Autobiography
good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid, uninteresting thing
which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the same burden on them
which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to desire any comfort from
the vehement sensual passion of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his
Laras. But while Byron was exactly what did not suit my condition,
Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked into the _Excursion_ two
or three years before, and found little in it; and I should probably
have found as little, had I read it at this time. But the miscellaneous
poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815 (to which little of value was
added in the latter part of the author's life), proved to be the precise
thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture.
In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one
of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural
objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for
much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one
of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty
over me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth's
poetry; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which,
owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty.
But Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had
merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott
does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape
does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a
medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward
beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under
the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the
feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a
source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which
could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with
struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement
in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to
learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the
greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once
better and happier as I came under their influence. There have certainly
been, even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry of
deeper and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what
his did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent
happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only
without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the
common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight
which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there
was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the
conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic,
"Intimations of Immortality": in which, along with more than his usual
sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand
imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had
similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first
freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had
sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now
teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely,
emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.
I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic
merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with
the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures,
possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are
precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation
Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically
far more poets than he.
It so fell out that the merits of Wordsworth were the occasion of my
first public declaration of my new way of thinking, and separation from
those of my habitual companions who had not undergone a similar change.
The person with whom at that time I was most in the habit of comparing
notes on such subjects was Roebuck, and I induced him to read
Wordsworth, in whom he also at first seemed to find much to admire: but
I, like most Wordsworthians, threw myself into strong antagonism to
Byron, both as a poet and as to his influence on the character. Roebuck,
all whose instincts were those of action and struggle, had, on the
contrary, a strong relish and great admiration of Byron, whose writings
he regarded as the poetry of human life, while Wordsworth's, according
to him, was that of flowers and butterflies. We agreed to have the fight
out at our Debating Society, where we accordingly discussed for two
evenings the comparative merits of Byron and Wordsworth, propounding and
illustrating by long recitations our respective theories of poetry:
Sterling also, in a brilliant speech, putting forward his particular
theory. This was the first debate on any weighty subject in which
Roebuck and I had been on opposite sides. The schism between us widened
from this time more and more, though we continued for some years longer
to be companions. In the beginning, our chief divergence related to the
cultivation of the feelings. Roebuck was in many respects very different
from the vulgar notion of a Benthamite or Utilitarian. He was a lover of
poetry and of most of the fine arts. He took great pleasure in music, in
dramatic performances, especially in painting, and himself drew and
designed landscapes with great facility and beauty. But he never could
be made to see that these things have any value as aids in the formation
of character. Personally, instead of being, as Benthamites are supposed
to be, void of feeling, he had very quick and strong sensibilities. But,
like most Englishmen who have feelings, he found his feelings stand very
much in his way. He was much more susceptible to the painful sympathies
than to the pleasurable, and, looking for his happiness elsewhere, he
wished that his feelings should be deadened rather than quickened. And,
in truth, the English character, and English social circumstances, make
it so seldom possible to derive happiness from the exercise of the
sympathies, that it is not wonderful if they count for little in an
Englishman's scheme of life. In most other countries the paramount
importance of the sympathies as a constituent of individual happiness is
an axiom, taken for granted rather than needing any formal statement;
but most English thinkers always seem to regard them as necessary evils,
required for keeping men's actions benevolent and compassionate. Roebuck
was, or appeared to be, this kind of Englishman. He saw little good in
any cultivation of the feelings, and none at all in cultivating them
through the imagination, which he thought was only cultivating
illusions. It was in vain I urged on him that the imaginative emotion
which an idea, when vividly conceived, excites in us, is not an illusion
but a fact, as real as any of the other qualities of objects; and, far
from implying anything erroneous and delusive in our mental apprehension
of the object, is quite consistent with the most accurate knowledge and
most perfect practical recognition of all its physical and intellectual
laws and relations. The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud
lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud
is vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a state of
suspension; and I am just as likely to allow for, and act on, these
physical laws whenever there is occasion to do so, as if I had been
incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness.
While my intimacy with Roebuck diminished, I fell more and more into
friendly intercourse with our Coleridgian adversaries in the Society,
Frederick Maurice and John Sterling, both subsequently so well known,
the former by his writings, the latter through the biographies by Hare
and Carlyle. Of these two friends, Maurice was the thinker, Sterling the
orator, and impassioned expositor of thoughts which, at this period,
were almost entirely formed for him by Maurice.
With Maurice I had for some time been acquainted through Eyton Tooke,
who had known him at Cambridge, and although my discussions with him
were almost always disputes, I had carried away from them much that
helped to build up my new fabric of thought, in the same way as I was
deriving much from Coleridge, and from the writings of Goethe and other
German authors which I read during these years. I have so deep a respect
for Maurice's character and purposes, as well as for his great mental
gifts, that it is with some unwillingness I say anything which may seem
to place him on a less high eminence than I would gladly be able to
accord to him. But I have always thought that there was more
intellectual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of my
contemporaries. Few of them certainly have had so much to waste. Great
powers of generalization, rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide
perception of important and unobvious truths, served him not for putting
something better into the place of the worthless heap of received
opinions on the great subjects of thought, but for proving to his own
mind that the Church of England had known everything from the first, and
that all the truths on the ground of which the Church and orthodoxy have
been attacked (many of which he saw as clearly as anyone) are not only
consistent with the Thirty-nine Articles, but are better understood and
expressed in those Articles than by anyone who rejects them. I have
never been able to find any other explanation of this, than by
attributing it to that timidity of conscience, combined with original
sensitiveness of temperament, which has so often driven highly gifted
men into Romanism, from the need of a firmer support than they can find
in the independent conclusions of their own judgment. Any more vulgar
kind of timidity no one who knew Maurice would ever think of imputing to
him, even if he had not given public proof of his freedom from it, by
his ultimate collision with some of the opinions commonly regarded as
orthodox, and by his noble origination of the Christian Socialist
movement. The nearest parallel to him, in a moral point of view, is
Coleridge, to whom, in merely intellectual power, apart from poetical
genius, I think him decidedly superior. At this time, however, he might
be described as a disciple of Coleridge, and Sterling as a disciple of
Coleridge and of him. The modifications which were taking place in my
old opinions gave me some points of contact with them; and both Maurice
and Sterling were of considerable use to my development. With Sterling I
soon became very intimate, and was more attached to him than I have ever
been to any other man. He was indeed one of the most lovable of men. His
frank, cordial, affectionate, and expansive character; a love of truth
alike conspicuous in the highest things and the humblest; a generous and
ardent nature, which threw itself with impetuosity into the opinions it
adopted, but was as eager to do justice to the doctrines and the men it
was opposed to, as to make war on what it thought their errors; and an
equal devotion to the two cardinal points of Liberty and Duty, formed a
combination of qualities as attractive to me as to all others who knew
him as well as I did. With his open mind and heart, he found no
difficulty in joining hands with me across the gulf which as yet divided
our opinions. He told me how he and others had looked upon me (from