Biographia Literaria
circumstances common to the class. Take Michael for instance:
An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen,
Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs,
And in his shepherd’s calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men.
Hence he had learned the meaning of all winds,
Of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes
When others heeded not, He heard the South
Make subterraneous music, like the noise
Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills.
The Shepherd, at such warning, of his flock
Bethought him, and he to himself would say,
‘The winds are now devising work for me!’
And truly, at all times, the storm, that drives
The traveller to a shelter, summoned 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 lived he, until his eightieth year was past.
And grossly that man errs, who should suppose
That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,
Were things indifferent to the Shepherd’s thoughts.
Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed
The common air; the hills, which he so oft
Had climbed with vigorous steps; which had impressed
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 saved,
Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts,
So grateful in themselves, the certainty
Of honourable gain; these fields, these hills
Which were his living Being, even more
Than his own blood--what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself.
On the other hand, in the poems which are pitched in a lower key, as the
HARRY GILL, and THE 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 the 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
judgment. Hence the two following charges seem to me not wholly
groundless: at least, they are the only plausible objections, which I
have heard to that fine poem. The one is, that the author has not, in
the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude from the reader’s
fancy the disgusting images of ordinary morbid idiocy, which yet it was
by no means his intention to represent. He was even by the “burr, burr,
burr,” uncounteracted by any preceding description of the boy’s beauty,
assisted in recalling them. The other is, that the idiocy of the boy
is so evenly balanced by the folly of the mother, as to present to the
general reader rather a laughable burlesque on the blindness of anile
dotage, than an analytic display of maternal affection in its ordinary
workings.
In THE THORN, the poet himself acknowledges in a note the necessity of
an introductory poem, in which he should have portrayed the character
of the person from whom the words of the poem are supposed to proceed:
a superstitious man moderately imaginative, of slow faculties and deep
feelings, “a captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who, being
past the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity, or small
independent income, to some village or country town of which he was
not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live. Such men
having nothing to do become credulous and talkative from indolence.” But
in a poem, still more in a lyric poem--and the Nurse in ROMEO AND JULIET
alone prevents me from extending the remark even to dramatic poetry, if
indeed even the Nurse 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 [64]; the seven
last lines of the tenth [65]; and the five following stanzas, with
the exception of the four admirable lines at the commencement of the
fourteenth, are felt by many unprejudiced and unsophisticated hearts,
as sudden and unpleasant sinkings from the height to which the poet had
previously lifted them, and to which he again re-elevates both himself
and his reader.
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 has been adopted (purified indeed from what
appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of
dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best
objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and
because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle
of their intercourse, being less under the action of social vanity,
they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated
expressions.” To this I reply; that a rustic’s language, purified from
all provincialism and grossness, and so far reconstructed as to be made
consistent with the rules of grammar--(which are in essence no
other than the laws of universal logic, applied to psychological
materials)--will not differ from the language of any other man of
common sense, however learned or refined he may be, except as far as
the notions, which the rustic has to convey, are fewer and more
indiscriminate. This will become still clearer, if we add the
consideration--(equally important though less obvious)--that the rustic,
from the more imperfect development of his faculties, and from the
lower state of their cultivation, aims almost solely to convey insulated
facts, either those of his scanty experience or his traditional belief;
while the educated man chiefly seeks to discover and express those
connections of things, or those relative bearings of fact to fact, from
which some more or less general law is deducible. For facts are valuable
to a wise man, chiefly as they lead to the discovery of the indwelling
law, which is the true being of things, the sole solution of their modes
of existence, and in the knowledge of which consists our dignity and our
power.
As little can I agree with the assertion, that from the objects with
which the rustic hourly communicates the best part of language is
formed. For first, if to communicate with an object implies such an
acquaintance with it, as renders it capable of being discriminately
reflected on, the distinct knowledge of an uneducated rustic would
furnish a very scanty vocabulary. The few things and modes of action
requisite for his bodily conveniences would alone be individualized;
while all the rest of nature would be expressed by a small number of
confused general terms. Secondly, I deny that the words and combinations
of words derived from the objects, with which the rustic is familiar,
whether with distinct or confused knowledge, can be justly said to form
the best part of language. It is more than probable, that many classes
of the brute creation possess discriminating sounds, by which they can
convey to each other notices of such objects as concern their food,
shelter, or safety. Yet we hesitate to call the aggregate of such
sounds a language, otherwise than metaphorically. The best part of human
language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts
of the mind itself. It is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed
symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of imagination, the
greater part of which have no place in the consciousness of uneducated
man; though in civilized society, by imitation and passive remembrance
of what they hear from their religious instructors and other superiors,
the most uneducated share in the harvest which they neither sowed,
nor reaped. If the history of the phrases in hourly currency among our
peasants were traced, a person not previously aware of the fact would
be surprised at finding so large a number, which three or four centuries
ago were the exclusive property of the universities and the schools;
and, at the commencement of the Reformation, had been transferred from
the school to the pulpit, and thus gradually passed into common life.
The extreme difficulty, and often the impossibility, of finding words
for the simplest moral and intellectual processes of the languages of
uncivilized tribes has proved perhaps the weightiest obstacle to the
progress of our most zealous and adroit missionaries. Yet these tribes
are surrounded by the same nature as our peasants are; but in still more
impressive forms; and they are, moreover, obliged to particularize many
more of them. When, therefore, Mr. Wordsworth adds, “accordingly, such
a language”--(meaning, as before, the language of rustic life purified
from provincialism)--“arising out of repeated experience and regular
feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language,
than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think
that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art in
proportion as they indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of
expression;” it may be answered, that the language, which he has in
view, can be attributed to rustics with no greater right, than the style
of Hooker or Bacon to Tom Brown or Sir Roger L’Estrange. Doubtless, if
what is peculiar to each were omitted in each, the result must needs be
the same. Further, that the poet, who uses an illogical diction, or a
style fitted to excite only the low and changeable pleasure of wonder by
means of groundless novelty, substitutes a language of folly and vanity,
not for that of the rustic, but for that of good sense and natural
feeling.
Here let me be permitted to remind the reader, that the positions, which
I controvert, are contained in the sentences--“a selection of the real
language of men;”--“the language of these men” (that is, men in low and
rustic life) “has been adopted; I have proposed to myself to imitate,
and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men.”
“Between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there
neither is, nor can be, any essential difference:” it is against these
exclusively that my opposition is directed.
I object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation in the use of
the word “real.” Every man’s language varies, according to the extent of
his knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and the depth or quickness
of his feelings. Every man’s language has, first, its individualities;
secondly, the common properties of the class to which he belongs; and