Biographia Literaria
by its sounds and regular movements, I should admonish him with Sancho
Panza, that it is no giant but a windmill; there it stands on its own
place, and its own hillock, never goes out of its way to attack anyone,
and to none and from none either gives or asks assistance. When
the public press has poured in any part of its produce between its
mill-stones, it grinds it off, one man’s sack the same as another, and
with whatever wind may happen to be then blowing. All the two-and-thirty
winds are alike its friends. Of the whole wide atmosphere it does not
desire a single finger-breadth more than what is necessary for its sails
to turn round in. But this space must be left free and unimpeded. Gnats,
beetles, wasps, butterflies, and the whole tribe of ephemerals and
insignificants, may flit in and out and between; may hum, and buzz, and
jar; may shrill their tiny pipes, and wind their puny horns, unchastised
and unnoticed. But idlers and bravadoes of larger size and prouder show
must beware, how they place themselves within its sweep. Much less may
they presume to lay hands on the sails, the strength of which is
neither greater nor less than as the wind is, which drives them round.
Whomsoever the remorseless arm slings aloft, or whirls along with it in
the air, he has himself alone to blame; though, when the same arm throws
him from it, it will more often double than break the force of his fall.
Putting aside the too manifest and too frequent interference of national
party, and even personal predilection or aversion; and reserving for
deeper feelings those worse and more criminal intrusions into the
sacredness of private life, which not seldom merit legal rather than
literary chastisement, the two principal objects and occasions which I
find for blame and regret in the conduct of the review in question are
first, its unfaithfulness to its own announced and excellent plan, by
subjecting to criticism works neither indecent nor immoral, yet of such
trifling importance even in point of size and, according to the critic’s
own verdict, so devoid of all merit, as must excite in the most candid
mind the suspicion, either that dislike or vindictive feelings were at
work; or that there was a cold prudential pre-determination to increase
the sale of the review by flattering the malignant passions of human
nature. That I may not myself become subject to the charge, which I am
bringing against others, by an accusation without proof, I refer to
the article on Dr. Rennell’s sermon in the very first number of the
EDINBURGH REVIEW as an illustration of my meaning. If in looking through
all the succeeding volumes the reader should find this a solitary
instance, I must submit to that painful forfeiture of esteem, which
awaits a groundless or exaggerated charge.
The second point of objection belongs to this review only in common with
all other works of periodical criticism: at least, it applies in common
to the general system of all, whatever exception there may be in favour
of particular articles. Or if it attaches to THE EDINBURGH REVIEW, and
to its only corrival (THE QUARTERLY), with any peculiar force, this
results from the superiority of talent, acquirement, and information
which both have so undeniably displayed; and which doubtless deepens
the regret though not the blame. I am referring to the substitution
of assertion for argument; to the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes
petulant verdicts, not seldom unsupported even by a single quotation
from the work condemned, which might at least have explained the
critic’s meaning, if it did not prove the justice of his sentence. Even
where this is not the case, the extracts are too often made without
reference to any general grounds or rules from which the faultiness or
inadmissibility of the qualities attributed may be deduced; and without
any attempt to show, that the qualities are attributable to the passage
extracted. I have met with such extracts from Mr. Wordsworth’s poems,
annexed to such assertions, as led me to imagine, that the reviewer,
having written his critique before he had read the work, had then
pricked with a pin for passages, wherewith to illustrate the various
branches of his preconceived opinions. By what principle of rational
choice can we suppose a critic to have been directed (at least in a
Christian country, and himself, we hope, a Christian) who gives the
following lines, portraying the fervour of solitary devotion excited by
the magnificent display of the Almighty’s works, as a proof and
example of an author’s tendency to downright ravings, and absolute
unintelligibility?
“O then what soul was his, when on the tops
Of the high mountains he beheld the sun
Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked--
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,
And ocean’s liquid mass, beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy: his spirit drank
The spectacle! sensation, soul, and form,
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live: they were his life.”
Can it be expected, that either the author or his admirers, should be
induced to pay any serious attention to decisions which prove nothing
but the pitiable state of the critic’s own taste and sensibility? On
opening the review they see a favourite passage, of the force and truth
of which they had an intuitive certainty in their own inward experience
confirmed, if confirmation it could receive, by the sympathy of their
most enlightened friends; some of whom perhaps, even in the world’s
opinion, hold a higher intellectual rank than the critic himself would
presume to claim. And this very passage they find selected, as the
characteristic effusion of a mind deserted by reason!--as furnishing
evidence that the writer was raving, or he could not have thus strung
words together without sense or purpose! No diversity of taste seems
capable of explaining such a contrast in judgment.
That I had over-rated the merit of a passage or poem, that I had erred
concerning the degree of its excellence, I might be easily induced to
believe or apprehend. But that lines, the sense of which I had analysed
and found consonant with all the best convictions of my understanding;
and the imagery and diction of which had collected round those
convictions my noblest as well as my most delightful feelings; that I
should admit such lines to be mere nonsense or lunacy, is too much for
the most ingenious arguments to effect. But that such a revolution of
taste should be brought about by a few broad assertions, seems little
less than impossible. On the contrary, it would require an effort of
charity not to dismiss the criticism with the aphorism of the wise man,
in animam malevolam sapientia haud intrare potest.
What then if this very critic should have cited a large number of single
lines and even of long paragraphs, which he himself acknowledges to
possess eminent and original beauty? What if he himself has owned, that
beauties as great are scattered in abundance throughout the whole
book? And yet, though under this impression, should have commenced his
critique in vulgar exultation with a prophecy meant to secure its own
fulfilment? With a “This won’t do!” What? if after such acknowledgments
extorted from his own judgment he should proceed from charge to charge
of tameness and raving; flights and flatness; and at length, consigning
the author to the house of incurables, should conclude with a strain of
rudest contempt evidently grounded in the distempered state of his own
moral associations? Suppose too all this done without a single leading
principle established or even announced, and without any one attempt at
argumentative deduction, though the poet had presented a more than usual
opportunity for it, by having previously made public his own principles
of judgment in poetry, and supported them by a connected train of
reasoning!
The office and duty of the poet is to select the most dignified as well
as
“The gayest, happiest attitude of things.”
The reverse, for in all cases a reverse is possible, is the appropriate
business of burlesque and travesty, a predominant taste for which has
been always deemed a mark of a low and degraded mind. When I was at
Rome, among many other visits to the tomb of Julius II. I went thither
once with a Prussian artist, a man of genius and great vivacity of
feeling. As we were gazing on Michael Angelo’s MOSES, our conversation
turned on the horns and beard of that stupendous statue; of the
necessity of each to support the other; of the super-human effect of the
former, and the necessity of the existence of both to give a harmony and
integrity both to the image and the feeling excited by it. Conceive
them removed, and the statue would become un-natural, without being
super-natural. We called to mind the horns of the rising sun, and I
repeated the noble passage from Taylor’s HOLY DYING. That horns were the
emblem of power and sovereignty among the Eastern nations, and are still
retained as such in Abyssinia; the Achelous of the ancient Greeks; and
the probable ideas and feelings, that originally suggested the mixture
of the human and the brute form in the figure, by which they realized
the idea of their mysterious Pan, as representing intelligence blended
with a darker power, deeper, mightier, and more universal than the
conscious intellect of man; than intelligence;--all these thoughts and
recollections passed in procession before our minds. My companion who
possessed more than his share of the hatred, which his countrymen bore
to the French, had just observed to me, “a Frenchman, Sir! is the only
animal in the human shape, that by no possibility can lift itself up to
religion or poetry:” when, lo! two French officers of distinction and
rank entered the church! “Mark you,” whispered the Prussian, “the
first thing which those scoundrels will notice--(for they will begin by
instantly noticing the statue in parts, without one moment’s pause of
admiration impressed by the whole)--will be the horns and the beard. And
the associations, which they will immediately connect with them will be
those of a he-goat and a cuckold.” Never did man guess more luckily. Had
he inherited a portion of the great legislator’s prophetic powers, whose
statue we had been contemplating, he could scarcely have uttered words
more coincident with the result: for even as he had said, so it came to
pass.
In THE EXCURSION the poet has introduced an old man, born in humble but
not abject circumstances, who had enjoyed more than usual advantages of
education, both from books and from the more awful discipline of nature.
This person he represents, as having been driven by the restlessness of
fervid feelings, and from a craving intellect to an itinerant life; and
as having in consequence passed the larger portion of his time, from
earliest manhood, in villages and hamlets from door to door,
“A vagrant Merchant bent beneath his load.”
Now whether this be a character appropriate to a lofty didactick poem,
is perhaps questionable. It presents a fair subject for controversy; and
the question is to be determined by the congruity or incongruity of such
a character with what shall be proved to be the essential constituents
of poetry. But surely the critic who, passing by all the opportunities
which such a mode of life would present to such a man; all the
advantages of the liberty of nature, of solitude, and of solitary
thought; all the varieties of places and seasons, through which his
track had lain, with all the varying imagery they bring with them; and