Biographia Literaria
Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
Took up the Lady’s voice, and laughed again!
That ancient woman seated on Helm-crag
Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar
And the tall Steep of Silver-How sent forth
A noise of laughter; southern Lougbrigg heard,
And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone.
Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky
Carried the lady’s voice!--old Skiddaw blew
His speaking trumpet!--back out of the clouds
From Glaramara southward came the voice:
And Kirkstone tossed it from its misty head!”
The third, which is in rhyme, I take from the SONG AT THE FEAST OF
BROUGHAM CASTLE, upon the restoration of Lord Clifford, the Shepherd, to
the Estates and Honours of his Ancestors.
------“Now another day is come,
Fitter hope, and nobler doom;
He hath thrown aside his crook,
And hath buried deep his book;
Armour rusting in his halls
On the blood of Clifford calls,--
‘Quell the Scot,’ exclaims the Lance!
Bear me to the heart of France,
Is the longing of the Shield--
Tell thy name, thou trembling Field!--
Field of death, where’er thou be,
Groan thou with our victory!
Happy day, and mighty hour,
When our Shepherd, in his power,
Mailed and horsed, with lance and sword,
To his ancestors restored,
Like a re-appearing Star,
Like a glory from afar,
First shall head the flock of war!”
“Alas! the fervent harper did not know,
That for a tranquil Soul the Lay was framed,
Who, long compelled in humble walks to go,
Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed.
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.”
The words themselves in the foregoing extracts, are, no doubt,
sufficiently common for the greater part.--But in what poem are they not
so, if we except a few misadventurous attempts to translate the arts
and sciences into verse? In THE EXCURSION the number of polysyllabic
(or what the common people call, dictionary) words is more than usually
great. And so must it needs be, in proportion to the number and variety
of an author’s conceptions, and his solicitude to express them with
precision.--But are those words in those places commonly employed in
real life to express the same thought or outward thing? Are they the
style used in the ordinary intercourse of spoken words? No! nor are the
modes of connections; and still less the breaks and transitions. Would
any but a poet--at least could any one without being conscious that he
had expressed himself with noticeable vivacity--have described a bird
singing loud by, “The thrush is busy in the wood?”--or have spoken of
boys with a string of club-moss round their rusty hats, as the boys
“with their green coronal?”--or have translated a beautiful May-day into
“Both earth and sky keep jubilee!”--or have brought all the different
marks and circumstances of a sealoch before the mind, as the actions of
a living and acting power? Or have represented the reflection of the sky
in the water, as “That uncertain heaven received into the bosom of the
steady lake?” Even the grammatical construction is not unfrequently
peculiar; as “The wind, the tempest roaring high, the tumult of a tropic
sky, might well be dangerous food to him, a youth to whom was given,
etc.” There is a peculiarity in the frequent use of the asymartaeton
(that is, the omission of the connective particle before the last of
several words, or several sentences used grammatically as single words,
all being in the same case and governing or governed by the same verb)
and not less in the construction of words by apposition (“to him, a
youth”). In short, were there excluded from Mr. Wordsworth’s poetic
compositions all, that a literal adherence to the theory of his preface
would exclude, two thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry
must be erased. For a far greater number of lines would be sacrificed
than in any other recent poet; because the pleasure received from
Wordsworth’s poems being less derived either from excitement of
curiosity or the rapid flow of narration, the striking passages form a
larger proportion of their value. I do not adduce it as a fair criterion
of comparative excellence, nor do I even think it such; but merely as
matter of fact. I affirm, that from no contemporary writer could so many
lines be quoted, without reference to the poem in which they are found,
for their own independent weight or beauty. From the sphere of my own
experience I can bring to my recollection three persons of no every-day
powers and acquirements, who had read the poems of others with more and
more unallayed pleasure, and had thought more highly of their authors,
as poets; who yet have confessed to me, that from no modern work had so
many passages started up anew in their minds at different times, and as
different occasions had awakened a meditative mood.
CHAPTER XXI
Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals.
Long have I wished to see a fair and philosophical inquisition into the
character of Wordsworth, as a poet, on the evidence of his published
works; and a positive, not a comparative, appreciation of their
characteristic excellencies, deficiencies, and defects. I know no claim
that the mere opinion of any individual can have to weigh down the
opinion of the author himself; against the probability of whose parental
partiality we ought to set that of his having thought longer and more
deeply on the subject. But I should call that investigation fair and
philosophical in which the critic announces and endeavours to establish
the principles, which he holds for the foundation of poetry in general,
with the specification of these in their application to the different
classes of poetry. Having thus prepared his canons of criticism for
praise and condemnation, he would proceed to particularize the most
striking passages to which he deems them applicable, faithfully noticing
the frequent or infrequent recurrence of similar merits or defects,
and as faithfully distinguishing what is characteristic from what is
accidental, or a mere flagging of the wing. Then if his premises be
rational, his deductions legitimate, and his conclusions justly applied,
the reader, and possibly the poet himself, may adopt his judgment in
the light of judgment and in the independence of free-agency. If he has
erred, he presents his errors in a definite place and tangible form, and
holds the torch and guides the way to their detection.
I most willingly admit, and estimate at a high value, the services which
the EDINBURGH REVIEW, and others formed afterwards on the same plan,
have rendered to society in the diffusion of knowledge. I think the
commencement of the EDINBURGH REVIEW an important epoch in periodical
criticism; and that it has a claim upon the gratitude of the literary
republic, and indeed of the reading public at large, for having
originated the scheme of reviewing those books only, which are
susceptible and deserving of argumentative criticism. Not less
meritorious, and far more faithfully and in general far more ably
executed, is their plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or
mediocrity, wisely left to sink into oblivion by its own weight, with
original essays on the most interesting subjects of the time, religious,
or political; in which the titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed
furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition. I do not arraign
the keenness, or asperity of its damnatory style, in and for itself, as
long as the author is addressed or treated as the mere impersonation of
the work then under trial. I have no quarrel with them on this account,
as long as no personal allusions are admitted, and no re-commitment
(for new trial) of juvenile performances, that were published, perhaps
forgotten, many years before the commencement of the review: since for
the forcing back of such works to public notice no motives are easily
assignable, but such as are furnished to the critic by his own personal
malignity; or what is still worse, by a habit of malignity in the form
of mere wantonness.
“No private grudge they need, no personal spite
The viva sectio is its own delight!
All enmity, all envy, they disclaim,
Disinterested thieves of our good name:
Cool, sober murderers of their neighbour’s fame!”
S. T. C.
Every censure, every sarcasm respecting a publication which the critic,
with the criticised work before him, can make good, is the critic’s
right. The writer is authorized to reply, but not to complain. Neither
can anyone prescribe to the critic, how soft or how hard; how friendly,
or how bitter, shall be the phrases which he is to select for the
expression of such reprehension or ridicule. The critic must know, what
effect it is his object to produce; and with a view to this effect must
he weigh his words. But as soon as the critic betrays, that he knows
more of his author, than the author’s publications could have told him;
as soon as from this more intimate knowledge, elsewhere obtained, he
avails himself of the slightest trait against the author; his censure
instantly becomes personal injury, his sarcasms personal insults. He
ceases to be a critic, and takes on him the most contemptible character
to which a rational creature can be degraded, that of a gossip,
backbiter, and pasquillant: but with this heavy aggravation, that he
steals the unquiet, the deforming passions of the world into the museum;
into the very place which, next to the chapel and oratory, should be our
sanctuary, and secure place of refuge; offers abominations on the altar
of the Muses; and makes its sacred paling the very circle in which he
conjures up the lying and profane spirit.
This determination of unlicensed personality, and of permitted and
legitimate censure, (which I owe in part to the illustrious Lessing,
himself a model of acute, spirited, sometimes stinging, but always
argumentative and honourable, criticism) is beyond controversy the
true one: and though I would not myself exercise all the rights of the
latter, yet, let but the former be excluded, I submit myself to
its exercise in the hands of others, without complaint and without
resentment.
Let a communication be formed between any number of learned men in the
various branches of science and literature; and whether the president
and central committee be in London, or Edinburgh, if only they
previously lay aside their individuality, and pledge themselves
inwardly, as well as ostensibly, to administer judgment according to
a constitution and code of laws; and if by grounding this code on the
two-fold basis of universal morals and philosophic reason, independent
of all foreseen application to particular works and authors, they obtain
the right to speak each as the representative of their body corporate;
they shall have honour and good wishes from me, and I shall accord to
them their fair dignities, though self-assumed, not less cheerfully than
if I could inquire concerning them in the herald’s office, or turn
to them in the book of peerage. However loud may be the outcries for
prevented or subverted reputation, however numerous and impatient the
complaints of merciless severity and insupportable despotism, I shall
neither feel, nor utter aught but to the defence and justification of
the critical machine. Should any literary Quixote find himself provoked