and the feeling permitted; and in irregular measure this is
+often done; just as musicians put twenty notes in a bar instead of
+two, quavers instead of minims, according as the feeling they are
+expressing impels them to fill up the time with short and hurried
+notes, or with long; or as the choristers in a cathedral retard or
+precipitate the words of the chant, according as the quantity of its
+notes, and the colon which divides the verse of the psalm, conspire to
+demand it. Had the moderns borne this principle in mind when they
+settled the prevailing systems of verse, instead of learning them, as
+they appear to have done, from the first drawling and one-syllabled
+notation of the church hymns, we should have retained all the
+advantages of the more numerous versification of the ancients, without
+being compelled to fancy that there was no alternative for us between
+our syllabical uniformity and the hexameters or other special forms
+unsuited to our tongues. But to leave this question alone, we will
+present the reader with a few sufficing specimens of the difference
+between monotony and variety in versification, first from Pope,
+Dryden, and Milton, and next from Gay and Coleridge. The following is
+the boasted melody of the nevertheless exquisite poet of the _Rape of
+the Lock_,--exquisite in his wit and fancy, though not in his numbers.
+The reader will observe that it is literally _see-saw_, like the
+rising and falling of a plank, with a light person at one end who is
+jerked up in the briefer time, and a heavier one who is set down more
+leisurely at the other. It is in the otherwise charming description of
+the heroine of that poem:
+
+    On her white breast--a sparkling cross she wore,
+    Which Jews might kiss--and infidels adore;
+    Her lively looks--a sprightly mind disclose,
+    Quick as her eyes--and as unfix'd as those;
+    Favours to none--to all she smiles extends,
+    Oft she rejects--but never once offends;
+    Bright as the sun--her eyes the gazers strike,
+    And like the sun--they shine on all alike;
+    Yet graceful ease--and sweetness void of pride,
+    Might hide her faults--if belles had faults to hide;
+    If to her share--some female errors fall,
+    Look on her face--and you'll forget them all.
+
+Compare with this the description of Iphigenia in one of Dryden's
+stories from Boccaccio:
+
+    It happen'd--on a summer's holiday,                        }
+    That to the greenwood shade--he took his way,              }
+    For Cymon shunn'd the church--and used not much to pray.   }
+    His quarter-staff--which he could ne'er forsake,
+    Hung half before--and half behind his back;
+    He trudg'd along--not knowing what he sought,
+    And whistled as he went--for want of thought.
+
+    By chance conducted--or by thirst constrain'd,
+    The deep recesses of a grove he gain'd:--
+    Where--in a plain defended by a wood,              }
+    Crept through the matted grass--a crystal flood,   }
+    By which--an alabaster fountain stood;             }
+    And on the margent of the fount was laid--
+    Attended by her slaves--a sleeping maid;
+    Like Dian and her nymphs--when, tir'd with sport,
+    To rest by cool Eurotas they resort.--
+    The dame herself--the goddess well express'd,
+    Not more distinguished by her purple vest--
+    Than by the charming features of the face--
+    And e'en in slumber--a superior grace:
+    Her comely limbs--compos'd with decent care,    }
+    Her body shaded--by a light cymar,              }
+    Her bosom to the view--was only bare;           }
+    Where two beginning paps were scarcely spied--
+    For yet their places were but signified.--
+    The fanning wind upon her bosom blows--                      }
+    To meet the fanning wind--the bosom rose;                    }
+    The fanning wind--and purling stream--continue her repose.   }
+
+For a further variety take, from the same author's _Theodore and
+Honoria_, a passage in which the couplets are run one into the other,
+and all of it modulated, like the former, according to the feeling
+demanded by the occasion:
+
+    Whilst listening to the murmuring leaves he stood--
+    More than a mile immers'd within the wood--
+    At once the wind was laid.|--The whispering sound
+    Was dumb.|--A rising earthquake rock'd the ground.
+    With deeper brown the grove was overspread--         }
+    A sudden horror seiz'd his giddy head--              }
+    And his ears tinkled--and his colour fled.           }
+
+    Nature was in alarm.--Some danger nigh
+    Seem'd threaten'd--though unseen to mortal eye.
+    Unus'd to fear--he summon'd all his soul,
+    And stood collected in himself--and whole:
+    Not long.--
+
+But for a crowning specimen of variety of pause and accent, apart from
+emotion, nothing can surpass the account, in _Paradise Lost_, of the
+Devil's search for an accomplice:
+
+                             There was a place,
+    Now not--though Sin--not Time--first wrought the change,
+    Where Tigris--at the foot of Paradise,
+    Into a gulf--shot under ground--till part
+    Rose up a fountain by the Tree of Life.
+    _In_ with the river sunk--and _with_ it _rose_
+    Satan--involv'd in rising mist--then sought
+    Where to lie hid.--Sea he had search'd--and land
+    From Eden over Pontus--and the pool
+    Maeotis--_up_ beyond the river _Ob_;
+    Downward as far antarctic;--and in length
+    West from Orontes--to the ocean barr'd
+    At Darien--thence to the land where flows
+    Ganges and Indus.--Thus the orb he roam'd
+    With narrow search;--and with inspection deep
+    Consider'd every creature--which of all
+    Most opportune might serve his wiles--and found
+    The serpent--subtlest beast of all the field.
+
+If the reader cast his eye again over this passage, he will not find a
+verse in it which is not varied and harmonized in the most remarkable
+manner. Let him notice in particular that curious balancing of the
+lines in the sixth and tenth verses:
+
+    _In_ with the river sunk, &c.
+
+and
+
+    _Up_ beyond the river _Ob_.
+
+It might, indeed, be objected to the versification of Milton, that it
+exhibits too constant a perfection of this kind. It sometimes forces
+upon us too great a sense of consciousness on the part of the
+composer. We miss the first sprightly runnings of verse,--the ease and
+sweetness of spontaneity. Milton, I think, also too often condenses
+weight into heaviness.
+
+Thus much concerning the chief of our two most popular measures. The
+other, called octo-syllabic, or the measure of eight syllables,
+offered such facilities for _namby-pamby_, that it had become a jest
+as early as the time of Shakespeare, who makes Touchstone call it the
+'butterwoman's rate to market', and the 'very false gallop of verses'.
+It has been advocated, in opposition to the heroic measure, upon the
+ground that ten syllables lead a man into epithets and other
+superfluities, while eight syllables compress him into a sensible and
+pithy gentleman. But the heroic measure laughs at it. So far from
+compressing, it converts one line into two, and sacrifices everything
+to the quick and importunate return of the rhyme. With Dryden, compare
+Gay, even in the strength of Gay,--
+
+    The wind was high, the window shakes;
+    With sudden start the miser wakes;
+    Along the silent room he stalks,
+
+(A miser never 'stalks'; but a rhyme was desired for 'walks')
+
+    Looks back, and trembles as he walks:
+    Each lock and every bolt he tries,
+    In every creek and corner pries;
+    Then opes the chest with treasure stor'd,
+    And stands in rapture o'er his hoard;
+
+('Hoard' and 'treasure stor'd' are just made for one another)
+
+    But now, with sudden qualms possess'd,
+    He wrings his hands, he beats his breast;
+    By conscience stung, he wildly stares,
+    And thus his guilty soul declares.
+
+And so he denounces his gold, as miser never denounced it; and sighs,
+because
+
+    Virtue resides on earth no more!
+
+Coleridge saw the mistake which had been made with regard to this
+measure, and restored it to the beautiful freedom of which it was
+capable, by calling to mind the liberties allowed its old musical
+professors the minstrels, and dividing it by _time_ instead of
+_syllables_;--by the _beat of four_ into which you might get as many
+syllables as you could, instead of allotting eight syllables to the
+poor time, whatever it might have to say. He varied it further with
+alternate rhymes and stanzas, with rests and omissions precisely
+analogous to those in music, and rendered it altogether worthy to
+utter the manifold thoughts and feelings of himself and his lady
+Christabel. He even ventures, with an exquisite sense of solemn
+strangeness and licence (for there is witchcraft going forward), to
+introduce a couplet of blank verse, itself as mystically and
+beautifully modulated as anything in the music of Gluck or Weber.
+
+    'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
+    And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock;
+    Tu-whit!--Tu-whoo!
+    And hark, again! the crowing cock,
+    _How drowsily he crew._
+    Sir Leoline, the baron rich,
+    Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
+    From her kennel beneath the rock
+    She maketh answer to the clock,
+    _Four f[)o]r th[)e] quart[)e]rs [)a]nd twelve f[)o]r th[)e] hour,_
+    Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
+    Sixteen short howls, not over loud:
+    Some say, she sees my lady's shroud.
+
+    _Is the night chilly and dark?
+    The night is chilly, but not dark._
+    The thin grey cloud is spread on high,
+    It covers, but not hides, the sky.
+    The moon is behind, and at the full,
+    And yet she looks both small and dull.
+    The night is chilly, the cloud is grey;
+
+(These are not superfluities, but mysterious returns of importunate
+feeling)
+
+    _'Tis a month before the month of May,
+    And the spring comes slowly up this way._
+    The lovely lady, Christabel,
+    Whom her father loves so well,
+    What makes her in the wood so late,
+    A furlong from the castle-gate?
+
+    She had dreams all yesternight
+    Of her own betrothed knight;
+    And she [)i]n th[)e] midnight wood will pray
+    For the weal [)o]f h[)e]r lover that's far away.
+
+    She stole along, she nothing spoke,
+    The sighs she heav'd were soft and low,
+    And nought was green upon the oak,
+    But moss and rarest mistletoe;
+    She kneels beneath the huge oak tree,
+    And in silence prayeth she.
+
+    The lady sprang up suddenly,
+    The lovely lady, Christabel!
+    It moan'd as near as near can be,
+    But what it is, she cannot tell.
+    On the other side it seems to be
+    Of th[)e] huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree.
+
+    The night is chill, the forest bare;
+    Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?
+
+(This 'bleak moaning' is a witch's)
+
+    There is not wind enough in the air
+    To move away the ringlet curl
+    From the lovely lady's cheek--
+    There is not wind enough to twirl
+    _The one red leaf, the last [)o]f [)i]ts clan,
+    That danc[)e]s [)a]s oft[)e]n [)a]s dance it can,
+    Hang[)i]ng s[)o] light and hang[)i]ng s[)o] high,
+    On th[)e] topmost twig th[)a]t lo[)o]ks up [)a]t th[)e] sky._
+
+    Hush, beating heart of Christabel!
+    Jesu Maria, shield her well!
+    She folded her arms beneath her cloak,
+    And stole to the other side of the oak.
+          What sees she there?
+
+    There she sees a damsel bright,
+    Drest in a robe of silken white,
+    That shadowy in the moonlight shone:
+    The neck that made that white robe wan,
+    Her stately neck and arms were bare:
+    Her blue-vein'd feet unsandall'd were;
+    And wildly glitter'd, here and there,
+    The gems entangled in her hair.
+    I guess 'twas _frightful_ there to see
+    _A lady so richly clad as she--
+    Beautiful exceedingly._
+
+The principle of Variety in Uniformity is here worked out in a style
+'beyond the reach of art'. Everything is diversified according to the
+demand of the moment, of the sounds, the sights, the emotions; the
+very uniformity of the outline is gently varied; and yet we feel that
+_the whole is one and of the same character_, the single and sweet
+unconsciousness of the heroine making all the rest seem more
+conscious, and ghastly, and expectant. It is thus that _versification
+itself becomes part of the sentiment of a poem_, and vindicates the
+pains that have been taken to show its importance. I know of no very
+fine versification unaccompanied with fine poetry; no poetry of a mean
+order accompanied with verse of the highest.
+
+As to Rhyme, which might be thought too insignificant to mention, it
+is not at all so. The universal consent of modern Europe, and of the
+East in all ages, has made it one of the musical beauties of verse for
+all poetry but epic and dramatic, and even for the former with
+Southern Europe,--a sustainment for the enthusiasm, and a demand to
+enjoy. The mastery of it consists in never writing it for its own
+sake, or at least never appearing to do so; in knowing how to vary
+it, to give it novelty, to render it more or less strong, to divide
+it (when not in couplets) at the proper intervals, to repeat it many
+times where luxury or animal spirits demand it (see an instance in
+Titania's speech to the Fairies), to impress an affecting or startling
+remark with it, and to make it, in comic poetry, a new and surprising
+addition to the jest.
+
+    Large was his bounty and his soul sincere,
+      Heav'n did a recompense as largely send;
+    He gave to misery all he had, _a tear_;
+      He gain'd from heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) _a friend_.
+
+                                 Gray's _Elegy_.
+
+    The fops are proud of scandal; for they cry
+    At every lewd, low character, 'That's _I_'.
+
+                                 Dryden's _Prologue to the Pilgrim_.
+
+    What makes all doctrines plain and clear?
+    _About two hundred pounds a-year._
+    And that which was proved true before,
+    Prove false again? _Two hundred more._
+
+                                 _Hudibras._
+
+    Compound for sins they are _inclin'd to_,
+    By damning those they have _no mind to_.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+    ----Stor'd with deletery _med'cines_,
+    Which whosoever took is _dead since_.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+Sometimes it is a grace in a master like Butler to force his rhyme,
+thus showing a laughing wilful power over the most stubborn materials:
+
+                                  Win
+    The women, and make them draw in
+    The men, as Indians with a _female_
+    Tame elephant inveigle _the_ male.
+
+                                 _Hudibras._
+
+    He made an instrument to know
+    If the moon shines at full or no;
+    That would, as soon as e'er she _shone, straight_
+    Whether 'twere day or night _demonstrate_;
+    Tell what her diameter to an _inch is_,
+    And prove that she's not made of _green cheese_.
+
+                                 _Id._
+
+Pronounce it, by all means, _grinches_, to make the joke more wilful.
+The happiest triple rhyme, perhaps, that ever was written, is in _Don
+Juan_:
+
+    But oh! ye lords of ladies _intellectual_,
+    Inform us truly,--haven't they _hen-peck'd you all_?
+
+The sweepingness of the assumption completes the flowing breadth of
+effect.
+
+Dryden confessed that a rhyme often gave him a thought. Probably the
+happy word 'sprung' in the following passage from Ben Jonson was
+suggested by it; but then the poet must have had the feeling in him.
+
+      --Let our trumpets sound,
+    And cleave both air and ground
+      With beating of our drums.
+    Let every lyre be strung,
+    Harp, lute, theorbo, _sprung_
+      _With touch of dainty thumbs_.
+
+Boileau's trick for appearing to rhyme naturally was to compose the
+second line of his couplet first! which gives one the crowning idea of
+the 'artificial school of poetry'. Perhaps the most perfect master of
+rhyme, the easiest and most abundant, was the greatest writer of
+comedy that the world has seen,--Moliere.
+
+If a young reader should ask, after all, What is the quickest way of
+knowing bad poets from good, the best poets from the next best, and so
+on? the answer is, the only and twofold way: first, the perusal of the
+best poets with the greatest attention; and, second, the cultivation
+of that love of truth and beauty which made them what they are. Every
+true reader of poetry partakes a more than ordinary portion of the
+poetic nature; and no one can be completely such, who does not love,
+or take an interest in, everything that interests the poet, from the
+firmament to the daisy,--from the highest heart of man to the most
+pitiable of the low. It is a good practice to read with pen in hand,
+marking what is liked or doubted. It rivets the attention, realizes
+the greatest amount of enjoyment, and facilitates reference. It
+enables the reader also, from time to time, to see what progress he
+makes with his own mind, and how it grows up towards the stature of
+its exalter.
+
+If the same person should ask, What class of poetry is the highest? I
+should say, undoubtedly, the Epic; for it includes the drama, with
+narration besides; or the speaking and action of the characters, with
+the speaking of the poet himself, whose utmost address is taxed to
+relate all well for so long a time, particularly in the passages least
+sustained by enthusiasm. Whether this class has included the greatest
+poet, is another question still under trial; for Shakespeare perplexes
+all such verdicts, even when the claimant is Homer; though, if a
+judgement may be drawn from his early narratives (_Venus and Adonis_,
+and the _Rape of Lucrece_), it is to be doubted whether even
+Shakespeare could have told a story like Homer, owing to that
+incessant activity and superfoetation of thought, a little less of
+which might be occasionally desired even in his plays;--if it were
+possible, once possessing anything of his, to wish it away. Next to
+Homer and Shakespeare come such narrators as the less universal, but
+still intenser Dante; Milton, with his dignified imagination; the
+universal, profoundly simple Chaucer; and luxuriant, remote
+Spenser--immortal child in poetry's most poetic solitudes: then the
+great second-rate dramatists; unless those who are better acquainted
+with Greek tragedy than I am, demand a place for them before Chaucer:
+then the airy yet robust universality of Ariosto; the hearty,
+out-of-door nature of Theocritus, also a universalist; the finest
+lyrical poets (who only take short flights, compared with the
+narrators); the purely contemplative poets who have more thought than
+feeling; the descriptive, satirical, didactic, epigrammatic. It is to
+be borne in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior class
+may be superior to followers in the train of a higher one, though the
+superiority is by no means to be taken for granted; otherwise Pope
+would be superior to Fletcher, and Butler to Pope. Imagination,
+teeming with action and character, makes the greatest poets; feeling
+and thought the next; fancy (by itself) the next; wit the last.
+Thought by itself makes no poet at all; for the mere conclusions of
+the understanding can at best be only so many intellectual matters of
+fact. Feeling, even destitute of conscious thought, stands a far
+better poetical chance; feeling being a sort of thought without the
+process of thinking,--a grasper of the truth without seeing it. And
+what is very remarkable, feeling seldom makes the blunders that
+thought does. An idle distinction has been made between taste and
+judgement. Taste is the very maker of judgement. Put an artificial
+fruit in your mouth, or only handle it, and you will soon perceive the
+difference between judging from taste or tact, and judging from the
+abstract figment called judgement. The latter does but throw you into
+guesses and doubts. Hence the conceits that astonish us in the
+gravest, and even subtlest, thinkers, whose taste is not proportionate
+to their mental perceptions; men like Donne, for instance; who, apart
+from accidental personal impressions, seem to look at nothing as it
+really is, but only as to what may be thought of it. Hence, on the
+other hand, the delightfulness of those poets who never violate truth
+of feeling, whether in things real or imaginary; who are always
+consistent with their object and its requirements; and who run the
+great round of nature, not to perplex and be perplexed, but to make
+themselves and us happy. And luckily, delightfulness is not
+incompatible with greatness, willing soever as men may be in their
+present imperfect state to set the power to subjugate above the power
+to please. Truth, of any great kind whatsoever, makes great writing.
+This is the reason why such poets as Ariosto, though not writing with
+a constant detail of thought and feeling like Dante, are justly
+considered great as well as delightful. Their greatness proves itself
+by the same truth of nature, and sustained power, though in a
+different way. Their action is not so crowded and weighty; their
+sphere has more territories less fertile; but it has enchantments of
+its own, which excess of thought would spoil,--luxuries, laughing
+graces, animal spirits; and not to recognize the beauty and greatness
+of these, treated as they treat them, is simply to be defective in
+sympathy. Every planet is not Mars or Saturn. There is also Venus and
+Mercury. There is one genius of the south, and another of the north,
+and others uniting both. The reader who is too thoughtless or too
+sensitive to like intensity of any sort, and he who is too thoughtful
+or too dull to like anything but the greatest possible stimulus of
+reflection or passion, are equally wanting in complexional fitness
+for a thorough enjoyment of books. Ariosto occasionally says as fine
+things as Dante, and Spenser as Shakespeare; but the business of both
+is to enjoy; and in order to partake their enjoyment to its full
+extent, you must feel what poetry is in the general as well as the
+particular, must be aware that there are different songs of the
+spheres, some fuller of notes, and others of a sustained delight; and
+as the former keep you perpetually alive to thought or passion, so
+from the latter you receive a constant harmonious sense of truth and
+beauty, more agreeable perhaps on the whole, though less exciting.
+Ariosto, for instance, does not _tell a story_ with the brevity and
+concentrated passion of Dante; every sentence is not so full of
+matter, nor the style so removed from the indifference of prose; yet
+you are charmed with a truth of another sort, equally characteristic
+of the writer, equally drawn from nature and substituting a healthy
+sense of enjoyment for intenser emotion. Exclusiveness of liking for
+this or that mode of truth, only shows, either that a reader's
+perceptions are limited, or that he would sacrifice truth itself to
+his favourite form of it. Sir Walter Raleigh, who was as trenchant
+with his pen as his sword, hailed the _Faerie Queene_ of his friend
+Spenser in verses in which he said that 'Petrarch' was thenceforward
+to be no more heard of; and that in all English poetry, there was
+nothing he counted 'of any price' but the effusions of the new author.
+Yet Petrarch is still living; Chaucer was not abolished by Sir Walter;
+and Shakespeare is thought somewhat valuable. A botanist might as well
+have said, that myrtles and oaks were to disappear, because acacias
+had come up. It is with the poet's creations, as with nature's, great
+or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their amount, can be
+worthily shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our
+hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether in productions grand and
+beautiful as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no
+bigger and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets;
+whether in Homer's epic or Gray's _Elegy_, in the enchanted gardens of
+Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the _Schoolmistress_ of
+Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and
+feel this, is to be deficient in the universality of Nature herself,
+who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who
+calls upon us to admire all her productions; not indeed with the same
+degree of admiration, but with no refusal of it, except to defect.
+
+I cannot draw this essay towards its conclusion better than with three
+memorable words of Milton; who has said, that poetry, in comparison
+with science, is 'simple, sensuous, and passionate'. By simple, he
+means unperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of
+imagery; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware that
+different constructions have been put on some of these words; but the
+context seems to me to necessitate those before us. I quote, however,
+not from the original, but from an extract in the _Remarks on Paradise
+Lost_ by Richardson.
+
+What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and
+truth;--what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the
+false. He will get no good by proposing to be 'in earnest at the
+moment'. His earnestness must be innate and habitual; born with him,
+and felt to be his most precious inheritance. 'I expect neither
+profit nor general fame by my writings,' says Coleridge, in the
+Preface to his Poems; 'and I consider myself as having been amply
+repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its "_own exceeding great
+reward_"; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined
+my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit
+of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets
+and surrounds me.'
+
+'Poetry', says Shelley, 'lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the
+world, _and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar_.
+It reproduces all that it represents; and the impersonations clothed
+in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who
+have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted
+content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which
+it co-exists. The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of
+our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
+which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be
+greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put
+himself in the place of another, and of many others: the pains and
+pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of
+moral good is imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by
+acting upon the cause.'
+
+I would not willingly say anything after perorations like these; but
+as treatises on poetry may chance to have auditors who think
+themselves called upon to vindicate the superiority of what is termed
+useful knowledge, it may be as well to add, that if the poet may be
+allowed to pique himself on any one thing more than another, compared
+with those who undervalue him, it is on that power of undervaluing
+nobody, and no attainments different from his own, which is given him
+by the very faculty of imagination they despise. The greater includes
+the less. They do not see that their inability to comprehend him
+argues the smaller capacity. No man recognizes the worth of utility
+more than the poet: he only desires that the meaning of the term may
+not come short of its greatness, and exclude the noblest necessities
+of his fellow-creatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance,
+with the facilities for rapid conveyance afforded him by the railroad,
+as the dullest confiner of its advantages to that single idea, or as
+the greatest two-idea'd man who varies that single idea with hugging
+himself on his 'buttons' or his good dinner. But he sees also the
+beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the
+heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming along like
+a magic horse, of the affections that are carrying, perhaps, half the
+passengers on their journey, nay, of those of the great two-idea'd
+man; and, beyond all this, he discerns the incalculable amount of
+good, and knowledge, and refinement, and mutual consideration, which
+this wonderful invention is fitted to circulate over the globe,
+perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and certainly to the
+diffusion of millions of enjoyments.
+
+'And a button-maker, after all, invented it!' cries our friend.
+
+Pardon me--it was a nobleman. A button-maker may be a very excellent,
+and a very poetical man too, and yet not have been the first man
+visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the combination of water
+and fire. It was a nobleman who first thought of this most poetical
+bit of science. It was a nobleman who first thought of it--a captain
+who first tried it--and a button-maker who perfected it. And he who
+put the nobleman on such thoughts was the great philosopher, Bacon,
+who said that poetry had 'something divine in it', and was necessary
+to the satisfaction of the human mind.
+
+
+
+
+MATTHEW ARNOLD
+
+1822-1888
+
+THE CHOICE OF SUBJECTS IN POETRY
+
+[Preface to 'Poems', 1853]
+
+
+In two small volumes of Poems, published anonymously, one in 1849, the
+other in 1852, many of the Poems which compose the present volume have
+already appeared. The rest are now published for the first time.
+
+I have, in the present collection, omitted the Poem from which the
+volume published in 1852 took its title. I have done so, not because
+the subject of it was a Sicilian Greek born between two and three
+thousand years ago, although many persons would think this a
+sufficient reason. Neither have I done so because I had, in my own
+opinion, failed in the delineation which I intended to effect. I
+intended to delineate the feelings of one of the last of the Greek
+religious philosophers, one of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus,
+having survived his fellows, living on into a time when the habits of
+Greek thought and feeling had begun fast to change, character to
+dwindle, the influence of the Sophists to prevail. Into the feelings
+of a man so situated there entered much that we are accustomed to
+consider as exclusively modern; how much, the fragments of Empedocles
+himself which remain to us are sufficient at least to indicate. What
+those who are familiar only with the great monuments of early Greek
+genius suppose to be its exclusive characteristics, have disappeared;
+the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have
+disappeared: the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced;
+modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts,
+we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.
+
+The representation of such a man's feelings must be interesting, if
+consistently drawn. We all naturally take pleasure, says Aristotle, in
+any imitation or representation whatever: this is the basis of our
+love of Poetry: and we take pleasure in them, he adds, because all
+knowledge is naturally agreeable to us; not to the philosopher only,
+but to mankind at large. Every representation therefore which is
+consistently drawn may be supposed to be interesting, inasmuch as it
+gratifies this natural interest in knowledge of all kinds. What is
+_not_ interesting, is that which does not add to our knowledge of any
+kind; that which is vaguely conceived and loosely drawn; a
+representation which is general, indeterminate, and faint, instead of
+being particular, precise, and firm.
+
+Any accurate representation may therefore be expected to be
+interesting; but, if the representation be a poetical one, more than
+this is demanded. It is demanded, not only that it shall interest, but
+also that it shall inspirit and rejoice the reader: that it shall
+convey a charm, and infuse delight. For the Muses, as Hesiod says,
+were born that they might be 'a forgetfulness of evils, and a truce
+from cares'; and it is not enough that the Poet should add to the
+knowledge of men, it is required of him also that he should add to
+their happiness. 'All Art', says Schiller, 'is dedicated to Joy, and
+there is no higher and no more serious problem, than how to make men
+happy. The right Art is that alone, which creates the highest
+enjoyment.'
+
+A poetical work, therefore, is not yet justified when it has been
+shown to be an accurate, and therefore interesting, representation; it
+has to be shown also that it is a representation from which men can
+derive enjoyment. In presence of the most tragic circumstances,
+represented in a work of Art, the feeling of enjoyment, as is well
+known, may still subsist: the representation of the most utter
+calamity, of the liveliest anguish, is not sufficient to destroy it:
+the more tragic the situation, the deeper becomes the enjoyment; and
+the situation is more tragic in proportion as it becomes more
+terrible.
+
+What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though
+accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in
+which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous
+state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope,
+or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to
+be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in
+the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in
+actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them
+in poetry is painful also.
+
+To this class of situations, poetically faulty as it appears to me,
+that of Empedocles, as I have endeavoured to represent him, belongs;
+and I have therefore excluded the Poem from the present collection.
+
+And why, it may be asked, have I entered into this explanation
+respecting a matter so unimportant as the admission or exclusion of
+the Poem in question? I have done so, because I was anxious to avow
+that the sole reason for its exclusion was that which has been stated
+above; and that it has not been excluded in deference to the opinion
+which many critics of the present day appear to entertain against
+subjects chosen from distant times and countries: against the choice,
+in short, of any subjects but modern ones.
+
+'The Poet,' it is said, and by an intelligent critic, 'the Poet who
+would really fix the public attention must leave the exhausted past,
+and draw his subjects from matters of present import, and _therefore_
+both of interest and novelty.'
+
+Now this view I believe to be completely false. It is worth examining,
+inasmuch as it is a fair sample of a class of critical dicta
+everywhere current at the present day, having a philosophical form and
+air, but no real basis in fact; and which are calculated to vitiate
+the judgement of readers of poetry, while they exert, so far as they
+are adopted, a misleading influence on the practice of those who write
+it.
+
+What are the eternal objects of Poetry, among all nations and at all
+times? They are actions; human actions; possessing an inherent
+interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an
+interesting manner by the art of the Poet. Vainly will the latter
+imagine that he has everything in his own power; that he can make an
+intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent
+one by his treatment of it: he may indeed compel us to admire his
+skill, but his work will possess, within itself, an incurable defect.
+
+The Poet, then, has in the first place to select an excellent action;
+and what actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most
+powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those
+elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which
+are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same;
+that which interests them is permanent and the same also. The
+modernness or antiquity of an action, therefore, has nothing to do
+with its fitness for poetical representation; this depends upon its
+inherent qualities. To the elementary part of our nature, to our
+passions, that which is great and passionate is eternally interesting;
+and interesting solely in proportion to its greatness and to its
+passion. A great human action of a thousand years ago is more
+interesting to it than a smaller human action of to-day, even though
+upon the representation of this last the most consummate skill may
+have been expended, and though it has the advantage of appealing by
+its modern language, familiar manners, and contemporary allusions, to
+all our transient feelings and interests. These, however, have no
+right to demand of a poetical work that it shall satisfy them; their
+claims are to be directed elsewhere. Poetical works belong to the
+domain of our permanent passions: let them interest these, and the
+voice of all subordinate claims upon them is at once silenced.
+
+Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido--what modern poem presents
+personages as interesting, even to us moderns, as these personages of
+an 'exhausted past'? We have the domestic epic dealing with the
+details of modern life which pass daily under our eyes; we have poems
+representing modern personages in contact with the problems of modern
+life, moral, intellectual, and social; these works have been produced
+by poets the most distinguished of their nation and time; yet I
+fearlessly assert that _Hermann and Dorothea_, _Childe Harold_,
+_Jocelyn_, _The Excursion_, leave the reader cold in comparison with
+the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the
+_Orestea_, or by the episode of Dido. And why is this? Simply because
+in the three latter cases the action is greater, the personages
+nobler, the situations more intense: and this is the true basis of the
+interest in a poetical work, and this alone.
+
+It may be urged, however, that past actions may be interesting in
+themselves, but that they are not to be adopted by the modern Poet,
+because it is impossible for him to have them clearly present to his
+own mind, and he cannot therefore feel them deeply, nor represent them
+forcibly. But this is not necessarily the case. The externals of a
+past action, indeed, he cannot know with the precision of a
+contemporary; but his business is with its essentials. The outward man
+of Oedipus or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the
+ceremonies of their courts, he cannot accurately figure to himself;
+but neither do they essentially concern him. His business is with
+their inward man; with their feelings and behaviour in certain tragic
+situations, which engage their passions as men; these have in them
+nothing local and casual; they are as accessible to the modern Poet as
+to a contemporary.
+
+The date of an action, then, signifies nothing: the action itself, its
+selection and construction, this is what is all-important. This the
+Greeks understood far more clearly than we do. The radical difference
+between their poetical theory and ours consists, as it appears to me,
+in this: that, with them, the poetical character of the action in
+itself, and the conduct of it, was the first consideration; with us,
+attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts and
+images which occur in the treatment of an action. They regarded the
+whole; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over
+the expression of it; with us, the expression predominates over the
+action. Not that they failed in expression, or were inattentive to it;
+on the contrary, they are the highest models of expression, the
+unapproached masters of the _grand style_: but their expression is so
+excellent because it is so admirably kept in its right degree of
+prominence; because it is so simple and so well subordinated; because
+it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it
+conveys. For what reason was the Greek tragic poet confined to so
+limited a range of subjects? Because there are so few actions which
+unite in themselves, in the highest degree, the conditions of
+excellence: and it was not thought that on any but an excellent
+subject could an excellent Poem be constructed. A few actions,
+therefore, eminently adapted for tragedy, maintained almost exclusive
+possession of the Greek tragic stage; their significance appeared
+inexhaustible; they were as permanent problems, perpetually offered to
+the genius of every fresh poet. This too is the reason of what appears
+to us moderns a certain baldness of expression in Greek tragedy; of
+the triviality with which we often reproach the remarks of the
+Chorus, where it takes part in the dialogue: that the action itself,
+the situation of Orestes, or Merope, or Alcmaeon, was to stand the
+central point of interest, unforgotten, absorbing, principal; that no
+accessories were for a moment to distract the spectator's attention
+from this; that the tone of the parts was to be perpetually kept down,
+in order not to impair the grandiose effect of the whole. The terrible
+old mythic story on which the drama was founded stood, before he
+entered the theatre, traced in its bare outlines upon the spectator's
+mind; it stood in his memory, as a group of statuary, faintly seen, at
+the end of a long and dark vista: then came the Poet, embodying
+outlines, developing situations, not a word wasted, not a sentiment
+capriciously thrown in; stroke upon stroke, the drama proceeded: the
+light deepened upon the group; more and more it revealed itself to the
+riveted gaze of the spectator: until at last, when the final words
+were spoken, it stood before him in broad sunlight, a model of
+immortal beauty.
+
+This was what a Greek critic demanded; this was what a Greek poet
+endeavoured to effect. It signified nothing to what time an action
+belonged; we do not find that the _Persae_ occupied a particularly
+high rank among the dramas of Aeschylus, because it represented a
+matter of contemporary interest: this was not what a cultivated
+Athenian required; he required that the permanent elements of his
+nature should be moved; and dramas of which the action, though taken
+from a long-distant mythic time, yet was calculated to accomplish this
+in a higher degree than that of the _Persae_, stood higher in his
+estimation accordingly. The Greeks felt, no doubt, with their
+exquisite sagacity of taste, that an action of present times was too
+near them, too much mixed up with what was accidental and passing, to
+form a sufficiently grand, detached, and self-subsistent object for a
+tragic poem: such objects belonged to the domain of the comic poet,
+and of the lighter kinds of poetry. For the more serious kinds, for
+_pragmatic_ poetry, to use an excellent expression of Polybius, they
+were more difficult and severe in the range of subjects which they
+permitted. Their theory and practice alike, the admirable treatise of
+Aristotle, and the unrivalled works of their poets, exclaim with a
+thousand tongues--'All depends upon the subject; choose a fitting
+action, penetrate yourself with the feeling of its situations; this
+done, everything else will follow.'
+
+But for all kinds of poetry alike there was one point on which they
+were rigidly exacting; the adaptability of the subject to the kind of
+poetry selected, and the careful construction of the poem.
+
+How different a way of thinking from this is ours! We can hardly at
+the present day understand what Menander meant, when he told a man who
+inquired as to the progress of his comedy that he had finished it, not
+having yet written a single line, because he had constructed the
+action of it in his mind. A modern critic would have assured him that
+the merit of his piece depended on the brilliant things which arose
+under his pen as he went along. We have poems which seem to exist
+merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of
+producing any total impression. We have critics who seem to direct
+their attention merely to detached expressions, to the language about
+the action, not to the action itself. I verily think that the
+majority of them do not in their hearts believe that there is such a
+thing as a total-impression to be derived from a poem at all, or to be
+demanded from a poet; they think the term a commonplace of
+metaphysical criticism. They will permit the Poet to select any action
+he pleases, and to suffer that action to go as it will, provided he
+gratifies them with occasional bursts of fine writing, and with a
+shower of isolated thoughts and images. That is, they permit him to
+leave their poetical sense ungratified, provided that he gratifies
+their rhetorical sense and their curiosity. Of his neglecting to
+gratify these, there is little danger; he needs rather to be warned
+against the danger of attempting to gratify these alone; he needs
+rather to be perpetually reminded to prefer his action to everything
+else; so to treat this, as to permit its inherent excellences to
+develop themselves, without interruption from the intrusion of his
+personal peculiarities: most fortunate when he most entirely succeeds
+in effacing himself, and in enabling a noble action to subsist as it
+did in nature.
+
+But the modern critic not only permits a false practice; he absolutely
+prescribes false aims.--'A true allegory of the state of one's own
+mind in a representative history,' the Poet is told, 'is perhaps the
+highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry.'--And
+accordingly he attempts it. An allegory of the state of one's own
+mind, the highest problem of an art which imitates actions! No
+assuredly, it is not, it never can be so: no great poetical work has
+ever been produced with such an aim. _Faust_ itself, in which
+something of the kind is attempted, wonderful passages as it contains,
+and in spite of the unsurpassed beauty of the scenes which relate to
+Margaret, _Faust_ itself, judged as a whole, and judged strictly as a
+poetical work, is defective: its illustrious author, the greatest poet
+of modern times, the greatest critic of all times, would have been the
+first to acknowledge it; he only defended his work, indeed, by
+asserting it to be 'something incommensurable'.
+
+The confusion of the present times is great, the multitude of voices
+counselling different things bewildering, the number of existing works
+capable of attracting a young writer's attention and of becoming his
+models, immense: what he wants is a hand to guide him through the
+confusion, a voice to prescribe to him the aim which he should keep in
+view, and to explain to him that the value of the literary works which
+offer themselves to his attention is relative to their power of
+helping him forward on his road towards this aim. Such a guide the
+English writer at the present day will nowhere find. Failing this, all
+that can be looked for, all indeed that can be desired, is, that his
+attention should be fixed on excellent models; that he may reproduce,
+at any rate, something of their excellence, by penetrating himself
+with their works and by catching their spirit, if he cannot be taught
+to produce what is excellent independently.
+
+Foremost among these models for the English writer stands Shakespeare:
+a name the greatest perhaps of all poetical names; a name never to be
+mentioned without reverence. I will venture, however, to express a
+doubt, whether the influence of his works, excellent and fruitful for
+the readers of poetry, for the great majority, has been of unmixed
+advantage to the writers of it. Shakespeare indeed chose excellent
+subjects; the world could afford no better than Macbeth, or Romeo and
+Juliet, or Othello: he had no theory respecting the necessity of
+choosing subjects of present import, or the paramount interest
+attaching to allegories of the state of one's own mind; like all great
+poets, he knew well what constituted a poetical action; like them,
+wherever he found such an action, he took it; like them, too, he found
+his best in past times. But to these general characteristics of all
+great poets, he added a special one of his own; a gift, namely, of
+happy, abundant, and ingenious expression, eminent and unrivalled: so
+eminent as irresistibly to strike the attention first in him, and even
+to throw into comparative shade his other excellences as a poet. Here
+has been the mischief. These other excellences were his fundamental
+excellences _as a poet_; what distinguishes the artist from the mere
+amateur, says Goethe, is _Architectonice_ in the highest sense; that
+power of execution, which creates, forms, and constitutes: not the
+profoundness of single thoughts, not the richness of imagery, not the
+abundance of illustration. But these attractive accessories of a
+poetical work being more easily seized than the spirit of the whole,
+and these accessories being possessed by Shakespeare in an unequalled
+degree, a young writer having recourse to Shakespeare as his model
+runs great risk of being vanquished and absorbed by them, and, in
+consequence, of reproducing, according to the measure of his power,
+these, and these alone. Of this preponderating quality of
+Shakespeare's genius, accordingly, almost the whole of modern English
+poetry has, it appears to me, felt the influence. To the exclusive
+attention on the part of his imitators to this it is in a great degree
+owing, that of the majority of modern poetical works the details
+alone are valuable, the composition worthless. In reading them one is
+perpetually reminded of that terrible sentence on a modern French
+poet--_il dit tout ce qu'il veut, mais malheureusement il n'a rien a
+dire_.
+
+Let me give an instance of what I mean. I will take it from the works
+of the very chief among those who seem to have been formed in the
+school of Shakespeare: of one whose exquisite genius and pathetic
+death render him for ever interesting. I will take the poem of
+_Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, by Keats. I choose this rather than
+the _Endymion_, because the latter work (which a modern critic has
+classed with the _Faerie Queene_!), although undoubtedly there blows
+through it the breath of genius, is yet as a whole so utterly
+incoherent, as not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all. The
+poem of _Isabella_, then, is a perfect treasure-house of graceful and
+felicitous words and images: almost in every stanza there occurs one
+of those vivid and picturesque turns of expression, by which the
+object is made to flash upon the eye of the mind, and which thrill the
+reader with a sudden delight. This one short poem contains, perhaps, a
+greater number of happy single expressions which one could quote than
+all the extant tragedies of Sophocles. But the action, the story? The
+action in itself is an excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by
+the Poet, so loosely constructed, that the effect produced by it, in
+and for itself, is absolutely null. Let the reader, after he has
+finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story in the _Decameron_:
+he will then feel how pregnant and interesting the same action has
+become in the hands of a great artist, who above all things
+delineates his object; who subordinates expression to that which it is
+designed to express.
+
+I have said that the imitators of Shakespeare, fixing their attention
+on his wonderful gift of expression, have directed their imitation to
+this, neglecting his other excellences. These excellences, the
+fundamental excellences of poetical art, Shakespeare no doubt
+possessed them--possessed many of them in a splendid degree; but it
+may perhaps be doubted whether even he himself did not sometimes give
+scope to his faculty of expression to the prejudice of a higher
+poetical duty. For we must never forget that Shakespeare is the great
+poet he is from his skill in discerning and firmly conceiving an
+excellent action, from his power of intensely feeling a situation, of
+intimately associating himself with a character; not from his gift of
+expression, which rather even leads him astray, degenerating sometimes
+into a fondness for curiosity of expression, into an irritability of
+fancy, which seems to make it impossible for him to say a thing
+plainly, even when the press of the action demands the very directest
+language, or its level character the very simplest. Mr. Hallam, than
+whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has
+had the courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark,
+how extremely and faultily difficult Shakespeare's language often is.
+It is so: you may find main scenes in some of his greatest tragedies,
+_King Lear_ for instance, where the language is so artificial, so
+curiously tortured, and so difficult, that every speech has to be read
+two or three times before its meaning can be comprehended. This
+overcuriousness of expression is indeed but the excessive employment
+of a wonderful gift--of the power of saying a thing in a happier way
+than any other man; nevertheless, it is carried so far that one
+understands what M. Guizot meant, when he said that Shakespeare
+appears in his language to have tried all styles except that of
+simplicity. He has not the severe and scrupulous self-restraint of the
+ancients, partly, no doubt, because he had a far less cultivated and
+exacting audience: he has indeed a far wider range than they had, a
+far richer fertility of thought; in this respect he rises above them:
+in his strong conception of his subject, in the genuine way in which
+he is penetrated with it, he resembles them, and is unlike the
+moderns: but in the accurate limitation of it, the conscientious
+rejection of superfluities, the simple and rigorous development of it
+from the first line of his work to the last, he falls below them, and
+comes nearer to the moderns. In his chief works, besides what he has
+of his own, he has the elementary soundness of the ancients; he has
+their important action and their large and broad manner: but he has
+not their purity of method. He is therefore a less safe model; for
+what he has of his own is personal, and inseparable from his own rich
+nature; it may be imitated and exaggerated, it cannot be learned or
+applied as an art; he is above all suggestive; more valuable,
+therefore, to young writers as men than as artists. But clearness of
+arrangement, rigour of development, simplicity of style--these may to
+a certain extent be learned: and these may, I am convinced, be learned
+best from the ancients, who, although infinitely less suggestive than
+Shakespeare, are thus, to the artist, more instructive.
+
+What then, it will be asked, are the ancients to be our sole models?
+the ancients with their comparatively narrow range of experience, and
+their widely different circumstances? Not, certainly, that which is
+narrow in the ancients, nor that in which we can no longer sympathize.
+An action like the action of the _Antigone_ of Sophocles, which turns
+upon the conflict between the heroine's duty to her brother's corpse
+and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is
+possible that we should feel a deep interest. I am speaking too, it
+will be remembered, not of the best sources of intellectual stimulus
+for the general reader, but of the best models of instruction for the
+individual writer. This last may certainly learn of the ancients,
+better than anywhere else, three things which it is vitally important
+for him to know:--the all-importance of the choice of a subject; the
+necessity of accurate construction; and the subordinate character of
+expression. He will learn from them how unspeakably superior is the
+effect of the one moral impression left by a great action treated as a
+whole, to the effect produced by the most striking single thought or
+by the happiest image. As he penetrates into the spirit of the great
+classical works, as he becomes gradually aware of their intense
+significance, their noble simplicity, and their calm pathos, he will
+be convinced that it is this effect, unity and profoundness of moral
+impression, at which the ancient Poets aimed; that it is this which
+constitutes the grandeur of their works, and which makes them
+immortal. He will desire to direct his own efforts towards producing
+the same effect. Above all, he will deliver himself from the jargon of
+modern criticism, and escape the danger of producing poetical works
+conceived in the spirit of the passing time, and which partake of its
+transitoriness.
+
+The present age makes great claims upon us: we owe it service, it will
+not be satisfied without our admiration. I know not how it is, but
+their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those
+who constantly practise it, a steadying and composing effect upon
+their judgement, not of literary works only, but of men and events in
+general. They are like persons who have had a very weighty and
+impressive experience; they are more truly than others under the
+empire of facts, and more independent of the language current among
+those with whom they live. They wish neither to applaud nor to revile
+their age: they wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and
+whether this is what they want. What they want, they know very well;
+they want to educe and cultivate what is best and noblest in
+themselves: they know, too, that this is no easy task--[Greek:
+chalepon], as Pittacus said, [Greek: chalepon esthlon emmenai]--and
+they ask themselves sincerely whether their age and its literature can
+assist them in the attempt. If they are endeavouring to practise any
+art, they remember the plain and simple proceedings of the old
+artists, who attained their grand results by penetrating themselves
+with some noble and significant action, not by inflating themselves
+with a belief in the pre-eminent importance and greatness of their own
+times. They do not talk of their mission, nor of interpreting their
+age, nor of the coming Poet; all this, they know, is the mere delirium
+of vanity; their business is not to praise their age, but to afford to
+the men who live in it the highest pleasure which they are capable of
+feeling. If asked to afford this by means of subjects drawn from the
+age itself, they ask what special fitness the present age has for
+supplying them: they are told that it is an era of progress, an age
+commissioned to carry out the great ideas of industrial development
+and social amelioration. They reply that with all this they can do
+nothing; that the elements they need for the exercise of their art are
+great actions, calculated powerfully and delightfully to affect what
+is permanent in the human soul; that so far as the present age can
+supply such actions, they will gladly make use of them; but that an
+age wanting in moral grandeur can with difficulty supply such, and an
+age of spiritual discomfort with difficulty be powerfully and
+delightfully affected by them.
+
+A host of voices will indignantly rejoin that the present age is
+inferior to the past neither in moral grandeur nor in spiritual
+health. He who possesses the discipline I speak of will content
+himself with remembering the judgements passed upon the present age,
+in this respect, by the two men, the one of strongest head, the other
+of widest culture, whom it has produced; by Goethe and by Niebuhr. It
+will be sufficient for him that he knows the opinions held by these
+two great men respecting the present age and its literature; and that
+he feels assured in his own mind that their aims and demands upon life
+were such as he would wish, at any rate, his own to be; and their
+judgement as to what is impeding and disabling such as he may safely
+follow. He will not, however, maintain a hostile attitude towards the
+false pretensions of his age; he will content himself with not being
+overwhelmed by them. He will esteem himself fortunate if he can
+succeed in banishing from his mind all feelings of contradiction, and
+irritation, and impatience; in order to delight himself with the
+contemplation of some noble action of a heroic time, and to enable
+others, through his representation of it, to delight in it also.
+
+I am far indeed from making any claim, for myself, that I possess this
+discipline; or for the following Poems, that they breathe its spirit.
+But I say, that in the sincere endeavour to learn and practise, amid
+the bewildering confusion of our times, what is sound and true in
+poetical art, I seemed to myself to find the only sure guidance, the
+only solid footing, among the ancients. They, at any rate, knew what
+they wanted in Art, and we do not. It is this uncertainty which is
+disheartening, and not hostile criticism. How often have I felt this
+when reading words of disparagement or of cavil: that it is the
+uncertainty as to what is really to be aimed at which makes our
+difficulty, not the dissatisfaction of the critic, who himself suffers
+from the same uncertainty. _Non me tua fervida terrent Dicta; Dii me
+terrent, et Jupiter hostis._
+
+Two kinds of _dilettanti_, says Goethe, there are in poetry: he who
+neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and thinks he has done
+enough if he shows spirituality and feeling; and he who seeks to
+arrive at poetry merely by mechanism, in which he can acquire an
+artisan's readiness, and is without soul and matter. And he adds, that
+the first does most harm to Art, and the last to himself. If we must
+be _dilettanti_: if it is impossible for us, under the circumstances
+amidst which we live, to think clearly, to feel nobly, and to
+delineate firmly: if we cannot attain to the mastery of the great
+artists--let us, at least, have so much respect for our Art as to
+prefer it to ourselves: let us not bewilder our successors: let us
+transmit to them the practice of Poetry, with its boundaries and
+wholesome regulative laws, under which excellent works may again,
+perhaps, at some future time, be produced, not yet fallen into
+oblivion through our neglect, not yet condemned and cancelled by the
+influence of their eternal enemy, Caprice.
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION
+
+(1854)
+
+I have allowed the Preface to the former edition of these Poems to
+stand almost without change, because I still believe it to be, in the
+main, true. I must not, however, be supposed insensible to the force
+of much that has been alleged against portions of it, or unaware that
+it contains many things incompletely stated, many things which need
+limitation. It leaves, too, untouched the question, how far, and in
+what manner, the opinions there expressed respecting the choice of
+subjects apply to lyric poetry; that region of the poetical field
+which is chiefly cultivated at present. But neither have I time now to
+supply these deficiencies, nor is this the proper place for attempting
+it: on one or two points alone I wish to offer, in the briefest
+possible way, some explanation.
+
+An objection has been ably urged to the classing together, as subjects
+equally belonging to a past time, Oedipus and Macbeth. And it is no
+doubt true that to Shakespeare, standing on the verge of the Middle
+Ages, the epoch of Macbeth was more familiar than that of Oedipus. But
+I was speaking of actions as they presented themselves to us moderns:
+and it will hardly be said that the European mind, since Voltaire, has
+much more affinity with the times of Macbeth than with those of
+Oedipus. As moderns, it seems to me, we have no longer any direct
+affinity with the circumstances and feelings of either; as
+individuals, we are attracted towards this or that personage, we have
+a capacity for imagining him, irrespective of his times, solely
+according to a law of personal sympathy; and those subjects for which
+we feel this personal attraction most strongly, we may hope to treat
+successfully. Alcestis or Joan of Arc, Charlemagne or Agamemnon--one
+of these is not really nearer to us now than another; each can be made
+present only by an act of poetic imagination: but this man's
+imagination has an affinity for one of them, and that man's for
+another.
+
+It has been said that I wish to limit the Poet, in his choice of
+subjects to the period of Greek and Roman antiquity: but it is not so:
+I only counsel him to choose for his subjects great actions, without
+regarding to what time they belong. Nor do I deny that the poetic
+faculty can and does manifest itself in treating the most trifling
+action, the most hopeless subject. But it is a pity that power should
+be wasted; and that the Poet should be compelled to impart interest
+and force to his subject, instead of receiving them from it, and
+thereby doubling his impressiveness. There is, it has been excellently
+said, an immortal strength in the stories of great actions: the most
+gifted poet, then, may well be glad to supplement with it that mortal
+weakness, which, in presence of the vast spectacle of life and the
+world, he must for ever feel to be his individual portion.
+
+Again, with respect to the study of the classical writers of
+antiquity: it has been said that we should emulate rather than imitate
+them. I make no objection: all I say is, let us study them. They can
+help to cure us of what is, it seems to me, the great vice of our
+intellect, manifesting itself in our incredible vagaries in
+literature, in art, in religion, in morals; namely, that it is
+_fantastic_, and wants _sanity_. Sanity--that is the great virtue of
+the ancient literature: the want of that is the great defect of the
+modern, in spite of all its variety and power. It is impossible to
+read carefully the great ancients, without losing something of our
+caprice and eccentricity; and to emulate them we must at least read
+them.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN RUSKIN
+
+1819-1900
+
+OF THE PATHETIC FALLACY
+
+[_Modern Painters_, vol. iii, pt. 4, 1856]
+
+
+Sec. 1. German dulness, and English affectation, have of late much
+multiplied among us the use of two of the most objectionable words
+that were ever coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysicians--namely,
+'Objective' and 'Subjective'.
+
+No words can be more exquisitely, and in all points, useless; and I
+merely speak of them that I may, at once and for ever, get them out of
+my way, and out of my reader's. But to get that done, they must be
+explained.
+
+The word 'Blue', say certain philosophers, means the sensation of
+colour which the human eye receives in looking at the open sky, or at
+a bell gentian.
+
+Now, say they farther, as this sensation can only be felt when the eye
+is turned to the object, and as, therefore, no such sensation is
+produced by the object when nobody looks at it, therefore the thing,
+when it is not looked at, is not blue; and thus (say they) there are
+many qualities of things which depend as much on something else as on
+themselves. To be sweet, a thing must have a taster; it is only sweet
+while it is being tasted, and if the tongue had not the capacity of
+taste, then the sugar would not have the quality of sweetness.
+
+And then they agree that the qualities of things which thus depend
+upon our perception of them, and upon our human nature as affected by
+them, shall be called Subjective; and the qualities of things which
+they always have, irrespective of any other nature, as roundness or
+squareness, shall be called Objective.
+
+From these ingenious views the step is very easy to a farther opinion,
+that it does not much matter what things are in themselves, but only
+what they are to us; and that the only real truth of them is their
+appearance to, or effect upon, us. From which position, with a hearty
+desire for mystification, and much egotism, selfishness, shallowness,
+and impertinence, a philosopher may easily go so far as to believe,
+and say, that everything in the world depends upon his seeing or
+thinking of it, and that nothing, therefore, exists, but what he sees
+or thinks of.
+
+Sec. 2. Now, to get rid of all these ambiguities and troublesome words at
+once, be it observed that the word 'Blue' does _not_ mean the
+_sensation_ caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the
+_power_ of producing that sensation; and this power is always there,
+in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would
+remain there though there were not left a man on the face of the
+earth. Precisely in the same way gunpowder has a power of exploding.
+It will not explode if you put no match to it. But it has always the
+power of so exploding, and is therefore called an explosive compound,
+which it very positively and assuredly is, whatever philosophy may say
+to the contrary.
+
+In like manner, a gentian does not produce the sensation of blueness
+if you don't look at it. But it has always the power of doing so; its
+particles being everlastingly so arranged by its Maker. And,
+therefore, the gentian and the sky are always verily blue, whatever
+philosophy may say to the contrary; and if you do not see them blue
+when you look at them, it is not their fault but yours.
+
+Sec. 3. Hence I would say to these philosophers: If, instead of using the
+sonorous phrase, 'It is objectively so,' you will use the plain old
+phrase, 'It _is_ so;' and if instead of the sonorous phrase, 'It is
+subjectively so,' you will say, in plain old English, 'It does so,' or
+'It seems so to me;' you will, on the whole, be more intelligible to
+your fellow-creatures: and besides, if you find that a thing which
+generally 'does so' to other people (as a gentian looks blue to most
+men), does _not_ so to you, on any particular occasion, you will not
+fall into the impertinence of saying, that the thing is not so, or did
+not so, but you will say simply (what you will be all the better for
+speedily finding out), that something is the matter with you. If you
+find that you cannot explode the gunpowder, you will not declare that
+all gunpowder is subjective, and all explosion imaginary, but you will
+simply suspect and declare yourself to be an ill-made match. Which, on
+the whole, though there may be a distant chance of a mistake about it,
+is, nevertheless, the wisest conclusion you can come to until farther
+experiment.
+
+Sec. 4. Now, therefore, putting these tiresome and absurd words quite out
+of our way, we may go on at our ease to examine the point in
+question--namely, the difference between the ordinary, proper, and
+true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false
+appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or
+contemplative fancy; false appearances, I say, as being entirely
+unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only
+imputed to it by us.
+
+For instance--
+
+    The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould
+    Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.
+
+This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a
+spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron.
+How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that
+it is anything else than a plain crocus?
+
+It is an important question. For, throughout our past reasonings about
+art, we have always found that nothing could be good, or useful, or
+ultimately pleasurable, which was untrue. But here is something
+pleasurable in written poetry which is nevertheless _un_true. And what
+is more, if we think over our favourite poetry, we shall find it full
+of this kind of fallacy, and that we like it all the more for being
+so.
+
+Sec. 5. It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this
+fallacy is of two principal kinds. Either, as in this case of the
+crocus, it is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real
+expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused
+by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or
+less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we shall have to speak
+presently; but, in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the
+other error, that which the mind admits when affected strongly by
+emotion. Thus, for instance, in Alton Locke--
+
+    They rowed her in across the rolling foam--
+    The cruel, crawling foam.
+
+The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which
+attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which
+the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same
+effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of
+external things, which I would generally characterize as the 'Pathetic
+Fallacy'.
+
+Sec. 6. Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as eminently
+a character of poetical description, and the temper of mind in which
+we allow it as one eminently poetical, because passionate. But, I
+believe, if we look well into the matter, that we shall find the
+greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness--that it is
+only the second order of poets who much delight in it.[31]
+
+    [31] I admit two orders of poets, but no third; and by these
+    two orders I mean the Creative (Shakespeare, Homer, Dante),
+    and Reflective or Perceptive (Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson).
+    But both of these must be _first_-rate in their range, though
+    their range is different; and with poetry second-rate in
+    _quality_ no one ought to be allowed to trouble mankind.
+    There is quite enough of the best,--much more than we can
+    ever read or enjoy in the length of a life; and it is a
+    literal wrong or sin in any person to encumber us with
+    inferior work. I have no patience with apologies made by
+    young pseudo-poets, 'that they believe there is _some_ good
+    in what they have written: that they hope to do better in
+    time,' &c. _Some_ good! If there is not _all_ good, there is
+    no good. If they ever hope to do better, why do they trouble
+    us now? Let them rather courageously burn all they have done,
+    and wait for the better days. There are few men, ordinarily
+    educated, who in moments of strong feeling could not strike
+    out a poetical thought, and afterwards polish it so as to be
+    presentable. But men of sense know better than so to waste
+    their time; and those who sincerely love poetry, know the
+    touch of the master's hand on the chords too well to fumble
+    among them after him. Nay, more than this; all inferior
+    poetry is an injury to the good, inasmuch as it takes away
+    the freshness of rhymes, blunders upon and gives a wretched
+    commonalty to good thoughts; and, in general, adds to the
+    weight of human weariness in a most woful and culpable
+    manner. There are few thoughts likely to come across ordinary
+    men, which have not already been expressed by greater men in
+    the best possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, more
+    noble thing to remember and point out the perfect words, than
+    to invent poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily the
+    world.
+
+Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of
+Acheron 'as dead leaves flutter from a bough', he gives the most
+perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness,
+passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an
+instant losing his own clear perception that _these_ are souls, and
+_those_ are leaves; he makes no confusion of one with the other. But
+when Coleridge speaks of
+
+    The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
+    That dances as often as dance it can,
+
+he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea about the leaf:
+he fancies a life in it, and will, which there are not; confuses its
+powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merriment, and the
+wind that shakes it with music. Here, however, there is some beauty,
+even in the morbid passage; but take an instance in Homer and Pope.
+Without the knowledge of Ulysses, Elpenor, his youngest follower, has
+fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace, and has been left
+dead, unmissed by his leader, or companions, in the haste of their
+departure. They cross the sea to the Cimmerian land; and Ulysses
+summons the shades from Tartarus. The first which appears is that of
+the lost Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the spirit of bitter
+and terrified lightness which is seen in Hamlet,[32] addresses the
+spirit with the simple, startled words:--
+
+     Elpenor! How camest thou under the shadowy darkness? Hast
+     thou come faster on foot than I in my black ship?
+
+    [32] 'Well said, old mole! can'st work i' the ground so
+    fast?'
+
+Which Pope renders thus:--
+
+    O, say, what angry power Elpenor led
+    To glide in shades, and wander with the dead?
+    How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,
+    Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind?
+
+I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the
+nimbleness of the sail, or the laziness of the wind! And yet how is it
+that these conceits are so painful now, when they have been pleasant
+to us in the other instances?
+
+Sec. 7. For a very simple reason. They are not a _pathetic_ fallacy at
+all, for they are put into the mouth of the wrong passion--a passion
+which never could possibly have spoken them--agonized curiosity.
+Ulysses wants to know the facts of the matter; and the very last thing
+his mind could do at the moment would be to pause, or suggest in
+anywise what was _not_ a fact. The delay in the first three lines, and
+conceit in the last, jar upon us instantly, like the most frightful
+discord in music. No poet of true imaginative power could possibly
+have written the passage.[33]
+
+    [33] It is worth while comparing the way a similar question
+    is put by the exquisite sincerity of Keats:--
+
+              He wept, and his bright tears
+        Went trickling down the golden bow he held.
+        Thus, with half-shut, suffused eyes, he stood;
+        While from beneath some cumb'rous boughs hard by,
+        With solemn step, an awful goddess came.
+        And there was purport in her looks for him,
+        Which he with eager guess began to read:
+        Perplexed the while, melodiously he said,
+        '_How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea?_'
+
+Therefore, we see that the spirit of truth must guide us in some
+sort, even in our enjoyment of fallacy. Coleridge's fallacy has no
+discord in it, but Pope's has set our teeth on edge. Without farther
+questioning, I will endeavour to state the main bearings of this
+matter.
+
+Sec. 8. The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is, as I said
+above, that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully
+with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or overclouded, or
+over-dazzled by emotion; and it is a more or less noble state,
+according to the force of the emotion which has induced it. For it is
+no credit to a man that he is not morbid or inaccurate in his
+perceptions, when he has no strength of feeling to warp them; and it
+is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of
+being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly,
+the intellect, and make it believe what they choose. But it is still a
+grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong
+enough to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost
+efforts of the passions; and the whole man stands in an iron glow,
+white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating; even
+if he melts, losing none of his weight.
+
+So, then, we have the three ranks: the man who perceives rightly,
+because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately
+the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who
+perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is
+anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy's shield,
+or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives
+rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for
+ever nothing else than itself--a little flower, apprehended in the
+very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the
+associations and passions may be, that crowd around it. And, in
+general, these three classes may be rated in comparative order, as the
+men who are not poets at all, and the poets of the second order, and
+the poets of the first; only however great a man may be, there are
+always some subjects which _ought_ to throw him off his balance; some,
+by which his poor human capacity of thought should be conquered, and
+brought into the inaccurate and vague state of perception, so that the
+language of the highest inspiration becomes broken, obscure, and wild
+in metaphor, resembling that of the weaker man, overborne by weaker
+things.
+
+Sec. 9. And thus, in full, there are four classes: the men who feel
+nothing, and therefore see truly; the men who feel strongly, think
+weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets); the men who feel
+strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order of poets); and
+the men who, strong as human creatures can be, are yet submitted to
+influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, because what
+they see is inconceivably above them. This last is the usual condition
+of prophetic inspiration.
+
+Sec. 10. I separate these classes, in order that their character may be
+clearly understood; but of course they are united each to the other by
+imperceptible transitions, and the same mind, according to the
+influences to which it is subjected, passes at different times into
+the various states. Still, the difference between the great and less
+man is, on the whole, chiefly in this point of _alterability_. That is
+to say, the one knows too much, and perceives and feels too much of
+the past and future, and of all things beside and around that which
+immediately affects him, to be in anywise shaken by it. His mind is
+made up; his thoughts have an accustomed current; his ways are
+steadfast; it is not this or that new sight which will at once
+unbalance him. He is tender to impression at the surface, like a rock
+with deep moss upon it; but there is too much mass of him to be moved.
+The smaller man, with the same degree of sensibility, is at once
+carried off his feet; he wants to do something he did not want to do
+before; he views all the universe in a new light through his tears; he
+is gay or enthusiastic, melancholy or passionate, as things come and
+go to him. Therefore the high creative poet might even be thought, to
+a great extent, impassive (as shallow people think Dante stern),
+receiving indeed all feelings to the full, but having a great centre
+of reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene, and watches the
+feeling, as it were, from far off.
+
+Dante, in his most intense moods, has entire command of himself, and
+can look around calmly, at all moments, for the image or the word that
+will best tell what he sees to the upper or lower world. But Keats and
+Tennyson, and the poets of the second order, are generally themselves
+subdued by the feelings under which they write, or, at least, write as
+choosing to be so, and therefore admit certain expressions and modes
+of thought which are in some sort diseased or false.
+
+Sec. 11. Now so long as we see that the _feeling_ is true, we pardon, or
+are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces:
+we are pleased, for instance, with those lines of Kingsley's, above
+quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they
+faithfully describe sorrow. But the moment the mind of the speaker
+becomes cold, that moment every such expression becomes untrue, as
+being for ever untrue in the external facts. And there is no greater
+baseness in literature than the habit of using these metaphorical
+expressions in cold blood. An inspired writer, in full impetuosity of
+passion, may speak wisely and truly of 'raging waves of the sea,
+foaming out their own shame'; but it is only the basest writer who
+cannot speak of the sea without talking of 'raging waves',
+'remorseless floods', 'ravenous billows', &c.; and it is one of the
+signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of
+thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the _pure fact_, out of
+which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a
+true one.
+
+To keep to the waves, I forget who it is who represents a man in
+despair, desiring that his body may be cast into the sea,
+
+    _Whose changing mound, and foam that passed away,_
+    Might mock the eye that questioned where I lay.
+
+Observe, there is not a single false, or even overcharged, expression.
+'Mound' of the sea wave is perfectly simple and true; 'changing' is as
+familiar as may be; 'foam that passed away', strictly literal; and the
+whole line descriptive of the reality with a degree of accuracy which
+I know not any other verse, in the range of poetry, that altogether
+equals. For most people have not a distinct idea of the clumsiness and
+massiveness of a large wave. The word 'wave' is used too generally of
+ripples and breakers, and bendings in light drapery or grass: it does
+not by itself convey a perfect image. But the word 'mound' is heavy,
+large, dark, definite; there is no mistaking the kind of wave meant,
+nor missing the sight of it. Then the term 'changing' has a peculiar
+force also. Most people think of waves as rising and falling. But if
+they look at the sea carefully, they will perceive that the waves do
+not rise and fall. They change. Change both place and form, but they
+do not fall; one wave goes on, and on, and still on; now lower, now
+higher, now tossing its mane like a horse, now building itself
+together like a wall, now shaking, now steady, but still the same
+wave, till at last it seems struck by something, and changes, one
+knows not how,--becomes another wave.
+
+The close of the line insists on this image, and paints it still more
+perfectly,--'foam that passed away'. Not merely melting, disappearing,
+but passing on, out of sight, on the career of the wave. Then, having
+put the absolute ocean fact as far as he may before our eyes, the poet
+leaves us to feel about it as we may, and to trace for ourselves the
+opposite fact,--the image of the green mounds that do not change, and
+the white and written stones that do not pass away; and thence to
+follow out also the associated images of the calm life with the quiet
+grave, and the despairing life with the fading foam:
+
+    Let no man move his bones.
+
+    As for Samaria, her king is out off like the foam upon the water.
+
+But nothing of this is actually told or pointed out, and the
+expressions, as they stand, are perfectly severe and accurate, utterly
+uninfluenced by the firmly governed emotion of the writer. Even the
+word 'mock' is hardly an exception, as it may stand merely for
+'deceive' or 'defeat', without implying any impersonation of the
+waves.
+
+Sec. 12. It may be well, perhaps, to give one or two more instances to
+show the peculiar dignity possessed by all passages which thus limit
+their expression to the pure fact, and leave the hearer to gather what
+he can from it. Here is a notable one from the Iliad. Helen, looking
+from the Scaean gate of Troy over the Grecian host, and telling Priam
+the names of its captains, says at last:
+
+     I see all the other dark-eyed Greeks; but two I cannot
+     see,--Castor and Pollux,--whom one mother bore with me. Have
+     they not followed from fair Lacedaemon, or have they indeed
+     come in their sea-wandering ships, but now will not enter
+     into the battle of men, fearing the shame and the scorn that
+     is in Me?
+
+Then Homer:
+
+     So she spoke. But them, already, the life-giving earth
+     possessed, there in Lacedaemon, in the dear fatherland.
+
+Note, here, the high poetical truth carried to the extreme. The poet
+has to speak of the earth in sadness, but he will not let that sadness
+affect or change his thoughts of it. No; though Castor and Pollux be
+dead, yet the earth is our mother still, fruitful, life-giving. These
+are the facts of the thing. I see nothing else than these. Make what
+you will of them.
+
+Sec. 13. Take another very notable instance from Casimir de la Vigne's
+terrible ballad, _La Toilette de Constance_. I must quote a few lines
+out of it here and there, to enable the reader who has not the book by
+him, to understand its close.
+
+        Vite, Anna, vite; au miroir
+          Plus vite, Anna. L'heure s'avance,
+        Et je vais au bal ce soir
+          Chez l'ambassadeur de France.
+
+    Y pensez-vous, ils sont fanes, ces noeuds,
+      Ils sont d'hier, mon Dieu, comme tout passe!
+    Que du reseau qui retient mes cheveux
+      Les glands d'azur retombent avec grace.
+    Plus haut! Plus bas! Vous ne comprenez rien!
+      Que sur mon front ce saphir etincelle:
+    Vous me piquez, maladroite. Ah, c'est bien,
+      Bien,--chere Anna! Je t'aime, je suis belle.
+
+    Celui qu'en vain je voudrais oublier
+      (Anna, ma robe) il y sera, j'espere.
+    (Ah, fi! profane, est-ce la mon collier?
+      Quoi! ces grains d'or benits par le Saint-Pere!)
+    Il y sera; Dieu, s'il pressait ma main,
+      En y pensant, a peine je respire;
+    Pere Anselmo doit m'entendre demain,
+      Comment ferai-je, Anna, pour tout lui dire?
+
+        Vite un coup d'oeil au miroir,
+          Le dernier. ----J'ai l'assurance
+        Qu'on va m'adorer ce soir
+          Chez l'ambassadeur de France.
+
+    Pres du foyer, Constance s'admirait.
+      Dieu! sur sa robe il vole une etincelle!
+    Au feu! Courez! Quand l'espoir l'enivrait,
+      Tout perdre ainsi! Quoi! Mourir,--et si belle!
+    L'horrible feu ronge avec volupte
+      Ses bras, son sein, et l'entoure, et s'eleve,
+    Et sans pitie devore sa beaute,
+      Ses dix-huit ans, helas, et son doux reve!
+
+        Adieu, bal, plaisir, amour!
+          On disait, Pauvre Constance!
+        Et on dansait, jusqu'au jour,
+          Chez l'ambassadeur de France.
+
+Yes, that is the fact of it. Right or wrong, the poet does not say.
+What you may think about it, he does not know. He has nothing to do
+with that. There lie the ashes of the dead girl in her chamber. There
+they danced, till the morning, at the Ambassador's of France. Make
+what you will of it.
+
+If the reader will look through the ballad, of which I have quoted
+only about the third part, he will find that there is not, from
+beginning to end of it, a single poetical (so called) expression,
+except in one stanza. The girl speaks as simple prose as may be; there
+is not a word she would not have actually used as she was dressing.
+The poet stands by, impassive as a statue, recording her words just as
+they come. At last the doom seizes her, and in the very presence of
+death, for an instant, his own emotions conquer him. He records no
+longer the facts only, but the facts as they seem to him. The fire
+gnaws with _voluptuousness--without pity_. It is soon past. The fate
+is fixed for ever; and he retires into his pale and crystalline
+atmosphere of truth. He closes all with the calm veracity,
+
+    They said, 'Poor Constance!'
+
+Sec. 14. Now in this there is the exact type of the consummate poetical
+temperament. For, be it clearly and constantly remembered, that the
+greatness of a poet depends upon the two faculties, acuteness of
+feeling, and command of it. A poet is great, first in proportion to
+the strength of his passion, and then, that strength being granted, in
+proportion to his government of it; there being, however, always a
+point beyond which it would be inhuman and monstrous if he pushed this
+government, and, therefore, a point at which all feverish and wild
+fancy becomes just and true. Thus the destruction of the kingdom of
+Assyria cannot be contemplated firmly by a prophet of Israel. The fact
+is too great, too wonderful. It overthrows him, dashes him into a
+confused element of dreams. All the world is, to his stunned thought,
+full of strange voices. 'Yea, the fir-trees rejoice at thee, and the
+cedars of Lebanon, saying, "Since thou art gone down to the grave, no
+feller is come up against us."' So, still more, the thought of the
+presence of Deity cannot be borne without this great astonishment.
+'The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into
+singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.'
+
+Sec. 15. But by how much this feeling is noble when it is justified by
+the strength of its cause, by so much it is ignoble when there is not
+cause enough for it; and beyond all other ignobleness is the mere
+affectation of it, in hardness of heart. Simply bad writing may almost
+always, as above noticed, be known by its adoption of these fanciful
+metaphorical expressions, as a sort of current coin; yet there is even
+a worse, at least a more harmful, condition of writing than this, in
+which such expressions are not ignorantly and feelinglessly caught up,
+but, by some master, skilful in handling, yet insincere, deliberately
+wrought out with chill and studied fancy; as if we should try to make
+an old lava stream look red-hot again, by covering it with dead
+leaves, or white-hot, with hoar-frost.
+
+When Young is lost in veneration, as he dwells on the character of a
+truly good and holy man, he permits himself for a moment to be
+overborne by the feeling so far as to exclaim:
+
+    Where shall I find him? angels, tell me where.
+    You know him; he is near you; point him out.
+    Shall I see glories beaming from his brow,
+    Or trace his footsteps by the rising flowers?
+
+This emotion has a worthy cause, and is thus true and right. But now
+hear the cold-hearted Pope say to a shepherd girl:
+
+    Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;
+    Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade;
+    Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove,
+    And winds shall waft it to the powers above.
+    But would you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain,
+    The wondering forests soon should dance again;
+    The moving mountains hear the powerful call,
+    And headlong streams hang, listening, in their fall.
+
+This is not, nor could it for a moment be mistaken for, the language
+of passion. It is simple falsehood, uttered by hypocrisy; definite
+absurdity, rooted in affectation, and coldly asserted in the teeth of
+nature and fact. Passion will indeed go far in deceiving itself; but
+it must be a strong passion, not the simple wish of a lover to tempt
+his mistress to sing. Compare a very closely parallel passage in
+Wordsworth, in which the lover has lost his mistress:
+
+    Three years had Barbara in her grave been laid,
+    When thus his moan he made:--
+
+    'Oh move, thou cottage, from behind yon oak,
+      Or let the ancient tree uprooted lie,
+    That in some other way yon smoke
+      May mount into the sky.
+    If still behind yon pine-tree's ragged bough,
+      Headlong, the waterfall must come,
+      Oh, let it, then, be dumb--
+    Be anything, sweet stream, but that which thou art now.'
+
+Here is a cottage to be moved, if not a mountain, and a waterfall to
+be silent, if it is not to hang listening: but with what different
+relation to the mind that contemplates them! Here, in the extremity of
+its agony, the soul cries out wildly for relief, which at the same
+moment it partly knows to be impossible, but partly believes possible,
+in a vague impression that a miracle _might_ be wrought to give relief
+even to a less sore distress,--that nature is kind, and God is kind,
+and that grief is strong: it knows not well what _is_ possible to such
+grief. To silence a stream, to move a cottage wall,--one might think
+it could do as much as that!
+
+Sec. 16. I believe these instances are enough to illustrate the main
+point I insist upon respecting the pathetic fallacy,--that so far as
+it _is_ a fallacy, it is always the sign of a morbid state of mind,
+and comparatively of a weak one. Even in the most inspired prophet it
+is a sign of the incapacity of his human sight or thought to bear what
+has been revealed to it. In ordinary poetry, if it is found in the
+thoughts of the poet himself, it is at once a sign of his belonging to
+the inferior school; if in the thoughts of the characters imagined by
+him, it is right or wrong according to the genuineness of the emotion
+from which it springs; always, however, implying necessarily _some_
+degree of weakness in the character.
+
+Take two most exquisite instances from master hands. The Jessy of
+Shenstone, and the Ellen of Wordsworth, have both been betrayed and
+deserted. Jessy, in the course of her most touching complaint, says:
+
+    If through the garden's flowery tribes I stray,
+      Where bloom the jasmines that could once allure,
+    'Hope not to find delight in us,' they say,
+      'For we are spotless, Jessy; we are pure.'
+
+Compare with this some of the words of Ellen:
+
+    'Ah, why,' said Ellen, sighing to herself,
+    'Why do not words, and kiss, and solemn pledge,
+    And nature, that is kind in woman's breast,
+    And reason, that in man is wise and good,
+    And fear of Him who is a righteous Judge,--
+    Why do not these prevail for human life,
+    To keep two hearts together, that began
+    Their springtime with one love, and that have need
+    Of mutual pity and forgiveness, sweet
+    To grant, or be received; while that poor bird--
+    O, come and hear him! Thou who hast to me
+    Been faithless, hear him;--though a lowly creature,
+    One of God's simple children, that yet know not
+    The Universal Parent, _how_ he sings!
+    As if he wished the firmament of heaven
+    Should listen, and give back to him the voice
+    Of his triumphant constancy and love.
+    The proclamation that he makes, how far
+    His darkness doth transcend our fickle light.'
+
+The perfection of both these passages, as far as regards truth and
+tenderness of imagination in the two poets, is quite insuperable. But,
+of the two characters imagined, Jessy is weaker than Ellen, exactly in
+so far as something appears to her to be in nature which is not. The
+flowers do not really reproach her. God meant them to comfort her, not
+to taunt her; they would do so if she saw them rightly.
+
+Ellen, on the other hand, is quite above the slightest erring emotion.
+There is not the barest film of fallacy in all her thoughts. She
+reasons as calmly as if she did not feel. And, although the singing of
+the bird suggests to her the idea of its desiring to be heard in
+heaven, she does not for an instant admit any veracity in the thought.
+'As if,' she says,--'I know he means nothing of the kind; but it does
+verily seem as if.' The reader will find, by examining the rest of the
+poem, that Ellen's character is throughout consistent in this clear
+though passionate strength.[34]
+
+    [34] I cannot quit this subject without giving two more
+    instances, both exquisite, of the pathetic fallacy, which I
+    have just come upon, in _Maud_:
+
+                     For a great speculation had fail'd;
+          And ever he mutter'd and madden'd, and ever wann'd with despair;
+        And out he walk'd, when the wind like a broken worldling wail'd,
+          And the _flying gold of the ruin'd woodlands drove, thro'
+              the air_.
+
+          There has fallen a splendid tear
+            From the passion-flower at the gate.
+          _The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near!'
+            And the white rose weeps, 'She is late.'
+          The larkspur listens, 'I hear, I hear!'
+            And the lily whispers, 'I wait.'_
+
+It is, I hope, now made clear to the reader in all respects that the
+pathetic fallacy is powerful only so far as it is pathetic, feeble so
+far as it is fallacious, and, therefore, that the dominion of Truth is
+entire, over this, as over every other natural and just state of the
+human mind.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN STUART MILL
+
+1806-1873
+
+THOUGHTS ON POETRY AND ITS VARIETIES (1859)
+
+
+I
+
+It has often been asked, What is Poetry? And many and various are the
+answers which have been returned. The vulgarest of all--one with which
+no person possessed of the faculties to which Poetry addresses itself
+can ever have been satisfied--is that which confounds poetry with
+metrical composition: yet to this wretched mockery of a definition,
+many have been led back, by the failure of all their attempts to find
+any other that would distinguish what they have been accustomed to
+call poetry, from much which they have known only under other names.
+
+That, however, the word 'poetry' imports something quite peculiar in
+its nature, something which may exist in what is called prose as well
+as in verse, something which does not even require the instrument of
+words, but can speak through the other audible symbols called musical
+sounds, and even through the visible ones which are the language of
+sculpture, painting, and architecture; all this, we believe, is and
+must be felt, though perhaps indistinctly, by all upon whom poetry in
+any of its shapes produces any impression beyond that of tickling the
+ear. The distinction between poetry and what is not poetry, whether
+explained or not, is felt to be fundamental: and where every one feels
+a difference, a difference there must be. All other appearances may be
+fallacious, but the appearance of a difference is a real difference.
+Appearances too, like other things, must have a cause, and that which
+can cause anything, even an illusion, must be a reality. And hence,
+while a half-philosophy disdains the classifications and distinctions
+indicated by popular language, philosophy carried to its highest point
+frames new ones, but rarely sets aside the old, content with
+correcting and regularizing them. It cuts fresh channels for thought,
+but does not fill up such as it finds ready-made; it traces, on the
+contrary, more deeply, broadly, and distinctly, those into which the
+current has spontaneously flowed.
+
+Let us then attempt, in the way of modest inquiry, not to coerce and
+confine nature within the bounds of an arbitrary definition, but
+rather to find the boundaries which she herself has set, and erect a
+barrier round them; not calling mankind to account for having
+misapplied the word 'poetry', but attempting to clear up the
+conception which they already attach to it, and to bring forward as a
+distinct principle that which, as a vague feeling, has really guided
+them in their employment of the term.
+
+The object of poetry is confessedly to act upon the emotions; and
+therein is poetry sufficiently distinguished from what Wordsworth
+affirms to be its logical opposite, namely, not prose, but matter of
+fact or science. The one addresses itself to the belief, the other to
+the feelings. The one does its work by convincing or persuading, the
+other by moving. The one acts by presenting a proposition to the
+understanding, the other by offering interesting objects of
+contemplation to the sensibilities.
+
+This, however, leaves us very far from a definition of poetry. This
+distinguishes it from one thing, but we are bound to distinguish it
+from everything. To bring thoughts or images before the mind for the
+purpose of acting upon the emotions, does not belong to poetry alone.
+It is equally the province (for example) of the novelist: and yet the
+faculty of the poet and that of the novelist are as distinct as any
+other two faculties; as the faculties of the novelist and of the
+orator, or of the poet and the metaphysician. The two characters may
+be united, as characters the most disparate may; but they have no
+natural connexion.
+
+Many of the greatest poems are in the form of fictitious narratives,
+and in almost all good serious fictions there is true poetry. But
+there is a radical distinction between the interest felt in a story as
+such, and the interest excited by poetry; for the one is derived from
+incident, the other from the representation of feeling. In one, the
+source of the emotion excited is the exhibition of a state or states
+of human sensibility; in the other, of a series of states of mere
+outward circumstances. Now, all minds are capable of being affected
+more or less by representations of the latter kind, and all, or almost
+all, by those of the former; yet the two sources of interest
+correspond to two distinct, and (as respects their greatest
+development) mutually exclusive, characters of mind.
+
+At what age is the passion for a story, for almost any kind of story,
+merely as a story, the most intense? In childhood. But that also is
+the age at which poetry, even of the simplest description, is least
+relished and least understood; because the feelings with which it is
+especially conversant are yet undeveloped, and not having been even in
+the slightest degree experienced, cannot be sympathized with. In what
+stage of the progress of society, again, is story-telling most valued,
+and the story-teller in greatest request and honour?--In a rude state
+like that of the Tartars and Arabs at this day, and of almost all
+nations in the earliest ages. But in this state of society there is
+little poetry except ballads, which are mostly narrative, that is,
+essentially stories, and derive their principal interest from the
+incidents. Considered as poetry, they are of the lowest and most
+elementary kind: the feelings depicted, or rather indicated, are the
+simplest our nature has; such joys and griefs as the immediate
+pressure of some outward event excites in rude minds, which live
+wholly immersed in outward things, and have never, either from choice
+or a force they could not resist, turned themselves to the
+contemplation of the world within. Passing now from childhood, and
+from the childhood of society, to the grown-up men and women of this
+most grown-up and unchildlike age--the minds and hearts of greatest
+depth and elevation are commonly those which take greatest delight in
+poetry; the shallowest and emptiest, on the contrary, are, at all
+events, not those least addicted to novel-reading. This accords, too,
+with all analogous experience of human nature. The sort of persons
+whom not merely in books but in their lives, we find perpetually
+engaged in hunting for excitement from without, are invariably those
+who do not possess, either in the vigour of their intellectual powers
+or in the depth of their sensibilities, that which would enable them
+to find ample excitement nearer home. The most idle and frivolous
+persons take a natural delight in fictitious narrative; the excitement
+it affords is of the kind which comes from without. Such persons are
+rarely lovers of poetry, though they may fancy themselves so, because
+they relish novels in verse. But poetry, which is the delineation of
+the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion, is interesting
+only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt, or whose
+imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they
+might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been
+different.
+
+Poetry, when it is really such, is truth; and fiction also, if it is
+good for anything, is truth: but they are different truths. The truth
+of poetry is to paint the human soul truly: the truth of fiction is to
+give a true picture of life. The two kinds of knowledge are different,
+and come by different ways, come mostly to different persons. Great
+poets are often proverbially ignorant of life. What they know has come
+by observation of themselves; they have found within them one highly
+delicate and sensitive specimen of human nature, on which the laws of
+emotion are written in large characters, such as can be read off
+without much study. Other knowledge of mankind, such as comes to men
+of the world by outward experience, is not indispensable to them as
+poets: but to the novelist such knowledge is all in all; he has to
+describe outward things, not the inward man; actions and events, not
+feelings; and it will not do for him to be numbered among those who,
+as Madame Roland said of Brissot, know man but not _men_.
+
+All this is no bar to the possibility of combining both elements,
+poetry and narrative or incident, in the same work, and calling it
+either a novel or a poem; but so may red and white combine on the same
+human features, or on the same canvas. There is one order of
+composition which requires the union of poetry and incident, each in
+its highest kind--the dramatic. Even there the two elements are
+perfectly distinguishable, and may exist of unequal quality, and in
+the most various proportion. The incidents of a dramatic poem may be
+scanty and ineffective, though the delineation of passion and
+character may be of the highest order; as in Goethe's admirable
+_Torquato Tasso_; or again, the story as a mere story may be well got
+up for effect, as is the case with some of the most trashy productions
+of the Minerva press: it may even be, what those are not, a coherent
+and probable series of events, though there be scarcely a feeling
+exhibited which is not represented falsely, or in a manner absolutely
+commonplace. The combination of the two excellences is what renders
+Shakespeare so generally acceptable, each sort of readers finding in
+him what is suitable to their faculties. To the many he is great as a
+story-teller, to the few as a poet.
+
+In limiting poetry to the delineation of states of feeling, and
+denying the name where nothing is delineated but outward objects, we
+may be thought to have done what we promised to avoid--to have not
+found, but made a definition, in opposition to the usage of language,
+since it is established by common consent that there is a poetry
+called descriptive. We deny the charge. Description is not poetry
+because there is descriptive poetry, no more than science is poetry
+because there is such a thing as a didactic poem. But an object which
+admits of being described, or a truth which may fill a place in a
+scientific treatise, may also furnish an occasion for the generation
+of poetry, which we thereupon choose to call descriptive or didactic.
+The poetry is not in the object itself, nor in the scientific truth
+itself, but in the state of mind in which the one and the other may be
+contemplated. The mere delineation of the dimensions and colours of
+external objects is not poetry, no more than a geometrical ground-plan
+of St. Peter's or Westminster Abbey is painting. Descriptive poetry
+consists, no doubt, in description, but in description of things as
+they appear, not as they are; and it paints them not in their bare and
+natural lineaments, but seen through the medium and arrayed in the
+colours of the imagination set in action by the feelings. If a poet
+describes a lion, he does not describe him as a naturalist would, nor
+even as a traveller would, who was intent upon stating the truth, the
+whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He describes him by imagery,
+that is, by suggesting the most striking likenesses and contrasts
+which might occur to a mind contemplating the lion, in the state of
+awe, wonder, or terror, which the spectacle naturally excites, or is,
+on the occasion, supposed to excite. Now this is describing the lion
+professedly, but the state of excitement of the spectator really. The
+lion may be described falsely or with exaggeration, and the poetry be
+all the better; but if the human emotion be not painted with
+scrupulous truth, the poetry is bad poetry, i. e. is not poetry at
+all, but a failure.
+
+Thus far our progress towards a clear view of the essentials of
+poetry has brought us very close to the last two attempts at a
+definition of poetry which we happen to have seen in print, both of
+them by poets and men of genius. The one is by Ebenezer Elliott, the
+author of _Corn-Law Rhymes_, and other poems of still greater merit.
+'Poetry', says he, 'is impassioned truth.' The other is by a writer in
+_Blackwood's Magazine_, and comes, we think, still nearer the mark. He
+defines poetry, 'man's thoughts tinged by his feelings'. There is in
+either definition a near approximation to what we are in search of.
+Every truth which a human being can enunciate, every thought, even
+every outward impression, which can enter into his consciousness, may
+become poetry when shown through any impassioned medium, when invested
+with the colouring of joy, or grief, or pity, or affection, or
+admiration, or reverence, or awe, or even hatred or terror: and,
+unless so coloured, nothing, be it as interesting as it may, is
+poetry. But both these definitions fail to discriminate between poetry
+and eloquence. Eloquence, as well as poetry, is impassioned truth;
+eloquence, as well as poetry, is thoughts coloured by the feelings.
+Yet common apprehension and philosophic criticism alike recognize a
+distinction between the two: there is much that every one would call
+eloquence, which no one would think of classing as poetry. A question
+will sometimes arise, whether some particular author is a poet; and
+those who maintain the negative commonly allow that, though not a
+poet, he is a highly eloquent writer. The distinction between poetry
+and eloquence appears to us to be equally fundamental with the
+distinction between poetry and narrative, or between poetry and
+description, while it is still farther from having been satisfactorily
+cleared up than either of the others.
+
+Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of
+feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that
+eloquence is _heard_, poetry is _over_heard. Eloquence supposes an
+audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's
+utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing
+itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in
+symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling
+in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind. Eloquence is
+feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or
+endeavouring to influence their belief or move them to passion or to
+action.
+
+All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy. It may be said that poetry
+which is printed on hot-pressed paper and sold at a bookseller's shop,
+is a soliloquy in full dress, and on the stage. It is so; but there is
+nothing absurd in the idea of such a mode of soliloquizing. What we
+have said to ourselves, we may tell to others afterwards; what we have
+said or done in solitude, we may voluntarily reproduce when we know
+that other eyes are upon us. But no trace of consciousness that any
+eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself. The actor knows
+that there is an audience present; but if he act as though he knew it,
+he acts ill. A poet may write poetry not only with the intention of
+printing it, but for the express purpose of being paid for it; that it
+should _be_ poetry, being written under such influences, is less
+probable; not, however, impossible; but no otherwise possible than if
+he can succeed in excluding from his work every vestige of such
+lookings-forth into the outward and every-day world, and can express
+his emotions exactly as he has felt them in solitude, or as he is
+conscious that he should feel them though they were to remain for ever
+unuttered, or (at the lowest) as he knows that others feel them in
+similar circumstances of solitude. But when he turns round and
+addresses himself to another person; when the act of utterance is not
+itself the end, but a means to an end,--viz. by the feelings he
+himself expresses, to work upon the feelings, or upon the belief, or
+the will, of another,--when the expression of his emotions, or of his
+thoughts tinged by his emotions, is tinged also by that purpose, by
+that desire of making an impression upon another mind, then it ceases
+to be poetry, and becomes eloquence.
+
+Poetry, accordingly, is the natural fruit of solitude and meditation;
+eloquence, of intercourse with the world. The persons who have most
+feeling of their own, if intellectual culture has given them a
+language in which to express it, have the highest faculty of poetry;
+those who best understand the feelings of others, are the most
+eloquent. The persons, and the nations, who commonly excel in poetry,
+are those whose character and tastes render them least dependent upon
+the applause, or sympathy, or concurrence of the world in general.
+Those to whom that applause, that sympathy, that concurrence are most
+necessary, generally excel most in eloquence. And hence, perhaps, the
+French, who are the least poetical of all great and intellectual
+nations, are among the most eloquent: the French, also, being the most
+sociable, the vainest, and the least self-dependent.
+
+If the above be, as we believe, the true theory of the distinction
+commonly admitted between eloquence and poetry; or even though it be
+not so, yet if, as we cannot doubt, the distinction above stated be a
+real bona fide distinction, it will be found to hold, not merely in
+the language of words, but in all other language, and to intersect the
+whole domain of art.
+
+Take, for example, music: we shall find in that art, so peculiarly the
+expression of passion, two perfectly distinct styles; one of which may
+be called the poetry, the other the oratory of music. This difference,
+being seized, would put an end to much musical sectarianism. There has
+been much contention whether the music of the modern Italian school,
+that of Rossini and his successors, be impassioned or not. Without
+doubt, the passion it expresses is not the musing, meditative
+tenderness, or pathos, or grief of Mozart or Beethoven. Yet it is
+passion, but garrulous passion--the passion which pours itself into
+other ears; and therein the better calculated for dramatic effect,
+having a natural adaptation for dialogue. Mozart also is great in
+musical oratory; but his most touching compositions are in the
+opposite style--that of soliloquy. Who can imagine 'Dove sono'
+_heard_? We imagine it _over_heard.
+
+Purely pathetic music commonly partakes of soliloquy. The soul is
+absorbed in its distress, and though there may be bystanders, it is
+not thinking of them. When the mind is looking within, and not
+without, its state does not often or rapidly vary; and hence the even,
+uninterrupted flow, approaching almost to monotony, which a good
+reader, or a good singer, will give to words or music of a pensive or
+melancholy cast. But grief taking the form of a prayer, or of a
+complaint, becomes oratorical; no longer low, and even, and subdued,
+it assumes a more emphatic rhythm, a more rapidly returning accent;
+instead of a few slow equal notes, following one after another at
+regular intervals, it crowds note upon note, and often assumes a hurry
+and bustle like joy. Those who are familiar with some of the best of
+Rossini's serious compositions, such as the air 'Tu che i miseri
+conforti', in the opera of _Tancredi_, or the duet 'Ebben per mia
+memoria', in _La Gazza Ladra_, will at once understand and feel our
+meaning. Both are highly tragic and passionate; the passion of both is
+that of oratory, not poetry. The like may be said of that most moving
+invocation in Beethoven's _Fidelio_--
+
+    Komm, Hoffnung, lass das letzte Stern
+      Der Muede nicht erbleichen;
+
+in which Madame Schroeder Devrient exhibited such consummate powers of
+pathetic expression. How different from Winter's beautiful 'Paga fui',
+the very soul of melancholy exhaling itself in solitude; fuller of
+meaning, and, therefore, more profoundly poetical than the words for
+which it was composed--for it seems to express not simple melancholy,
+but the melancholy of remorse.
+
+If, from vocal music, we now pass to instrumental, we may have a
+specimen of musical oratory in any fine military symphony or march:
+while the poetry of music seems to have attained its consummation in
+Beethoven's Overture to Egmont, so wonderful in its mixed expression
+of grandeur and melancholy.
+
+In the arts which speak to the eye, the same distinctions will be
+found to hold, not only between poetry and oratory, but between
+poetry, oratory, narrative, and simple imitation or description.
+
+Pure description is exemplified in a mere portrait or a mere
+landscape--productions of art, it is true, but of the mechanical
+rather than of the fine arts, being works of simple imitation, not
+creation. We say, a mere portrait, or a mere landscape, because it is
+possible for a portrait or a landscape, without ceasing to be such, to
+be also a picture; like Turner's landscapes, and the great portraits
+by Titian or Vandyke.
+
+Whatever in painting or sculpture expresses human feeling--or
+character, which is only a certain state of feeling grown
+habitual--may be called, according to circumstances, the poetry, or
+the eloquence, of the painter's or the sculptor's art: the poetry, if
+the feeling declares itself by such signs as escape from us when we
+are unconscious of being seen; the oratory, if the signs are those we
+use for the purpose of voluntary communication.
+
+The narrative style answers to what is called historical painting,
+which it is the fashion among connoisseurs to treat as the climax of
+the pictorial art. That it is the most difficult branch of the art we
+do not doubt, because, in its perfection, it includes the perfection
+of all the other branches: as in like manner an epic poem, though in
+so far as it is epic (i. e. narrative) it is not poetry at all, is yet
+esteemed the greatest effort of poetic genius, because there is no
+kind whatever of poetry which may not appropriately find a place in
+it. But an historical picture as such, that is, as the representation
+of an incident, must necessarily, as it seems to us, be poor and
+ineffective. The narrative powers of painting are extremely limited.
+Scarcely any picture, scarcely even any series of pictures, tells its
+own story without the aid of an interpreter. But it is the single
+figures which, to us, are the great charm even of an historical
+picture. It is in these that the power of the art is really seen. In
+the attempt to narrate, visible and permanent signs are too far behind
+the fugitive audible ones, which follow so fast one after another,
+while the faces and figures in a narrative picture, even though they
+be Titian's, stand still. Who would not prefer one Virgin and Child of
+Raphael, to all the pictures which Rubens, with his fat, frouzy Dutch
+Venuses, ever painted? Though Rubens, besides excelling almost every
+one in his mastery over the mechanical parts of his art, often shows
+real genius in _grouping_ his figures, the peculiar problem of
+historical painting. But then, who, except a mere student of drawing
+and colouring, ever cared to look twice at any of the figures
+themselves? The power of painting lies in poetry, of which Rubens had
+not the slightest tincture--not in narrative, wherein he might have
+excelled.
+
+The single figures, however, in an historical picture, are rather the
+eloquence of painting than the poetry: they mostly (unless they are
+quite out of place in the picture) express the feelings of one person
+as modified by the presence of others. Accordingly the minds whose
+bent leads them rather to eloquence than to poetry, rush to historical
+painting. The French painters, for instance, seldom attempt, because
+they could make nothing of, single heads, like those glorious ones of
+the Italian masters, with which they might feed themselves day after
+day in their own Louvre. They must all be historical; and they are,
+almost to a man, attitudinizers. If we wished to give any young
+artist the most impressive warning our imagination could devise
+against that kind of vice in the pictorial, which corresponds to rant
+in the histrionic art, we would advise him to walk once up and once
+down the gallery of the Luxembourg. Every figure in French painting or
+statuary seems to be showing itself off before spectators; they are
+not poetical, but in the worst style of corrupted eloquence.
+
+
+II
+
+_Nascitur Poeta_ is a maxim of classical antiquity, which has passed
+to these latter days with less questioning than most of the doctrines
+of that early age. When it originated, the human faculties were
+occupied, fortunately for posterity, less in examining how the works
+of genius are created, than in creating them: and the adage, probably,
+had no higher source than the tendency common among mankind to
+consider all power which is not visibly the effect of practice, all
+skill which is not capable of being reduced to mechanical rules, as
+the result of a peculiar gift. Yet this aphorism, born in the infancy
+of psychology, will perhaps be found, now when that science is in its
+adolescence, to be as true as an epigram ever is, that is, to contain
+some truth: truth, however, which has been so compressed and bent out
+of shape, in order to tie it up into so small a knot of only two words
+that it requires an almost infinite amount of unrolling and laying
+straight, before it will resume its just proportions.
+
+We are not now intending to remark upon the grosser misapplications of
+this ancient maxim, which have engendered so many races of
+poetasters. The days are gone by when every raw youth whose borrowed
+phantasies have set themselves to a borrowed tune, mistaking, as
+Coleridge says, an ardent desire of poetic reputation for poetic
+genius, while unable to disguise from himself that he had taken no
+means whereby he might _become_ a poet, could fancy himself a born
+one. Those who would reap without sowing, and gain the victory without
+fighting the battle, are ambitious now of another sort of distinction,
+and are born novelists, or public speakers, not poets. And the wiser
+thinkers understand and acknowledge that poetic excellence is subject
+to the same necessary conditions with any other mental endowment; and
+that to no one of the spiritual benefactors of mankind is a higher or
+a more assiduous intellectual culture needful than to the poet. It is
+true, he possesses this advantage over others who use the 'instrument
+of words', that, of the truths which he utters, a larger proportion
+are derived from personal consciousness, and a smaller from
+philosophic investigation. But the power itself of discriminating
+between what really is consciousness, and what is only a process of
+inference completed in a single instant--and the capacity of
+distinguishing whether that of which the mind is conscious be an
+eternal truth, or but a dream--are among the last results of the most
+matured and perfect intellect. Not to mention, that the poet, no more
+than any other person who writes, confines himself altogether to
+intuitive truths, nor has any means of communicating even these but by
+words, every one of which derives all its power of conveying a
+meaning, from a whole host of acquired notions, and facts learnt by
+study and experience.
+
+Nevertheless, it seems undeniable in point of fact, and consistent
+with the principles of a sound metaphysics, that there are poetic
+_natures_. There is a mental and physical constitution or temperament,
+peculiarly fitted for poetry. This temperament will not of itself make
+a poet, no more than the soil will the fruit; and as good fruit may be
+raised by culture from indifferent soils, so may good poetry from
+naturally unpoetical minds. But the poetry of one who is a poet by
+nature, will be clearly and broadly distinguishable from the poetry of
+mere culture. It may not be truer; it may not be more useful; but it
+will be different: fewer will appreciate it, even though many should
+affect to do so; but in those few it will find a keener sympathy, and
+will yield them a deeper enjoyment.
+
+One may write genuine poetry, and not be a poet; for whosoever writes
+out truly any human feeling, writes poetry. All persons, even the most
+unimaginative, in moments of strong emotion, speak poetry; and hence
+the drama is poetry, which else were always prose, except when a poet
+is one of the characters. What _is_ poetry, but the thoughts and words
+in which emotion spontaneously embodies itself? As there are few who
+are not, at least for some moments and in some situations, capable of
+some strong feeling, poetry is natural to most persons at some period
+of their lives. And any one whose feelings are genuine, though but of
+the average strength,--if he be not diverted by uncongenial thoughts
+or occupations from the indulgence of them, and if he acquire by
+culture, as all persons may, the faculty of delineating them
+correctly,--has it in his power to be a poet, so far as a life passed
+in writing unquestionable poetry may be considered to confer that
+title. But _ought_ it to do so? Yes, perhaps, in a collection of
+'British Poets'. But 'poet' is the name also of a variety of man, not
+solely of the author of a particular variety of book: now, to have
+written whole volumes of real poetry is possible to almost all kinds
+of characters, and implies no greater peculiarity of mental
+construction, than to be the author of a history, or a novel.
+
+Whom, then, shall we call poets? Those who are so constituted, that
+emotions are the links of association by which their ideas, both
+sensuous and spiritual, are connected together. This constitution
+belongs (within certain limits) to all in whom poetry is a pervading
+principle. In all others, poetry is something extraneous and
+superinduced: something out of themselves, foreign to the habitual
+course of their every-day lives and characters; a world to which they
+may make occasional visits, but where they are sojourners, not
+dwellers, and which, when out of it, or even when in it, they think
+of, peradventure, but as a phantom-world, a place of _ignes fatui_ and
+spectral illusions. Those only who have the peculiarity of association
+which we have mentioned, and which is a natural though not a universal
+consequence of intense sensibility, instead of seeming not themselves
+when they are uttering poetry, scarcely seem themselves when uttering
+anything to which poetry is foreign. Whatever be the thing which they
+are contemplating, if it be capable of connecting itself with their
+emotions, the aspect under which it first and most naturally paints
+itself to them, is its poetic aspect. The poet of culture sees his
+object in prose, and describes it in poetry; the poet of nature
+actually sees it in poetry.
+
+This point is perhaps worth some little illustration; the rather, as
+metaphysicians (the ultimate arbiters of all philosophical criticism),
+while they have busied themselves for two thousand years, more or
+less, about the few _universal_ laws of human nature, have strangely
+neglected the analysis of its _diversities_. Of these, none lie deeper
+or reach further than the varieties which difference of nature and of
+education makes in what may be termed the habitual bond of
+association. In a mind entirely uncultivated, which is also without
+any strong feelings, objects whether of sense or of intellect arrange
+themselves in the mere casual order in which they have been seen,
+heard, or otherwise perceived. Persons of this sort may be said to
+think chronologically. If they remember a fact, it is by reason of a
+fortuitous coincidence with some trifling incident or circumstance
+which took place at the very time. If they have a story to tell, or
+testimony to deliver in a witness-box, their narrative must follow the
+exact order in which the events took place: _dodge_ them, and the
+thread of association is broken; they cannot go on. Their
+associations, to use the language of philosophers, are chiefly of the
+successive, not the synchronous kind, and whether successive or
+synchronous, are mostly casual.
+
+To the man of science, again, or of business, objects group themselves
+according to the artificial classifications which the understanding
+has voluntarily made for the convenience of thought or of practice.
+But where any of the impressions are vivid and intense, the
+associations into which these enter are the ruling ones: it being a
+well-known law of association, that the stronger a feeling is, the
+more quickly and strongly it associates itself with any other object
+or feeling. Where, therefore, nature has given strong feelings, and
+education has not created factitious tendencies stronger than the
+natural ones, the prevailing associations will be those which connect
+objects and ideas with emotions, and with each other through the
+intervention of emotions. Thoughts and images will be linked together,
+according to the similarity of the feelings which cling to them. A
+thought will introduce a thought by first introducing a feeling which
+is allied with it. At the centre of each group of thoughts or images
+will be found a feeling; and the thoughts or images will be there only
+because the feeling was there. The combinations which the mind puts
+together, the pictures which it paints, the wholes which Imagination
+constructs out of the materials supplied by Fancy, will be indebted to
+some dominant _feeling_, not as in other natures to a dominant
+_thought_, for their unity and consistency of character, for what
+distinguishes them from incoherencies.
+
+The difference, then, between the poetry of a poet, and the poetry of
+a cultivated but not naturally poetic mind, is, that in the latter,
+with however bright a halo of feeling the thought may be surrounded
+and glorified, the thought itself is always the conspicuous object;
+while the poetry of a poet is Feeling itself, employing Thought only
+as the medium of its expression. In the one, feeling waits upon
+thought; in the other, thought upon feeling. The one writer has a
+distinct aim, common to him with any other didactic author; he desires
+to convey the thought, and he conveys it clothed in the feelings which
+it excites in himself, or which he deems most appropriate to it. The
+other merely pours forth the overflowing of his feelings; and all the
+thoughts which those feelings suggest are floated promiscuously along
+the stream.
+
+It may assist in rendering our meaning intelligible, if we illustrate
+it by a parallel between the two English authors of our own day who
+have produced the greatest quantity of true and enduring poetry,
+Wordsworth and Shelley. Apter instances could not be wished for; the
+one might be cited as the type, the _exemplar_, of what the poetry of
+culture may accomplish: the other as perhaps the most striking example
+ever known of the poetic temperament. How different, accordingly, is
+the poetry of these two great writers! In Wordsworth, the poetry is
+almost always the mere setting of a thought. The thought may be more
+valuable than the setting, or it may be less valuable, but there can
+be no question as to which was first in his mind: what he is impressed
+with, and what he is anxious to impress, is some proposition, more or
+less distinctly conceived; some truth, or something which he deems
+such. He lets the thought dwell in his mind, till it excites, as is
+the nature of thought, other thoughts, and also such feelings as the
+measure of his sensibility is adequate to supply. Among these thoughts
+and feelings, had he chosen a different walk of authorship (and there
+are many in which he might equally have excelled), he would probably
+have made a different selection of media for enforcing the parent
+thought: his habits, however, being those of poetic composition, he
+selects in preference the strongest feelings, and the thoughts with
+which most of feeling is naturally or habitually connected. His
+poetry, therefore, may be defined to be, his thoughts, coloured by,
+and impressing themselves by means of, emotions. Such poetry,
+Wordsworth has occupied a long life in producing. And well and wisely
+has he so done. Criticisms, no doubt, may be made occasionally both
+upon the thoughts themselves, and upon the skill he has demonstrated
+in the choice of his media: for an affair of skill and study, in the
+most rigorous sense, it evidently was. But he has not laboured in
+vain; he has exercised, and continues to exercise, a powerful, and
+mostly a highly beneficial influence over the formation and growth of
+not a few of the most cultivated and vigorous of the youthful minds of
+our time, over whose heads poetry of the opposite description would
+have flown, for want of an original organization, physical or mental,
+in sympathy with it.
+
+On the other hand, Wordsworth's poetry is never bounding, never
+ebullient; has little even of the appearance of spontaneousness: the
+well is never so full that it overflows. There is an air of calm
+deliberateness about all he writes, which is not characteristic of the
+poetic temperament: his poetry seems one thing, himself another; he
+seems to be poetical because he wills to be so, not because he cannot
+help it: did he will to dismiss poetry, he need never again, it might
+almost seem, have a poetical thought. He never seems _possessed_ by
+any feeling; no emotion seems ever so strong as to have entire sway,
+for the time being, over the current of his thoughts. He never, even
+for the space of a few stanzas, appears entirely given up to
+exultation, or grief, or pity, or love, or admiration, or devotion, or
+even animal spirits. He now and then, though seldom, attempts to write
+as if he were: and never, we think, without leaving an impression of
+poverty: as the brook which on nearly level ground quite fills its
+banks, appears but a thread when running rapidly down a precipitous
+declivity. He has feeling enough to form a decent, graceful, even
+beautiful decoration to a thought which is in itself interesting and
+moving; but not so much as suffices to stir up the soul by mere
+sympathy with itself in its simplest manifestation, nor enough to
+summon up that array of 'thoughts of power' which in a richly stored
+mind always attends the call of really intense feeling. It is for this
+reason, doubtless, that the genius of Wordsworth is essentially
+unlyrical. Lyric poetry, as it was the earliest kind, is also, if the
+view we are now taking of poetry be correct, more eminently and
+peculiarly poetry than any other: it is the poetry most natural to a
+really poetic temperament, and least capable of being successfully
+imitated by one not so endowed by nature.
+
+Shelley is the very reverse of all this. Where Wordsworth is strong,
+he is weak; where Wordsworth is weak, he is strong. Culture, that
+culture by which Wordsworth has reared from his own inward nature the
+richest harvest ever brought forth by a soil of so little depth, is
+precisely what was wanting to Shelley: or let us rather say, he had
+not, at the period of his deplorably early death, reached sufficiently
+far in that intellectual progression of which he was capable, and
+which, if it has done so much for greatly inferior natures, might have
+made of him the most perfect, as he was already the most gifted of our
+poets. For him, voluntary mental discipline had done little: the
+vividness of his emotions and of his sensations had done all. He
+seldom follows up an idea; it starts into life, summons from the
+fairy-land of his inexhaustible fancy some three or four bold images,
+then vanishes, and straight he is off on the wings of some casual
+association into quite another sphere. He had scarcely yet acquired
+the consecutiveness of thought necessary for a long poem; his more
+ambitious compositions too often resemble the scattered fragments of a
+mirror; colours brilliant as life, single images without end, but no
+picture. It is only when under the overruling influence of some one
+state of feeling, either actually experienced, or summoned up in the
+vividness of reality by a fervid imagination, that he writes as a
+great poet; unity of feeling being to him the harmonizing principle
+which a central idea is to minds of another class, and supplying the
+coherency and consistency which would else have been wanting. Thus it
+is in many of his smaller, and especially his lyrical poems. They are
+obviously written to exhale, perhaps to relieve, a state of feeling,
+or of conception of feeling, almost oppressive from its vividness. The
+thoughts and imagery are suggested by the feeling, and are such as it
+finds unsought. The state of feeling may be either of soul or of
+sense, or oftener (might we not say invariably?) of both: for the
+poetic temperament is usually, perhaps always, accompanied by
+exquisite senses. The exciting cause may be either an object or an
+idea. But whatever of sensation enters into the feeling, must not be
+local, or consciously organic; it is a condition of the whole frame,
+not of a part only. Like the state of sensation produced by a fine
+climate, or indeed like all strongly pleasurable or painful sensations
+in an impassioned nature, it pervades the entire nervous system.
+States of feeling, whether sensuous or spiritual, which thus possess
+the whole being, are the fountains of that which we have called the
+poetry of poets; and which is little else than a pouring forth of the
+thoughts and images that pass across the mind while some permanent
+state of feeling is occupying it.
+
+To the same original fineness of organization, Shelley was doubtless
+indebted for another of his rarest gifts, that exuberance of imagery,
+which when unrepressed, as in many of his poems it is, amounts to a
+fault. The susceptibility of his nervous system, which made his
+emotions intense, made also the impressions of his external senses
+deep and clear; and agreeably to the law of association by which, as
+already remarked, the strongest impressions are those which associate
+themselves the most easily and strongly, these vivid sensations were
+readily recalled to mind by all objects or thoughts which had
+co-existed with them, and by all feelings which in any degree
+resembled them. Never did a fancy so teem with sensuous imagery as
+Shelley's. Wordsworth economizes an image, and detains it until he has
+distilled all the poetry out of it, and it will not yield a drop more:
+Shelley lavishes his with a profusion which is unconscious because it
+is inexhaustible.
+
+If, then, the maxim _Nascitur poeta_ mean, either that the power of
+producing poetical compositions is a peculiar faculty which the poet
+brings into the world with him, which grows with his growth like any
+of his bodily powers, and is as independent of culture as his height,
+and his complexion; or that any natural peculiarity whatever is
+implied in producing poetry, real poetry, and in any quantity--such
+poetry too, as, to the majority of educated and intelligent readers,
+shall appear quite as good as, or even better than, any other; in
+either sense the doctrine is false. And nevertheless, there _is_
+poetry which could not emanate but from a mental and physical
+constitution peculiar, not in the kind, but in the degree of its
+susceptibility: a constitution which makes its possessor capable of
+greater happiness than mankind in general, and also of greater
+unhappiness; and because greater, so also more various. And such
+poetry, to all who know enough of nature to own it as being in nature,
+is much more poetry, is poetry in a far higher sense, than any other;
+since the common element of all poetry, that which constitutes poetry,
+human feeling, enters far more largely into this than into the poetry
+of culture. Not only because the natures which we have called
+poetical, really feel more, and consequently have more feeling to
+express; but because, the capacity of feeling being so great, feeling,
+when excited and not voluntarily resisted, seizes the helm of their
+thoughts, and the succession of ideas and images becomes the mere
+utterance of an emotion; not, as in other natures, the emotion a mere
+ornamental colouring of the thought.
+
+Ordinary education and the ordinary course of life are constantly at
+work counteracting this quality of mind, and substituting habits more
+suitable to their own ends: if instead of substituting they were
+content to superadd, there would be nothing to complain of. But when
+will education consist, not in repressing any mental faculty or power,
+from the uncontrolled action of which danger is apprehended, but in
+training up to its proper strength the corrective and antagonist
+power?
+
+In whomsoever the quality which we have described exists, and is not
+stifled, that person is a poet. Doubtless he is a greater poet in
+proportion as the fineness of his perceptions, whether of sense or of
+internal consciousness, furnishes him with an ampler supply of lovely
+images--the vigour and richness of his intellect, with a greater
+abundance of moving thoughts. For it is through these thoughts and
+images that the feeling speaks, and through their impressiveness that
+it impresses itself, and finds response in other hearts; and from
+these media of transmitting it (contrary to the laws of physical
+nature) increase of intensity is reflected back upon the feeling
+itself. But all these it is possible to have, and not be a poet; they
+are mere materials, which the poet shares in common with other people.
+What constitutes the poet is not the imagery nor the thoughts, nor
+even the feelings, but the law according to which they are called up.
+He is a poet, not because he has ideas of any particular kind, but
+because the succession of big ideas is subordinate to the course of
+his emotions.
+
+Many who have never acknowledged this in theory, bear testimony to it
+in their particular judgements. In listening to an oration, or reading
+a written discourse not professedly poetical, when do we begin to feel
+that the speaker or author is putting off the character of the orator
+or the prose writer, and is passing into the poet? Not when he begins
+to show strong feeling; _then_ we merely say, he is in earnest, he
+feels what he says; still less when he expresses himself in imagery;
+then, unless illustration be manifestly his sole object, we are apt to
+say, this is affectation. It is when the feeling (instead of passing
+away, or, if it continue, letting the train of thoughts run on
+exactly as they would have done if there were no influence at work but
+the mere intellect) becomes itself the originator of another train of
+association, which expels or blends with the former; when (for
+example) either his words, or the mode of their arrangement, are such
+as we spontaneously use only when in a state of excitement, proving
+that the mind is at least as much occupied by a passive state of its
+own feelings, as by the desire of attaining the premeditated end which
+the discourse has in view.[35]
+
+    [35] And this, we may remark by the way, seems to point to
+    the true theory of poetic diction; and to suggest the true
+    answer to as much as is erroneous of Wordsworth's celebrated
+    doctrine on that subject. For on the one hand, _all_ language
+    which is the natural expression of feeling, is really
+    poetical, and will be felt as such, apart from conventional
+    associations; but on the other, whenever intellectual culture
+    has afforded a choice between several modes of expressing the
+    same emotion, the stronger the feeling is, the more naturally
+    and certainly will it prefer the language which is most
+    peculiarly appropriated to itself, and kept sacred from the
+    contact of more vulgar objects of contemplation.
+
+Our judgements of authors who lay actual claim to the title of poets,
+follow the same principle. Whenever, after a writer's meaning is fully
+understood, it is still matter of reasoning and discussion whether he
+is a poet or not, he will be found to be wanting in the characteristic
+peculiarity of association so often adverted to. When, on the
+contrary, after reading or hearing one or two passages, we
+instinctively and without hesitation cry out, 'This is a poet', the
+probability is, that the passages are strongly marked with this
+peculiar quality. And we may add that in such case, a critic who, not
+having sufficient feeling to respond to the poetry, is also without
+sufficient philosophy to understand it though he feel it not, will be
+apt to pronounce, not 'this is prose', but 'this is exaggeration',
+'this is mysticism', or, 'this is nonsense'.
+
+Although a philosopher cannot, by culture, make himself, in the
+peculiar sense in which we now use the term, a poet, unless at least
+he have that peculiarity of nature which would probably have made
+poetry his earliest pursuit; a poet may always, by culture, make
+himself a philosopher. The poetic laws of association are by no means
+incompatible with the more ordinary laws; are by no means such as
+_must_ have their course, even though a deliberate purpose require
+their suspension. If the peculiarities of the poetic temperament were
+uncontrollable in any poet, they might be supposed so in Shelley; yet
+how powerfully, in the _Cenci_, does he coerce and restrain all the
+characteristic qualities of his genius; what severe simplicity, in
+place of his usual barbaric splendour; how rigidly does he keep the
+feelings and the imagery in subordination to the thought.
+
+The investigation of nature requires no habits or qualities of mind,
+but such as may always be acquired by industry and mental activity.
+Because at one time the mind may be so given up to a state of feeling,
+that the succession of its ideas is determined by the present
+enjoyment or suffering which pervades it, this is no reason but that
+in the calm retirement of study, when under no peculiar excitement
+either of the outward or of the inward sense, it may form any
+combinations, or pursue any trains of ideas, which are most conducive
+to the purposes of philosophic inquiry; and may, while in that state,
+form deliberate convictions, from which no excitement will afterwards
+make it swerve. Might we not go even further than this? We shall not
+pause to ask whether it be not a misunderstanding of the nature of
+passionate feeling to imagine that it is inconsistent with calmness;
+whether they who so deem of it, do not mistake passion in the militant
+or antagonistic state, for the type of passion universally; do not
+confound passion struggling towards an outward object, with passion
+brooding over itself. But without entering into this deeper
+investigation; that capacity of strong feeling, which is supposed
+necessarily to disturb the judgement, is also the material out of
+which all _motives_ are made; the motives, consequently, which lead
+human beings to the pursuit of truth. The greater the individual's
+capability of happiness and of misery, the stronger interest has that
+individual in arriving at truth; and when once that interest is felt,
+an impassioned nature is sure to pursue this, as to pursue any other
+object, with greater ardour; for energy of character is commonly the
+offspring of strong feeling. If, therefore, the most impassioned
+natures do not ripen into the most powerful intellects, it is always
+from defect of culture, or something wrong in the circumstances by
+which the being has originally or successively been surrounded.
+Undoubtedly strong feelings require a strong intellect to carry them,
+as more sail requires more ballast: and when, from neglect, or bad
+education, that strength is wanting, no wonder if the grandest and
+swiftest vessels make the most utter wreck.
+
+Where, as in some of our older poets, a poetic nature has been united
+with logical and scientific culture, the peculiarity of association
+arising from the finer nature so perpetually alternates with the
+associations attainable by commoner natures trained to high
+perfection, that its own particular law is not so conspicuously
+characteristic of the result produced, as in a poet like Shelley, to
+whom systematic intellectual culture, in a measure proportioned to the
+intensity of his own nature, has been wanting. Whether the superiority
+will naturally be on the side of the philosopher-poet or of the mere
+poet--whether the writings of the one ought, as a whole, to be truer,
+and their influence more beneficent, than those of the other--is too
+obvious in principle to need statement: it would be absurd to doubt
+whether two endowments are better than one; whether truth is more
+certainly arrived at by two processes, verifying and correcting each
+other, than by one alone. Unfortunately, in practice the matter is not
+quite so simple; there the question often is, which is least
+prejudicial to the intellect, uncultivation or malcultivation. For, as
+long as education consists chiefly of the mere inculcation of
+traditional opinions, many of which, from the mere fact that the human
+intellect has not yet reached perfection, must necessarily be false;
+so long as even those who are best taught, are rather taught to know
+the thoughts of others than to think, it is not always clear that the
+poet of acquired ideas has the advantage over him whose feeling has
+been his sole teacher. For the depth and durability of wrong as well
+as of right impressions is proportional to the fineness of the
+material; and they who have the greatest capacity of natural feeling
+are generally those whose artificial feelings are the strongest.
+Hence, doubtless, among other reasons, it is, that in an age of
+revolutions in opinion, the co-temporary poets, those at least who
+deserve the name, those who have any individuality of character, if
+they are not before their age, are almost sure to be behind it. An
+observation curiously verified all over Europe in the present century.
+Nor let it be thought disparaging. However urgent may be the necessity
+for a breaking up of old modes of belief, the most strong-minded and
+discerning, next to those who head the movement, are generally those
+who bring up the rear of it.
+
+
+
+
+WALTER BAGEHOT
+
+1826-1877
+
+WORDSWORTH, TENNYSON, AND BROWNING
+
+OR
+
+PURE, ORNATE, AND GROTESQUE ART IN ENGLISH POETRY (1864)
+
+_Enoch Arden, &c._ By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate.
+
+_Dramatis Personae._ By Robert Browning.
+
+
+We couple these two books together, not because of their likeness, for
+they are as dissimilar as books can be, nor on account of the eminence
+of their authors, for in general two great authors are too much for
+one essay, but because they are the best possible illustration of
+something we have to say upon poetical art--because they may give to
+it life and freshness. The accident of contemporaneous publication has
+here brought together two books, very characteristic of modern art,
+and we want to show how they are characteristic.
+
+Neither English poetry nor English criticism have ever recovered the
+_eruption_ which they both made at the beginning of this century into
+the fashionable world. The poems of Lord Byron were received with an
+avidity that resembles our present avidity for sensation novels, and
+were read by a class which at present reads little but such novels.
+Old men who remember those days may be heard to say, 'We hear nothing
+of poetry nowadays; it seems quite down.' And 'down' it certainly is,
+if for poetry it be a descent to be no longer the favourite excitement
+of the more frivolous part of the 'upper' world. That stimulating
+poetry is now little read. A stray schoolboy may still be detected in
+a wild admiration for the _Giaour_ or the _Corsair_ (and it is
+suitable to his age, and he should not be reproached for it), but the
+_real_ posterity--the quiet students of a past literature--never read
+them or think of them. A line or two linger in the memory; a few
+telling strokes of occasional and felicitous energy are quoted, but
+this is all. As wholes, these exaggerated stories were worthless; they
+taught nothing, and, therefore, they are forgotten. If nowadays a
+dismal poet were, like Byron, to lament the fact of his birth, and to
+hint that he was too good for the world, the _Saturday Review_ would
+say that 'they doubted if he _was_ too good; that a sulky poet was a
+questionable addition to a tolerable world; that he need not have been
+born, as far as they were concerned.' Doubtless, there is much in
+Byron besides his dismal exaggeration, but it was that exaggeration
+which made 'the sensation', which gave him a wild moment of dangerous
+fame. As so often happens, the cause of his momentary fashion is the
+cause also of his lasting oblivion. Moore's former reputation was less
+excessive, yet it has not been more permanent. The prettiness of a few
+songs preserves the memory of his name, but as a poet to _read_ he is
+forgotten. There is nothing to read in him; no exquisite thought, no
+sublime feeling, no consummate description of true character. Almost
+the sole result of the poetry of that time is the harm which it has
+done. It degraded for a time the whole character of the art. It said
+by practice, by a most efficient and successful practice, that it was
+the aim, the _duty_ of poets, to catch the attention of the passing,
+the fashionable, the busy world. If a poem 'fell dead', it was
+nothing; it was composed to please the 'London' of the year, and if
+that London did not like it, why, it had failed. It fixed upon the
+minds of a whole generation, it engraved in popular memory and
+tradition, a vague conviction that poetry is but one of the many
+_amusements_ for the light classes, for the lighter hours of all
+classes. The mere notion, the bare idea, that poetry is a deep thing,
+a teaching thing, the most surely and wisely elevating of human
+things, is even now to the coarse public mind nearly unknown.
+
+As was the fate of poetry, so inevitably was that of criticism. The
+science that expounds which poetry is good and which is bad is
+dependent for its popular reputation on the popular estimate of poetry
+itself. The critics of that day had _a_ day, which is more than can be
+said for some since; they professed to tell the fashionable world in
+what books it would find new pleasure, and therefore they were read by
+the fashionable world. Byron counted the critic and poet equal. The
+_Edinburgh Review_ penetrated among the young, and into places of
+female resort where it does not go now. As people ask, 'Have you read
+_Henry Dunbar_? and what do you think of it?' so they then asked,
+'Have you read the _Giaour_? and what do you think of it?' Lord
+Jeffrey, a shrewd judge of the world, employed himself in telling it
+what to think; not so much what it ought to think, as what at bottom
+it did think, and so by dexterous sympathy with current society he
+gained contemporary fame and power. Such fame no critic must hope for
+now. His articles will not penetrate where the poems themselves do not
+penetrate. When poetry was noisy, criticism was loud; now poetry is a
+still small voice, and criticism must be smaller and stiller. As the
+function of such criticism was limited so was its subject. For the
+great and (as time now proves) the _permanent_ part of the poetry of
+his time--for Shelley and for Wordsworth--Lord Jeffrey had but one
+word. He said[36] 'It won't do'. And it will not do to amuse a
+drawing-room.
+
+    [36] The first words in Lord Jeffrey's celebrated review of
+    the _Excursion_ were, 'This will never do.'
+
+The doctrine that poetry is a light amusement for idle hours, a
+metrical species of sensational novel, has not indeed been without
+gainsayers wildly popular. Thirty years ago, Mr. Carlyle most rudely
+contradicted it. But perhaps this is about all that he has done. He
+has denied, but he has not disproved. He has contradicted the floating
+paganism, but he has not founded the deep religion. All about and
+around us a _faith_ in poetry struggles to be extricated, but it is
+not extricated. Some day, at the touch of the true word, the whole
+confusion will by magic cease; the broken and shapeless notions cohere
+and crystallize into a bright and true theory. But this cannot be yet.
+
+But though no complete theory of the poetic art as yet be possible for
+us, though perhaps only our children's children will be able to speak
+on this subject with the assured confidence which belongs to accepted
+truth, yet something of some certainty may be stated on the easier
+elements, and something that will throw light on these two new books.
+But it will be necessary to assign reasons, and the assigning of
+reasons is a dry task. Years ago, when criticism only tried to show
+how poetry could be made a good amusement, it was not impossible that
+criticism itself should be amusing. But now it must at least be
+serious, for we believe that poetry is a serious and a deep thing.
+
+There should be a word in the language of literary art to express what
+the word 'picturesque' expresses for the fine arts. _Picturesque_
+means fit to be put into a picture; we want a word _literatesque_,
+'fit to be put into a book.' An artist goes through a hundred
+different country scenes, rich with beauties, charms, and merits, but
+he does not paint any of them. He leaves them alone; he idles on till
+he finds the hundred-and-first--a scene which many observers would not
+think much of, but which _he_ knows by virtue of his art will look
+well on canvas, and this he paints and preserves. Susceptible
+observers, though not artists, feel this quality too; they say of a
+scene, 'How picturesque!' meaning by this a quality distinct from that
+of beauty, or sublimity, or grandeur--meaning to speak not only of the
+scene as it is in itself, but also of its fitness for imitation by
+art; meaning not only that it is good, but that its goodness is such
+as ought to be transferred to paper; meaning not simply that it
+fascinates, but also that its fascination is such as ought to be
+copied by man. A fine and insensible instinct has put language to this
+subtle use; it expresses an idea without which fine art criticism
+could not go on, and it is very natural that the language of pictorial
+should be better supplied with words than that of literary criticism,
+for the eye was used before the mind, and language embodies primitive
+sensuous ideas, long ere it expresses, or need express, abstract and
+literary ones.
+
+The reason why a landscape is 'picturesque' is often said to be that
+such landscape represents an 'idea'. But this explanation, though in
+the minds of some who use it it is near akin to the truth, fails to
+explain that truth to those who did not know it before; the Word
+'idea,' is so often used in these subjects when people do not know
+anything else to say; it represents so often a kind of intellectual
+insolvency, when philosophers are at their wits' end, that shrewd
+people will never readily on any occasion give it credit for meaning
+anything. A wise explainer must, therefore, look out for other words
+to convey what he has to say. _Landscapes_, like everything else in
+nature, divide themselves as we look at them into a sort of rude
+classification. We go down a river, for example, and we see a hundred
+landscapes on both sides of it, resembling one another in much, yet
+differing in something; with trees here, and a farmhouse there, and
+shadows on one side, and a deep pool far on; a collection of
+circumstances most familiar in themselves, but making a perpetual
+novelty by the magic of their various combinations. We travel so for
+miles and hours, and then we come to a scene which also has these
+various circumstances and adjuncts, but which combines them best,
+which makes the best whole of them, which shows them in their best
+proportion at a single glance before the eye. Then we say, 'This is
+the place to paint the river; this is the picturesque point!' Or, if
+not artists or critics of art, we feel without analysis or examination
+that somehow this bend or sweep of the river, shall, in future, _be
+the river to us_: that it is the image of it which we will retain in
+our mind's eye, by which we will remember it, which we will call up
+when we want to describe or think of it. Some fine countries, some
+beautiful rivers, have not this picturesque quality: they give us
+elements of beauty, but they do not combine them together; we go on
+for a time delighted, but _after_ a time somehow we get wearied; we
+feel that we are taking in nothing and learning nothing; we get no
+collected image before our mind; we see the accidents and
+circumstances of that sort of scenery, but the summary scene we do not
+see; we find _disjecta membra_, but no form; various and many and
+faulty approximations are displayed in succession; but the absolute
+perfection in that country or river's scenery--its _type_--is
+withheld: We go away from such places in part delighted, but in part
+baffled; we have been puzzled by pretty things; we have beheld a
+hundred different inconsistent specimens of the same sort of beauty;
+but the rememberable idea, the full development, the characteristic
+individuality of it, we have not seen.
+
+We find the same sort of quality in all parts of painting. We see a
+portrait of a person we know, and we say, 'It is like--yes, like, of
+course, but it is not _the man_;' we feel it could not be any one
+else, but still, somehow it fails to bring home to us the individual
+as we know him to be. _He_ is not there. An accumulation of features
+like his are painted, but his essence is not painted; an
+approximation more or less excellent is given, but the characteristic
+expression, the _typical_ form, of the man is withheld.
+
+Literature--the painting of words--has the same quality but wants the
+analogous word. The word '_literatesque_,' would mean, if we possessed
+it, that perfect combination in the _subject-matter_ of literature,
+which suits the _art_ of literature. We often meet people, and say of
+them, sometimes meaning well and sometimes ill, 'How well so-and-so
+would do in a book!' Such people are by no means the best people; but
+they are the most effective people--the most rememberable people.
+Frequently when we first know them, we like them because they explain
+to us so much of our experience; we have known many people 'like
+that,' in one way or another, but we did not seem to understand them;
+they were nothing to us, for their traits were indistinct; we forgot
+them, for they _hitched_ on to nothing, and we could not classify
+them; but when we see the _type_ of the genus, at once we seem to
+comprehend its character; the inferior specimens are explained by the
+perfect embodiment; the approximations are definable when we know the
+ideal to which they draw near. There are an infinite number of classes
+of human beings, but in each of these classes there is a distinctive
+type which, if we could expand it out in words, would define the
+class. We cannot expand it in formal terms any more than a landscape
+or a species of landscapes; but we have an art, an art of words, which
+can draw it. Travellers and others often bring home, in addition to
+their long journals--which though so living to them, are so dead, so
+inanimate, so undescriptive to all else--a pen-and-ink sketch, rudely
+done very likely, but which, perhaps, even the more for the blots and
+strokes, gives a distinct notion, an emphatic image, to all who see
+it. They say at once, '_Now_ we know the sort of thing'. The sketch
+has _hit_ the mind. True literature does the same. It describes sorts,
+varieties, and permutations, by delineating the type of each sort, the
+ideal of each variety, the central, the marking trait of each
+permutation.
+
+On this account, the greatest artists of the world have ever shown an
+enthusiasm for reality. To care for notions and abstractions; to
+philosophize; to reason out conclusions; to care for schemes of
+thought, are signs in the artistic mind of secondary excellence. A
+Schiller, a Euripides, a Ben Jonson, cares for _ideas_--for the
+parings of the intellect, and the distillation of the mind; a
+Shakespeare, a Homer, a Goethe, finds his mental occupation, the true
+home of his natural thoughts, in the real world--'which is the world
+of all of us'--where the face of nature, the moving masses of men and
+women, are ever changing, ever multiplying, ever mixing one with the
+other. The reason is plain--the business of the poet, of the artist,
+is with _types_; and those types are mirrored in reality. As a painter
+must not only have a hand to execute, but an eye to distinguish--as he
+must go here and then there through the real world to catch the
+picturesque man, the picturesque scene, which is to live on his
+canvas--so the poet must find in that reality, the _literatesque_ man,
+the _literatesque_ scene which nature intends for him, and which will
+live in his page. Even in reality he will not find this type complete,
+or the characteristics perfect; but there, at least, he will find
+_something_, some hint, some intimation, some suggestion; whereas, in
+the stagnant home of his own thoughts he will find nothing pure,
+nothing _as it is_, nothing which does not bear his own mark, which is
+not somehow altered by a mixture with himself.
+
+The first conversation of Goethe and Schiller illustrates this
+conception of the poet's art. Goethe was at that time prejudiced
+against Schiller, we must remember, partly from what he considered the
+_outrages_ of the _Robbers_, partly because of the philosophy of Kant.
+Schiller's 'Essay on _Grace and Dignity_', he tells us, 'was yet less
+of a kind to reconcile me. The philosophy of Kant, which exalts the
+dignity of mind so highly, while appearing to restrict it, Schiller
+had joyfully embraced: it unfolded the extraordinary qualities which
+Nature had implanted in him; and in the lively feeling of freedom and
+self-direction, he showed himself unthankful to the Great Mother, who
+surely had not acted like a step-dame towards him. Instead of viewing
+her as self-subsisting, as producing with a living force, and
+according to appointed laws, alike the highest and the lowest of her
+works, he took her up under the aspect of some empirical native
+qualities of the human mind. Certain harsh passages I could even
+directly apply to myself: they exhibited my confession of faith in a
+false light; and I felt that if written without particular attention
+to me they were still worse; for in that case, the vast chasm which
+lay between us, gaped but so much the more distinctly.' After a casual
+meeting at a Society for Natural History, they walked home and Goethe
+proceeds:
+
+'We reached his house; the talk induced me to go in. I then expounded
+to him, with as much vivacity as possible, the _Metamorphosis of
+Plants_, drawing out on paper, with many characteristic strokes, a
+symbolic Plant for him, as I proceeded. He heard and saw all this,
+with much interest and distinct comprehension; but when I had done, he
+shook his head and said: 'This is no experiment, this is an idea.' I
+stopped with some degree of irritation; for the point which separated
+us was most luminously marked by this expression. The opinions in
+_Dignity and Grace_, again occurred to me; the old grudge was just
+awakening; but I smothered it, and merely said: "I was happy to find
+that I had got ideas without knowing it, nay that I saw them before my
+eyes."
+
+'Schiller had much more prudence and dexterity of management than I;
+he was also thinking of his periodical the _Horen_, about this time,
+and of course rather wished to attract than repel me. Accordingly he
+answered me like an accomplished Kantite; and as my stiff-necked
+Realism gave occasion to many contradictions, much battling took place
+between us, and at last a truce, in which neither party would consent
+to yield the victory, but each held himself invincible. Positions like
+the following grieved me to the very soul: _How can there ever be an
+experiment, that shall correspond with an idea? The specific quality
+of an idea is, that no experiment can reach it or agree with it._ Yet
+if he held as an idea, the same thing which I looked upon as an
+experiment; there must certainly, I thought, be some community between
+us, some ground whereon both of us might meet!'
+
+With Goethe's natural history, or with Kant's philosophy, we have
+here no concern, but we can combine the expressions of the two great
+poets into a nearly complete description of poetry. The 'symbolic
+plant' is the _type_ of which we speak, the ideal at which inferior
+specimens aim, the class-characteristic in which they all share, but
+which none shows forth fully: Goethe was right in searching for this
+in reality and nature; Schiller was right in saying that it was an
+'idea', a transcending notion to which approximations could be found
+in experience, but only approximations--which could not be found there
+itself. Goethe, as a poet, rightly felt the primary necessity of
+outward suggestion and experience; Schiller as a philosopher, rightly
+felt its imperfection.
+
+But in these delicate matters, it is easy to misapprehend. There is,
+undoubtedly, a sort of poetry which is produced as it were out of the
+author's mind. The description of the poet's own moods and feelings is
+a common sort of poetry--perhaps the commonest sort. But the
+peculiarity of such cases is, that the poet does not describe himself
+_as_ himself: autobiography is not his object; he takes himself as a
+specimen of human nature; he describes, not himself, but a
+distillation of himself: he takes such of his moods as are most
+characteristic, as most typify certain moods of certain men, or
+certain moods of all men; he chooses preponderant feelings of special
+sorts of men, or occasional feelings of men of all sorts; but with
+whatever other difference and diversity, the essence is that such
+self-describing poets describe what is _in_ them, but not _peculiar_
+to them,--what is generic, not what is special and individual. Gray's
+_Elegy_ describes a mood which Gray felt more than other men, but
+which most others, perhaps all others, feel too. It is more popular,
+perhaps, than any English poem, because that sort of feeling is the
+most diffused of high feelings, and because Gray added to a singular
+nicety of fancy an habitual proneness to a _contemplative_--a
+discerning but unbiassed--meditation on death and on life. Other poets
+cannot hope for such success: a subject, so popular, so grave, so
+wise, and yet so suitable to the writer's nature is hardly to be
+found. But the same ideal, the same unautobiographical character is to
+be found in the writings of meaner men. Take sonnets of Hartley
+Coleridge, for example:
+
+
+I
+
+TO A FRIEND
+
+    When we were idlers with the loitering rills,
+    The need of human love we little noted:
+    Our love was nature; and the peace that floated
+    On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills,
+    To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills:
+    One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,
+    That, wisely doating, ask'd not why it doated,
+    And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.
+    But now I find, how dear thou wert to me;
+    That man is more than half of nature's treasure,
+    Of that fair Beauty which no eye can see,
+    Of that sweet music which no ear can measure;
+    And now the streams may sing for others' pleasure,
+    The hills sleep on in their eternity.
+
+
+II
+
+TO THE SAME
+
+    In the great city we are met again,
+    Where many souls there are, that breathe and die,
+    Scarce knowing more of nature's potency,
+    Than what they learn from heat, or cold, or rain;
+    The sad vicissitude of weary pain;--
+    For busy man is lord of ear and eye,
+    And what hath nature, but the vast, void sky,
+    And the thronged river toiling to the main?
+    Oh! say not so, for she shall have her part
+    In every smile, in every tear that falls,
+    And she shall hide her in the secret heart,
+    Where love persuades, and sterner duty calls:
+    But worse it were than death, or sorrow's smart,
+    To live without a friend within these walls.
+
+
+III
+
+TO THE SAME
+
+    We parted on the mountains, as two streams
+    From one clear spring pursue their several ways;
+    And thy fleet course hath been through many a maze,
+    In foreign lands, where silvery Padus gleams
+    To that delicious sky, whose glowing beams
+    Brightened the tresses that old Poets praise;
+    Where Petrarch's patient love, and artful lays,
+    And Ariosto's song of many themes,
+    Moved the soft air. But I, a lazy brook,
+    As close pent up within my native dell,
+    Have crept along from nook to shady nook,
+    Where flowrets blow, and whispering Naiads dwell.
+    Yet now we meet, that parted were so wide,
+    O'er rough and smooth to travel side by side.
+
+The contrast of instructive and enviable locomotion with refining but
+instructive meditation is not special and peculiar to these two, but
+general and universal. It was set down by Hartley Coleridge because he
+was the most meditative and refining of men.
+
+What sort of literatesque types are fit to be described in the sort of
+literature called poetry, is a matter on which much might be written.
+Mr. Arnold, some years since, put forth a theory that the art of
+poetry could only delineate _great actions_. But though, rightly
+interpreted and understood--using the word action so as to include
+high and sound activity in contemplation--this definition may suit the
+highest poetry, it certainly cannot be stretched to include many
+inferior sorts and even many good sorts. Nobody in their senses would
+describe Gray's _Elegy_ as the delineation of a 'great action'; some
+kinds of mental contemplation may be energetic enough to deserve this
+name, but Gray would have been frightened at the very word. He loved
+scholar-like calm and quiet inaction; his very greatness depended on
+his _not_ acting, on his 'wise passiveness,' on his indulging the
+grave idleness which so well appreciates so much of human life. But
+the best answer--the _reductio ad absurdum_--of Mr. Arnold's doctrine,
+is the mutilation which it has caused him to make of his own writings.
+It has forbidden him, he tells us, to reprint _Empedocles_--a poem
+undoubtedly containing defects and even excesses, but containing also
+these lines:
+
+    And yet what days were those, Parmenides!
+    When we were young, when we could number friends
+    In all the Italian cities like ourselves,
+    When with elated hearts we join'd your train,
+    Ye Sun-born virgins! on the road of Truth.
+    Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought
+    Nor outward things were clos'd and dead to us,
+    But we receiv'd the shock of mighty thoughts
+    On simple minds with a pure natural joy;
+    And if the sacred load oppress'd our brain,
+    We had the power to feel the pressure eas'd.
+    The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,
+    In the delightful commerce of the world.
+    We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
+    Thought's slaves and dead to every natural joy.
+    The smallest thing could give us pleasure then--
+    The sports of the country people;
+    A flute note from the woods;
+    Sunset over the sea:
+    Seed-time and harvest;
+    The reapers in the corn;
+    The vinedresser in his vineyard;
+    The village-girl at her wheel.
+    Fullness of life and power of feeling, ye
+    Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,
+    Who dwell on a firm basis of content.
+    But he who has outliv'd his prosperous days,
+    But he, whose youth fell on a different world
+    From that on which his exil'd age is thrown;
+    Whose mind was fed on other food, was train'd
+    By other rules than are in vogue to-day;
+    Whose habit of thought is fix'd, who will not change,
+    But in a world he loves not must subsist
+    In ceaseless opposition, be the guard
+    Of his own breast, fetter'd to what he guards,
+    That the world win no mastery over him;
+    Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;
+    Who has no minute's breathing space allow'd
+    To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy:--
+    Joy and the outward world must die to him
+    As they are dead to me.
+
+What freak of criticism can induce a man who has written such poetry
+as this, to discard it, and say it is not poetry? Mr. Arnold is
+privileged to speak of his own poems, but no other critic could speak
+so and not be laughed at.
+
+We are disposed to believe that no very sharp definition can be
+given--at least in the present state of the critical art--of the
+boundary line between poetry and other sorts of imaginative
+delineation. Between the undoubted dominions of the two kinds there is
+a debateable land; everybody is agreed that the _Oedipus at Colonus_
+_is_ poetry: every one is agreed that the wonderful appearance of Mrs.
+Veal is _not_ poetry. But the exact line which separates grave novels
+in verse like _Aylmer's Field_ or _Enoch Arden_, from grave novels not
+in verse like _Silas Marner_ or _Adam Bede_, we own we cannot draw
+with any confidence. Nor, perhaps, is it very important; whether a
+narrative is thrown into verse or not certainly depends in part on the
+taste of the age, and in part on its mechanical helps. Verse is the
+only mechanical help to the memory in rude times, and there is little
+writing till a cheap something is found to write upon, and a cheap
+something to write with. Poetry--verse at least--is the literature of
+_all work_ in early ages; it is only later ages which write in what
+_they_ think a natural and simple prose. There are other casual
+influences in the matter too; but they are not material now. We need
+only say here that poetry, because it has a more marked rhythm than
+prose, must be more intense in meaning and more concise in style than
+prose. People expect a 'marked rhythm' to imply something worth
+marking; if it fails to do so they are disappointed. They are
+displeased at the visible waste of a powerful instrument; they call it
+'doggerel,' and rightly call it, for the metrical expression of full
+thought and eager feeling--the burst of metre--incident to high
+imagination, should not be wasted on petty matters which prose does as
+well,--which it does better--which it suits by its very limpness and
+weakness, whose small changes it follows more easily, and to whose
+lowest details it can fully and without effort degrade itself. Verse,
+too, should be _more concise_, for long-continued rhythm tends to jade
+the mind, just as brief rhythm tends to attract the attention. Poetry
+should be memorable and emphatic, intense, and _soon over_.
+
+The great divisions of poetry, and of all other literary art, arise
+from the different modes in which these _types_--these characteristic
+men, these characteristic feelings--may be variously described. There
+are three principal modes which we shall attempt to describe--the
+_pure_, which is sometimes, but not very wisely, called the classical;
+the _ornate_, which is also unwisely called romantic; and the
+_grotesque_, which might be called the mediaeval. We will describe the
+nature of these a little. Criticism we know must be brief--not, like
+poetry, because its charm is too intense to be sustained--but on the
+contrary, because its interest is too weak to be prolonged; but
+elementary criticism, if an evil, is a necessary evil; a little while
+spent among the simple principles of art is the first condition, the
+absolute pre-requisite, for surely apprehending and wisely judging the
+complete embodiments and miscellaneous forms of actual literature.
+
+The definition of _pure_ literature is that it describes the type in
+its simplicity, we mean, with the exact amount of accessory
+circumstance which is necessary to bring it before the mind in
+finished perfection, and _no more_ than that amount. The _type_ needs
+some accessories from its nature--a picturesque landscape does not
+consist wholly of picturesque features. There is a setting of
+surroundings--as the Americans would say, of _fixings_--without which
+the reality is not itself. By a traditional mode of speech, as soon as
+we see a picture in which a complete effect is produced by detail so
+rare and so harmonized as to escape us, we say 'how classical'. The
+whole which is to be seen appears at once and through the detail, but
+the detail itself is not seen: we do not think of that which gives us
+the idea; we are absorbed in the idea itself. Just so in literature
+the pure art is that which works with the fewest strokes; the fewest,
+that is, for its purpose, for its aim is to call up and bring home to
+men an idea, a form, a character, and if that idea be twisted, that
+form be involved, that character perplexed, many strokes of literary
+art will be needful. Pure art does not mutilate its object: it
+represents it as fully as is possible with the slightest effort which
+is possible: it shrinks from no needful circumstances, as little as it
+inserts any which are needless. The precise peculiarity is not merely
+that no incidental circumstance is inserted which does not tell on the
+main design: no art is fit to be called _art_ which permits a stroke
+to be put in without an object; but that only the minimum of such
+circumstance is inserted at all. The form is sometimes said to be
+bare, the accessories are sometimes said to be invisible, because the
+appendages are so choice that the shape only is perceived.
+
+The English literature undoubtedly contains much impure literature;
+impure in its style if not in its meaning: but it also contains one
+great, one nearly perfect, model of the pure style in the literary
+expression of typical _sentiment_; and one not perfect, but gigantic
+and close approximation to perfection in the pure delineation of
+objective character. Wordsworth, perhaps, comes as near to choice
+purity of style in sentiment as is possible; Milton, with exceptions
+and conditions to be explained, approaches perfection by the
+strenuous purity with which he depicts character.
+
+A wit once said, that '_pretty_ women had more features than
+_beautiful_ women', and though the expression may be criticized, the
+meaning is correct. Pretty women seem to have a great number of
+attractive points, each of which attracts your attention, and each one
+of which you remember afterwards; yet these points have not _grown
+together_, their features have not linked themselves into a single
+inseparable whole. But a beautiful woman is a whole as she is; you no
+more take her to pieces than a Greek statue; she is not an aggregate
+of divisible charms, she is a charm in herself. Such ever is the
+dividing test of pure art; if you catch yourself admiring its details,
+it is defective; you ought to think of it as a single whole which you
+must remember, which you must admire, which somehow subdues you while
+you admire it, which is a 'possession' to you 'for ever'.
+
+Of course no individual poem embodies this ideal perfectly; of course
+every human word and phrase has its imperfections, and if we choose an
+instance to illustrate that ideal, the instance has scarcely a fair
+chance. By contrasting it with the ideal we suggest its imperfections;
+by protruding it as an example, we turn on its defectiveness the
+microscope of criticism. Yet these two sonnets of Wordsworth may be
+fitly read in this place, not because they are quite without faults,
+or because they are the very best examples of their kind of style; but
+because they are _luminous_ examples; the compactness of the sonnet
+and the gravity of the sentiment, hedging in the thoughts,
+restraining the fancy, and helping to maintain a singleness of
+expression:
+
+
+THE TROSACHS.
+
+    There's not a nook within this solemn Pass,
+    But were an apt Confessional for one
+    Taught by his summer spent; his autumn gone,
+    That Life is but a tale of morning grass
+    Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase
+    That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes
+    Feed it 'mid Nature's old felicities,
+    Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass
+    Untouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy guest,
+    If from a golden perch of aspen spray
+    (October's workmanship to rival May)
+    The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast
+    That moral teaches by a heaven-taught lay,
+    Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest!
+
+
+COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPT. 3, 1802
+
+    Earth has not anything to show more fair:
+    Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
+    A sight so touching in its majesty:
+    This city now doth, like a garment, wear
+    The beauty of the morning; silent, bare.
+    Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
+    Open unto the fields and to the sky;
+    All bright and open in the smokeless air.
+    Never did sun more beautifully steep
+    In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
+    Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
+    The river glideth at his own sweet will:
+    Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
+    And all that mighty heart is lying still!
+
+Instances of barer style than this may easily be found, instances of
+colder style--few better instances of purer style. Not a single
+expression (the invocation in the concluding couplet of the second
+sonnet perhaps excepted) can be spared, yet not a single expression
+rivets the attention. If, indeed, we take out the phrase--
+
+    The city now doth like a garment wear
+    The beauty of the morning,
+
+and the description of the brilliant yellow of autumn--
+
+    October's workmanship to rival May,
+
+they have independent value, but they are not noticed in the sonnet
+when we read it through; they fall into place there, and being in
+their place are not seen. The great subjects of the two sonnets, the
+religious aspect of beautiful but grave nature--the religious aspect
+of a city about to awaken and be alive, are the only ideas left in our
+mind. To Wordsworth has been vouchsafed the last grace of the
+self-denying artist; you think neither of him nor his style, but you
+cannot help thinking of--you _must_ recall--the exact phrase, the
+_very_ sentiment he wished.
+
+Milton's purity is more eager. In the most exciting parts of
+Wordsworth--and these sonnets are not very exciting--you always feel,
+you never forget, that what you have before you is the excitement of a
+recluse. There is nothing of the stir of life; nothing of the _brawl_
+of the world. But Milton though always a scholar by trade, though
+solitary in old age, was through life intent on great affairs, lived
+close to great scenes, watched a revolution, and if not an actor in
+it, was at least secretary to the actors. He was familiar--by daily
+experience and habitual sympathy--with the earnest debate of arduous
+questions, on which the life and death of the speakers certainly
+depended, on which the weal or woe of the country perhaps depended.
+He knew how profoundly the individual character of the speakers--their
+inner and real nature--modifies their opinion on such questions; he
+knew how surely that nature will appear in the expression of them.
+This great experience, fashioned by a fine imagination, gives to the
+debate of Satanic Council in Pandaemonium its reality and its life. It
+is a debate in the Long Parliament, and though the _theme_ of
+_Paradise Lost_ obliged Milton to side with the monarchical element in
+the universe, his old habits are often too much for him; and his real
+sympathy--the impetus and energy of his nature--side with the
+rebellious element. For the purposes of art this is much better--of a
+court, a poet can make but little; of a heaven he can make very
+little, but of a courtly heaven, such as Milton conceived, he can make
+nothing at all. The idea of a court and the idea of a heaven are so
+radically different, that a distinct combination of them is always
+grotesque and often ludicrous. _Paradise Lost_, as a whole, is
+radically tainted by a vicious principle. It professes to justify the
+ways of God to man, to account for sin and death, and it tells you
+that the whole originated in a political event; in a court squabble as
+to a particular act of patronage and the due or undue promotion of an
+eldest son. Satan may have been wrong, but on Milton's theory he had
+an _arguable_ case at least. There was something arbitrary in the
+promotion; there were little symptoms of a job; in _Paradise Lost_ it
+is always clear that the devils are the weaker, but it is never clear
+that the angels are the better. Milton's sympathy and his imagination
+slip back to the Puritan rebels whom he loved, and desert the courtly
+angels whom he could not love although he praised. There is no wonder
+that Milton's hell is better than his heaven, for he hated officials
+and he loved rebels, for he employs his genius below, and accumulates
+his pedantry above. On the great debate in Pandaemonium all his genius
+is concentrated. The question is very practical; it is, 'What are we
+devils to do, now we have lost heaven?' Satan who presides over and
+manipulates the assembly; Moloch
+
+                              the fiercest spirit
+    That fought in Heaven, now fiercer by despair,
+
+who wants to fight again; Belial, 'the man of the world', who does not
+want to fight any more; Mammon, who is for commencing an industrial
+career; Beelzebub, the official statesman,
+
+                      deep on his front engraven
+    Deliberation sat and Public care,
+
+who, at Satan's instance, proposes the invasion of earth--are as
+distinct as so many statues. Even Belial, 'the man of the world', the
+sort of man with whom Milton had least sympathy, is perfectly painted.
+An inferior artist would have made the actor who 'counselled ignoble
+ease and peaceful sloth', a degraded and ugly creature; but Milton
+knew better. He knew that low notions require a better garb than high
+notions. Human nature is not a high thing, but at least it has a high
+idea of itself; it will not accept mean maxims, unless they are gilded
+and made beautiful. A prophet in goatskin may cry, 'Repent, repent',
+but it takes 'purple and fine linen' to be able to say, 'Continue in
+your sins'. The world vanquishes with its speciousness and its show,
+and the orator who is to persuade men to worldliness must have a share
+in them. Milton well knew this; after the warlike speech of the fierce
+Moloch he introduces a brighter and a more graceful spirit:
+
+    He ended frowning, and his look denounced
+    Desp'rate revenge, and battle dangerous
+    To less than Gods. On th' other side up rose
+    Belial, in act more graceful and humane:
+    A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seem'd
+    For dignity composed and high exploit:
+    But all was false and hollow, though his tongue
+    Dropt manna, and could make the worse appear
+    The better reason, to perplex and dash
+    Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low;
+    To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds
+    Tim'rous and slothful: yet he pleased the ear,
+    And with persuasive accent thus began:
+
+He does not begin like a man with a strong case, but like a man with a
+weak case; he knows that the pride of human nature is irritated by
+mean advice, and though he may probably persuade men to _take_ it, he
+must carefully apologise for _giving_ it. Here, as elsewhere, though
+the formal address is to devils, the real address is to men: to the
+human nature which we know, not to the fictitious demonic nature we do
+not know:
+
+    I should be much for open war, O Peers!
+    As not behind in hate, if what was urged
+    Main reason to persuade immediate war,
+    Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast
+    Ominous conjecture on the whole success:
+    When he who most excels in fact of arms,
+    In what he counsels and in what excels
+    Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair,
+    And utter dissolution, as the scope
+    Of all his aim, after some dire revenge.
+    First, what revenge? The tow'rs of Heav'n are fill'd
+    With armed watch, that render all access
+    Impregnable; oft on the bord'ring deep
+    Encamp their legions, or with obscure wing
+    Scout far and wide into the realm of night,
+    Scorning surprise. Or could we break our way
+    By force, and at our heels all hell should rise
+    With blackest insurrection, to confound
+    Heav'n's purest light, yet our great Enemy,
+    All incorruptible, would on his throne
+    Sit unpolluted, and th' ethereal mould
+    Incapable of stain would soon expel
+    Her mischief, and purge oft the baser fire
+    Victorious. Thus repulsed, our final hope
+    Is flat despair. We must exasperate
+    Th' Almighty Victor to spend all his rage,
+    And that must end us: that must be our cure,
+    To be no more? Sad cure; for who would lose,
+    Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
+    Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
+    To perish rather, swallow'd up and lost
+    In the wide womb of uncreated night,
+    Devoid of sense and motion? And who knows,
+    Let this be good, whether our angry Foe
+    Can give it, or will ever? How he can
+    Is doubtful; that he never will is sure.
+    Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire
+    Belike through impotence, or unaware,
+    To give his enemies their wish, and end
+    Them in his anger, whom his anger saves
+    To punish endless? Wherefore cease we then?
+    Say they who counsel war, we are decreed,
+    Reserved, and destined, to eternal woe;
+    Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,
+    What can we suffer worse? Is this then worst,
+    Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so on.
+
+Mr. Pitt knew this speech by heart, and Lord Macaulay has called it
+incomparable; and these judges of the oratorical art have well
+decided. A mean foreign policy cannot be better defended. Its
+sensibleness is effectually explained, and its tameness as much as
+possible disguised.
+
+But we have not here to do with the excellence of Belial's policy, but
+with the excellence of his speech; and with that speech in a peculiar
+manner. This speech, taken with the few lines of description with
+which Milton introduces them, embody, in as short a space as possible,
+with as much perfection as possible, the delineation of the type of
+character common at all times, dangerous in many times, sure to come
+to the surface in moments of difficulty, and never more dangerous than
+then. As Milton describes, it is one among several _typical_
+characters which will ever have their place in great councils, which
+will ever be heard at important decisions, which are part of the
+characteristic and inalienable whole of this statesmanlike world. The
+debate in Pandaemonium is a debate among these typical characters at
+the greatest conceivable crisis, and with adjuncts of solemnity which
+no other situation could rival. It is the greatest _classical_
+triumph, the highest achievement of the pure _style_ in English
+literature; it is the greatest description of the highest and most
+typical characters with the most choice circumstances and in the
+fewest words.
+
+It is not unremarkable that we should find in Milton and in _Paradise
+Lost_ the best specimen of pure style. He was schoolmaster in a
+pedantic age, and there is nothing so unclassical--nothing so impure
+in style--as pedantry. The out-of-door conversational life of Athens
+was as opposed to bookish scholasticism as a life can be. The most
+perfect books have been written not by those who thought much of
+books, but by those who thought little, by those who were under the
+restraint of a sensitive talking world, to which books had contributed
+something, and a various eager life the rest. Milton is generally
+unclassical in spirit where he is learned, and naturally, because the
+purest poets do not overlay their conceptions with book knowledge, and
+the classical poets, having in comparison no books, were under little
+temptation to impair the purity of their style by the accumulation of
+their research. Over and above this, there is in Milton, and a little
+in Wordsworth also, one defect which is in the highest degree faulty
+and unclassical, which mars the effect and impairs the perfection of
+the pure style. There is a want of _spontaneity_, and a sense of
+effort. It has been happily said that Plato's words must have _grown_
+into their places. No one would say so of Milton or even of
+Wordsworth. About both of them there is a taint of duty; a vicious
+sense of the good man's task. Things seem right where they are, but
+they seem to be put where they are. _Flexibility_ is essential to the
+consummate perfection of the pure style because the sensation of the
+poet's efforts carries away our thoughts from his achievements. We are
+admiring his labours when we should be enjoying his words. But this is
+a defect in those two writers, not a defect in pure art. Of course it
+is more difficult to write in few words than to write in many; to take
+the best adjuncts, and those only, for what you have to say, instead
+of using all which comes to hand; it _is_ an additional labour if you
+write verses in a morning, to spend the rest of the day in _choosing_,
+or making those verses fewer. But a perfect artist in the pure style
+is as effortless and as natural as in any style, perhaps is more so.
+Take the well-known lines:
+
+    There was a little lawny islet
+    By anemone and violet,
+        Like mosaic, paven:
+    And its roof was flowers and leaves
+    Which the summer's breath enweaves,
+    Where nor sun, nor showers, nor breeze,
+    Pierce the pines and tallest trees,
+        Each a gem engraven;--
+    Girt by many an azure wave
+    With which the clouds and mountains pave
+        A lake's blue chasm.
+
+Shelley had many merits and many defects. This is not the place for a
+complete or indeed for _any_ estimate of him. But one excellence is
+most evident. His words are as flexible as any words; the rhythm of
+some modulating air seems to move them into their place without a
+struggle by the poet and almost without his knowledge. This is the
+perfection of pure art, to embody typical conceptions in the choicest,
+the fewest accidents, to embody them so that each of these accidents
+may produce its full effect, and so to embody them without effort.
+
+The extreme opposite to this pure art is what may be called ornate
+art. This species of art aims also at giving a delineation of the
+typical idea in its perfection and its fullness, but it aims at so
+doing in a manner most different. It wishes to surround the type with
+the greatest number of circumstances which it will _bear_. It works
+not by choice and selection, but by accumulation and aggregation. The
+idea is not, as in the pure style, presented with the least clothing
+which it will endure, but with the richest and most involved clothing
+that it will admit.
+
+We are fortunate in not having to hunt out of past literature an
+illustrative specimen of the ornate style. Mr. Tennyson has just given
+one admirable in itself, and most characteristic of the defects and
+the merits of this style. The story of Enoch Arden, as he has enhanced
+and presented it, is a rich and splendid composite of imagery and
+illustration. Yet how simple that story is in itself. A sailor who
+sells fish, breaks his leg, gets dismal, gives up selling fish, goes
+to sea, is wrecked on a desert island, stays there some years, on his
+return finds his wife married to a miller, speaks to a landlady on the
+subject, and dies. Told in the pure and simple, the unadorned and
+classical style, this story would not have taken three pages, but Mr.
+Tennyson has been able to make it the principal--the largest tale in
+his new volume. He has done so only by giving to every event and
+incident in the volume an accompanying commentary. He tells a great
+deal about the torrid zone which a rough sailor like Enoch Arden
+certainly would not have perceived; and he gives to the fishing
+village, to which all the characters belong, a softness and a
+fascination which such villages scarcely possess in reality.
+
+The description of the tropical island on which the sailor is thrown,
+is an absolute model of adorned art:
+
+    The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
+    And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
+    The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes,
+    The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
+    The lustre of the long convolvuluses
+    That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran
+    Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows
+    And glories of the broad belt of the world,
+    All these he saw; but what he fain had seen
+    He could not see, the kindly human face,
+    Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard
+    The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
+    The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
+    The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd
+    And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep
+    Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
+    As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
+    Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
+    A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail:
+    No sail from day to day, but every day
+    The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
+    Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
+    The blaze upon the waters to the east;
+    The blaze upon his island overhead;
+    The blaze upon the waters to the west;
+    Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
+    The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
+    The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail.
+
+No expressive circumstance can be added to this description, no
+enhancing detail suggested. A much less happy instance is the
+description of Enoch's life before he sailed:
+
+    While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas,
+    Or often journeying landward; for in truth
+    Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean spoil
+    In ocean-smelling osier, and his face,
+    Rough-redden'd with a thousand winter gales,
+    Not only to the market-cross were known,
+    But in the leafy lanes behind the down,
+    Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp,
+    And peacock yew-tree of the lonely Hall,
+    Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering.
+
+So much has not often been made of selling fish.
+
+The essence of ornate art is in this manner to accumulate round the
+typical object, everything which can be said about it, every
+associated thought that can be connected with it without impairing the
+essence of the delineation.
+
+The first defect which strikes a student of ornate art--the first
+which arrests the mere reader of it--is what is called a want of
+simplicity. Nothing is described as it is, everything has about it an
+atmosphere of _something else_. The combined and associated thoughts,
+though they set off and heighten particular ideas and aspects of the
+central conception, yet complicate it: a simple thing--'a daisy by the
+river's brim'--is never left by itself, something else is put with it;
+something not more connected with it than 'lion-whelp' and the
+'peacock yew-tree' are with the 'fresh fish for sale' that Enoch
+carries past them. Even in the highest cases ornate art leaves upon a
+cultured and delicate taste, the conviction that it is not the highest
+art, that it is somehow excessive and over-rich, that it is not chaste
+in itself or chastening to the mind that sees it--that it is in an
+unexplained manner unsatisfactory, 'a thing in which we feel there is
+some hidden want!'
+
+That want is a want of 'definition'. We must all know landscapes,
+river landscapes especially, which are in the highest sense beautiful,
+which when we first see them give us a delicate pleasure; which in
+some--and these the best cases--give even a gentle sense of surprise
+that such things should be so beautiful, and yet when we come to live
+in them, to spend even a few hours in them, we seem stifled and
+oppressed. On the other hand there are people to whom the sea-shore is
+a companion, an exhilaration; and not so much for the brawl of the
+shore as for the _limited_ vastness, the finite infinite of the ocean
+as they see it. Such people often come home braced and nerved, and if
+they spoke out the truth, would have only to say, 'We have seen the
+horizon line'; if they were let alone indeed, they would gaze on it
+hour after hour, so great to them is the fascination, so full the
+sustaining calm, which they gain from that union of form and
+greatness. To a very inferior extent, but still, perhaps, to an extent
+which most people understand better, a common arch will have the same
+effect. A bridge completes a river landscape; if of the old and
+many-arched sort it regulates by a long series of defined forms the
+vague outline of wood and river which before had nothing to measure
+it; if of the new scientific sort it introduces still more strictly a
+geometrical element; it stiffens the scenery which was before too
+soft, too delicate, too vegetable. Just such is the effect of pure
+style in literary art. It calms by conciseness; while the ornate style
+leaves on the mind a mist of beauty, an excess of fascination, a
+complication of charm, the pure style leaves behind it the simple,
+defined, measured idea, as it is, and by itself. That which is chaste
+chastens; there is a poised energy--a state half thrill, and half
+tranquillity--which pure art gives, which no other can give; a
+pleasure justified as well as felt; an ennobled satisfaction at what
+ought to satisfy us, and must ennoble us.
+
+Ornate art is to pure art what a painted statue is to an unpainted. It
+is impossible to deny that a touch of colour _does_ bring out certain
+parts, does convey certain expressions, does heighten certain
+features, but it leaves on the work as a whole, a want, as we say,
+'of something'; a want of that inseparable chasteness which clings to
+simple sculpture, an impairing predominance of alluring details which
+impairs our satisfaction with our own satisfaction; which makes us
+doubt whether a higher being than ourselves will be satisfied even
+though we are so. In the very same manner, though the _rouge_ of
+ornate literature excites our eye, it also impairs our confidence.
+
+Mr. Arnold has justly observed that this self-justifying,
+self-_proving_ purity of style, is commoner in ancient literature than
+in modern literature, and also that Shakespeare is not a great or an
+unmixed example of it. No one can say that he is. His works are full
+of undergrowth, are full of complexity, are not models of style;
+except by a miracle nothing in the Elizabethan age could be a model of
+style; the restraining taste of that age was feebler and more mistaken
+than that of any other equally great age. Shakespeare's mind so teemed
+with creation that he required the most just, most forcible, most
+constant restraint from without. He most needed to be guided of poets,
+and he was the least and worst guided. As a whole no one can call his
+works finished models of the pure style, or of any style. But he has
+many passages of the most pure style, passages which could be easily
+cited if space served. And we must remember that the task which
+Shakespeare undertook was the most difficult which any poet has ever
+attempted, and that it is a task in which after a million efforts
+every other poet has failed. The Elizabethan drama--as Shakespeare has
+immortalized it--undertakes to delineate in five acts, under stage
+restrictions, and in mere dialogue, a whole list of dramatis
+personae, a set of characters enough for a modern novel, and with the
+distinctness of a modern novel. Shakespeare is not content to give two
+or three great characters in solitude and in dignity, like the
+classical dramatists; he wishes to give a whole _party_ of characters
+in the play of life, and according to the nature of each. He would
+'hold the mirror up to nature', not to catch a monarch in a tragic
+posture, but a whole group of characters engaged in many actions,
+intent on many purposes, thinking many thoughts. There is life enough,
+there is action enough, in single plays of Shakespeare to set up an
+ancient dramatist for a long career. And Shakespeare succeeded. His
+characters, taken _en masse_, and as a whole, are as well-known as any
+novelist's characters; cultivated men know all about them, as young
+ladies know all about Mr. Trollope's novels. But no other dramatist
+has succeeded in such an aim. No one else's characters are staple
+people in English literature, hereditary people whom every one knows
+all about in every generation. The contemporary dramatists, Beaumont
+and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, &c., had many merits, some of them
+were great men. But a critic must say of them the worst thing he has
+to say; 'they were men who failed in their characteristic aim;' they
+attempted to describe numerous sets of complicated characters, and
+they failed. No one of such characters, or hardly one, lives in common
+memory; the Faustus of Marlowe, a really great idea, is not
+remembered. They undertook to write what they could not write, five
+acts full of real characters, and in consequence, the fine individual
+things they conceived are forgotten by the mixed multitude, and known
+only to a few of the few. Of the Spanish theatre we cannot speak; but
+there are no such characters in any French tragedy: the whole aim of
+that tragedy forbade it. Goethe has added to literature a few great
+characters; he may be said almost to have added to literature the idea
+of 'intellectual creation',--the idea of describing great characters
+through the intellect; but he has not added to the common stock what
+Shakespeare added, a new _multitude_ of men and women; and these not
+in simple attitudes, but amid the most complex parts of life, with all
+their various natures roused, mixed, and strained. The severest art
+must have allowed many details, much overflowing circumstance to a
+poet who undertook to describe what almost defies description. Pure
+art would have _commanded_ him to use details lavishly, for only by a
+multiplicity of such could the required effect have been at all
+produced. Shakespeare could accomplish it, for his mind was a
+_spring_, an inexhaustible fountain of human nature, and it is no
+wonder that being compelled by the task of his time to let the
+fullness of his nature overflow, he sometimes let it overflow too
+much, and covered with erroneous conceits and superfluous images
+characters and conceptions which would have been far more justly, far
+more effectually, delineated with conciseness and simplicity. But
+there is an infinity of pure art _in_ Shakespeare, although there is a
+great deal else also.
+
+It will be said, if ornate art be as you say, an inferior species or
+art, why should it ever be used? If pure art be the best sort of art,
+why should it not always be used?
+
+The reason is this: literary art, as we just now explained, is
+concerned with literatesque characters in literatesque situations; and
+the _best_ art is concerned with the _most_ literatesque characters in
+the _most_ literatesque situations. Such are the subjects of pure art;
+it embodies with the fewest touches, and under the most select and
+choice circumstances, the highest conceptions; but it does not follow
+that only the best subjects are to be treated by art, and then only in
+the very best way. Human nature could not endure such a critical
+commandment as that, and it would be an erroneous criticism which gave
+it. _Any_ literatesque character may be described in literature under
+_any_ circumstances which exhibit its literatesqueness.
+
+The essence of pure art consists in its describing what is as it is,
+and this is very well for what can bear it, but there are many
+inferior things which will not bear it, and which nevertheless ought
+to be described in books. A certain kind of literature deals with
+illusions, and this kind of literature has given a colouring to the
+name romantic. A man of rare genius, and even of poetical genius, has
+gone so far as to make these illusions the true subject of
+poetry--almost the sole subject. 'Without,' says Father Newman, of one
+of his characters, 'being himself a poet, he was in the season of
+poetry, in the sweet spring-time, when the year is most beautiful
+because it is new. Novelty was beauty to a heart so open and cheerful
+as his; not only because it was novelty, and had its proper charm as
+such, but because when we first see things, we see them in a gay
+confusion, which is a principal element of the poetical. As time goes
+on, and we number and sort and measure things,--as we gain views,--we
+advance towards philosophy and truth, but we recede from poetry.
+
+'When we ourselves were young, we once on a time walked on a hot
+summer-day from Oxford to Newington--a dull road, as any one who has
+gone it knows; yet it was new to us; and we protest to you, reader,
+believe it or not, laugh or not, as you will, to us it seemed on that
+occasion quite touchingly beautiful; and a soft melancholy came over
+us, of which the shadows fall even now, when we look back upon that
+dusty, weary journey. And why? because every object which met us was
+unknown and full of mystery. A tree or two in the distance seemed the
+beginning of a great wood, or park, stretching endlessly; a hill
+implied a vale beyond, with that vale's history; the bye-lanes, with
+their green hedges, wound on and vanished, yet were not lost to the
+imagination. Such was our first journey; but when we had gone it
+several times, the mind refused to act, the scene ceased to enchant,
+stern reality alone remained; and we thought it one of the most
+tiresome, odious roads we ever had occasion to traverse.'
+
+That is to say, that the function of the poet is to introduce a 'gay
+confusion', a rich medley which does not exist in the actual
+world--which perhaps could not exist in any world--but which would
+seem pretty if it did exist. Everyone who reads _Enoch Arden_ will
+perceive that this notion of all poetry is exactly applicable to this
+one poem. Whatever be made of Enoch's 'Ocean spoil in ocean-smelling
+osier,' of the 'portal-warding lion-whelp, and peacock yew-tree',
+every one knows that in himself Enoch could not have been charming.
+People who sell fish about the country (and that is what he did,
+though Mr. Tennyson won't speak out, and wraps it up) never are
+beautiful. As Enoch was and must be coarse, in itself the poem must
+depend for its charm on a 'gay confusion'--on a splendid accumulation
+of impossible accessories.
+
+Mr. Tennyson knows this better than many of us--he knows the country
+world; he has proved it that no one living knows it better; he has
+painted with pure art--with art which describes what is a race perhaps
+more refined, more delicate, more conscientious, than the sailor--the
+'Northern Farmer', and we all know what a splendid, what a living
+thing, he has made of it. He could, if he only would, have given us
+the ideal sailor in like manner--the ideal of the natural sailor we
+mean--the characteristic present man as he lives and is. But this he
+has not chosen. He has endeavoured to describe an exceptional sailor,
+at an exceptionally refined port, performing a graceful act, an act of
+relinquishment. And with this task before him, his profound taste
+taught him that ornate art was a necessary medium--was the sole
+effectual instrument--for his purpose. It was necessary for him if
+possible to abstract the mind from reality, to induce us _not_ to
+conceive or think of sailors as they are while we are reading of his
+sailors, but to think of what a person who did not know might fancy
+sailors to be. A casual traveller on the sea-shore, with the sensitive
+mood and the romantic imagination Mr. Newman has described, might
+fancy, would fancy, a seafaring village to be like that. Accordingly,
+Mr. Tennyson has made it his aim to call off the stress of fancy from
+real life, to occupy it otherwise, to bury it with pretty accessories;
+to engage it on the 'peacock yew-tree', and the 'portal-warding
+lion-whelp'. Nothing, too, can be more splendid than the description
+of the tropics as Mr. Tennyson delineates them, but a sailor would not
+have felt the tropics in that manner. The beauties of nature would not
+have so much occupied him. He would have known little of the scarlet
+shafts of sunrise and nothing of the long convolvuluses. As in
+_Robinson Crusoe_, his own petty contrivances and his small ailments
+would have been the principal subject to him. 'For three years', he
+might have said, 'my back was bad, and then I put two pegs into a
+piece of drift wood and so made a chair, and after that it pleased God
+to send me a chill.' In real life his piety would scarcely have gone
+beyond that.
+
+It will indeed be said, that though the sailor had no words for, and
+even no explicit consciousness of the splendid details of the torrid
+zone, yet that he had, notwithstanding, a dim latent inexpressible
+conception of them: though he could not speak of them or describe
+them, yet they were much to him. And doubtless such is the case. Rude
+people are impressed by what is beautiful--deeply impressed--though
+they could not describe what they see, or what they feel. But what is
+absurd in Mr. Tennyson's description--absurd when we abstract it from
+the gorgeous additions and ornaments with which Mr. Tennyson distracts
+us--is, that his hero feels nothing else but these great splendours.
+We hear nothing of the physical ailments, the rough devices, the low
+superstitions, which really would have been the _first_ things, the
+favourite and principal occupations of his mind. Just so when he gets
+home he _may_ have had such fine sentiments, though it is odd, and he
+_may_ have spoken of them to his landlady, though that is odder
+still--but it is incredible that his whole mind should be made up of
+fine sentiments. Beside those sweet feelings, if he had them, there
+must have been many more obvious, more prosaic, and some perhaps more
+healthy. Mr. Tennyson has shown a profound judgement in distracting us
+as he does. He has given us a classic delineation of the 'Northern
+Farmer' with no ornament at all--as bare a thing as can be--because he
+then wanted to describe a true type of real men: he has given us a
+sailor crowded all over with ornament and illustration, because he
+then wanted to describe an unreal type of fancied men, not sailors as
+they are, but sailors as they might be wished.
+
+Another prominent element in _Enoch Arden_ is yet more suitable to,
+yet more requires the aid of, ornate art. Mr. Tennyson undertook to
+deal with _half belief_. The presentiments which Annie feels are
+exactly of that sort which everybody has felt, and which every one has
+half believed--which hardly any one has more than half believed.
+Almost every one, it has been said, would be angry if any one else
+reported that he believed in ghosts; yet hardly any one, when thinking
+by himself, wholly disbelieves them. Just so such presentiments as Mr.
+Tennyson depicts, impress the inner mind so much that the outer
+mind--the rational understanding--hardly likes to consider them nicely
+or to discuss them sceptically. For these dubious themes an ornate or
+complex style is needful. Classical art speaks out what it has to say
+plainly and simply. Pure style cannot hesitate; it describes in
+concisest outline what is, as it is. If a poet really believes in
+presentiments he can speak out in pure style. One who could have been
+a poet--one of the few in any age of whom one can say certainly that
+they could have been, and have not been--has spoken thus:
+
+    When Heaven sends sorrow,
+      Warnings go first,
+      Lest it should burst
+      With stunning might
+      On souls too bright
+        To fear the morrow.
+
+    Can science bear us
+      To the hid springs
+      Of human things?
+      Why may not dream,
+      Or thought's day-gleam,
+        Startle, yet cheer us?
+
+    Are such thoughts fetters,
+      While faith disowns
+      Dread of earth's tones,
+      Recks but Heaven's call,
+      And on the wall,
+        Reads but Heaven's letters?
+
+But if a poet is not sure whether presentiments are true or not true;
+if he wishes to leave his readers in doubt; if he wishes an atmosphere
+of indistinct illusion and of moving shadow, he must use the romantic
+style, the style of miscellaneous adjunct, the style 'which shirks,
+not meets' your intellect, the style which as you are scrutinizing
+disappears.
+
+Nor is this all, or even the principal lesson, which _Enoch Arden_ may
+suggest to us, of the use of ornate art. That art is the appropriate
+art for an _unpleasing type_. Many of the characters of real life, if
+brought distinctly, prominently, and plainly before the mind, as they
+really are, if shown in their inner nature, their actual essence, are
+doubtless very unpleasant. They would be horrid to meet and horrid to
+think of. We fear it must be owned that Enoch Arden is this kind of
+person. A dirty sailor who did _not_ go home to his wife is not an
+agreeable being: a varnish must be put on him to make him shine. It is
+true that he acts rightly; that he is very good. But such is human
+nature that it finds a little tameness in mere morality. Mere virtue
+belongs to a charity school-girl, and has a taint of the catechism.
+All of us feel this, though most of us are too timid, too scrupulous,
+too anxious about the virtue of others, to speak out. We are ashamed
+of our nature in this respect, but it is not the less our nature. And
+if we look deeper into the matter there are many reasons why we should
+not be ashamed of it. The soul of man, and as we necessarily believe
+of beings greater than man, has many parts beside its moral part. It
+has an intellectual part, an artistic part, even a religious part, in
+which mere morals have no share. In Shakespeare or Goethe, even in
+Newton or Archimedes, there is much which will not be cut down to the
+shape of the commandments. They have thoughts, feelings,
+hopes--immortal thoughts and hopes--which have influenced the life of
+men, and the souls of men, ever since their age, but which the 'whole
+duty of man', the ethical compendium, does not recognize. Nothing is
+more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind. A highly
+developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature,
+an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature,
+is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature--a good
+bit, of course, but a bit only--in disproportionate, unnatural, and
+revolting prominence; and, therefore, unless an artist use delicate
+care, we are offended. The dismal act of a squalid man needed many
+condiments to make it pleasant, and therefore Mr. Tennyson was right
+to mix them subtly and to use them freely.
+
+A mere act of self-denial can indeed scarcely be pleasant upon paper.
+An heroic struggle with an external adversary, even though it end in a
+defeat, may easily be made attractive. Human nature likes to see
+itself look grand, and it looks grand when it is making a brave
+struggle with foreign foes. But it does not look grand when it is
+divided against itself. An excellent person striving with temptation
+is a very admirable being in reality, but he is not a pleasant being
+in description. We hope he will win and overcome his temptation, but
+we feel that he would be a more interesting being, a higher being, if
+he had not felt that temptation so much. The poet must make the
+struggle great in order to make the self-denial virtuous, and if the
+struggle be too great, we are apt to feel some mixture of contempt.
+The internal metaphysics of a divided nature are but an inferior
+subject for art, and if they are to be made attractive, much else must
+be combined with them. If the excellence of _Hamlet_ had depended on
+the ethical qualities of Hamlet, it would not have been the
+masterpiece of our literature. He acts virtuously of course, and kills
+the people he ought to kill, but Shakespeare knew that such goodness
+would not much interest the pit. He made him a handsome prince, and a
+puzzling meditative character; these secular qualities relieve his
+moral excellence, and so he becomes 'nice'. In proportion as an artist
+has to deal with types essentially imperfect, he must disguise their
+imperfections; he must accumulate around them as many first-rate
+accessories as may make his readers forget that they are themselves
+second-rate. The sudden _millionaires_ of the present day hope to
+disguise their social defects by buying old places, and hiding among
+aristocratic furniture; just so a great artist who has to deal with
+characters artistically imperfect will use an ornate style, will fit
+them into a scene where there is much else to look at.
+
+For these reasons ornate art is within the limits as legitimate as
+pure art. It does what pure art could not do. The very excellence of
+pure art confines its employment. Precisely because it gives the best
+things by themselves and exactly as they are, it fails when it is
+necessary to describe inferior things among other things, with a list
+of enhancements and a crowd of accompaniments that in reality do not
+belong to it. Illusion, half belief, unpleasant types, imperfect
+types, are as much the proper sphere of ornate art, as an inferior
+landscape is the proper sphere for the true efficacy of moonlight. A
+really great landscape needs sunlight and bears sunlight; but
+moonlight is an equalizer of beauties; it gives a romantic unreality
+to what will not stand the bare truth. And just so does romantic art.
+
+There is, however, a third kind of art which differs from these on the
+point in which they most resemble one another. Ornate art and pure art
+have this in common, that they paint the types of literature in as
+good perfection as they can. Ornate art, indeed, uses undue disguises
+and unreal enhancements; it does not confine itself to the best types;
+on the contrary it is its office to make the best of imperfect types
+and lame approximations; but ornate art, as much as pure art, catches
+its subject in the best light it can, takes the most developed aspect
+of it which it can find, and throws upon it the most congruous colours
+it can use. But grotesque art does just the contrary. It takes the
+type, so to say, _in difficulties_. It gives a representation of it in
+its minimum development, amid the circumstances least favourable to
+it, just while it is struggling with obstacles, just where it is
+encumbered with incongruities. It deals, to use the language of
+science, not with normal types but with abnormal specimens; to use the
+language of old philosophy, not with what nature is striving to be,
+but with what by some lapse she has happened to become.
+
+This art works by contrast. It enables you to see, it makes you see,
+the perfect type by painting the opposite deviation. It shows you what
+ought to be by what ought not to be, when complete it reminds you of
+the perfect image, by showing you the distorted and imperfect image.
+Of this art we possess in the present generation one prolific master.
+Mr. Browning is an artist working by incongruity. Possibly hardly one
+of his most considerable efforts can be found which is not great
+because of its odd mixture. He puts together things which no one else
+would have put together, and produces on our minds a result which no
+one else would have produced, or tried to produce. His admirers may
+not like all we may have to say of him. But in our way we too are
+among his admirers. No one ever read him without seeing not only his
+great ability but his great _mind_. He not only possesses superficial
+useable talents, but the strong something, the inner secret something
+which uses them and controls them; he is great, not in mere
+accomplishments, but in himself. He has applied a hard strong
+intellect to real life; he has applied the same intellect to the
+problems of his age. He has striven to know what _is_: he has
+endeavoured not to be cheated by counterfeits, not to be infatuated
+with illusions. His heart is in what he says. He has battered his
+brain against his creed till he believes it. He has accomplishments
+too, the more effective because they are mixed. He is at once a
+student of mysticism, and a citizen of the world. He brings to the
+club sofa distinct visions of old creeds, intense images of strange
+thoughts: he takes to the bookish student tidings of wild Bohemia, and
+little traces of the _demi-monde_. He puts down what is good for the
+naughty and what is naughty for the good. Over women his easier
+writings exercise that imperious power which belongs to the writings
+of a great man of the world upon such matters. He knows women, and
+therefore they wish to know him. If we blame many of Browning's
+efforts, it is in the interest of art, and not from a wish to hurt or
+degrade him.
+
+If we wanted to illustrate the nature of grotesque art by an
+exaggerated instance we should have selected a poem which the chance
+of late publication brings us in this new volume. Mr. Browning has
+undertaken to describe what may be called _mind in difficulties_--mind
+set to make out the universe under the worst and hardest
+circumstances. He takes 'Caliban', not perhaps exactly Shakespeare's
+Caliban, but an analogous and worse creature; a strong thinking power,
+but a nasty creature--a gross animal, uncontrolled and unelevated by
+any feeling of religion or duty. The delineation of him will show that
+Mr. Browning does not wish to take undue advantage of his readers by a
+choice of nice subjects.
+
+    'Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
+    Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire,
+    With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin;
+    And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
+    And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
+    Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh;
+    And while above his head a pompion-plant,
+    Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
+    Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
+    And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
+    And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch:
+
+This pleasant creature proceeds to give his idea of the origin of the
+Universe, and it is as follows. Caliban speaks in the third person,
+and is of opinion that the maker of the Universe took to making it on
+account of his personal discomfort:
+
+    Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
+    'Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon.
+
+    'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
+    But not the stars: the stars came otherwise;
+    Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
+    Also this isle, what lives, and grows thereon,
+    And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.
+
+    'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:
+    He hated that He cannot change His cold,
+    Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish
+    That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived,
+    And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
+    O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
+    A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave;
+    Only she ever sickened, found repulse
+    At the other kind of water, not her life,
+    (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun)
+    Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,
+    And in her old bounds buried her despair,
+    Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.
+
+    'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,
+    Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
+    Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
+    Yon auk, one fire-eye, in a ball of foam,
+    That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
+    He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
+    By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
+    That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
+    And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
+    But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
+    That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
+    About their hole--He made all these and more,
+    Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?
+
+It may seem perhaps to most readers that these lines are very
+difficult, and that they are unpleasant. And so they are. We quote
+them to illustrate, not the _success_ of grotesque art, but the
+_nature_ of grotesque art. It shows the end at which this species of
+art aims, and if it fails, it is from over-boldness in the choice of a
+subject by the artist, or from the defects of its execution. A
+thinking faculty more in difficulties--a great type,--an inquisitive,
+searching intellect under more disagreeable conditions, with worse
+helps, more likely to find falsehood, less likely to find truth, can
+scarcely be imagined. Nor is the mere description of the thought at
+all bad: on the contrary, if we closely examine it, it is very clever.
+Hardly any one could have amassed so many ideas at once nasty and
+suitable. But scarcely any readers--any casual readers--who are not of
+the sect of Mr. Browning's admirers will be able to examine it enough
+to appreciate it. From a defect, partly of subject, and partly of
+style, many of Mr. Browning's works make a demand upon the reader's
+zeal and sense of duty to which the nature of most readers is unequal.
+They have on the turf the convenient expression 'staying power': some
+horses can hold on and others cannot. But hardly any reader not of
+especial and peculiar nature can hold on through such composition.
+There is not enough of 'staying power' in human nature. One of his
+greatest admirers once owned to us that he seldom or never began a new
+poem without looking on in advance, and foreseeing with caution what
+length of intellectual adventure he was about to commence. Whoever
+will work hard at such poems will find much mind in them: they are a
+sort of quarry of ideas, but whoever goes there will find these ideas
+in such a jagged, ugly, useless shape that he can hardly bear them.
+
+We are not judging Mr. Browning simply from a hasty recent production.
+All poets are liable to misconceptions, and if such a piece as
+_Caliban upon Setebos_ were an isolated error, a venial and particular
+exception, we should have given it no prominence. We have put it
+forward because it just elucidates both our subject and the
+characteristics of Mr. Browning. But many other of his best known
+pieces do so almost equally; what several of his devotees think his
+best piece is quite enough illustrative for anything we want. It
+appears that on Holy Cross day at Rome the Jews were obliged to listen
+to a Christian sermon in the hope of their conversion, though this is,
+according to Mr. Browning, what they really said when they came away:
+
+    Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
+    Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week,
+    Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough,
+    Stinking and savoury, smug and gruff,
+    Take the church-road, for the bell's due chime
+    Gives us the summons--'t is sermon-time.
+
+    Boh, here's Barnabas! Job, that's you?
+    Up stumps Solomon--bustling too?
+    Shame, man! greedy beyond your years
+    To handsel the bishop's shaving-shears?
+    Fair play's a jewel! leave friends in the lurch?
+    Stand on a line ere you start for the church.
+
+    Higgledy, piggledy, packed we lie,
+    Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,
+    Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,
+    Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.
+    Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs
+    And buzz for the bishop--here he comes.
+
+And after similar nice remarks for a church, the edified congregation
+concludes:
+
+    But now, while the scapegoats leave our flock,
+    And the rest sit silent and count the clock,
+    Since forced to muse the appointed time
+    On these precious facts and truths sublime,--
+    Let us fitly employ it, under our breath,
+    In saying Ben Ezra's Song of Death.
+
+    For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died,
+    Called sons and sons' sons to his side,
+    And spoke, 'This world has been harsh and strange;
+    Something is wrong: there needeth a change.
+    But what, or where? at the last, or first?
+    In one point only we sinned, at worst.
+
+    'The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,
+    And again in his border see Israel set.
+    When Judah beholds Jerusalem,
+    The stranger-seed shall be joined to them:
+    To Jacob's House shall the Gentiles cleave,
+    So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.
+
+    'Ay, the children of the chosen race
+    Shall carry and bring them to their place:
+    In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,
+    Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blame
+    When the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o'er
+    The oppressor triumph for evermore?
+
+    'God spoke, and gave us the word to keep,
+    Bade never fold the hands nor sleep
+    'Mid a faithless world,--at watch and ward,
+    Till Christ at the end relieve our guard.
+    By His servant Moses the watch was set:
+    Though near upon cock-crow, we keep it yet.
+
+    'Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid-watch came,
+    By the starlight, naming a dubious Name!
+    And if, too heavy with sleep--too rash
+    With fear--O Thou, if that martyr-gash
+    Fell on Thee coming to take Thine own,
+    And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne--
+
+    'Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.
+    But, the judgement over, join sides with us!
+    Thine too is the cause! and not more Thine
+    Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,
+    Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,
+    Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!
+
+    'We withstood Christ then? be mindful how
+    At least we withstand Barabbas now!
+    Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,
+    To have called these--Christians, had we dared!
+    Let defiance to them pay mistrust of Thee,
+    And Rome make amends for Calvary!
+
+    'By the torture, prolonged from age to age,
+    By the infamy, Israel's heritage,
+    By the Ghetto's plague, by the garb's disgrace,
+    By the badge of shame, by the felon's place,
+    By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,
+    And the summons to Christian fellowship,--
+
+    'We boast our proof that at least the Jew
+    Would wrest Christ's name from the Devil's crew.
+    Thy face took never so deep a shade
+    But we fought them in it, God our aid!
+    A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band,
+    South, East, and on to the Pleasant Land!'
+
+It is very natural that a poet whose wishes incline, or whose genius
+conducts him to a grotesque art, should be attracted towards mediaeval
+subjects. There is no age whose legends are so full of grotesque
+subjects, and no age where real life was so fit to suggest them. Then,
+more than at any other time, good principles have been under great
+hardships. The vestiges of ancient civilization, the germs of modern
+civilization, the little remains of what had been, the small
+beginnings of what is, were buried under a cumbrous mass of barbarism
+and cruelty. Good elements hidden in horrid accompaniments are the
+special theme of grotesque art, and these mediaeval life and legends
+afford more copiously than could have been furnished before
+Christianity gave its new elements of good, or since modern
+civilization has removed some few at least of the old elements of
+destruction. A _buried_ life like the spiritual mediaeval was Mr.
+Browning's natural element, and he was right to be attracted by it.
+His mistake has been, that he has not made it pleasant; that he has
+forced his art to topics on which no one could charm, or on which he,
+at any rate, could not; that on these occasions and in these poems he
+has failed in fascinating men and women of sane taste.
+
+We say 'sane' because there is a most formidable and estimable
+_insane_ taste. The will has great though indirect power over the
+taste, just as it has over the belief. There are some horrid beliefs
+from which human nature revolts, from which at first it shrinks, to
+which, at first, no effort can force it. But if we fix the mind upon
+them they have a power over us just because of their natural
+offensiveness. They are like the sight of human blood: experienced
+soldiers tell us that at first men are sickened by the smell and
+newness of blood almost to death and fainting, but that as soon as
+they harden their hearts and stiffen their minds, as soon as they
+_will_ bear it, then comes an appetite for slaughter, a tendency to
+gloat on carnage, to love blood, at least for the moment, with a deep
+eager love. It is a principle that if we put down a healthy
+instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy
+insane attraction. For this reason the most earnest truth-seeking men
+fall into the worst delusions; they will not let their mind alone;
+they force it towards some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a
+conceit of intellect recommends, and nature punishes their disregard
+of her warning by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so
+the most industrious critics get the most admiration. They think it
+unjust to rest in their instinctive natural horror: they overcome it,
+and angry nature gives them over to ugly poems and marries them to
+detestable stanzas.
+
+Mr. Browning possibly, and some of the worst of Mr. Browning's
+admirers certainly, will say that these grotesque objects exist in
+real life, and therefore they ought to be, at least may be, described
+in art. But though pleasure is not the end of poetry, pleasing is a
+condition of poetry. An exceptional monstrosity of horrid ugliness
+cannot be made pleasing, except it be made to suggest--to recall--the
+perfection, the beauty, from which it is a deviation. Perhaps in
+extreme cases no art is equal to this; but then such self-imposed
+problems should not be worked by the artist; these out-of-the-way and
+detestable subjects should be let alone by him. It is rather
+characteristic of Mr. Browning to neglect this rule. He is the most of
+a realist, and the least of an idealist of any poet we know. He
+evidently sympathizes with some part at least of Bishop Blougram's
+apology. Anyhow this world exists. 'There _is_ good wine--there _are_
+pretty women--there _are_ comfortable benefices--there _is_ money, and
+it is pleasant to spend it. Accept the creed of your age and you get
+these, reject that creed and you lose them. And for what do you lose
+them? For a fancy creed of your own, which no one else will accept,
+which hardly any one will call a "creed", which most people will
+consider a sort of unbelief.' Again, Mr. Browning evidently loves what
+we may call the realism, the grotesque realism, of orthodox
+christianity. Many parts of it in which great divines have felt keen
+difficulties are quite pleasant to him. He must _see_ his religion, he
+must nave an 'object-lesson' in believing. He must have a creed that
+will _take_, which wins and holds the miscellaneous world, which stout
+men will heed, which nice women will adore. The spare moments of
+solitary religion--the 'obdurate questionings', the high 'instincts',
+the 'first affections', the 'shadowy recollections',
+
+          Which, do they what they may,
+    Are yet the fountain-light of all our day--
+    Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
+
+the great but vague faith--the unutterable tenets seem to him
+worthless, visionary; they are not enough immersed in matter; they
+move about 'in worlds not realized'. We wish he could be tried like
+the prophet once; he would have found God in the earthquake and the
+storm; he could have deciphered from them a bracing and a rough
+religion: he would have known that crude men and ignorant women felt
+them too, and he would accordingly have trusted them; but he would
+have distrusted and disregarded the 'still small voice'; he would have
+said it was 'fancy'--a thing you thought you heard to-day, but were
+not sure you had heard to-morrow: he would call it a nice illusion, an
+immaterial prettiness; he would ask triumphantly 'How are you to get
+the mass of men to heed this little thing?' he would have persevered
+and insisted '_My wife_ does not hear it'.
+
+But although a suspicion of beauty, and a taste for ugly reality, have
+led Mr. Browning to exaggerate the functions, and to caricature the
+nature of grotesque art, we own or rather we maintain that he has
+given many excellent specimens of that art within its proper
+boundaries and limits. Take an example, his picture of what we may
+call the _bourgeois_ nature in _difficulties_; in the utmost
+difficulty, in contact with magic and the supernatural. He has made of
+it something homely, comic, true; reminding us of what _bourgeois_
+nature really is. By showing us the type under abnormal conditions,
+he reminds us of the type under its best and most satisfactory
+conditions--
+
+    Hamelin Town's in Brunswick,
+      By famous Hanover city;
+    The river Weser, deep and wide,
+    Washes its walls on the southern side;
+    A pleasanter spot you never spied;
+      But, when begins my ditty,
+    Almost five hundred years ago,
+    To see the townsfolk suffer so
+      From vermin was a pity.
+
+      Rats!
+    They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
+    And bit the babies in the cradles,
+    And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
+      And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles,
+    Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
+    Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
+    And even spoiled the women's chats
+      By drowning their speaking
+      With shrieking and squeaking
+    In fifty different sharps and flats.
+
+    At last the people in a body
+      To the Town Hall came flocking:
+    ''Tis clear', cried they, 'our Mayor's a noddy;
+      And as for our Corporation--shocking
+    To think we buy gowns lined with ermine
+    For dolts that can't or won't determine
+    What's best to rid us of our vermin!
+    You hope, because you're old and obese,
+    To find in the furry civic robe ease?
+    Rouse up, Sirs! Give your brains a racking
+    To find the remedy we're lacking,
+    Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing!'
+    At this the Mayor and Corporation
+    Quaked with a mighty consternation.
+
+A person of musical abilities proposes to extricate the civic
+dignitaries from the difficulty, and they promise him a thousand
+guilders if he does.
+
+    Into the street the Piper stept,
+      Smiling first a little smile,
+    As if he knew what magic slept
+      In his quiet pipe the while;
+    Then, like a musical adept,
+    To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
+    And green and blue his sharp eye twinkled
+    Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled;
+    And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered
+    You heard as if an army muttered;
+    And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
+    And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
+    And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
+    Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
+    Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
+    Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
+      Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
+    Cooking tails and pricking whiskers,
+      Families by tens and dozens,
+    Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives--
+    Followed the Piper for their lives.
+    From street to street he piped advancing,
+    And step for step they followed dancing,
+    Until they came to the river Weser,
+    Wherein all plunged and perished!
+    --Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar,
+    Swam across and lived to carry
+    (As he, the manuscript he cherished)
+    To Rat-land home his commentary:
+    Which was, 'At the first shrill notes of the pipe,
+    I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
+    And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
+    Into a cider-press's gripe:
+    And a moving away of pickle-tub boards,
+    And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,
+    And a drawing the corks of train-oil flasks,
+    And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks:
+    And it seemed as if a voice
+    (Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
+    Is breathed) called out, "Oh rats, rejoice!
+    The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!
+    So, munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
+    Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!"
+    And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,
+    All ready staved, like a great sun shone
+    Glorious scarce an inch before me,
+    Just as methought it said, "Come, bore me!"
+    --I found the Weser rolling o'er me.'
+    You should have heard the Hamelin people
+    Ringing the bells till they rocked the steeple.
+    'Go', cried the Mayor, 'and get long poles,
+    Poke out the nests and block up the holes!
+    Consult with carpenters and builders,
+    And leave in our town not even a trace
+    Of the rats!'--when suddenly, up the face
+    Of the Piper perked in the market-place,
+    With a 'First, if you please, my thousand guilders!'
+    A thousand guilders! The Mayor looked blue;
+    So did the Corporation too.
+    For council dinners made rare havoc
+    With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock;
+    And half the money would replenish
+    Their cellar's biggest butt with Rhenish.
+    To pay this sum to a wandering fellow
+    With a gipsy coat of red and yellow!
+    'Beside,' quoth the Mayor with a knowing wink,
+    'Our business was done at the river's brink;
+    We saw with our eyes the vermin sink,
+    And what's dead can't come to life, I think.
+    So, friend, we're not the folks to shrink
+    From the duty of giving you something for drink,
+    And a matter of money to put in your poke;
+    But as for the guilders, what we spoke
+    Of them, as you very well know, was in joke.
+    Besides, our losses have made us thrifty.
+    A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!'
+
+    The piper's face fell, and he cried,
+    'No trifling! I can't wait, beside!
+    I've promised to visit by dinner time
+    Bagdat, and accept the prime
+    Of the Head-Cook's pottage, all he's rich in,
+    For having left, in the Caliph's kitchen,
+    Of a nest of scorpions no survivor--
+    With him I proved no bargain-driver,
+    With you, don't think I'll bate a stiver!
+    And folks who put me in a passion
+    May find me pipe to another fashion.'
+
+    'How?' cried the Mayor, 'd'ye think I'll brook
+    Being worse treated than a Cook?
+    Insulted by a lazy ribald
+    With idle pipe and vesture piebald?
+    You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,
+    Blow your pipe there till you burst!'
+
+    Once more he stept into the street
+      And to his lips again
+    Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;
+      And ere he blew three notes (such sweet
+    Soft notes as yet musician's cunning
+      Never gave the enraptured air)
+    There was a rustling, that seemed like a bustling
+    Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling.
+    Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,
+    Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering,
+    And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,
+    Out came the children running.
+
+    All the little boys and girls,
+    With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
+    And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls.
+    Tripping and skipping ran merrily after
+    The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    And I must not omit to say
+    That in Transylvania there's a tribe
+    Of alien people that ascribe
+    The outlandish ways and dress
+    On which their neighbours lay such stress,
+    To their fathers and mothers having risen
+    Out of some subterraneous prison
+    Into which they were trepanned
+    Long time ago in a mighty band
+    Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
+    But how or why, they don't understand.
+
+Something more we had to say of Mr. Browning, but we must stop. It is
+singularly characteristic of this age that the poems which rise to the
+surface should be examples of ornate art, and grotesque art, not of
+pure art. We live in the realm of the _half_ educated. The number of
+readers grows daily, but the quality of readers does not improve
+rapidly. The middle class is scattered, headless; it is well-meaning
+but aimless; wishing to be wise, but ignorant how to be wise. The
+aristocracy of England never was a literary aristocracy, never even in
+the days of its full power, of its unquestioned predominance, did it
+guide--did it even seriously try to guide--the taste of England.
+Without guidance young men and tired men are thrown amongst a mass of
+books; they have to choose which they like; many of them would much
+like to improve their culture, to chasten their taste, if they knew
+how. But left to themselves they take, not pure art, but showy art;
+not that which permanently relieves the eye and makes it happy
+whenever it looks, and as long as it looks, but _glaring_ art which
+catches and arrests the eye for a moment, but which in the end
+fatigues it. But before the wholesome remedy of nature--the
+fatigue--arrives, the hasty reader has passed on to some new
+excitement, which in its turn stimulates for an instant, and then is
+passed by for ever. These conditions are not favourable to the due
+appreciation of pure art--of that art which must be known before it is
+admired--which must have fastened irrevocably on the brain before you
+appreciate it--which you must love ere it will seem worthy of your
+love. Women too, whose voice in literature counts as well as that of
+men--and in a light literature counts for more than that of
+men--women, such as we know them, such as they are likely to be, ever
+prefer a delicate unreality to a true or firm art. A dressy
+literature, an exaggerated literature seem to be fated to us. These
+are our curses, as other times had theirs.
+
+                                   And yet
+    Think not the living times forget,
+    Ages of heroes fought and fell,
+    That Homer in the end might tell;
+    O'er grovelling generations past
+    Upstood the Gothic fane at last;
+    And countless hearts in countless years
+    Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,
+    Rude laughter and unmeaning tears;
+    Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome
+    The pure perfection of her dome.
+    Others I doubt not, if not we,
+    The issue of our toils shall see;
+    And (they forgotten and unknown)
+    Young children gather as their own
+    The harvest that the dead had sown.
+
+
+
+
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+1839-1894
+
+COLERIDGE'S WRITINGS (1866)
+
+_Conversations, Letters, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge._ Edited
+by THOMAS ALLSOP. London. 1864.
+
+
+Forms of intellectual and spiritual culture often exercise their
+subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing from them.
+Searching and irresistible as are the changes of the human spirit on
+its way to perfection, there is yet so much elasticity of temper that
+what must pass away sooner or later is not disengaged all at once even
+from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by one law of
+development evolves ideas, moralities, modes of inward life, and
+represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier
+growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the
+whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the
+spectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined
+by the antagonism of the new. That current of new life chastens them
+as they contend against it. Weaker minds do not perceive the change;
+clearer minds abandon themselves to it. To feel the change everywhere,
+yet not to abandon oneself to it, is a situation of difficulty and
+contention. Communicating in this way to the passing stage of culture
+the charm of what is chastened, high-strung, athletic, they yet
+detach the highest minds from the past by pressing home its
+difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such is the charm of
+Julian, of St. Louis, perhaps of Luther; in the narrower compass of
+modern times, of Dr. Newman and Lacordaire; it is also the peculiar
+charm of Coleridge.
+
+Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the
+'relative' spirit in place of the 'absolute'. Ancient philosophy
+sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in
+a necessary formula, and types of life in a classification by 'kinds'
+or _genera_. To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known
+except relatively under conditions. An ancient philosopher indeed
+started a philosophy of the relative, but only as an enigma. So the
+germs of almost all philosophical ideas were enfolded in the mind of
+antiquity, and fecundated one by one in after ages by the external
+influences of art, religion, culture in the natural sciences,
+belonging to a particular generation, which suddenly becomes
+preoccupied by a formula or theory, not so much new as penetrated by a
+new meaning and expressiveness. So the idea of 'the relative' has been
+fecundated in modern times by the influence of the sciences of
+observation. These sciences reveal types of life evanescing into each
+other by inexpressible refinements of change. Things pass into their
+opposites by accumulation of undefinable quantities. The growth of
+those sciences consists in a continual analysis of facts of rough and
+general observation into groups of facts more precise and minute. A
+faculty for truth is a power of distinguishing and fixing delicate and
+fugitive details. The moral world is ever in contact with the
+physical; the relative spirit has invaded moral philosophy from the
+ground of the inductive science. There it has started a new analysis
+of the relations of body and mind, good and evil, freedom and
+necessity. Hard and abstract moralities are yielding to a more exact
+estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life. Always, as an
+organism increases in perfection the conditions of its life become
+more complex. Man is the most complex of the products of nature.
+Character merges into temperament; the nervous system refines itself
+into intellect. His physical organism is played upon not only by the
+physical conditions about it, but by remote laws of inheritance, the
+vibrations of long past acts reaching him in the midst of the new
+order of things in which he lives. When we have estimated these
+conditions he is not yet simple and isolated; for the mind of the
+race, the character of the age, sway him this way or that through the
+medium of language and ideas. It seems as if the most opposite
+statements about him were alike true; he is so receptive, all the
+influences of the world and of society ceaselessly playing upon him,
+so that every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a
+stray word, or glance, or touch. The truth of these relations
+experience gives us; not the truth of eternal outlines effected once
+for all, but a world of fine gradations and subtly linked conditions,
+shifting intricately as we ourselves change; and bids us by constant
+clearing of the organs of observation and perfecting of analysis to
+make what we can of these. To the intellect, to the critical spirit,
+these subtleties of effect are more precious than anything else. What
+is lost in precision of form is gained in intricacy of expression. To
+suppose that what is called 'ontology' is what the speculative
+instinct seeks, is the misconception of a backward school of
+logicians. Who would change the colour or curve of a roseleaf for that
+[Greek: ousia achromatos, aschematistos, anaphes]. A transcendentalism
+that makes what is abstract more excellent than what is concrete has
+nothing akin to the leading philosophies of the world. The true
+illustration of the speculative temper is not the Hindoo, lost to
+sense, understanding, individuality; but such an one as Goethe, to
+whom every moment of life brought its share of experimental,
+individual knowledge, by whom no touch of the world of form, colour,
+and passion was disregarded.
+
+The literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle against
+the application of the relative spirit to moral and religious
+questions. Everywhere he is restlessly scheming to apprehend the
+absolute; to affirm it effectively; to get it acknowledged. Coleridge
+failed in that attempt, happily even for him, for it was a struggle
+against the increasing life of the mind itself. The real loss was,
+that this controversial interest betrayed him into a direction which
+was not for him the path of the highest intellectual success; a
+direction in which his artistic talent could never find the conditions
+of its perfection. Still, there is so much witchery about his poems,
+that it is as a poet that he will most probably be permanently
+remembered. How did his choice of a controversial interest, his
+determination to affirm the absolute, weaken or modify his poetical
+gift?
+
+In 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the composition of a volume of
+poems--the _Lyrical Ballads_. What Wordsworth then wrote is already
+vibrant with that blithe _elan_ which carried him to final happiness
+and self-possession. In Coleridge we feel already that faintness and
+obscure dejection which cling like some contagious damp to all his
+writings. Wordsworth was to be distinguished by a joyful and
+penetrative conviction of the existence of certain latent affinities
+between nature and the human mind, which reciprocally gild the mind
+and nature with a kind of 'heavenly alchemy':
+
+                 ... My voice proclaims
+    How exquisitely the individual mind
+    (And the progressive powers perhaps no less
+    Of the whole species) to the external world
+    Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too,
+    The external world is fitted to the mind:
+    And the creation, by no lower name
+    Can it be called, which they with blended might
+    Accomplish.[37]
+
+    [37] Preface to the _Excursion_.
+
+In Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken dreaming over the
+aspects and transitions of nature, a reflective, but altogether
+unformulated, analysis of them.
+
+There are in Coleridge's poems expressions of this conviction as deep
+as Wordsworth's. But Coleridge could never have abandoned himself to
+the dream as Wordsworth did, because the first condition of such
+abandonment is an unvexed quietness of heart. No one can read the
+_Lines composed above Tintern_ without feeling how potent the physical
+element was among the conditions of Wordsworth's genius:--'felt in the
+blood and felt along the heart,'--'My whole life I have lived in
+quiet thought.' The stimulus which most artists require from nature he
+can renounce. He leaves the ready-made glory of the Swiss mountains to
+reflect a glory on a mouldering leaf. He loves best to watch the
+floating thistledown, because of its hint at an unseen life in the
+air. Coleridge's temperament, [Greek: aei en sphodra orexei], with its
+faintness, its grieved dejection, could never have been like that.
+
+          My genial spirits fail
+          And what can these avail
+    To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
+          It were a vain endeavour,
+          Though I should gaze for ever
+    On that green light that lingers in the west:
+    I may not hope from outward forms to win
+    The passion and the life whose fountains are within.
+
+It is that flawless temperament in Wordsworth which keeps his
+conviction of a latent intelligence in nature within the limits of
+sentiment or instinct, and confines it, to those delicate and subdued
+shades of expression which perfect art allows. In sadder dispositions,
+that is in the majority of cases, where such a conviction has existed,
+it has stiffened into a formula, it has frozen into a scientific or
+pseudo-scientific theory. For the perception of those affinities
+brings one so near the absorbing speculative problems of
+life--optimism, the proportion of man to his place in nature, his
+prospects in relation to it--that it ever tends to become theory
+through their contagion. Even in Goethe, who has brilliantly handled
+the subject in his lyrics entitled _Gott und Welt_, it becomes
+something stiffer than poetry; it is tempered by the 'pale cast' of
+his technical knowledge of the nature of colours, of anatomy, of the
+metamorphosis of plants.
+
+That, however, which had only a limited power over Coleridge as
+sentiment, entirely possessed him as a philosophical idea. We shall
+see in what follows how deep its power was, how it pursued him
+everywhere, and seemed to him to interpret every question.
+Wordsworth's poetry is an optimism; it says man's relation to the
+world is, and may be seen by man to be, a perfect relation; but it is
+an optimism that begins and ends in an abiding instinct. Coleridge
+accepts the same optimism as a philosophical idea, but an idea is
+relative to an intellectual assent; sometimes it seems a better
+expression of facts, sometimes a worse, as the understanding weighs it
+in the logical balances. And so it is not a permanent consolation. It
+is only in the rarer moments of intellectual warmth and sunlight that
+it is entirely credible. In less exhilarating moments that perfect
+relation of man and nature seems to shift and fail; that is, the
+philosophical idea ceases to be realizable; and with Coleridge its
+place is not supplied, as with Wordsworth, by the corresponding
+sentiment or instinct.
+
+What in Wordsworth is a sentiment or instinct, is in Coleridge a
+philosophical idea. In other words, Coleridge's talent is a more
+intellectual one than Wordsworth's, more dramatic, more
+self-conscious. Wordsworth's talent, deeply reflective as it is,
+because its base is an instinct, is deficient in self-knowledge.
+Possessed by the rumours and voices of the haunted country, the
+borders of which he has passed alone, he never thinks of withdrawing
+from it to look down upon it from one of the central heights of human
+life. His power absorbs him, not he it; he cannot turn it round or get
+without it; he does not estimate its general relation to life. But
+Coleridge, just because the essence of his talent is the intuition of
+an idea, commands his talent. He not only feels with Wordsworth the
+expression of mind in nature, but he can project that feeling outside
+him, reduce it to a psychological law, define its relation to other
+elements of culture, place it in a complete view of life.
+
+And in some such activity as that, varied as his wide learning, in a
+many-sided dramatic kind of poetry, assigning its place and value to
+every mode of the inward life, seems to have been for Coleridge the
+original path of artistic success. But in order to follow that path
+one must hold ideas loosely in the relative spirit, not seek to
+stereotype any one of the many modes of that life; one must
+acknowledge that the mind is ever greater than its own products,
+devote ideas to the service of art rather than of [Greek: gnosis], not
+disquiet oneself about the absolute. Perhaps Coleridge is more
+interesting because he did not follow this path. Repressing his
+artistic interest and voluntarily discolouring his own work, he turned
+to console and strengthen the human mind, vulgarized or dejected, as
+he believed, by the acquisition of new knowledge about itself in the
+_eclaircissement_ of the eighteenth century.
+
+What the reader of our own generation will least find in Coleridge's
+prose writings is the excitement of the literary sense. And yet in
+those grey volumes we have the production of one who made way ever by
+a charm, the charm of voice, of aspect, of language, above all, by
+the intellectual charm of new, moving, luminous ideas. Perhaps the
+chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of seriousness, a seriousness
+that arises not from any moral principle, but from a misconception of
+the perfect manner. There is a certain shade of levity and unconcern,
+the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which marks complete
+culture in the handling of abstract questions. The humanist, he who
+possesses that complete culture, does not 'weep' over the failure of
+'a theory of the quantification of the predicate', nor 'shriek' over
+the fall of a philosophical formula. A kind of humour is one of the
+conditions of the true mental attitude in the criticism of past stages
+of thought. Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them, any
+more than a man of good sense can afford to be too serious in looking
+back upon his own childhood. Plato, whom Coleridge claims as the first
+of his spiritual ancestors, Plato, as we remember him, a true
+humanist, with Petrarch and Goethe and M. Renan, holds his theories
+lightly, glances with a blithe and naive inconsequence from one view
+to another, not anticipating the burden of meaning 'views' will one
+day have for humanity. In reading him one feels how lately it was that
+Croesus thought it a paradox to say that external prosperity was not
+necessarily happiness. But on Coleridge lies the whole weight of the
+sad reflection that has since come into the world, with which for us
+the air is full, which the children in the market-place repeat to each
+other. Even his language is forced and broken, lest some saving
+formula should be lost--'distinctities', 'enucleation', 'pentad of
+operative Christianity'--he has a whole vocabulary of such phrases,
+and expects to turn the tide of human thought by fixing the sense of
+such expressions as 'reason', 'understanding', 'idea'.
+
+Again, he has not the jealousy of the true artist in excluding all
+associations that have no charm or colour or gladness in them;
+everywhere he allows the impress of an inferior theological
+literature; he is often prolix and importunate about most indifferent
+heroes--Sir Alexander Ball, Dr. Bell, even Dr. Bowyer, the coarse
+pedant of the Blue-coat School. And the source of all this is closely
+connected with the source of his literary activity. For Coleridge had
+chosen as the mark of his literary egotism a kind of intellectual
+_tour de force_--to found a religious philosophy, to do something with
+the 'idea' in spite of the essential nature of the 'idea'. And
+therefore all is fictitious from the beginning. He had determined,
+that which is humdrum, insipid, which the human spirit has done with,
+shall yet stimulate and inspire. What he produced symbolizes this
+purpose--the mass of it _ennuyant_, depressing: the _Aids to
+Reflection_, for instance, with Archbishop Leighton's vague pieties
+all twisted into the jargon of a spiritualistic philosophy. But
+sometimes 'the pulse of the God's blood' does transmute it, kindling
+here and there a spot that begins to live; as in that beautiful
+fragment at the end of the _Church and State_, or in the distilled and
+concentrated beauty of such a passage as this:
+
+     The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of
+     human life, is the horizon for the majority of its
+     inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and
+     departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they
+     vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and
+     bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher
+     ascents are too often hidden by mists and clouds from
+     uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to
+     penetrate. To the multitude below these vapours appear now
+     as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may
+     intrude with impunity; and now all a-glow, with colours not
+     their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of
+     happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few
+     who, measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the
+     feet of their furthest inaccessible falls, have learned that
+     the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few who,
+     even in the level streams, have detected elements which
+     neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains
+     contained or could supply.
+
+                                 _Biographia Literaria._
+
+'I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation.'
+So Coleridge sums up his childhood with its delicacy, its
+sensitiveness, and passion. From his tenth to his eighteenth year he
+was at a rough school in London. Speaking of this time, he says:
+
+     When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my
+     birthplace and family, Providence, it has often occurred to
+     me, gave me the first intimation that it was my lot, and
+     that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a
+     detached individual, a _terrae filius_, who was to ask love
+     or service of no one on any more specific relation than that
+     of being a man, and as such to take my chance for the free
+     charities of humanity.[38]
+
+    [38] Biographical Supplement to _Biographia Literaria_, chap.
+    ii.
+
+Even his fine external nature was for years repressed, wronged, driven
+inward--'at fourteen I was in a continual state of low fever.' He
+becomes a dreamer, an eager student, but without ambition.
+
+This depressed boy is nevertheless, on the spiritual side, the child
+of a noble house. At twenty-five he is exercising a wonderful charm,
+and has defined for himself a peculiar line of intellectual activity.
+He had left Cambridge without a degree, a Unitarian. Unable to take
+orders, he determined through Southey's influence to devote himself to
+literature. When he left Cambridge there was a prejudice against him
+which has given occasion to certain suspicions. Those who knew him
+best discredit these suspicions. What is certain is that he was
+subject to fits of violent, sometimes fantastic, despondency. He
+retired to Stowey, in Somersetshire, to study poetry and philosophy.
+In 1797 his poetical gift was in full flower; he wrote _Kubla Khan_,
+the first part of _Christabel_, and _The Ancient Mariner_. His
+literary success grew in spite of opposition. He had a strange
+attractive gift of conversation, or rather of monologue, as De Stael
+said, full of _bizarrerie_, with the rapid alternations of a dream,
+and here and there a sudden summons into a world strange to the
+hearer, abounding with images drawn from a sort of divided, imperfect
+life, as of one to whom the external world penetrated only in part,
+and, blended with all this, passages of the deepest obscurity,
+precious only for their musical cadence, the echo in Coleridge of the
+eloquence of the older English writers, of whom he was so ardent a
+lover. All through this brilliant course we may discern the power of
+the Asiatic temperament, of that voluptuousness which is perhaps
+connected with his appreciation of the intimacy, the almost mystical
+_rapport_, between man and nature. 'I am much better', he writes, 'and
+my new and tender health is all over me like a voluptuous feeling.'
+
+And whatever fame, or charm, or life-inspiring gift he has had is the
+vibration of the interest he excited then, the propulsion into years
+that clouded his early promise of that first buoyant, irresistible
+self-assertion: so great is even the indirect power of a sincere
+effort towards the ideal life, of even a temporary escape of the
+spirit from routine. Perhaps the surest sign of his election--that he
+was indeed, on the spiritual side, the child of a noble house--is that
+story of the Pantisocratic scheme, which at this distance looks so
+grotesque. In his enthusiasm for the French Revolution, the old
+communistic dream with its appeal to nature (perhaps a little
+theatrical), touched him, as it had touched Rousseau, Saint-Pierre,
+and Chateaubriand. He had married one, his affection for whom seems to
+have been only a passing feeling; with her and a few friends he was to
+found a communistic settlement on the banks of the Susquehannah--'the
+name was pretty and metrical.' It was one of Coleridge's lightest
+dreams; but also one which could only have passed through the liberal
+air of his earlier life. The later years of the French Revolution,
+which for us have discredited all such dreams, deprived him of that
+youthfulness which is the preservative element in a literary talent.
+
+In 1798, he visited Germany. A beautiful fragment of this period
+remains, describing a spring excursion to the Brocken. His excitement
+still vibrates in it. Love, all joyful states of mind, are
+self-expressive; they loosen the tongue, they fill the thoughts with
+sensuous images, they harmonize one with the world of sight. We hear
+of the 'rich graciousness and courtesy' of Coleridge's manner, of the
+white and delicate skin, the abundant black hair, the full, almost
+animal lips, that whole physiognomy of the dreamer already touched
+with fanaticism. One says of the text of one of his Unitarian sermons,
+'his voice rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes'; another,
+'he talks like an angel, and does--nothing.'
+
+Meantime, he had designed an intellectual novelty in the shape of a
+religious philosophy. Socinian theology and the philosophy of Hartley
+had become distasteful. 'Whatever is against right reason, that no
+faith can oblige us to believe.' Coleridge quotes these words from
+Jeremy Taylor. And yet ever since the dawn of the Renaissance, had
+subsisted a conflict between reason and faith. From the first, indeed,
+the Christian religion had affirmed the existence of such a conflict,
+and had even based its plea upon its own weakness in it. In face of
+the classical culture, with its deep wide-struck roots in the world as
+it permanently exists, St. Paul asserted the claims of that which
+could not appeal with success to any genuinely human principle.
+Paradox as it was, that was the strength of the new spirit; for how
+much is there at all times in humanity which cannot appeal with
+success for encouragement or tolerance to any genuinely human
+principle. In the Middle Ages it might seem that faith had reconciled
+itself to philosophy; the Catholic church was the leader of the
+world's life as well as of the spirit's. Looking closer we see that
+the conflict is still latent there; the supremacy of faith is only a
+part of the worship of sorrow and weakness which marks the age. The
+weak are no longer merely a majority, they are all Europe. It is not
+that faith has become one with reason; but a strange winter, a strange
+suspension of life, has passed over the classical culture which is
+only the human reason in its most trenchant form. Glimpse after
+glimpse, as that pagan culture awoke to life, the conflict was felt
+once more. It is at the court of Frederick II that the Renaissance
+first becomes discernible as an actual power in European society. How
+definite and unmistakable is the attitude of faith towards that! Ever
+since the Reformation all phases of theology had been imperfect
+philosophies--that is, in which there was a religious _arriere
+pensee_; philosophies which could never be in the ascendant in a
+sincerely scientific sphere. The two elements had never really mixed.
+Writers so different as Locke and Taylor have each his liberal
+philosophy, and each has his defence of the orthodox belief; but,
+also, each has a divided mind; we wonder how the two elements could
+have existed side by side; brought together in a single mind, but
+unable to fuse in it, they reveal their radical contrariety. The
+Catholic church and humanity are two powers that divide the intellect
+and spirit of man. On the Catholic side is faith, rigidly logical as
+Ultramontanism, with a proportion of the facts of life, that is, all
+that is despairing in life coming naturally under its formula. On the
+side of humanity is all that is desirable in the world, all that is
+sympathetic with its laws, and succeeds through that sympathy.
+Doubtless, for the individual, there are a thousand intermediate
+shades of opinion, a thousand resting-places for the religious spirit;
+still, [Greek: to diorizein ouk esti ton pollon], fine distinctions
+are not for the majority; and this makes time eventually a dogmatist,
+working out the opposition in its most trenchant form, and fixing the
+horns of the dilemma; until, in the present day, we have on one side
+Pius IX, the true descendant of the fisherman, issuing the Encyclical,
+pleading the old promise against the world with a special kind of
+justice; and on the other side, the irresistible modern culture,
+which, as religious men often remind us, is only Christian
+accidentally.
+
+The peculiar temper of Coleridge's intellect made the idea of
+reconciling this conflict very seductive. With a true speculative
+talent he united a false kind of subtlety and the full share of
+vanity. A dexterous intellectual _tour de force_ has always an
+independent charm; and therefore it is well for the cause of truth
+that the directness, sincerity, and naturalness of things are beyond a
+certain limit sacrificed in vain to a factitious interest. A method so
+forced as that of Coleridge's religious philosophy is from the first
+doomed to be insipid, so soon as the temporary interest or taste or
+curiosity it was designed to meet has passed away. Then, as to the
+manner of such books as the _Aids to Reflection_, or _The
+Friend_:--These books came from one whose vocation was in the world of
+art; and yet, perhaps, of all books that have been influential in
+modern times, they are farthest from the classical form--bundles of
+notes--the original matter inseparably mixed up with that borrowed
+from others--the whole, just that mere preparation for an artistic
+effect which the finished artist would be careful one day to destroy.
+Here, again, we have a trait profoundly characteristic of Coleridge.
+He often attempts to reduce a phase of thought, subtle and exquisite,
+to conditions too rough for it. He uses a purely speculative gift in
+direct moral edification. Scientific truth is something fugitive,
+relative, full of fine gradations; he tries to fix it in absolute
+formulas. The _Aids to Reflection_, or _The Friend_, is an effort to
+propagate the volatile spirit of conversation into the less ethereal
+fabric of a written book; and it is only here and there that the
+poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really lifted by the spirit.
+
+At forty-two, we find Coleridge saying in a letter:
+
+     I feel with an intensity unfathomable by words my utter
+     nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness in and for myself.
+     I have learned what a sin is against an infinite,
+     imperishable being such as is the soul of man. The
+     consolations, at least the sensible sweetness of hope, I do
+     not possess. On the contrary, the temptation which I have
+     constantly to fight up against is a fear that, if
+     annihilation and the possibility of heaven were offered to
+     my choice, I should choose the former.
+
+What was the cause of this change? That is precisely the point on
+which, after all the gossip there has been, we are still ignorant. At
+times Coleridge's opium excesses were great; but what led to those
+excesses must not be left out of account. From boyhood he had a
+tendency to low fever, betrayed by his constant appetite for bathing
+and swimming, which he indulged even when a physician had opposed it.
+In 1803, he went to Malta as secretary to the English Governor. His
+daughter suspects that the source of the evil was there, that for one
+of his constitution the climate of Malta was deadly. At all events,
+when he returned, the charm of those five wonderful years had failed
+at the source.
+
+De Quincey said of him, 'he wanted better bread than can be made with
+wheat.' Lamb said of him that from boyhood he had 'hungered for
+eternity'. Henceforth those are the two notes of his life. From this
+time we must look for no more true literary talent in him. His style
+becomes greyer and greyer, his thoughts _outre_, exaggerated, a kind
+of credulity or superstition exercised upon abstract words. Like
+Clifford, in Hawthorne's beautiful romance--the born Epicurean, who by
+some strange wrong has passed the best of his days in a prison--he is
+the victim of a division of the will, often showing itself in trivial
+things: he could never choose on which side of the garden path he
+would walk. In 1803, he wrote a poem on 'The Pains of Sleep'. That
+unrest increased. Mr. Gillman tells us 'he had long been greatly
+afflicted with nightmare, and when residing with us was frequently
+aroused from this painful sleep by any one of the family who might
+hear him'.
+
+That faintness and continual dissolution had its own consumptive
+refinements, and even brought, as to the 'Beautiful Soul' in _Wilhelm
+Meister_, a faint religious ecstasy--that 'singing in the sails' which
+is not of the breeze. Here, again, is a note of Coleridge's:
+
+     'In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at
+     yonder moon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem
+     rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical
+     language for something within me that already and for ever
+     exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter
+     is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling, as
+     if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten
+     or hidden truth of my inner nature.' Then, 'while I was
+     preparing the pen to write this remark, I lost the train of
+     thought which had led me to it.'
+
+What a distemper of the eye of the mind! What an almost bodily
+distemper there is in that!
+
+Coleridge's intellectual sorrows were many; but he had one singular
+intellectual happiness. With an inborn taste for transcendental
+philosophy he lived just at the time when that philosophy took an
+immense spring in Germany, and connected itself with a brilliant
+literary movement. He had the luck to light upon it in its freshness,
+and introduce it to his countrymen. What an opportunity for one reared
+on the colourless English philosophies, but who feels an irresistible
+attraction towards metaphysical synthesis! How rare are such occasions
+of intellectual contentment! This transcendental philosophy, chiefly
+as systematized by Schelling, Coleridge applies, with an eager,
+unwearied subtlety, to the questions of theology and art-criticism. It
+is in his theory of art-criticism that he comes nearest to true and
+important principles; that is the least fugitive part of his work. Let
+us take this first; here we shall most clearly apprehend his main
+principle.
+
+What, then, is the essence of this criticism? On the whole it may be
+described as an attempt to reclaim the world of art as a world of
+fixed laws--to show that the creative activity of genius and the
+simplest act of thought are but higher and lower products of the laws
+of a universal logic. Criticism, feeling its own unsuccess in dealing
+with the greater works of art, has sometimes made too much of those
+dark and capricious suggestions of genius which even the intellect
+possessed by them is unable to track or recall. It has seemed due to
+their half-sacred character to look for no link between the process by
+which they were produced and the slighter processes of the mind.
+Coleridge assumes that the highest phases of thought must be more, not
+less, than the lower, subjects of law.
+
+With this interest, in the _Biographia Literaria_, he refines
+Schelling's 'Philosophy of Nature' into a theory of art. 'Es giebt
+kein Plagiat in der Philosophie' says Heine, alluding to the charge
+brought against Schelling of unacknowledged borrowing from Bruno, and
+certainly that which is common to Coleridge and Schelling is of far
+earlier origin than the Renaissance. Schellingism, the 'Philosophy of
+Nature', is indeed a constant tradition in the history of thought; it
+embodies a permanent type of the speculative temper. That mode of
+conceiving nature as a mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man may
+be traced up to the first beginnings of Greek speculation. There are
+two ways of envisaging those aspects of nature which appear to bear
+the impress of reason or intelligence. There is the deist's way, which
+regards them merely as marks of design, which separates the informing
+mind from nature, as the mechanist from the machine; and there is the
+pantheistic way, which identifies the two, which regards nature itself
+as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as, but
+vaster than, the human. Greek philosophy, finding indications of mind
+everywhere, dwelling exclusively in its observations on that which is
+general or formal, on that which modern criticism regards as the
+modification of things by the mind of the observer, adopts the latter,
+or pantheistic way, through the influence of the previous mythological
+period. Mythology begins in the early necessities of language, of
+which it is a kind of accident. But at a later period its essence
+changes; it becomes what it was not at its birth, the servant of a
+genuine poetic interest, a kind of _vivification_ of nature. Played
+upon by those accidents of language, the Greek mind becomes possessed
+by the conception of nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to
+the mind of man. This unfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an
+abstract form, petrified into an idea, is the conception which gives a
+unity of aim to Greek philosophy. Step by step it works out the
+substance of the Hegelian formula: 'Was ist, das ist vernuenftig; was
+vernuenftig ist, das ist'--'Whatever is, is according to reason;
+whatever is according to reason, that is.' A science of which that
+could be the formula is still but an intellectual aspiration; the
+formula of true science is different. Experience, which has gradually
+saddened the earth's colour, stiffened its motions, withdrawn from it
+some blithe and debonair presence, has moderated our demands upon
+science. The positive method makes very little account of marks of
+intelligence in nature; in its wider view of phenomena it sees that
+those incidents are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences; it
+absorbs them in the simpler conception of law. But the suspicion of a
+mind latent in nature, struggling for release and intercourse with the
+intellect of man through true ideas, has never ceased to haunt a
+certain class of minds. Started again and again in successive periods
+by enthusiasts on the antique pattern, in each case the thought has
+seemed paler and more evanescent amidst the growing consistency and
+sharpness of outline of other and more positive forms of knowledge.
+Still, wherever a speculative instinct has been united with extreme
+inwardness of temperament, as in Jakob Boehme, there the old Greek
+conception, like some seed floating in the air, has taken root and
+sprung up anew. Coleridge, thrust inward upon himself, driven from
+'life in thought and sensation' to life in thought only, feels in that
+dark London school a thread of the Greek mind vibrating strangely in
+him. At fifteen he is discoursing on Plotinus, and has translated the
+hymns of Synesius. So in later years he reflects from Schelling the
+flitting tradition. He conceives a subtle co-ordination between the
+ideas of the mind and the laws of the natural world. Science is to be
+attained, not by observation, analysis, generalization, but by the
+evolution or recovery of those ideas from within, by a sort of [Greek:
+anamnesis], every group of observed facts remaining an enigma until
+the appropriate idea is struck upon them from the mind of Newton or
+Cuvier, the genius in whom sympathy with the universal reason is
+entire. Next he supposes that this reason or intelligence in nature
+gradually becomes reflective--self-conscious. He fancies he can track
+through all the simpler orders of life fragments of an eloquent
+prophecy about the human mind. He regards the whole of nature as a
+development of higher forms out of the lower, through shade after
+shade of systematic change. The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the
+axes of a crystal form, the trance-like life of plants, the animal
+troubled by strange irritabilities, are stages which anticipate
+consciousness. All through that increasing stir of life this was
+forming itself; each stage in its unsatisfied susceptibilities seeming
+to be drawn out of its own limits by the more pronounced current of
+life on its confines, the 'shadow of approaching humanity' gradually
+deepening, the latent intelligence working to the surface. At this
+point the law of development does not lose itself in caprice; rather
+it becomes more constraining and incisive. From the lowest to the
+highest acts of intelligence, there is another range of refining
+shades. Gradually the mind concentrates itself, frees itself from the
+limits of the particular, the individual, attains a strange power of
+modifying and centralizing what it receives from without according to
+an inward ideal. At last, in imaginative genius, ideas become
+effective; the intelligence of nature, with all its elements connected
+and justified, is clearly reflected; and the interpretation of its
+latent purposes is fixed in works of art.
+
+In this fanciful and bizarre attempt to rationalize art, to range it
+under the dominion of law, there is still a gap to be filled up. What
+is that common law of the mind, of which a work of art and the
+slighter acts of thought are alike products? Here Coleridge weaves in
+Kant's fine-spun theory of the transformation of sense into
+perception. What every theory of perception has to explain is that
+associative power which gathers isolated sensible qualities into the
+objects of the world about us. Sense, without an associative power,
+would be only a threadlike stream of colours, sounds, odours--each
+struck upon one for a moment, and then withdrawn. The basis of this
+association may be represented as a material one, a kind of
+many-coloured 'etching' on the brain. Hartley has dexterously handled
+this hypothesis. The charm of his 'theory of vibrations' is the vivid
+image it presents to the fancy. How large an element in a speculative
+talent is the command of these happy images! Coleridge, by a finer
+effort of the same kind, a greater delicacy of fancy, detects all
+sorts of slips, transitions, breaks of continuity in Hartley's
+glancing cobweb. Coleridge, with Kant, regards all association as
+effected by a power within, to which he gives a fanciful Greek
+name.[39] In an act of perception there is the matter which sense
+presents, colour, tone, feeling; but also a form or mould, such as
+space, unity, causation, suggested from within. In these forms we
+arrest and frame the many attributes of sense. It is like that simple
+chemical phenomenon where two colourless fluids uniting reflect a full
+colour. Neither matter nor form can be perceived asunder; they unite
+into the many-coloured image of life. This theory has not been able to
+bear a loyal induction. Even if it were true, how little it would tell
+us; how it attenuates fact! There, again, the charm is all in the
+clear image; the image of the artist combining a few elementary
+colours, curves, sounds into a new whole. Well, this power of
+association, of concentrating many elements of sense in an object of
+perception, is refined and deepened into the creative acts of
+imagination.
+
+    [39] Esemplastic.
+
+We of the modern ages have become so familiarized with the greater
+works of art that we are little sensitive of the act of creation in
+them; they do not impress us as a new presence in the world. Only
+sometimes in productions which realize immediately a profound emotion
+and enforce a change in taste, such as _Werther_ or _Emile_, we are
+actual witnesses of the moulding of an unforeseen type by some new
+principle of association. By imagination, the distinction between
+which and fancy is so thrust upon his readers, Coleridge means a
+vigorous act of association, which, by simplifying and restraining
+their natural expression to an artificial order, refines and perfects
+the types of human passion. It represents the excitements of the
+human kind, but reflected in a new manner, 'excitement itself
+imitating order.' 'Originally the offspring of passion,' he somewhere
+says, 'but now the adopted children of power.' So far there is nothing
+new or distinctive; every one who can receive from a poem or picture a
+total impression will admit so much. What makes the view distinctive
+in Coleridge are the Schellingistic associations with which he colours
+it, that faint glamour of the philosophy of nature which was ever
+influencing his thoughts. That suggested the idea of a subtly winding
+parallel, a 'rapport' in every detail, between the human mind and the
+world without it, laws of nature being so many transformed ideas.
+Conversely, the ideas of the human mind would be only transformed
+laws. Genius would be in a literal sense an exquisitely purged
+sympathy with nature. Those associative conceptions of the
+imagination, those unforeseen types of passion, would come, not so
+much of the artifice and invention of the understanding, as from
+self-surrender to the suggestions of nature; they would be evolved by
+the stir of nature itself realizing the highest reach of its latent
+intelligence; they would have a kind of antecedent necessity to rise
+at some time to the surface of the human mind.
+
+It is natural that Shakespeare should be the idol of all such
+criticism, whether in England or Germany. The first effect in
+Shakespeare is that of capricious detail, of the waywardness that
+plays with the parts careless of the impression of the whole. But
+beyond there is the constraining unity of effect, the uneffaceable
+impression, of _Hamlet_ or _Macbeth_. His hand moving freely is
+curved round by some law of gravitation from within; that is, there is
+the most constraining unity in the most abundant variety. Coleridge
+exaggerates this unity into something like the unity of a natural
+organism, the associative act that effected it into something closely
+akin to the primitive power of nature itself. 'In the Shakespearian
+drama', he says, 'there is a vitality which grows and evolves itself
+from within.' Again:
+
+     He, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the
+     germ from within by the imaginative power according to the
+     idea. For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea
+     in mind to a law in nature. They are correlatives which
+     suppose each other.
+
+Again:
+
+     The organic form is innate; it shapes, as it develops,
+     itself from within, and the fulness of its development is
+     one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.
+     Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime
+     genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally
+     inexhaustible in forms; each exterior is the physiognomy of
+     the being within, and even such is the appropriate
+     excellence of Shakespeare, himself a nature humanized, a
+     genial understanding, directing self-consciously a power and
+     an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.
+
+There 'the absolute' has been affirmed in the sphere of art; and
+thought begins to congeal. Coleridge has not only overstrained the
+elasticity of his hypothesis, but has also obscured the true interest
+of art. For, after all, the artist has become something almost
+mechanical; instead of being the most luminous and self-possessed
+phase of consciousness, the associative act itself looks like some
+organic process of assimilation. The work of art is sometimes likened
+to the living organism. That expresses the impression of a
+self-delighting, independent life which a finished work of art gives
+us; it does not express the process by which that work was produced.
+Here there is no blind ferment of lifeless elements to realize a type.
+By exquisite analysis the artist attains clearness of idea, then, by
+many stages of refining, clearness of expression. He moves slowly over
+his work, calculating the tenderest tone, and restraining the subtlest
+curve, never letting his hand or fancy move at large, gradually
+refining flaccid spaces to the higher degree of expressiveness.
+Culture, at least, values even in transcendent works of art the power
+of the understanding in them, their logical process of construction,
+the spectacle of supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.
+
+Coleridge's criticism may well be remembered as part of the long
+pleading of German culture for the things 'behind the veil'. It
+recalls us from the work of art to the mind of the artist; and, after
+all, this is what is infinitely precious, and the work of art only as
+the index of it. Still, that is only the narrower side of a complete
+criticism. Perhaps it is true, as some one says in Lessing's _Emilie
+Galotti_, that, if Michael Angelo had been born without hands, he
+would still have been the greatest of artists. But we must admit the
+truth also of an opposite view: 'In morals as in art', says M. Renan,
+'the word is nothing--the fact is everything. The idea which lurks
+under a picture of Raphael is a slight matter; it is the picture
+itself only that counts.'
+
+What constitutes an artistic gift is, first of all, a natural
+susceptibility to moments of strange excitement, in which the colours
+freshen upon our thread bare world, and the routine of things about
+us is broken by a novel and happier synthesis. These are moments into
+which other minds may be made to enter, but which they cannot
+originate. This susceptibility is the element of genius in an artistic
+gift. Secondly, there is what may be called the talent of projection,
+of throwing these happy moments into an external concrete form--a
+statue, or play, or picture. That projection is of all degrees of
+completeness; its facility and transparence are modified by the
+circumstances of the individual, his culture, and his age. When it is
+perfectly transparent, the work is classical. Compare the power of
+projection in Mr. Browning's _Sordello_, with that power in the
+_Sorrows of Werther_. These two elements determine the two chief aims
+of criticism. First, it has to classify those initiative moments
+according to the amount of interest excited in them, to estimate their
+comparative acceptability, their comparative power of giving joy to
+those who undergo them. Secondly, it has to test, by a study of the
+artistic product itself, in connexion with the intellectual and
+spiritual condition of its age, the completeness of the projection.
+These two aims form the positive, or concrete, side of criticism;
+their direction is not towards a metaphysical definition of the
+universal element in an artistic effort, but towards a subtle
+gradation of the shades of difference between one artistic gift and
+another. This side of criticism is infinitely varied; and it is what
+French culture more often achieves than the German.
+
+Coleridge has not achieved this side in an equal degree with the
+other; and this want is not supplied by the _Literary Remains_, which
+contain his studies on Shakespeare. There we have a repetition, not
+an application, of the absolute formula. Coleridge is like one who
+sees in a picture only the rules of perspective, and is always trying
+to simplify even those. Thus: 'Where there is no humour, but only wit,
+or the like, there is no growth from within.' 'What is beauty'? he
+asks. 'It is the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the
+diverse.' So of Dante: 'There is a total impression of infinity; the
+wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in an inner feeling of
+totality and absolute being.' Again, of the _Paradise Lost_: 'It has
+the totality of the poem as distinguished from the _ab ovo_ birth and
+parentage or straight line of history.'
+
+That exaggerated inwardness is barren. Here, too, Coleridge's thoughts
+require to be thawed, to be set in motion. He is admirable in the
+detection, the analysis, and statement of a few of the highest general
+laws of art-production. But he withdraws us too far from what we can
+see, hear, and feel. Doubtless, the idea, the intellectual element, is
+the spirit and life of art. Still, art is the triumph of the senses
+and the emotions; and the senses and the emotions must not be cheated
+of their triumph after all. That strange and beautiful psychology
+which he employs, with its evanescent delicacies, has not sufficient
+corporeity. Again, one feels that the discussion about Hartley,
+meeting us in the way, throws a tone of insecurity over the critical
+theory which it introduces. Its only effect is to win for the terms in
+which that criticism is expressed, the associations of one side in a
+metaphysical controversy.
+
+The vagueness and fluidity of Coleridge's theological opinions have
+been exaggerated through an illusion, which has arisen from the
+occasional form in which they have reached us. Criticism, then, has to
+methodize and focus them. They may be arranged under three heads; the
+general principles of supernaturalism, orthodox dogmas, the
+interpretation of Scripture. With regard to the first and second,
+Coleridge ranks as a Conservative thinker; but his principles of
+Scriptural interpretation resemble Lessing's; they entitle him to be
+regarded as the founder of the modern liberal school of English
+theology. By supernaturalism is meant the theory of a divine person in
+immediate communication with the human mind, dealing with it out of
+that order of nature which includes man's body and his ordinary trains
+of thought, according to fixed laws, which the theologian sums up in
+the doctrines of 'grace' and 'sin'. Of this supernaturalism, the _Aids
+to Reflection_ attempts to give a metaphysical proof. The first
+necessity of the argument is to prove that religion, with its supposed
+experiences of grace and sin, and the realities of a world above the
+world of sense, is the fulfilment of the constitution of every man,
+or, in the language of the 'philosophy of nature', is part of the
+'idea' of man; so that, when those experiences are absent, all the
+rest of his nature is unexplained, like some enigmatical fragment, the
+construction and working of which we cannot surmise. According to
+Schelling's principle, the explanation of every phase of life is to be
+sought in that next above it. This axiom is applied to three supposed
+stages of man's reflective life: Prudence, Morality, Religion.
+Prudence, by which Coleridge means something like Bentham's
+'enlightened principle of self-preservation', is, he says, an
+inexplicable instinct, a blind motion in the dark, until it is
+expanded into morality. Morality, again, is but a groundless
+prepossession until transformed into a religious recognition of a
+spiritual world, until, as Coleridge says in his rich figurative
+language, 'like the main feeder into some majestic lake, rich with
+hidden springs of its own, it flows into, and becomes one with, the
+spiritual life.' A spiritual life, then, being the fulfilment of human
+nature, implied, if we see clearly, in those instincts which enable
+one to live on from day to day, is part of the 'idea' of man.
+
+The second necessity of the argument is to prove that 'the idea',
+according to the principle of the 'philosophy of nature', is an
+infallible index of the actual condition of the world without us. Here
+Coleridge introduces an analogy:
+
+     In the world, we see everywhere evidences of a unity, which
+     the component parts are so far from explaining, that they
+     necessarily presuppose it as the cause and condition of
+     their existing as those parts, or even of their existing at
+     all. This antecedent unity, or cause and principle of each
+     union, it has, since the time of Bacon and Kepler, been
+     customary to call a law. This crocus for instance; or any
+     other flower the reader may have before his sight, or choose
+     to bring before his fancy; that the root, stem, leaves,
+     petals, &c., cohere to one plant is owing to an antecedent
+     power or principle in the seed which existed before a single
+     particle of the matters that constitute the size and
+     visibility of the crocus had been attracted from the
+     surrounding soil, air, and moisture. Shall we turn to the
+     seed? there, too, the same necessity meets us: an antecedent
+     unity must here, too, be supposed. Analyse the seeds with
+     the finest tools, and let the solar microscope come in aid
+     of your senses, what do you find?--means and instruments; a
+     wondrous fairy tale of nature, magazines of food, stores of
+     various sorts, pipes, spiracles, defences; a house of many
+     chambers, and the owner and inhabitant invisible.
+
+                                 _Aids to Reflection._
+
+Nature, that is, works by what we may call 'intact ideas'. It
+co-ordinates every part of the crocus to all the other parts; one
+stage of its growth to the whole process; and having framed its
+organism to assimilate certain external elements, it does not cheat it
+of those elements, soil, air, moisture. Well, if the 'idea' of man is
+to be intact, he must be enveloped in a supernatural world; and nature
+always works by intact ideas. The spiritual life is the highest
+development of the idea of man; there must be a supernatural world
+corresponding to it.
+
+One finds, it is hard to say how many, difficulties in drawing
+Coleridge's conclusion. To mention only one of them--the argument
+looks too like the exploded doctrine of final causes. Of course the
+crocus would not live unless the conditions of its life were supplied.
+The flower is made for soil, air, moisture, and it has them; just as
+man's senses are made for a sensible world, and we have the sensible
+world. But give the flower the power of dreaming, nourish it on its
+own reveries, put man's wild hunger of heart and susceptibility to
+_ennui_ in it, and what indication of the laws of the world without
+it, would be afforded by its longing to break its bonds?
+
+In theology people are content with analogies, probabilities, with the
+empty schemes of arguments for which the data are still lacking;
+arguments, the rejection of which Coleridge tells us implies 'an evil
+heart of unbelief', but of which we might as truly say that they
+derive all their consistency from the peculiar atmosphere of the mind
+which receives them. Such arguments are received in theology because
+what chains men to a religion is not its claim on their reason, their
+hopes or fears, but the glow it affords to the world, its 'beau
+ideal'. Coleridge thinks that if we reject the supernatural, the
+spiritual element in life will evaporate also, that we shall have to
+accept a life with narrow horizons, without disinterestedness, harshly
+cut off from the springs of life in the past. But what is this
+spiritual element? It is the passion for inward perfection, with its
+sorrows, its aspirations, its joy. These mental states are the
+delicacies of the higher morality of the few, of Augustine, of the
+author of the 'Imitation', of Francis de Sales; in their essence they
+are only the permanent characteristics of the higher life. Augustine,
+or the author of the 'Imitation', agreeably to the culture of their
+age, had expressed them in the terms of a metaphysical theory, and
+expanded them into what theologians call the doctrines of grace and
+sin, the fluctuations of the union of the soul with its unseen friend.
+The life of those who are capable of a passion for perfection still
+produces the same mental states; but that religious expression of them
+is no longer congruous with the culture of the age. Still, all inward
+life works itself out in a few simple forms, and culture cannot go
+very far before the religious graces reappear in it in a subtilized
+intellectual shape. There are aspects of the religious character which
+have an artistic worth distinct from their religious import. Longing,
+a chastened temper, spiritual joy, are precious states of mind, not
+because they are part of man's duty or because God has commanded them,
+still less because they are means of obtaining a reward, but because
+like culture itself they are remote, refined, intense, existing only
+by the triumph of a few over a dead world of routine in which there
+is no lifting of the soul at all. If there is no other world, art in
+its own interest must cherish such characteristics as beautiful
+spectacles. Stephen's face, 'like the face of an angel,' has a worth
+of its own, even if the opened heaven is but a dream.
+
+Our culture, then, is not supreme, our intellectual life is
+incomplete, we fail of the intellectual throne, if we have no inward
+longing, inward chastening, inward joy. Religious belief, the craving
+for objects of belief, may be refined out of our hearts, but they must
+leave their sacred perfume, their spiritual sweetness behind. This law
+of the highest intellectual life has sometimes seemed hard to
+understand. Those who maintain the claims of the older and narrower
+forms of religious life against the claims of culture are often
+embarrassed at finding the intellectual life heated through with the
+very graces to which they would sacrifice it. How often in the higher
+class of theological writings--writings which really spring from an
+original religious genius, such as those of Dr. Newman--does the
+modern aspirant to perfect culture seem to find the expression of the
+inmost delicacies of his own life, the same yet different! The
+spiritualities of the Christian life have often drawn men on, little
+by little, into the broader spiritualities of systems opposed to
+it--pantheism, or positivism, or a philosophy of indifference. Many in
+our own generation, through religion, have become dead to religion.
+How often do we have to look for some feature of the ancient religious
+life, not in a modern saint, but in a modern artist or philosopher!
+For those who have passed out of Christianity, perhaps its most
+precious souvenir is the ideal of a transcendental disinterestedness.
+Where shall we look for this ideal? In Spinoza; or perhaps in Bentham
+or in Austin.
+
+Some of those who have wished to save supernaturalism--as, for
+instance, Theodore Parker--have rejected more or less entirely the
+dogmas of the Church. Coleridge's instinct is truer than theirs; the
+two classes of principles are logically connected. It was in defence
+of the dogmas of the Church that Coleridge elaborated his unhappy
+crotchet of the diversity of the reason from the understanding. The
+weakness of these dogmas had ever been, not so much a failure of the
+authority of Scripture or tradition in their favour, as their conflict
+with the reason that they were words rather than conceptions. That
+analysis of words and conceptions which in modern philosophy has been
+a principle of continual rejuvenescence with Descartes and Berkeley,
+as well as with Bacon and Locke, had desolated the field of scholastic
+theology. It is the rationality of the dogmas of that theology that
+Coleridge had a taste for proving.
+
+Of course they conflicted with the understanding, with the common
+daylight of the mind, but then might there not be some mental faculty
+higher than the understanding? The history of philosophy supplied many
+authorities for this opinion. Then, according to the 'philosophy of
+nature', science and art are both grounded upon the 'ideas' of genius,
+which are a kind of intuition, which are their own evidence. Again,
+this philosophy was always saying the ideas of the mind must be true,
+must correspond to reality; and what an aid to faith is that, if one
+is not too nice in distinguishing between ideas and mere convictions,
+or prejudices, or habitual views, or safe opinions! Kant also had
+made a distinction between the reason and the understanding. True,
+this harsh division of mental faculties is exactly what is most
+sterile in Kant, the essential tendency of the German school of
+thought being to show that the mind always acts _en masse_. Kant had
+defined two senses of reason as opposed to the understanding. First,
+there was the 'speculative reason', with its 'three categories of
+totality', God, the soul, and the universe--three mental forms which
+might give a sort of unity to science, but to which no actual
+intuition corresponded. The tendency of this part of Kant's critique
+is to destroy the rational groundwork of theism. Then there was the
+'practical reason', on the relation of which to the 'speculative', we
+may listen to Heinrich Heine:
+
+     'After the tragedy comes the farce. [The tragedy is Kant's
+     destructive criticism of the speculative reason.] So far
+     Immanuel Kant has been playing the relentless philosopher;
+     he has laid siege to heaven.' Heine goes on with some
+     violence to describe the havoc Kant has made of the orthodox
+     belief: 'Old Lampe,[40] with the umbrella under his arm,
+     stands looking on much disturbed, perspiration and tears of
+     sorrow running down his cheeks. Then Immanuel Kant grows
+     pitiful, and shows that he is not only a great philosopher
+     but also a good man. He considers a little; and then, half
+     in good nature, half in irony, he says, "Old Lampe must have
+     a god, otherwise the poor man will not be happy; but man
+     ought to be happy in this life, the practical reason says
+     that; let the practical reason stand surety for the
+     existence of a god; it is all the same to me." Following
+     this argument, Kant distinguishes between the theoretical
+     and the practical reason, and, with the practical reason for
+     a magic wand, he brings to life the dead body of deism,
+     which the theoretical reason had slain.'
+
+    [40] The servant who attended Kant in his walks.
+
+Coleridge first confused the speculative reason with the practical,
+and then exaggerated the variety and the sphere of their combined
+functions. Then he has given no consistent definition of the reason.
+It is 'the power of universal and necessary convictions'; it is 'the
+knowledge of the laws of the whole considered as one'; it is 'the
+science of all as a whole'. Again, the understanding is 'the faculty
+judging according to sense', or 'the faculty of means to mediate
+ends'; and so on. The conception floating in his mind seems to have
+been a really valuable one; that, namely, of a distinction between an
+organ of adequate and an organ of inadequate ideas. But when we find
+him casting about for a definition, not precisely determining the
+functions of the reason, making long preparations for the 'deduction'
+of the faculty, as in the third column of _The Friend_, but never
+actually starting, we suspect that the reason is a discovery in
+psychology which Coleridge has a good will to make, and that is all;
+that he has got no farther than the old vague desire to escape from
+the limitations of thought by some extraordinary mystical faculty.
+Some of the clergy eagerly welcomed the supposed discovery. In their
+difficulties they had often appealed in the old simple way to
+sentiment and emotion as of higher authority than the understanding,
+and on the whole had had to get on with very little philosophy. Like
+M. Jourdain, they were amazed to find that they had been all the time
+appealing to the reason; now they might actually go out to meet the
+enemy. Orthodoxy might be cured by a hair of the dog that had bitten
+it.
+
+Theology is a great house, scored all over with hieroglyphics by
+perished hands. When we decipher one of these hieroglyphics, we find
+in it the statement of a mistaken opinion; but knowledge has crept
+onward since the hand dropped from the wall; we no longer entertain
+the opinion, and we can trace the origin of the mistake. Dogmas are
+precious as memorials of a class of sincere and beautiful spirits, who
+in a past age of humanity struggled with many tears, if not for true
+knowledge, yet for a noble and elevated happiness. That struggle is
+the substance, the dogma only its shadowy expression; received
+traditionally in an altered age, it is the shadow of a shadow, a mere
+[Greek: triton eidolon], twice removed from substance and reality. The
+true method then in the treatment of dogmatic theology must be
+historical. Englishmen are gradually finding out how much that method
+has done since the beginning of modern criticism by the hands of such
+writers as Baur. Coleridge had many of the elements of this method:
+learning, inwardness, a subtle psychology, a dramatic power of
+sympathy with modes of thought other than his own. Often in carrying
+out his own method he gives the true historical origin of a dogma,
+but, with a strange dullness of the historical sense, he regards this
+as a reason for the existence of the dogma now, not merely as reason
+for its having existed in the past. Those historical elements he could
+not envisage in the historical method, because this method is only one
+of the applications, the most fruitful of them all, of the relative
+spirit.
+
+After Coleridge's death, seven letters of his on the inspiration of
+Scripture were published, under the title of _Confessions of an
+Inquiring Spirit_. This little book has done more than any other of
+Coleridge's writings to discredit his name with the orthodox. The
+frequent occurrence in it of the word 'bibliolatry', borrowed from
+Lessing, would sufficiently account for this pious hatred. From
+bibliolatry Coleridge was saved by the spiritualism, which, in
+questions less simple than that of the infallibility of Scripture, was
+so retarding to his culture. Bibliolators may remember that one who
+committed a kind of intellectual suicide by catching at any appearance
+of a fixed and absolute authority, never dreamed of resting on the
+authority of a book. His Schellingistic notion of the possibility of
+absolute knowledge, of knowing God, of a light within every man which
+might discover to him the doctrines of Christianity, tended to
+depreciate historical testimony, perhaps historical realism
+altogether. Scripture is a legitimate sphere for the understanding. He
+says, indeed, that there is more in the Bible that 'finds' him than he
+has experienced in all other books put together. But still, 'There is
+a Light higher than all, even the Word that was in the beginning. If
+between this Word and the written letter I shall anywhere seem to
+myself to find a discrepance, I will not conclude that such there
+actually is; nor on the other hand will I fall under the condemnation
+of them that would lie for God, but seek as I may, be thankful for
+what I have--and wait.' Coleridge is the inaugurator of that _via
+media_ of Scriptural criticism which makes much of saving the word
+'inspiration', while it attenuates its meaning; which supposes a sort
+of modified inspiration residing in the whole, not in the several
+parts. 'The Scriptures were not dictated by an infallible
+intelligence;' nor 'the writers each and all divinely informed as
+well as inspired'. 'They refer to other documents, and in all points
+express themselves as sober-minded and veracious writers under
+ordinary circumstances are known to do.' To make the Bible itself 'the
+subject of a special article of faith, is an unnecessary and useless
+abstraction'.
+
+His judgement on the popular view of inspiration is severe. It is
+borrowed from the Cabbalists; it 'petrifies at once the whole body of
+Holy Writ, with all its harmonies and symmetrical gradations;--turns
+it at once into a colossal Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a
+voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many men, and speaks in their
+names, and yet is but one voice and the same;--and no man uttered it
+and never in a human heart was it conceived'. He presses very hard on
+the tricks of the 'routiniers of desk and pulpit'; forced and
+fantastic interpretations; 'the strange--in all other writings
+unexampled--practice of bringing together into logical dependency
+detached sentences from books composed at the distance of centuries,
+nay, sometimes a millennium, from each other, under different
+dispensations, and for different objects.'
+
+Certainly he is much farther from bibliolatry than from the perfect
+freedom of the humanist interpreters. Still he has not freed himself
+from the notion of a sacred canon; he cannot regard the books of
+Scripture simply as fruits of the human spirit; his criticism is not
+entirely disinterested. The difficulties he finds are chiefly the
+supposed immoralities of Scripture; just those difficulties which fade
+away before the modern or relative spirit, which in the moral world,
+as in the physical traces everywhere change, growth, development. Of
+historical difficulties, of those deeper moral difficulties which
+arise, for instance, from a consideration of the constitutional
+unveracity of the Oriental mind, he has no suspicion. He thinks that
+no book of the New Testament was composed so late as A.D. 120.
+
+Coleridge's undeveloped opinions would be hardly worth stating except
+for the warning they afford against retarding compromises. In reading
+these letters one never doubts what Coleridge tells us of himself:
+'that he loved truth with an indescribable awe,' or, as he beautifully
+says, 'that he would creep towards the light, even if the light had
+made its way through a rent in the wall of the temple.' And yet there
+is something sad in reading them by the light which twenty-five years
+have thrown back upon them. Taken as a whole, they contain a fallacy
+which a very ardent lover of truth might have detected.
+
+The Bible is not to judge the spirit, but the spirit the Bible. The
+Bible is to be treated as a literary product. Well, but that is a
+conditional, not an absolute principle--that is not, if we regard it
+sincerely, a delivery of judgement, but only a suspension of it. If we
+are true to the spirit of that, we must wait patiently the complete
+result of modern criticism. Coleridge states that the authority of
+Scripture is on its trial--that at present it is not known to be an
+absolute resting-place; and then, instead of leaving that to aid in
+the formation of a fearless spirit, the spirit which, for instance,
+would accept the results of M. Renan's investigations, he turns it
+into a false security by anticipating the judgement of an undeveloped
+criticism. Twenty-five years of that criticism have gone by, and have
+hardly verified the anticipation.
+
+The man of science asks, Are absolute principles attainable? What are
+the limits of knowledge? The answer he receives from science itself is
+not ambiguous. What the moralist asks is, Shall we gain or lose by
+surrendering human life to the relative spirit? Experience answers,
+that the dominant tendency of life is to turn ascertained truth into a
+dead letter--to make us all the phlegmatic servants of routine. The
+relative spirit, by dwelling constantly on the more fugitive
+conditions or circumstances of things, breaking through a thousand
+rough and brutal classifications, and giving elasticity to inflexible
+principles, begets an intellectual finesse, of which the ethical
+result is a delicate and tender justness in the criticism of human
+life. Who would gain more than Coleridge by criticism in such a
+spirit? We know how his life has appeared when judged by absolute
+standards. We see him trying to apprehend the absolute, to stereotype
+one form of faith, to attain, as he says, 'fixed principles' in
+politics, morals, and religion; to fix one mode of life as the essence
+of life, refusing to see the parts as parts only; and all the time his
+own pathetic history pleads for a more elastic moral philosophy than
+his, and cries out against every formula less living and flexible than
+life itself.
+
+'From his childhood he hungered for eternity.' After all, that is the
+incontestable claim of Coleridge. The perfect flower of any elementary
+type of life must always be precious to humanity, and Coleridge is the
+perfect flower of the romantic type. More than Childe Harold, more
+than Werther, more than Rene, Coleridge, by what he did, what he was,
+and what he failed to do, represents that inexhaustible discontent,
+languor, and home-sickness, the chords of which ring all through our
+modern literature. Criticism may still discuss the claims of classical
+and romantic art, or literature, or sentiment; and perhaps one day we
+may come to forget the horizon, with full knowledge to be content with
+what is here and now; and that is the essence of classical feeling.
+But by us of the present moment, by us for whom the Greek spirit, with
+its engaging naturalness, simple, chastened, debonair, [Greek:
+tryphes, habrotetos, chlides, chariton, himerou pothou pater], is
+itself the Sangraal of an endless pilgrimage, Coleridge, with his
+passion for the absolute, for something fixed where all is moving, his
+faintness, his broken memory, his intellectual disquiet, may still be
+ranked among the interpreters of one of the constituent elements of
+our life.
+
+
+
+
+RALPH WALDO EMERSON
+
+1803-1882
+
+SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET. 1850.
+
+
+Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
+originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,
+like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and
+making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor
+does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
+is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what
+men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of
+sight and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is
+the most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes
+uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something
+good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is
+nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad
+earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with
+the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.
+
+The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have
+any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice
+to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say,
+'I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent:
+to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a
+new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a
+new mechanic power:' no, but he finds himself in the river of the
+thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his
+contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and
+their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The
+church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the
+advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her
+chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by
+trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
+counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of
+production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.
+Every master has found his material collected, and his power lay in
+his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he
+wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
+shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him
+thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the
+hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations,
+poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into
+their labours. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency,
+out of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do
+for himself; his powers would be expended in the first preparations.
+Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being
+original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world
+do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed
+through the mind.
+
+Shakespeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were
+importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily
+at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans,
+a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican
+church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,
+houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs,
+were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted
+this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers
+now,--no, not by the strongest party,--neither then could king,
+prelate, or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ, which was
+ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, punch, and library, at the
+same time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all found their own
+account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national interest,--by
+no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of
+treating it in an English history,--but not a whit less considerable,
+because it was cheap, and of no account, like a baker's shop. The best
+proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke
+into this field: Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker,
+Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and
+Fletcher.
+
+The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the
+first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
+idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
+case of Shakespeare, there is much more. At the time when he left
+Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all
+dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced
+on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear
+hearing some part of every week; the Death of Julius Caesar, and other
+stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of
+English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the
+royal Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful
+tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the
+London prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or
+less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and
+tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote
+them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so long, and so
+many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a
+speech, or a whole Scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer
+claim copyright in this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to.
+They are not yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many
+spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.
+
+Shakespeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
+plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had
+the _prestige_ which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing
+could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England
+circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he
+wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in
+popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain
+his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people,
+supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much
+work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for
+the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his
+legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in
+Greece, grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the ornament
+of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then
+the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the
+wall, the groups being still arranged with reference to the building,
+which serves also as a frame to hold the figures; and when, at last,
+the greatest freedom of style and treatment was reached, the
+prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness
+and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for
+itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began
+to decline; freak, extravagance, and exhibition, took the place of the
+old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in
+architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the
+accumulated dramatic materials to which the people were already
+wonted, and which had a certain excellence which no single genius,
+however extraordinary, could hope to create.
+
+In point of fact, it appears that Shakespeare did owe debts in all
+directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
+indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's laborious computations in
+regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of _Henry VI_, in which,
+'out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
+Shakespeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;
+and 1899 were entirely his own.' And the proceeding investigation
+hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's
+sentence is an important piece of external history. In _Henry VIII_, I
+think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his
+own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior,
+thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know
+well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene
+with Cromwell, where,--instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose
+secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for
+the sense will best bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are
+constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit
+eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable
+traits of Shakespeare's hand, and some passages, as the account of the
+coronation, are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen
+Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm.
+
+Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any
+invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his
+resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was
+not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The
+universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who
+appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light
+which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of
+sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes
+to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore little
+solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through
+translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant
+countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are
+equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near
+home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good
+many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He
+knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place,
+wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps; of
+Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are
+librarians and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was
+heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world,--
+
+    Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line,
+    And the tale of Troy divine.
+
+The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;
+and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to
+him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large
+unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence
+which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.
+Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from
+Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a
+compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch,
+Boccaccio, and the Provencal poets are his benefactors: the _Romaunt
+of the Rose_ is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and
+John of Meun: _Troilus and Creseide_, from Lollius of Urbino: _The
+Cock and the Fox_, from the _Lais_ of Marie: _The House of Fame_, from
+the French or Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a
+brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build his house. He
+steals by this apology; that what he takes has no worth where he finds
+it, and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically
+a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself
+capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the
+writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who
+can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain
+awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we
+have learned what to do with them, they become our own.
+
+Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The
+learned member of the legislature at Westminster or at Washington,
+speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now
+invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes,
+the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or
+conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates,
+and it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of something of
+their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so
+Locke and Rousseau think for thousands; and so there were fountains
+all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew;
+friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all perished,--which,
+if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with
+authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion? The
+appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his
+breast a Delphi whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing,
+whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely
+on that? All the debts which such a man could contract to other wit,
+would never disturb his consciousness of originality: for the
+ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a whiff of smoke to
+that most private reality with which he has conversed.
+
+It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the
+world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labour, when a
+thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible
+is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English
+language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but
+centuries and churches brought it to perfection; There never was a
+time when there was not some translation existing. The Liturgy,
+admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of
+ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the
+Catholic church,--these collected, too, in long periods, from the
+prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer, all over the
+world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's Prayer,
+that the single clauses of which it is composed were already in use,
+in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms. He picked out the
+grains of gold. The nervous language of the Common Law, the impressive
+forms of our courts, and the precision and substantial truth of the
+legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the sharp-sighted,
+strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws
+govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being
+translation on translation. There never was a time when there was
+none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and all
+others successively picked out, and thrown away. Something like the
+same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these
+books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, AEsop's
+Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish
+Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of such
+works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter,
+the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book
+supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every
+trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic genius who is
+not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of
+all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his
+own.
+
+We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakespeare
+Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the
+Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final
+detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from
+_Ferrex and Porrex_, and _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, down to the
+possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakespeare altered,
+remodelled, and finally made his own. Elated with success, and piqued
+by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no bookstall
+unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow
+accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to
+discover whether the boy Shakespeare poached or not, whether he held
+horses at the theatre door, whether he kept school, and why he left in
+his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.
+
+There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age
+mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are
+turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen
+Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and
+Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the founder
+of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be
+remembered,--the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the
+inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people
+of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to
+receive this and not another bias. A popular player,--nobody suspected
+he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as
+faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and
+frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human
+understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson,
+though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no
+suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was
+attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him
+generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet
+of the two.
+
+If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakespeare's
+time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born
+four years after Shakespeare, and died twenty-three years after him;
+and I find, among his correspondents and acquaintances, the following
+persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of
+Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane,
+Izaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton,
+John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi,
+Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having
+communicated, without enumerating many others, whom doubtless he
+saw,--Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts,
+Marlowe, Chapman, and the rest. Since the constellation of great men
+who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any
+such society; yet their genius failed them to find out the best head
+in the universe. Our poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the
+mountain near. It took a century to make it suspected; and not until
+two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we
+think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the
+history of Shakespeare till now; for he is the father of German
+literature: it was on the introduction of Shakespeare into German, by
+Lessing, and the translation of his works by Wieland and Schlegel,
+that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately
+connected. It was not until the nineteenth century, whose speculative
+genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could
+find such wondering readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought
+are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present,
+we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge
+and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our convictions
+with any adequate fidelity; but there is in all cultivated minds a
+silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like
+Christianity, qualifies the period.
+
+The Shakespeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised
+the missing facts, offered money for any information that will lead
+to proof; and with what result? Beside some important illustration of
+the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted, they have
+gleaned a few facts touching the property, and dealings in regard to
+property, of the poet. It appears that, from year to year, he owned a
+larger share in the Blackfriars Theatre: its wardrobe and other
+appurtenances were his; that he bought an estate in his native
+village, with his earnings, as writer and shareholder; that he lived
+in the best house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbours with
+their commissions in London, as of borrowing money, and the like; that
+he was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was writing
+_Macbeth_, he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford,
+for thirty-five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at
+different times; and, in all respects, appears as a good husband, with
+no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good-natured sort
+of man, an actor and shareholder in the theatre, not in any striking
+manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit the
+importance of this information. It was well worth the pains that have
+been taken to procure it.
+
+But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these
+researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite
+invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We
+are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of
+parentage, birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of
+money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we
+have come to an end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears
+between it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at
+random into the _Modern Plutarch_ and read any other life there, it
+would have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to
+spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to
+abolish the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and
+Collier have wasted their oil. The famed theatres, Covent Garden,
+Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton,
+Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready dedicate their lives to this
+genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows
+them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal
+from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with
+invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once to
+see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of the English stage;
+and all I then heard, and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was
+that in which the tragedian had no part; simply, Hamlet's question to
+the ghost:
+
+                    What may this mean,
+    That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
+    Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?
+
+That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's
+dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces
+the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his
+magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any biography
+shed light on the localities into which the _Midsummer Night's Dream_
+admits me? Did Shakespeare confide to any notary or parish recorder,
+sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate
+creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the
+moonlight of Portia's villa, 'the antres vast and desarts idle' of
+Othello's captivity,--where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the
+chancellor's file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one
+word of those transcendent secrets? In fine, in this drama, as in all
+great works of art,--in the Cyclopean architecture of Egypt and India;
+in the Phidian sculpture; the Gothic minsters; the Italian painting;
+the Ballads of Spain and Scotland;--the Genius draws up the ladder
+after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a
+new age, which sees the works, and asks in vain for a history.
+
+Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can
+tell nothing, except to the Shakespeare in us; that is, to our most
+apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod,
+and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents
+extricated, analysed, and compared by the assiduous Dyce and Collier;
+and now read one of those skyey sentences,--aerolites,--which seem to
+have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but the man
+within the breast, has accepted as words of fate; and tell me if they
+match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or which
+gives the most historical insight into the man.
+
+Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet with Shakespeare
+for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the
+information which is material, that which describes character and
+fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with
+him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions on
+those questions which knock for answer at every heart,--on life and
+death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and the
+ways whereby we come at them; on the characters of men, and the
+influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes; and on those
+mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science, and which yet
+interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who
+ever read the volume of the Sonnets, without finding that the poet had
+there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the
+lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the
+most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men?
+What trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can
+discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, what
+forms and humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of friends, in
+large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let
+Antonio the merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from
+Shakespeare's being the least known, he is the one person, in all
+modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of
+economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life,
+has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge
+of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not
+remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught
+Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What
+lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What
+gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behaviour?
+
+Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare
+valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is
+falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these
+critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a
+full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images,
+which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less,
+we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good
+a dramatist he was, and he is the best in the world. But it turns out,
+that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw some
+attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is
+to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs
+and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which
+gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer,
+or of a code of laws, is immaterial, compared with the universality of
+its application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of
+life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text of
+modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and
+Europe; the father of the man in America: he drew the man, and
+described the day, and what is done in it; he read the hearts of men
+and women, their probity, and their second thought, and wiles; the
+wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices
+slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother's part from
+the father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine
+demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression
+which make the police of nature; and all the sweets and all the
+terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the
+landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life
+sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like making a
+question concerning the paper on which a king's message is written.
+
+Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he
+is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others,
+conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain,
+and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of
+doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No
+man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety
+compatible with an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and
+only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of
+life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He
+clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if
+they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have
+left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in
+language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him
+into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent
+humanity co-ordinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story
+to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain
+observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence,
+and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves
+that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his
+fitness and strength. But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no
+importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities:
+no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no
+discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small,
+subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong,
+as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without
+effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and
+likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of
+power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so
+incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other
+readers.
+
+This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of
+things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has
+added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into
+natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing
+new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without
+loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with
+compass; the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any
+distortion or favour. He carried his powerful execution into minute
+details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as
+he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the
+scrutiny of the solar microscope.
+
+In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of
+production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the
+power to make one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch
+its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to etch
+a million. There are always objects; but there was never
+representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let
+the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given
+for the making of a Shakespeare; but the possibility of the
+translation of things into song is demonstrated.
+
+His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though
+their excellence is lost in the splendour of the dramas, are as
+inimitable as they; and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit
+of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so
+is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now
+as a whole poem.
+
+Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty
+which tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism, yet the
+sentence is so loaded with meaning, and so linked with its foregoers
+and followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as
+admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps
+himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is
+not reduced to dismount and walk, because his horses are running off
+with him in some distant direction: he always rides.
+
+The finest poetry was first experience: but the thought has suffered a
+transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men often attain
+a good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy to read,
+through their poems, their personal history: any one acquainted with
+parties can name every figure: this is Andrew, and that is Rachel. The
+sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and not
+yet a butterfly. In the poet's mind, the fact has gone quite over into
+the new element of thought, and has lost all that is exuvial. This
+generosity abides with Shakespeare. We say, from the truth and
+closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart. Yet
+there is not a trace of egotism.
+
+One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his
+cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his
+aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace: he
+delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that
+sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds
+over the universe. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such charms that
+a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the true
+bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies
+in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, 'It was
+rumoured abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with
+repentance?' Not less sovereign and cheerful,--much more sovereign and
+cheerful, is the tone of Shakespeare. His name suggests joy and
+emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any company
+of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing
+that does not borrow health and longevity from his festal style.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and benefactor,
+when in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame,
+we seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere lessons; it can
+teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs Shakespeare
+also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection of
+humanity.
+
+Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendour of meaning that
+plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than
+for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the
+earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and
+finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and
+conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on
+human life. Shakespeare employed them as colours to compose his
+picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the step which
+seemed inevitable to such genius, namely, to explore the virtue which
+resides in these symbols, and imparts this power,--What is that which
+they themselves say? He converted the elements, which waited on his
+command, into entertainments. He was master of the revels to mankind.
+Is it not as if one should have, through majestic powers of science,
+the comets given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, and
+should draw them from their orbits to glare with the municipal
+fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all towns, 'very
+superior pyrotechny this evening!' Are the agents of nature, and the
+power to understand them, worth no more than a street serenade, or the
+breath of a cigar? One remembers again the trumpet-text in the
+Koran,--'The heavens and the earth, and all that is between them,
+think ye we have created them in jest?' As long as the question is of
+talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show.
+But when the question is to life, and its materials, and its
+auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it signify? It is but a
+Twelfth Night, or Midsummer Night's Dream, or a Winter Evening's Tale:
+what signifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of
+the Shakespeare Societies comes to mind, that he was a jovial actor
+and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable
+men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but
+this man, in wide contrast. Had he been less, had he reached only the
+common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes,
+we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but, that this
+man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger
+subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity
+some furlongs forward into Chaos,--that he should not be wise for
+himself,--it must even go into the world's history, that the best poet
+led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public
+amusement.
+
+Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German, and Swede,
+beheld the same objects: they also saw through them that which was
+contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished; they
+read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a
+sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly,
+joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered round with
+doleful histories of Adam's fall and curse, behind us; with doomsdays
+and purgatorial and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer
+and the heart of the listener sank in them.
+
+It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The world
+still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle with
+Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the
+mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration.
+For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than
+private affection; and love is compatible with universal wisdom.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
+
+1819-1891
+
+WORDSWORTH (1875)
+
+
+A generation has now passed away since Wordsworth was laid with the
+family in the churchyard at Grasmere. Perhaps it is hardly yet time to
+take a perfectly impartial measure of his value as a poet. To do this
+is especially hard for those who are old enough to remember the last
+shot which the foe was sullenly firing in that long war of critics
+which began when he published his manifesto as Pretender, and which
+came to a pause rather than end when they flung up their caps with the
+rest at his final coronation. Something of the intensity of the _odium
+theologicum_ (if indeed the _aestheticum_ be not in these days the
+more bitter of the two) entered into the conflict. The Wordsworthians
+were a sect, who, if they had the enthusiasm, had also not a little of
+the exclusiveness and partiality to which sects are liable. The verses
+of the master had for them the virtue of religious canticles stimulant
+of zeal and not amenable to the ordinary tests of cold-blooded
+criticism. Like the hymns of the Huguenots and Covenanters, they were
+songs of battle no less than of worship, and the combined ardours of
+conviction and conflict lent them a fire that was not naturally their
+own. As we read them now, that virtue of the moment is gone out of
+them, and whatever of Dr. Wattsiness there is gives us a slight shock
+of disenchantment. It is something like the difference between the
+_Marseillaise_ sung by armed propagandists on the edge of battle, or
+by Brissotins in the tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in the
+closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy of Therese. It was
+natural in the early days of Wordsworth's career to dwell most fondly
+on those profounder qualities to appreciate which settled in some sort
+the measure of a man's right to judge of poetry at all. But now we
+must admit the shortcomings, the failures, the defects, as no less
+essential elements in forming a sound judgement as to whether the seer
+and artist were so united in him as to justify the claim first put in
+by himself and afterwards maintained by his sect to a place beside the
+few great poets who exalt men's minds, and give a right direction and
+safe outlet to their passions through the imagination, while
+insensibly helping them toward balance of character and serenity of
+judgement by stimulating their sense of proportion, form, and the nice
+adjustment of means to ends. In none of our poets has the constant
+propulsion of an unbending will, and the concentration of exclusive,
+if I must not say somewhat narrow, sympathies done so much to make the
+original endowment of nature effective, and in none accordingly does
+the biography throw so much light on the works, or enter so largely
+into their composition as an element whether of power or of weakness.
+Wordsworth never saw, and I think never wished to see, beyond the
+limits of his own consciousness and experience. He early conceived
+himself to be, and through life was confirmed by circumstances in the
+faith that he was, a 'dedicated spirit',[41] a state of mind likely
+to further an intense but at the same time one-sided development of
+the intellectual powers. The solitude in which the greater part of his
+mature life was passed, while it doubtless ministered to the
+passionate intensity of his musings upon man and nature, was, it may
+be suspected, harmful to him as an artist, by depriving him of any
+standard of proportion outside himself by which to test the
+comparative value of his thoughts, and by rendering him more and more
+incapable of that urbanity of mind which could be gained only by
+commerce with men more nearly on his own level, and which gives tone
+without lessening individuality. Wordsworth never quite saw the
+distinction between the eccentric and the original. For what we call
+originality seems not so much anything peculiar, much less anything
+odd, but that quality in a man which touches human nature at most
+points of its circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of
+our own powers by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations
+and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings,
+and adequate utterance to our own stammering conceptions or emotions.
+The poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one crying in the
+wilderness to a knot of already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid
+the throng of men, and lifting their common aspirations and
+sympathies (so first clearly revealed to themselves) on the wings of
+his song to a purer ether and a wider reach of view. We cannot, if we
+would, read the poetry of Wordsworth as mere poetry; at every other
+page we find ourselves entangled in a problem of aesthetics. The
+world-old question of matter and form, of whether nectar _is_ of
+precisely the same flavour when served to us from a Grecian chalice or
+from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up for decision anew. The
+Teutonic nature has always shown a sturdy preference of the solid bone
+with a marrow of nutritious moral to any shadow of the same on the
+flowing mirror of sense. Wordsworth never lets us long forget the
+deeply rooted stock from which he sprang,--_vien ben da lui_.
+
+    [41] In the _Prelude_ he attributes this consecration to a
+    sunrise seen (during a college vacation) as he walked
+    homeward from some village festival where he had danced all
+    night:
+
+        My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
+        Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
+        Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly.
+        A dedicated Spirit.--Book IV.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland on the 7th of
+April, 1770, the second of five children. His father was John
+Wordsworth, an attorney-at-law, and agent of Sir James Lowther,
+afterwards first Earl of Lonsdale. His mother was Anne Cookson, the
+daughter of a mercer in Penrith. His paternal ancestors had been
+settled immemorially at Penistone in Yorkshire, whence his grandfather
+had emigrated to Westmorland. His mother, a woman of piety and wisdom,
+died in March 1778, being then in her thirty-second year. His father,
+who never entirely cast off the depression occasioned by her death,
+survived her but five years, dying in December 1783, when William was
+not quite fourteen years old.
+
+The poet's early childhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, and
+partly with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher
+appears to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone's
+Schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her pupils, teaching them
+chiefly by rote, and not endeavouring to cultivate their reasoning
+faculties, a process by which children are apt to be converted from
+natural logicians into impertinent sophists. Among his schoolmates
+here was Mary Hutchinson, who afterwards became his wife.
+
+In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of
+York, in the year 1585, at Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawkshead is a
+small market-town in the vale of Esthwaite, about a third of a mile
+north-west of the lake. Here Wordsworth passed nine years, among a
+people of simple habits and scenery of a sweet and pastoral dignity.
+His earliest intimacies were with the mountains, lakes, and streams of
+his native district, and the associations with which his mind was
+stored during its most impressible period were noble and pure. The
+boys were boarded among the dames of the village, thus enjoying a
+freedom from scholastic restraints, which could be nothing but
+beneficial in a place where the temptations were only to sports that
+hardened the body, while they fostered a love of nature in the spirit
+and habits of observation in the mind. Wordsworth's ordinary
+amusements here were hunting and fishing, rowing, skating, and long
+walks around the lake and among the hills, with an occasional scamper
+on horseback.[42] His life as a schoolboy was favourable also to his
+poetic development, in being identified with that of the people among
+whom he lived. Among men of simple habits, and where there are small
+diversities of condition, the feelings and passions are displayed with
+less restraint, and the young poet grew acquainted with that primal
+human basis of character where the Muse finds firm foothold, and to
+which he ever afterward cleared his way through all the overlying
+drift of conventionalism. The dalesmen were a primitive and hardy race
+who kept alive the traditions and often the habits of a more
+picturesque time. A common level of interests and social standing
+fostered unconventional ways of thought and speech, and friendly human
+sympathies. Solitude induced reflection, a reliance of the mind on its
+own resources, and individuality of character. Where everybody knew
+everybody, and everybody's father had known everybody's father, the
+interest of man in man was not likely to become a matter of cold
+hearsay and distant report. When death knocked at any door in the
+hamlet, there was an echo from every fireside, and a wedding dropped
+its white flowers at every threshold. There was not a grave in the
+churchyard but had its story; not a crag or glen or aged tree
+untouched with some ideal hue of legend. It was here that Wordsworth
+learned that homely humanity which gives such depth and sincerity to
+his poems. Travel, society, culture, nothing could obliterate the deep
+trace of that early training which enables him to speak directly to
+the primitive instincts of man. He was apprenticed early to the
+difficult art of being himself.
+
+    [42] _Prelude_, Book II.
+
+At school he wrote some task-verses on subjects imposed by the master,
+and also some voluntaries of his own, equally undistinguished by any
+peculiar merit. But he seems to have made up his mind as early as in
+his fourteenth year to become a poet.[43] 'It is recorded', says his
+biographer vaguely, 'that the poet's father set him very early to
+learn portions of the best English poets by heart, so that at an early
+age he could repeat large portions of Shakespeare, Milton, and
+Spenser.'
+
+    [43]
+
+        I to the muses have been bound,
+        These fourteen years, by strong indentures.
+
+                                 _Idiot Boy_ (1798).]
+
+The great event of Wordsworth's schooldays was the death of his
+father, who left what may be called a hypothetical estate, consisting
+chiefly of claims upon the first Earl of Lonsdale, the payment of
+which, though their justice was acknowledged, that nobleman contrived
+in some unexplained way to elude so long as he lived. In October 1787
+he left school for St. John's College, Cambridge. He was already, we
+are told, a fair Latin scholar, and had made some progress in
+mathematics. The earliest books we hear of his reading were _Don
+Quixote_, _Gil Blas_, _Gulliver's Travels_, and the _Tale of a Tub_;
+but at school he had also become familiar with the works of some
+English poets, particularly Goldsmith and Gray, of whose poems he had
+learned many by heart. What is more to the purpose, he had become,
+without knowing it, a lover of Nature in all her moods, and the same
+mental necessities of a solitary life which compel men to an interest
+in the transitory phenomena of scenery, had made him also studious of
+the movements of his own mind, and the mutual interaction and
+dependence of the external and internal universe.
+
+Doubtless his early orphanage was not without its effect in confirming
+a character naturally impatient of control, and his mind, left to
+itself, clothed itself with an indigenous growth, which grew fairly
+and freely, unstinted by the shadow of exotic plantations. It has
+become a truism, that remarkable persons have remarkable mothers; but
+perhaps this is chiefly true of such as have made themselves
+distinguished by their industry, and by the assiduous cultivation of
+faculties in themselves of only an average quality. It is rather to be
+noted how little is known of the parentage of men of the first
+magnitude, how often they seem in some sort foundlings, and how early
+an apparently adverse destiny begins the culture of those who are to
+encounter and master great intellectual or spiritual experiences.
+
+Of his disposition as a child little is known, but that little is
+characteristic. He himself tells us that he was 'stiff, moody, and of
+violent temper'. His mother said of him that he was the only one of
+her children about whom she felt any anxiety,--for she was sure that
+he would be remarkable for good or evil. Once, in resentment at some
+fancied injury, he resolved to kill himself, but his heart failed him.
+I suspect that few boys of passionate temperament have escaped these
+momentary suggestions of despairing helplessness. 'On another
+occasion,' he says, 'while I was at my grandfather's house at Penrith,
+along with my eldest brother Richard, we were whipping tops together
+in the long drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid down on
+particular occasions. The walls were hung round with family pictures,
+and I said to my brother, "Dare you strike your whip through that old
+lady's petticoat?" He replied, "No, I won't." "Then," said I, "here
+goes," and I struck my lash through her hooped petticoat, for which,
+no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was properly punished. But,
+possibly from some want of judgement in punishments inflicted, I had
+become perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather
+proud of it than otherwise.' This last anecdote is as happily typical
+as a bit of Greek mythology which always prefigured the lives of
+heroes in the stories of their childhood. Just so do we find him
+afterward striking his defiant lash through the hooped petticoat of
+the artificial style of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the
+punishment of the Reviewers.
+
+Of his college life the chief record is to be found in _The Prelude_.
+He did not distinguish himself as a scholar, and if his life had any
+incidents, they were of that interior kind which rarely appear in
+biography, though they may be of controlling influence upon the life.
+He speaks of reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton while at
+Cambridge,[44] but no reflection from them is visible in his earliest
+published poems. The greater part of his vacations was spent in his
+native Lake-country, where his only sister, Dorothy, was the companion
+of his rambles. She was a woman of large natural endowments, chiefly
+of the receptive kind, and had much to do with the formation and
+tendency of the poet's mind. It was she who called forth the shyer
+sensibilities of his nature, and taught an originally harsh and
+austere imagination to surround itself with fancy and feeling, as the
+rock fringes itself with a sun-spray of ferns. She was his first
+public, and belonged to that class of prophetically appreciative
+temperaments whose apparent office it is to cheer the early solitude
+of original minds with messages from the future. Through the greater
+part of his life she continued to be a kind of poetical conscience to
+him.
+
+    [44] _Prelude_, Book III.
+
+Wordsworth's last college vacation was spent in a foot journey upon
+the Continent (1790). In January 1791 he took his degree of B.A., and
+left Cambridge. During the summer of this year he visited Wales, and,
+after declining to enter upon holy orders under the plea that he was
+not of age for ordination, went over to France in November, and
+remained during the winter at Orleans. Here he became intimate with
+the republican General Beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations he
+ardently sympathized. In the spring of 1792 he was at Blois, and
+returned thence to Orleans, which he finally quitted in October for
+Paris. He remained here as long as he could with safety, and at the
+close of the year went back to England, thus, perhaps, escaping the
+fate which soon after overtook his friends the Brissotins.
+
+As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be called a fortunate one, not
+less so in the training and expansion of his faculties was this period
+of his stay in France. Born and reared in a country where the homely
+and familiar nestles confidingly amid the most savage and sublime
+forms of nature, he had experienced whatever impulses the creative
+faculty can receive from mountain and cloud and the voices of winds
+and waters, but he had known man only as an actor in fireside
+histories and tragedies, for which the hamlet supplied an ample stage.
+In France he first felt the authentic beat of a nation's heart; he was
+a spectator at one of those dramas where the terrible footfall of the
+Eumenides is heard nearer and nearer in the pauses of the action; and
+he saw man such as he can only be when he is vibrated by the orgasm of
+a national emotion. He sympathized with the hopes of France and of
+mankind deeply, as was fitting in a young man and a poet; and if his
+faith in the gregarious advancement of men was afterward shaken, he
+only held the more firmly by his belief in the individual, and his
+reverence for the human as something quite apart from the popular and
+above it. Wordsworth has been unwisely blamed, as if he had been
+recreant to the liberal instincts of his youth. But it was inevitable
+that a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind which always
+compensated itself for its artistic radicalism by an involuntary
+leaning toward external respectability, should recoil from whatever
+was convulsionary and destructive in politics, and above all in
+religion. He reads the poems of Wordsworth without understanding, who
+does not find in them the noblest incentives to faith in man and the
+grandeur of his destiny, founded always upon that personal dignity and
+virtue, the capacity for whose attainment alone makes universal
+liberty possible and assures its permanence. He was to make men better
+by opening to them the sources of an inalterable well-being; to make
+them free, in a sense higher than political, by showing them that
+these sources are within them, and that no contrivance of man can
+permanently emancipate narrow natures and depraved minds. His politics
+were always those of a poet, circling in the larger orbit of causes
+and principles, careless of the transitory oscillation of events.
+
+The change in his point of view (if change there was) certainly was
+complete soon after his return from France, and was perhaps due in
+part to the influence of Burke.
+
+    While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
+    Against all systems built on abstract rights,
+    Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
+    Of institutes and laws hallowed by time;
+    Declares the vital power of social ties
+    Endeared by custom; and with high disdain,
+    Exploding upstart theory, insists
+    Upon the allegiance to which men are born.
+              ... Could a youth, and one
+    In ancient story versed, whose breast had heaved
+    Under the weight of classic eloquence,
+    Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired?[45]
+
+    [45] _Prelude_, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring
+    to a still earlier date.
+
+He had seen the French for a dozen years eagerly busy in tearing up
+whatever had roots in the past, replacing the venerable trunks of
+tradition and orderly growth with liberty-poles, then striving vainly
+to piece together the fibres they had broken, and to reproduce
+artificially that sense of permanence and continuity which is the main
+safeguard of vigorous self-consciousness in a nation. He became a Tory
+through intellectual conviction, retaining, I suspect, to the last, a
+certain radicalism of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells us that
+in 1809 Sir George Beaumont said to him and Wilkie, 'Wordsworth may
+perhaps walk in; if he do, I caution you both against his terrific
+democratic notions'; and it must have been many years later that
+Wordsworth himself told Crabb Robinson, 'I have no respect whatever
+for Whigs, but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me'. In 1802,
+during his tour in Scotland, he travelled on Sundays as on the other
+days of the week. He afterwards became a theoretical churchgoer.
+'Wordsworth defended earnestly the Church establishment. He even said
+he would shed his blood for it. Nor was he disconcerted by a laugh
+raised against him on account of his having confessed that he knew not
+when he had been in a church in his own country. "All our ministers
+are so vile," said he. The mischief of allowing the clergy to depend
+on the caprice of the multitude he thought more than outweighed all
+the evils of an establishment.'
+
+In December 1792 Wordsworth had returned to England, and in the
+following year published _Descriptive Sketches_ and the _Evening
+Walk_. He did this, as he says in one of his letters, to show that,
+although he had gained no honours at the University, he _could_ do
+something. They met with no great success, and he afterward corrected
+them so much as to destroy all their interest as juvenile productions,
+without communicating to them any of the merits of maturity. In
+commenting, sixty years afterward, on a couplet in one of these
+poems,--
+
+    And, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines
+    Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines,--
+
+he says: 'This is feebly and imperfectly expressed, but I recollect
+distinctly the very spot where this first struck me.... The moment was
+important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness
+of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been
+unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was
+acquainted with them, and I made a resolution to supply in some degree
+the deficiency.'
+
+It is plain that Wordsworth's memory was playing him a trick here,
+misled by that instinct (it may almost be called) of consistency which
+leads men first to desire that their lives should have been without
+break or seam, and then to believe that they have been such. The more
+distant ranges of perspective are apt to run together in
+retrospection. How far could Wordsworth at fourteen have been
+acquainted with the poets of all ages and countries,--he who to his
+dying day could not endure to read Goethe and knew nothing of
+Calderon? It seems to me rather that the earliest influence traceable
+in him is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and it is, perhaps,
+some slight indication of its having already begun that his first
+volume of _Descriptive Sketches_ (1793) was put forth by Johnson, who
+was Cowper's publisher. By and by the powerful impress of Burns is
+seen both in the topics of his verse and the form of his expression.
+But whatever their ultimate effect upon his style, certain it is that
+his juvenile poems were clothed in the conventional habit of the
+eighteenth century. 'The first verses from which he remembered to have
+received great pleasure were Miss Carter's _Poem on Spring_, a poem in
+the six-line stanza which he was particularly fond of and had composed
+much in,--for example, _Ruth_.' This is noteworthy, for Wordsworth's
+lyric range, especially so far as tune is concerned, was always
+narrow. His sense of melody was painfully dull, and some of his
+lighter effusions, as he would have called them, are almost
+ludicrously wanting in grace of movement. We cannot expect in a modern
+poet the thrush-like improvisation, the impulsively bewitching
+cadences, that charm us in our Elizabethan drama and whose last
+warble died with Herrick; but Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have
+shown that the simple pathos of their music was not irrecoverable,
+even if the artless poignancy of their phrase be gone beyond recall.
+We feel this lack in Wordsworth all the more keenly if we compare such
+verses as
+
+    Like an army defeated
+    The snow hath retreated
+    And now doth fare ill
+    On the top of the bare hill,
+
+with Goethe's exquisite _Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh_, in which the
+lines (as if shaken down by a momentary breeze of emotion) drop
+lingeringly one after another like blossoms upon turf.
+
+_The Evening Walk_ and _Descriptive Sketches_ show plainly the
+prevailing influence of Goldsmith, both in the turn of thought and the
+mechanism of the verse. They lack altogether the temperance of tone
+and judgement in selection which have made the _Traveller_ and the
+_Deserted Village_ perhaps the most truly classical poems in the
+language. They bear here and there, however, the unmistakable stamp of
+the maturer Wordsworth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in
+the intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. Of this realism, from
+which Wordsworth never wholly freed himself, the following verses may
+suffice as a specimen. After describing the fate of a chamois-hunter
+killed by falling from a crag, his fancy goes back to the bereaved
+wife and son:
+
+    Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze,
+    Passing his father's bones in future days,
+    Start at the reliques of that very thigh
+    On which so oft he prattled when a boy.
+
+In these poems there is plenty of that 'poetic diction' against which
+Wordsworth was to lead the revolt nine years later.
+
+    To wet the peak's impracticable sides
+    He opens of his feet the sanguine tides,
+    Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes
+    Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies.
+
+Both of these passages have disappeared from the revised edition, as
+well as some curious outbursts of that motiveless despair which Byron
+made fashionable not long after. Nor are there wanting touches of
+fleshliness which strike us oddly as coming from Wordsworth.
+
+    Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade
+    Rest near their little plots of oaten glade,
+    Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire
+    To throw the 'sultry ray' of young Desire;
+    Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go
+    Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow;
+    Those shadowy breasts in love's soft light arrayed,
+    And rising by the moon of passion swayed.
+
+The political tone is also mildened in the revision, as where he
+changes 'despotcourts' into 'tyranny'. One of the alterations is
+interesting. In the _Evening Walk_ he had originally written
+
+    And bids her soldier come her wars to share
+    Asleep on Minden's charnel hill afar.
+
+An erratum at the end directs us to correct the second verse, thus:
+
+    Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar.
+
+Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for making the owl a bodeful
+bird. He had himself done so in the _Evening Walk_, and corrects his
+epithets to suit his later judgement, putting 'gladsome' for 'boding',
+and replacing
+
+    The tremulous sob of the complaining owl
+
+by
+
+    The sportive outcry of the mocking owl.
+
+Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much changed in the
+revision as to make the dates appended to them a misleading
+anachronism. But there is one truly Wordsworthian passage which
+already gives us a glimpse of that passion with which he was the first
+to irradiate descriptive poetry and which sets him on a level with
+Turner.
+
+    'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour
+    All day the floods a deepening murmur pour:
+    The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight;
+    Dark is the region as with coming night;
+    But what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
+    Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
+    Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;
+    Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine
+    The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;
+    Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
+    At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
+    Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun
+    The West that burns like one dilated sun,
+    Where in a mighty crucible expire
+    The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire.
+
+Wordsworth has made only one change in these verses, and that for the
+worse, by substituting 'glorious' (which was already implied in
+'glances' and 'fire-clad') for 'wheeling'. In later life he would have
+found it hard to forgive the man who should have made cliffs recline
+over a lake. On the whole, what strikes us as most prophetic in these
+poems is their want of continuity, and the purple patches of true
+poetry on a texture of unmistakable prose; perhaps we might add the
+incongruous clothing of prose thoughts in the ceremonial robes of
+poesy.
+
+During the same year (1793) he wrote, but did not publish, a political
+tract, in which he avowed himself opposed to monarchy and to the
+hereditary principle, and desirous of a republic, if it could be had
+without a revolution. He probably continued to be all his life in
+favour of that ideal republic 'which never was on land or sea', but
+fortunately he gave up politics that he might devote himself to his
+own nobler calling, to which politics are subordinate, and for which
+he found freedom enough in England as it was. Dr. Wordsworth admits
+that his uncle's opinions were democratical so late as 1802. I suspect
+that they remained so in an esoteric way to the end of his days. He
+had himself suffered by the arbitrary selfishness of a great
+landholder, and he was born and bred in a part of England where there
+is a greater social equality than elsewhere. The look and manner of
+the Cumberland people especially are such as recall very vividly to a
+New-Englander the associations of fifty years ago, ere the change from
+New England to New Ireland had begun. But meanwhile, Want, which makes
+no distinctions of Monarchist or Republican, was pressing upon him.
+The debt due to his father's estate had not been paid, and Wordsworth
+was one of those rare idealists who esteem it the first duty of a
+friend of humanity to live for, and not on, his neighbour. He at first
+proposed establishing a periodical journal to be called _The
+Philanthropist_, but luckily went no further with it, for the receipts
+from an organ of opinion which professed republicanism, and at the
+same time discountenanced the plans of all existing or defunct
+republicans, would have been necessarily scanty. There being no
+appearance of any demand, present or prospective, for philanthropists,
+he tried to get employment as correspondent of a newspaper. Here also
+it was impossible that he should succeed; he was too great to be
+merged in the editorial We, and had too well defined a private opinion
+on all subjects to be able to express that average of public opinion
+which constitutes able editorials. But so it is that to the prophet in
+the wilderness the birds of ill omen are already on the wing with food
+from heaven; and while Wordsworth's relatives were getting impatient
+at what they considered his waste of time, while one thought he had
+gifts enough to make a good parson, and another lamented the rare
+attorney that was lost in him, the prescient muse guided the hand of
+Raisley Calvert while he wrote the poet's name in his will for a
+legacy of L900. By the death of Calvert, in 1795, this timely help
+came to Wordsworth at the turning-point of his life, and made it
+honest for him to write poems that will never die, instead of
+theatrical critiques as ephemeral as play-bills, or leaders that led
+only to oblivion.
+
+In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sister took up their abode at
+Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. Here nearly two years
+were passed, chiefly in the study of poetry, and Wordsworth to some
+extent recovered from the fierce disappointment of his political
+dreams, and regained that equable tenor of mind which alone is
+consistent with a healthy productiveness. Here Coleridge, who had
+contrived to see something more in the _Descriptive Sketches_ than
+the public had discovered there, first made his acquaintance. The
+sympathy and appreciation of an intellect like Coleridge's supplied
+him with that external motive to activity which is the chief use of
+popularity, and justified to him his opinion of his own powers. It was
+now that the tragedy of _The Borderers_ was for the most part written,
+and that plan of the _Lyrical Ballads_ suggested which gave Wordsworth
+a clue to lead him out of the metaphysical labyrinth in which he was
+entangled. It was agreed between the two young friends, that
+Wordsworth was to be a philosophic poet, and, by a good fortune
+uncommon to such conspiracies, Nature had already consented to the
+arrangement. In July 1797, the two Wordsworths removed to Allfoxden in
+Somersetshire, that they might be near Coleridge, who in the meanwhile
+had married and settled himself at Nether Stowey. In November _The
+Borderers_ was finished, and Wordsworth went up to London with his
+sister to offer it for the stage. The good Genius of the poet again
+interposing, the play was decisively rejected, and Wordsworth went
+back to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first tragi-comedy so
+common to young authors.
+
+The play has fine passages, but is as unreal as _Jane Eyre_. It shares
+with many of Wordsworth's narrative poems the defect of being written
+to illustrate an abstract moral theory, so that the overbearing thesis
+is continually thrusting the poetry to the wall. Applied to the drama,
+such predestination makes all the personages puppets and disenables
+them for being characters. Wordsworth seems to have felt this when he
+published _The Borderers_ in 1842, and says in a note that it was 'at
+first written ... without any view to its exhibition upon the stage'.
+But he was mistaken. The contemporaneous letters of Coleridge to
+Cottle show that he was long in giving up the hope of getting it
+accepted by some theatrical manager.
+
+He now applied himself to the preparation of the first volume of the
+_Lyrical Ballads_ for the press, and it was published toward the close
+of 1798. The book, which contained also _The Ancient Mariner_ of
+Coleridge, attracted little notice, and that in great part
+contemptuous. When Mr. Cottle, the publisher, shortly after sold his
+copyrights to Mr. Longman, that of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was reckoned
+at _zero_, and it was at last given up to the authors. A few persons
+were not wanting, however, who discovered the dawn-streaks of a new
+day in that light which the critical fire-brigade thought to
+extinguish with a few contemptuous spurts of cold water.
+
+Lord Byron describes himself as waking one morning and finding himself
+famous, and it is quite an ordinary fact, that a blaze may be made
+with a little saltpetre that will be stared at by thousands who would
+have thought the sunrise tedious. If we may believe his biographer,
+Wordsworth might have said that he awoke and found himself infamous,
+for the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ undoubtedly raised him to
+the distinction of being the least popular poet in England. Parnassus
+has two peaks; the one where improvising poets cluster; the other
+where the singer of deep secrets sits alone,--a peak veiled sometimes
+from the whole morning of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke
+of kitchen fires, only to glow the more consciously at sunset, and
+after nightfall to crown itself with imperishable stars. Wordsworth
+had that self-trust which in the man of genius is sublime, and in the
+man of talent insufferable. It mattered not to him though all the
+reviewers had been in a chorus of laughter or conspiracy of silence
+behind him. He went quietly over to Germany to write more Lyrical
+Ballads, and to begin a poem on the growth of his own mind, at a time
+when there were only two men in the world (himself and Coleridge) who
+were aware that he had one, or at least one anywise differing from
+those mechanically uniform ones which are stuck drearily, side by
+side, in the great pin-paper of society.
+
+In Germany Wordsworth dined in company with Klopstock, and after
+dinner they had a conversation, of which Wordsworth took notes. The
+respectable old poet, who was passing the evening of his days by the
+chimney-corner, Darby and Joan like, with his respectable Muse, seems
+to have been rather bewildered by the apparition of a living genius.
+The record is of value now chiefly for the insight it gives us into
+Wordsworth's mind. Among other things he said, 'that it was the
+province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to
+descend to theirs',--memorable words, the more memorable that a
+literary life of sixty years was in keeping with them.
+
+It would be instructive to know what were Wordsworth's studies during
+his winter in Goslar. De Quincey's statement is mere conjecture. It
+may be guessed fairly enough that he would seek an entrance to the
+German language by the easy path of the ballad, a course likely to
+confirm him in his theories as to the language of poetry. The
+Spinozism with which he has been not unjustly charged was certainly
+not due to any German influence, for it appears unmistakably in the
+_Lines composed at Tintern Abbey_ in July 1798. It is more likely to
+have been derived from his talks with Coleridge in 1797. When Emerson
+visited him in 1833, he spoke with loathing of _Wilhelm Meister_, a
+part of which he had read in Carlyle's translation apparently. There
+was some affectation in this, it should seem, for he had read
+Smollett. On the whole, it may be fairly concluded that the help of
+Germany in the development of his genius may be reckoned as very
+small, though there is certainly a marked resemblance both in form and
+sentiment between some of his earlier lyrics and those of Goethe. His
+poem of the _Thorn_, though vastly more imaginative, may have been
+suggested by Buerger's _Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain_. The little
+grave _drei Spannen lang_, in its conscientious measurement, certainly
+recalls a famous couplet in the English poem.
+
+After spending the winter at Goslar, Wordsworth and his sister
+returned to England in the spring of 1799, and settled at Grasmere in
+Westmorland. In 1800, the first edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ being
+exhausted, it was republished with the addition of another volume, Mr.
+Longman paying L100 for the copyright of two editions. The book passed
+to a second edition in 1802, and to a third in 1805. Wordsworth sent a
+copy of it, with a manly letter, to Mr. Fox, particularly recommending
+to his attention the poems _Michael_ and _The Brothers_, as displaying
+the strength and permanence among a simple and rural population of
+those domestic affections which were certain to decay gradually under
+the influence of manufactories and poor-houses. Mr. Fox wrote a civil
+acknowledgement, saying that his favourites among the poems were
+_Harry Gill_, _We are Seven_, _The Mad Mother_, and _The Idiot_, but
+that he was prepossessed against the use of blank verse for simple
+subjects. Any political significance in the poems he was apparently
+unable to see. To this second edition Wordsworth prefixed an
+argumentative Preface, in which he nailed to the door of the cathedral
+of English song the critical theses which he was to maintain against
+all comers in his poetry and his life. It was a new thing for an
+author to undertake to show the goodness of his verses by the logic
+and learning of his prose; but Wordsworth carried to the reform of
+poetry all that fervour and faith which had lost their political
+object, and it is another proof of the sincerity and greatness of his
+mind, and of that heroic simplicity which is their concomitant, that
+he could do so calmly what was sure to seem ludicrous to the greater
+number of his readers. Fifty years have since demonstrated that the
+true judgement of one man outweighs any counterpoise of false
+judgement, and that the faith of mankind is guided to a man only by a
+well-founded faith in himself. To this _Defensio_ Wordsworth afterward
+added a supplement, and the two form a treatise of permanent value for
+philosophic statement and decorous English. Their only ill effect has
+been, that they have encouraged many otherwise deserving young men to
+set a Sibylline value on their verses in proportion as they were
+unsaleable. The strength of an argument for self-reliance drawn from
+the example of a great man depends wholly on the greatness of him who
+uses it; such arguments being like coats of mail, which, though they
+serve the strong against arrow-flights and lance-thrusts, may only
+suffocate the weak or sink him the sooner in the waters of oblivion.
+
+An advertisement prefixed to the _Lyrical Ballads_, as originally
+published in one volume, warned the reader that 'they were written
+chiefly with a view to ascertain how far _the language of conversation
+in the middle and lower classes_ of society is adapted to the purposes
+of poetic pleasure'. In his preface to the second edition, in two
+volumes, Wordsworth already found himself forced to shift his ground a
+little (perhaps in deference to the wider view and finer sense of
+Coleridge), and now says of the former volume that 'it was published
+as an experiment which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain how
+far, by fitting to metrical arrangement, _a selection of the real
+language of men in a state of vivid sensation_, that sort of pleasure
+and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted which a poet may
+_rationally endeavour_ to impart'. Here is evidence of a retreat
+towards a safer position, though Wordsworth seems to have remained
+unconvinced at heart, and for many years longer clung obstinately to
+the passages of bald prose into which his original theory had betrayed
+him. In 1815 his opinions had undergone a still further change, and an
+assiduous study of the qualities of his own mind and of his own poetic
+method (the two subjects in which alone he was ever a thorough
+scholar) had convinced him that poetry was in no sense that appeal to
+the understanding which is implied by the words 'rationally endeavour
+to impart'. In the preface of that year he says, 'The observations
+prefixed to that portion of these volumes which was published many
+years ago under the title of _Lyrical Ballads_ have so little of
+special application to the greater part of the present enlarged and
+diversified collection, that they could not with propriety stand as an
+introduction to it.' It is a pity that he could not have become an
+earlier convert to Coleridge's pithy definition, that 'prose was words
+in their best order, and poetry the _best_ words in the best order'.
+But idealization was something that Wordsworth was obliged to learn
+painfully. It did not come to him naturally as to Spenser and Shelley
+and to Coleridge in his higher moods. Moreover, it was in the too
+frequent choice of subjects incapable of being idealized without a
+manifest jar between theme and treatment that Wordsworth's great
+mistake lay. For example, in _The Blind Highland Boy_ he had
+originally the following stanzas:
+
+    Strong is the current, but be mild,
+    Ye waves, and spare the helpless child!
+    If ye in anger fret or chafe,
+    A bee-hive would be ship as safe
+      As that in which he sails.
+
+    But say, what was it? Thought of fear!
+    Well may ye tremble when ye hear!
+    --A household tub like one of those
+    Which women use to wash their clothes,
+      This carried the blind boy.
+
+In endeavouring to get rid of the downright vulgarity of phrase in the
+last stanza, Wordsworth invents an impossible tortoise-shell, and thus
+robs his story of the reality which alone gave it a living interest.
+Any extemporized raft would have floated the boy down to immortality.
+But Wordsworth never quite learned the distinction between Fact, which
+suffocates the Muse, and Truth, which is the very breath of her
+nostrils. Study and self-culture did much for him, but they never
+quite satisfied him that he was capable of making a mistake. He
+yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on certain points, and gave
+up, for example, the ludicrous exactness of
+
+    I've measured it from side to side,
+    'Tis three feet long and two feet wide.
+
+But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to his dying day he
+could never quite shake off that habit of over-minute detail which
+renders the narratives of uncultivated people so tedious, and
+sometimes so distasteful. _Simon Lee_, after his latest revision,
+still contains verses like these:
+
+    And he is lean and he is sick;
+    His body, dwindled and awry,
+    Rests upon ankles swollen and thick;
+    His legs are thin and dry;
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Few months of life he has in store,
+    As he to you will tell,
+    For still, the more he works, the more
+    Do his weak ankles swell,--
+
+which are not only prose, but _bad_ prose, and moreover guilty of the
+same fault for which Wordsworth condemned Dr. Johnson's famous parody
+on the ballad-style,--that their '_matter_ is contemptible'. The
+sonorousness of conviction with which Wordsworth sometimes gives
+utterance to commonplaces of thought and trivialities of sentiment has
+a ludicrous effect on the profane and even on the faithful in
+unguarded moments. We are reminded of a passage in _The Excursion_:
+
+             List! I heard
+    From yon huge breast of rock _a solemn bleat_,
+    _Sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice_.
+
+In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with Lamb began, and was
+thenceforward never interrupted. He continued to live at Grasmere,
+conscientiously diligent in the composition of poems, secure of
+finding the materials of glory within and around him; for his genius
+taught him that inspiration is no product of a foreign shore, and that
+no adventurer ever found it, though he wandered as long as Ulysses.
+Meanwhile the appreciation of the best minds and the gratitude of the
+purest hearts gradually centred more and more towards him. In 1802 he
+made a short visit to France, in company with Miss Wordsworth, and
+soon after his return to England was married to Mary Hutchinson, on
+the 4th of October of the same year. Of the good fortune of this
+marriage no other proof is needed than the purity and serenity of his
+poems, and its record is to be sought nowhere else.
+
+On the 18th of June, 1803, his first child, John, was born, and on the
+14th of August of the same year he set out with his sister on a foot
+journey into Scotland. Coleridge was their companion during a part of
+this excursion, of which Miss Wordsworth kept a full diary. In
+Scotland he made the acquaintance of Scott, who recited to him a part
+of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, then in manuscript. The travellers
+returned to Grasmere on the 25th of September. It was during this
+year that Wordsworth's intimacy with the excellent Sir George
+Beaumont began. Sir George was an amateur painter of considerable
+merit, and his friendship was undoubtedly of service to Wordsworth in
+making him familiar with the laws of a sister art and thus
+contributing to enlarge the sympathies of his criticism, the tendency
+of which was toward too great exclusiveness. Sir George Beaumont,
+dying in 1827, did not forgo his regard for the poet, but contrived to
+hold his affection in mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of L100, to
+defray the charges of a yearly journey.
+
+In March 1805, the poet's brother, John, lost his life by the
+shipwreck of the _Abergavenny_ East-Indiaman, of which he was captain.
+He was a man of great purity and integrity, and sacrificed himself to
+his sense of duty by refusing to leave the ship till it was impossible
+to save him. Wordsworth was deeply attached to him, and felt such
+grief at his death as only solitary natures like his are capable of,
+though mitigated by a sense of the heroism which was the cause of it.
+The need of mental activity as affording an outlet to intense emotion
+may account for the great productiveness of this and the following
+year. He now completed _The Prelude_, wrote _The Waggoner_, and
+increased the number of his smaller poems enough to fill two volumes,
+which were published in 1807.
+
+This collection, which contained some of the most beautiful of his
+shorter pieces, and among others the incomparable _Odes_ to Duty and
+on Immortality, did not reach a second edition till 1815. The
+reviewers had another laugh, and rival poets pillaged while they
+scoffed, particularly Byron, among whose verses a bit of Wordsworth
+showed as incongruously as a sacred vestment on the back of some
+buccaneering plunderer of an abbey. There was a general combination to
+put him down, but on the other hand there was a powerful party in his
+favour, consisting of William Wordsworth. He not only continued in
+good heart himself, but, reversing the order usual on such occasions,
+kept up the spirits of his friends.
+
+Wordsworth passed the winter of 1806-7 in a house of Sir George
+Beaumont's, at Coleorton in Leicestershire, the cottage at Grasmere
+having become too small for his increased family. On his return to the
+Vale of Grasmere he rented the house at Allan Bank, where he lived
+three years. During this period he appears to have written very little
+poetry, for which his biographer assigns as a primary reason the
+smokiness of the Allan Bank chimneys. This will hardly account for the
+failure of the summer crop, especially as Wordsworth composed chiefly
+in the open air. It did not prevent him from writing a pamphlet upon
+the Convention of Cintra, which was published too late to attract much
+attention, though Lamb says that its effect upon him was like that
+which one of Milton's tracts might have had upon a contemporary. It
+was at Allan Bank that Coleridge dictated _The Friend_, and Wordsworth
+contributed to it two essays, one in answer to a letter of Mathetes
+(Professor Wilson), and the other on Epitaphs, republished in the
+Notes to _The Excursion_. Here also he wrote his _Description of the
+Scenery of the Lakes_. Perhaps a truer explanation of the comparative
+silence of Wordsworth's Muse during these years is to be found in the
+intense interest which he took in current events, whose variety,
+picturesqueness, and historical significance were enough to absorb all
+the energies of his imagination.
+
+In the spring of 1811 Wordsworth removed to the Parsonage at Grasmere.
+Here he remained two years, and here he had his second intimate
+experience of sorrow in the loss of two of his children, Catharine and
+Thomas, one of whom died 4th June, and the other 1st December, 1812.
+Early in 1813 he bought Rydal Mount, and, having removed thither,
+changed his abode no more during the rest of his life. In March of
+this year he was appointed Distributor of Stamps for the county of
+Westmorland, an office whose receipts rendered him independent, and
+whose business he was able to do by deputy, thus leaving him ample
+leisure for nobler duties. De Quincey speaks of this appointment as an
+instance of the remarkable good luck which waited upon Wordsworth
+through his whole life. In our view it is only another illustration of
+that scripture which describes the righteous as never forsaken. Good
+luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and
+conscientious observance of duty. Wordsworth owed his nomination to
+the friendly exertions of the Earl of Lonsdale, who desired to atone
+as far as might be for the injustice of the first Earl, and who
+respected the honesty of the man more than he appreciated the
+originality of the poet. The Collectorship at Whitehaven (a more
+lucrative office) was afterwards offered to Wordsworth, and declined.
+He had enough for independence, and wished nothing more. Still later,
+on the death of the Stamp-Distributor for Cumberland, a part of that
+district was annexed to Westmorland, and Wordsworth's income was
+raised to something more than L1,000 a year.
+
+In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland, visiting Yarrow in
+company with the Ettrick Shepherd. During this year _The Excursion_
+was published, in an edition of five hundred copies, which supplied
+the demand for six years. Another edition of the same number of copies
+was published in 1827, and not exhausted till 1834. In 1815 _The White
+Doe of Rylstone_ appeared, and in 1816 _A Letter to a Friend of
+Burns_, in which Wordsworth gives his opinion upon the limits to be
+observed by the biographers of literary men. It contains many valuable
+suggestions, but allows hardly scope enough for personal details, to
+which he was constitutionally indifferent. Nearly the same date may be
+ascribed to a rhymed translation of the first three books of the
+_Aeneid_, a specimen of which was printed in the Cambridge
+_Philological Museum_ (1832). In 1819 _Peter Bell_, written twenty
+years before, was published, and, perhaps in consequence of the
+ridicule of the reviewers, found a more rapid sale than any of his
+previous volumes. _The Waggoner_, printed in the same year, was less
+successful. His next publication was the volume of _Sonnets on the
+river Duddon_, with some miscellaneous poems, 1820. A tour on the
+Continent in 1820 furnished the subjects for another collection,
+published in 1822. This was followed in the same year by the volume of
+_Ecclesiastical Sketches_. His subsequent publications were _Yarrow
+Revisited_, 1835, and the tragedy of _The Borderers_, 1842.
+
+During all these years his fame was increasing slowly but steadily,
+and his age gathered to itself the reverence and the troops of
+friends which his poems and the nobly simple life reflected in them
+deserved. Public honours followed private appreciation. In 1838 the
+University of Dublin conferred upon him the degree of D.C.L. In 1839
+Oxford did the same, and the reception of the poet (now in his
+seventieth year) at the University was enthusiastic. In 1842 he
+resigned his office of Stamp-Distributor, and Sir Robert Peel had the
+honour of putting him upon the civil list for a pension of L300. In
+1843 he was appointed Laureate, with the express understanding that it
+was a tribute of respect, involving no duties except such as might be
+self-imposed. His only official production was an Ode for the
+installation of Prince Albert as Chancellor of the University of
+Cambridge. His life was prolonged yet seven years, almost, it should
+seem, that he might receive that honour which he had truly conquered
+for himself by the unflinching bravery of a literary life of half a
+century, unparalleled for the scorn with which its labours were
+received, and the victorious acknowledgement which at last crowned
+them. Surviving nearly all his contemporaries, he had, if ever any man
+had, a foretaste of immortality, enjoying in a sort his own posthumous
+renown, for the hardy slowness of its growth gave a safe pledge of its
+durability. He died on the 23rd of April, 1850, the anniversary of the
+death of Shakespeare.
+
+We have thus briefly sketched the life of Wordsworth,--a life
+uneventful even for a man of letters; a life like that of an oak, of
+quiet self-development, throwing out stronger roots toward the side
+whence the prevailing storm-blasts blow, and of tougher fibre in
+proportion to the rocky nature of the soil in which it grows. The
+life and growth of his mind, and the influences which shaped it, are
+to be looked for, even more than is the case with most poets, in his
+works, for he deliberately recorded them there.
+
+Of his personal characteristics little is related. He was somewhat
+above the middle height, but, according to De Quincey, of indifferent
+figure, the shoulders being narrow and drooping. His finest feature
+was the eye, which was grey and full of spiritual light. Leigh Hunt
+says: 'I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired, so supernatural.
+They were like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of
+acrid fixture of regard. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have
+had such eyes.' Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and
+Haydon that he had none of form. The best likeness of him, in De
+Quincey's judgement, is the portrait of Milton prefixed to
+Richardson's notes on _Paradise Lost_. He was active in his habits,
+composing in the open air, and generally dictating his poems. His
+daily life was regular, simple, and frugal; his manners were dignified
+and kindly; and in his letters and recorded conversations it is
+remarkable how little that was personal entered into his judgement of
+contemporaries.
+
+The true rank of Wordsworth among poets is, perhaps, not even yet to
+be fairly estimated, so hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of
+judgement uninflamed by the tumult of partisanship which besets the
+doors.
+
+Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great poet, at a time when
+the artificial school of poetry was enthroned with all the authority
+of long succession and undisputed legitimacy, it was almost
+inevitable that Wordsworth, who, both by nature and judgement was a
+rebel against the existing order, should become a partisan.
+Unfortunately, he became not only the partisan of a system, but of
+William Wordsworth as its representative. Right in general principle,
+he thus necessarily became wrong in particulars. Justly convinced that
+greatness only achieves its ends by implicitly obeying its own
+instincts, he perhaps reduced the following his instincts too much to
+a system, mistook his own resentments for the promptings of his
+natural genius, and, compelling principle to the measure of his own
+temperament or even of the controversial exigency of the moment, fell
+sometimes into the error of making naturalness itself artificial. If a
+poet resolve to be original, it will end commonly in his being merely
+peculiar.
+
+Wordsworth himself departed more and more in practice, as he grew
+older, from the theories which he had laid down in his prefaces;[46]
+but those theories undoubtedly had a great effect in retarding the
+growth of his fame. He had carefully constructed a pair of spectacles
+through which his earlier poems were to be studied, and the public
+insisted on looking through them at his mature works, and were
+consequently unable to see fairly what required a different focus. He
+forced his readers to come to his poetry with a certain amount of
+conscious preparation, and thus gave them beforehand the impression of
+something like mechanical artifice, and deprived them of the contented
+repose of implicit faith. To the child a watch seems to be a living
+creature; but Wordsworth would not let his readers be children, and
+did injustice to himself by giving them an uneasy doubt whether
+creations which really throbbed with the very heart's-blood of genius,
+and were alive with nature's life of life, were not contrivances of
+wheels and springs. A naturalness which we are told to expect has lost
+the crowning grace of nature. The men who walked in Cornelius
+Agrippa's visionary gardens had probably no more pleasurable emotion
+than that of a shallow wonder, or an equally shallow self-satisfaction
+in thinking they had hit upon the secret of the thaumaturgy; but to a
+tree that has grown as God willed we come without a theory and with
+no botanical predilections, enjoying it simply and thankfully; or the
+Imagination recreates for us its past summers and winters, the birds
+that have nested and sung in it, the sheep that have clustered in its
+shade, the winds that have visited it, the cloud-bergs that have
+drifted over it, and the snows that have ermined it in winter. The
+Imagination is a faculty that flouts at foreordination, and Wordsworth
+seemed to do all he could to cheat his readers of her company by
+laying out paths with a peremptory _Do not step off the gravel!_ at
+the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every conceivable
+emotion, with guide-boards to tell each when and where it must be
+caught.
+
+    [46] How far he swung backward toward the school under whose
+    influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he
+    had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The
+    advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his
+    _Thanksgiving Ode_ which, if one met with it by itself, he
+    would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope:
+
+        While the _tubed engine_ [the organ] feels the inspiring blast.
+
+    And in _The Italian Itinerant_ and _The Swiss Goatherd_ we
+    find a thermometer or barometer called
+
+                      The well-wrought scale
+        Whose sentient tube instructs to time
+        A purpose to a fickle clime.
+
+    Still worse in the _Eclipse of the Sun_, 1821:
+
+        High on her speculative tower
+        Stood Science, waiting for the hour
+        When Sol was destined to endure
+          That darkening.
+
+    So in _The Excursion_,
+
+        The cold March wind raised in her tender throat
+        Viewless obstructions.
+
+But if these things stood in the way of immediate appreciation, he had
+another theory which interferes more seriously with the total and
+permanent effect of his poems. He was theoretically determined not
+only to be a philosophic poet, but to be a _great_ philosophic poet,
+and to this end he must produce an epic. Leaving aside the question
+whether the epic be obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether the
+history of a single man's mind is universal enough in its interest to
+furnish all the requirements of the epic machinery, and it may be more
+than doubted whether a poet's philosophy be ordinary metaphysics,
+divisible into chapter and section. It is rather something which is
+more energetic in a word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts
+unclose themselves instinctively at its simple _Open sesame!_ while
+they would stand firm against the reading of the whole body of
+philosophy. In point of fact, the one element of greatness which _The
+Excursion_ possesses indisputably is heaviness. It is only the
+episodes that are universally read, and the effect of these is diluted
+by the connecting and accompanying lectures on metaphysics. Wordsworth
+had his epic mould to fill, and, like Benvenuto Cellini in casting his
+Perseus, was forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal, lest
+it should run short. Separated from the rest, the episodes are perfect
+poems in their kind, and without example in the language.
+
+Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong minds, was a good critic
+of the substance of poetry, but somewhat niggardly in the allowance he
+made for those subsidiary qualities which make it the charmer of
+leisure and the employment of minds without definite object. It may be
+doubted, indeed, whether he set much store by any contemporary writing
+but his own, and whether he did not look upon poetry too exclusively
+as an exercise rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the
+imagination. He says of himself, speaking of his youth:
+
+                                     In fine,
+    I was a better judge of thoughts than words,
+    Misled in estimating words, not only
+    By common inexperience of youth,
+    But by the trade in classic niceties,
+    The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase
+    From languages that want the living voice
+    To carry meaning to the natural heart;
+    To tell us what is passion, what is truth,
+    What reason, what simplicity and sense.[47]
+
+    [47] _Prelude_, Book VI.
+
+Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this was always true of
+him, and his thought seems often to lean upon a word too weak to bear
+its weight. No reader of adequate insight can help regretting that he
+did not earlier give himself to 'the trade of classic niceties'. It
+was precisely this which gives to the blank-verse of Landor the severe
+dignity and reserved force which alone among later poets recall the
+tune of Milton, and to which Wordsworth never attained. Indeed,
+Wordsworth's blank-verse (though the passion be profounder) is always
+essentially that of Cowper. They were alike also in their love of
+outward nature and of simple things. The main difference between them
+is one of scenery rather than of sentiment, between the lifelong
+familiar of the mountains and the dweller on the plain.
+
+It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest powers of the
+poetic mind were associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and
+commonplace. It is in the understanding (always prosaic) that the
+great golden veins of his imagination are imbedded. He wrote too much
+to write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes-army of words, but
+a compact Greek ten thousand, that march safely down to posterity. He
+set tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to
+make Jove's eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout _The
+Prelude_ and _The Excursion_ he seems striving to bind the wizard
+Imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have
+forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the particles cohere.
+There is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress
+wearisome. Yet with what splendours as of mountain-sunsets are we
+rewarded! what golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching
+heavenward with angels ascending and descending! what haunting
+harmonies hover around us deep and eternal like the undying baritone
+of the sea! and if we are compelled to fare through sands and desert
+wildernesses, how often do we not hear airy shapes that syllable our
+names with a startling personal appeal to our highest consciousness
+and our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for in vain in any other
+poet!
+
+Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot but allow,
+and what is left will show how truly great he was. He had no humour,
+no dramatic power, and his temperament was of that dry and juiceless
+quality, that in all his published correspondence you shall not find a
+letter, but only essays. If we consider carefully where he was most
+successful, we shall find that it was not so much in description of
+natural scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid expression
+of the effect produced by external objects and events upon his own
+mind, and of the shape and hue (perhaps momentary) which they in turn
+took from his mood or temperament. His finest passages are always
+monologues. He had a fondness for particulars, and there are parts of
+his poems which remind us of local histories in the undue relative
+importance given to trivial matters. He was the historian of
+Wordsworthshire. This power of particularization (for it is as truly a
+power as generalization) is what gives such vigour and greatness to
+single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a
+single thought or sentiment. It was this that made him so fond of the
+sonnet. That sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his
+fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was never self-denying
+enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary and meditative
+temper, and it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of what was
+permanent in literature) liked him best. Its narrow bounds, but
+fourteen paces from end to end, turn into a virtue his too common
+fault of giving undue prominence to every passing emotion. He excels
+in monologue, and the law of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy.
+In _The Excursion_ we are driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict
+of extenuating circumstances. His mind had not that reach and
+elemental movement of Milton's, which, like the trade-wind, gathered
+to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter;
+some deep with silks and spicery, some brooding over the silent
+thunders of their battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their
+destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of
+canvas strained by the unifying breath of their common epic impulse.
+It was an organ that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable
+equally of the trumpet's ardours or the slim delicacy of the flute,
+and sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his prose, as
+if he touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. If
+Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it
+aside soon and willingly for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral
+reed. And it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream, but that which
+Apollo breathed through, tending the flocks of Admetus,--that which
+Pan endowed with every melody of the visible universe,--the same in
+which the soul of the despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her
+dual nature,--so that ever and anon, amid the notes of human joy or
+sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone,
+thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity.
+
+Wordsworth's absolute want of humour, while it no doubt confirmed his
+self-confidence by making him insensible both to the comical
+incongruity into which he was often led by his earlier theory
+concerning the language of poetry and to the not unnatural ridicule
+called forth by it, seems to have been indicative of a certain
+dullness of perception in other directions.[48] We cannot help
+feeling that the material of his nature was essentially prose, which,
+in his inspired moments, he had the power of transmuting, but which,
+whenever the inspiration failed or was factitious, remained
+obstinately leaden. The normal condition of many poets would seem to
+approach that temperature to which Wordsworth's mind could be raised
+only by the white heat of profoundly inward passion. And in proportion
+to the intensity needful to make his nature thoroughly aglow is the
+very high quality of his best verses. They seem rather the productions
+of nature than of man, and have the lastingness of such, delighting
+our age with the same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our
+youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of
+diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of
+fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed for ever in immutable
+grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very
+ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of
+mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of
+prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavouring it, falls more below
+himself, and is, more even than many poets his inferiors in
+imaginative quality, a poet of passages. Indeed, one cannot help
+having the feeling sometimes that the poem is there for the sake of
+these passages, rather than that these are the natural jets and
+elations of a mind energized by the rapidity of its own motion. In
+other words, the happy couplet or gracious image seems not to spring
+from the inspiration of the poem conceived as a whole, but rather to
+have dropped of itself into the mind of the poet in one of his
+rambles, who then, in a less rapt mood, has patiently built up around
+it a setting of verse too often ungraceful in form and of a material
+whose cheapness may cast a doubt on the priceless quality of the gem
+it encumbers.[49] During the most happily productive period of his
+life, Wordsworth was impatient of what may be called the mechanical
+portion of his art. His wife and sister seem from the first to have
+been his scribes. In later years, he had learned and often insisted
+on the truth that poetry was an art no less than a gift, and corrected
+his poems in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment. But he
+certainly had more of the vision than of the faculty divine, and was
+always a little numb on the side of form and proportion. Perhaps his
+best poem in these respects is the _Laodamia_, and it is not
+uninstructive to learn from his own lips that 'it cost him more
+trouble than almost anything of equal length he had ever written'. His
+longer poems (miscalled epical) have no more intimate bond of union
+than their more or less immediate relation to his own personality. Of
+character other than his own he had but a faint conception, and all
+the personages of _The Excursion_ that are not Wordsworth are the
+merest shadows of himself upon mist, for his self-concentrated nature
+was incapable of projecting itself into the consciousness of other men
+and seeing the springs of action at their source in the recesses of
+individual character. The best parts of these longer poems are bursts
+of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers were always clumsy at the
+_callida junctura_. The stream of narration is sluggish, if varied by
+times with pleasing reflections (_viridesque placido aequore sylvas_);
+we are forced to do our own rowing, and only when the current is
+hemmed in by some narrow gorge of the poet's personal consciousness do
+we feel ourselves snatched along on the smooth but impetuous rush of
+unmistakable inspiration. The fact that what is precious in
+Wordsworth's poetry was (more truly even than with some greater poets
+than he) a gift rather than an achievement should always be borne in
+mind in taking the measure of his power. I know not whether to call
+it height or depth, this peculiarity of his, but it certainly endows
+those parts of his work which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian
+with an unexpectedness and impressiveness of originality such as we
+feel in the presence of Nature herself. He seems to have been half
+conscious of this, and recited his own poems to all comers with an
+enthusiasm of wondering admiration that would have been profoundly
+comic but for its simple sincerity and for the fact that William
+Wordsworth, Esquire, of Rydal Mount, was one person, and the William
+Wordsworth whom he so heartily reverenced quite another. We recognize
+two voices in him, as Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah and
+his scribe Baruch. If the prophet cease from dictating, the
+amanuensis, rather than be idle, employs his pen in jotting down some
+anecdotes of his master, how he one day went out and saw an old woman,
+and the next day did _not_, and so came home and dictated some verses
+on this ominous phenomenon, and how another day he saw a cow. These
+marginal annotations have been carelessly taken up into the text, have
+been religiously held by the pious to be orthodox scripture, and by
+dexterous exegesis have been made to yield deeply oracular meanings.
+Presently the real prophet takes up the word again and speaks as one
+divinely inspired, the Voice of a higher and invisible power.
+Wordsworth's better utterances have the bare sincerity, the absolute
+abstraction from time and place, the immunity from decay, that belong
+to the grand simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more his own
+than ours and every man's, the word of the inalterable Mind. This gift
+of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament, and
+accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product belongs to
+the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the
+pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.[50] He did not
+grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant. One
+of the most delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is
+the poet Albert, who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly
+idealizing hand, does his best afterwards to look like it. Many of
+Wordsworth's later poems seem like rather unsuccessful efforts to
+resemble his former self. They would never, as Sir John Harington says
+of poetry, 'keep a child from play and an old man from the
+chimney-corner'.[51]
+
+    [48] Nowhere is this displayed with more comic
+    self-complacency than when he thought it needful to rewrite
+    the ballad of Helen of Kirconnel,--a poem hardly to be
+    matched in any language for swiftness of movement and savage
+    sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly.
+    Compare:
+
+        Curst be the heart that thought the thought,
+        And curst the hand that fired the shot,
+        When in my arms burd Helen dropt,
+          That died to succour me!
+        O, think ye not my heart was sair
+        When my love dropt down and spake na mair?
+
+    Compare this with,--
+
+        Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts
+          That through his brain are travelling,
+        And, starting up, to Bruce's heart
+          He launched a deadly javelin:
+        Fair Ellen saw it when it came,
+        And, _stepping forth to meet the same_,
+        Did with her body cover
+        The Youth, her chosen lover.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+        And Bruce (_as soon as he had slain_
+        _The Gordon_) sailed away to Spain,
+        And fought with rage incessant
+        Against the Moorish Crescent.
+
+    These are surely the versos of an attorney's clerk 'penning a
+    stanza when he should engross'. It will be noticed that
+    Wordsworth here also departs from his earlier theory of the
+    language of poetry by substituting a javelin for a bullet as
+    less modern and familiar. Had he written
+
+        And Gordon never gave a hint,
+        But, having somewhat picked his flint,
+        Let fly the fatal bullet
+        That killed that lovely pullet,
+
+    it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest.
+    He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the _Ancient
+    Mariner_ in the second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_: 'The
+    poem of my friend has indeed great defects; first, that the
+    principal person has no distinct character, either in his
+    profession of mariner, or as a human being who, having been
+    long under the control of supernatural impressions, might be
+    supposed himself to partake of something supernatural;
+    secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted
+    upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary
+    connexion, do not produce each other; and lastly, that the
+    imagery is somewhat laboriously accumulated.' Here is an
+    indictment, to be sure, and drawn, plainly enough, by the
+    attorney's clerk aforenamed. One would think that the strange
+    charm of Coleridge's most truly original poems lay in this
+    very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect.
+
+    [49]
+
+        A hundred times when, roving high and low,
+        I have been harassed with the toil of verse,
+        Much pains and little progress, and at once
+        Some lovely Image in the song rose up,
+        Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea.
+
+                                 _Prelude_, Book IV.
+
+    [50] His best poetry was written when he was under the
+    immediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have
+    felt this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes
+    when he speaks of 'those who have been so well pleased that I
+    should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills
+    into _their_ main stream' (_Letters, Conversations, and
+    Recollections of S. T. C._, vol. i, pp. 5-6). Wordsworth
+    found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of
+    the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees:
+
+        The singing masons building roofs of gold.
+
+    This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have
+    written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the
+    repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the
+    singers' (Leigh Hunt's _Autobiography_). Wordsworth writes to
+    Crabb Robinson in 1837, 'My ear is susceptible to the
+    clashing of sounds almost to disease.' One cannot help
+    thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by
+    Coleridge.
+
+    [51] In the Preface to his translation of the _Orlando
+    Furioso_.
+
+Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted a junior counsel who
+was arguing certain obvious points of law at needless length, by
+saying, 'Brother Jones, there are _some_ things which a Supreme Court
+of the United States sitting in equity may be presumed to know.'
+Wordsworth has this fault of enforcing and restating obvious points
+till the reader feels as if his own intelligence were somewhat
+underrated. He is over-conscientious in giving us full measure, and
+once profoundly absorbed in the sound of his own voice, he knows not
+when to stop. If he feel himself flagging, he has a droll way of
+keeping the floor, as it were, by asking himself a series of questions
+sometimes not needing, and often incapable of answer. There are three
+stanzas of such near the close of the First Part of _Peter Bell_,
+where Peter first catches a glimpse of the dead body in the water, all
+happily incongruous, and ending with one which reaches the height of
+comicality:
+
+    Is it a fiend that to a stake
+    Of fire his desperate self is tethering?
+    Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell,
+    In solitary ward or cell,
+    Ten thousand miles from all his brethren?
+
+The same want of humour which made him insensible to incongruity may
+perhaps account also for the singular unconsciousness of disproportion
+which so often strikes us in his poetry. For example, a little farther
+on in _Peter Bell_ we find:
+
+    _Now_--like a tempest-shattered bark
+    That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,
+    And in a moment to the verge
+    Is lifted of a foaming surge--
+    Full suddenly the Ass doth rise!
+
+And one cannot help thinking that the similes of the huge stone, the
+sea-beast, and the cloud, noble as they are in themselves, are
+somewhat too lofty for the service to which they are put.[52]
+
+    [52] In _Resolution and Independence_.
+
+The movement of Wordsworth's mind was too slow and his mood too
+meditative for narrative poetry. He values his own thoughts and
+reflections too much to sacrifice the least of them to the interests
+of his story. Moreover, it is never action that interests him, but the
+subtle motives that lead to or hinder it. _The Waggoner_ involuntarily
+suggests a comparison with _Tam O'Shanter_, infinitely to its own
+disadvantage. _Peter Bell_, full though it be of profound touches and
+subtle analysis, is lumbering and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced to
+confess that he did not like it. _The White Doe_, the most
+Wordsworthian of them all in the best meaning of the epithet, is also
+only the more truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What charms in
+Wordsworth and will charm for ever is the
+
+                    Happy tone
+    Of meditation slipping in between
+    The beauty coming and the beauty gone.
+
+A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their words to the tune of
+our own feelings and fancies, in the charm of their manner,
+indefinable as the sympathetic grace of woman, _are_ everything to us
+without our being able to say that they are much in themselves. They
+rather narcotize than fortify. Wordsworth must subject our mood to his
+own before he admits us to his intimacy; but, once admitted, it is for
+life, and we find ourselves in his debt, not for what he has been to
+us in our hours of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a
+reinforcement of faltering purpose and personal independence of
+character. His system of a Nature-cure, first professed by Dr. Jean
+Jacques and continued by Cowper, certainly breaks down as a whole. The
+Solitary of _The Excursion_, who has not been cured of his scepticism
+by living among the medicinal mountains, is, so far as we can see,
+equally proof against the lectures of Pedlar and Parson. Wordsworth
+apparently felt that this would be so, and accordingly never saw his
+way clear to finishing the poem. But the treatment, whether a panacea
+or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as it inculcates abstinence,
+exercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure, indeed, that the
+Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in constitutions less
+vigorous than Wordsworth's what Milton would call a fugitive and
+cloistered virtue at a dear expense of manlier qualities. The ancients
+and our own Elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become
+fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by taking a frank delight
+in its action and passion and by grappling with the facts of this
+world, rather than muddling themselves over the insoluble problems of
+another. If they had not discovered the picturesque, as we understand
+it, they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his destiny, and
+would have seen something ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the
+spectacle of a grown man running to hide his head in the apron of the
+Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in
+the tussle for existence.
+
+But when, as I have said, our impartiality has made all those
+qualifications and deductions against which even the greatest poet may
+not plead his privilege, what is left to Wordsworth is enough to
+justify his fame. Even where his genius is wrapped in clouds, the
+unconquerable lightning of imagination struggles through, flashing out
+unexpected vistas, and illuminating the humdrum pathway of our daily
+thought with a radiance of momentary consciousness that seems like a
+revelation. If it be the most delightful function of the poet to set
+our lives to music, yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our
+maturer gratitude if he do his part also as moralist and philosopher
+to purify and enlighten; if he define and encourage our vacillating
+perceptions of duty; if he piece together our fragmentary
+apprehensions of our own life and that larger life whose unconscious
+instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected map of
+experience a coherent chart. In the great poets there is an exquisite
+sensibility both of soul and sense that sympathizes like gossamer
+sea-moss with every movement of the element in which it floats, but
+which is rooted on the solid rock of our common sympathies. Wordsworth
+shows less of this finer feminine fibre of organization than one or
+two of his contemporaries, notably than Coleridge or Shelley; but he
+was a masculine thinker, and in his more characteristic poems there is
+always a kernel of firm conclusion from far-reaching principles that
+stimulates thought and challenges meditation. Groping in the dark
+passages of life, we come upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall
+that gives us our bearings and enables us to find an outlet. Compared
+with Goethe we feel that he lacks that serene impartiality of mind
+which results from breadth of culture; nay, he seems narrow, insular,
+almost provincial. He reminds us of those saints of Dante who gather
+brightness by revolving on their own axis. But through this very
+limitation of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the
+impressiveness which results from eagerness of personal conviction. If
+we read Wordsworth through, as I have just done, we find ourselves
+changing our mind about him at every other page, so uneven is he. If
+we read our favourite poems or passages only, he will seem uniformly
+great. And even as regards _The Excursion_ we should remember how few
+long poems will bear consecutive reading. For my part I know of but
+one,--the _Odyssey_.
+
+None of our great poets can be called popular in any exact sense of
+the word, for the highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions
+which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that
+shore between our abiding divine and our fluctuating human nature,
+rooted in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid bare, and
+otherwise visible only at exceptional moments of entire calm and
+clearness. Of no other poet except Shakespeare have so many phrases
+become household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more
+epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of
+having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those
+faint and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentle
+ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely
+ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won for himself a secure
+immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds at
+their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and
+by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest
+heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and
+abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us
+to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own
+instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs not to bid
+
+    Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh
+    To rare Beaumont, and learned Beaumont lie
+    A little nearer Spenser;
+
+for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with whom he
+is now enrolled as fifth in the succession of the great English Poets.
+
+
+
+
+
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