And still as I drew near with gentle pace, Or lastly, the second of the three following stanzas, compared both with the first and the third. My former thoughts returned; the fear that kills; But now, perplex'd by what the old man had said, "How is it that you live, and what is it you do?" He with a smile did then his words repeat; 10 most intense, weighty and philosophical product of human art; adding, as the reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. The following passage from Davenant's prefatory letter to Hobbes well expresses this truth. "When I considered the actions which I meant to describe (those inferring the persons), I was again persuaded rather to choose those of a former age, than the present; and in a century so far removed, as might preserve me from their improper examinations, who know not the requisites of a poem, nor how much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are 15 not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of an historian. For why should a poet doubt in story to mend the intrigues of fortune by more delightful conveyances of probable fictions, because austere historians have entered into bond to truth? An obligation, which were in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as is the bondage of false martyrs, who lie in chains for a mistaken opinion. But by this I would imply that truth, narrative and past, is the idol of historians (who worship a dead thing), and truth operative, and by effects continually alive, is the mistress of poets, who hath not her existence in matter, but in reason. 20 Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. There is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it 25 would not present a specimen. But it would be unjust not to repeat that this defect is only occasional. From a careful reperusal of the two volumes of poems, I doubt whether the objectionable passages would 80 amount in the whole to one hundred lines; not the eighth part of the number of pages. In The Excursion the feeling of incongruity is seldom excited by the diction of any passage considered in itself, but by the sudden superiority of some other passage forming the context. The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word. There is, I should say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances, in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their dispositions and actions, which circumstances might be necessary to establish the probability of a statement in real life, where nothing is taken for granted by the hearer, but appear superfluous in poetry, where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. To this accidentality I object, as contravening the essence of poetry, which Aristotle pronounces to be σπουδαιότατον καὶ φιλοσοφώτατον γένος, 1 the 1 The most serious and most philosophical kind (Poetics, 9, 3). 85 40 45 50 55 For this minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery, the lines in The Excursion, pp. 96, 97, and 98,1 may be taken, if not as a striking instance, yet as an illustration of my meaning. It must be some strong motive (as, for instance, that the description was necessary to the intelligibility of the tale) which could induce me to describe in a number of verses what a draughtsman could present to the eye with incomparably greater satisfaction by half a dozen strokes of his pencil, or the painter with as many touches of his brush. Such descriptions too often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is determined to understand his author, a feeling of labor not very dissimilar to that with which he would construct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical proposition. It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, then join and dovetail them; and when the successive acts of attention have been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as a whole. The poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and I know no happier case to exemplify the distinction between these two faculties. Masterpieces of 1 Book 3, 50 ff. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE the former mode of poetic painting abound The fig-tree; not that kind for fruit renown'd, High over-arch'd and ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN: This is creation rather than painting, or and the feeling, which may be, and ought to be, found in all ranks? The feelings with which, as Christians, we contemplate a mixed congregation rising or kneeling before their 5 common Maker, Mr. Wordsworth would have us entertain at all times, as men, and as readers; and by the excitement of this lofty, yet prideless impartiality in poetry, he might hope to have encouraged its conThe praise of good 10 tinuance in real life. 15 20 25 30 35 40 The second division respects an apparent minute adherence to matter-of-fact in character and incidents; a biographical attention to probability, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect. Under this head I shall deliver, with no feigned diffidence, the results of my best reflection on the great point of controversy between Mr. Wordsworth and his objectors; namely, on the choice of his characters. I have already declared and, I trust, justified, my utter dissent from the mode of argument which his critics have hitherto employed. To their question, Why did you choose such a character, or a character from such a rank of life? the poet might, in my opinion, fairly retort: Why with the conception of my character did you make wilful choice of mean or ludicrous associations not furnished by me, but sup- 45 plied from your own sickly and fastidious feelings? How was it, indeed, probable that such arguments could have any weight with an author whose plan, whose guiding principle, and main object it was to attack 50 and subdue that state of association which leads us to place the chief value on those things on which man differs from man, and to forget or disregard the high dignities, which belong to Human Nature, the sense 1 Paradise Lost, 9, 1101 ff. The statue of Mem non, when struck by the first rays of the 55 men be his! In real life, and, I trust, even But yet I object, nevertheless, and for the And having made a due reverence before the In the plain presence of his dignity.1 Who is not at once delighted and improved, O, many are the poets that are sown The measure of themselves, these favored beings, Are often those of whom the noisy world On 15 30 the subject, had invented an account of his birth, parentage, and education, with all the strange and fortunate accidents which had concurred in making him at once poet, phi5 losopher, and sweep! Nothing but biography can justify this. If it be admissible even in a novel, it must be one in the manner of De Foe's, that were meant to pass for histories, not in the manner of Fielding's: 10 in The Life of Moll Flanders, or Colonel Jack, not in a Tom Jones, or even a Joseph Andrews. Much less, then, can it be legitimately introduced in a poem, the characters of which, amid the strongest individualization, must still remain representative. The precepts of Horace,1 on this point, are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of the human mind. They are not more peremptory, than wise and prudent. For, in the first place, a deviation from them perplexes the reader's feelings, and all the circumstances which are feigned in order to make such accidents less improbable, divide and disquiet his faith, rather than aid and support it. Spite of all attempts, the fiction will appear, and unfortunately not as fictitious but as false. The reader not only knows that the sentiments and language are the poet's own, and his own, too, in his artificial character, as poet; but by the fruitless endeavors to make him think the contrary, he is not even suffered to forget it. The effect is similar to that produced by an epic poet, when the fable and the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in The Messiah of Klopstock, or in Cumberland's Calvary; and not merely suggested by it as in the Paradise Lost of Milton. That illusion, contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment, is rendered impossible by their immediate neighborhood to words and facts of known and absolute truth. A faith which transcends even historic belief must absolutely put out this mere poetic analogon2 of faith, as the summer sun is said to extinguish our household fires, when it shines full upon them. What would otherwise have been yielded to as pleasing fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect produced in this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is in a less degree brought about in the instances to which I have been objecting, by the baffled attempts of the author to make him believe. 1 See his Ars Poetica (Poetic Art), 148 ff. 2 analogue To use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, But be this as it may; the feelings with which I think of Chatterton, the marvellous boy, 40 45 50 are widely different from those with which 1 The Excursion, 1, 76. 2 The Excursion, 1, 77 ff. 8 Resolution and Independence, 43 ff. (p. 284). " Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project and of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one word, for instance, attributed to the pedlar in The Excursion, characteristic of a pedlar? one sentiment that might not more plausibly, even without the aid of any previous explanation, have proceeded from any wise and beneficent old man, of a rank or profession in which the language of learning and refinement are natural and to be expected? Need the rank have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? when on the contrary this information renders the man's language, feelings, sentiments, and information a riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes of anecdote? Finally, when this, and this alone, could have induced a genuine poet to inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects the loftiest and of most universal interest, such minute matters of fact, (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the friends of some obscure "ornament of society lately deceased' in some obscure town,) as Among the hills of Athol he was born; From his sixth year, the boy of whom I speak, For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might, with trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with far greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet; and without incurring another defect which I shall now mention, and a sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated. 5 10 15 20 25 The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling. disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize. In this class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying, instead of progression, of thought. As instances, see pages 27, 28,1 and 622 of the Poems, Vol. I., and the first eighty lines of the Sixth Book of The Excursion. Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale.. It is a well-known faet that bright colors in motion both make and leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is more 30 likely too, than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this in 35 such lines as 40 45 They flash upon that inward eye, in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the images and virtuous' actions of a whole well-spent life pass before that conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed "the bliss of solitude?" Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from this couplet to And then my heart with pleasure fills, Vol. I, p. 320.. The second instance is from Vol. II., page 12, where the poet, having gone out for a day's tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning with a knot of Gipsies, who had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds, together with their children and asses, in 1 Anecdote for Fathers. This page of vol. I is blank. I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud, 21-22 (p. 295). Gipsies. 4 some field by the roadside. At the close of the day on his return our tourist found them in the same place. "Twelve hours," says he, Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I Have been a traveller under open sky, Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might be quite as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was pleasing or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather above, than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire of China improgressive for thirty centuries: The weary Sun betook himself to rest :- The glorious path in which he trod! The last instance of this defect (for I know no other than these already cited) is from the Ode,1 page 351, Vol. II, where, speaking of a child, "a six years' darling of a pigmy size," he thus addresses him: Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find! Broods like the day, a master o'er a slave, Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects the epithets "deaf and silent," with the apostrophized eye: or (if we are to refer it to the preceding word, "philosopher") the faulty and equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of making a "master brood o'er a slave," or "the day" brood at all; we will merely ask, What does all this mean? In what sense is a child of 1 Intimations of Immortality (p. 303). 5 10 15 20 25 35 40 that age a philosopher? In what sense does he read the eternal deep?" In what sense is he declared to be "forever haunted" by the Supreme Being? or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a mighty prophet, a blessed seer? By reflection? by knowledge? by conscious intuition? or by any form or modification of consciousness? These would be tidings indeed; but such as would presuppose an immediate revelation to the inspired communicator, and require miracles to authenticate his inspiration. Children at this age give us no such information of themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the Lethe, which has produced such utter oblivion of a state so godlike? There are many of us that still possess some remembrances, more or less distinct, respecting themselves at six years old; pity that the worthless straws only should float, while treasures, compared with which all the mines of Golconda and Mexico were but straws, should be absorbed by some unknown gulf into some unknown abyss. But if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as having been the poet's meaning; if these mysterious gifts, faculties, and operations, are not accompanied with consciousness; who else is conscious of them? 30 or how can it be called the child, if it be no part of the child's conscious being? For aught I know, the thinking Spirit within me may be substantially one with the principle of life, and of vital operation. For aught I know, it might be employed as a secondary agent in the marvellous organization and organic movements of my body. But, surely, it would be strange language to say that I. construct my heart! or that I propel the finer influences through my nerves! or that I compress my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my own eyes! Spinoza and Behmen were, on different systems, both Pantheists; and among the ancients there 45 were philosophers, teachers of the EN KAI TAN,1 who not only taught that God was All, but that this All constituted God. not even these would confound the part, as a part, with the whole, as the whole. Nay, in no system is the distinction between the individual and God, between the modification, and the one only substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of Spinoza. Jacobi indeed relates of Lessing, that, after a conversation with him at the house of the poet Gleim (the Tyrtæus and Anacreon of the German Parnassus) in which conversation Lessing had avowed privately to Jacobi his 1 one and the whole (pantheism) 50 55 Yet |