Biographia Literaria
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 allowances 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 as
much from the general language of cultivated society, as the language
of Mr. Wordsworth’s homeliest composition differs from that of a common
peasant. For “real” therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or lingua
communis. And this, we have proved, is no more to be found in the
phraseology 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 manufacturers. 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 exciteman, publican, and barber happen to be, 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 every where in parts, and no where as
a whole.
Neither is the case rendered at all more tenable by the addition of
the words, “in a state of excitement.” 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 connections 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 VIII. 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 apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling, in which
the passion is greater and of longer endurance 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. Judges v. 27.
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 imposed on the metrical writer
in the choice of his diction.
I conclude, therefore, that the attempt is impracticable; 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 language
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 judgment? 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 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 seemed, 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,” etc., etc.
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,
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 extemporary
devotion, and such as we might expect to hear from every self-inspired
minister of a conventicle! 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 composition.” Such is Mr.
Wordsworth’s assertion. Now prose itself, at least in all argumentative
and consecutive works, differs, and ought to differ, from the language
of conversation; even as [66] reading ought 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. 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 “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 appropriated 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. 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 essentially different from that of St. Paul, 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 (that is the formal construction,
or architecture, of the words and phrases) is essentially different from
that of prose. Now the burden 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