Biographia Literaria
Horace, on this point, are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of
the human mind. They are not more peremptory, than wise and prudent.
For in the first place a deviation from them perplexes the reader’s
feelings, and all the circumstances which are feigned in order to make
such accidents less improbable, divide and disquiet his faith, rather
than aid and support it. Spite of all attempts, the fiction will appear,
and unfortunately not as fictitious but as false. The reader not only
knows, that the sentiments and language are the poet’s own, and his
own too in his artificial character, as poet; but by the fruitless
endeavours to make him think the contrary, he is not even suffered to
forget it. The effect is similar to that produced by an Epic Poet, when
the fable and the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in
THE MESSIAH of Klopstock, or in CUMBERLAND’S CALVARY; and not merely
suggested by it as in the PARADISE LOST of Milton. That illusion,
contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply
permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either
denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment, is
rendered impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and facts
of known and absolute truth. A faith, which transcends even historic
belief, must absolutely put out this mere poetic analogon of faith, as
the summer sun is said to extinguish our household fires, when it shines
full upon them. What would otherwise have been yielded to as pleasing
fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect produced in
this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is in a less degree
brought about in the instances, to which I have been objecting, by the
balked attempts of the author to make him believe.
Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project and
of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one word,
for instance, attributed to the pedlar in THE EXCURSION, characteristic
of a Pedlar? One sentiment, that might not more plausibly, even without
the aid of any previous explanation, have proceeded from any wise and
beneficent old man, of a rank or profession in which the language of
learning and refinement are natural and to be expected? Need the
rank have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the
knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? When on the contrary
this information renders the man’s language, feelings, sentiments,
and information a riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes
of anecdote? Finally when this, and this alone, could have induced a
genuine Poet to inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects
the loftiest and of most universal interest, such minute matters of
fact, (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the
friends of some obscure “ornament of society lately deceased” in some
obscure town,) as
“Among the hills of Athol he was born
There, on a small hereditary Farm,
An unproductive slip of rugged ground,
His Father dwelt; and died in poverty;
While He, whose lowly fortune I retrace,
The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe,
A little One--unconscious of their loss.
But ere he had outgrown his infant days
His widowed Mother, for a second Mate,
Espoused the teacher of the Village School;
Who on her offspring zealously bestowed
Needful instruction.”
“From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak,
In summer tended cattle on the Hills;
But, through the inclement and the perilous days
Of long-continuing winter, he repaired
To his Step-father’s School,”-etc.
For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might, with
trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with far
greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet;
and without incurring another defect which I shall now mention, and a
sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated.
Third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems,
from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and
diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an
incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and
then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented
as talking, while in truth one man only speaks.
The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former;
but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling
disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described,
as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most
cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few
particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: In this
class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying,
instead of progression, of thought. As instances, see pages 27, 28, and
62 of the Poems, vol. I. and the first eighty lines of the VIth Book of
THE EXCURSION.
Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This
is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast,
as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a
disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a
disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the
bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the
awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale.
It is a well-known fact, that bright colours in motion both make and
leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is more likely too,
than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become
the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had
accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this in such
lines, as
“They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude!”
in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the
images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that
conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed “the bliss
of solitude?” Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say
burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from this couplet to--
“And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.” Vol. I. p. 328.
The second instance is from vol. II. page 12, where the poet having gone
out for a day’s tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning with a knot
of Gipsies, who had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds, together
with their children and asses, in some field by the road-side. At the
close of the day on his return our tourist found them in the same place.
“Twelve hours,” says he,
“Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I
Have been a traveller under open sky,
Much witnessing of change and cheer,
Yet as I left I find them here!”
Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny
wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through
road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been
right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole
day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might be quite
as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was pleasing
or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a
series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather
above, than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire
of China improgressive for thirty centuries:
“The weary Sun betook himself to rest:--
--Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west,
Outshining, like a visible God,
The glorious path in which he trod.
And now, ascending, after one dark hour,
And one night’s diminution of her power,
Behold the mighty Moon! this way
She looks, as if at them--but they
Regard not her:--oh, better wrong and strife,
Better vain deeds or evil than such life!
The silent Heavens have goings on
The stars have tasks!--but these have none!”
The last instance of this defect,(for I know no other than these already
cited) is from the Ode, page 351, vol. II., where, speaking of a child,
“a six years’ Darling of a pigmy size,” he thus addresses him:
“Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind,--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find!
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave,
A Present which is not to be put by!”
Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects
the epithets “deaf and silent,” with the apostrophized eye: or (if we
are to refer it to the preceding word, “Philosopher”), the faulty and
equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of
making a “Master brood o’er a Slave,” or “the Day” brood at all; we will
merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that
age a Philosopher? In what sense does he read “the eternal deep?” In
what sense is he declared to be “for ever haunted” by the Supreme Being?
or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a Mighty Prophet, a
blessed Seer? By reflection? by knowledge? by conscious intuition? or
by any form or modification of consciousness? These would be tidings
indeed; but such as would pre-suppose an immediate revelation to
the inspired communicator, and require miracles to authenticate his
inspiration. Children at this age give us no such information of
themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the Lethe, which has
produced such utter oblivion of a state so godlike? There are many of us
that still possess some remembrances, more or less distinct, respecting
themselves at six years old; pity that the worthless straws only should
float, while treasures, compared with which all the mines of Golconda
and Mexico were but straws, should be absorbed by some unknown gulf into
some unknown abyss.
But if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as having
been the poet’s meaning; if these mysterious gifts, faculties, and
operations, are not accompanied with consciousness; who else is
conscious of them? or how can it be called the child, if it be no part
of the child’s conscious being? For aught I know, the thinking Spirit
within me may be substantially one with the principle of life, and of
vital operation. For aught I know, it might be employed as a secondary
agent in the marvellous organization and organic movements of my body.
But, surely, it would be strange language to say, that I construct my
heart! or that I propel the finer influences through my nerves! or that
I compress my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my own eyes!
Spinoza and Behmen were, on different systems, both Pantheists; and
among the ancients there were philosophers, teachers of the EN KAI PAN,
who not only taught that God was All, but that this All constituted God.
Yet not even these would confound the part, as a part, with the
whole, as the whole. Nay, in no system is the distinction between
the individual and God, between the Modification, and the one only
Substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of Spinoza. Jacobi indeed
relates of Lessing, that, after a conversation with him at the house of
the Poet, Gleim, (the Tyrtaeus and Anacreon of the German Parnassus,) in
which conversation Lessing had avowed privately to Jacobi his reluctance