Biographia Literaria
allowed to expand, and my original tendencies to develop themselves;--my
fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and
sounds.
The second advantage, which I owe to my early perusal, and admiration
of these poems, (to which let me add,) though known to me at a somewhat
later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr. Crowe bears more immediately on
my present subject. Among those with whom I conversed, there were,
of course, very many who had formed their taste, and their notions of
poetry, from the writings of Pope and his followers; or to speak more
generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by
English understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I
was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from inexperience of
the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the general subjects of
these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I doubtless undervalued the
kind, and with the presumption of youth withheld from its masters
the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind
consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an
artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the
logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as
its form: that even when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the
intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it
was a consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless
talent and ingenuity Pope’s Translation of the Iliad; still a point
was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was, as
it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical
metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter
and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts,
as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this last
point, I had occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and
more plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin’s
Botanic Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only
by the reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and
natural robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act
foremost in dissipating these “painted mists” that occasionally rise
from the marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge
vacation, I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society
in Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin’s work to
the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory. In the same
essay too, I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a comparison
of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek, from which they
were borrowed, for the preference of Collins’s odes to those of Gray;
and of the simile in Shakespeare
How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg’d and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather’d ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar’d by the strumpet wind!
(Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6.)
to the imitation in the Bard;
Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows
While proudly riding o’er the azure realm
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm;
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind’s sway,
That hush’d in grim repose, expects it’s evening prey.
(in which, by the bye, the words “realm” and “sway” are rhymes dearly
purchased)--I preferred the original on the ground, that in the
imitation it depended wholly on the compositor’s putting, or not
putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many other passages of
the same poet, whether the words should be personifications, or mere
abstractions. I mention this, because, in referring various lines in
Gray to their original in Shakespeare and Milton, and in the clear
perception how completely all the propriety was lost in the transfer,
I was, at that early period, led to a conjecture, which, many years
afterwards was recalled to me from the same thought having been started
in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more fully, by
Mr. Wordsworth;--namely, that this style of poetry, which I have
characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic
language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the
custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to
these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been the
case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue was so
general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have forgotten his
native language; yet in the present day it is not to be supposed, that a
youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other reliance on the
force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer
from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his
thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more
compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in which to
embody them.
I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man
from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided I
find him always arguing on one side of the question. The controversies,
occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a favourite
contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of great
advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and critical
opinions. In my defence of the lines running into each other, instead of
closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither bookish, nor
vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel, such as I will
remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up in the rag-fair
finery of,
------thy image on her wing
Before my fancy’s eye shall memory bring,--
I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets,
from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder
English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was
my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets
of great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth,
Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my
former passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid
foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component
faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative dignity and
importance. According to the faculty or source, from which the pleasure
given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of
such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and meditation,
I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the
conditions and criteria of poetic style;--first, that not the poem which
we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure,
possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential
poetry;--secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into other
words of the same language, without diminution of their significance,
either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far
vicious in their diction. Be it however observed, that I excluded from
the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere novelty in
the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in the
author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing French tragedies, I
have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each line, as
hieroglyphics of the author’s own admiration at his own cleverness.
Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of
feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate
excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would be scarcely more
difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with the bare hand, than
to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare,
(in their most important works at least,) without making the poet
say something else, or something worse, than he does say. One great
distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the
characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the
moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic
out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother
English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most
fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion
and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the
stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet
broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something,
made up, half of image, and half of abstract [5] meaning. The one
sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point
and drapery.
The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of
composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand
and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets, the Monody
at Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original
genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success
in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of
West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction; but they were
cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the
best of Warton’s there is a stiffness, which too often gives them the
appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore,
of cause or impulse Percy’s collection of Ballads may bear to the most
popular poems of the present day; yet in a more sustained and elevated
style, of the then living poets, Cowper and Bowles [6] were, to the best
of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural
diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head.
It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own
powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction, which
I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior worth.
Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better judgment; and the
compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years--(for example,
the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which now form the middle and
conclusion of the poem entitled the Destiny of Nations, and the tragedy
of Remorse)--are not more below my present ideal in respect of the
general tissue of the style than those of the latest date. Their faults
were at least a remnant of the former leaven, and among the many who
have done me the honour of putting my poems in the same class with those
of my betters, the one or two, who have pretended to bring examples of
affected simplicity from my volume, have been able to adduce but
one instance, and that out of a copy of verses half ludicrous, half
splenetic, which I intended, and had myself characterized, as sermoni
propiora.
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an
excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader will excuse me for
noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the three
sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to beset a
young writer. So long ago as the publication of the second number of the
Monthly Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom, I contributed
three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a
good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism, and at the
recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of being at
once trite and licentious;--the second was on low creeping language and