Biographia Literaria
thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the third, the phrases of
which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate
use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. The reader will find
them in the note [7] below, and will I trust regard them as reprinted
for biographical purposes alone, and not for their poetic merits. So
general at that time, and so decided was the opinion concerning the
characteristic vices of my style, that a celebrated physician (now,
alas! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness,
to a gentleman, who was about to meet me at a dinner party, could not
however resist giving him a hint not to mention ‘The house that Jack
built’ in my presence, for “that I was as sore as a boil about that
sonnet;” he not knowing that I was myself the author of it.
CHAPTER II
Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of
facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice.
I have often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor
unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness,
that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against
the author, in favour of the critic; and the readiness with which they
apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of his
time
------genus irritabile vatum.
A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent
necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we
know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having
a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class
seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which they do not
possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp
hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees they become
restless and irritable through the increased temperature of collected
multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism, (such at least was
its original import,) is derived from the swarming of bees, namely,
schwaermen, schwaermerey. The passion being in an inverse proportion to
the insight,--that the more vivid, as this the less distinct--anger is
the inevitable consequence. The absense of all foundation within their
own minds for that, which they yet believe both true and indispensable
to their safety and happiness, cannot but produce an uneasy state of
feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from which nature has no means
of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience informs us that the first
defence of weak minds is to recriminate.
There’s no philosopher but sees,
That rage and fear are one disease;
Tho’ that may burn, and this may freeze,
They’re both alike the ague.
But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of
combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more
easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects
of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things;
and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most important
events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into
thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition with fanaticism
on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased
slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the mind may be
so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realizing of
them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who possess more
than mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and applying the
knowledge of others,)--yet still want something of the creative and
self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this reason therefore,
they are men of commanding genius. While the former rest content between
thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their
own living spirit supplies the substance, and their imagination the
ever-varying form; the latter must impress their preconceptions on the
world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the
satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality. These
in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace, or
temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of romance in canals that join
sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which, shouldering back the billows,
imitate the power, and supply the benevolence of nature to sheltered
navies; or in aqueducts that, arching the wide vale from mountain to
mountain, give a Palmyra to the desert. But alas! in times of tumult
they are the men destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of ruin,
to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a
day, and to change kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the
clouds [8]. The records of biography seem to confirm this theory. The
men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works
or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of
calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves. In the
inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either
indifferent or resigned with regard to immediate reputation. Through all
the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which
makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in
the author himself. Shakespeare’s evenness and sweetness of temper were
almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance
of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his Sonnets,
which could scarcely have been known to Pope [9], when he asserted, that
our great bard--
------grew immortal in his own despite.
(Epist. to Augustus.)
Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration of
his works with that of his personal existence, Shakespeare adds:
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Tho’ I once gone to all the world must die;
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead:
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, e’en in the mouth of men.
SONNET LXXXI.
I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakespeare’s readiness to
praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own equality
with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike
manifested in another Sonnet.
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost,
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence!
But when your countenance fill’d up his line,
Then lack’d I matter, that enfeebled mine.
S. LXXXVI.
In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate,
and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said,
effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution 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 no where do we find the least trace of
irritability, and still less of quarrelsome or affected contempt of his
censurers.
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 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 detractors; 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.
I am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when there exist
many and excellent models, a high degree of talent, combined with taste
and judgment, and employed in works of imagination, will acquire for
a man the name of a great genius; though even that analogon of genius,
which, in certain states of society, may even render his writings more
popular than the absolute reality could have done, would be sought
for in vain in the mind and temper of the author himself. Yet even in
instances of this kind, a close examination will often detect, that the
irritability, which has been attributed to the author’s genius as its
cause, did really originate in an ill conformation of body, obtuse pain,
or constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation. What is charged to
the author, belongs to the man, who would probably have been still more
impatient, but for the humanizing influences of the very pursuit, which
yet bears the blame of his irritability.
How then are we to explain the easy credence generally given to this
charge, if the charge itself be not, as I have endeavoured to show,
supported by experience? This seems to me of no very difficult solution.
In whatever country literature is widely diffused, there will be many
who mistake an intense desire to possess the reputation of poetic
genius, for the actual powers, and original tendencies which constitute
it. But men, whose dearest wishes are fixed on objects wholly out of
their own power, become in all cases more or less impatient and prone to
anger. Besides, though it may be paradoxical to assert, that a man can
know one thing and believe the opposite, yet assuredly a vain person may
have so habitually indulged the wish, and persevered in the attempt, to
appear what he is not, as to become himself one of his own proselytes.
Still, as this counterfeit and artificial persuasion must differ, even
in the person’s own feelings, from a real sense of inward power, what
can be more natural, than that this difference should betray itself
in suspicious and jealous irritability? Even as the flowery sod, which
covers a hollow, may be often detected by its shaking and trembling.
But, alas! the multitude of books and the general diffusion of
literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects in the world
of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, though by no means to
justify, the contempt with which the best grounded complaints of injured
genius are rejected as frivolous, or entertained as matter of merriment.