' X •••••' I St .'I 1 a :•■ 1 X Id 1 * | * l-H 1 3 ...J I ; 1 UJ i ; pJ 9C 1 H * i ; 1 9 c 5 ,. ..., 9 -i 1 * .: 1 J Ld 1 , » ': 1 S 0> S en 3 en s; t a en 3? en 3J I 3 en 3 en 31 en 5 en 3 en 3 en » l_- 9 !-- 3 en 9 en 9 en « «» 9 THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL ENDOWED BY THE DIALECTIC AND PHILANTHROPIC SOCIETIES UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL 00014405351 This book is due at the LOUIS R. WILSON LIBRARY on the last date stamped under "Date Due." If not on hold it may be renewed by bringing it to the library. DATE RET DATE DUE DEC 11989 y A ' QV10'8* SFP2 3 ?nn? hz: « P 1 5 20tt ^ ] . ^VApi A^npi -do THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL ENDOWED BY THE DIALECTIC AND PHILANTHROPIC SOCIETIES COLEEIDGE'S LITEEAEY CRITICISM WITH AN INTRODUCTION By J. W. MACKAIL •/ /W^ LONDON HUMPHREY MILFORD 1921 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil http://archive.org/details/coleridgesliteraOOcole INTRODUCTION More than seventy years have passed since the death of Coleridge ; and we now stand far enough off him to see him in intelligible perspective ; he begins to take shape, to assume something like a permanent place and value. He affected his own age as a changeable and complex force, at first revolutionary, then constructive and interpretative. His influence on English poetry was far-reaching and profound. His influence on English thought was, as it appeared at the time, even greater. To the younger genera- tion of his own contemporaries he was a prophet, a teacher who gave light on life. That side of his influence was in its nature transitory; for life is in perpetual progress, and each age has to face the problem of life afresh and find its own interpretation. For six wonderful years he was a poet and one of the immortals. That immortality remains. But he was also, both during the brief culmination of his powers and in the long succeeding period of shattered energy and fragmentary production, a critic of the first rank. In virtue of that faculty alone he was not only an expounder but a creator ; and, like all creative work, his criticism has a substantive artistic value, an in- herent vitality. The saying that poetry is a criticism of life, so far as it is more than a brilliant paradox, has refer- ence to poetry as the highest form of literature, and to criticism as something constructive and vital. In s, c. a % iv INTRODUCTION this sense, not only poetry but all literature is a criticism of life. It interprets life and, so to speak, recreates it. But literature itself requires inter- pretation ; for it also is life : it is a world of its own. The critical faculty as applied to the masterpieces of literature, and still more the critical faculty as applied to the art of literature itself, is akin to the creative faculty of the artist. It does not deal with letters as something detached from life, but as the form or substance in which life is intelligibly presented. Its interpretation is also creation. A sharp line can be drawn between the artist and the critic where they work in different material, as in the criticism of painting, or of music. No such line can be drawn in literary criticism ; for the critic w r orks in the same material, and his criticism so far as it is vital (that is to say, so far as it is relevant and worth pre- servation) is also a work of art. Criticism of literature is literature. Like all the other gifts with which he was so richly endowed, and which he misused so tragically, Coleridge exercised his superb critical faculty fitfully and capri- ciously. It was often overclouded ; it often ran to waste. The body of criticism which he contri- buted to literature has to be pieced together from fragmentary records ; some of it from published writings, some from records of his conversation and notes taken at his lectures. But even so it is of lasting value and interest. What a great artist says about his own art is never negligible. Coleridge was a great literary artist, one whose mastery of INTRODUCTION v his art in practice it was impossible to deny, any more than it was possible to deny his subtlety of intellect and copiousness of eloquence. We have here the judgements in letters of one who had sin- gular qualifications for judging. For he was one who impressed all his contemporaries as, in no common sense of the words, noble in reason, infinite in faculty, in action like an angel, in apprehension like a god. This volume, as its title indicates, includes passages dealing with the art of literature in general, and in particular with a number of prose authors and prose writings. These include some of Coleridge's best known and most brilliant sayings. In prose, as much as in poetry, he read largely, and seldom read with- out making some comment on the effect produced by the author whom he was reading upon his sensitive appreciation and vivid intelligence. Among his criticisms on men of letters other than the poets are such things as the famous epigram on Swift, anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco, or the equally ^famous antithesis between Richardson and Fielding, sayings which have become, as one might say, part of the thing they criticize. But they are comparatively few in number, and for the most part detached or occasional. Coleridge himself was a prose writer of distinction, as a pamphleteer, an essayist, an ex- pounder of artistic, religious, and philosophic doctrine. But his highest achievement in letters was as a poet ; and his chief work as a critic of letters is in his criticism of poetry. This criticism, as it will be found collected in the vi INTRODUCTION following pages, falls mainly under three heads. First, and bulking much most largely as it was thought out and recorded most deliberately, comes that which is directly connected with Wordsworth, and with the movement in English poetry which Wordsworth and himself had initiated. Next, but at once less full and less systematic, is that on Shakespeare, and in- cidentally or collaterally on the other dramatists of the Shakespearian age. Lastly come a few pages, brief in substance but of great importance, on poetry itself. These may be read either before or after the rest, according as we are disposed to regard them as the root-principles, or the summing-up and dis- tillation, of the whole body of his criticism. But that circle returns into itself and ends where it began ; and so it is well to read these few pages both before and after the rest. The editor has very properly chosen to place them at the beginning of this volume, as giving the essential groundwork of ideas, the scheme of thought, on which all Coleridge's specific literary criticisms are based. But, on the other hand, it is only in the light of those criticisms that we can gradually come to understand the ideas themselves and their connexion with one another. Only in that light do the formulae in which he embodies them become clearly intelligible — if they always become intelligible even then. Without a sufficient know- ledge of their applications these formulae are abstract, and have not an obvious relevance to actual poetry or its effect upon us. But though Coleridge, in in- terpreting and accounting for poetry, followed a INTRODUCTION vii deductive method, the definitions and axioms from which he starts were themselves induced from a wide discursive survey. His reading in poetry was large and varied ; the response of his senses to it was of unequalled delicacy, the response of his intelligence to it was almost instantaneous ; his power of analys- ing and recording impressions was extraordinarily great. In his theorizing he is really following the guidance, or at all events the suggestions, of his instinct : he is justifying impressions already made, habits of appreciation already formed. Comprehensive definitions, or what purport to be such, in matters which deal with life, or with any art which, like poetry, is a function of life, must always be taken at their worth. They are not so much definitions as crystallized impressions. The thing to be defined is infinitely delicate, mobile, and complex. A definition can express one or another aspect of it, not the thing itself. The problem is somewhat similar to that which presented itself to painters when they set themselves to paint not outlines but the -things indicated by outlines, not colours but light. The more the definition approaches reality, the less it becomes a definition at all. Even with Coleridge we shall find that his attempts to define poetry are best, are most helpful, when they are most obviously incomplete. ' Poetry is the best words in the best order ' : that is a mere improvisation to be sure, a piece of table-talk, but it is a phrase which he often repeated, and dwelt on with obvious satisfac- tion. • It does not bear analysis ; but it stimulates viii INTRODUCTION thought. It suggests more than it conveys. It throws one strong ray of light full on its subject : formally, it is an epigram rather than a definition ; still less is it what Coleridge calls it, a homely defini- tion. But when he goes beyond a saying like this, he becomes, like all others who have made similar attempts to define poetry, confused and unreal. In the extract from the Biographia Literaria which has been chosen to head the following selection, we have Coleridge possibly at his most characteristic, but certainly not at his best or his most illuminating. 'The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordina- tion of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul, reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities : of sameness, with difference ; of the general with the concrete ; the idea with the image ; the individual with the repre- sentative ; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects ; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order ; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature, the manner to the matter, and our admiration of the poet to the sympathy with the poetry.' INTRODUCTION ix There is not much help here; it is rhetoric, not criticism. And when we go on to read that ' Good Sense is the Body of poetic Genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each ', we seem to be back in the barren word-play of a century earlier, in the desert from which poetry had already been delivered, and from which Coleridge himself had been one of her deliverers. But as soon as we pas's from these large incoherent abstractions to the body of criticism which they in- troduce, our feet are on firm ground, and Coleridge is a guide wno seldom fails to show us a way. This is especially so when he handles Wordsworth. The conjunction and mutual interaction of the two minds in the Annus Mirabilis of 1796-7 had created much more than the volume of Lyrical Ballads. It had created a new world; and in that world Coleridge lived and had his effective being. All that he did afterwards may be traced back in germ to that year and its results. When he returns upon it he always recovers something of its original radiance and strength. Apart from this, Coleridge the critic is generally at his best when he is, directly or by implication, criticizing criticism : for then he had something to bite on, and he was kept to the point. His critical faculty, like his creative faculty, was subject to fits of torpor ; his delight in dialectic was constantly enticing him into bypaths of speculation. His powers were only called into full activity by some x INTRODUCTION external excitation ; and that they might be exer- cised coherently he required a tonic, not an opiate. Both requirements were met when he addressed him- self to a sustained consideration of Wordsworth's poetry and Wordsworth's poetical doctrine. Both the poetry and the poetical doctrine were enough his own to excite in him the keenest sympathy and the mest delicate appreciation ; both were enough not his own for him to have no illusions about them. Hence this section of Coleridge's literary criticism should be read in close connexion with the companion volume of Wordsworth's literary criticism. Words- worth's greatness was in poetry, not in criticism or exposition. He was unskilful as a dialectician, and lacked persuasiveness of rhetoric ; as Coleridge very justly points out, the opposition and obloquy which his poetry for long encountered were very largely brought on by his own prefaces. Again, the qualities which make the special greatness of his poetry are alien, or even opposed, to those of the accomplished critic. Wordsworth thought and felt with great intensity ; but his experience of letters (as we speak of a man's experience of life) was not great, and his intellect lost in range and flexibility what it gained in concentration. Throughout life he brooded over his own mind, over his own ideas, over his own writings. He found his own life an unfathomable well into which, as his eye grew trained to see in darkness, he could plunge deeper and deeper down among the springs of life. From those depths — and they were inexhaustible — he drew the water of which INTRODUCTION xi we may still drink, and which we shall not find in other vessels. But when he rose from them, it was with eyes that did not readily adjust themselves to the upper air ; and that is why he so often reminds one of an owl in the daylight. The circling flight, the poise and swoop of the critic were not his. When he went beyond himself he was unsure, he was almost unobservant. His sister Dorothy observed for him : s She gave me eyes, 1 he says, and it is no mere form of words, but, like all that he says of her, the exact truth. The sensitiveness and receptive- ness which, through the wonderful sympathy that existed between them, she was able to project into him from herself, is perhaps a feminine quality, or at least implies in a man a texture of senses and mind too fine to resist the impact of life. Thus, at all events, it was with Coleridge. The * damaged archangel' of Lamb's profoundly pene- trating phrase passed his life floundering between the empyrean and the gutter. His senses and his intellect were both painfully acute, so much so that they were a misery to him ; he was their servant and not their master. In his highest flights he often finds himself, like another damaged archangel before him, adrift for want of controlling power — His sail-broad vans He spreads for flight, and in the surging smoke As in a cloudy chair, ascending, rides Audacious ; but, that seat soon failing, meets A vast vacuity. Such is the feeling which Coleridge's criticism is xii INTRODUCTION apt to give when he generalizes, and especially when he attempts to define the functions of poetry or the quality of a poet in the terms of a quasi-philosophical system. But this comes of the excess rather than the defect of his critical faculty. So long as he moves among real things, his insight is instinctive, his touch certain. One of the most striking things about Wordsworth as a critic is the contrast between the truth of his general principles and the bungling way in which he applies them. His applications of his own doctrine, his particular criticisms on the work of other poets, are often loose, sometimes demon- strably wrong. With Coleridge it is the reverse. His general ideas are nebulous ; he becomes intoxi- cated with his own rhetoric and dialectic, and seems now and then like one talking (as, in fact, he often did) in a sort of dream, under the effect of some opiate which invested all things in an iridescent haze. But when he is following and testing Wordsworth's doctrine, his criticism is as accurate as it is luminous. He not only sees where Wordsworth goes wrong, but points out how and why. Take, for instance, his analysis of Wordsworth's theory about the language of poetry. Here, strangely enough, it is Wordsworth who is fantastic, Coleridge who is sensible and sound. 6 Volition should be discernible in metrical language, because it is an artificial structure ' ; 6 Whatever is combined with metre must, though not in itself poetic, have nevertheless some property in common with poetry ' ; ' Where the language is not different from that of prose, the metre itself must become INTRODUCTION xiii feeble ' ; nothing could be more true, or more exactly right. So it is with his particular judgements on Wordsworth's poems. They are always good : they are sometimes still the best. His enumeration of Wordsworth's excellences in the Biographia Literaria is even now the closest to truth of any which have been made. This certainty of judgement extends to nearly all his criticisms of the poets. Exceptions must be made in some cases, where he criticizes on insufficient knowledge. Thus some remarks which he makes on Claudian seem to show either that he had never read Claudian or that he confused his poetry with that of Ausonius, as is possible in view of the fact that he criticizes as Claudian's the famous Phoenix of Lactantius. But he was quite incapable of blundering, and blundering obstinately, as Words- worth does in his detailed criticism of Gray's sonnet on the death of West. It is when he theorizes, even in relation to Wordsworth, that he is apt to lose touch of reality, and consequently to lose touch of poetry. In a well-known passage of the Table Talk he sets forth, with his usual persuasiveness and mastery of language, his theory of the sort of poetry that Wordsworth ought to have written. 4 It is in sub- stance,' he adds, ' what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy.' Yes ! but poetry is not philosophy. When Coleridge, as he so often does, tries to identify the two, tries to express the function of poetry, in the terms of his own meta- physical system, he not only ceases to be a poet but ceases to be a critic. xiv INTRODUCTION Nigh foundered, on he fares, Treading the crude consistence, half on foot, Half flying. Much of this crude consistence will be found in the following pages. To discern its boundaries, to discriminate the false from the true in it, is a task which itself demands a trained faculty and a sound judgement. And this demand, which is made on us when we study Coleridge's literary criticism, is just one of the main reasons why the study of it is not only illuminating, but stimulating and formative, in so high a degree. This is true of his criticism on Wordsworth. It is true, with a difference, of his criticism on Shake- speare, which comes next to the other both in amount and in value. But here we are at an in- cidental disadvantage; Ave do not possess it in any continuous and considered shape. His lectures on Shakespeare were for the most part brilliant but erratic improvisations. ' In this,' Crabb Robinson drily notes in his diary of one of them, ■ he surpassed himself in the art of talking in a very interesting way, without speaking at all on the subject.'' Of another in the same series, a month later, he records that it was ' incomparably the best ' of the seven : ' he was spirited, methodical, and for the greater part, intelligible.'' Even for what he said we have to depend on imperfect notes taken among the audience. Beyond these there is nothing but a number of detached remarks, or records of spoken monologues. In this heterogeneous mass of fragments gold is INTRODUCTION xv mixed with dross. But we shall find here also that the chief permanent value of what is preserved lies in particular criticisms, and that his generalizations are often incoherent and sometimes nearly meaning- less. He had, indeed, in the fullest measure one great qualification : his admiration for Shakespeare was boundless. But it was not always true. In his critical as in his creative work he was a romantic ; and to both the saying of Sainte-Beuve applies, 6 L'ecueil particulier du genre romantique, c'est le faux.' In dealing with his predecessors in Shake- spearian criticism he is always, or neai'ly always, admirable ; he sees where they went wrong, and how : but he falls into errors of his own which it is now easy to see and perhaps, therefore, a little ungracious to emphasize. It was natural, one may even say it was inevitable, to exaggerate where the task was that of breaking down an inveterate tradi- tion. But that very exaggeration helped to create a new tradition which was largely false, and which, so far as it was false, has been necessarily mischievous, all the more so that he clothed it in the colours of a persuasive and seductive eloquence. ' Not only individuals,' he says in his attack on the eighteenth- century tradition, ' but even whole nations are oft- times so enslaved to the habits of their education and immediate circumstances as not to judge dis- interestedly.' It sounds strangely in our ears now to hear Coleridge accuse any one^of being enslaved to habits. For the self- wrought enslavement of his senses communicated itself — slowly, perhaps, but in xvi INTRODUCTION the end surely— to his once lucid and unconfined intelligence. Of him we may be apt to say, as he said then of those others, that ' individuals may attain to ex- quisite discrimination, but a true critic cannot be such without placing himself on some central point, some general rule founded in reason, or the faculties common to all\ He believed himself to have found that central point. Other critics before him, and others after him, have thought the same. No such point exists. It is for ever being sought, and for ever eluding the seeker ; it shifts before him as he advances towards it, like the retreating horizon. The history of criticism, like the history of poetry itself, is one of perpetual progress : for criticism is itself a function of life, and life does not stand still. The radiant point from which all the swarming streams of light issue, from which or by reference to which alone they fall into intelligible order, is itself moving with incalculable speed and on a curve of which we cannot trace the law. Thus it is that all criticism necessarily becomes obsolete. Its reference is to a synthesis of life which is provisional and evanescent. It bases itself on a momentary con- figuration of human intelligence, which it treats as though it were a fixed chart giving ascertained distances and relations. Thus, also, it is that no criticism, in another sense, ever becomes obsolete : for it is part of history ; and history is alive. Coleridge's criticism illuminated Shakespeare and the Shakespearian age in poetry for his own genera- INTRODUCTION xvii tion, because it taught them to discard an earlier critical attitude no longer relevant to their own minds, and led them to look at Shakespeare with fresh eyes. It may still illuminate him for ours, if we regard it less as a systematic exposition, a theory of Shakespeare, than as a body of observations and records. It remains true, as Coleridge himself acutely remarks, that the characters of Shakespeare's work, like those in real life, are to be inferred by the reader, not told to him. But we have to be trained to inference ; we begin by seeing, for the most part, only what has been already seen by others, who have made a record of what they have seen and turn our attention to it. In some such way Coleridge may best serve as a guide : not when he tells us that 'Shakespeare wished to impress upon us the truth that' this or that is the case; not when he says that a certain psychological method ' constitutes our Shakespeare the morning star, the guide and the pioneer, of true philosophy ' : but rather when he shows us things in Shakespeare that we had not seen before, but see with a thrill of recognition when he points them out to us : something in Lear or Othello, in Cressida or Miranda ; or < Ophelia's wild snatches, and the sweet carollings in As You Like It ' ; or how 'we get to like Helena from the other characters praising and commending her so much \ Especially is this so where he abandons himself, as it were, to his own poetical sensitiveness, and uses his un- equalled power of making language a vehicle of emotion. In this kind the most celebrated instance xviii INTRODUCTION is a single sentence on Romeo and Juliet, let fall incidentally in a discussion of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher : ' It is a spring day, gusty and beautiful in the morn, and closing like an April evening with the song of the nightingale.'' This is hardly criticism in any formal sense : it is the sort of criticism in which words are used with the effect of music. Music does not argue. Art explains nothing. And criticism, in the hands of an artist, is itself art. Thus it is with Coleridge's criticism, even when it most nearly approaches dogma. He does not cease to be an artist and a critic even when he is preaching ; and of course it was only Lamb's fun to say that he had never heard him doing anything else. What he says magisterially tells us what he had felt instinc- tively ; it does not explain Shakespeare and the poets except by showing us what effect they had on him, and inducing an effect of the same nature in us, through sympathy, or it may be through reaction. We must translate, as the acquired instinct of a true critical faculty will gradually enable us to do, his language into our own ; in doing so we shall come to learn how far the thought or feeling below the language is our own also. This value at least all criticism which was in its time vital retains. For the point of view from which we regard Shakespeare, or any great poet or artist of a past age, is in a sense the integration of all the points of view from which he has been regarded in the intervening generations. His light comes to us, not as vibra- tions strike through a vacuum, but coloured and INTRODUCTION xix refracted by many layers of association and inter- pretation. We stand in our actual relation to him as the result of that process : our own position, our own point of view, is destined in its turn to become historical, to be a new element in moulding the appreciation of the future. Coleridge's poetry, where it can be compared with that of any other great poet, is generally inferior to it ; where it is most characteristic, it is wholly in- comparable. So it is also to a certain extent with his poetical criticism. He did not bring to it the heavy armament of scholarship. He did not give to it the qualities of industry, patience, and con- scientiousness. They are qualities with which criti- cism can hardly dispense, but they were not his to give. But he had a miraculous gift of expression, and a poetical instinct never surpassed, seldom if ever equalled. What he says about poetry cannot lose its value or its interest ; for it tells us, not indeed what poetry is, but what poetry meant to the author of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, r \ NOTE The order in which the extracts have been arranged sacrifices all idea of balance to the preservation of a scheme of development. The Wordsworth chapters in the Biographia Literaria demanded full quotation, and yet thrust out a great deal of critical matter which might well have been included in a more cumbersome volume. The difficulty indeed of cutting down the material to a reasonable limit has been very great, and has involved the question how far preference should be given to passages actually written by Coleridge himself. The unwary reader must be warned that the Wordsworth chapters alone are from works published by the author during his life. The rest consists of Table Talk, edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge, of quotations from the Literary Remains and Anima Poetae, i. e. autograph annotations of books and scraps from notebooks and diaries, as well as some reported lectures ; and of one or two passages from Mr. Payne Collier's diaries and shorthand notes on the lectures. Briefly, many of the following extracts may not be expressed in Coleridge's own words ; but there can be no doubt that the speaker's ideas have been faithfully preserved, and in most instances his style of expressing them. Thanks are especially due to Mr. William Heinemann for permission to print extracts from the Anima Poetae, edited in 1895 by Mr. E. H. Coleridge. The text of the passages from Biographia Literaria is that of Mr. J. Shawcross's edition in two volumes (Oxford, 1907), reprinted from the original edition of 1 8 1 7. Coleridge's methods of punctuation and spelling are often bewil- dering; but an attempt has been made to introduce some uniformity into the passages selected from his own writings and from his reported speeches. Much help has also been obtained from Mr. Thomas Ashe's volume of the Lectures on Shakespeare, &c, in the Bohn series. LITERARY CRITICISM POETRY The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordina- tion of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul (laocis ejfertur habenis) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities : of sameness, with difference ; of the general with the concrete ; the idea with the image ; the individual with the representative ; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects ; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order ; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement ; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature ; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. 6 Doubtless,' as Sir John Davies observes of the soul — (and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and 2 POETRY even more appropriately, to the poetic Imagina- tion) — Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange, As fire converts to fire the things it burns, As we our food into our nature change. From their gross matter she abstracts their forms, And draws a kind of quintessence from things; Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light on her celestial wings. Thus does she, when from individual states She doth abstract the universal kinds : Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates. Steal access through the senses to our minds. Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic Genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each ; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole. Biog. Lit., ch. xiv. *■ Peculiar, not far-fetched ; natural, but not obvious; delicate, not affected ; dignified, not swelling ; fiery, but not mad ; rich in imagery, but not loaded with it— in short, a union of harmony and good sense, of perspicuity and conciseness. Thought is the body of such an ode, enthusiasm the soul, and imagery the drapery. Anima Poetae, p. 4. Poetry, like schoolboys, by too frequent and severe correction, may be cowed into dullness ! Anima Poetae, p. 4. POETRY 3 Poetry which excites us to artificial feelings makes us callous to real ones. Anima Poetae, p. 5. The elder languages were fitter for poetry because they expressed only prominent ideas with clearness, the others but darkly. . . . Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood. It was so by me with Gray's Bard and Collins"* Odes. The Bard once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure. From this cause it is that what I call metaphysical poetry gives me so much delight. Anima Poetae, p. 5. Great harm is done by bad poets in trivializin beautiful expressions and images, and associatin disgust and indifference with the technical forms of poetry. Anima Poetae, p. 59. » A poet ought not to pick Nature's pocket ; let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine Nature accurately, but write from recollection ; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory. T. T. Sept. 22, 1830. Modern Poetry Really the metre of some of the modern poems I have read, bears about the same relation to metre properly understood, that dumb-bells do to music ; both are for exercise, and pretty severe too, I think. T. T. Sept. 22, 183Q. B2 4 POETRY Prose and Poetry I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry ; that is, prose — words in their best order; — poetry, the best words in the best order. T. T. July 12, 1827. A Caution to Posterity There are actions which left undone mark the greater man ; but to have done them does not imply a bad or mean man. Such, for instance, are Martial's compliments of Domitian. So may we praise Milton without condemning Dryden. By the by, we are all too apt to forget that contemporaries have not the same wholeness, and fixedness in their notions of persons' characters, that we their posterity have. They can hope wad. fear and believe and disbelieve. We make up an ideal which, like the fox or lion in the fable, never changes. Anima Poetae, p. 159. Limitation of Love of Poetry A man may be, perhaps, exclusively a poet, a poet most exquisite in his kind, though the kind must needs be of inferior worth ; I say, may be ; for I cannot recollect any one instance in which I have a right to suppose it. But, surely, to have an exclusive pleasure in poetry, not being yourself a poet; — to turn away from all effort, and to dwell wholly on the images of another's vision — is an unworthy and effeminate thing. A jeweller may devote his whole time to jewels unblamed; but the mere amateur, who grounds his taste on no chemical or geological idea, cannot claim the same exemption POETRY 5 from despect. How shall he fully enjoy Wordsworth, who has never meditated on the truths which Words- worth has wedded to immortal verse ? Omniana. Poetical Filter I once thought of making a collection — to be called ' The Poetical Filter ' — upon the principle of simply omitting from the old pieces of lyrical poetry which we have, those parts in which the whim or the bad taste of the author or the fashion of his age prevailed over his genius. You would be surprised at the number of exquisite wholes which might be made by this simple operation, and, perhaps, by the insertion of a single line or half a line, out of poems which are now utterly disregarded on account of some odd or incongruous passages in them ; — just as whole volumes of Wordsworth's poems were formerly neglected or laughed at, solely because of some few wilfulnesses, if I may so call them, of that great man — whilst at the same time five-sixths of his poems would have been admired, and indeed popular, if they had appeared without those drawbacks, under the name of Byron or Moore or Campbell, or any other of the fashionable favourites of the day. But he has won the battle now, aye ! and will wear the crown, whilst English is English. T. T. Oct. 23, 1833. Elegy and Ode Elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. It may treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject for itself \ but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself. As he will feel regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow 6 POETRY and love become the principal themes of elegy. Elegy presents everything as lost and gone, or absent and future. The elegy is the exact opposite of the Homeric epic, in which all is purely external and objective, and the poet is a mere voice. The true lyric ode is subjective too : but then it delights to present things as actually existing and visible, although associated with the past, or coloured highly by the subject of the ode itself. T. T. Oct. 23, 1833. Dialogue in Verse Can dialogues in verse be defended? I cannot but think that a great philosophical poet ought always to teach the reader himself as from himself. A poem does not admit argumentation, though it does admit development of thought. In prose there may be a difference ; though I must confess that, even in Plato and Cicero, I am always vexed that the authors do not say what they have to say at once in their own persons. The introductions and little urbanities are, to be sure, very delightful in their way ; I would not lose them ; but I have no admiration for the practice of ventriloquizing through another man's mouth. T. T. July 21, 1832. Style The collocation of words is so artificial in Shake- speare and Milton, that you may as well think of pushing a brick out of a wall with your fore-finger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of their finished passages. A good lecture upon style might be composed, by taking, on the one hand, the slang of L'Estrange, POETRY 7 and perhaps even of Roger North, which became so fashionable after the Restoration as a mark^ of loyalty ; and, on the other, the Johnsonian magnilo- quence or the balanced metre of Junius ; and then showing how each extreme is faulty, upon different grounds. It is quite curious to remark the prevalence of the Cavalier slang style in the divines of Charles the Second's time. BarroAV could not, of course, adopt such a mode of writing throughout, because he could not in it have communicated his elaborate thinkings and lofty rhetoric ; but even Barrow not unfrequently lets slip a phrase here and there, in the regular Roger North way— much to the delight, no doubt, of the largest part of his audience and contemporary readers. See particularly, for instances of this 5> his work on the Pope's supremacy. South is full of it. The style of Junius is a sort of metre, the law of which is a balance of thesis and antithesis. When he gets out of this aphorismic metre into a sentence of five or six lines long, nothing -can exceed the slovenliness of the English. Home Tooke and a long sentence seem the only two antagonists that were too much for him. Still the antithesis of Junius is a real antithesis of images or thought ; but the antithesis of Johnson is rarely more than verbal. The definition of good prose is — proper words in their proper places ; — of good verse — the most proper words in their proper places. The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more ; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault. In the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page after page, understanding the author perfectly, without once taking notice of the medium of communication ; — it is as if he had been speaking 8 POETRY to you all the while. But in verse you must do more; — there the words, the media, must be beautiful, and ought to attract your notice — yet not so much and so perpetually as to destroy the unity which ought to result from the whole poem. This is the general rule, but, of course, subject to some modifi- cations, according to the different kinds of prose or verse. Some prose may approach towards verse, as oratory, and therefore a more studied exhibition of the media may be proper ; and some verse may border more on mere narrative, and there the style should be simpler. But the great thing in poetry is, quocunque modo, to effect a unity of impression upon the whole ; and a too great fullness and profusion of point in the parts will prevent this. Who can read with pleasure more than a hundred lines or so of Hudibras at one time ? Each couplet or quatrain is so whole in itself, that you can't connect them. There is no fusion — just as it is in Seneca. T. T. July 3, 1833. Parodies Parodies on new poems are read as satires ; on old ones — the soliloquy of Hamlet, for instance — as compliments. A man of genius may securely laugh at a mode of attack by which his reviler, in half a century or less, becomes his encomiast. Omniana. Taste, an Ethical Quality Modern poetry is characterized by the poets' anxiety to be always striking. There is the same march in the Greek and Latin poets. Claudian, who had powers to have been anything — observe in him this anxious, craving vanity ! Every line, nay, POETRY 9 every word, stops, looks full in your face, and asks and begs for praise! As in a Chinese painting, there are no distances, no perspective, but all is in the foreground; and this is nothing but vanity. I am pleased to think that, when a mere stripling, I had formed the opinion that true taste was virtue and that bad writing was bad feeling. Anima Poetae, p. 165. Ancient Mariner Mrs. Barbauld once told me that she admired the Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults m it— it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question ; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgement the poem had too much ; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might sav^ so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo ! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son. I took the thought of 'grinning for joy \ in that poem, from my companion's remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon, and were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me— 'You grinned like an idiot ! ' He had done the same. T. T. May 31, 1830. 10 POETRY Criterion of Genius You will find this a good gage or criterion of genius — whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take DrydeiVs Achitophel and Zimri — Shaftesbury and Buckingham ; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse ; whereas, in Pope's Timon, &c, the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized. In like manner compare Charles Lamb's exquisite criticisms on Shakespeare with Hazlitt's round and round imitations of them. T. T. Aug. 6, 1832. Talent and Genius • Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited ; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never. T. T. May 21, 1830. Few Poets from the Lower Classes It is very singular that no true poet should have arisen from the lower classes, when it is considered that every peasant who can read knows more of books now than did Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Homer; yet if we except Burns, none such have been. Add. T. T. 11 WORDSWORTH BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA, CHAPTER IV The lyrical Ballads with the preface — Mr. Wordsworth's earlier poems— On fancy and imagination — The investigation of the distinction important to the fine arts. I have wandered far from the object in view, but as I fancied to myself readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted me from the main road ; so I dare calculate on not a few, who will warmly sympathize with them. At present it will be sufficient for my purpose, if I have proved, that Mr. Southey's writings no more than my own furnished the original occasion to this fiction of a new school of poetry, and to the clamors against its supposed founders and proselytes. As little do I believe that Mr. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads were in themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes so entitled. A careful and repeated examination of these confirms me in the belief, that the omission of less than an hundred lines would have precluded nine-tenths of the criticism on this work. I hazard this declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader has taken it up, as he would have done any other collection of poems purporting to derive their sub- jects or interests from the incidents of domestic or ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of meditation which the poet utters in his own person and character; with the proviso, that they were perused without knowledge of, or reference to, the author's peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his attention previously directed to 12 WORDSWORTH those peculiarities. In these, as was actually the case with Mr. Southey's earlier works, the lines and passages which might have offended the general taste, would have been considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to perversity of judgement. The men of business who had passed their lives chiefly in cities, and who might therefore be expected to derive the highest pleasure from acute notices of men and manners conveyed in easy, yet correct and pointed language ; and all those who, reading but little poetry, are most stimulated with that species of it, which seems most distant from prose, would probably have passed by the volumes altogether. Others more catholic in their taste, and yet habituated to be most pleased when most excited, would have contented themselves with deciding, that the author had been successful in proportion to the elevation of his style and subject. Not a few perhaps, might by their admiration of 'the lines written near Tintern Abbey', those 'left upon a Seat under a Yew Tree ', the ' old Cumberland beggar ', and ' Ruth ', have been gradually led to peruse with kindred feeling the ' Brothers ', the ' Hart leap well ', and whatever other poems in that collection may be described as holding a- middle place between those written in the highest and those in the humblest style ; as for instance between the ' Tintern Abbey *, and ' the Thorn', or the 'Simon Lee'. Should their taste submit to no further change, and still remain unrecon- ciled to the colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them, that are, more or less, scattered through the class last mentioned ; yet even from the small number of the latter, they would have deemed them but an inconsiderable subtraction from the merit of the whole work ; or, what is sometimes not unpleasing WORDSWORTH 13 in the publication of a new writer, as serving to ascertain the natural tendency, and consequently the proper direction of the author's genius. In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the Lyrical Ballads, I believe that we may safely rest, as the true origin of the unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth's writings have been since doomed to encounter. The humbler passages in the poems themselves were dwelt on and cited to justify the rejection of the theory. What in and for themselves would have been either for- gotten or forgiven as imperfections, or at least comparative failures, provoked direct hostility when announced as intentional, as the result of choice after full deliberation. Thus the poems, admitted by all as excellent, joined with those which had pleased the far greater number, though they formed two-thirds of the whole work, instead of being deemed (as in all right they should have been, even if we take for granted that the reader judged aright) an atonement for the few exceptions, gave wind and fuel to the animosity against both the poems and the poet. In all perplexity there is a portion of fear, which pre- disposes the mind to anger. Not able to deny that the author possessed both genius and a powerful intellect, they felt very positive, but yet were not quite certain, that he might not be in the right, and they themselves in the wrong ; an unquiet state of mind, which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the occasion of it, and by wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had written a long and argumenta- tive essay to persuade them, that Fair is foul, and foul is fair ; in other words, that they had been all their lives 14 WORDSWORTH admiring without judgement, and were now about to censure without reason. 1 That this conjecture is not wide from the mark, I am induced to believe from the noticeable fact, which I can state on my own knowledge, that the same general censure should have been grounded by 1 In opinions of long continuance, and in which we have never before been molested by a single doubt, to be suddenly con- vinced of an error, is almost like being convicted of a fault. There is a state of mind, which is the direct antithesis of that, which takes place when we make a bull. The bull namely consists in the bringing together two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense, of their connexion. The psychological condition, or that which constitutes the possibility of this state, being such disproportionate vividness of two distant thoughts, as extinguishes or obscures the con- sciousness of the intermediate images or conceptions, or wholly abstracts the attention from them. Thus in the well-known bull, 'I was a fine child, but they changed me ' : the first conception expressed in the word * / ', is that of personal identity — Ego contemplans : the second expressed in the word ' me ', is the visual image or object by which the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed — Ego con- templatus. Now the change of one visual image for another involves in itself no absurdity, and becomes absurd only by its immediate juxta-position with the first thought, which is rendered possible by the whole attention being successively absorbed in each singly, so as not to notice the interjacent notion, 'changed', which by its incongruity with the first thought, '/', constitutes the bull. Add only, that this process is facilitated by the circum- stance of the words * I ' and ' me ', being sometimes equivalent, and sometimes having a distinct meaning ; sometimes, namely, signifying the act of self-consciousness, sometimes the external image in and by which the mind represents that act to itself, the result and symbol of its individuality. Now suppose the direct contrary state, and you will have a distinct sense of the connexion between two conceptions, without that sensation of such connexion which is supplied by habit. The man feels as if he were standing on his head, though he cannot but see that he is truly standing on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course have a tendency to associate itself with the person who occasions it ; even as persons, who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are known to feel an in- voluntary dislike towards their physician. WORDSWORTH 15 almost every different person on some different poem. Among those, whose candour and judgement I estimate highly, I distinctly remember six who expressed their objections to the Lyrical Ballads almost in the same words, and altogether to the same purport, at the same time admitting, that several of the poems had given them great pleasure ; and, strange as it might seem, the composition which one cited as execrable, another quoted as his favorite. I am indeed convinced in my own mind, that could the same experiment have been tried with these volumes, as was made in the well known story of the picture, the result would have been the same ; the parts which had been covered by the number of the black spots on the one day, would be found equally albo lapide notatae on the succeeding. However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much aversion, as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of passing them over in silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a bookseller's catalogue; especially, as no one pretends to have found any immorality or indelicacy ; and the poems, therefore, at the worst, could only be regarded as so many light or inferior coins in a roleau of gold, not as so much alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend whose talents I hold in the highest respect, but whose judgement and strong sound sense I have had almost continued occasion to revere, making the usual complaints to me concerning both the style and subjects of Mr. Wordsworth's minor poems ; I admitted that there were some few of the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find a sufficient cause for their having been recorded in metre. I mentioned the ' Alice Fell ' as an instance ; ' Nay,' 16 WORDSWORTH replied my friend with more than usual quickness of manner, ■ I cannot agree with you there ! — that, I own, does seem to me a remarkably pleasing poem.' In the Lyrical Ballads (for my experience does not enable me to extend the remark equally unqualified to the two subsequent volumes), I have heard at different times, and from different individuals every single poem extolled and reprobated, with the ex- ception of those of loftier kind, which as was before observed, seem to have won universal praise. This fact of itself would have made me diffident in my censures, had not a still stronger ground been furnished by the strange contrast of the heat and long continuance of the opposition, with the nature of the faults stated as justifying it. The seductive faults, the dulcia vitia of Cowley, Marini, or Darwin might reasonably be thought capable of corrupting the public judgement for half a century, and require a twenty years' war, campaign after campaign, in order to dethrone the usurper and re-establish the legitimate taste. But that a downright simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity, prosaic words in feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and a preference of mean, degrading, or at best trivial associations and characters, should succeed in forming a school of imitators, a company of almost religious admirers, and this too among young men of ardent minds, liberal education, and not with academic laurels unbestowed ; and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is characterized as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have well-nigh engrosse d criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph ; — this is indeed mat- ter of wonder ) Of yet greater is it, that the contest WORDSWORTH 17 should still continue as 1 undecided as that between Bacchus and the frogs in Aristophanes ; when the former descended to the realms of the departed to bring back the spirit of old and genuine poesy ; — X. (3p€K€K€K€£ KO(i£ K0&£. A. <$AA' efo'Aoto-0' airy ko&£. ovbev yap ear' aAA' 77 Kod£. oIiaioCzt' ov yap juot /oteAei. X. aAAa fxrjv K€Kpa£6[JL€(r6a y 6tt6(tov f] apvy£ av 7]\i&v Xavhdvr) SV f)fx4pas. A. (3p€K€K€Ke}£ KOO,£ Kod£, TOVT(p yap OV VLKT](T€T€. X. ov8e pn]V ?//xaj 5' kcppoVTHTa. — JRanae, 492-3. And here let me dare hint to the authors of the numerous parodies, and pretended imitations of Mr. Wordsworth's style, that at once to conceal and convey wit and wisdom in the sem- blance of folly and dullness, as is done in the Clowns and Fools, nay even in the Dogberry, of our Shakespeare, is doubtless a proof of genius, or at all events of satiric talent ; but that the attempt to ridicule a silly and childish poem, by writing another still sillier and still more childish, can only prove (if it prove anything at all) that the parodist is a still greater blockhead than the original writer, and, what is far worse, a malignant coxcomb to boot. The talent for mimicry seems strongest where the human race are most degraded. The poor, naked, half-human savages of New Holland were found excellent mimics : and, in civilized society, minds of the very lowest stamp alone satirize by copying. At least the difference which must blend with and balance the likeness, in order to constitute a just imitation, existing here merely in caricature, detracts from the libeller's heart, without adding an iota to the credit of his understanding. 18 WORDSWORTH ovbiirore. K€Kpa£oixaL y&p, k&v /me birj, bC fjfxepas, ecus av vfJiQv iirucpaTrjCTG) rod Koa£. X. ppcK€K€&£ KOA v H KOA'E ! During the last year of my residence at Cam- bridge, I became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication entitled Descriptive Sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evi- dently announced. In the form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of the par- ticular lines and periods, there is an harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images all a-glow, which might recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out of the hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit was elaborating. The language was not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength ; while the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with the difficulties of the style, de- mands always a greater closeness of attention, than poetry, — at all events, than descriptive poetry — has a right to claim. It not seldom therefore justified the complaint of obscurity. In the following extract I have sometimes fancied, that I saw an emblem of the poem itself, and of the author's genius as it was then displayed. — '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 ; And yet what frequent bursts of overpowering light ! Triumphant on the bosom of the storm, Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form ; WORDSWORTH 19 Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline ; Wide o'er the Alps a hundred streams unfold, At once to pillars turn'd that flame with gold; Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun The West, that burns like one dilated sun, Where in a mighty crucible expire The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire. The poetic Psyche, in its process to full develope- ment, undergoes as many changes as its Greek name- sake, the butterfly. 1 And it is remarkable how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults and errors of its earliest products ; faults which, in its earliest compositions, are the more obtrusive and confluent, because as heterogeneous elements, which had only a temporary use, they constitute the very ferment, by which themselves are carried off. Or we may compare them to some diseases, which must work on the humours, and be thrown out on the surface, in order to secure the patient from their future recurrence. I was in my twenty-fourth year, when I had the happiness of knowing Mr. Words- worth personally, and while memory lasts, I shall hardly forget the sudden effect produced on my mind, by his recitation of a manuscript poem, which still remains unpublished, but of which the stanza and 1 The fact, that in Greek Psyche is the common name for the soul, and the butterfly, is thus alluded to in the following stanzas from an unpublished poem of the author : The butterfly the ancient Grecians made The soul's fair emblem, and its only name — t But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade Of mortal life ! For in this earthly frame Our's is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame, Manifold motions making little speed, And to deform and kill the things, whereon we feed. S.T.C. c2 20 WORDSWORTH tone of style were the same as those of ' The Female Vagrant ', as originally printed in the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads. There was here no mark of strained thought, or forced diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery ; and, as the poet hath himself well described in his lines 'on re-visiting the Wye\ manly reflection and human associations had given both variety, and an additional interest to natural objects, which, in the passion and appetite of the first love, they had seemed to him neither to need or permit. The occasional obscurities, which had risen from an imperfect controul over the resources of his native language, had almost wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and wil], more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless the attention has been specially directed to their worthlessness and incongruity. 1 I did not perceive anything particular in the mere style of the poem alluded to during its 1 Mr. Wordsworth, even in his two earliest, the Evening Walk and the Descriptive Sketches, is more free from this latter defect than most of the young poets his contemporaries. It may however be exemplified, together with the harsh and obscure construction, in which he more often offended, in the following lines : — 'Mid stormy vapours ever driving by, Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry ; Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer, Denied the bread of life, the foodful ear, Dwindles the pear on autumn's latest spray, And apple sickens pale in summer's ray ; Ev'n here content has fixed her smiling reign With independence, child of high disdain. I hope, I need not say, that I have quoted these lines for no other purpose than to make my meaning fully understood. It is to be regretted that Mr. Wordsworth has not republished these two poems entire. WORDSWORTH 21 recitation, except indeed such difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's mind Spenser's own style, would doubt- less have authorized, in my then opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life, than could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet. It was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to common defects, or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and sub- sequently on my judgement. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought ; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed ; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmo- sphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops. 6 To find no contradiction in the union of old and new ; to contemplate the ancient of days and all his works with feelings as fresh, as if all had then sprang forth at the first creative fiat ; charac- terizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood ; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar; With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, And man and woman ; this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talents. %% WORDSWORTH And therefore is it the prime merit of genius and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accom- paniment of mental, no less than of bodily, con- valescence. Who has not a thousand times seen snow fall on water ? Who has not watched it with a new feeling, from the time that he has read Burns' comparison of sensual pleasure To snow that falls upon a river A moment white — then gone for ever ! In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission. Truths of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet being at the same time of universal interest, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the life and efficiency of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.' — The Friend, 1 p. 76, No. 5. This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or less predominant, and which con- stitutes the character of his mind, I no sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led me first to suspect — (and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my conjecture into full 1 As * the Friend ' was printed on stampt sheets, and sent only by the post to a very limited number of subscribers, the author has felt less objection to quote from it, though a work of his own. To the public at large indeed it is the same as a volume in manuscript. WORDSWORTH 23 conviction) — that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. It is not, I own, easy to conceive a more opposite translation of the Greek Phantasia than the Latin Imaginatio ; but it is equally true that in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize 1 those words originally of the same meaning, which the conflux of dialects had supplied to the more homo- geneous languages, as the Greek and German : and which the same cause, joined with accidents of trans- 1 This is effected either by giving to the one word a general, and to the other an exclusive use ; as ' to put on the back ' and * to endorse ' ; or by an actual distinction of meanings, as * naturalist ' and ' physician ' ; or by difference of relation, as 1 1 ' and ' Me ' (each of which the rustics of our different pro- vinces still use in all the cases singular of the first personal pronoun). Even the mere difference, or corruption, in the pro- nunciation of the same word, if it have become general, will produce a new word with a distinct signification ; thus ' pro- perty ' and ' propriety ' ; the latter of which, even to the time of Charles II, was the written word for all the senses of both. Thus too ' mister' and ' master', both hasty pronunciations of the same word « magister ', « mistress ', and • miss ', ' if ', and • give ', &c. , &c. There is a sort of minim immortal among the animal- cula infusoria, which has not naturally either birth, or death, absolute beginning, or absolute end : for at a certain period a small point appears on its back, which deepens and lengthens till the creature divides into two, and the same process recom- mences in each of the halves now become integral. This may be a fanciful, but it is by no means a bad emblem of the formation of words, and may facilitate the conception, how immense a nomenclature may be organized from a few simple sounds by rational beings in a social state. For each new application, or excitement of the same sound, will call forth a different sensation, which cannot but affect the pronunciation. The after recollections of the sound, without the same vivid sensation, will modify it still further ; till at length all trace of the original likeness is worn away. U WORDSWORTH lation from original works of different countries, occasion in mixt languages like our own. The first and most important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under one and the same word, and (this done) to appropriate that word exclusively to one meaning, and the synonyme (should there be one) to the other. But if — (as will be often the case in the arts and sciences) — no synonyme exists, we must either invent or borrow a word. In the present instance the appro- priation has already begun, and been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If there- fore I should succeed in establishing the actual exist- ence of two faculties generally different, the nomen- clature would be at once determined. To the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should con- fine the term imagination ; while the other would be contra - distinguished as fancy. Now were it once fully ascertained, that this division is no less grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania or Otway's Lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber, from Shakespeare's What ! have his daughters brought him to this pass ? or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements ; the theory of the fine arts, and of poetry in particular, could not, I thought, but derive some additional and important light. It would in its immediate effects furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic ; and ultimately to the poet himself. In energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power ; and from directing in the discrimination and WORDSWORTH 25 appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production. To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of originality. It has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology have long been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it, are so com- monly found together, that they pass almost for the same. I trust therefore, that there will be more good humour than contempt, in the smile with which the reader chastises my self-complacency, if I confess myself uncertain, whether the satisfaction from the perception of a truth new to myself may not have been rendered more poignant by the conceit, that it would be equally so to the public. There was a time, certainly, in which I took some little credit to myself, in the belief that I had been the first of my country- men, who had pointed out the diverse meaning of which the two terms were capable, and analyzed the faculties to which they should be appropriated. Mr. W. Taylor's recent volume of synonymes I have not yet seen ; * but his specification of the terms 1 I ought to have added, with the exception of a single sheet which I accidentally met with at the printer's. Even from this scanty specimen, I found it impossible to doubt the talent, or not to admire the ingenuity, of the author. That his distinctions were for the greater part unsatisfactory to my mind, proves nothing against their accuracy ; but it may possibly be service- able to him, in case of a second edition, if I take this opportunity of suggesting the query : whether he may not have been occasionally misled, by having assumed, as to me he appears to have done, the non-existence of any absolute synonymes in our language ? Now I cannot but think, that there are many which remain for our posterity to distinguish and appropriate, and which I regard as so much reversionary wealth in our mother tongue. When two distinct meanings are confounded under one or more words (and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is progressive and of course imperfect), erroneous consequences will be drawn, and what is true in one sense of the word will be affirmed as true in toto. Men of research, startled by the consequences, seek in the things themselves 26 WORDSWORTH in question has been clearly shown to be both in- sufficient and erroneous by Mr. Wordsworth in the Preface added to the late collection of his ' Lyrical Ballads and other poems 1 . The explanation which Mr. Wordsworth has himself given, will be found to differ from mine, chiefly perhaps, as our objects are different. It could scarcely indeed happen otherwise, from the advantage I have enjoyed of frequent con- versation with him on a subject to which a poem of his own first directed my attention, and my conclusions concerning which, he had made more lucid to myself by many happy instances drawn from the operation of natural objects on the mind. But it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose to consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude their diversity in kind ; while it is my object to investigate the seminal principle, and (whether in or out of the mind) for a knowledge of the fact, and having discovered the difference, remove the equivocation either by the substitution of a new word, or by the appropriation of one of the two or more words, which had before been used pro- miscuously. When this distinction has been so naturalized and of such general currency that the language does as it were think for us (like the sliding rule which is the mechanic's safe sub- stitute for arithmetical knowledge) we then say that it is evident to common sense. Common sense, therefore, differs in different ages. What was born and christened in the schools passes by degrees into the world at large, and becomes the property of the market and the tea-table. At least I can dis- cover no other meaning of the term, common sense, if it is to convey any specific difference from sense and judgement in genere, and where it is not used scholastically for the universal reason. Thus in the reign of Charles II. the philosophic world was called to arms by the moral sophisms of Hobbes, and the ablest writers exerted themselves in the detection of an error which a school-boy would now be able to confute by the mere recollection, that compulsion and obligation conveyed two ideas Perfectly disparate, and that what appertained to the one had een falsely transferred to the other by a mere confusion of terms. WORDSWORTH 27 then from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness. Yet even in this attempt I am aware that I shall be obliged to draw more largely on the reader's attention, than so immethodical a miscellany can authorize; when in such a work (the Ecclesiastical Polity) of such a mind as Hookers, the judicious author, though no less admirable for the perspicuity than for the port and dignity of his language ; and though he wrote for men of learning in a learned age ; saw nevertheless occasion to anticipate and guard against 'complaints of obscurity', as often as he was about to trace his subject 6 to the highest well-spring and fountain'. Which (continues he), ' because men are not accustomed to, the pains we take are more needful a great deal, than acceptable ; and the matters we handle, seem by reason of newness (till the mind grow better acquainted with them) dark and intricate.' I would gladly therefore spare both myself and others this labor, if I knew how without it to present an intelligible statement of my poetic creed, — not as my opinions, which weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established premises conveyed in such a form, as is calculated either to effect a fundamental conviction, or to receive a funda- mental confutation. If I may dare once more adopt the words of Hooker, 'they, unto whom we shall seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, because it is in their own hands to spare that labor, which they are not willing to endure.' Those at least, let me be permitted to add, who have taken so much pains to render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, 28 WORDSWORTH and have supported the charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other authority than their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as to me not to refuse their attention to my own statement of the theory, which I do acknowledge ; or shrink from the trouble of examining the grounds on which I rest it, or the arguments which I offer in its justification. CHAPTER XVII Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth — Rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially unfavorable to the formation of a human diction — The best parts of language the product of philosophers, not of clowns or shepherds — Poetry essentially ideal and generic— The language of Milton as much the language of real life, yea, incomparably more so than that of the cottager. As far then as Mr. Wordsworth in his preface contended, and most ably contended, for a reforma- tion 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 con- verted 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 empassioned 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 WORDSWORTH 29 preface. I cannot likewise but add, that the com- parison 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 in- effectual. 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 con- troversy, 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 con- gruous with his own theory than with that which he reprobates. In like manner with a kind of instinc- tive 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 ', 30 WORDSWORTH 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 inter- preted, 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 quali- fied 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 WORDSWORTH 31 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 con- dition 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 em- phatic 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 ; be- cause 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 trans- ferred 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 coun- try. As the two principal I rank that independence, which raises a man above servitude, or daily toil for m WORDSWORTH the profit of others, yet not above the necessity of industry and a frugal simplicity of domestic life; and the accompanying unambitious, but solid and religious, education, which has rendered few books familiar, but the Bible, and the liturgy or hymn book. To the latter cause, indeed, which is so far accidental, that it is the blessing of particular coun- tries 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 (Enthusiasmus triumphatus. Sec. xxxv), 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 inter- mixture 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 labors. 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 farmer WORDSWORTH 33 are the overseers and guardians of the poor. If my own experience have not been particularly unfor- tunate, as well as that of the many respectable coun- try clergymen with whom I have conversed on the subject, the result would engender more than scep- ticism concerning the desireable influences of low and rustic life in and for itself. Whatever may be con- cluded 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 moun- tains, 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 x ideal, that it avoids and ex- 1 Say not that I am recommending abstractions ; for these class-characteristics which constitute the instructiveness of a character, are so modified and particularized in each person of the Shakespearean Drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. Paradoxical as it may sound, one of the essential properties of Geometry is not less essential to dramatic excel- lence ; and Aristotle has accordingly required of the poet an involution of the universal in the individual. The chief differ- ences are, that in Geometry it is the universal truth, which s. c. -D 34 WORDSWORTH eludes all accident ; that its apparent individualities of rank, character, or occupation must be representa- tive of a class ; and that the persons of poetry must be clothed with generic attributes, with the common attributes of the class : not with such as one gifted individual might possibly possess, but such as from his situation it is most probable before-hand that he would possess. If my premises are right and my deductions legitimate, it follows that there can be no poetic medium between the swains of Theocritus and those of an imaginary golden age. The characters of the vicar and the shepherd- mariner in the poem of ' The Brothers ', 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 cir- is uppermost in the consciousness ; in poetry the individual form, in which the truth is clothed. With the ancients, and not less with the elder dramatists of England and France, both comedy and tragedy were considered as kinds of poetry. They neither sought in comedy to make us laugh merely ; much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of common-place morals drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their charac- ters. Nor did they condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the applause of the spectators, by representing before them fac- similes of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on the sluggish sympathies by a pathos not a whit more respectable than the maudlin tears of drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to affect us indeed ; but yet within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with the activity both of our understanding and imagination. They wished to transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant the germs of that greatness, during the temporary oblivion of the worthless * thing we are ', and of the peculiar state in which each man happens to be, suspending our individual recollections and lulling them to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts. Friend, pages 251, 252. WORDSWORTH 35 cumstances 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 vallies, and the streams and rocks, Were things indifferent to the shepherd's thoughts. Fields, where with chearful spirits he had breathM The common air; the hills, which he so oft Had climb'd with vigorous steps ; which had im- press'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 d % m WORDSWORTH Of honorable 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 plausi- ble 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 de- scription 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 dis- play of maternal affection in its ordinary workings. WORDSWORTH 37 In * The Thorn ', the poet himself acknowledges in a note the necessity of an introductory poem, in which he should have pourtrayed 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 ; 1 the seven last lines of the tenth ; 2 and 1 I've measured it from side to side ; 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide. a 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: 38 WORDSWORTH the five following stanzas, with the exception of the four admirable lines at the commencement of the 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, WORDSWORTH 39 fourteenth, are felt by many unprejudiced and un- sophisticated hearts, as sudden and unpleasant sink- ings from the height to which the poet had pre- viously lifted them, and to which he again re-elevates both himself and his reader. If then I am compelled to doubt the theory, by which the choice of characters was to be directed, not only a priori, from grounds of reason, but both from the few instances in which the poet himself need be supposed to have been governed by it, and from the comparative inferiority of those instances ; still more must I hesitate in my assent to the sentence which immediately follows the former citation ; and which I can neither admit as particular fact, nor as general rule. ' The language, too, of these men 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 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. 40 WORDSWORTH feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions.' To this I reply ; that a rustic's lan- guage, 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 im- portant though less obvious) — that the rustic, from the more imperfect developement 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 WORDSWORTH 41 be expressed by a small number of confused general terms. Secondly, I deny that the words and combina- tions of words derived from the objects, with which the rustic is familiar, whether with distinct or con- fused 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 discrimina- ting 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 metaphori- cally. 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 appropria- tion 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 un- educated share in the harvest which they neither sowed or 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 commence- ment 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 sur- rounded by the same nature as our peasants are; 42 WORDSWORTH 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 philo- sophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets, who think that they are conferring honor upon themselves and their art in proportion as they indulge in arbitrary and capri- cious 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 — fi a selection of the real language of men ' ; — c the language of these men ' (i.e. men in low and rustic life) '/ propose to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men.'' 4 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 equivoca- tion in the use of the word { real\ Every man's language varies, according to the extent of his know- 3V0RDSW0RTH 43 ledge, 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 allow- ances 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 lan- guage of cultivated society, as the language of Mr. Wordsworth's homeliest composition differs from that of a common peasant. For 4 real ' therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or lingua communis. And this, we have proved, is nomoretobefoundinthephrase- ology 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 manufac- turers. 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, 44 WORDSWORTH 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 excite- ment. 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 VIHth. 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 WORDSWORTH 45 apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling, in which the passion is greater and of longer endur- ance 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. CHAPTER XVIII Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially- different from that of prose— Origin and elements of metre- Its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby im- posed on the metrical writer in the choice of his diction. ^ I conclude, therefore, that the attempt is imprac- ticable ; 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 lan- guage 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 46 WORDSWORTH 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, WORDSWORTH 47 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 ex- temporary devotion, and such as we might expect to hear from every self-inspired minister of a con- venticle! 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 com- position.'' Such is Mr. Wordsworth's assertion. Now prose itself, at least in all argumentative and con- secutive works, differs, and ought to differ, from the language of conversation ; even as l reading ought 1 It is no less an error in teachers, than a torment to the poor children, to enforce the necessity of reading as they would talk. 48 WORDSWORTH 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. In order to cure them of singing as it is called, that is, of too great a difference, the child is made to repeat the words with his eyes from off the book ; and then, indeed, his tones resemble talking, as far as his fears, tears and trembling will permit. But as soon as the eye is again directed to the printed page, the spell begins anew ; for an instinctive sense tells the child's feelings, that to utter its own momentary thoughts, and to recite the written thoughts of another, as of another, and a far wiser than himself, are two widely different things ; and as the two acts are accompanied with widely different feelings, so must they justify different modes of enunciation. Joseph Lancaster, among his other sophistications of the excellent Dr. Bell's invaluable system, cures this fault of singing, by hanging fetters and chains on the child, to the music of which one of his school- fellows, who walks before, dolefully chaunts out the child's last speech and confession, birth, parentage, and education. And this soul-benumbing ignominy, this unholy and heart-hardening burlesque on the last fearful infliction of outraged law, in pro- nouncing the sentence to which the stern and familiarized judge not seldom bursts into tears, has been extolled as a happy and ingenious method of remedying— what ? and how ? — why, one extreme in order to introduce another, scarce less distant from good sense, and certainly likely to have worse moral effects, by enforcing a semblance of petulant ease and self-sufficiency, in repression, and possible after-perversion of the natural feelings. I have to beg Dr. Bell's pardon for this connexion of the two names, but he knows that contrast is no less powerful a cause of association than likeness. WORDSWORTH 49 But Mr. Wordsworth is among the last men, to whom a delusion of this kind would be attributed by anyone, who had enjoyed the slightest opportunity of understanding his mind and character. Where an objection has been anticipated by such an author as natural, his answer to it must needs be interpreted in some sense which either is, or has been, or is capable of being controverted. My object then must be to discover some other meaning for the term 4 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 appro- priated 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. 50 WORDSWORTH Thus too, without any tautology we contend for the existence of the Supreme Being; that is, for a reality correspondent to the idea. There is, next, a secondary use of the word essence, in which it signifies the point or ground of contra-distinction between two modifications of the same substance or subject. Thus we should be allowed to say, that the style of architecture of Westminster Abbey is essen- tially 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; WORDSWORTH 51 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, I 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 sen- tences 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 sen- tences, which are in their fit and natural place in a serious prose composition, but would be dispropor- tionate and heterogeneous in metrical poetry; and, vice versa, whether in the language of a serious poem e % 52 WORDSWORTH 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 fre- quency, 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, con- sciously and for the foreseen purpose of pleasure. Assuming these principles, as the data of our argu- ment, 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 volun- tary act, with the design and for the purpose of blending delight with emotion, so the traces of present volition should throughout the metrical lan- guage 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 spon- taneous impulse and of voluntary purpose. Again, this union can be manifested only in a frequency of forms and figures of speech (originally the offspring WORDSWORTH 53 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 scyon 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 54 WORDSWORTH produces by the continued excitement of surprize, 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 esti- mate 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 amuse- ment; 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) WORDSWORTH 55 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. Words- worth 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 c Pierce Plouman ', or at the end, as in rhymes), possessed an independent value as assisting the recollection, and consequently the preservation, of any series of truths or incidents. But I am not convinced by the collation of facts, that 'The Children in the Wood' owes either its preservation, or its popularity, to its metrical form. Mr. Marshal's repository affords a number of tales in prose inferior in pathos and general merit, some of as old a date, and many as widely popular. Tom Hickathrift, Jack the Giant-killer, Goody Two- shoes, and Little Red Riding-hood are formidable rivals. And that they have continued in prose, cannot be fairly explained by the assumption, that the comparative meanness of their thoughts and images precluded even the humblest forms of metre. The scene of Goody Two-shoes in the church is perfectly susceptible of metrical narration ; and, among the Qavfiara flau/xaoroWa 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, 56 WORDSWORTH 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 com- posed 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 atten- tion, 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 super- added. 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 WORDSWORTH 57 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 pro- perty. 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 trisyllable 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 58 WORDSWORTH woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had placed the poet's imagination, (a state, which spreads its influence and coloring 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,) 1 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 in- stance 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 1 Altered from the description of Night-Mair in the Remorse. * Oh Heaven ! 'twas frightful ! Now run down and stared at By hideous shapes that cannot be remembered ; Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing ; But only being afraid— stifled with fear ! While every goodly or familiar form Had a strange power of spreading terror round me ! ' N.B. — Though Shakespeare has, for his own all-justifying purposes, introduced the Nigljt-J/are with her own foals, yet Mair means a Sister, or perhaps a Hag. WORDSWORTH 59 without metre. Metre, therefore, having been con- nected with poetry most often and by a peculiar fitness, whatever else is combined with metre must, though it be not itself essentially poetic, have never- theless some property in common with poetry, as an intermedium of affinity, a sort (if I may dare borrow a well-known phrase from technical chemistry) of mordaunt between it and the super-added metre. Now poetry, Mr. Wordsworth truly affirms, does always imply passion: which word must be here understood in its most general sense, as an excited state of the feelings and faculties. And as every passion has its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its characteristic modes of expression. But where there exists that degree of genius and talent which entitles a writer to aim at the honors of a poet, the very act of poetic composition itself is, and is allowed to imply and to produce, an unusual state of excite- ment, which of course justifies and demands a cor- respondent 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 fervor 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 60 WORDSWORTH being impelling us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and thus establishing the principle, that all the parts of an organized whole must be assimi- lated 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 WORDSWORTH 61 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 con- gruous with the common and material attribute of shining.) And, doubtless, this adjunction of epi- thets 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; — m WORDSWORTH has indeed almost as many faults as words. But then it is a bad line, not because the language is distinct from that of prose ; but because it conveys incongruous images, because it confounds the cause and the effect, the real thing with the personified representative of the thing; in short, because it differs from the language of good sense ! That the 'Phoebus'' is hackneyed, and a school-boy image, is an accidental fault, dependent on the age in which the author wrote, and not deduced from the nature of the thing. That it is part of an exploded mythology, is an objection more deeply grounded. Yet when the torch of ancient learning was re- kindled, so cheering were its beams, that our eldest poets, cut off by Christianity x from all accredited machinery, and deprived of all acknowledged guar- dians and symbols of the great objects of nature, were naturally induced to adopt, as a poetic lan- guage, 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 1 But still more by the mechanical system of philosophy which has needlessly infected our theological opinions, and teaching us to consider the world in its relation to God, as of a building to its mason, leaves the idea of omnipresence a mere abstract notion in the state-room of our reason. WORDSWORTH 63 that it is vicious, and that the stanzas are blots in the ' Faery Queen ' ? By this the northern wagoner had set His sevenfold teme behind the 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 1 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 huiTd his glistVing beams through gloomy ayre : Which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streight- way 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 wipoetic, 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. 64 WORDSWORTH To such specimens it would indeed be a fair and full reply, that these lines are not bad, because they are unpoetk ; 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, not- withstanding 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 in- structive, and even interesting work ; but take the following stanzas (and from the hundred instances which abound I might probably have selected others far more striking) : And to the end we may with better ease Discern the true discourse, vouchsafe to shew What were the times foregoing near to these, That these we may with better profit know. Tell how the world fell into this disease ; And how so great distemperature did grow; So shall we see with what degrees it came ; How things at full do soon wax out of frame. Ten kings had from the Norman conquror reign'd With intermixt and variable fate, When England to her greatest height attained 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. WORDSWORTH 65 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 66 WORDSWORTH 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, un- recognizable 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 1 for no assignable 1 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 in- stance : 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 WORDSWORTH 67 cause or reason but that of the author's convenience ; but if it be in rhyme, by the mere exchange of the final word of each line for some other of the same meaning, equally appropriate, dignified and euphonic. The answer or objection in the preface to the anticipated remark 'that metre paves the way to other distinctions ', is contained in the following words. 'The distinction of rhyme and metre is voluntary and uniform, and not, like that pro- duced 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 respect- ing 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 phan- tast ! And might not brains so wild and so deficient make just the same havock 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 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. f2 68 WORDSWORTH 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 poefs 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 be- tween 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 dis- crimination. Through the same process and by the same creative agency will the poet distinguish the WORDSWORTH 69 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 colors of speech de- generate 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 change- lings, 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 fjLopcfxao-is, not irofytn?. 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 colors 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 fervor self-im- passioned, 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 : 70 WORDSWORTH 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 evVy 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 shew my story in thy eternal book, &c. As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honors 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 apo- strophes 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 WORDSWORTH 71 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 honor 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 trans- lated 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 72 WORDSWORTH 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-controuling 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 juxta-position and apparent recon- ciliation 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 juxta- WORDSWORTH 73 position 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 fervor 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 con- demnation 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 pre- caution, 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. CHAPTER XIX Continuation— Concerning the real object which, it is probable, Mr. Wordsworth had before him in his critical preface- Elucidation and application of this — The neutral style, or that common to Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from Chaucer, Herbert, and others. It might appear from some passages in the former part of Mr. Wordsworth's preface, that he meant to confine his theory of style, and the necessity of a close accordance with the actual language of men, to those particular subjects from low and rustic life, 74 WORDSWORTH which by way of experiment he had purposed to naturalize as a new species in our English poetry. But from the train of argument that follows ; from the reference to Milton ; and from the spirit of his critique on Gray's sonnet ; those sentences appear to have been rather courtesies of modesty, than actual limitations of his system. Yet so groundless does this system appear on a close examination ; and so strange and overwhelming 1 in its consequences, that I cannot, and I do not, believe that the poet did ever himself adopt it in the unqualified sense, in which his expressions have been understood by others, and which, indeed, according to all the common laws of interpretation they seem to bear. What then did he mean ? I apprehend, that in the clear perception, not unaccompanied with disgust or contempt, of the gaudy affections of a style which passed current with too many for poetic diction, (though in truth it had as little pretensions to poetry, as to logic or common sense,) he narrowed his view for the time ; and feeling a justifiable preference for the language of nature and of good sense, even in its humblest and least ornamented forms, he suffered himself to express, in terms at once too large and too exclusive, his predilection for a style the most remote possible from the false and showy splendour which he wished to explode. It is possible, that this predilection, at first merely comparative, deviated for a time into 1 I had in my mind the striking but untranslatable epithet, which the celebrated Mendelssohn applied to the great founder of the Critical Philosophy « Der alleszermalmende Kant ', that is, the all-becrushing, or rather the all-to-nothing-crushing Kant. In the facility and force of compound epithets, the German from the numher of its cases and inflections approaches to the Greek, that language so Bless'd in the happy marriage of sweet words. It is in the woeful harshness of its sounds alone that the German need shrink from the comparison. WORDSWORTH 75 direct partiality. But the real object which he had in view, was, I doubt not, a species of excellence which had been long before most happily charac- terized by the judicious and amiable Garve, whose works are so justly beloved and esteemed by the Germans, in his remarks on Gellert, from which the following is literally translated. 'The talent, that is required to make excellent verses, is perhaps greater than the philosopher is ready to admit, or would find it in his power to acquire : the talent to seek only the apt expression of the thought, and yet to find at the same time with it the rhyme and the metre. Gellert possessed this happy gift, if ever any one of our poets possessed it ; and nothing perhaps contributed more to the great and universal im- pression which his fables made on their first publica- tion, or conduces more to their continued popularity. It was a strange and curious phenomenon, and such as in Germany had been previously unheard of, to read verses in which everything was expressed just as one would wish to talk, and yet all dignified, attractive, and interesting ; and all at the same time perfectly correct as to the measure of the syllables and the rhyme. It is certain that poetry, when it has attained this excellence, makes a far greater impression than prose. So much so indeed, that even the gratification which the very rhymes afford, becomes then no longer a contemptible or trifling gratification.' * However novel this phenomenon may have been in Germany at the time of Gellert, it is by no means new, nor yet of recent existence in our language. Spite of the licentiousness with which Spenser occasionally compels the orthography of his words 1 Sammlung einiger Abfiandlungen von Christian Garve. 76 WORDSWORTH into a subservience to his rhymes, the whole Faery Queen is an almost continued instance of this beauty. Waller's song, ' Go, lovely Rose ', is doubtless familiar to most of my readers; but if I had happened to have had by me the poems of Cotton, more but far less deservedly celebrated as the author of the Virgil Travestied, I should have indulged myself, and I think have gratified many, who are not acquainted with his serious works, by selecting some admirable specimens of this style. There are not a few poems in that volume, replete with every excellence of thought, image, and passion, which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder muse ; and yet so worded, that the reader sees no one reason either in the selection or the order of the words, why he might not have said the very same in an appropriate con- versation, and cannot conceive how indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise, without loss or injury to his meaning. But in truth our language is, and from the first dawn of poetry ever has been, particularly rich in compositions distinguished by this excellence. The final e, which is now mute, in Chaucer's age was either sounded or dropt indifferently. We our- selves still use either ' beloved ' or ' belov'd ' according as the rhyme, or measure, or the purpose of more or less solemnity may require. Let the reader then only adopt the pronunciation of the poet and of the court, at which he lived, both with respect to the final e and to the accentuation of the last syllable ; I would then venture to ask, what even in the colloquial language of elegant and unaffected women, (who are the peculiar mistresses of 'pure English and undefiled ',) what could we hear more natural, or seemingly more unstudied, than the following stanzas from Chaucer's Trollies and Creseide ? WORDSWORTH 77 And after this forth to the gate he wente, Ther as Creseide out rode a full gode paas, And up and doun there made he many a wente, And to himselfe ful oft he said, Alas ! Fro hennis rode my blisse and my solas : As woulde blisful God now for his joie, I might her sene agen come in to Troie! And to the yondir hil I gan her guide, Alas ! and there I toke of her my leve : And yond I saw her to her fathir ride; For sorrow of which mine herte shall to-cleve; And hithir home I came whan it was eve, And here I dwel, out-cast from alle joie, And shal, til I maie sene her efte in Troie. And of himselfe imaginid he ofte To ben defaitid, pale and waxen lesse Than he was wonte, and that men saidin soffce, What may it be ? who can the sothe gesse, Why Troilus hath al this hevinesse ? And al this n' as but his melancolie, That he had of himselfe suche fantasie. Another time imaginin he would That every wight, that past him by the wey, Had of him routhe, and that they saien should, I am right sory, Troilus wol dey ! And thus he drove a daie yet forth or twey, As ye have herde : suche life gan he to lede As he that stode betwixin hope and drede : For which him likid in his songis shewe Th' encheson of his wo as he best might, And made a songe of wordis but a fewe, Somwhat his woful herte for to light, 78 WORDSWORTH And whan he was from every mannis sight With softe voice he of his lady dere, That absent was, gan sing as ye may hear: ***** This song, when he thus songin had, ful soon He fell agen into his sighis olde : And every night, as was his wonte to done, He stode the bright moone to beholde And all his sorrowe to the moone he tolde, And said : I wis, whan thou art hornid newe, I shall be glad, if al the world be trewe ■ Another exquisite master of this species of style, where the scholar and the poet supplies the material, but the perfect well-bred gentleman the expressions and the arrangement, is George Herbert. As from the nature of the subject, and the too frequent quaintness of the thoughts, his Temple, or Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations are comparatively but little known, I shall extract two poems. The first is a sonnet, equally admirable for the weight, number, and expression of the thoughts, and for the simple dignity of the language. (Unless, indeed, a fastidious taste should object to the latter half of the sixth line.) The second is a poem of greater length, which I have chosen not only for the present purpose, but likewise as a striking example and illustration of an assertion hazarded in a former page of these sketches: namely, that the characteristic fault of our elder poets is the reverse of that, which distinguishes too many of our more recent versifiers ; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct and natural language ; the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts. The latter is a riddle of words; WORDSWORTH 79 the former an enigma of thoughts. The one reminds me of an odd passage in Drayton's Ideas : Sonnet IX. As other men, so I myself do muse, Why in this sort I wrest invention so ; And why these giddy metaphors I use, Leaving the path the greater part do go ; I will resolve you : / am lunatic I The other recalls a still odder passage in The Synagogue, or The Shadow of the Temple, a con- nected series of poems in imitation of Herbert's Temple, and, in some editions, annexed to it. O how my mind Is gravelPd! Not a thought, That I can find, But's ravell'd All to nought! Short ends of threds, And narrow shreds Of lists, Knots, snarled ruffs, Loose broken tufts Of twists, Are my torn meditation's ragged clothing, Which, wound and woven, shape a suit for nothing: One while I think, and then I am in pain To think how to unthink that thought again ! Immediately after these burlesque passages I cannot proceed to the extracts promised, without changing the ludicrous tone of feeling by the interposition of the three following stanzas of Herbert's : 80 WORDSWORTH Virtue. Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky, The dew shall weep thy fall to-night; For thou must dye. Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye: Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must dye. Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A nest, wfrere sweets compacted lie : My musick shows, ye have your closes, And all must dye. The Bosom Sin: a sonnet by george herbert. Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round, Parents first season us ; then schoolmasters Deliver us to laws ; they send us bound To rules of reason, holy messengers, Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin, Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes, Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in, Bibles laid open, millions of surprizes; Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness, The sound of glory ringing in our ears : Without, our shame; within, our consciences; Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears ! Yet all these fences and their whole array One tunning bosom-sin blows quite away. WORDSWORTH 81 Love Unknown. Dear friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad: And in my faintings, I presume, your love Will more comply than help. A Lord I had, And have, of whom some grounds, which may improve, I hold for two lives, and both lives in me. To him I brought a dish of fruit one day, And in the middle placed my heart. But he (I sigh to say) Look't on a servant, who did know his eye, Better than you knew me, or (which is one) Than I myself. The servant instantly, Quitting the fruit, seizM on my heart alone, And threw it in a font, wherein did fall A stream of blood, which issued from the side Of a great rock : I well remember all, And have good cause : there it was dipt and dyed, And washt, and wrung : the very wringing yet Enforceth tears. 'Your heart was foul, I fear. 1 Indeed 'tis true. I did and do commit Many a fault, more than my lease will bear ; Yet still ask'd pardon, and was not deny'd. But you shall hear. After my heart was well, And clean and fair, as I one eventide (I sigh to tell) Walk'd by myself abroad, I saw a large And spacious furnace flaming, and thereon A boiling cauldron, round about whose verge Was in great letters set AFFLICTION. The greatness shew'd the owner. So I went To fetch a sacrifice out of my fold, Thinking with that, which I did thus present, To warm his love, which, I did fear, grew cold. But as my heart did tender it, the man Who was to take it from me, slipt his hand, 82 WORDSWORTH And threw my heart into the scalding pan; My heart that brought it (do you understand?) The offerer's heart. * Your heart was hard, I fear.' Indeed 'tis true. I found a callous matter Began to spread and to expatiate there: But with a richer drug than scalding water I bath'd it often, ev'n with holy blood, Which at a board, while many drank bare wine, A friend did steal into my cup for good, Ev'n taken inwardly, and most divine To supple hardnesses. But at the length Out of the caldron getting, soon I fled Unto my house, where to repair the strength Which I had lost, I hasted to my bed: But when I thought to sleep out all these faults, (I sigh to speak) I found that some had stuffed the bed with thoughts, I would say tho?'ns. Dear, could my heart not break, When with my pleasures ev'n my rest was gone? Full well I understood who had been there: For I had given the key to none but one : It must be he. 'Your heart was dull, I fear.' Indeed a slack and sleepy state of mind Did oft possess me; so that when I pray'd, Though my lips went, my heart did stay behind. But all my scores were by another paid, Who took my guilt upon him. 'Truly, Friend, For aught I hear, your Master shews to you More favor than you wot of. Mark the end ! The font did only what was old renew: The caldron suppled what was grown too hard: The thorns did quicken what was grown too dull: All did but strive to mend what you had marr'd. Wherefore be cheer'd, and praise him to the full Each day, each hour, each moment of the week Who fain would have you be new, tender, quick ! ' WORDSWORTH 83 CHAPTER XX The former subject continued. I have no fear in declaring my conviction, that the excellence defined and exemplified in the pre- ceding chapter is not the characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's style; because I can add with equal sincerity, that it is precluded by higher powers. The praise of uniform adherence to genuine, logical English is undoubtedly his; nay, laying the main emphasis on the word uniform, I will dare add that, of all contemporary poets, it is his alone. For, in a less absolute sense of the word, I should certainly include Mr. Bowles, Lord Byron, and, as to all his later writings, Mr. Southey, the exceptions in their works being so few and unimportant. But of the specific excellence described in the quotation from Garve, I appear to find more, and more undoubted specimens in the works of others ; for instance, among the minor poems of Mr. Thomas Moore, and of our illustrious Laureate. To me it will always remain a singular and noticeable fact ; that a theory, which would establish this lingua communis, not only as the best, but as the only commendable style, should have proceeded from a poet, whose diction, next to that of Shakespeare and Milton, appears to me of all others the most individualized and characteristic. And let it be remembered too, that I am now interpreting the controverted passages ot Mr. Wordsworth's critical preface by the purpose and object, which he may be supposed to have intended, rather than by the sense which the words themselves must convey, if they are taken without this allowance. * A person of any taste, who had but studied three or four of Shakespeare's principal plays, would with- 62 84 WORDSWORTH out the name affixed scarcely fail to recognise as Shakespeare's a quotation from any other play, though but of a few lines. A similar peculiarity, though in a less degree, attends Mr. Wordsworth's style, whenever he speaks in his own person ; or whenever, though under a feigned name, it is clear that he himself is still speaking, as in the different dramatis personae of 'The Recluse 1 . Even in the other poems, in which he purposes to be most dra- matic, there are few in which it does not occasionally burst forth. The reader might often address the poet in his own words with reference to the persons introduced : It seems, as I retrace the ballad line by line, That but half of it is theirs, and the better half is thine. Who, having been previously acquainted with any considerable portion of Mr. Wordsworth's publica- tions, and having studied them with a full feeling of the author's genius, would not at once claim as Wordsworthian the little poem on the rainbow ? The child is father of the man, &c. Or in the ' Lucy Gray ' ? No mate, no comrade Lucy knew; She dwelt on a wide moor; The sweetest thing that ever grew Beside a human door. Or in the ' Idle Shepherd-boys ' ? Along the river's stony marge The sand-lark chaunts a joyous song; The thrush is busy in the wood, And carols loud and strong. A thousand lambs are on the rocks, All newly born ! both earth and sky WORDSWORTH 85 Keep jubilee, and more than all, Those boys with their green coronal ; They never hear the cry, That plaintive cry ! which up the hill Comes from the depth of Dungeon Gill. Need I mention the exquisite description of the Sea Loch in 'The Blind Highland Boy ' ? Who but a poet tells a tale in such language to the little ones by the fire-side as — Yet had he many a restless dream, Both when he heard the eagle's scream, And when he heard the torrents roar, And heard the water beat the shore Near where their cottage stood. Beside a lake their cottage stood, Not small like ours, a peaceful flood, But one of mighty size, and strange, That, rough or smooth, is full of change, And stirring in its bed. For to this lake, by night and day, The great sea- water finds its way Through long, long windings of the hills, And drinks up all the pretty rills And rivers large and strong: Then hurries back the road it came — Returns on errand still the same; This did it when the earth was new; And this for evermore will do, As long as earth shall last. And with the coming of the tide, Come boats and ships that sweetly ride, Between the woods and lofty rocks; And to the shepherds with their flocks Bring tales of distant lands. 86 WORDSWORTH I might quote almost the whole of his ' Ruth,' but take the following stanzas : But, as you have before been told, This stripling, sportive, gay, and bold, And with his dancing crest, So beautiful, through savage lands Had roamed about with vagrant bands Of Indians in the West. The wind, the tempest roaring high, The tumult of a tropic sky, Might well be dangerous food For him, a youth to whom was given So much of earth, so much of heaven, And such impetuous blood. Whatever in those climes he found Irregular in sight or sound, Did to his mind impart A kindred impulse, seemed allied To his own powers, and justified The workings of his heart. Nor less, to feed voluptuous thought, The beauteous forms of nature wrought, Fair trees and lovely flowers; The breezes their own languor lent ; The stars had feelings, which they sent Into those magic bowers. Yet, in his worst pursuits, I ween That sometimes there did intervene Pure hopes of high intent: For passions, linked to forms so fair And stately, needs must have their share Of noble sentiment. But from Mr. Wordsworth's more elevated com- positions, which already form three-fourths of his WORDSWORTH 87 works ; and will, I trust, constitute hereafter a still larger proportion ; — from these, whether in rhyme or blank-verse, it would be difficult and almost super- fluous to select instances of a diction peculiarly his own, of a style which cannot be imitated, without its being at once recognised, as originating in Mr. Wordsworth. It would not be easy to open on any one of his loftier strains, that does not contain examples of this; and more in proportion as the lines are more excellent, and most like the author. For those, who may happen to have been less familiar with his writings, I will give three specimens taken with little choice. The first from the lines on the Boy of Winandeb-Mere, — who Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, That they might answer him. And they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, With long halloos and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild Of mirth and jocund din. And when it chanced, That pauses of deep silence mock'd his skill, Then sometimes in that silence, while he himg Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain-torrents ; or the visible scene 1 1 Mr. Wordsworth's having judiciously adopted 'concourse wild ' in this passage for ' a wild scene ' as it stood in the former edition, encourages me to hazard a remark, which I certainly should not have made in the works of a poet less austerely accurate in the use of the words, than he is, to his own great honor. It respects the propriety of the word ' scene ' even in the sentence in which it is retained. Dryden, and he only in his more careless verses, was the first, as far as my researches have discovered, who for the convenience of rhyme used this word in the vague sense, which has been since too current even in our best writers, and which (unfortunately, I think) is given as its first explanation in Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, and there- 88 WORDSWORTH Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks. Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady lake. The second shall be that noble imitation of Drayton 1 (if it was not rather a coincidence) in the Joanna. — When I had gazed perhaps two minutes' space, Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud. The rock, like something starting from a sleep, fore would be taken by an incautious reader as its proper sense. In Shakespeare and Milton the word is never used without some clear reference, proper or metaphorical, to the theatre. Thus Milton: Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvan scene; and, as the ranks ascend, Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view. I object to any extension of its meaning, because the word is already more equivocal than might be wished ; inasmuch as in the limited use, which I recommend, it may still signify two different things ; namely, the scenery, and the characters and actions presented on the stage during the presence of particular scenes. It can therefore be preserved from obscurity only by keeping the original signification full in the mind. Thus Milton again : Prepare thee for another scene. 1 Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every hill, Upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring vallies fill ; Helvillon from his height it through the mountains threw, From whom as soon again the sound Dunbalrase drew, From whose stone-trophied head, it on the Wendross went, Which tow'rds the sea again resounded it to Dent. That Broadwater, therewith within her banks astound, In sailing to the sea, told it to Egiiemound, Whose buildings, walks, and streets, with echoes loud and long, Did mightily commend old Copland for her song. Drayton's Polvolbion : Song XXX. WORDSWORTH 89 Took up the lady's voice, and laughed again ! That ancient woman seated on Helm-Crag Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-Scar And the tall steep of Silver-How sent forth A noise of laughter ; southern Loughrigg heard, And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone. Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky Carried the lady's voice !— old Skiddaw blew His speaking trumpet! — back out of the clouds From Glaramara southward came the voice: And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head ! The third, which is in rhyme, I take from the 'Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, upon the restoration of Lord Clifford the shepherd to the estates o*f his ancestors.' Now another day is come, Fitter hope, and nobler doom ; He hath thrown aside his crook, And hath buried deep his book; Armour rusting in the halls On the blood of Clifford calls ; 6 Quell the Scot,'' exclaims the lance ! Bear me to the heart of France, Is the longing of the shield — Tell thy name, thou trembling field ! — Field of death, wherever thou be, Groan thou with our victory ! Happy day, and mighty hour, When our shepherd, in his power, Mailed and horsed, with lance and sword, To his ancestors restored, Like a re-appearing star, Like a glory from afar, First shall head the flock of war ! 90 WORDSWORTH Alas ! the fervent harper did not know That for a tranquil soul the lay was framed, Who, long compelled in humble walks to go, Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed. Love had he found in huts where poor men lie ; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills. The words themselves, in the foregoing extracts, are no doubt sufficiently common for the greater part. (But in what poem are they not so, if we except a few misadventurous attempts to translate the arts and sciences into verse ?) In the ' Excursion ' the number of polysyllabic (or what the common people call, dictionary) words is more than usually great. And so must it needs be, in proportion to the number and variety of an author's conceptions, and his solicitude to express them with precision. But are those words in those places commonly em- ployed in real life to express the same thought or outward thing? Are they the style used in the ordinary intercourse of spoken words ? No ! nor are the modes of connexions ; and still less the breaks and transitions. Would any but a poet — at least could any one without being conscious that he had expressed himself with noticeable vivacity — have described a bird singing loud by, ■ The thrush is busy in the wood ? ' — or having spoken of boys with a string of club-moss round their rusty hats, as the boys ' with their green coronal ? ' — or have translated a beautiful May-day into * Both earth and sky keep jubilee?^ or have brought all the different marks and circumstances of a sea-loch before the mind, as the actions of a living and acting power ? Or have represented the reflection of the sky in the water, as WORDSWORTH 91 1 Tliat uncertain heaven received into the bosom of the steady UkeV Even the grammatical construction is not unfrequently peculiar ; as * The wind, the tempest roaring high, the tumult of a tropic shy, might well be dangerous food to him, a youth to whom was given, &c.' There is a peculiarity in the frequent use of the avvvapTiqTov (i. e. the omission of the connective particle before the last of several words, or several sentences used grammatically as single words, all being in the same case and governing or governed by the same verb) and not less in the construction of words by apposition (to him, a youth). In short, were there excluded from Mr. Wordsworth's poetic compositions all, that a literal adherence to the theory of his preface would exclude, two-thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry must be erased. For a far greater number of lines would be sacrificed than in any other recent poet ; because the pleasure received from Wordsworth's poems being less derived either from excitement of curiosity or the rapid flow of narration, the striking passages form a larger pro- portion of their value. I do not adduce it as a fair criterion of comparative excellence, nor do I even think it such ; but merely as matter of fact. I affirm, that from no contemporary writer could so many lines be quoted, without reference to the poem in which they are found, for their own independent weight or beauty. From the sphere of my own experience I can bring to my recollection three persons of no every-day powers and acquirements, who had read the poems of others with more and more unalloyed pleasure, and had thought more highly of their authors, as poets ; who yet have confessed to me, that from no modern work had so many passages started up anew in their minds at different times, and as different occasions had awakened a meditative mood. 92 WORDSWOKTH CHAPTER XXII The characteristic defects of Wordsworth's poetry, with the principles from which the judgement, that they are defects, is deduced— Their proportion to the beauties— For the greatest part characteristic of his theory only. If Mr. Wordsworth have set forth principles of poetry which his arguments are insufficient to support, let him and those who have adopted his sentiments be set right by the confutation of these arguments, and by the substitution of more philosophical principles. And still let the due credit be given to the portion and importance of the truths, which are blended with his theory; truths, the too exclusive attention to which had occasioned its errors, by tempting him to carry those truths beyond their proper limits. If his mistaken theory have at all influenced his poetic compositions, let the effects be pointed out, and the instances given. But let it likewise be shown, how far the influence has acted ; whether diffusively, or only by starts ; whether the number and importance of the poems and passages thus infected be great or trifling compared with the sound portion ; and lastly, whether they are inwoven into the texture of his works, or are loose and separable. The result of such a trial would evince beyond a doubt, what it is high time to announce decisively and aloud, that the sup- posed characteristics of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, whether admired or reprobated ; whether they are simplicity or simpleness ; faithful adherence to essen- tial nature, or wilful selections from human nature of its meanest forms and under the least attractive associations ; are as little the real characteristics of his poetry at large, as of his genius and the con- stitution of his mind. In a comparatively small number of poems he chose to try an experiment ; and this experiment we will WORDSWORTH 93 suppose to have failed. Yet even in these poems it is impossible not to perceive that the natural tendency of the poet's mind is to great objects and elevated conceptions. The poem entitled 4 Fidelity ' is for the greater part written in language, as unraised and naked as any perhaps in the two volumes. Yet take the following stanza and compare it with the pre- ceding stanzas of the same poem. There sometimes doth a leaping fish Send through the tarn a lonely cheer; The crags repeat the raven's croak, In symphony austere; Thither the rainbow comes — the cloud — And mists that spread the flying shroud; And sun-beams; and the sounding blast, That if it could would hurry past ; But that enormous barrier binds it fast. Or compare the four last lines of the concluding stanza with the former half. Yes, proof was plain that since the day On which the traveller thus had died, The dog had watched about the spot, Or by his master's side : How nourished here through such long time He knows, who gave that love sublime, And gave that strength of feeling, great Above all human estimate! Can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining, which of these best represents the ten- dency and native character of the poet's genius ? Will he not decide that the one was written because the poet would so write, and the other because he could not so entirely repress the force and grandeur of his mind, but that he must in some part or other 94 WORDSWORTH of every composition write otherwise ? In short, that his only disease is the being out of his element ; like the swan, that, having amused himself, for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river's bank, soon returns to his own majestic movements on its reflect- ing and sustaining surface. Let it be observed that I am here supposing the imagined judge, to whom I appeal, to have already decided against the poet's theory, as far as it is different from the principles of the art, generally acknowledged. I cannot here enter into a detailed examination of Mr. Wordsworth's works ; but I will attempt to give the main results of my own judgement, after an acquaintance of many years, and repeated perusals. And though, to appreciate the defects of a great mind it is necessary to understand previously its characteristic excellences, yet I have already expressed myself with sufficient fulness, to preclude most of the ill effects that might arise from my pursuing a con- trary arrangement. I will therefore commence with what I deem the prominent defects of his poems hitherto published. The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I appear to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. Under this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity — (at all events striking and original) — to a style, not only unimpassioned but undistinguished. He sinks too often and too abruptly to that style, which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species ; first, that which is peculiar to poetry ; second, that which is only proper in prose ; and third, the neutral or common to both. There have been works, such as Cowley's Essay on Crom- well, in which prose and verse are intermixed (not WORDSWORTH 95 as in the Consolation of Boetius, or the Argenis of Barclay, by the insertion of poems supposed to have been spoken or composed on occasions previously related in prose, but) the poet passing from one to the other, as the nature of the thoughts or his own feelings dictated. Yet this mode of composition does not satisfy a cultivated taste. There is some- thing unpleasant in the being thus obliged to alter- nate states of feeling so dissimilar, and this too in a species of writing, the pleasure from which is in part derived from the preparation and previous ex- pectation of the reader. A portion of that awkward- ness is felt which hangs upon the introduction of songs in our modern comic operas ; and to prevent which the judicious Metastasio (as to whose exquisite taste there can be no hesitation, whatever doubts may be entertained as to his poetic genius) uniformly placed the aria at the end of the scene, at the same time that he almost always raises and impassions the style of the recitative immediately preceding. Even in real life, the difference is great and evident between words used as the arbitrary marks of thought, our smooth market-coin of intercourse, with the image and superscription worn out by currency; and those which convey pictures either borrowed from one outward object to enliven and particularize some other ; or used allegorically to body forth the inward state of the person speaking ; or such as are at least the exponents of his peculiar turn and un- usual extent of faculty. So much so indeed, that in the social circles of private life we often find a striking use of the latter put a stop to the general flow of conversation, and by the excitement arising from concentered attention produce a sort of damp and interruption for some minutes after. But in the perusal of works of literary art, we prepare ourselves 96 WORDSWORTH for such language ; and the business of the writer, like that of a painter whose subject requires unusual splendor and prominence, is so to raise the lower and neutral tints, that what in a different style would be the commanding colors, are here used as the means of that gentle degradation requisite in order to produce the effect of a whole. Where this is not achieved in a poem, the metre merely reminds the reader of his claims in order to disappoint them ; and where this defect occurs frequently, his feelings are alternately startled by anticlimax and hyper- climax. I refer the reader to the exquisite stanzas cited for another purpose from the blind Highland Roy ; and then annex, as being in my opinion instances of this disharmony in style, the two following : And one, the rarest, was a shell, Which he, poor child, had studied well: The shell of a green turtle, thin And hollow; — you might sit therein, It was so wide, and deep. Our Highland Roy oft visited The house which held this prize; and, led By choice or chance, did thither come One day, when no one was at home, And found the door unbarred. Or p. 172, vol. I. 'Tis gone — forgotten — let me do My best. There was a smile or two — I can remember them, I see The smiles worth all the world to me. Dear Raby ! I must lay thee down : Thou troublest me with strange alarms; WORDSWORTH 97 Smiles hast thou, sweet ones of thine own ; I cannot keep thee in my arms ; For they confound me : as it is 9 I have forgot those smiles of his ! Or p. 269, vol. I. Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest, And though little troubled with sloth Drunken lark ! thou would'st be loth To be such a traveller as I. Happy, happy liver ! With a soul as strong as a mountain river Pouring out praise to tft Almighty giver ! Joy and jollity be with us both! Hearing thee or else some other, As merry a brother I on the earth will go plodding on By myself chearfully till the day is done. The incongruity, which I appear to find in this passage, is that of the two noble lines in italics with the preceding and following. So vol. II. p. 30. Close by a pond, upon the further side, He stood alone; a minute's space, I guess, I watch'd him, he continuing motionless : To the pool's further margin then I drew, He being all the while before me full in view. Compare this with the repetition of the same image, in the next stanza but two. And, still as I drew near with gentle pace, Beside the little pond or moorish flood Motionless as a cloud the old man stood, That heareth not the loud winds as they call, And moveth altogether, if it move at all. s. c. H 98 WORDSWORTH Or lastly, the second of the three following stanzas, compared both with the first and the third. * My former thoughts returned ; the fear that kills ; And hope that is unwilling to be fed ; Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills; And mighty poets in their misery dead. But now, perplexed by what the old man had said, My question eagerly did I renew, ' How is it that you live, and what is it you do ? , He with a smile did then his words repeat; And said, that gathering leeches far and wide He traveird ; stirring thus about his feet The waters of the ponds where they abide. 'Once I could meet with them on every side; But they have dwindled long by slow decay; Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.' While he was talking thus, the lonely place, The old man's shape, and speech, all troubled me : In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace About the weary moors continually, Wandering about alone and silently. Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. There is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would not present a specimen. But it would be unjust not to repeat that this defect is only occasional. From a careful reperusal of the two volumes of poems, I doubt whether the objection- able passages would amount in the whole to one hundred lines ; not the eighth part of the number of pages. In the Excursion the feeling of incongruity is seldom excited by the diction of any passage con- sidered in itself, but by the sudden superiority of some other passage forming the context. WORDSWORTH 99 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^r^, 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 dis- positions 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 airov- haiorarov /cat $iAoo-o$a>rarozj yivos, the most intense, weighty and philosophical product of human art ; adding, as the reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. The following passage from Davenant's prefatory letter to Hobbs 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 examina- tions, who know not the requisites of a poem, nor how much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of an historian. For why should a poet doubt in story to mend the intrigues of fortune by more delightful conveyances of probable fictions, because austere historians have entered into bond to truth? An obligation, which were in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as in the bondage of false h2 100 WORDSWORTH 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 xvorship a dead thing) and truth operative, and by effects continually alive, is the mistress of poets, who hath not her existence in matte?\ but in reason? For this minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery, the lines in the Excursion, pp. 96, 97, and 98, may be taken, if not as a striking instance, yet as an illustration of my meaning. It must be some strong motive — (as, for instance, that the description was necessary to the intelligibility of the tale) — which could induce me to describe in a number of verses what a draughtsman could present to the eye with incomparably greater satisfaction by half a dozen strokes of his pencil, or the painter with as many touches of his brush. Such descriptions too often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is determined to understand his author, a feeling of labor, not very dissimilar to that, with which he would con- struct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical proposition. It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, then join and dove- tail them ; and when the successive acts of attention have been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as a whole. The poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and I know no happier case to exemplify the distinction between these two faculties. Master-pieces of the former mode of poetic painting abound in the writings of Milton, ex. gr. The fig-tree; not that kind for fruit renown'd, But such as at this day, to Indians known, In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms WORDSWORTH 101 Branching so broad and long, that in the ground The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow About the mother tree, a pillared shade High over-arched, and echoing walks between: There oft the Indian Herdsman, shunning heat, Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds At loop holes cut through thickest shade. Milton P.L., 9. 1100. This is creation rather than painting, or if paint- ing, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the poet must likewise understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia of the senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a magical penna duplex, the excitement of vision by sound and the exponents of sound. Thus, 'the echoing walks between,' may be almost said to reverse the fable in tradition of the head of Memnon, in the Egyptian statue.^ Such may be deservedly entitled the creative words in the world of imagination. The second division respects an apparent minute adherence to matter-of-fact in characters and inci- dents; 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 ob- jectors ; 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 chuse 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 102 WORDSWORTH did you make wilful choice of mean or ludicrous associations not furnished by me, but supplied from your own sickly and fastidious feelings ? How was it, indeed, probable, that such arguments could have any weight with an author, whose plan, whose guiding principle, and main object it was to attack and subdue that state of association, which leads us to place the chief value on those things on which man differs from man, and to forget or dis- regard the high dignities, which belong to human nature, the sense and the feeling, which may be, and ought to be, found in all ranks ? The feelings with which, as Christians, we contemplate a mixed con- gregation rising or kneeling before their common Maker : Mr. Wordsworth would have us entertain at all times, as men, and as readers ; and by the excite- ment of this lofty, yet prideless impartiality in poetry, he might hope to have encouraged its continuance in real life. The praise of good men be his ! In real life, and, I trust, even in my imagination, I honor a virtuous and wise man, without reference to the presence or absence of artificial advantages. Whether in the person of an armed baron, a laurePd bard, &c, or of an old pedlar, or still older leach- gatherer, the same qualities of head and heart must claim the same reverence. And even in poetry I am not conscious, that I have ever suffered my feelings to be disturbed or offended by any thoughts or images, which the poet himself has not presented. But yet I object nevertheless and for the follow- ing reasons. First, because the object in view, as an immediate object, belongs to the moral philosopher, and would be pursued, not only more appropriately, but in my opinion with far greater probability of success, in sermons or moral essays, than in an elevated poem. It seems, indeed, to destroy the main funda- WORDSWORTH 103 mental distinction, not only between a poem and prose, but even between philosophy and works of fiction, inasmuch as it proposes truth for its imme- diate object, instead of pleasure. Now till the blessed time shall come, when truth itself shall be pleasure, and both shall be so united, as to be distinguishable in words only, not in feeling, it will remain the poet's office to proceed upon that state of association, which actually exists as general; instead of attempting first to make it what it ought to be, and then to let the pleasure follow. But here is unfortunately a small Hysteron-Proteron. For the communication of plea- sure is the introductory means by which alone the poet must expect to moralize his readers. Secondly : though I were to admit, for a moment, this argument to be groundless : yet how is the moral effect to be produced, by merely attaching the name of some low profession to powers which are least likely, and to qualities which are assuredly not more likely, to be found in it ? The poet, speaking in his own person, may at once delight and improve us by sentiments, which teach us the independence of goodness, of wisdom, and even of genius, on the favors of fortune. And having made a due reverence before the throne of Antonine, he may bow with equal awe before Epictetus among his fellow-slaves — and rejoice In the plain presence of his dignity. Who is not at once delighted and improved, when the poet Wordsworth himself exclaims, O many are the poets that are sown By Nature ; men endowed with highest gifts, The vision and the faculty divine, Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse, Nor having e'er, as life advanced, been led 104 WORDSWORTH By circumstance to take unto the height The measure of themselves, these favor'd beings, All but a scattered few, live out their time Husbanding that which they possess within, And go to the grave unthought of. Strongest minds Are often those of whom the noisy world Hears least. Excursion, B.I. To use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, in such language, do one's heart good ; though I, for my part, have not the fullest faith in the truth of the obser- vation. On the contrary I believe the instances to be exceedingly rare ; and should feel almost as strong an objection to introduce such a character in a poetic fiction, as a pair of black swans on a lake in a fancy- landscape. When I think how many, and how much better books than Homer, or even than Herodotus, Pindar or Eschylus, could have read, are in the power of almost every man, in a country where almost every man is instructed to read and write ; and how restless, how difficultly hidden, the powers of genius are ; and yet find even in situations the most favor- able, according to Mr. Wordsworth, for the formation of a pure and poetic language ; in situations which ensure familiarity with the grandest objects of the imagination ; but one Burns, among the shepherds of Scotland, and not a single poet of humble life among those of English lakes and mountains ; I conclude, that Poetic Genius is not only a very delicate but a very rare plant. But be this as it may, the feelings with which I think of Chatterton, the marvellous boy, The sleepless soul, that perished in its pride ; Of Burns, that walk'd in glory and in joy Behind his plough upon the mountain-side — WORDSWORTH 105 are widely different from those with which I should read a poem, where the author, having occasion for the character of a poet and a philosopher in the fable of his narration, had ichosen to make him a chimney-sweeper ; and then, in order to remove all doubts on the subject, had invented an account of his birth, parentage and education, with all the strange and fortunate accidents which had concurred in making him at once poet, philosopher, and sweep ! Nothing but biography can justify this. If it be ad- missible even in a Novel, it must be one in the manner of De Foe's, that were meant to pass for histories, not in the manner of Fielding's : in the life of Moll Flanders, or Colonel Jack, not in a Tom Jones, or even a Joseph Andrews. Much less then can it be legitimately introduced in a poem, the characters of which, amid the strongest individuali- zation, must still remain representative. The precepts of Horace, on this point, are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of the human mind. They are not more peremptory, than wise and prudent. For in the first place a deviation from them perplexes the reader's feelings, and all the circumstances, which are feigned in order to make such accidents less improb- able, 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 senti- ments and language are the poet's own, and his own too in his artificial character, as poet ; but by the fruitless endeavours to make him think the contrary, he is not even suffered to forget it. The effect is similar to that produced by an epic poet, when the fable and the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in the Messiah of Klopstock, or in Cumberland's Calvary ; and not merely suggested by 106 WORDSWORTH it, as in the Paradise Lost of Milton. That illusion, contra-distinguished from delusion, that negative faith which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirma- tion of their real existence by the judgement, is ren- dered impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and facts of known and absolute truth. A faith, which transcends even historic belief, must absolutely put out this mere poetic Analogon of faith, as the summer sun is said to extinguish our household fires, when it shines full upon them. What would otherwise have been yielded to as pleasing fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect pro- duced 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 baf- fled attempts of the author to make him believe. Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project and of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one word, for in- stance, 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 WORDSWORTH 107 matters of fact, (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the friends of some obscure ornament of society lately deceased in some obscure town), as Among the hills of Athol he was born : There, on a small hereditary farm, An unproductive slip of rugged ground, His Father dwelt ; and died in poverty ; While he, whose lowly fortune I retrace, The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe, A little one — unconscious of their loss. But, ere he had outgrown his infant days, His widowed mother, for a second mate, Espoused the teacher of the Village School ; Who on her offspring zealously bestowed Needful instruction. From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak, In summer tended cattle on the hills; But, through the inclement and the perilous days Of long-continuing winter, he repaired To his step -father's school, — &c. For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might, with trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with far greater veri- similitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet ; and without incurring another defect which I shall now mention, and a sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated. Third ; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems, from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an incongruity of style ; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents a species 108 WORDSWORTH of ventriloquism, where two are represented as talk- ing, while in truth one man only speaks. The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former ; but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most cultivated classes ; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize. In this class, I com- prise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying, instead of progression, of thought. As instance, see pp. 27, #8, and 62 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 dis- proportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale. It is a well-known fact, that bright colors in motion both make and leave the strongest impres- sions on the eye. Nothing is more likely too, than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this in such lines, as They flash upon that inward eye, Which is the bliss of solitude ! in what words shall we describe the joy of retro- spection, when the images and virtuous actions of WORDSWORTH 109 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 medly, from this couplet to — And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. Vol. i, p. 320. The second instance is from vol. ii, p. 1% where the poet, having gone out for a day's tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning with a knot of gypsies, who had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds, together with their children and asses, in some field by the road-side. At the close of the day on his return our tourist found them in the same place. 6 Twelve hours,' says he, Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I Have been a traveller under open sky, Much witnessing of change and cheer, Yet as I left I find them here ! Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole day ; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might be quite as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was pleasing or healthful for the more fortunate poet ; expresses his indignation in a series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather above, than below the mark, had they been 110 WORDSWORTH applied to the immense empire of China impro- gressive for thirty centuries : The weary Sun betook himself to rest : — — Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west, Outshining, like a visible God, The glorious path in which he trod ! And now, ascending, after one dark hour, And one night's diminution of her power, Behold the mighty Moon ! this way She looks, as if at them — but they Regard not her: — oh, better wrong and strife, Better vain deeds or evil than such life ! The silent Heavens have goings on : The Stars have tasks ! — but these have none ! The last instance of this defect (for I know no other than these already cited) is from the Ode, p. 351, vol. ii., where, speaking of a child, 'a six years"' darling of a pigmy size', he thus addresses him : Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep Thy heritage! Thou eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind, — Mighty Prophet ! Seer blest ! On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find ! Thou, over whom thy immortality Broods like the day, a master o'er the slave, A presence that is not to be put by ! Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects the epithets ' deaf and silent,' with the apostrophized eye: or (if we are to refer it to the preceding word, philosopher) the faulty and equivocal syntax of the passage; and WORDSWORTH 111 without examining the propriety of making a * master brood o'er a slave \ or the day brood at all ; we will merely ask, What does all this mean ? In what sense is a child of that age a philosopher? In what sense does he read ' the eternal deep ' ? In what sense is he declared to be 'for ever haunted'' by the Supreme Being ? or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a mighty prophet, a blessed seer ? By reflection ? by knowledge ? by conscious intuition ? or by any form or modification of consciousness ? These would be tidings indeed ; but such as would 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 con- scious of them ? or how can it be called the child, if it be no part of the child's conscious being ? For aught I know, the thinking Spirit within me may be substantially one with the principle of life, and of vital operation. For aught I know it might be employed as a secondary agent in the marvellous organization and organic movements of my body. But, surely, it would be strange language to say, 112 WORDSWORTH that / construct my heart! or that / propel the finer influences through my nerves ! or that / com- press my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my own eyes ! Spinoza and Behmen were, on different systems, both Pantheists ; and among the ancients there were philosophers, teachers of the EN KAI I1AN, who not only taught that God was All, but that this All constituted God. Yet not even these would confound the part, as a part, with the Whole, as the whole. Nay, in no system is the distinction between the individual and God, between the Modification, and the one only Substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of Spinoza. Jacobi indeed relates of Lessing, that, after a conversation with him at the house of the poet, Gleim (the Tyrtaeus and Anacreon of the German Parnassus) in which conversation L. had avowed privately to Jacobi his reluctance to admit any personal existence of the Supreme Being, or the possibility of personality except in a finite Intellect, and while they were sitting at table, a shower of rain came on unex- pectedly. Gleim expressed his regret at the circum- stance, because they had meant to drink their wine in the garden : upon which Lessing in one of his half-earnest, half-joking moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, ' It is /, perhaps, that am doing that \ i. e., raining ! and J. answered, ' or perhaps I ' ; Gleim contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for any explanation. So with regard to this passage. In what sense can the magnificent attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or ajleld of com : or even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it ? The omnipresent Spirit works equally in them, as in the child ; and the child is equally WORDSWORTH 113 unconscious of it as they. It cannot surely be, that the four lines, immediately following, are to contain the explanation? To whom the grave Is but a lonely Jbed without the sense or sight Of day or the warm light, A place of thought where we in waiting lie. Surely, it cannot be that this wonder-rousing apostrophe is but a comment on the little poem, 'We are seven'? that the whole meaning of the passage is reducible to the assertion, that a child, who, by the by, at six years old would have been better instructed in most Christian families, has no other notion of death than that of lying in a dark, cold place ? And still, I hope, not as in a place of thought ! not the frightful notion of lying awake in his grave ! The analogy between death and sleep is too simple, too natural, to render so horrid a belief possible for children ; even had they not been in the habit, as all Christian children are, of hearing the latter term used to express the former. But if the child's belief be only, that ' he is not dead, but sleepeth'; wherein does it differ from that of his father and mother, or any other adult and instructed person? To form an idea of a thing's becoming nothing ; or of nothing becoming a thing ; is im- possible to all finite beings alike, of whatever age, and however educated or uneducated. Thus it is with splendid paradoxes in general. If the words are taken in the common sense, they convey an absurdity; and if, in contempt of dictionaries and custom, they are so interpreted as to avoid the absurdity, the meaning dwindles into some bald truism. Thus you must at once understand the words contrary to their common import, in order to s. c. I 114 WORDSWORTH arrive at any sense ; and according to their common import, if you are to receive from them any feeling of sublimity or admiration. Though the instances of this defect in Mr. Wordsworth's poems are so few, that for them- selves it would have been scarce just to attract the reader's attention toward them ; yet I have dwelt on it, and perhaps the more for this very reason. For being so very few, they cannot sensibly detract from the reputation of an author, who is even characterized by a number of profound truths in his writings, which will stand the severest analysis ; and yet few as they are, they are exactly those passages which his blind admirers would be most likely, and best able, to imitate. But Wordsworth, where he is indeed Wordsworth, may be mimicked by Copyists, he may be plundered by Plagiarists ; but he cannot be imitated, except by those who are not born to be imitators. For without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power his sense would want its vital warmth and peculiarity ; and without his strong sense, his mysticism would become sickly — mere fog, and dimness ! To these defects which, as appears by the extracts, are only occasional, I may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the dissent of any candid and intelli- gent reader, the following (for the most part corre- spondent) excellences. First, an austere purity of language, both grammatically and logically; in short, a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. Of how high value I deem this, and how particularly estimable I hold the example at the present day, has been already stated : and in part too the reasons on which I ground both the moral and intellectual importance of habituating ourselves to a strict accuracy of expression. It is noticeable, WORDSWORTH 115 how limited an acquaintance with the masterpieces of art will suffice to form a correct and even a sen- sitive taste, where none but masterpieces have been seen and admired : while, on the other hand, the most correct notions, and the widest acquaintance with the works of excellence of all ages and countries, will not perfectly secure us against the contagious familiarity with the far more numerous offspring of tastelessness or of a perverted taste. If this be the case, as it notoriously is, with the arts of music and painting, much more difficult will it be to avoid the infection of multiplied and daily examples in the practice of an art, which uses words, and words only, as its instruments. In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blame- less style ; its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning. Be it observed, however, that I include in the meaning 1 of a word not only its correspondent object, but likewise all the associations which it recalls. For language is framed to convey not the object alone, but likewise the character, mood and intentions of the person who is representing it. In poetry it is practicable to preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affectations and misappropriations, which pro- miscuous authorship, and reading not promiscuous only because it is disproportion ally most conversant with the compositions of the day, have rendered general. Yet even to the poet, composing in his own province, it is an arduous work : and as the result and pledge of a watchful good sense, of fine and luminous distinction, and of complete self- possession, may justly claim all the honor which \% 116 WORDSWORTH belongs to an attainment equally difficult and valuable, and the more valuable for being rare. It is at all times the proper food of the understanding ; but in an age of corrupt eloquence it is both food and antidote. In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere, from the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or sentiment. Our chains rattle, even while we are complaining of them. The poems of Boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them with those of his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apollinaris, &c. They might even be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in which they are set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age of the writer. Much, however, may be effected by education. I believe not only from grounds of reason, but from having in great measure assured myself of the fact by actual though limited experience, that, to a youth led from his first boyhood to investigate the meaning of every word and the reason of its choice and position, Logic presents itself as an old acquaintance under new names. On some future occasion, more especially demanding such disquisition, I shall attempt to prove the close connexion between veracity and habits of mental accuracy; the beneficial after-effects of verbal precision in the preclusion of fanaticism, which masters the feelings more especially by indistinct watch-words ; and to display the advantages which language alone, at least which language with in- comparably greater ease and certainty than any other means, presents to the instructor of impressing WORDSWORTH 117 modes of intellectual energy so constantly, so imper- ceptibly, and as it were by such elements and atoms, as to secure in due time the formation of a second nature. When we reflect, that the cultivation of the judgement is a positive command of the moral law, since the reason can give the principle alone, and the conscience bears witness only to the motive, while the application and effects must depend on the judgement : when we consider, that the greater part of our success and comfort in life depends on dis- tinguishing the similar from the same, that which is peculiar in each thing from that which it has in common with others, so as still to select the most probable, instead of the merely possible or positively unfit, we shall learn to value earnestly and with a practical seriousness a mean, already prepared for us by nature and society, of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the same unre- membered process and with the same never forgotten results, as those by which it is taught to speak and converse. Now how much warmer the interest is, how much more genial the feelings of reality and practicability, and thence how much stronger the impulses to imitation are, which a contemporary writer, and especially a contemporary poet, excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been treated of in the earlier pages of these sketches. I have only to add, that all the praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for a purpose so important, joined with that which must be claimed for the in- frequency of the same excellence in the same per- fection, belongs in full right to Mr. Wordsworth. I am far, however, from denying that we have poets, whose general style possesses the same excellence, as Mr. Moore, Lord Byron, Mr. Bowles, and, in all his later and more important works, our laurel- 118 WORDSWORTH honoring Laureate. But there are none, in whose works I do not appear to myself to find more ex- ceptions, than in those of Wordsworth. Quotations or specimens would here be wholly out of place, and must be left for the critic who doubts and would invalidate the justice of this eulogy so applied. The second characteristic excellence of Mr. W's work is : a correspondent weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments, won — not from books, but— from the poet's own meditative observation. They are fresh and have the dew upon them. His muse, at least when in her strength of wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element, Makes audible a linked lay of truth, Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay, Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes ! S. T. C. Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one which is not rendered valuable by some just and original reflection. See p. 25, vol. ii : or the two following passages in one of his humblest compositions. O Reader ! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader ! you would find A tale in every thing ; and I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning ; Alas ! the gratitude of men Has oftener left me mourning; or in a still higher strain the six beautiful quatrains, p. 134: Thus fares it still in our decay : And yet the wiser mind WORDSWORTH 119 Mourns less for what age takes away Than what it leaves behind. The Blackbird in the summer trees, The Lark upon the hill, Let loose their carols when they please. Are quiet when they will. With nature never do they wage A foolish strife ; they see A happy youth, and their old age Is beautiful and free ! But we are pressed by heavy laws ; And often, glad no more, We wear a face of joy, because We have been glad of yore. If there is one, who need bemoan His kindred laid in earth, The household hearts that were his own, It is the man of mirth. My days, my Friend, are almost gone, My life has been approved, And many love me ; but by none Am I enough beloved. or the sonnet on Buonaparte, p. 202, vol. ii; or finally (for a volume would scarce suffice to exhaust the instances) the last stanza of the poem on the withered Celandine, vol. ii, p. 212. To be a prodigal's favorite — then, worse truth, A miser's pensioner — behold our lot ! O man ! that from thy fair and shining youth Age might but take the things youth needed not. Both in respect of this and of the former excel- lence, Mr. Wordsworth strikingly resembles Samuel 120 WORDSWORTH Daniel, one of the golden writers of our golden Elizabethan age, now most causelessly neglected: Samuel Daniel, whose diction bears no mark of time, no distinction of age, which has been, and as long as our language shall last, will be so far the language of the to-day and for ever, as that it is more intelligible to us, than the transitory fashions of our own par- ticular age. A similar praise is due to his senti- ments. No frequency of perusal can deprive them of their freshness. For though they are brought into the full day-light of every reader's comprehen- sion ; yet are they drawn up from depths which few in any age are priviledged to visit, into which few in any age have courage or inclination to descend. If Mr. Wordsworth is not equally with Daniel alike intelligible to all readers of average understanding in all passages of his works, the comparative difficulty does not arise from the greater impurity of the ore, but from the nature and uses of the metal. A poem is not necessarily obscure, because it does not aim to be popular. It is enough, if a work be perspicuous to those for whom it is written, and Fit audience find, though few. To the 'Ode on the intimation of immortality from recollections of early childhood ' the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante addresses to one of his own Canzoni — Canzon, io credo, che saranno radi Che tua ragione intendan bene : Tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto. O lyric song, there will be few, think I, Who may thy import understand aright: Thou art for them so arduous and so high ! But the ode was intended for such readers only as WORDSWORTH 121 had been accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet cannot be con- veyed save in symbols of time and space. For such readers the sense is sufficiently plain, and they will be as little disposed to charge Mr. Wordsworth with believing the Platonic pre-existence in the ordinary interpretation of the words, as I am to believe that Plato himself ever meant or taught it. TloWd fxoi vif ayKca- vos w/cea fiikr] evbov ivrl (jmpirpas <})OdvavTa (TvveToicnv' is be to rcav eppL-qvecov XarCCei. Cronos 6 tto\- \a elbots vq. IxadovTes be, kaftpoi irayy\(0(rs, CLKpavra yapverov A toy irpos opvvya Qziov. < Third (and wherein he soars far above Daniel) the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs : the frequent curiosa felicitas of his dic- tion, of which I need not here give specimens, having anticipated them in a preceding page. This beauty, and as eminently characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, his rudest assailants have felt themselves compelled to acknowledge and admire. Fourth ; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions, as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression 122 WORDSWORTH to all the works of nature. Like a green field re- flected in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colours its objects ; but on the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint, which escapes the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high road of custom. Let me refer to the whole description of skating, vol. i, pp. 42-7, especially to the lines So through the darkness and the cold we flew. And not a voice was idle; with the din Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud ; The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron ; while the distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away. Or to the poem on the green linnet, vol. i, p. 244. What can be more accurate yet more lovely than the two concluding stanzas ? Upon yon tuft of hazel trees, That twinkle to the gusty breeze, Behold him perched in ecstasies, Yet seeming still to hover; There ! where the flutter of his wings Upon his back and body flings Shadows and sunny glimmerings, That cover him all over, WORDSWORTH 128 While thus before my eyes he gleams, A brother of the leaves he seems ; When in a moment forth he teems His little song in gushes: As if it pleased him to disdain And mock the form which he did feign, While he was dancing with the train Of leaves among the bushes. Or the description of the blue-cap, and of the noon-tide silence, p. 284 ; or the poem to the cuckoo, p. 299; or, lastly, though I might multiply the references to ten times the number, to the poem, so completely Wordsworth's, commencing Three years she grew in sun and shower, &c. Fifth : a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility ; a sympathy with man as man ; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate (spectator, haud particeps), but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature ; no injuries of wind or weather, or toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The superscription and the image of the Creator still remain legible to him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or cross-barred it. Here the man and the poet lose and find them- selves in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a com- peer. Such he is : so he writes. See vol. i, pp. 134-6, or that most affecting composition, the 'Affliction of Margaret of ', pp. 165-8, which no mother, and, if I may judge by my own experience, no parent can read without a tear. Or turn to that 124 WORDSWORTH genuine lyric, in the former edition, entitled * The Mad Mother 1 , pp. 174-8, of which I cannot refrain from quoting two of the stanzas, both of them for their pathos, and the former for the fine transition in the two concluding lines of the stanza, so expres- sive of that deranged state, in which from the increased sensibility the sufferer's attention is abruptly drawn off by every trifle, and in the same instant plucked back again by the one despotic thought, bringing home with it, by the blending, fusing power of Imagination and Passion, the alien object to which it had been so abruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an inmate. Suck, little babe, oh suck again ! It cools my blood ; it cools my brain : Thy lips, I feel them, baby! they Draw from my heart the pain away. Oh ! press me with thy little hand ; It loosens something at my chest: About that tight and deadly band I feel thy little fingers prest. The breeze I see is in the tree: It comes to cool my babe and me. Thy father cares not for my breast; 'Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest, 'Tis all thine own ! — and, if its hue Be changed, that was so fair to view, 'Tis fair enough for thee, my dove ! My beauty, little child, is flown, But thou wilt live with me in love ; And what if my poor cheek be brown? 'Tis well for me, thou canst not see How pale and wan it else would be. Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet WORDSWORTH 125 the gift of Imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of Fancy Words- worth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature of pre-determined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. In- deed his fancy seldom displays itself, as mere and unmodified fancy. But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton ; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an instance and an illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects add the gleam, The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet's dream. I shall select a few examples as most obviously manifesting this faculty; but if I should ever be fortunate enough to render my analysis of imagina- tion, its origin and characters, thoroughly intelligible to the reader, he will scarcely open on a page of this poet's works without recognising, more or less, the presence and the influences of this faculty. From the poem on the Yew Trees, vol. i, pp. 303-4. But worthier still of note Are those fraternal four of Borrowdale, Joined in one solemn and capacious grove: Huge trunks !— and each particular trunk a growth Of intertwisted fibres serpentine Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved, — Not uninformed with phantasy, and looks That threaten the profane ;— a pillared shade, Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue, 126 WORDSWORTH By sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged Perennially — beneath whose sable roof Of boughs, as if for festal purpose decked With unrejoicing berries, ghostly shapes May meet at noontide — Fear and trembling Hope, Silence and Foresight — Death, the skeleton, And Time, the shadow — there to celebrate, As in a natural temple scattered o'er With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, United worship ; or in mute repose To lie, and listen to the mountain flood Murmuring from Glaramara 1 s inmost caves. The effect of the old man's figure in the poem of Resignation and Independence, vol. ii, p. 33. While he was talking thus, the lonely place, The old man's shape, and speech, all troubled me : In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace About the weary moors continually, Wandering about alone and silently. Or the 8th, 9th, 19th, 26th, 31st, and 33rd, in the collection of miscellaneous sonnets — the sonnet on the subjugation of Switzerland, p. 210, or the last ode, from which I especially select the two following stanzas or paragraphs, pp. 349-350. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life's star. Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home : Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! WORDSWORTH 127 Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy ; But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy ! The youth who daily further from the East Must travel, still is nature"^ priest, And by the splendid vision Is on his way attended ; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. And pp. 352-4 of the same ode. O joy that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive ! The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benedictions : not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest ; Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast ; — Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise ; But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized, High instincts, before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised! But for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 128 WORDSWORTH Are yet a master light of all our seeing ; Uphold us — cherish — and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal silence ; truths that wake To perish never: Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, Nor man nor boy Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy! Hence, in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither; Can in a moment travel thither — And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. And since it would be unfair to conclude with an extract, which, though highly characteristic, must yet, from the nature of the thoughts and the subject, be interesting, or perhaps intelligible, to but a limited number of readers ; I will add, from the poet's last published work, a passage equally Words- worthian ; of the beauty of which, and of the ima- ginative power displayed therein, there can be but one opinion, and one feeling. See 'White Doe', p. 5. Fast the church-yard fills; — anon Look again and they are gone ; The cluster round the porch, and the folk Who sate in the shade of the prior's oak ! And scarcely have they disappear'd, Ere the prelusive hymn is heard: — With one consent the people rejoice, Filling the church with a lofty voice ! WORDSWORTH 129 They sing a service which they feel, For 'tis the sun-rise of their zeal ; And faith and hope are in their prime In great Eliza's golden time. A moment ends the fervent din, And all is hushed, without and' within; £or though the priest, more tranquilly, Recites the holy liturgy, The only voice which you can hear Is the river murmuring near. When soft !— the dusky trees between, And down the path through the open green, Where is no living thing to be seen; And through yon gateway, where is found, .Beneath the arch with ivy bound, Free entrance to the church-yard' ground • And right across the verdant sod, Towards the very house of God ; Comes gliding in with lovely gleam, Comes gliding in serene and slow, Soft and silent as a dream, A solitary doe! White she is as lily of June, And beauteous as the silver moon When out of sight the clouds are driven And she is left alone in heaven ! Or like a ship some gentle day In sunshine sailing far away— A glittering ship, that hath the plain Of ocean for her own domain. * * * * # jj{ What harmonious pensive changes Wait upon her as she ranges s Round and through this pile of state Overthrown and desolate! 8. o. 130 WORDSWORTH Now a step or two her way Is through space of open day, Where the enamoured sunny light Brightens her that was so bright; Now doth a delicate shadow fall, Falls upon her like a breath, From some lofty arch or wall, As she passes underneath. The following analogy will, I am apprehensive, appear dim and fantastic, but in reading Bartram's Travels I could not help transcribing the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor of Wordsworth's intellect and genius. — 'The soil is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay ; and that on a foundation of rocks, which often break through both strata, lifting their back above the surface. The trees which chiefly grow here are the gigantic black oak ; magnolia magni-floria ; fraxinus excelsior ; platane ; and a few stately tulip trees.' What Mr. Words- worth will produce, it is not for me to prophesy : but I could pronounce with the liveliest convictions what he is capable of producing. It is the First Genuine Philosophic Poem. The preceding criticism will not, I am aware, avail to overcome the prejudices of those who have made it a business to attack and ridicule Mr. Words- worth's compositions. Truth and prudence might be imaged as concentric circles. The poet may perhaps have passed beyond the latter, but he has confined himself far within the bounds of the former, in designating these critics, as too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple with him ; — 8 men of palsied imaginations, in whose minds all healthy action is WORDSWORTH . 131 languid ; — who, therefore, feed as the many direct them, or with the many are greedy after vicious provocatives '. Let not Mr. Wordsworth be charged with having expressed himself too indignantly, till the wantonness and the systematic and malignant perseverance of the aggressions have been taken into fair consideration. I myself heard the commander in chief of this unmanly warfare make a boast of his private admiration of Wordsworth's genius. I have heard him declare, that whoever came into his room would probably find the Lyrical Ballads lying open on his table, and that (speaking exclusively of those written by Mr. Wordsworth himself) he could nearly repeat the whole of them by heart. But a Review, in order to be a saleable article, must be personal, sharp, and pointed : and, since then, the poet has made himself, and with himself all who were, or were supposed to be, his friends and admirers, the object of the critic's revenge — how? by having spoken of a work so conducted in the terms which it deserved ! I once heard a clergyman in boots and buckskin avow, that he would cheat his own father in a horse. A moral system of a similar nature seems to have been adopted by too many anonymous critics. As we used to say at school, in reviewing they make being rogues : and he, who complains, is to be laughed at for his ignor- ance of the game. With the pen out of their hand they are honorable men. They exert indeed power (which is to that of the injured party who should attempt to expose their glaring perversions and mis- statements, as twenty to one) to write down, and (where the author's circumstances permit) to im- poverish the man, whose learning and genius they themselves in private have repeatedly admitted. They knowingly strive to make it impossible for the k2 132 WORDSWORTH man even to publish 1 any future work without ex- posing himself to all the wretchedness of debt and embarrassment. But this is all in their vocation : and, bating what they do in their vocation, ' who can say that black is the white of their eye ? ' So much for the detractors from Wordsworth's merits. On the other hand, much as I might wish for their fuller sympathy, I dare not flatter myself, that the freedom with which I have declared my opinions concerning both his theory and his defects, most of which are more or less connected with his theory, either as cause or effect, will be satisfactory or pleasing to all the poet's admirers and advocates. More indiscriminate than mine their admiration may be : deeper and more sincere it cannot be. But I have advanced no opinion either for praise or censure, other than as texts introductory to the reasons which compel me to form it. Above all, I was fully convinced that such a criticism was not only wanted ; but that, if executed with adequate ability, it must conduce, in no mean degree, to Mr. Wordsworth's reputation. His fame belongs to another age, and can neither be accelerated nor retarded. How small the proportion of the defects are to the beauties, I have repeatedly declared ; and that no one of them originates in deficiency of poetic genius. Had they been more and greater, I should still, as a friend to his literary character in the present age, consider an analytic display of them as pure gain ; if only it removed, as surely to all reflecting minds even the foregoing analysis must have re- 1 Not many months ago an eminent bookseller was asked what he thought of ? The answer was : ■ I have heard his r)wers very highly spoken of by some of our first-rate men ; but would not have a work of his if any one would give it me : for he is spoken but slightly of, or not at all, in the Quarterly Review : and the Edinburgh, you know, is decided to cut him up ! ' WORDSWORTH 133 moved, the strange mistake, so slightly grounded, yet so widely and industriously propagated, of Mr. Wordsworth's turn for simplicity ! I am not half so much irritated by hearing his enemies abuse him for vulgarity of style, subject, and conception ; as I am disgusted with the gilded side of the same meaning, as displayed by some affected admirers, with whom he is, forsooth, a sweet, simple poet ! and so natural, that little master Charles and his younger sister are so charmed with them, that they play at 4 Goody Blake ', or at ' Johnny and Betty Foy ! ' Were the collection of poems, published with these biographical sketches, important enough (which I am not vain enough to believe) to deserve such a distinction ; even as i have done, so would i be done unto. Biog. Lit. chaps. 4, 17-20, 22. Of all the men I ever knew, Wordsworth has the least femineity in his mind. He is all man. He is a man of whom it might have been said, — * It is good for him to be alone.' Add. T. T. I have often wished that the first two books of The Excursion had been published separately, under the name of 4 The Deserted Cottage \ They would have formed, what indeed they are, one of the most beauti- ful poems in the language. T. T. July 21, 1832. I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen books on the growth of an individual mind — superior, as I used to think, upon the whole, to The Excursion. You may judge how I felt about them by my own poem upon the occasion. Then the plan laid out, and, I believe, partly suggested by 134 WORDSWORTH me, was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man, — a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in con- tact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses ; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melan- choly picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice ; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive pro- cess in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restora- tion. Something of this sort was, I think, agreed on. It is, in substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy. I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton ; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position, which is peculiarly — perhaps I might say exclusively — fitted for him. His proper title is Spectator ah extra. T. T. July 31, 1832. Wordsworth and tJie Prelude. I am sincerely glad that he has bidden farewell to all small poems, and is devoting himself to his great work, grandly imprisoning, while it deifies, his atten- tion and feelings within the sacred circle and temple- walls of great objects and elevated conceptions. In WORDSWORTH 135 those little poems, his own corrections coming of necessity so often— at the end of every fourteen or twenty lines, or whatever the poem might chance to be— W ore him out ; difference of opinion with his best friends irritated him, and he wrote, at times, too much with a sectarian spirit, in a sort of bravado. But now he is at the helm of a noble bark ; now he sails right onward ; it is all open ocean and a steady breeze, and he drives before it, unfretted by short tacks, reefing and unreefing the sails, hauling and disentangling the ropes. His only disease is the having been out of his element ; his return to it is food to famine ; it is both the specific remedy and the condition of health. Anima Poetae, p. 30. CHAUCER I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melan- choly or morbid drooping ! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakespeare and Chaucer ; but what the first effects by a strdhg act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer ! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakespeare ! I cannot in the least allow any necessity for Chaucer's poetry, especially the Canterbury Tales, being considered obsolete. Let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final e of syllables, and for expressing the termination of such words as ocean, 136 CHAUCER and nation, &c, as dissyllables, — or let the syllables to be sounded in such cases be marked by a com- petent metrist. This simple expedient would, with a very few trifling exceptions, where the errors are inveterate, enable any reader to feel the perfect smoothness and harmony of Chaucer's verse. As to understanding his language, if you read twenty pages with a good glossary, you surely can find no further difficulty, even as it is ; but I should have no objec- tion to see this done :— Strike out those words which are now obsolete, and I will venture to say that I will replace every one of them by words still in use out of Chaucer himself, or Gower his disciple. I don't want this myself : I rather like to see the significant terms which Chaucer unsuccessfully offered as candi- dates for admission into our language ; but surely so very slight a change of the text may well be par- doned, even by hl&ck-letterati, for the purpose of restoring so great a poet to his ancient and most deserved popularity. T. T. March 15, 1834. Chaucer must be read with an eye to the Norman- French Trouveres, of whom he is the best representa- tive in English. As in Shakespeare, his characters represent classes, but in a different manner ; Shake- speare's characters are the representatives of the interior nature of humanity, in which some element has become so predominant as to destroy the health of the mind ; whereas Chaucer's are rather repre- sentatives of classes of manners. He is therefore more led to individualize in a mere personal sense. Observe Chaucer's love of nature ; and how happily the subject of his main work is chosen. When you reflect that the company in the Decameron have retired to a place of safety from the raging of CHAUCER 137 a pestilence, their mirth provokes a sense of their unfeelingness ; whereas in Chaucer nothing of this sort occurs, and the scheme of a party on a pil- grimage, with different ends and occupations, aptly allows of the greatest variety of expression in the tales. Int. Rem. I. 88. SPENSER There is this difference, among many others, between Shakespeare and Spenser : — Shakespeare is never coloured by the customs of his age ; what appears of contemporary character in him is merely negative ; it is just not something else. He has none of the fictitious realities of the classics, none of the grotesquenesses of chivalry, none of the allegory of the middle ages ; there is no sectarianism either of politics or religion, no miser, no witch, — no com- mon witch, — no astrology — nothing impermanent of however long duration ; but he stands like the yew tree in Lorton vale, which has known so many ages that it belongs to none in particular ; a living image of endless self-reproduction, like the immortal tree of Malabar. In Spenser the spirit of chivalry is entirely predominant, although with a much greater infusion of the poet's own individual self into it than is found in any other writer. He has the wit of the southern with the deeper inwardness of the northern genius. No one can appreciate Spenser without some re- flection on the nature of allegorical writing. The mere etymological meaning of the word, allegory, — to talk of one thing and thereby convey another, — is too wide. The true sense is this, — the employment 138 SPENSER of one set of agents and images to convey in disguise a moral meaning, with a likeness to the imagination, but with a difference to the understanding, — those agents and images being so combined as to form a homogeneous whole. This distinguishes it from metaphor, which is part of an allegory. But allegory is not properly distinguishable from fable, otherwise than as the first includes the second, as a genus its species ; for in a fable there must be nothing but what is universally known and acknowledged, but in an allegory there may be that which is new and not previously admitted. The pictures of the great masters, especially of the Italian schools, are genuine allegories. Amongst the classics, the multitude of their gods either precluded allegory altogether, or else made everything allegory, as in the Hesiodic Theogonia ; for you can scarcely distinguish between power and the personification of power. The Cupid and Psyche of, or found in, Apuleius, is a phaeno- menon. It is the platonic mode of accounting for the fall of man. The Battle of the Soul by Prudentius is an early instance of Christian allegory. /"Narrative allegory is distinguished from mythology as reality from symbol ; it is, in short, the proper intermedium between person and personification. Where it is top strongly individualized, it ceases to be allegory ; | this is often felt in the Pilgrim's Progress, where the characters are real persons with nicknames. Perhaps one of the most curious warn- ings against another attempt at narrative allegory on a great scale, may be found in Tasso's account of what he himself intended in and by his Jerusalem Delivered, As characteristic of Spenser, I would call your particular attention in the first place to the inde- scribable sweetness and fluent projection of his verse, SPENSER 1^9 very clearly distinguishable from the deeper and more inwoven harmonies of Shakespeare and Milton. . . . 9, Combined with this sweetness and fluency, the scientific construction of the metre of the Faery Queene is very noticeable. One of Spenser s arts is that of alliteration, and he uses it with great effect m doubling the impression of an image. . . . He is par- ticularly given to an alternate alliteration, which is, perhaps, when well used, a great secret in melody. . . . You cannot read a page of the Faery Queene, it you read for that purpose, without perceiving the intentional alliterativeness of the words ; and yet so skilfully is this managed, that it never strikes any unwarned ear as artificial, or other than the result of the necessary movement of the verse. 3. Spenser displays great skill in harmonizing his descriptions of external nature and actual incidents with the allegorical character and epic activity ot the poem. . . . Observe also the exceeding vividness of Spenser's descriptions. They are not, in the true sense of the word, picturesque ; but are composed ot a wondrous series of images, as in our dreams. 4. You will take especial note of the marvellous independence and true imaginative absence of all particular space or time in the Faery Queene. It is in the domains neither of history or geography ; it is ignorant of all artificial boundary, all material obsta- cles ; it is truly in land of Faery, that is, of mental space The poet has placed you in a dream, a charmed sleep, and you neither wish, nor have the power, to inquire where you are, or how you got there. . . . 5 You should note the quintessential character of Christian chivalry in all his characters, but more especially in his women. The Greeks, except, per- haps, in Homer, seem to have had no way of making their women interesting, but by unsexing them, as 140 SPENSER in the instances of the tragic Medea, Electra, &c. Contrast such characters with Spenser's Una, who exhibits no prominent feature, has no particulari- zation, but produces the same feeling that a statue does, when contemplated at a distance. . . . 6. In Spenser we see the brightest and purest form of that nationality which was so common a characteristic of our elder poets. There is nothing unamiable, nothing contemptuous of others, in it. To glorify their country — to elevate England into a queen, an empress of the heart — this was their passion and object ; and how dear and important an object it was or may be, let Spain, in the recollection of her Cid, declare! There is a great magic in national names. What a damper to all interest is a list of native East Indian merchants ! Unknown names are non-conductors ; they stop all sympathy. No one of our poets has touched this string more exquisitely than Spenser ; especially in his chronicle of the British Kings (B. II. c. 10), and the marriage of the Thames with the Medway (B. IV. c. 11), in both which passages the mere names constitute half the pleasure we receive. Lastly, the great and prevailing character of Spenser's mind is fancy under the conditions of the imagination, as an ever present but not always active power. He has an imaginative fancy, but he has not imagination, in kind or degree, as Shakespeare and Milton have ; the boldest effort of his powers in this way is the character of Talus. Add to this a feminine tenderness and almost maidenly purity of feeling, and above all, a deep moral earnestness which produces a believing sympathy and acquiescence in the reader, and you have a tolerably adequate view of Spenser's intellectual being. Lit. Rem. I. 89-97. SPENSER 141 Spenser's Epithalamion is truly sublime ; and pray mark the swan- like movement of his exquisite Pro- thalamion. His attention to metre and rhythm is sometimes so extremely minute as to be painful even to my ear, and you know how highly I prize versification. T. T. June 24, 1827. MILTON The age in which the foundations of his mind were laid, was congenial to it as one golden aera of profound erudition and individual genius; — that in which the superstructure was carried up, was no less favourable to it by a sternness of discipline and a show of self-control, highly flattering to the imaginative dignity of an heir of fame, and which won Milton over from the dear-loved delights of academic groves and cathedral aisles to the anti- prelatic party. It acted on him, too, no doubt, and modified his studies by a characteristic controversial spirit (his presentation of God is tinted with it) — a spirit not less busy indeed in political than in theological and ecclesiastical dispute, but carrying on the former almost always, more or less, in the guise of the latter. And so far as Pope's censure of our poet, — that he makes God the Father a school divine — is just, we must attribute it to the character of his age, from which the men of genius, who escaped, escaped by a worse disease, the licentious indifference of a Frenchified court. Such was the nidus or soil, which constituted, in the strict sense of the word, the circumstances of Milton's mind. In his mind itself there were purity and piety absolute ; an imagination to which neither 142 MILTON the past nor the present were interesting, except as far as they called forth and enlivened the great ideal, in which and for which he lived ; a keen love of truth, which, after many weary pursuits, found a harbour in a sublime listening to the still voice in his own spirit, and as keen a love of his country, which, after a disappointment still more depressive, expanded and soared into a love of man as a pro- bationer of immortality. These were, these alone could be, the conditions under which such a work as the Paradise Lost could be conceived and accom- plished. By a life-long study Milton had known — What was of use to know, What best to say could say, to do had done. His actions to his words agreed, his words To his large heart gave utterance due, his heart Contain'd of good, wise, fair, the perfect shape; and he left the imperishable total, as a bequest to the ages coming, in the Paradise Lost. . . . The language and versification of the Paradise Lost are peculiar in being so much more necessarily correspondent to each than those in any other poem or poet. The connexion of the sentences and the position of the words are exquisitely artificial ; but the position is rather according to the logic of passion or universal logic, than to the logic of grammar. Milton attempted to make the English language obey the logic of passion as perfectly as the Greek and Latin. Hence the occasional harsh- ness in the construction. . . . Milton is not a picturesque, but a musical, poet ; although he has this merit that the object chosen by him for any particular foreground always remains prominent to the end, enriched, but not incumbered, by the opulence of descriptive details furnished by MILTON 143 an exhaustless imagination. I wish the Paradise Lost were more carefully read and studied than I can see any ground for believing it is, especially those parts which, from the habit of always looking for a story in poetry, are scarcely read at all — as for example, Adam's vision of future events in the 11th and 12th books. No one can rise from the perusal of this immortal poem without a deep sense of the grandeur and the purity of Milton's soul, or without feeling how susceptible of domestic enjoyments he really was, notwithstanding the discomforts which actually resulted from an apparently unhappy choice in marriage. He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man ; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion, or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendent ideal. Lit. Rem. 1. 169-78. In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitution- ally tender, delicate, and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said, effeminate ; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecu- tion of Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter days. These causes have diffused over all his compositions 'a melancholy grace', and have drawn forth occasional strains, the more pathetic from their gentleness. But nowhere do we find the least trace of irritability, and still less of quarrelsome or affected contempt of his cen- surers. The same calmness, and even greater self-possession, may be affirmed of Milton, as far as his poems, and poetic character are concerned. He reserved his 144 MILTON anger for the enemies of religion, freedom, and his country. My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception, than arises from the contemplation of this great man in his latter days : poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted, Darkness before, and danger's voice behind, — in an age in which he was as little understood by the party, for whom, as by that, against whom he had contended ; and among men before whom he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance ; yet still listening to the music of his own thoughts, or if additionally cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three solitary individuals, he did nevertheless ■ Argue not Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot Of heart or hope ; but still bore up and steer'd Right onward. From others only do we derive our knowledge that Milton, in his latter day, had his scorners and de- tractors; and even in his day of youth and hope, that he had enemies would have been unknown to us, had they not been likewise the enemies of his country. Biog. Lit. ch. 2. The reader of Milton must be always on his duty : he is surrounded with sense ; it rises in every line ; every word is to the purpose. There are no lazy intervals ; all has been considered, and demands and merits observation. If this be called obscurity, let it be remembered that it is such an obscurity as is a compliment to the reader ; not that vicious obscurity, which proceeds from a muddled head. Ashe. p. 529. MILTON 145 I think nothing can be added to Milton's definition or rule of poetry — that it ought to be simple, sensuous, and impassioned ; that is to say, single in conception, abounding in sensible images, and inform- ing them all with the spirit of the mind. Milton's Latin style is, I think, better and easier than his English. His style, in prose, is quite as characteristic of him as a philosophic republican, as Cowley's is of him as a first-rate gentleman. T. T. May 8, 1824. In the Paradise Lost — indeed in every one of his poems — it is Milton himself whom you see ; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve — are all John Milton ; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading Milton's works. The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit. T. T. Aug. 18, 1833. RABELAIS AND SWIFT Rabelais is a most wonderful writer. Pantagruel is the Reason ; Panurge the Understanding, — the pollarded man, the man with every faculty except the reason. I scarcely know an example more illustrative of the distinction between the two. Rabelais had no mode of speaking the truth in those days but in such a form as this ; as it was, he was indebted to the King's protection for his life. Some of the com- mentators talk about his book being all political ; there are contemporary politics in it, of course, but the real scope is much higher and more philosophical. It is in vain to look about for a hidden meaning in all that he has written ; you will observe that, after any particularly deep thrust, as the Papimania, for 146 RABELAIS AND SWIFT example, Rabelais, as if to break the blow, and to appear unconscious of what he has done, writes a chapter or two of pure buffoonery. He, every now and then, flashes you a glimpse of a real face from his magic lantern, and then buries the whole scene in mist. The morality of the work is of the most re- fined and exalted kind ; as for the manners, to be sure, I cannot say much. Swift was anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco, — the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place. Yet Swift was rare. Can anything beat his remark on King William's motto, — Recepit, non rapuit, — 6 that the receiver was as bad as the thief 1 ? T. T. June 15, 1830. SWIFT AND STELLA I think Swift adopted the name of Stella, which is a man's name, with a feminine termination, to denote the mysterious epicene relation in which poor Miss Johnston stood to him. T. T. July 26, 1836. SIR THOMAS BROWNE It would be difficult to describe Browne ade- quately ; exuberant in conception and conceit, dignified, hyper-latinistic, a quiet and sublime en- thusiast ; yet a fantast, a humourist, a brain with a twist ; egotistic like Montaigne, yet with a feeling heart and an active curiosity, which, however, too often degenerates into a hunting after oddities. In his Hydriotaphia, and, indeed, almost all his works, SIR THOMAS BROWNE 147 the entireness of his mental action is very observable ; he metamorphoses everything, be it what it may, into the subject under consideration. Lit. Rem. II. 236. DONNE The wit of Donne, the wit of Butler, the wit of Pope, the wit of Congreve, the wit of Sheridan — how many disparate things are here expressed by one and the same word, Wit ! — Wonder-exciting vigour, intenseness and peculiarity of thought, using at will the almost boundless stories of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects where we have no right to expect it — this is the wit of Donne ! Lit. Rem. I. 149. LORD BROOKE I do not remember a more beautiful piece of prose in English than the consolation addressed by Lord Brooke (Fulke Greville) to a lady of quality on certain conjugal infelicities. The diction is such that it might have been written now, if we could find any one combining so thoughtful a head with so tender a heart and so exquisite a taste. T. T. July 5, 1834. ASGILL AND DEFOE I know no genuine Saxon English superior to Asgill's. I think his and Defoe's irony often finer than Swift's. T. T. April 30, 1832. l2 148 DON QUIXOTE Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. Sancho is the common sense of the social man-animal, un- enlightened and unsanctified by the reason. You see how he reverences his master at the very time he is cheating him. T. T. Aug. 11, 1832. THE BIBLE Our version of the Bible is to be loved and prized for this, as for a thousand other things — that it has preserved a purity of meaning to many terms of natural objects. Without this holdfast, our vitiated imaginations would refine away language to mere abstractions. Hence the French have lost their poetical language ; and Mr. Blanco White says the same thing has happened to the Spanish. T. T. June 24, 1827. Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style. T. T. June 14, 1830. PILGRIM'S PROGRESS This wonderful work is one of the few books which may be read repeatedly at different times, and each time with a new and different pleasure. I read it once as a theologian — and let me assure you that there is great theological acumen in the work — once with devotional feelings — and once as PILGRIM'S PROGRESS 149 a poet. I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely de- lightful colours. . . . The Pilgrwi's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language ; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. T. T. May 31, 1830. CRASHAW Crashaw seems in his poems to have given the first ebullience of his imagination, unshapen into form, or much of, what we now term, sweetness. In the poem Hope, by way of question and answer, his superiority to Cowley is self-evident. In that on the name of Jesus equally so ; but his lines on St. Theresa are the finest. Where he does combine richness of thought and diction nothing can excel, as in the lines you so much admire — Since 'tis not to be had at home, She'l travel to a martyrdome. No home for her confesses she, But where she may a martyr be. She'l to the Moores, and trade with them For this invalued diadem ; She offers them her dearest breath, With Christ's name in't, in change for death. She'l bargain with them, and will give Them God, and teach them how to live In Him, or if they this deny, 150 CRASHAW For Him she'l teach them how to die. So shall she leave amongst them sown The Lord's blood, or, at least, her own. Farewell then, all the world— adieu, Teresa is no more for you : Farewell all pleasures, sports and joys, Never till now esteemed toys — Farewell whatever dear'st may be, Mother's arms or father's knee ; Farewell house, and farewell home, She 's for the Moores and martyrdom. These verses were ever present to my mind. whilst writing the second part of Christabel ; if, indeed, by some subtle process of the mind they did not suggest the first thought of the whole poem. Add. T. T. GRAY I think there is something very majestic in Gray's Installation Ode ; but as to the Bard and the rest of his lyrics, I must say I think them frigid and artificial. There is more real lyric feeling in Cotton's Ode on Winter. T. T. Oct. 23, 1833. DR. JOHNSON Dr. Johnson seems to have been really more power- ful in discoursing viva voce in conversation than with his pen in hand. It seems as if the excitement of company called something like reality andconsecutive- ness into his reasonings, which in his writings I can- not see. His antitheses are almost always verbal only ; and sentence after sentence in the Rambler may be pointed out to which you cannot attach any definite DR. JOHNSON 151 meaning whatever. In his political pamphlets there is more truth of expression than in his other works, for the same reason that his conversation is better than his writings in general. He was more excited and in earnest. T. T. Nov. 1, 1833. JOHNSON AND BURKE Dr. Johnson's fame now rests principally upon Boswell. It is impossible not to be amused with such a book. But his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced ; — for no one, I suppose, will set Johnson before Burke, — and Burke was a great and universal talker ; — yet now we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in Boswell. The fact is, Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous ; hence he is not reported ; he seldom said the sharp, short things that Johnson almost always did, which produce a more decided effect at the moment, and which are so much more easy to carry off. Besides, as to Burke's testimony to Johnson's powers, you must remember that Burke was a great courtier ; and after all, Burke said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life. T. T. July 4, 1833. BURKE The very greatest writers write best when calm, and exerting themselves upon subjects unconnected with party. Burke rarely shows all his powers, unless where he is in a passion. The French 152 BURKE Revolution was alone a subject fit for him. We are not yet aware of all the consequences of that event. We are too near it. T. T. Jan. 4, 1823. Burke was, indeed, a great man. No one ever read history so philosophically as he seems to have done. Yet, until he could associate his general principles with some sordid interest, panic of pro- perty, Jacobinism, &c., he was a mere dinner-bell. Hence you will find so many half truths in his speeches and writings. Nevertheless, let us heartily acknowledge his transcendent greatness. He would have been more influential if he had less surpassed his contemporaries, as Fox and Pitt, men of much inferior minds in all respects. T. T. April 8, 1833. Burke possessed and had sedulously sharpened that eye which sees all things, actions, and events, in relation to the laws which determine their exist- ence and circumscribe their possibility. He referred habitually to principles : he was a scientific states- man, and therefore a Seer. For every principle contains in itself the germs of a prophecy ; and, as the prophetic power is the essential privilege of science, so the fulfilment of its oracles supplies the outward, and (to men in general) the only test, of its claim to the title. There is not one word I would add or withdraw from this, scarcely one which I would substitute. I can read Burke, and apply everything not merely temporary to the present most fearful condition of our country. I cannot conceive a time or a state of things in which the writings of Burke will not have the highest value. Add. T. T. 153 FIELDING AND RICHARDSON What a master of composition Fielding was ! Upon my word I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Alchemist, and Tom Jones, the three most perfect plots ever planned. And how charming, how whole- some, Fielding is ! To take him up after Richard- son, is like emerging from a sick-room heated by stoves, into an open lawn, on a breezy day in May. T. T. July 5, 1834. RICHARDSON I confess that it has cost, and still costs, my philosophy some exertion not to be vexed that I must admire, aye, greatly admire, Richardson. His mind is so very vile a mind, so oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent ! Bat to understand and draw him would be to produce a work almost equal to his own ; and, in order to do this, ' down, proud Heart, down ' (as we teach little children to say to themselves, bless them !), all hatred down ! and, instead thereof, charity, calm- ness, a heart fixed on the good part, though the understanding is surveying all. Richardson felt truly the defect of Fielding, or what was not his excellence, and made that his defect — a trick of un- charitableness often played, though not exclusively, by contemporaries. Fielding's talent was observation, not meditation. But Richardson was not philosopher enough to know the difference —say, rather, to under- stand and develop it. Anima Poetae, p. 1G6. 154 STERNE I think highly of Sterne — that is, of the first part of Tristram Shandy : for as to the latter part about the widow Wadman, it is stupid and disgusting ; and the Sentimental Journey is poor sickly stuff. There is a great deal of affectation in Sterne, to be sure ; but still the characters of Trim and the two Shandies are most individual and delightful. Sterne's morals are bad, but I don't think they can do much harm to any one whom they would not find bad enough before. Besides, the oddity and erudite grimaces under which much of his dirt is hidden take away the effect for the most part ; although, to be sure, the book is scarcely readable by women. T. T. Aug. 18, 1833. DRAYTON Drayton is a sweet poet, and Selden's notes to the early part of the Polyolbion are well worth your perusal. Daniel is a superior man ; his diction is pre-eminently pure — of that quality which I believe has always existed somewhere in society. It is just such English, without any alteration, as Wordsworth or Sir George Beaumont might have spoken or written in the present day. Yet there are instances of sublimity in Drayton. When deploring the cutting down of some of our old forests, he says, in language which reminds the reader of Lear, written subsequently, and also of several of Mr. Wordsworth's poems : — our trees so hack'd above the ground, That where their lofty tops the neighbouring countries crown'd, DRAYTON 155 Their trunks (like aged folks) now ba#e and naked stand, As for revenge to heaven each held a wither d hand. That is very fine. T. T. Sept. 12, 1830. JEREMY TAYLOR The writings of Bishop Jeremy Taylor are a per- petual feast to me. His hospitable board groans under the weight and multitude of his viands. Yet I seldom rise from the perusal of his works, without repeating or recollecting the excellent observation of Minucius Felix: — ' Fabulas et errores ab imperitis parentibus discimus ; et quod est gravius, ipsis studiis et disciplinis elaboramus.' Omniana. Jeremy Taylor is an excellent author for a young man to study, for the purpose of imbibing noble principles, and at the same time learning to exer- cise caution and thought in detecting his numerous errors. T. T. Aug. 29, 1827. BERKELEY Berkeley can only be confuted, or answered, by one sentence. So it is with Spinoza. His premiss granted, the deduction is a chain of adamant. T. T. July 23, 1827. 156 ALGERNON SIDNEY In my judgement Bolingbroke's style is not in any respect equal to that of Cowley or Dry den. Read Algernon Sidney : his style reminds you as little of books as of blackguards. What a gentleman he was ! T. T. July 12, 1827. LANDOR What is it that Mr. Landor wants, to make him a poet ? His powers are certainly very considerable, but he seems to be totally deficient in that modifying faculty, which compresses several units into one whole. The truth is, he does not possess imagina- tion in its highest form — that of stamping il piu nelV uno. Hence his poems, taken as wholes, are unintelligible ; you have eminences excessively bright, and all the ground around and between them in darkness. Besides which, he has never learned, with all his energy, how to write simple and lucid English. T. T. Jan. 1, 1834. LORD BYRON It seems, to my ear, that there is a sad want of harmony in Lord Byron's verses. Is it not unnatural to be always connecting very great intellectual power with utter depravity? Does such a combination often really exist in remm natura ? T. T. Dec. 29, 1822. How lamentably the art of versification is neg- lected by the poets of the present day ! — by Lord LORD BYRON 157 Byron, as it strikes me, in particular, among those of eminence for other qualities. Upon the whole, I think the part of Don Juan in which Lambro's return to his home, and Lambro himself, are described, is the best, that is, the most individual, thing in all I know of Lord Byron's works. The festal abandon- ment puts one in mind of Nicholas Poussin's pictures. T. T. June 7, 1824. [LAMB] Nothing ever left a stain on that gentle creature's mind, which looked upon the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, which shines and takes no pollution. All things are shadows to him, except those which move his affections. T. T. Sept. 22, 1830. TENNYSON I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me ; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses ; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson, — indeed without it he earn never be a poet in act, — is to write in the next two or three years in none but one 158 TENNYSON or two well known and strictly defined metres, such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octo- syllabic measure of the Allegro and Penseroso. He would, probably, thus get imbued with a sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is, I can scarcely scan some of his verses. T. T. April 24, 1833. SCOTCHMEN A whimsical friend of mine, of more genius than discretion, characterizes the Scotchman of literature (confining his remark, however, to the period since the Union) as a dull Frenchman and a superficial German. But when I recollect the splendid excep- tions of Hume, Robertson, Smollett, Reid, Thomson (if this last instance be not objected to as savouring of geographical pedantry, that truly amiable man and genuine poet having been born but a few fur- longs from the English border), Dugald Stewart, Burns, Walter Scott, Hogg, and Campbell — not to mention the very numerous physicians and promi- nent dissenting ministers born and bred beyond the Tweed — I hesitate in recording so wild an opinion, which derives its plausibility chiefly from the circum- stance, so honourable to our northern sister, that Scotchmen generally have more, and a more learned, education than the same ranks in other countries, below the first class ; but in part likewise, from the common mistake of confounding the general charac- ter of an emigrant, whose objects are in one place and his best affections in another, with the par- ticular character of a Scotchman : to which we may add, perhaps, the clannish spirit of provincial litera- SCOTCHMEN 159 ture, fostered undoubtedly by the peculiar relations of Scotland, and of which therefore its metropolis may be a striking, but is far from being a solitary, instance. TJie Friend, Section II, Essay I. SCOTT Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious opposites in this ; — that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations, — just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees ; — whereas, for myself, notwith- standing Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features. Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the battle, in Herodotus, as any one can. Charles Lamb wrote an essay on a man who lived in past time : — I thought of adding another to it on one who lived not in time at all, past, present, or future, — but beside or collaterally. T. T. Aug. 10, 1833. 'UNDINE' Undine is a most exquisite work. It shows the general want of any sense for the fine and the subtle in the public taste, that this romance made no deeper impression. Undine's character, before she receives a soul, is marvellously beautiful. T. T. May 31, 1830. 160 SCHILLER Schiller has the material Sublime ; to produce an effect, he sets you a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old tower. But Shakespeare drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow. T. T. Dec. 29, 1822. Schiller's blank verse is bad. He moves in it as a fly in a glue-bottle. His thoughts have their connexion and variety, it is true, but there is no sufficiently corresponding movement in the verse. How different from Shakespeare's endless rhythms ! There is a nimiety — a too-muchness — in all Ger- mans. It is the national fault. Lessing had the best notion of blank verse. The trochaic termination of German words renders blank verse in that language almost impracticable. We have it in our dramatic hendecasyllable ; but then we have a power of inter- weaving the iambic close ad libitum. T. T. June 2, 1834. GOETHE Goethe's small lyrics are delightful. He showed good taste in not attempting to imitate Shakespeare's Witches, which are threefold — Fates, Furies, and earthly Hags o' the caldron. T. T. May 18, 1833. HESIOD I like reading Hesiod, meaning the Works and Days. If every verse is not poetry, it is, at least, good sense, which is a great deal to say. T. T. Aug. 11, 1832. 161 PINDAR The odes of Pindar (with few exceptions, and these chiefly in the shorter ones) seem by intention to die away by soft gradations into a languid interest, like most of the landscapes of the great elder painters. Modern ode-writers have commonly preferred a con- tinued rising of interest. Anima Poetae, p. 168. PLOTINUS Plotinus was a man of wonderful ability, and some of the sublimest passages I ever read are in his works. T. T. Sept. 24, 1830. SENECA You may get a motto for every sect in religion, or line of thought in morals or philosophy, from Seneca ; but nothing is ever thought out by him. T. T. June 26, 1830. CLAUDIAN Claudian deserves more attention than is generally paid to him. He is the link between the old classic and the modern way of thinking in verse. You will observe in him an oscillation between the objective poetry of the ancients and the subjective mood of the moderns. His power of pleasingly reproducing the same thought in different language is remark- able, as it is in Pope. Read particularly the Phoenix, and see how the single image of renascence is varied. T. T. Aug. 1, 1833. 8. C. M 162 SYMPATHY OF OLD GREEK AND LATIN WITH ENGLISH If you take Sophocles, Catullus, Lucretius, the better parts of Cicero, and so on, you may, just with two or three exceptions arising out of the different idioms as to cases, translate page after page into good mother English, word by word, without altering the order ; but you cannot do so with Virgil or Tibullus \ if you attempt it, you will make nonsense. T. T. June 9, 1832. THUCYDIDES AND TACITUS The object of Thucydides was to show the ills resulting to Greece from the separation and conflict of the spirits or elements of democracy and oligarchy. The object of Tacitus was to demonstrate the des- perate consequences of the loss of liberty on the minds and hearts of men. T. T. Sept. 22, 1830. ANCIENT HISTORIANS: GIBBON I consider the two works of Sallust which have come down to us entire, as romances founded on facts ; no adequate causes are stated, and there is no real con- tinuity of action. In Thucydides, you are aware from the beginning that you are reading the reflections of a man of great genius and experience upon the charac- ter and operation of the two great political principles in conflict in the civilised world in his time ; his ANCIENT HISTORIANS: GIBBON 163 narrative of events is of minor importance, and it is evident that he selects for the purpose of illustration. It is Thucydides himself whom you read throughout under the names of Pericles, Nicias, &c. But in Herodotus it is just the reverse. He has as little subjectivity as Homer; and, delighting in the great fancied epic of events, he narrates them without im- pressing any thing as of his own mind upon the narrative. It is the charm of Herodotus that he gives you the spirit of his age — that of Thucydides, that he reveals to you his own, which was above the spirit of his age. The difference between the composition of a history in modern and ancient times is very great ; still there are certain principles upon which the history of a modern period may be written, neither sacrificing all truth and reality, like Gibbon, nor descending into mere biography and anecdote. Gibbon's style is detestable, but his style is not the worst thing about him. His history has proved an effectual bar to all real familiarity with the temper and habits of imperial Rome. Few persons read the original authorities, even those which are classical ; and certainly no distinct knowledge of the actual state of the empire can be obtained from Gibbon's rhetorical sketches. He takes notice of nothing but what may produce an effect ; he skips on from emi- nence to eminence, without ever taking you through the valleys between : in fact, his work is little else but a disguised collection of all the splendid anecdotes which he could find in any book concerning any per- sons or nations from the Antonines to the capture of Constantinople. When I read a chapter in Gibbon I seem to be looking through a luminous haze or fog : — figures come and go, I know not how or why, all larger than life, or distorted or discoloured; m2 164 ANCIENT HISTORIANS: GIBBON nothing is real, vivid, true; all is scenical, and as it were, exhibited by candlelight. And then to call it a History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ! Was there ever a greater misnomer ? I protest I do not remember a single philosophical attempt made throughout the work to fathom the ultimate causes of the decline or fall of that empire. How miserably deficient is the narrative of the im- portant reign of Justinian ! And that poor scepti- cism, which Gibbon mistook for Socratic philosophy, has led him to misstate and mistake the character and influence of Christianity in a way which even an avowed infidel or atheist would not and could not have done. Gibbon was a man of immense reading ; but he had no philosophy ; and he never fully understood the principle upon which the best of the old historians wrote. He attempted to imitate their artificial construction of the whole work — their dramatic ordonnance of the parts — without seeing that their histories were intended more as documents illustrative of the truths of political philosophy than as mere chronicles of events. The true key to the declension of the Roman empire — which is not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work — may be stated in two words : — the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation. T. T. Aug. 15, 1833. GREEK DRAMA In Aeschylus religion appears terrible, malignant, and persecuting : Sophocles is the mildest of the three tragedians, but the persecuting aspect is still maintained : Euripides is like a modern Frenchman, GREEK DRAMA 165 never so happy as when giving a slap at the gods altogether. T. T. Jan. 4, 1823. When I was a boy, I was fondest of Aeschylus ; in youth and middle age, I preferred Euripides ; now, in my declining years, I admire Sophocles. I can now at length see that Sophocles is the most perfect. Yet he never rises to the sublime simplicity of Aeschylus —simplicity of design, I mean — nor diffuses himself in the passionate outpourings of Euripides. I under- stand why the ancients called Euripides the most tragic of their dramatists: he evidently embraces within the scope of the tragic poet many passions, — love, conjugal affection, jealousy, and so on, which Sophocles seems to have considered as incongruous with the ideal statuesqueness of the tragic drama. Certainly Euripides was a greater poet in the abs- tract than Sophocles. His choruses may be faulty as choruses, but how beautiful and affecting they are as odes and songs ! I think the famous Evlttttov, give, in the (Edipus Coloneus, cold in comparison with many of the odes of Euripides, as that song of the chorus in the Hippolytus— v Epcos, v Epco?, and so on ; and I remember a choric ode in the Hecuba, which always struck me as exquisitely rich and finished ; I mean, where the chorus speaks of Troy and the night of the capture. There is nothing very surprising in Milton's pre- ference of Euripides, though so unlike himself. It is very common — very natural — for men to like and even admire an exhibition of power very different in kind from anything of their own. No jealousy arises. Milton preferred Ovid too, and I dare say he admired both as a man of sensibility admires a lovely woman, with a feeling into which jealousy 166 GREEK DRAMA or envy cannot enter. With Aeschylus or Sophocles he might perchance have matched himself. In Euripides you have oftentimes a very near approach to comedy, and I hardly know any writer in whom you can find such fine models of serious and dignified conversations. T. T. July 1, 1833. SHAKESPEARE The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis of Shakespeare's * Venus and Adonis ', and * Lucrece\ In the application of these principles to purposes of practical criticism as employed in the appraisal of works more or less imperfect, I have endeavoured to discover what the qualities in a poem are, which may be deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic power, as distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition by accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than by the inspiration of a genial and productive nature. In this investigation, I could not, I thought, do better, than keep before me the earliest work of the greatest genius that, perhaps, human nature has yet pro- duced, our myriad-minded 1 Shakespeare. I mean the ' Venus and Adonis ', and the ' Lucrece ' ; works which give at once strong promises of the strength, and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity, of his genius. From these I abstracted the following 1 'Avrjp nvpiovovs, a phrase which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople. I might have said, that I have reclaimed rather than borrowed it : for it seems to belong to Shakespeare, ' de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturae.' SHAKESPEARE 167 marks, as characteristics of original poetic genius in general. 1. In the 'Venus and Adonis,' the first and most obvious excellence is the perfect sweetness of the versification ; its adaptation to the subject ; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or per- mitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant. The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in the compositions of a young man. 'The man that hath not music in his soul' can indeed never be a genuine poet. Imagery (even taken from nature, much more when transplanted from books, as travels, voyages, and works of natural history) ; affecting incidents ; just thoughts ; interesting per- sonal or domestic feelings ; and with these the art of their combination or intertexture in the form of a poem ; may all by incessant effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talents and much reading, who, as I once before observed, has mistaken an intense desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius ; the love of the arbitrary end for a possession of the peculiar means. But the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination ; and this together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modify- ing a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learned. It is in these that ' poeta nascitur non fit.' £. A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and 168 SHAKESPEARE circumstances of the writer himself. At least I have found that where the subject is taken immediately from the author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a particular poem is but an equi- vocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power. We may perhaps remember the tale of the statuary, who had acquired considerable re- putation for the legs of his goddesses, though the rest of the statue accorded but indifferently with ideal beauty ; till his wife, elated by her husband's praises, modestly acknowledged that she herself had been his constant model. In the Venus and Adonis this proof of poetic power exists even to excess. It is throughout as if a superior spirit more intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the characters themselves, not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view ; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable ex- citement, which had resulted from the energetic fervour of his own spirit in so vividly exhibiting, what it had so accurately and profoundly contem- plated. I think, I should have conjectured from these poems, that even then the great instinct, which impelled the poet to the drama, was secretly work- ing in him, prompting him by a series and never broken chain of imagery, always vivid and, because unbroken, often minute ; by the highest effort of the picturesque in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted ; to provide a substi- tute for that visual language, that constant inter- vention and running comment by tone, look and gesture, which in his dramatic works he was entitled to expect from the players. His « Venus and SHAKESPEARE 169 Adonis' seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those characters by the most consummate actors. You seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything. Hence it is, that from the perpetual activity of attention re- quired on the part of the reader ; from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images ; and above all from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst ; that though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account. Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still more offensively, Wieland has done, instead of degrading and deforming passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence ; Shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse itself, so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader's notice among the thousand outward ima- ges, and now beautiful, now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery ; or by divert- ing our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty or profound reflections, which the poet's ever active mind has deduced from, or con- nected with, the imagery and the incidents. The reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of our nature. As little can a mind thus roused and awakened be brooded on by mean and indistinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can creep upon the surface of a lake, while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and billows. 3. It has been before observed that images, how- ever beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, 170 SHAKESPEARE and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion ; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion ; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit, Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air. In the two following lines, for instance, there is nothing objectionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place, part of a descriptive poem : Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve. But with a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. The same image will rise to semblance of poetry if thus conveyed : Yon row of bleak and visionary pines, By twilight glimpse discerned, mark ! how they flee From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild Streaming before them. I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of that particular excellence which I had in view, and in which Shakespeare even in his earliest, as in his latest, works surpasses all other poets. It is by this, that he still gives a dignity and a passion to the objects which he presents. Un- SHAKESPEARE 171 aided by any previous excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in power, Full many a glorious morning have I seen * Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye. Shakespeare's Sonnet 33rd. Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come— ******** ******** The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd, And the sad augurs mock their own presage ; Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd, And Peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now with the drops of this most balmy time My Love looks fresh, and Death to me sub- scribes ! Since spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes. And thou in this shall find thy monument, When tyrant's crests, and tombs of brass are spent. Sonnet 107. As of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colors itself to the circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the mind. For unrivalled instances of this excellence, the reader's own memory will refer him to the Lear, Othello, in short to which not of the 'great, ever living dead man's'' dramatic works ? 'Inopem me copia fecit.' How true it is to nature, he has himself finely expressed in the instance of love in Sonnet 98. From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud pied April drest in all its trim 172 SHAKESPEARE Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing, That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap\l with him. Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue, Could make me any summer's story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them, where they grew : Nor did I wonder at the lilies white, Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose ; They were, tho"* sweet, but figures of delight, Drawn after you, you pattern of all those. Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away, As zvith your shadow I with these did play ! Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable mark TovCfJiov \i\v ttoltitov— — ootis pi]fJ.a yzvvaZov AaKOi, will the imagery supply, when, with more than the power of the painter, the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of simultaneous- ness ! With this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace Of those fair arms, that held him to her heart, And homeward through the dark lawns runs apace : Look ! how a bright star shooteth from the shy, So glides he in the night from Venus' 1 eye. 4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove indeed but little, except as taken con- jointly with the former; yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric power; is DEFra, SHAKESPEARE 173 and energy of thought. No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a pro- found philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. In Shakespeare's poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other and intermix reluctantly and in tumult ; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice. The Venus and Adonis did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favor and even demand their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shake- speare's management of the tale neither pathos, nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language. What then shall we say ? even this ; that Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius ; no passive vehicle of inspira- tion possessed by the spirit, not possessing it ; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and 174 SHAKESPEARE intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class ; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer, not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood ; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton ; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself. O what great men hast thou not produced, England ! my country ! truly indeed — Must we be free or die, who speak the tongue, Which Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold, Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold ! Wordsworth. Biog. Lit. ch. xv. Shakespeare as a Poet generally. Clothed in radiant armour, and authorized by titles sure and manifold, as a poet, Shakespeare came forward to demand the throne of fame, as the dra- matic poet of England. His excellencies compelled even his contemporaries to seat him on that throne, although there were giants in those days contending for the same honour. Hereafter I would fain en- deavour to make out the title of the English drama as created by, and existing in, Shakespeare, and its SHAKESPEARE 175 right to the supremacy of dramatic excellence in general. But he had shown himself a poet, previously to his appearance as a dramatic poet ; and had no Lear, no Othello, no Henry IV, no Twelfth Night ever appeared, we must have admitted that Shake- speare possessed the chief, if not every, requisite of a poet— deep feeling and exquisite sense of beauty, both as exhibited to the eye in the combinations of form, and to the ear in sweet and appropriate melody ; that these feelings were under the command of his own will ; that in his very first productions he projected his mind out of his own particular being, and felt, and made others feel, on subjects no way connected with himself, except by force of contempla- tion and that sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that on which it meditates. To this must be added that affectionate love of nature and natural objects, without which no man could have observed so steadily, or painted so truly and passionately, the very minutest beauties of the external world : — And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare, Mark the poor wretch ; to overshoot his troubles, How he outruns the wind, and with what care He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles ; The many musits through the which he goes Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes. Sometimes he runs among the flock of sheep, To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell; And sometime where earth-delving conies keep, To stop the loud pursuers in their yell; And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer: Danger deviseth shifts, wit waits on fear. For there his smell with others' being mingled, The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt, Ceasing their clamorous cry, till they have singled, 176 SHAKESPEARE With much ado, the cold fault cleanly out, Then do they spend their mouths ; echo replies, As if another chase were in the skies. By this poor Wat far off, upon a hill, Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear, To hearken if his foes pursue him still : Anon their loud alarums he doth hear, And now his grief may be compared well To one sore-sick, that hears the passing-bell. Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch Turn, and return, indenting with the way : Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch, Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay. For misery is trodden on by many, And being low, never relieved by any. Venus and Adonis, And the preceding description : But, lo ! from forth a copse that neighbours by, A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud, &c. is much more admirable, but in parts less fitted for quotation. Moreover Shakespeare had shown that he possessed fancy, considered as the faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the main by some one point or more of likeness, as in such a passage as this : Full gently now she takes him by the hand, A lily prisoned in a jail of snow, Or ivory in an alabaster band ; So white a friend ingirts so white a foe ! — lb. And still mounting the intellectual ladder, he had as unequivocally proved the indwelling in his mind of imagination, or the power by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others, and by SHAKESPEARE 177 a sort of fusion to force many into one ; — that which afterwards showed itself in such might and energy in Lear, where the deep anguish of a father spreads the feeling of ingratitude and cruelty over the very ele- ments of heaven ; — and which, combining many cir- cumstances into one moment of consciousness, tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its principle and fountain, who is alone truly one. Various are the workings of this the greatest faculty of the human mind, both passionate and tranquil. In its tranquil and purely pleasur- able operation, it acts chiefly by creating out of many things, a§ they would have appeared in the description of an ordinary mind, detailed in unim- passioned succession, a oneness, even as nature, the greatest of poets, acts upon us, when we open our eyes upon an extended prospect. Thus the flight of Adonis in the dusk of the evening : Look ! how a bright star shooteth from the sky ; So glides he in the night from Venus' eye ! How many images and feelings are here brought together without effort and without discord, in the beauty of Adonis, the rapidity of his flight, the yearning, yet hopelessness, of the enamoured gazer, while a shadowy ideal character is thrown over the whole ! Or this power acts by impressing the stamp of humanity, and of human feelings, on inanimate or mere natural objects : Lo ! here the gentle lark, weary of rest, From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast The sun ariseth in his majesty, Who doth the world so gloriously behold, The cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold. 178 SHAKESPEARE Or again, it acts by so carrying on the eye of the reader as to make him almost lose the consciousness of words, — to make him see everything flashed, as Wordsworth has grandly and appropriately said, — ■ Flashed upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; — and this without exciting any painful or laborious attention, without any anatomy of description (a fault not uncommon in descriptive poetry) — but with the sweetness and easy movement of nature. This energy is an absolute essential of poetry, and of itself would constitute a poet, though not one of the highest class ; it is, however, a most hopeful symptom, and the Venus and Adonis is one continued specimen of it. In this beautiful poem there is an endless activity of thought in all the possible associations of thought with thought, thought with feeling, or with words, of feelings with feelings, and of words with words. Even as the sun, with purple-colour'd face, Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheekM Adonis hied him to the chase : Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn. Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo him. Remark the humanizing imagery and circumstances of the first two lines, and the activity of thought in the play of words in the fourth line. The whole stanza presents at once the time, the appearance of the morning, and the two persons distinctly charac- terized, and in six simple verses puts the reader in possession of the whole argument of the poem. SHAKESPEARE 179 Over one arm the lusty courser's rein, Under the other was the tender boy, Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain, With leaden appetite, unapt to toy, She red and hot, as coals of glowing fire, He red for shame, but frosty to desire : — This stanza and the two following afford good in- stances of that poetic power, which I mentioned above, of making everything present to the imagina- tion — both the forms, and the passions which modify those forms, either actually, as in the representations of love, or anger, or other human affections : or imagi- natively, by the different manner in which inanimate objects, or objects unimpassioned themselves, are caused to be seen by the mind in moments of strong excitement, and according to the kind of the excite- ment, — whether of jealousy, or rage, or love, in the only appropriate sense of the word, or of the lower impulses of our nature, or finally of the poetic feeling itself. It is, perhaps, chiefly in the power of pro- ducing and reproducing the latter that the poet stands distinct. The subject of the Venus and Adonis is unpleasing ; but the poem itself is for that very reason the more illustrative of Shakespeare. There are men who can write passages of deepest pathos and even sublimity on circumstances personal to themselves and stimula- tive of their own passions ; but they are not, there- fore, on this account poets. Read that magnificent burst of woman's patriotism and exultation, Deborah's song of victory ; it is glorious, but nature is the poet there. It is quite another matter to become all things and yet remain the same, — to make the changeful god be felt in the river, the lion and the flame ; — this it is, that is the true imagination. n2 180 SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare writes in this poem, as if he were of another planet, charming you to gaze on the move- ments of Venus and Adonis, as you would on the twinkling dances of two vernal butterflies. Finally, in this poem and the Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare gave ample proof of his possession of a most profound, energetic, and philosophical mind, without which he might have pleased, but could not have been a great dramatic poet. Chance and the necessity of his genius combined to lead him to the drama his proper province ; in his conquest of which we should consider both the difficulties which op- posed him, and the advantages by which he was assisted. Lit. Rem., II. 53-60. Shakespeare's Judgment equal to his Genius. Thus then Shakespeare appears, from his Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece alone, apart from all his great works, to have possessed all the conditions of the true poet. Let me now proceed to destroy, as far as may be in my power, the popular notion that he was a great dramatist by mere instinct, that he grew immortal in his own despite, and sank below men of second or third-rate power, when he attempted aught beside the drama — even as bees construct their cells and manufacture their honey to admirable perfection ; but would in vain attempt to build a nest. Now this mode of reconciling a com- pelled sense of inferiority with a feeling of pride, began in a few pedants, who having read that Sophocles was the great model of tragedy, and Aristotle the infallible dictator of its rules, and finding that the Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and other masterpieces, were neither in imitation of Sophocles SHAKESPEARE 181 nor in obedience to Aristotle — and not having (with one or two exceptions) the courage to affirm that the delight which their country received from generation to generation, in defiance of the altera- tions of circumstances and habits, was wholly ground- less — took upon them, as a happy medium and refuge, to talk of Shakespeare as a sort of beautiful lusus naturae, a delightful monster — wild, indeed, and without taste or judgment, but like the inspired idiots so much venerated in the East, uttering, amid the strangest follies, the sublimest truths. In nine places out of ten in which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with some epithet of * wild,' 6 irregu- lar,' ' pure child of nature,' &c. If all this be true, we must submit to it ; though to a thinking mind it cannot but be painful to find any excellence, merely human, thrown out of all human analogy, and thereby leaving us neither rules for imitation, nor motives to imitate ; — but if false, it is a dangerous falsehood ; — for it affords a refuge to secret self-con- ceit, — enables a vain man at once to escape his reader's indignation by general swoln panegyrics, and merely by his ipse dixit to treat, as contemptible, what he has not intellect enough to comprehend, or soul to feel, without assigning any reason, or referring his opinion to any demonstrative principle; — thus leav- ing Shakespeare as a sort of Grand Lama, adored indeed, and his very excrements prized as relics, but with no authority or real influence. I grieve that every late voluminous edition of his works would enable me to substantiate the present charge with a variety of facts, one-tenth of which would of themselves exhaust the time allotted to me. Every critic, who has or has not made a collection of black- letter books, — in itself a useful and respectable amuse- ment, — puts on the seven-league boots of self-opinion, 182 SHAKESPEARE and strides at once from an illustrator into a supreme judge, and, blind and deaf, fills his three-ounce phial at the waters of Niagara ; and determines positively the greatness of the cataract to be neither more nor less than his three-ounce phial has been able to receive. I think this a very serious subject. It is my earnest desire, — my passionate endeavour, — to enforce at various times and by various arguments and instances the close and reciprocal connexion of just taste with pure morality. Without that acquaint- ance with the heart of man, or that docility and childlike gladness to be made acquainted with it, which those only can have, who dare look at their own hearts — and that with a steadiness which religion only has the power of reconciling with sincere humility ; — without this, and the modesty produced by it, I am deeply convinced that no man, however wide his erudition, however patient his antiquarian researches, can possibly understand, or be worthy of understanding, the writings of Shakespeare. Assuredly that criticism of Shakespeare will alone be genial which is reverential. The Englishman who without reverence, a proud and affectionate reverence, can utter the name of William Shake- speare, stands disqualified for the office of critic. He wants one at least of the very senses, the language of which he is to employ, and will dis- course, at best, but as a blind man, while the whole harmonious creation of light and shade with all its subtle interchange of deepening and dissolving colours rises in silence to the silent fiat of the uprising Apollo. However inferior in ability I may be to some who have followed me, I own I am proud that I was the first in time who publicly demonstrated to the full extent of the position, that the supposed SHAKESPEARE 183 irregularity and extravagancies of Shakespeare were the mere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it had not the dimensions of the swan. In all the successive courses of lectures delivered by me, since my first attempt at the Royal Institution, it has been, and it still remains, my object, to prove that in all points, from the most important to the most minute, the judgment of Shakespeare is com- mensurate with his genius, — nay, that his genius reveals itself in his judgment as in its most exalted form. And the more gladly do I recur to this subject from the clear conviction, that to judge aright, and with distinct consciousness of the grounds of our judgment, concerning the works of Shake- speare, implies the power and the means of judging rightly of all other works of intellect, those of abs- tract science alone excepted. It is a painful truth that not only individuals, but even whole nations, are ofttimes so enslaved to the habits of their education and immediate circum- stances as not to judge disinterestedly even on those subjects, the very pleasure arising from which con- sists in its disinterestedness, namely, on subjects of taste and polite literature. Instead of deciding con- cerning their own modes and customs by any rule of reason, nothing appears rational, becoming, or beautiful to them, but what coincides with the peculiarities of their education. In this narrow circle, individuals may attain to exquisite discrimina- tion, as the French critics have done in their own literature; but a true critic can no more be such without placing himself on some central point, from which he may command the whole, that is, some general rule, which, founded in reason, or the facul- ties common to all men, must therefore apply to each, — than an astronomer can explain the movements 184 SHAKESPEARE of the solar system without taking his stand in the sun. And let me remark that this will not tend to produce despotism, but, on the contrary, true tolerance, in the critic. He will, indeed, require, as the spirit and substance of a work, something true in human nature itself, and independent of all circum- stances; but in the mode of applying it he will estimate genius and judgment according to the felicity with which the imperishable soul of intellect shall have adapted itself to the age, the place, and the existing manners. The error he will expose lies in reversing this, and holding up the mere circum- stances as perpetual, to the utter neglect of the power which can alone animate them. For art can- not exist without, or apart from, nature ; and what has man of his own to give to his fellow-man, but his own thoughts and feelings, and his observations so far as they are modified by his own thoughts or feelings ? Let me, then, once more submit this question to minds emancipated alike from national, or party, or sectarian prejudice: — Are the plays of Shakespeare works of rude uncultivated genius, in which the splendour of the parts compensates, if aught can compensate, for the barbarous shapelessness and irregularity of the whole ? — Or is the form equally admirable with the matter, and the judgment of the great poet not less deserving our wonder than his genius? — Or, again, to repeat the question in other words : — Is Shakespeare a great dramatic poet on account only of those beauties and excellencies which he possesses in common with the ancients, but with diminished claims to our love and honour to the full extent of his differences from them? Or are these very differences additional proofs of poetic wisdom, at once results and symbols of living power SHAKESPEARE 185 as contrasted with lifeless mechanism — of free and rival originality as contradistinguished from servile imitation, or, more accurately, a blind copying of effects, instead of a true imitation of the essential principles ? — Imagine not that I am about to oppose genius to rules. No ! the comparative value of these rules is the very cause to be tried. The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty. It must embody in order to reveal itself; but a living body is of necessity an organized one ; and what is organization but the connexion of parts in and for a whole, so that each part is at once end and means ? — This is no discovery of criticism ; it is a necessity of the human mind ; and all nations have felt and obeyed it, in the inven- tion of metre and measured sounds, as the vehicle and involucrum of poetry — itself a fellow-growth from the same life, — even as the bark is to the tree ! No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless ; for it is even this that constitutes it genius — the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination. How then comes it that not only single Zoili, but whole nations have combined in unhesitating con- demnation of our great dramatist, as a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful monsters, — as a wild heath where islands of fertility look the greener from the surrounding waste, where the loveliest plants now shine out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked by their parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the weed without snapping the flower ?— In this statement I have had no refer- ence to the vulgar abuse of Voltaire, save as far as his charges are coincident with the decisions of 186 SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare's own commentators and (so they would tell you) almost idolatrous admirers. The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material ; — as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate ; it shapes, as it developes, 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, — its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror ; — and even such is the appropriate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own Shake- speare, — himself a nature humanized, a genial under- standing directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness. I greatly dislike beauties and selections in general ; but as proof positive of his unrivalled excellence, I should like to try Shakespeare by this criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the human faculties, as reason or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the coincidence of the two (a feeling sui generis et demonstratio demonstrationum) called the conscience, the understanding or prudence, wit, fancy, imagination, judgment, — and then of the objects on which these are to be employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the seeming caprices of nature, the realities and the capabilities, that is, the actual and the ideal, of the human mind, conceived as an individual or as a social being, as in innocence or SHAKESPEARE 187 in guilt, in a play-paradise, or in a war-field of temptation; — and then compare with Shakespeare under each of these heads all or any of the writers in prose and verse that have ever lived ! Who, that is competent to judge, doubts the result ? — And ask your own hearts, — ask your own common-sense — to conceive the possibility of this man being — I say not the drunken savage of that wretched sciolist, whom Frenchmen, to their shame, have honoured before their elder and better worthies, — but the anomalous, the wild, the irregular, genius of our daily criticism ! What! are we to have miracles in sport? — Or, I speak reverently, does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man ? Lit. Rem., II. 60-69. Shakespeare found the infant stage demanding an intermixture of ludicrous character as imperiously as that of Greece did the chorus, and high language accordant. And there are many advantages in this ; — a greater assimilation to nature, a greater scope of power, more truths, and more feelings ; — the effects of contrast, as in Lear and the Fool; and especially this, that the true language of passion becomes sufficiently elevated by your having previously heard, in the same piece, the lighter conversation of men under no strong emotion. The very nakedness of the stage, too, was advan- tageous, — for the drama thence became something between recitation and a re-presentation ; and the absence or paucity of scenes allowed a freedom from the laws of unity of place and unity of time, the observance of which must either confine the drama to as few subjects as may be counted on the fingers, or involve gross improbabilities, far more striking than the violation would have caused. Thence, 188 SHAKESPEARE also, was precluded the danger of a false ideal, — of aiming at more than what is possible on the whole. What play of the ancients, with reference to their ideal, does not hold out more glaring absurdities than any in Shakespeare? On the Greek plan a man could more easily be a poet than a dramatist ; upon our plan more easily a dramatist than a poet. Lit. Bern., II. 39. Recapitulation and Summary of the Characteristics ( of Shakespeare } s Dramas, In lectures, of which amusement forms a large part of the object, there are some peculiar diffi- culties. The architect places his foundation out of sight, and the musician tunes his instrument before he makes his appearance; but the lecturer has to try his chords in the presence of the assembly ; an operation not likely, indeed, to produce much pleasure, but yet indispensably necessary to a right understanding of the subject to be developed. Poetry in essence is as familiar to barbarous as to civilized nations. The Laplander and the savage Indian are cheered by it as well as the inhabitants of London and Paris ; — its spirit takes up and incorporates surrounding materials, as a plant clothes itself with soil and climate, whilst it exhibits the working of a vital principle within indepen- dent of all accidental circumstances. And to judge with fairness of an author's works, we ought to distinguish what is inward and essential from what is outward and circumstantial. It is essential to poetry that it be simple, and appeal to the elements and primary laws of our nature ; that it be sensuous, and by its imagery elicit truth at a flash ; that it be impassioned, and be able to move our feelings SHAKESPEARE 189 and awaken our affections. In comparing different poets with each other, we should inquire which have brought into the fullest play our imagination and our reason, or have created the greatest ex- citement and produced the greatest harmony. If we consider great exquisiteness of language and sweetness of metre alone, it is impossible to deny to Pope the character of a delightful writer ; but whether he be a poet, must depend upon our definition of the word ; and, doubtless, if everything that pleases be poetry, Pope's satires and epistles must be poetry. This I must say, that poetry, as distinguished from other modes of composition, does not rest in metre, and that it is not poetry, if it make no appeal to our passions or our imagination. One character belongs to all true poets, that they write from a principle within, not originating in anything without; and that the true poet's work in its form, its shapings, and its modifications, is distinguished from all other works that assume to belong to the class of poetry, as a natural from an artificial flower, or as the mimic garden of a child from an enamelled meadow. In the former the flowers are broken from their stems and stuck into the ground ; they are beautiful to the eye and fragrant to the sense, but their colours soon fade, and their odour is transient as the smile of the planter ; — while the meadow may be visited again and again with renewed delight, its beauty is innate in the soul, and its bloom is of the freshness of nature. The next ground of critical judgment, and point of comparison, will be as to how far a given poet has been influenced by accidental circumstances. As a living poet must surely write, not for the ages past, but for that in which he lives, and those 190 SHAKESPEARE which are to follow, it is, on the one hand, natural that he should not violate, and on the other, necessary that he should not depend on, the mere manners and modes of his day. See how little does Shakespeare leave us to regret that he was born in his particular age ! The great aera in modern times was what is called the Restoration of Letters ! — the ages preceding it are called the dark ages ; but it would be more wise, perhaps, to call them the ages in which we were in the dark. It is usually overlooked that the supposed dark period was not universal, but partial and successive, or alternate ; that the dark age of England was not the dark age of Italy, but that one country was in its light and vigour, whilst another was in its gloom and bondage. But no sooner had the Reformation sounded through Europe like the blast of an archangel's trumpet, than from king to peasant there arose an enthusiasm for knowledge ; the discovery of a manuscript became the subject of an embassy ; Erasmus read by moonlight, because he could not afford a torch, and begged a penny, not for the love of charity, but for the love of learning. The three great points of attention were religion, morals, and taste ; men of genius as well as men of learning, who in this age need to be so widely distinguished, then alike became copyists of the ancients ; and this, indeed, was the only way by which the taste of mankind could be improved, or their understandings informed. Whilst Dante imagined himself a humble follower of Virgil, and Ariosto of Homer, they were both unconscious of that greater power working within them, which in many points carried them beyond their supposed originals. All great discoveries bear the stamp of the age in which they are made ; — hence we SHAKESPEARE 191 perceive the effects of the purer religion of the moderns, visible for the most part in their lives; and in reading their works we should not content ourselves with the mere narratives of events long since passed, but should learn to apply their maxims and conduct to ourselves. Having intimated that times and manners lend their form and pressure to genius, let me once more draw a slight parallel between the ancient and modern stage, the stages of Greece and of England. The Greeks were polytheists ; their religion was local ; almost the only object of all their knowledge, art and taste, was their gods ; and, accordingly, their productions were, if the expression may be allowed, statuesque, whilst those of the moderns are picturesque. The Greeks reared a structure, which in its parts, and as a whole, fitted the mind with the calm and elevated impression of perfect beauty and symmetrical proportion. The moderns also produced a whole, a more striking whole : but it was by blending materials and fusing the parts together. And as the Pantheon is to York Minster or Westminster Abbey, so is Sophocles compared with Shakespeare ; in the one a completeness, a satisfaction, an excellence, on which the mind rests with complacency ; in the other a multitude of interlaced materials, great and little, magnificent and mean, accompanied, indeed, with the sense of a falling short of perfection, and yet, at the same time, so promising of our social and individual progression, that we would not, if we could, exchange it for that repose of the mind which dwells on the forms of symmetry in acquiescent admiration of grace. This general characteristic of the ancient and modern drama might be illustrated by a parallel of the ancient 192 SHAKESPEARE and modern music ; — the one consisting of melody arising from a succession only of pleasing sounds, — the modern embracing harmony also, the result of combination and the effect of a whole. I have said, and I say it again, that great as was the genius of Shakespeare, his judgment was at least equal to it. Of this any one will be con- vinced, who attentively considers those points in which the dramas of 'Greece and England differ, from the dissimilitude of circumstances by which each was modified and influenced. The Greek stage had its origin in the ceremonies of a sacrifice, such as of the goat to Bacchus, whom we most erroneously regard as merely the jolly god of wine ; — for among the ancients he was venerable, as the symbol of that power which acts without our consciousness in the vital energies of nature, — the vinum mundi, — as Apollo was that of the conscious agency of our intellectual being. The heroes of old under the influence of this Bacchic enthusiasm performed more than human actions; — hence tales of the favourite champions soon passed into dialogue. On the Greek stage the chorus was always before the audience ; the curtain was never dropped, as we should say ; and change of place being there- fore, in general, impossible, the absurd notion of condemning it merely as improbable in itself was never entertained by any one. If we can believe ourselves at Thebes in one act, we may believe ourselves at Athens in the next. If a story lasts twenty-four hours or twenty-four years, it is equally improbable. There seems to be no just boundary but what the feelings prescribe. But on the Greek stage where the same persons were per- petually before the audience, great judgment was necessary in venturing on any such change. The SHAKESPEARE 193 poets never, therefore, attempted to impose on the senses by bringing places to men, but they did bring men to places, as in the well-known instance in the Eumenides, where during an evident re- tirement of the chorus from the orchestra, the scene is changed to Athens, and Orestes is first introduced in the temple of Minerva, and the chorus of Furies come in afterwards in pursuit of him. In the Greek drama there were no formal divisions into scenes and acts ; there were no means, therefore, of allowing for the necessary lapse of time between one part of the dialogue and another, and unity of time in a strict sense was, of course, impossible. To overcome that difficulty of accounting for time, which is effected on the modern stage by dropping a curtain, the judgment and great genius of the ancients supplied music and measured motion, and with the lyric ode filled up the vacuity. In the story of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the capture of Troy is supposed to be announced by a fire lighted on the Asiatic shore, and the transmission of the signal by successive beacons to Mycenae. The signal is first seen at the 21st line, and the herald from Troy itself enters at the 486th, and Agamemnon himself at the 783rd line. But the practical absurdity of this was not felt by the audience, who in imagination stretched minutes into hours, while they listened to the lofty narrative odes of the chorus which almost entirely fill up the interspace. Another fact deserves attention here, namely, that regularly on the Greek stage a drama, or acted story, consisted in reality of three dramas, called together a trilogy, and performed consecutively in the course of one day. Now you may conceive a tragedy of Shakespeare's as a trilogy connected in one single representation. Divide 194 SHAKESPEARE Lear into three parts, and each would be a play with the ancients ; or take the three Aeschylean dramas of Agamemnon, and divide them into, or call them, as many acts, and they together would be one play. The first act would comprise the usurpation of Aegisthus, and the murder of Agamemnon : the second, the revenge of Orestes, and the murder of his mother; and the third, the penance and absolution of Orestes ; — occupying a period of twenty-two years. The stage in Shakespeare^ time was a naked room with a blanket for a curtain ; but he made it a field for monarchs. The law of unity, which has its foundations, not in the factitious necessity of custom, but in nature itself, the unity of feeling, is everywhere and at all times observed by Shake- speare in his plays. Read Romeo and Juliet ; — all is youth and spring ; — youth with all its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies ; — spring with its odours, its flowers, and its transiency ; it is one and the same feeling that commences, goes through, and ends the play. The old men, the Capulets and the Montagues, are not common old men ; they have an eagerness, a heartiness, a vehemence, the effect of spring; with Romeo, his change of passion, his sudden marriage, and his rash death, are all the effects of youth : — whilst in Juliet love has all that is tender and melancholy in the nightingale, all that is voluptuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in the freshness of spring ; but it ends with a long deep sigh like the last breeze of the Italian evening. This unity of feeling and character pervades every drama of Shakespeare. It seems to me that his plays are distinguished from those of all other dramatic poets by the following characteristics • SHAKESPEARE 195 1. Expectation in preference to surprise. It is like the true reading of the passage : — 6 God said, Let there be light, and there was light ; ' — not there was light. As the feeling with which we startle at a shooting star, compared with that of watching the sunrise at the pre-established moment, such and so low is surprise compared with expectation. % Signal adherence to the great law of nature, that all opposites tend to attract and temper each other. Passion in Shakespeare generally displays libertinism, but involves morality ; and if there are exceptions to this, they are, independently of their intrinsic value, all of them indicative of individual character, and, like the farewell admonitions of a parent, have an end beyond the parental relation. Thus the Countess's beautiful precepts to Bertram, by elevating. her character, raise that of Helena her favourite, and soften down the point in her which Shakespeare does not mean us not to see, but to see and to forgive, and at length to justify. And so it is in Polonius, who is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. Shakespeare never intended to exhibit him as a buf- foon : for although it was natural that Hamlet, — a young man of fire and genius, detesting formality, and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagin- ing that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation, — should express himself satirically, — yet this must not be taken as exactly the poet's conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character had arisen from long habits of business ; but take his advice to Laertes, and Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he was meant to be represented as a statesman somewhat past his faculties, — his recollections of life all full of wisdom, and o2 196 SHAKESPEARE showing a knowledge of human nature, whilst what immediately takes place before him, and escapes from him, is indicative of weakness. But as in Homer all the deities are in armour, even Venus ; so in Shakespeare all the characters are strong. Hence real folly and dulness are made by him the vehicles of wisdom. There is no difficulty for one being a fool to imitate a fool : but to be, remain, and speak like a wise man and a great wit, and yet so as to give a vivid representation of a veritable fool, — hie labor, hoc opus est. A drunken constable is not uncommon, nor hard to draw ; but see and examine what goes to make up a Dog- berry. 3. Keeping at all times in the high road of life. Shakespeare has no innocent adulteries, no interesting incests, no virtuous vice: — he never renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher, the Kotzebues of the day. Shakespeare's fathers are roused by ingratitude, his husbands stung by unfaithfulness; in him, in short, the affections are wounded in those points in which all may, nay, must, feel. Let the morality of Shakespeare be contrasted with that of the writers of his own, or the succeeding, age, or of those of the present day, who boast their superiority in this respect. No one can dispute that the result of such a comparison is altogether in favour of Shakespeare : — even the letters of women of high rank in his age were often coarser than his writings. If he oc- casionally disgusts a keen sense of delicacy, he never injures the mind; he neither excites, nor flatters, passion, in order to degrade the subject of it ; he does not use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carries on warfare against virtue, by causing SHAKESPEARE 197 wickedness to appear as no wickedness, through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate. In Shakespeare vice never walks as in twilight : nothing is purposely out of its place; — he inverts not the order of nature and propriety, — does not make every magistrate a drunkard or glutton, nor every poor man meek, humane, and temperate ; he has no benevolent butchers, nor any sentimental rat-catchers. 4. Independence of the dramatic interest on the plot. The interest in the plot is always in fact on account of the characters, not vice versa, as in almost all other writers ; the plot is a mere canvas and no more. Hence arises the true justification of the same stratagem being used in regard to Benedick and Beatrice, — the vanity in each being alike. Take away from the Much Ado About Nothing all that which is not indispensable to the plot, either as having little to do with it, or, at best, like Dogberry and his comrades, forced into the service, when any other less ingeniously absurd watchmen and night- constables would have answered the mere necessities of the action ; — take away Benedick, Beatrice, Dog- berry, and the reaction of the former on the character of Hero, — and what will remain ? In other writers the main agent of the plot is always the prominent character; in Shakespeare it is so, or is not so, as the character is in itself calculated, or not calculated, to form the plot. Don John is the main-spring of the plot of this play ; but he is merely shown and then withdrawn. 5. Independence of the interest on the story as the ground- work of the plot. Hence Shakespeare never took the trouble of inventing stories. It was enough for him to select from those that had been already invented or recorded such as had one or other, or 198 SHAKESPEARE both, of two recommendations, namely, suitableness to his particular purpose, and their being parts of popular tradition, — names of which we had often heard, and of their fortunes, and as to which all we wanted was, to see the man himself. So it is just the man himself, the Lear, the Shylock, the Richard, that Shakespeare makes us for the first time ac- quainted with. Omit the first scene in Lear and yet everything will remain ; so the first and second scenes in the Merchant of Venice. Indeed it is universally true. 6. Interfusion of the lyrical — that which in its very essence is poetical — not only with the dramatic, as in the plays of Metastasio, where at the end of the scene comes the aria as the exit speech of the character, — but also in and through the dramatic. Songs in Shakespeare are introduced as songs only, just as songs are in real life, beautifully as some of them are characteristic of the person who has sung or called for them, as Desdemona's 'Willow,' and Ophelia's wild snatches, and the sweet carollings in As You Like It. But the whole of the Midsummer Nighfs Dream is one continued specimen of the dramatized lyrical. And observe how exquisitely the dramatic of Hotspur ; — Marry, and I'm glad on't with all my heart; I had rather be a kitten, and cry — mew, &c. melts away into the lyric of Mortimer ; — I understand thy looks: that pretty Welsh Which thou pourest down from these swelling heavens, I am too perfect in, &c. Henry IV, Part I, Act III. Scene 1. 7. The characters of the dramatis personae, like those in real life, are to be inferred by the reader ; — they are not told to him. And it is well worth SHAKESPEARE 199 remarking that Shakespeare's characters, like those in real life, are very commonly misunderstood, and almost always understood by different persons in different ways. The causes are the same in either case. If you take only what the friends of the character say, you may be deceived, and still more so, if that which his enemies say ; nay, even the character himself sees himself through the medium of his character, and not exactly as he is. Take all altogether, not omitting a shrewd hint from the clown or the fool, and perhaps your impression may be right; and you may know whether you have in fact discovered the poet's own idea, by all the speeches receiving light from it, and attesting its reality by reflecting it. Lastly, in Shakespeare the heterogeneous is united, as it is in nature. You must not suppose a pressure or passion always acting on or in the character ; — passion in Shakespeare is that by which the individual is distinguished from others, not that which makes a different kind of him. Shakespeare followed the main march of the human affections. He entered into no analysis of the passions or faiths of men, but assured himself that such and such passions and faiths were grounded in our common nature, and not in the mere accidents of ignorance and disease. This is an important consideration, and constitutes our Shakespeare the morning star, the guide and the pioneer, of true philosophy. Lit. Bern. II. 69-83. We have often heard Shakespeare spoken of as a child of nature, and some of his modern imitators, without the genius to copy nature, by resorting to real incidents, and treating them in a certain way, have produced that stage- phenomenon which is 200 SHAKESPEARE neither tragic nor comic, nor tragi-comic, nor comi- tragic, but sentimental. This sort of writing de- pends upon some very affecting circumstances, and in its greatest excellence aspires no higher than the genius of an onion, — the power of drawing tears ; while the author, acting the part of a ventriloquist, distributes his own insipidity among the characters, if characters they can be called, which have no marked and distinguishing features. I have seen dramas of this sort, some translated and some the growth of our own soil, so well acted, and so ill written, that if I could have been made for the time artificially deaf, I should have been pleased with that performance as a pantomime, which was intolerable as a play. Shakespeare's characters, from Othello and Macbeth down to Dogberry and the Grave-digger, may be termed ideal realities. They are not the things themselves, so much as abstracts of the things, which a great mind takes into itself, and there naturalizes them to its own conception. Take Dogberry: are no important truths there conveyed, no admirable lessons taught, and no valuable allusions made to reigning follies, which the poet saw must for ever reign ? He is not the creature of the day, to dis- appear with the day, but the representative and abstract of truth which must ever be true, and of humour which must ever be humorous. . . . In the plays of Shakespeare every man sees himself, without knowing that he does so : as in some of the phenomena of nature, in the mist of the mountain, the traveller beholds his own figure, but the glory round the head distinguishes it from a mere vulgar copy. In traversing the Brocken, in the north of Germany, at sunrise, the brilliant beams are shot askance, and you see before you a being of gigantic SHAKESPEARE 201 proportions, and of such elevated dignity, that you only know it to be yourself by similarity of action. In the same way, near Messina, natural forms, at determined distances, are represented on an invisible mist, not as they really exist, but dressed in all the prismatic colours of the imagination. So in Shake- speare : every form is true, everything has reality for its foundation ; we can all recognize the truth, but we see it decorated with such hues of beauty, and magnified to such proportions of grandeur, that, while we know the figure, we know also how much it has been refined and exalted by the poet. Ashe, p. 124. The old dramatists took great liberties in respect of bringing parties in scene together, and representing one as not recognising the other under some faint disguise. Some of their finest scenes are constructed on this ground. Shakespeare avails himself of this artifice only twice, I think, — in Twelfth Night, where the two are with great skill kept apart till the end of the play ; and in the Comedy of Errors, which is a pure farce, and should be so considered. The definition of a farce is, an improbability or even impossibility granted in the outset ; see what odd and laughable events will fairly follow from it ! In Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally ; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere ; yet, when the creation in its outline is once perfect, then he seems to rest from his labour, and to smile upon his work, and tell himself that it is very good. You see many scenes and parts of scenes which are simply Shakespeare's disporting himself in joyous triumph and vigorous fun after a great achievement of his highest genius. T. T. April 7, 1833. 202 SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare is of no age. It is idle to endeavour to support his phrases by quotations from Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, &c. His language is entirely his own, and the younger dramatists imitated him. The construction of Shakespeare's sentences, whether in verse or prose, is the necessary and homogeneous vehicle of his peculiar manner of thinking. His is not the style of the age. More particularly, Shake- speare's blank verse is an absolutely new creation. Read Daniel — the admirable Daniel — in his Civil Wars and Triumphs of Hymen. The style and language are just such as any very pure and manly writer of the present day — Wordsworth, for example — would use ; it seems quite modern in comparison with the style of Shakespeare. Ben Jonson's blank verse is very masterly and individual, and perhaps Massinger's is even still nobler. In Beaumont and Fletcher it is constantly slipping into lyricisms. I believe Shakespeare was not a whit more intelli- gible in his own day, than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local allusions of no conse- quence. As I said, he is of no age— nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the un- fathomable depths of his own oceanic mind ; his observation and reading, which was considerable, supplied him with the drapery of his figures. T.T. March 15, 1834. Shakespeare's intellectual action is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson, or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare goes on creating and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes p, fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength. T T March 5> 1834# SHAKESPEARE 203 The wonderful faculty which Shakespeare above all other men possessed, or rather the power which possessed him in the highest degree, of anticipating everything, evidently is the result — at least partakes — of meditation, or that mental process which con- sists in the submitting to the operation of thought every object of feeling, or impulse, or passion observed out of it. I would be willing to live only as long as Shakespeare were the mirror to nature. r Add. T. T. Observe the fine humanity of Shakespeare in that his sneerers are all worthless villains. Too cunning to attach value to self-praise, and unable to obtain approval from those whom they are compelled to respect, they propitiate their own self-love by dis- paraging and lowering others. A dtt» 1. 1» Lear is the most tremendous effort of Shakespeare as a poet; Hamlet as a philosopher or meditater; and Othello is the union of the two. There is some- thing gigantic and unformed in the former two ; but in the latter, everything assumes its due place and proportion, and the whole mature powers of his mind are displayed in admirable equilibrium. T. T. Dec. 29, 1322. Compare Nestor, Ajax, Achilles, &c, in the Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare, with their namesakes in the Iliad. The old heroes seem all to have been at school ever since. I scarcely know a more striking instance of the strength and pregnancy of the Gothic mmd T. T. Nov. 1, 1833. Shakespeare is the Spinozistic deity— an omnipre- sent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience ; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and 204 SHAKESPEARE four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakespeare's poetry is characterless ; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakespeare ; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakespeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed, — epigrams with the point everywhere; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out. No one can understand Shakespeare's superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, all that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shakespeare's own. His rhythm is so perfect, that you may be almost sure that you do not understand the real force of a line, if it does not run well as you read it. The necessary mental pause after every hemistich or im- perfect line is always equal to the time that would have been taken in reading the complete verse. T. T. May 12, 1830. Except in Shakespeare, you can find no such thing as a pure conception of wedded love in our old dra- matists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. There is scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose abilities are not discussed by the lady or her waiting-woman. In this, as in all things, how transcendent over his age and his rivals was our sweet Shakespeare! r T. T. April 24, 1833. I cannot agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon Bertram in AlVs Well that Ends Well. He was a young nobleman in feudal times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth and appetite for pleasure SHAKESPEARE 205 and liberty natural to such a character so circum- stanced. Of course, he had never regarded Helena otherwise than as a dependant in the family ; and of all that which she possessed of goodness and fidelity and courage, which might atone for her inferiority in other respects, Bertram was necessarily in a great measure ignorant. And after all, her prima facie merit was the having inherited a prescription from her old father the doctor, by which she cures the king, — a merit which supposes an extravagance of personal loyalty in Bertram to make conclusive to him in such a matter as that of taking a wife. Bertram had surely good reason to look upon the king's forcing him to marry Helena as a very tyrannical act. Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it required all Shakespeare's consummate skill to interest us for her ; and he does this chiefly by the operation of the other characters, — the Countess, Lafeu, &c. We get to like Helena from their praising and commending her so much. T. T. July 1, 1833. Falstaff was no coward, but pretended to be one merely for the sake of trying experiments on the credulity of mankind : he was a liar with the same object, and not because he loved falsehood for itself. He was a man of such pre-eminent abilities, as to give him a profound contempt for all those by whom he was usually surrounded, and to lead to a determination on his part, in spite of their fancied superiority, to make them his tools and dupes. He knew, however low he descended, that his own talents would raise him, and extricate him from any difficulty. While he was thought to be the greatest rogue, thief, and liar, he still had that 206 SHAKESPEARE about him which could render him not only respect- able, but absolutely necessary to his companions. It was in characters of complete moral depravity, but of first-rate wit and talents, that Shakespeare delighted; and Coleridge instanced Richard the Third, Falstaff, and Iago. Collier's Diary, Oct. 13, 1811. The first act of the Virgin Martyr is as fine an act as I remember in any play. The Very Woman is, I think, one of the most perfect plays we have. There is some good fun in the first scene between Don John, or Antonio, and Cuculo, his master ; and can anything exceed the skill and sweetness of the scene between him and his mistress, in which he relates his story? The Bondman is also a delightful play. Massinger is always entertaining; his plays have the interest of novels. But, like most of his contemporaries, except Shakespeare, Massinger often deals in exaggerated passion. Malefort senior, in the Unnatural Combat, however he may have had the moral will to be so wicked, could never have actually done all that he is represented as guilty of, without losing his senses. He would have been, in fact, mad. Regan and Goneril are the only pictures of the unnatural in Shakespeare — the pure unnatural ; and you will observe that Shakespeare has left their hideousness unsoftened or diversified by a single line of goodness or common human frailty. Whereas, in Edmund, for whom passion, the sense of shame as a bastard, and ambition, offer some plausible excuses, Shake- speare has placed many redeeming traits. Edmund is what, under certain circumstances, any man of powerful intellect might be, if some other qualities and feelings were cut off. Hamlet is, inclusively, an SHAKESPEARE 207 Edmund, but different from him as a whole, on account of the controlling agency of other principles which Edmund had not. It is worth while to remark the use which Shakespeare always makes of his bold villains as vehicles for expressing opinions and conjectures of a nature too hazardous for a wise man to put forth directly as his own, or from any sustained character. . . . The parts pointed out in Hieronimo as Ben Jonson's bear no traces of his style ; but they are very like Shakespeare's ; and it is very remarkable that every one of them re-appears in full form and development, and tempered with mature judg- ment, in some one or other of Shakespeare's great pieces. T. T. April 5, 1833. The Tempest. The Tempest is a specimen of the purely romantic drama, in which the interest is not historical, or dependent upon fidelity of portraiture, or the natural connexion of events, — but is a birth of the imagina- tion, and rests only on the coaptation and union of the elements granted to, or assumed by, the poet. It is a species of drama which owes no allegiance to time or space", and in which, therefore, errors of chronology and geography — no mortal sins in any species — are venial faults, and count for nothing. It addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty; and although the illusion may be assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and decorations of modern times, yet this sort of assist- ance is dangerous. For the principal and only genuine excitement ought to come from within, — 208 SHAKESPEARE from the moved and sympathetic imagination; whereas, where so much is addressed to the mere external senses of seeing and hearing, the spiritual vision is apt to languish, and the attraction from without will withdraw the mind from the proper and only legitimate interest which is intended to spring from within. The romance opens with a busy scene admirably appropriate to the kind of drama, and giving, as it were, the key-note to the whole harmony. It pre- pares and initiates the excitement required for the entire piece, and yet does not demand anything from the spectators, which their previous habits had not fitted them to understand. It is the bustle of a tem- pest, from which the real horrors are abstracted ; — therefore it is poetical, though not in strictness natural — (the distinction to which I have so often alluded) — and is purposely restrained from concen- tering the interest on itself, but used merely as an induction or tuning for what is to follow. In the second scene, Prospero's speeches, till the entrance of Ariel, contain the finest example I re- member of retrospective narration for the purpose of exciting immediate interest, and putting the audience in possession of all the information neces- sary for the understanding of the plot. Observe, too, the perfect probability of the moment chosen by Prospero (the very Shakespeare himself, as it were, of the tempest) to open out the truth to his daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how com- pletely anything that might have been disagreeable to us in the magician, is reconciled and shaded in the humanity and natural feelings of the father. In the very first speech of Miranda the simplicity and tenderness of her character are at once laid open ; it would have been lost in direct contact with the SHAKESPEARE 209 agitation of the first scene. The opinion once pre- vailed, but, happily, is now abandoned, that Fletcher alone wrote for women; — the truth is, that with very few, and those partial, exceptions, the female characters in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are, when of the light kind, not decent; when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakespeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that continuates society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the analytic processes, but in that sane equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are representa- tive of all past experience, — not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their predecessors even up to the first mother that lived. Shakespeare saw that the want of pro- minence, which Pope notices for sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of the woman's character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency, but from the more exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral being constituting one living total of head and heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude, — shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty, — sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. In all the Shakespearean women there is essentially the same foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety are merely the result of the modification of circumstances, whether in Miranda the maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katharine the queen. But to return. The appearance and characters of 210 SHAKESPEARE the super or ultra-natural servants are finely con- trasted. Ariel has in everything the airy tint which gives the name ; and it is worthy of remark that Miranda is never directly brought into comparison with Ariel, lest the natural and human of the one and the supernatural of the other should tend to neutralize each other; Caliban, on the other hand, is all earth, all condensed and gross in feelings and images ; he has the dawnings of understanding with- out reason or the moral sense, and in him, as in some brute animals, this advance to the intellectual faculties, without the moral sense, is marked by the appearance of vice. For it is in the primacy of the moral being only that man is truly human ; in his intellectual powers he is certainly approached by the brutes, and, man's whole system duly considered, those powers cannot be considered other than means to an end, that is, to morality. In this scene, as it proceeds, is displayed the im- pression made by Ferdinand and Miranda on each other ; it is love at first sight ; — • at the first sight They have changed eyes : — and it appears to me, that in all cases of real love, it is at one moment that it takes place. That moment may have been prepared by previous esteem, admiration, or even affection, — yet love seems to require a momentary act of volition, by which a tacit bond of devotion is imposed, — a bond not to be thereafter broken without violating what should be sacred in our nature. How finely is the true Shake- spearean scene contrasted with Dry den's vulgar alteration of it, in which a mere ludicrous psycho- logical experiment, as it were, is tried — displaying nothing but indelicacy without passion. Prospero's . SHAKESPEARE 211 interruption of the courtship has often seemed to me to have no sufficient motive; still his alleged reason — lest too light winning ' Make the prize light — is enough for the ethereal connexions of the romantic imagination, although it would not be so for the historical. The whole courting scene, indeed, in the beginning of the third act, between the lovers is a masterpiece ; and the first dawn of disobedience in the mind of Miranda to the command of her father is very finely drawn, so as to seem the working of the Scriptural command, Thou shalt leave father and mother, &c. O ! with what exquisite purity this scene is conceived and executed ! Shakespeare may sometimes be gross, but I boldly say that he is always moral and modest. Alas! in this our day decency of manners is preserved at the expense of morality of heart, and delicacies for vice are allowed, whilst grossness against it is hypocritically, or at least morbidly, condemned. In this play are admirably sketched the vices generally accompanying a low degree of civilization ; and in the first scene of the second act Shakespeare has, as in many other places, shown the tendency in bad men to indulge in scorn and contemptuous expressions, as a mode of getting rid of their own uneasy feelings of inferiority to the good, and also, by making the good ridiculous, of rendering the transition of others to wickedness easy. Shakespeare never puts habitual scorn into the mouths of other than bad men, as here in the instances of Antonio and Sebastian. The scene of the intended assassina- tion of Alonzo and Gonzalo is the exact counterpart of the scene between Macbeth and his lady, only p2 212 SHAKESPEARE pitched in a lower key throughout, as designed to be frustrated and concealed, and exhibiting the same profound management in the manner of familiarizing a mind, .not immediately recipient, to the suggestion of guilt, by associating the proposed crime with something ludicrous or out of place, — something not habitually matter of reverence. By this kind of sophistry the imagination and fancy are first bribed to contemplate the suggested act, and at length to become acquainted with it. Observe how the effect of this scene is heightened by contrast with another counterpart of it in low life, — that between the conspirators Stephano, Caliban, and Trinculo in the second scene of the third act, in which there are the same essential characteristics. In this play and in this scene of it are also shown the springs of the vulgar in politics, — of that kind of politics which is inwoven with human nature. In his treatment of this subject, wherever it occurs, Shakespeare is quite peculiar. In other writers we find the particular opinions of the individual; in Massinger it is rank republicanism ; in Beaumont and Fletcher even jure divino principles are carried to excess ; — but Shakespeare never promulgates any party tenets. He is always the philosopher and the moralist, but at the same time with a profound veneration for all the established institutions of society, and for those classes which form the per- manent elements of the state — especially never intro- ducing a professional character, as such, otherwise than as respectable. If he must have any name, he should be styled a philosophical aristocrat, delight- ing in those hereditary institutions which have a tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages. Hence, SHAKESPEARE 213 again, you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its absurdities to its face ; and some- times you may trace a tone of almost affectionate superiority, something like that in which a father speaks of the rogueries of a child. See the good- humoured way in which he describes Stephano pass- ing from the most licentious freedom to absolute despotism over Trinculo and Caliban. The truth is, Shakespeare's characters are all genera intensely individualized ; the results of meditation, of which observation supplied the drapery and the colours necessary to combine them with each other. He had virtually surveyed all the great component powers and impulses of human nature, — had seen that their different combinations and subordinations were in fact the individualizers of men, and showed how their harmony was produced by reciprocal dis- proportions of excess or deficiency. The language in which these truths are expressed was not drawn from any set fashion, but from the profoundest depths of his moral being, and is therefore for all ages. Lit. Rem. II. 94. In my opinion the picturesque power displayed by Shakespeare, of all the poets that ever lived, is only equalled, if equalled, by Milton and Dante. The presence of genius is not shown in elaborating a picture : we have had many specimens of this sort of work in modern poems, where all is so dutchified, if I may use the word, by the most minute touches, that the reader naturally asks why words, and not painting, are used. I know a young lady of much 214 SHAKESPEARE taste, who observed, that in reading recent versified accounts of voyages and travels, she, by a sort of instinct, cast her eyes on the opposite page, for coloured prints of what was so patiently and punctu- ally described. The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to instil that energy into the mind, which compels the imagination to produce the picture. Prospero tells Miranda, One midnight, Fated to the purpose, did Antonio open The gates of Milan ; and i 1 the dead of darkness, The ministers for the purpose hurried thence Me, and thy crying self. Here, by introducing a single happy epithet, 6 cry- ing, 1 in the last line, a complete picture is presented to the mind, and in the production of such pictures the power of genius consists. . . . Another instance of admirable judgment and excellent preparation is to be found in the creature contrasted with Ariel — Caliban ; who is described in such a manner by Prospero, as to lead us to expect the appearance of a foul, unnatural monster. He is not seen at once : his voice is heard ; this is the preparation : he was too offensive to be seen first in all his deformity, and in nature we do not receive so much disgust from sound as from sight. After we have heard Caliban's voice he does not enter, until Ariel has entered like a water-nymph. All the strength of contrast is thus acquired without any of the shock of abruptness, or of that unpleasant sensation, which we experience when the object pre- sented is in any way hateful to our vision. The character of Caliban is wonderfully conceived : he is a sort of creature of the earth, as Ariel is a sort SHAKESPEARE 215 of creature of the air. He partakes of the qualities of the brute, but is distinguished from brutes in two ways : — by having mere understanding without moral reason ; and by not possessing the instincts which pertain to absolute animals. Still, Caliban is in some respects a noble being : the poet has raised him far above contempt : he is a man in the sense of the imagination : all the images he uses are drawn from nature, and are highly poetical; they fit in with the images of Ariel. Caliban gives us images from the earth, Ariel images from the air. Caliban talks of the difficulty of finding fresh water, of the situation of morasses, and of other circumstances which even brute instinct, without reason, could comprehend. No mean figure is employed, no mean passion displayed, beyond animal passion, and repug- nance to command. Ashe, pp. 138, 142. Measure for Measure. This play, which is Shakespeare's throughout, is to me the most painful — say rather, the only painful — part of his genuine works. The comic and tragic parts equally border on the ijuo-qrov — the one being disgusting, the other horrible ; and the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong indignant claim of justice — (for cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being morally repented of) ; but it is likewise degrading to the character of woman. Beaumont and Fletcher, who can follow Shakespeare in his errors only, have presented a still worse, because more loathsome and contradictory, instance of the same kind in the Night- Walker, in the marriage of Alathe to Algripe. Of the counter- 216 SHAKESPEARE balancing beauties of Measure for Measure, I need say nothing ; for I have already remarked that the play is Shakespeare's throughout. Lit. Rem. II. 122. Comedy of Errors. The myriad-minded man, our, and all men's, Shakespeare, has in this piece presented us with a legitimate farce in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from comedy and from entertainments. A proper farce is mainly distinguished from comedy by the licence allowed, and even required, in the fable, in order to produce strange and laughable situations. The story need not be probable, it is enough that it is possible. A comedy would scarcely allow even the two Antipholuses ; because, although there have been instances of almost indistinguishable likeness in two persons, yet these are mere individual accidents, casus ludentis naturae, and the verum will not excuse the inverisimile. But farce dares add the two Dromios, and is justified in so doing by the laws of its end and constitution. In a word, farces com- mence in a postulate, which must be granted. Lit. Bern. II. 114. Lovers Labour's Lost. I think I could point out to a half-line what is really Shakespeare's in Lovers Labour's Lost, and some other of the not entirely genuine plays. What he wrote in that play is of his earliest manner, having the all-pervading sweetness which he never lost, and that extreme condensation which makes the couplets fall into epigrams, as in the Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece. In the drama alone, as Shake- SHAKESPEARE 217 speare soon found out, could the sublime poet and profound philosopher find the conditions of a com- promise. In the Love's Labour's Lost there are many faint sketches of some of his vigorous portraits in after-life — as, for example, in particular, of Benedick and Beatrice. T. T. April 7, 1833. The Winter's Tale. Although, on the whole, this play is exquisitely respondent to its title, and even in the fault I am about to mention, still a winter's tale ; yet it seems a mere indolence of the great bard not to have provided in the oracular response (Act ii. sc. 2) some ground for Hermione's seeming death and fifteen years voluntary concealment. This might have been easily effected by some obscure sentence of the oracle, as for example : — Nor shall he ever recover an heir, if he have a wife before that recovery. The idea of this delightful drama is a genuine jealousy of disposition, and it should be immediately followed by the perusal of Othello, which is the direct contrast of it in every particular. For jealousy is a vice of the mind, a culpable tendency of the temper, having certain well known and well defined effects and concomitants, all of which are visible in Leontes, and, I boldly say, not one of which marks its presence in Othello ; — such as, first, an excitability by the most inadequate causes, and an eagerness to snatch at proofs ; secondly, a gross- ness of conception, and a disposition to degrade the object of the passion by sensual fancies and images; thirdly, a sense of shame of his own feelings ex- 218 SHAKESPEARE hibited in a solitary moodiness of humour, and yet from the violence of the passion forced to utter itself, and therefore catching occasions to ease the mind by ambiguities, equivoques, by talking to those who cannot, and who are known not to be able to, understand what is said to them, — in short, by soliloquy in the form of dialogue, and hence a con- fused, broken, and fragmentary, manner ; fourthly, a dread of vulgar ridicule, as distinct from a high sense of honour, or a mistaken sense of duty ; and lastly, and immediately, consequent on this, a spirit of selfish vindictiveness. Lit. Rem. II. 250. Richard II. From the length of the speeches, and the circum- stance that, with one exception, the events are all historical, and presented in their results, not pro- duced by acts seen by, or taking place before, the audience, this tragedy is ill suited to our present large theatres. But in itself, and for the closet, I feel no hesitation in placing it as the first and most admirable of all Shakespeare^ purely historical plays. For the two parts of Henry IV form a species of themselves, which may be named the mixed drama. The distinction does not depend on the mere quantity of historical events in the play compared with the fictions, for there is as much history in Macbeth as in Richard ; but in the relation of the history to the plot. In the purely historical plays, the history forms the plot : in the mixed, it directs it; in the rest, as Macbeth, Hamlet, Cym- beline, Lear, it subserves it. But, however unsuited to the stage this drama may be, God forbid that even there it should fall dead on the hearts of SHAKESPEARE 219 jacobinized Englishmen ! Then, indeed, we might say—praeteriit gloria mundi ! For, the spirit of patriotic reminiscence is the all-permeating soul of this noble work. It is, perhaps, the most purely historical of Shakespeare's dramas. There are not in it, as in the others, characters introduced merely for the purpose of giving a greater individuality and realness, as in the comic parts of Henry IV, by presenting, as it were, our very selves. Shakespeare avails himself of every opportunity to effect the great object of the historic drama, that, namely, of familiarizing the people to the great names of their country, and thereby of exciting a steady patriotism, a love of just liberty, and a respect for all those fundamental institutions of social life, which bind men together : This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise ; This fortress, built by nature for herself, Against infection, and the hand of war; This happy breed of men, this little world ; This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands ; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Eng- land, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Fear'd by their breed, and famous by their birth, &c. Add the famous passage in King John : This England never did, nor ever shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself. 220 SHAKESPEARE Now these her princes are come home again, Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them : nought shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true. And it certainly seems that Shakespeare's historic dramas produced a very deep effect on the minds of the English people, and in earlier times they were familiar even to the least informed of all ranks, according to the relation of Bishop Corbett. Marl- borough, we know, was not ashamed to confess that his principal acquaintance with English history was derived from them ; and I believe that a large part of the information as to our old names and achieve- ments even now abroad is due, directly or indirectly, to Shakespeare. Admirable is the judgment with which Shake- speare always in the first scenes prepares, yet how naturally, and with what concealment of art, for the catastrophe. Observe how he here presents the germ of all the after events in Richard's insincerity, partiality, arbitrariness, and favouritism, and in the proud, tempestuous, temperament of his barons. In the very beginning, also, is displayed that feature in Richard's character, which is never forgotten through- out the play — his attention to decorum, and high feeling of the kingly dignity. These anticipations show with what judgment Shakespeare wrote, and illustrate his care to connect the past and future, and unify them with the present by forecast and reminiscence. Lit. Rem. II. 164. Troilus and Cressida. The Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare can scarcely be classed with his dramas of Greek and Roman history; but it forms an intermediate link SHAKESPEARE 221 between the fictitious Greek and Roman histories, which we may call legendary dramas, and the proper ancient histories; that is, between the Pericles or Titus Andronicus and the Coriolanus, or Julius Caesar. Cymbeline is a congener with Pericles, and distin- guished from Lear by not having any declared prominent object. But where shall we class the Timon of Athens ? Perhaps immediately below Lear. It is a Lear of the satirical drama ; a Lear of domestic or ordinary life ;— a local eddy of passion on the high road of society, while all around is the week-day goings on of wind and weather ; a Lear, therefore, without its soul-searching flashes, its ear-cleaving thunderclaps, its meteoric splendours—without the contagion and the fearful sympathies of nature, the fates, the furies, the frenzied elements,' dancing in and out, now breaking through, and scattering— now hand in hand with— the fierce or fantastic group of human passions, crimes, and anguishes, reeling on the unsteady ground, in a wild harmony to the shock and the swell of an earthquake. But my present subject was Troilus and Cressida ; and I suppose that, scarcely knowing what to say of it, I by a cunning of instinct ran off to subjects on which I should find it difficult not to say too much, though certain after all that I should still leave the better part unsaid, and the gleaning for others richer than my own harvest. Indeed, there is no one of Shakespeare's plays harder to characterize. The name and the remem- brances connected with it, prepare us for the repre- sentation of attachment no less faithful than fervent on the side of the youth, and of sudden and shameless inconstancy on the part of the lady. And this is, indeed, as the gold thread on which the scenes are strung, though often kept out of sight and out of 222 SHAKESPEARE mind by gems of greater value than itself. But as Shakespeare calls forth nothing from the mauso- leum of history, or the catacombs of tradition, without giving, or eliciting, some permanent and general interest, and brings forward no subject which he does not moralize or intellectualize, — so here he has drawn in Cressida the portrait of a vehement passion, that, having its true origin and proper cause in warmth of temperament, fastens on, rather than fixes to, some one object by liking and temporary preference. There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks ; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. This Shakespeare has contrasted with the profound affection represented in Troilus, and alone worthy the name of love; — affection, passionate indeed, — swoln with the confluence of youthful instincts and youthful fancy, and growing in the radiance of hope newly risen, in short enlarged by the collective sympathies of nature ; — but still having a depth of calmer element in a will stronger than desire, more entire than choice, and which gives permanence to its own act by converting it into faith and duty. Hence with excellent judgment, and with an ex- cellence higher than mere judgment can give, at the close of the play, when Cressida has sunk into infamy below retrieval and beneath hope, the same will, which had been the substance and the basis of his love, while the restless pleasures and passionate longings, like sea- waves, had tossed but on its sur- face, — this same moral energy is represented as snatching him aloof from all neighbourhood with her dishonour, from all lingering fondness and lan- guishing regrets, whilst it rushes with him into other and nobler duties, and deepens the channel, which SHAKESPEARE 223 his heroic brother's death had left empty for its collected flood. Yet another secondary and sub- ordinate purpose Shakespeare has inwoven with his delineation of these two characters, — that of opposing the inferior civilization, but purer morals, of the Trojans to the refinements, deep policy, but duplicity and sensual corruptions, of the Greeks. To all this, however, so little comparative pro- jection is given, — nay, the masterly group of Aga- memnon, Nestor, and Ulysses, and, still more in advance, that of Achilles, Ajax, and Thersites, so manifestly occupy the foreground, that the subser- vience and vassalage of strength and animal courage to intellect and policy seems to be the lesson most often in our poet's view, and which he has taken little pains to connect with the former more interesting moral impersonated in the titular hero and heroine of the drama. But I am half inclined to believe, that Shakespeare's main object, or shall I rather say, his ruling impulse, was to translate the poetic heroes of paganism into the not less rude, but more in- tellectually vigorous, and more featurely, warriors of Christian chivalry, — and to substantiate the distinct and graceful profiles or outlines of the Homeric epic into the flesh and blood of the romantic drama, — in short, to give a grand history-piece in the robust style of Albert Durer. The character of Thersites, in particular, well de- serves a more careful examination, as the Caliban of demagogic life ; — the admirable portrait of intel- lectual power deserted by all grace, all moral prin- ciple, all not momentary impulse ; — just wise enough to detect the weak head, and fool enough to provoke the armed fist of his betters; — one whom malcontent Achilles can inveigle from malcontent Ajax, under the one condition, that he shall be called on to do 224 SHAKESPEARE nothing but abuse and slander, and that he shall be allowed to abuse as much and as purulently as he likes, that is, as he can ;— in short, a mule, — quarrel- some by the original discord of his nature, — a slave by tenure of his own baseness, — made to bray and be brayed at, to despise and be despicable. ' Aye, Sir, but say what you will, he is a very clever fellow, though the best friends will fall out. There was a time when Ajax thought he deserved to have a statue of gold erected to him, and handsome Achilles, at the head of the Myrmidons, gave no little credit to his friend Thersites ! ' Lit. Rem. II. 130. Coriolanus. This play illustrates the wonderfully philosophic impartiality of Shakespeare's politics. His own country's history furnished him with no matter, but what was too recent to be devoted to patriotism. Besides, he knew that the instruction of ancient history would seem more dispassionate. In Coriolanus and Julius Caesar^ you see Shakespeare's good-natured laugh at mobs. Compare this with Sir Thomas Browne's aristocracy of spirit. Lit. Bern. II. 135. Romeo and Juliet. I have previously had occasion to speak at large on the subject of the three unities of time, place, and action, as applied to the drama in the abstract, and to the particular stage for which Shakespeare wrote, as far as he can be said to have written for any stage but that of the universal mind. I hope I have in some measure succeeded in demonstrating that the former two, instead of being rules, were SHAKESPEARE 225 mere inconveniences attached to the local peculia- rities of the Athenian drama ; that the last alone deserved the name of a principle, and that in the preservation of this unity Shakespeare stood pre- eminent. Yet, instead of unity of action, I should greatly prefer the more appropriate, though scholastic and uncouth, words homogeneity, proportionateness, and totality of interest — expressions which involve the distinction, or rather the essential difference, betwixt the shaping skill of mechanical talent, and the creative, productive, life-power of inspired genius. In the former each part is separately conceived, and then by a succeeding act put together ; — not as watches are made for wholesale — (for there each part supposes a pre-conception of the whole in some mind) — but more like pictures on a motley screen. Whence arises the harmony that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes — in the relative shapes of rocks, the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the oak, the stems and rich brown branches of the birch and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring, — compared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial planta- tions ? — From this, that the natural landscape is effected, as it were, by a single energy modified ab intra in each component part. And as this is the particular excellence of the Shakespearian drama generally, so it is especially characteristic of the Romeo and Juliet, The groundwork of the tale is altogether in family life, and the events of the play have their first origin in family feuds. Filmy as are the eyes of party- spirit, at once dim and truculent, still there is commonly some real or supposed object in view, or principle to be maintained ; and though but the 226 SHAKESPEARE twisted wires on the plate of rosin in the preparation for electrical pictures, it is still a guide in some degree, an assimilation to an outline. But in family quarrels, which have proved scarcely less injurious to states, wilfulness, and precipitancy, and passion from mere habit and custom, can alone be expected. With his accustomed judgment, Shakespeare has begun by placing before us a lively picture of all the impulses of the play; and, as nature ever presents two sides, one for Heraclitus, and one for Democritus, he has, by way of prelude, shown the laughable ab- surdity of the evil by the contagion of it reaching the servants, who have so little to do with it, but who are under the necessity of letting the superfluity of sensorial power fly off through the escape-valve of wit-combats, and of quarrelling with weapons of sharper edge, all in humble imitation of their masters. Yet there is a sort of unhired fidelity, an ourishness about all this that makes it rest pleasant on one's feelings. All the first scene, down to the conclusion of the Prince's speech, is a motley dance of all ranks and ages to one tune, as if the horn of Huon had been playing behind the scenes. Benvolio's speech — Madam, an hour before the worshipp'd sun Peer'd forth the golden window of the east — and, far more strikingly, the following speech of old Montague — Many a morning hath he there been seen With tears augmenting the fresh morning dew — prove that Shakespeare meant the Romeo and Juliet to approach to a poem, which, and indeed its early date, may be also inferred from the multitude of rhyming couplets throughout. And if we are right, SHAKESPEARE 227 from the internal evidence, in pronouncing this one of Shakespeare's early dramas, it affords a strong instance of the fineness of his insight into the nature of the passions, that Romeo is introduced already love-bewildered. The necessity of loving creates an object for itself in man and woman ; and yet there is a difference in this respect between the sexes, though only to be known by a perception of it. It would have displeased us if Juliet had been represented as already in love, or as fancying herself so ; — but no one, I believe, ever experiences any shock at Romeo's forgetting his Rosaline, who had been a mere name for the yearning of his youthful imagination, and rushing into his passion for Juliet. Rosaline was a mere creation of his fancy ; and we should remark the boastful positiveness of Romeo in a love of his own making, which is never shown where love is really near the heart. When the devout religion of mine eye Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires! One fairer than my love! the all-seeing sun Ne'er saw her match, since first the world begun. The character of the Nurse is the nearest of anything in Shakespeare to a direct borrowing from mere observation ; and the reason is, that as in infancy and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class — just as in describing one larch tree, you generalize a grove of them — so it is nearly as much so in old age. The generalization is done to the poet's hand. Here you have the garrulity of age strengthened by the feelings of a long- trusted servant, whose sympathy with the mother's affections gives her privileges and rank in the household ; and Q2 228 SHAKESPEARE observe the mode of connexion by accidents of time and place, and the childlike fondness of repetition in a second childhood, and also that happy, humble, ducking under, yet constant resurgence against, the check of her superiors ! — Yes, madam ! — Yet I cannot choose but laugh, &c. In the fourth scene we have Mercutio introduced to us. Oh ! how shall I describe that exquisite ebullience and overflow of youthful life, wafted on over the laughing waves of pleasure and prosperity, as a wanton beauty that distorts the face on which she knows her lover is gazing enraptured, and wrinkles her forehead in the triumph of its smooth- ness ! Wit ever wakeful, fancy busy and pro- creative as an insect, courage, an easy mind that, without cares of its own, is at once disposed to laugh away those of others, and yet to be inter- ested in. them — these and all congenial qualities, melting into the common copula of them all, the man of rank and the gentleman, with all its excellencies and all its weaknesses, constitute the character of Mercutio ! . . . Act ii, scene 2. Jul. Well, do not swear; although I joy in thee, I have no joy in this, contract to-night : It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, &c. With love, pure love, there is always an anxiety for the safety of the object, a disinterestedness, by which it is distinguished from the counterfeits of its name. Compare this scene with Act iii, scene 1 of the Tempest. I do not know a more wonderful SHAKESPEARE 229 instance of Shakespeare's mastery in playing a distinctly rememberable variety on the same remem- bered air, than in the transporting love-confessions of Romeo and Juliet and Ferdinand and Miranda. There seems more passion in the one, and more dignity in the other ; yet you feel that the sweet girlish lingering and busy movement of Juliet, and the calmer and more maidenly fondness of Miranda, might easily pass into each other. Lit. Rem. II. 149. As I may not have another opportunity, the intro- duction of Friar Laurence into this tragedy enables me to remark upon the different manner in which Shakespeare has treated the priestly character, as compared with other writers. In Beaumont and Fletcher priests are represented as a vulgar mockery ; and, as in others of their dramatic personages, the errors of a few are mistaken for the demeanour of the many : but in Shakespeare they always carry with them our love and respect. He made no in- jurious abstracts : he took no copies from the worst parts of our nature; and, like the rest, his char- acters of priests are truly drawn from the general body. It may strike some as singular, that throughout all his productions he has never introduced the passion of avarice. The truth is, that it belongs only to particular parts of our nature, and is prevalent only in particular states of society ; hence it could not, and cannot, be permanent. The Miser of Moliere and Plautus is now looked upon as a species of madman, and avarice as a species of madness. Elwes, of whom everybody has heard, was an in- dividual influenced by an insane condition of mind ; but, as a passion, avarice has disappeared. How 230 SHAKESPEARE admirably, then, did Shakespeare foresee, that if he drew such a character it could not be permanent! he drew characters which would always be natural, and therefore permanent, inasmuch as they were not dependent upon accidental circumstances. There is not one of the plays of Shakespeare that is built upon anything but the best and surest foun- dation ; the characters must be permanent — per- manent while men continue men, — because they stand upon what is absolutely necessary to our existence. This cannot be said even of some of the most famous authors of antiquity. Take the capital tragedies of Orestes, or of the husband of Jocasta : great as was the genius of the writers, these dramas have an obvious fault, and the fault lies at the very root of the action. In Oedipus a man is represented oppressed by fate for a crime of which he was not morally guilty ; and while we read we are obliged to say to ourselves, that in those days they considered actions without reference to the real guilt of the persons. There is no character in Shakespeare in which envy is portrayed, with one solitary exception — Cassius, in Julius Caesar ; yet even there the vice is not hateful, inasmuch as it is counterbalanced by a number of excellent qualities and virtues. The poet leads the reader to suppose that it is rather something constitutional, something derived from his parents, something that he cannot avoid, and not something that he has himself acquired ; thus throwing the blame from the will of man to some inevitable circumstance, and leading us to suppose that it is hardly to be looked upon as one of those passions that actually debase the mind. Ashe, p. 99. SHAKESPEARE 231 Macbeth, The Weird Sisters are as true a creation of Shakespeare's as his Ariel and Caliban, — fates, furies, and materializing witches being the elements. They are wholly different from any representation of witches in the contemporary writers, and yet pre- sented a sufficient external resemblance to the creatures of vulgar prejudice to act immediately on the audience. Their character consists in the imaginative disconnected from the good ; they are the shadowy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature, the lawless of human nature, — elemental avengers without sex or kin : Fair is foul, and foul is fair; Hover thro' the fog and filthy air. How much it were to be wished in playing Macbeth, that an attempt should be made to introduce the flexile character-mask of the ancient pantomime; — that Flaxman would contribute his genius to the embodying and making sensuously perceptible that of Shakespeare ! . . . Macbeth is described by Lady Macbeth so as at the same time to reveal her own character. Could he have everything he wanted, he would rather have it innocently ; — ignorant, as alas ! how many of us are, that he who wishes a temporal end for itself, does in truth will the means ; and hence the danger of indulging fancies. Lady Macbeth, like all in Shakespeare, is a class individualized : — of high rank, left much alone, and feeding herself with day-dreams of ambition, she mistakes the courage of fantasy for the power of bearing the consequences of the realities of guilt. Hers is the mock fortitude of a mind deluded by ambition ; she shames her husband with 232 SHAKESPEARE a superhuman audacity of fancy which she cannot support, but sinks in the season of remorse, and dies in suicidal agony. Her speech : Come, all you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, &c. is that of one who had habitually familiarized her imagination to dreadful conceptions, and was trying to do so still more. Her invocations and requisitions are all the false efforts of a mind accustomed only hitherto to the shadows of the imagination, vivid enough to throw the every-day substances of life into shadow, but never as yet brought into direct contact with their own correspondent realities. She evinces no womanly life, no wifely joy, at the return of her husband, no pleased terror at the thought of his past dangers ; whilst Macbeth bursts forth naturally — My dearest love — and shrinks from the boldness with which she presents his own thoughts to him. With consum- mate art she at first uses as incentives the very circumstances, Duncan's coming to their house, &c, which Macbeth's conscience would most probably have adduced to her as motives of abhorrence or repulsion. Yet Macbeth is not prepared. We will speak further. Lit. Bern. II. 237. Hamlet. Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abs- tracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking ; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that SHAKESPEARE 233 Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should be impelled, at last, by mere accident, to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so. . . . Polonius. — A Maxim is a conclusion upon obser- vation of matters of fact, and is merely retrospective ; an idea, or, if you like, a Principle, carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective. Polonius is a man of maxims. While he is descanting on matters of past experience, as in that excellent speech to Laertes before he sets out on his travels, he is admirable ; but when he comes to advise or project, he is a mere dotard. You see Hamlet, as the man of ideas, despises him. A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that eye placed in the back of his head. Hamlet and Ophelia. — In the scene with Ophelia, in the third act, Hamlet is beginning with great and unfeigned tenderness; but perceiving her reserve and coyness, fancies there are some listeners, and then, to sustain his part, breaks out into all that coarseness. T. T. June 15, 1827. He intended to portray a person, in whose view the external world, and all its incidents and objects, were comparatively dim, and of no interest in themselves, and which began to interest only, when they were reflected in the mirror of his mind. Hamlet beheld external things in the same way that a man of vivid imagination, who shuts his eyes, sees what has previously made an impression on his organs. The poet places him in the most stimulating circumstances that a human being can be placed in. He is the heir apparent of a throne ; his father dies 234 SHAKESPEARE suspiciously ; his mother excludes her son from his throne by marrying his uncle. This is not enough ; but the Ghost of the murdered father is introduced, to assure the son that he was put to death by his own brother. What is the effect upon the son ? — instant action and pursuit of revenge ? No : end- less reasoning and hesitating — constant urging and solicitation of the mind to act, and as constant an escape from action ; ceaseless reproaches of himself for sloth and negligence, while the whole energy of his resolution evaporates in these reproaches. This, too, not from cowardice, for he is drawn as one of the bravest of his time — not from want of fore- thought or slowness of apprehension, for he sees through the very souls of all who surround him, but merely from that aversion to action, which prevails among such as have a world in themselves. How admirable, too, is the judgment of the poet ! Hamlet's own disordered fancy has not conjured up the spirit of his father ; it has been seen by others ; he is prepared by them to witness its re-appearance, and when he does it, Hamlet is not brought forward as having long brooded on the subject. The moment before the Ghost enters, Hamlet speaks of other matters : he mentions the coldness of the night, and observes that he has not heard the clock strike, adding, in reference to the custom of drink- ing, that it is More honour'd in the breach than the observance. Act i, Scene 4. Owing to the tranquil state of his mind, he indulges in some moral reflections. Afterwards, the Ghost suddenly enters. Ho?\ Look, my lord ! it comes. Ham. Angels and ministers of grace defend us ! SHAKESPEARE 235 The same thing occurs in Macbeth : in the dagger- scene, the moment before the hero sees it, he has his mind applied to some indifferent matters ; ' Go, tell thy mistress,' &c. Thus, in both cases, the preternatural appearance has all the effect of abrupt- ness, and the reader is totally divested of the notion, that the figure is a vision of a highly wrought imagination. ... There is no indecision about Hamlet, as far as his own sense of duty is concerned ; he knows well what he ought to do, and over and over again he makes up his mind to do it. The moment the players, and the two spies set upon him, have with- drawn, of whom he takes leave with a line so expressive of his contempt, Ay so; good bye you. — Now I am alone, he breaks out into a delirium of rage against him- self for neglecting to perform the solemn duty he had undertaken, and contrasts the factitious and artificial display of feeling by the player with his own apparent indifference; What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her ? Yet the player did weep for her, and was in an agony of grief at her sufferings, while Hamlet is unable to rouse himself to action, in order that he may perform the command of his father, who had come from the grave to incite him to revenge: — This is most brave! That I, the son of a dear father murder'd, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, And fall a cursing like a very drab, A scullion. Act ii, Scene % 236 % SHAKESPEARE It is the same feeling, the same conviction of what is his duty, that makes Hamlet exclaim in a subsequent part of the tragedy : How all occasions do inform against me, And spur my dull revenge ! What is a man, If his chief good, and market of his time, Be but to sleep and feed ? A beast, no more. I do not know Why yet I live to say — 'this thing's to do, 1 Sith I have cause and will and strength and means To do't. Act iv, Scene 4. Yet with all this strong conviction of duty, and with all this resolution arising out of strong conviction, nothing is done. This admirable and consistent character, deeply acquainted with his own feelings, painting them with such wonderful power and accuracy, and firmly persuaded that a moment ought not to be lost in executing the solemn charge committed to him, still yields to the same retiring from reality, which is the result of having, what we express by the terms, a world within himself. Such a mind as Hamlet's is near akin to madness. Dryden has somewhere said, 1 Great wit to madness nearly is allied, and he was right ; for he means by ' wit ' that great- ness of genius, which led Hamlet to a perfect knowledge of his own character, which, with all strength of motive, was so weak as to be unable to carry into act his own most obvious duty. . . . 1 Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide. Absalom and Achitophel, 163-4. SHAKESPEARE 237 Even after the scene with Osrick, we see Hamlet still indulging in reflection, and hardly thinking of the task he has just undertaken : he is all despatch and resolution, as far as words and present inten- tions are concerned, but all hesitation and irresolu- tion, when called upon to carry his words and intentions into effect; so that, resolving to do everything, he does nothing. He is full of purpose, but void of that quality of mind which accom- plishes purpose. Anything finer than this conception, and working out of a great character, is merely impossible. Shakespeare wished to impress upon us the truth, that action is the chief end of existence — that no faculties of intellect, however brilliant, can be con- sidered valuable, or indeed otherwise than as mis- fortunes, if they withdraw us from, or render us repugnant to action, and lead us to think and think of doing, until the time has elapsed when we can do anything effectually. In enforcing this moral truth, Shakespeare has shown the fulness and force of his powers : all that is amiable and excellent in nature is combined in Hamlet, with the exception of one quality. He is a man living in meditation, called upon to act by every motive human and divine, but the great object of his life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve. Ashe, p. 159. In Hamlet he seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our meditation on the workings of our minds — an equilibrium between the real and imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed : his thoughts, 238 SHAKESPEARE and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his con- templations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action con- sequent upon it, with all its symptoms and ac- companying qualities. This character Shakespeare places in circumstances, under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment : — Hamlet is brave and careless of death ; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve. Thus it is that this tragedy presents a direct con- trast to that of Macbeth; the one proceeds with the utmost slowness, the other with a crowded and breathless rapidity. The effect of this overbalance of the imaginative power is beautifully illustrated in the everlasting broodings and superfluous activities of Hamlefs mind, which, unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly occupied with the world within, and abs- tracted from the world without — giving substance to shadows, and throwing a mist over all common- place actualities. It is the nature of thought to be" indefinite ;— definiteness belongs to external imagery alone. Hence it is that the sense of sublimity arises, not from the sight of an outward object, but from the beholder's reflection upon it; — not from the sensuous impression, but from the imaginative reflex. Few have seen a celebrated waterfall with- out feeling something akin to disappointment : it is only subsequently that the image comes back full into the mind, and brings with it a train of grand or beautiful associations. Hamlet feels this ; his SHAKESPEARE 239 senses are in a train of trance, and he looks upon external things as hieroglyphics. His soliloquy — O ! that this too too solid flesh would melt, &c. springs from that craving after the indefinite— for that which is not— which most easily besets men of genius; and the self-delusion common to this temper of mind is finely exemplified in the character which Hamlet gives of himself: — It cannot be But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall To make oppression bitter. He mistakes the seeing his chains for the breaking them, delays action till action is of no use, and dies the victim of mere circumstance and accident. . . . Act i, Sc. 2. Hamlet's first soliloquy : — O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew ! &c. This taedium vitae is a common oppression on minds cast in the Hamlet mould, and is caused by disproportionate mental exertion, which necessitates exhaustion of bodily feeling. Where there is a just coincidence of external and internal action, pleasure is always the result ; but where the former is deficient, and the mind's appetency of the ideal is unchecked, realities will seem cold and unmoving. In such cases, passion combines itself with the indefinite alone. In this mood of his mind the relation of the appearance of his father's spirit in arms is made all at once to Hamlet : — it is — Horatio's speech, in par- ticular — a perfect model of the true style of dramatic narrative ; — the purest poetry, and yet in the most natural language, equally remote from the ink-horn and the plough. Act i, Sc. 6. This scene must be regarded as 240 SHAKESPEARE one of Shakespeare's lyric movements in the play, and the skill with which it is interwoven with the dramatic parts is peculiarly an excellence of our poet. You experience the sensation of a pause without the sense of a stop. You will observe in Ophelia's short and general answer to the long speech of Laertes the natural carelessness of innocence, which cannot think such a code of cautions and prudences necessary to its own preservation. Lit. Rem. II. 205. Lear. Of all Shakespeare's plays Macbeth is the most rapid, Hamlet the slowest, in movement. Lear com- bines length with rapidity — like the hurricane and the whirlpool, absorbing while it advances. It begins as a stormy day in summer, with brightness; but that brightness is lurid, and anticipates the tempest. It was not without forethought, nor is it without its due significance, that the division of Lear's king- dom is in the first six lines of the play stated as a thing already determined in all its particulars, previously to the trial of professions, as the relative rewards of which the daughters were to be made to consider their several portions. The strange, yet by no means unnatural, mixture of selfishness, sensibility, and habit of feeling derived from, and fostered by, the particular rank and usages of the individual ; — the intense desire of being intensely beloved, — selfish, and yet characteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature alone ; — the self-supportless leaning for all pleasure on another's breast; — the cravings after sympathy with a prodigal disinterestedness, frustrated by its own ostentation, and the mode and nature of its claims ; — the anxiety, the distrust, the jealousy, which more or less accompany all selfish SHAKESPEARE 241 affections, and are amongst the surest contradistinc- tions of mere fondness from true love, and which originate Lear's eager wish to enjoy his daughter's violent professions, whilst the inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish into claim and positive right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason ; — these facts, these passions, these moral verities, on which the whole tragedy is founded, are all prepared for, and will to the retrospect be found implied, in these first four or five lines of the play. They let us know that the trial is but a trick ; and that the grossness of the old king's rage is in part the natural result of a silly trick suddenly and most unexpectedly baffled and disappointed. It may here be worthy of notice, that Lear is the only serious performance of Shakespeare, the interest and situations of which are derived from the assump- tion of a gross improbability ; whereas Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedies are, almost all of them, founded on some out of the way accident or excep- tion to the general experience of mankind. But observe the matchless judgment of our Shakespeare. First, improbable as the conduct of Lear is in the first scene, yet it was an old story rooted in the popular faith — a thing taken for granted already, and consequently without any of the effects of im- probability. Secondly, it is merely the canvas for the characters and passions, — a mere occasion for, — and not, in the manner of Beaumont and Fletcher, perpetually recurring as the cause, and sine qua non of, — the incidents and emotions. Let the first scene of this play have been lost, and let it only be understood that a fond father had been duped by hypocritical professions of love and duty on the part of two daughters to disinherit the third, previously, and deservedly, more dear to him ; — and all the rest s. a B 242 SHAKESPEARE of the tragedy would retain its interest undiminished, and be perfectly intelligible. The accidental is no- where the groundwork of the passions, but that which is catholic, which in all ages has been, and ever will be, close and native to the heart of man, — parental anguish from filial ingratitude, the genuineness of worth, though coffined in bluntness, and the execra- ble vileness of a smooth iniquity. Perhaps I ought to have added the Merchant of Venice ; but here too the same remarks apply. It was an old tale; and substitute any other, danger than that of the pound of flesh (the circumstance in which the improbability lies), yet all the situations and the emotions ap- pertaining to them remain equally excellent and appropriate. Whereas take away from the Mad Lover of Beaumont and Fletcher, the fantastic hypo- thesis of his engagement to cut out his own heart, and have it presented to his mistress, and all the main scenes must go with it. . . . Act i, Sc. 4. In Lear old age is itself a character, — its natural imperfections being increased by life- long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any addition of individuality would have been unnecessary and painful ; for the relations of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of frightful ingratitude, alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes the open and ample play-room of nature's passions. Knight, Since my young lady's going into France, Sir ; the fool hath much pin'd away. The Fool is no comic buffoon to make the ground- lings laugh, — no forced condescension of Shakespeare's genius to the taste of his audience. Accordingly the poet prepares for his introduction, which he never does with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into living connexion with the pathos SHAKESPEARE 243 of the play. He is as wonderful a creation as Caliban ; his wild babblings, and inspired idiocy, articulate and gauge the horrors of the scene. The monster Goneril prepares what is necessary, while the character of Albany renders a still more maddening grievance possible, namely, Regan and Cornwall in perfect sympathy of monstrosity. Not a sentiment, not an image, which can give pleasure on its own account, is admitted ; whenever these creatures are introduced, and they are brought forward as little as possible, pure horror reigns throughout. In this scene, and in all the early speeches of Lear, the one general sentiment of filial ingratitude prevails as the main spring of the feel- ings ; — in this early stage the outward object causing the pressure on the mind, which is not yet sufficiently familiarized with the anguish for the imagination to work upon it. . . . Act iii, Sc. 4. O, what a world's convention of agonies is here ! All external nature in a storm, all moral nature convulsed, — the real madness of Lear, the feigned madness of Edgar, the babbling of the Fool, the desperate fidelity of Kent — surely such a scene was never conceived before or since ! Take it but as a picture for the eye only, it is more terrific than any which a Michel Angelo, inspired by a Dante, could have conceived, and which none but a Michel Angelo could have executed. Or let it have been uttered to the blind, the howlings of nature would seem converted into the voice of conscious humanity. This scene ends with the first symptoms of positive derangement ; and the intervention of the fifth scene is particularly judicious — the interruption allowing an interval for Lear to appear in full madness in the sixth scene. Lit. Rem. II. 185. 244 SHAKESPEARE While Shakespeare accommodated himself to the taste and spirit of the times in which he lived, his genius and his judgment taught him to use these characters with terrible effect, in aggravating the misery and agony of some of his most distressing scenes. This result is especially obvious in King Lear : the contrast of the Fool wonderfully heightens the colouring of some of the most painful situations, where the old monarch in the depth and fury of his despair, complains to the warring elements of the ingratitude of his daughters. Spit, fire ! spout, rain ! Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters : I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness, I never gave you kingdom, calFd you children ; You owe me no subscription : then, let fall Your horrible pleasure ; here I stand, your slave, A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man. King Lear, Act iii, Scene 2. Just afterwards, the Fool interposes, to heighten and inflame the passion of the scene. Ashe, p. 54. Othello. Othello must not be conceived as a negro, but a high and chivalrous Moorish chief. Shakespeare learned the spirit of the character from the Spanish poetry, which was prevalent in England in his time. Jealousy does not strike me as the point in his passion ; I take it to be rather an agony that the creature, whom he had believed angelic, with whom he had garnered up his heart, and whom he could not help still loving, should be proved impure and worthless. It was the struggle not to love her. It was a moral indignation and regret that virtue should so fall :— * But yet the pity of it, Iago !— O SHAKESPEARE 245 Iago ! the pity of it, Iago ! ' In addition to this, his honour was concerned: Iago would not have succeeded but by hinting that his honour was com- promised. There is no ferocity in Othello ; his mind is majestic and composed. He deliberately deter- mines to die ; and speaks his last speech with a view of showing his attachment to the Venetian State, though it had superseded him. T. T. Dec. 29, 1822. I have often told you that I do not think there is any jealousy, properly so called, in the character of Othello. There is no predisposition to suspicion, which I take to be an essential term in the definition of the word. Desdemona very truly told Emilia that he was not jealous, that is, of a jealous habit, and he says so as truly of himself. Iago's suggestions, you see, are quite new to him ; they do not corre- spond with anything of a like nature previously in his mind. If Desdemona had, in fact, been guilty, no one would have thought of calling Othello's conduct that of a jealous man. He could not act otherwise than he did with the lights he had; whereas jealousy can never be strictly right. See how utterly unlike Othello is to Leontes, in the Winter's Tale, or even to Leonatus, in Cymbeline ! The jealousy of the first proceeds from an evident trifle, and something like hatred is mingled with it ; and the conduct of Leonatus in accepting the wager, and exposing his wife to the trial, denotes a jealous temper already formed. r T.T. June 24, 182T. Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare can be complimented only by com- parison with himself: all other eulogies are either heterogeneous, as when they are in reference to Spenser 246 SHAKESPEARE or Milton ; or they are flat truisms, as when he is gravely preferred to Corneille, Ilacine, or even his own immediate successors, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and the rest. The highest praise, or rather form of praise, of this play, which I can offer in my own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether the Antony and Cleopatra is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival of Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. Feliciter audax is the motto for its style comparatively with that of Shakespeare's other works, even as it is the general motto of all his works compared with those of other poets. Be it remembered, too, that this happy valiancy of style is but the representative and result of all the material excellencies so ex- pressed. This play should be perused in mental contrast with Romeo and Juliet ; — as the love of passion and appetite opposed to the love of affection and instinct. But the art displayed in the character of Cleopatra is profound ; in this, especially, that the sense of criminality in her passion is lessened by our insight into its depth and energy, at the very moment that w r e cannot but perceive that the passion itself springs out of the habitual craving of a licentious nature, and that it is supported and reinforced by voluntary stimulus and sought-for associations, instead of blos- soming out of spontaneous emotion. Of all Shakespeare's historical plays, Antony and Cleopatra is by far the most wonderful. There is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so much ; — perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. This is greatly owing to the manner in which the fiery force SHAKESPEARE 247 is sustained throughout, and to the numerous momen- tary flashes of nature counteracting the historic abs- traction. As a wonderful specimen of the way in which Shakespeare lives up to the very end of this play, read the last part of the concluding scene. And if you would feel the judgment as well as the genius of Shakespeare in your heart's core, compare this astonishing drama with Dry den's All for Love. Lit. Rem. II. 142. BEN JONSON Ben Jonson is original ; he is, indeed, the only one of the great dramatists of that day who was not either directly produced, or very greatly modified, by Shakespeare. In truth, he differs from our great master in everything — in form and in substance — and betrays no tokens of his proximity. He is not original in the same way as Shakespeare is original ; but after a fashion of his own, Ben Jonson is most truly original. The characters in his plays are, in the strictest sense of the term, abstractions. Some very prominent feature is taken from the whole man, and that single feature or humour is made the basis upon which the entire character is built up. Ben Jonson's dramatis per- sonce are almost as fixed as the masks of the ancient actors ; you know from the first scene — sometimes from the list of names— exactly what every one of them is to be. He was a very accurately observing man ; but he cared only to observe what was external or open to, and likely to impress, the senses. He individualizes, not so much, if at. all, by the exhi- bition of moral or intellectual differences, as by the varieties and contrasts of manners, modes of speech 248 BEN JONSON and tricks of temper ; as in such characters as Puntarvolo, Bobadill, &c. I believe there is not one whim or affectation in common life noted in any memoir of that age which may not be found drawn and framed in some corner or other of Ben Jonson's dramas; and they have this merit, in common with Hogarth's prints, that not a single circumstance is introduced in them which does not play upon, and help to bring out, the dominant humour or humours of the piece. Indeed I ought very particularly to call your attention to the extraordinary skill shown by Ben Jonson in contriving situations for the display of his characters. In fact, his care and anxiety in this matter led him to do what scarcely any of the dramatists of that age did — that is, invent his plots. It is not a first perusal that suffices for the full perception of the elaborate artifice of the plots of the Alchemist and the Silent Woman-, — that of the former is absolute perfection for a necessary entangle- ment, and an unexpected, yet natural, evolution. Ben Jonson exhibits a sterling English diction, and he has with great skill contrived varieties of construction ; but his style is rarely sweet or har- monious, in consequence of his labour at point and strength being so evident. In all his works, in verse and prose, there is an extraordinary opulence of thought ; but it is the produce of an amassing power in the author, and not the growth from within. Indeed a large proportion of Ben Jonson's thoughts may be traced to classic or obscure modern writers, by those who are learned and curious enough to follow the steps of this robust, surly, and ob- serving dramatist. Lit. Rem. I. 98-100. BEN JONSON 249 Volpone, I am inclined to consider The Fox as the greatest of Ben Jonson's works. But his smaller works are full of poetry. T. T. June 24, 1827. This admirable, indeed, but yet more wonderful than admirable, play is from the fertility and vigour of invention, character, language, and sentiment the strongest proof, how impossible it is to keep up any pleasurable interest in a tale, in which there is no goodness of heart in any of the prominent characters. After the third act, this play becomes not a dead, but a painful, weight on the feelings. Zeluco is an instance of the same truth. Bonario and Celia should have been made in some way or other principals in the plot ; which they might have been, and the objects of interest, without having been made characters. In novels, the person, in whose fate you are most interested, is often the least marked character of the whole. If it were possible to lessen the paramountcy of Volpone himself, a most delightful comedy might be produced, by making Celia the ward or niece of Corvino, instead of his wife, and Bonario her lover. Lit. Bern. II. 276. Poetaster. Crisp. O — oblatrant — furibund — fatuate — strenuous. O — conscious. — Act iv, Sc. 3. It would form an interesting essay, or rather series of essays, in a periodical work, were all the attempts to ridicule new phrases brought together, the proportion observed of words ridiculed which 250 BEN JONSON have been adopted, and are now common, such as strenuous, conscious, &c, and a trial made how far any grounds can be detected, so that one might determine beforehand whether a word was invented under the conditions of assimilability to our lan- guage or not. This much is certain, that the ridiculers were as often wrong as right; and Shakespeare himself could not prevent the naturali- zation of accommodation, remuneration, &c. ; or Swift the gross abuse even of the word idea. Lit. Rem. II. 273. BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER The plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are mere aggregations without unity; in the Shakespearian drama there is a vitality which grows and evolves itself from within, — a key note which guides and controls the harmonies throughout. What is Lear ? — It is storm and tempest — the thunder at first grumbling in the far horizon, then gathering around us, and at length bursting in fury over our heads — succeeded by a breaking of the clouds for a while, a last flash of lightning, the closing in of night, and the single hope of darkness ! And Romeo and Juliet ? — It is a spring day, gusty and beautiful in the morn, and closing like an April evening with the song of the nightingale ;*— whilst Macbeth is deep and earthy — composed to the subterranean music of a troubled conscience, which converts everything into the wild and fearful ! Doubtless from mere observation, or from the occasional similarity of the writer's own character, more or less in Beaumont and Fletcher and other such writers will happen to be in correspondence BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 251 with nature, and still more in apparent compatibility with it. But yet the false source is always discover- able, first by the gross contradictions to nature in so many other parts, and secondly, by the want of the impression which Shakespeare makes, that the thing said not only might have been said, but that nothing else could be substituted, so as to excite the same sense of its exquisite propriety. I have always thought the conduct and expressions of Othello and Iago in the last scene, when Iago is brought in prisoner, a wonderful instance of Shakespeare's con- summate judgment : — Oth. I look-down towards his feet; — but that's a fable. If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee. Iago. I bleed, Sir; but not khTd. Oth. I am not sorry neither. Think what a volley of execrations and defiances Beaumont and Fletcher would have poured forth here! Indeed Massinger and Ben Jonson are both more perfect in their kind than Beaumont and Fletcher ; the former in the story and affecting incidents ; the latter in the exhibition of manners and peculiarities, whims in language, and vanities of appearance. There is, however, a diversity of the most dangerous kind here. Shakespeare shaped his characters out of the nature within ; but we cannot so safely say, out of his own nature as an individual person. No ! this latter is itself but a natura naturata, — an effect, a product, not a power. It was Shakespeare's pre- rogative to have the universal, which is potentially in each particular, opened out to him, the homo generalis, not as an abstraction from observation of a variety of men, but as the substance capable 252 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER of endless modifications, of which his own personal existence was but one, and to use this one as the eye that beheld the other, and as the tongue that could convey the discovery. There is no greater or more common vice in dramatic writers than to draw out of themselves. How I — alone and in the self-sufficiency of my study, as all men are apt to be proud in their dreams — should like to be talking king I Shake- speare, in composing, had no 7, but the I representa- tive. In Beaumont and Fletcher you have descriptions of characters by the poet rather than the characters themselves; we are told, and impressively told, of their being ; but we rarely or never feel that they actually are. Beaumont and Fletcher are the most lyrical of our dramatists. I think their comedies the best part of their works, although there are scenes of very deep tragic interest in some of their plays. I particularly recommend Monsieur Thomas for good pure comic humour. Lit. Rem. I. 104-6. In Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedies the comic scenes are rarely so interfused amidst the tragic as to produce a unity of the tragic on the whole, without which the intermixture is a fault. In Shakespeare, this is always managed with transcendent skill. The Fool in Lear contributes in a very sensible manner to the tragic wildness of the whole drama. Beaumont and Fletcher's serious plays or tragedies are complete hybrids, — neither fish nor flesh, — upon any rules, Greek, Roman, or Gothic ; and yet they are very delightful notwithstanding. No doubt, they imitate the ease of gentlemanly conversation better than Shakespeare, who was unable not to be too much associated to succeed perfectly in this. T. T. July 1, 1833. BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 253 Monsieur Thomas and The Little French Lawyer are great favourites of mine amongst Beaumont and Fletcher's plays. How those plays overflow with wit ! And yet I scarcely know a more deeply tragic scene anywhere than that in Hollo, in which Edith pleads for her father's life, and then, when she cannot prevail, rises up and imprecates vengeance on his murderer. T. T. June 24, 1827. In the romantic drama Beaumont and Fletcher are almost supreme. Their plays are in general most truly delightful. I could read The Beggar's Bush from morning to night. How sylvan and sunshiny it is ! The Little French Lawyer is excellent. Lawrit is conceived and executed from first to last in genuine comic humour. Monsieur Thomas is also capital. I have no doubt whatever that the first act and the first scene of the second act of the Two Noble Kinsmen are Shakespeare's. Beaumont and Fletcher's plots are, to be sure, wholly inartificial ; they only care to pitch a character into a position to make him or her talk ; you must swallow all their gross improbabilities, and, taking it all for granted, attend only to the dialogue. How lamentable it is that no gentleman and scholar can be found to edit these beautiful plays ! Did the name of criticism ever descend so low as in the hands of those two fools and knaves, Seward and Simpson? There are whole scenes in their edition which I could with certainty put back into their original verse, and more that could be replaced in their native prose. Was there ever such an absolute disregard of literary fame as that dis- played by Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher ?. . . In Ben Jonson you have an intense and burning art. Some of his plots, that of the Alchemist, for 254 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER example, are perfect. Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher would, if united, have made a great dramatist indeed, and yet not have come near Shakespeare ; but no doubt Ben Jonson was the greatest man after Shakespeare in that age of dramatic genius. T. T. Feb. 17, 1833. The Loyal Subject. It is well worthy of notice, and yet has not been, I believe, noticed hitherto, what a marked difference there exists in the dramatic writers of the Elizabetho- Jacobaean age — (Mercy on me! what a phrase for 'the writers during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I ! ') — in respect of their political opinions. Shakespeare, in this as in all other things, himself and alone, gives the permanent politics of human nature, and the only predilection, which appears, shows itself in his contempt of mobs and the popu- lacy. Massinger is a decided Whig; — Beaumont and Fletcher high-flying, passive-obedience, Tories. The Spanish dramatists furnished them with this, as with many other ingredients. By the by, an accurate and familiar acquaintance with all the pro- ductions of the Spanish stage previously to 1620, is an indispensable qualification for an editor of B. and F. ; — and with this qualification a most interesting and instructive edition might be given. This edition of Colman's (Stockdale, 1811) is below criticism. In metre, B. and F. are inferior to Shakespeare, on the one hand, as expressing the poetic part of the drama, and to Massinger, on the other, in the art of reconciling metre with the natural rhythm of con- versation, — in which, indeed, Massinger is unrivalled. BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 255 Read him aright, and measure by time, not syllables, and no lines can be more legitimate, — none in which the substitution of equipollent feet, and the modifica- tions by emphasis, are managed with such exquisite judgment. B. and F. are fond of the twelve syllable (not Alexandrine) line, as — Too many fears 'tis thought too : and to nourish those — This has, often, a good effect, and is one of the varieties most common in Shakespeare. Lit. Rem. II. 304. The Queen of Corinth, In respect of style and versification, this play and the following of Bonduca may be taken as the best, and yet as characteristic, specimens of Beaumont and Fletcher's dramas. I particularly instance the first scene of the Bonduca. Take Shakespeare's Richard II, and having selected some one scene of about the same number of lines, and consisting mostly of long speeches, compare it with the first scene in Bonduca, — not for the idle purpose of finding out which is the better, but in order to see and understand the difference. The latter, that of B. and F., you will find a well arranged bed of flowers, each having its separate root, and its position determined aforehand by the will of the gardener, — each fresh plant a fresh volition. In the former you see an Indian fig-tree, as described by Milton ; — all is growth, evolution, yevecri? ; — each line, each word almost, begets the following, and the will of the writer is an interfusion, a continuous agency, and not a series of separate acts. Shake- speare is the height, breadth, and depth of genius : 256 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER Beaumont and Fletcher the excellent mechanism, in juxta-position and succession, of talent. Lit. Rem. II. 316. MASSINGER With regard to Massinger, observe, 1. The vein of satire on the times ; but this is not as in Shakespeare, where the natures evolve themselves according to their incidental dispro- portions, from excess, deficiency, or mislocation, of one or more of the component elements; but is merely satire on what is attributed to them by others. 2. His excellent metre — a better model for dra- matists in general to imitate than Shakespeare's — even if a dramatic taste existed in the frequenters of the stage, and could be gratified in the present size and management, or rather mismanagement, of the two patent theatres. I do not mean that Massinger's verse is superior to Shakespeare's or equal to it. Far from it; but it is much more easily constructed and may be more successfully adopted by writers in the present day. It is the nearest approach to the language of real life at all compatible with a fixed metre. In Massinger, as in all our poets before Dry den, in order to make harmonious verse in the reading, it is absolutely necessary that the meaning should be understood ; — when the meaning is once seen, then the harmony is perfect. Whereas in Pope and in most of the writers who followed in his school, it is the mechanical metre which determines the sense. 3. The impropriety, and indecorum of demeanour in his favourite characters, as in Bertoldo in the MASSINGER 257 Maid of Honour, who is a swaggerer, talking to his sovereign what no sovereign could endure, and to gentlemen what no gentleman would answer without pulling his nose. 4. Shakespeare's Ague-cheek, Osric, &c, are dis- played through others, in the course of social intercourse, by the mode of their performing some office in which they are employed ; but Massinger's Sylli come forward to declare themselves fools ad arbitrium auctoris, and so the diction always needs the subintelligitur ('the man looks as if he thought so and so,') expressed in the language of the satirist, and not in that of the man himself: — Sylli. You may, madam, Perhaps, believe that I in this use art To make you dote upon me, by exposing My more than most rare features to your view; But I, as I have ever done, deal simply, A mark of sweet simplicity, ever noted In the family of the Syllis. Therefore, lady, Look not with too much contemplation on me; If you do, you are in the suds. Maid of Honour, Act i, Sc. 2. The author mixes his own feelings and judgments concerning the presumed fool ; but the man himself, till mad, fights up against them, and betrays, by his attempts to modify them, that he is no fool at all, but one gifted with activity and copiousness of thought, image and expression, which belong not to a fool, but to a man of wit making himself merry with his own character. 5. There is an utter want of preparation in the decisive acts of Massinger's characters, as in Camiola and Aurelia in the Maid of Honour. Why ? 258 MASSINGER Because the dramatis persona? were all planned each by itself. Whereas in Shakespeare, the play is syngenesia ; each character has, indeed, a life of its own, and is an individuum of itself, but yet an organ of the whole, as the heart in the human body. Shakespeare was a great comparative anatomist. Hence Massinger and all, indeed, but Shakespeare, take a dislike to their own characters, and spite themselves upon them by making them talk like fools or monsters; as Fulgentio in his visit to Camiola (Act ii, Sc. 2). Hence too, in Massinger, the continued flings at kings, courtiers, and all the favourites of fortune, like one who had enough of intellect to see injustice in his own inferiority in the share of the good things of life, but not genius enough to rise above it, and forget himself. Beau- mont and Fletcher have the same vice in the opposite pole, a servility of sentiment and a spirit of partizan- ship with the monarchical faction. 6. From the want of a guiding point in Massinger's characters, you never know what they are about. In fact they have no character. 7. Note the faultiness of his soliloquies, with connectives and arrangements, that have no other motive but the fear lest the audience should not understand him. 8. A play of Massinger's produces no one single effect, whether arising from the spirit of the whole, as in the As You Like It ; or from any one indis- putably prominent character, as Hamlet. It is just 6 which you like best, gentlemen ' ! 9. The unnaturally irrational passions and strange whims of feeling which Massinger delights to draw, deprive the reader of all sound interest in the characters; — as in Mathias in The Picture, and in other instances. MASSINGER 259 10. The comic scenes in Massinger not only do not harmonize with the tragic, not only interrupt the feeling, but degrade the characters that are to form any part in the action of the piece, so as to render them unfit for any tragic interest. At least, they do not concern, or act upon, or modify, the principal characters. As when a gentleman is in- sulted by a mere blackguard, — it is the same as if any other accident of nature had occurred, a pig run under his legs, or his horse thrown him. There is no dramatic interest in it. I like Massinger's comedies better than his tra- gedies, although where the situation requires it, he often rises into the truly tragic and pathetic. He excels in narration, and for the most part displays his mere story with skill. But he is not a poet of high imagination ; he is like a Flemish painter, in whose delineations objects appear as they do in nature, have the same force and truth, and produce the same effect upon the spectator. But Shakespeare is beyond this ; — he always by metaphors and figures involves in the thing considered a universe of past and possible experiences ; he mingles earth, sea and air, gives a soul to everything, and at the same time that he inspires human feelings, adds a dignity in his images to human nature itself : — Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye; Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy, &c. 33rd Sonnet. Lit. Rem. I. 108-12. The styles of Massinger's plays and the Samson Agonistes are the two extremes of the arc within * s2 260 MASSINGER which the diction of dramatic poetry may oscillate. Shakespeare in his great plays is the midpoint. In the Samson Agonistes, colloquial language is left at the greatest distance, yet something of it is preserved, to render the dialogue probable : in Massinger the style is differenced, but differenced in the smallest degree possible, from animated conversation by the vein of poetry. T. T. Feb. 17, 1833. INDEX Aeschylus, 10,61,104, 164,165, 166, 193. Allegorical writing, 137-8. Ancient Mariner, The, 9. Angelo, Michel, 243. Apuleius, 138. Arabian Nights, 9. Ariel, 208 ff., 231. Ariosto, 169, 190. Aristophanes, 17-18. Aristotle, 33 and n, 99, 180. Asgill, 147. Bacon, Francis, 42, 43, 101. Barbauld, Mrs., 9. Barclay, The Argents, 95. Barrow, 7. Bartram's Travels, quoted, 130. Beatrice, 197, 217. Beaumont and Fletcher, 196, 202, 204, 229, 241, 246, 250-6, 258. politics, 212. women characters, 209. Bonduca, 255. Monsieur Thomas, 252, 253. Rollo, 253. The Beggar's Bush, 253. The Little French Lawyer, 253. TJie Loyal Subject, 254-5. The Mad Lover, 242. The Night-walker, 215. The Queen of Corinth, 255-6. Two Noble Kinsmen, 253. Beaumont, Sir George, 154. Behmen, 112. Bell, Dr., 48 n. Benedick, 197, 217. s. c. Berkeley, Bishop, 155. Bertram, 195, 204-5. Bible, The, 32, 72, 148. Boetius, 95, 116. Bolingbroke's style, 156. Boswell, James, 151. Bowles, W. L., 83, 117. Brooke, Lord, 147. Brown, Tom, 42. Browne, Sir Thomas, 146-7, 224. Buckingham, Duke of, 10. Bunyan, John, Pilgrim's Pro- gress, 138, 148-9. Burke, Edmund, 43, 151-2. Burleigh, Lord, 143. Burns, Robert, 10, 22, 104, 158. Butler, Samuel, 8, 147. Byron, Lord, 5, 83, 117, 156-7. Cadwallader, 54. Caliban, 210 ff., 214, 215, 223, 231, 243. Campbell, Thomas, 5, 158. Cassius, 230. Catullus, 162. Cervantes, 148. Charles II,timeof,7,23w.,26n. Chatterton, 104. Chaucer, 62, 76-8, 135-7. Cicero, 6, 162. Claudian, 8, 161. Cleopatra, 246. Coleridge, S. T., at Cam- bridge, 18. Ancient Mariner, 9. Christabel, 150. The Friend, 22 and n. The Remorse, 58 n, 262 INDEX Collins, William, 3. Colman's Edition of Beau- mont and Fletcher, 254. Congreve, wit of, 147. Corbett, Bishop, 220. Corneille, 246. Cotton, 76, 150. Cowley, Abraham, 16, 24, 70- 71, 94, 149, 156. Crashaw, Richard, 149-50. Cressida, 222. Cumberland's Calvary, 105. Daniel, Samuel, 64-5, 120, 121, 154, 202. Dante, 44, 120, 168, 190, 213, 243. Darwin, 16. Davenant, Sir W., 99. Da vies, Sir John, 1. Deborah, Song of, 179. Decameron, contrasted with Canterbury Tales, 136. De Foe, 105, 147. Desdemona, 198, 245. Dialogue in verse, 6. Dodsley's Collection, 70. Dogberry, 17 n, 196, 197, 200. Domitian, 4. Don John, 197. Don Quixote, 148. Donne, John, 59, 69-70, 147. Drayton, Michael, 79, 88 and n, 154. Dryden, John, 4, 10, 59, 87 n, 156, 210, 236, 247, 256. Durer, Albert, 223. Edmund, in Lear, 206-7. Elegy, 5. Elwes, the miser, 229. Epictetus, 103. Erasmus, 190. Euripides, 164, 165, 166. Faery Queene, 63, 76, 139 ff. Falstaff, 205-6, Farce, definition of, 201. Ferdinand, 210 ff., 229. Fielding, Henry, 105, 153. Flaxman, 231. Fletcher. See under Beau- mont. Fool in Lear, 187, 242-4, 252. Fox, C. J., 152. French critics, discrimination of, 183. French Revolution, 151-2. Friar Laurence, 229. Garve, 75, 83. Gellert, 75. Genius, 10. Ghost in Hamlet, 234. Gibbon, 163-4. Gleim, anecdote of, 112. Goethe, 160. Goneril, 206, 243. Goody Two-Shoes, 55. Gower, Chaucer's disciple, 136. Gravedigger in Hamlet, 200. Gray, Thomas, 3, 50-1, 60, 74, 150. Greek drama, 164-6, 187, 188, 191-4, 225, 230. Greville, Fulke (Lord Brooke), 147. Hamlet, 8, 195, 203, 206, 232- 40, 258. Hazlitt, William, 10. Hecuba, 165. Helena, 195, 205. Herbert, George, 78-82. Hercules and Omphale, 108. Hermione, 217. Hero, 197. Herodotus, 104, 159, 163. Hesiod, 138, 160. Hippolytus, 165. Historians, 162-4. Hobbes, 26 n, 99. Hogarth, 248. Hogg, James, 158. INDEX Homer, 10, 61, 104, 139, 163, 190, 196, 203. Hooker, 27, 42, 43. Horace, 105. Horatio, 239. Hotspur, 198. Hudibras, 8. Hume, David, 158. Iago, 206, 244-5, 251. Iliad compared with Troilus and Cressida, 203. Imagination, 1, 69. Imagination and fancy, 23 ff., 125. Imogen, 209. Jacobi, 112. Johnson, Samuel, 7, 150, 151, 159. Dictionary, 87 n. Johnston, Miss, and Swift, 146. Jonson, Ben, 202, 247-50, 251, 253-4. Alchemist, 248, 253. Hieronymo, 207 . Poetaster, 249-50. Silent Woman, 248. Volpone, 249. Juliet, 227. Junius, 7. Juvenal, 134. Kant, 74 n. Katherine, Queen, 209. Klopstock, The Messiah, 105. Kotzebue, 196. Laertes, 195, 233. Lamb, Charles, 10, 65, 157, 159. Lancaster, Joseph, 48 n. Landor, W. S., 156. Lear, King, 198, 203, 240-4. Leonatus, 245. Leontes, 217, 245. Lessing, 112, 160. L'Estrange, Sir Roger, 6, 42. Logic, 116. Lucretius, 162. Macbeth, 200, 211, 231-2, 235 Macbeth, Lady, 231-2. Marathon, 159. Marini, 16. Marlborough, Duke of, 220. Marshal's Repository, 55. Martial, 4. Massinger, 202, 204, 212, 246, 251, 254, 256-60. politics, 212, 254. Maid of Honour, 257. The Bondman, 206. The Picture, 258. Unnatural Combat, 206. Very Woman, 206. Virgin Martyr, 206. Mendelssohn, 74 n. Mercutio, 228. Metastasio, 95, 198. Metre, 52 ff. Milton, John, 4, 24, 47, 50, 61, 74, 83, 88 n, 100, 106, 125, 134, 139, 140, 141-5, 203, 204, 246, 255. and Shakespeare, 174, 213. definition of poetry, 145. egotism, 145. not picturesque but musical, 142. preference of Euripides and Ovid, 165. style, 6. the Deity of prescience, 203. Paradise Lost, 142 ff., 204. Samson Agonistes, 259-60. Minucius Felix, quoted, 155. Miranda, 208 ff., 229. ' Moliere's Miser, 229. Montaigne and Sir T. Browne, 146. Moore, Thomas, 5, 83, 117. More, Dr. Henry, 32. Mortimer, 198. 264 INDEX Newton, 64. North, Roger, 7. Nurse in llomeo and Juliet, 37, 227-8. Ode, 5. Oedipus, 230. Oedipus Coloneus, 165. Oedipus Tyr annus, 153. Ophelia, 195, 198, 233, 240. Osrick, 237. Othello, 200, 202, 244-5, 251. Otway, 24. Ovid, 158, 165. Parodies, 8. Perdita, 53. Petrarch, 62. Pierce Plouman, 55. Pilqrims Progress, 138, 148-9. Pindar, 70-1, 73, 104, 161. Pitt, William, 152. Plato, 6, 121. Plautus, his Miser, 229. Plotinus, 161. Poetical Filter, 5. Poetry, 1-10. Poetry and prose, 4. Polixenes, 53. Poloniiis, 195, 197, 233. Pope, 7, 10, 141, 147, 161, 189, 209, 256. Poussin, Nicholas, 157. Prose, definition of good, 4, 7. Prospero, 208 ff. Prudentius, 138. Psyche, the soul and the butterfly, 19 and n. Rabelais, 145-6. Racine, 246. Rambler, The, 150. Reformation, the, 41, 190. Regan, 206, 243. Reid, 158. Reviews, method of, 131. Richard II, 220. Richard III, 206. Richardson, 153. Robertson, 158. Romeo, 227 ff. Sallust, 162. 'Scene,' meaning of the word, 87 ve. Schiller, 160. Scotchmen, 158. Scott, Sir Walter, 158, 159. Selden, 154. Seneca, 8, 161. Seward, 253. Shaftesbury, 10. Shakespeare, William, 166- 247 yassim. all his characters strong, 196. 'aloofness', 169. and 'the unities', 224-5. as poet generally, 174-80. choice of subjects, 167-9. clowns, 17 n, 187, 199, 242. compared with Ben Jonson, 247 ; with Schiller, 160. depth and energy of thought, 173-4. distinction from other dra- matists, 194-9. historical plays, 218, 221, 246. imagery, 169-72. imagination, 176-7, 179, 259. intellectual action, 202. judgement, 180-7, 192, 220, 234, 241. laughs at mobs, 213, 224. lyrical passages, 198. metre, 256. morality, 195, 196. 'myriad-minded', 166,216. never treats of avarice, 229. not a lusus naturae, 1S1-7, 199-200. of no age, 190, 202. on jealousy, 217, 244-5. patriotism, 219, INDEX 265 permanence of his charac- ters, 230. picturesque power, 213-4. plots, 197. poetic power analysed, 166- 74. politics, 212-3, 224,254. priests, 229. rhythm, 204. sneerers, 203. songs, 198. style, 6. superiority, 204. the Spinozistic Deity, 203. versification, 167. villains, 203, 207. wedded love, 204. witches, 160, 231. women, 209. All's Well that Ends Well, 204-5. Antony and Cleopatra, 245- As You Like It, 198, 258. Comedy of Errors, 201, 216. Coriolanus, 221, 224. Cymbeline, 218, 221, 245. Hamlet, 8, 180, 195, 200, 203, 218, 232-40, 246. Henry IV, 175, 198, 218. Henry VIII, 44. Julius Caesar, 221, 224, 230. King John, 219. Lear, 154, 171, 175, 180, 187, 194, 198, 203, 206, 218, 221, 240-4, 246, 250, 252. Love's Labour's Lost, 216. Macbeth, 44, 200, 211, 218, 231-2, 235, 238, 240, 246, 250. Measure for Measure, 215-6. Merchant of Venice, 198, 242. Midsummer Night's Bream, 198. Much Ado about Nothing, 197. Othello, 171, 175, 180, 198, .200, 203, 217, 244-5, 246, 251. Pericles, 221. Rape of Lucrece, 166-80, 216. Richard II, 198, 218-20, 255. Richard III, 206. Romeo and Juliet, 37, 194, 224-30, 246, 250. Sonnets, 171. Tempest, 207-15, 228. Timon of Athens, 221. Titus Andronicus, 221. Troilus and Cressida, 203, 220-4. Twelfth Night, 175, 201. Two Noble Kinsmen, 253. Venus and Adonis, 166-80, 216. Winter's Tale, 53, 217-8, 245. Sheridan, R. B., 147. Shylock, 198. Sidney, Algernon, 43, 156. Sidonius Apollinaris, 116. Simpson, 253. Smollett, 158. Sophocles, 10, 153, 162, 164-6, 180, 191. South, 7. Southey, Robert, 7, 11, 12, 83, 117-8. Spanish stage, 254. Spenser, Edmund, 21, 62-3,75, 137-41, 143, 245. Spinoza, 112, 155. Stage, the infant, 187 ; in Shakespeare's time, 194. Sterne, Laurence, 56, 154. Stewart, Dugald, 158. Style, 6-8. Suttons, the two, 70. Swift, Jonathan, 146, 147, 250. Swiss, the, 33. Tacitus, 162. 266 INDEX Talent, 10. Tasso, 138. Taste, 8-9, 68. Taylor, Bishop Jeremy, 43, 155. Taylor, W., 25 and n. Tennyson, Lord, 157-8. Theocritus, 34. Thersites, 223. Thomson, James, 158. Thucydides, 162, 163. Tibullus, 158, 162. 'Timon'of Pope, 10. Tooke, Home, 7. Trilogy, 193-4. Troilus, 222. Una, 140. Undine, 159. Virgil, 162, 190. Waller, Edmund, 76. White, Blanco, 148. Wieland, 169. Wit, 147. Words, their assimilability to our language, 249-50. Wordsworth, William, 5, 11- 135 passim, 154, 175, 178, 202. defects, 92 ff. manliness, 133. Descriptive Sketches, 18, 20 n. Lyrical Ballads, 11, 13, 15, 20, 26, 46, 131. Ode on Intimations of Im- mortality, etc., 110, 120, 126-8. The Excursion, 90, 98, 100, 103, 104, 106, 108, 133. The Prelude, 134-5. Zoili, 185. Printed in England A3! THE OXffORD UNIVERSITY PRESS