Biographia Literaria
to admit any personal existence of the Supreme Being, or the possibility
of personality except in a finite Intellect, and while they were sitting
at table, a shower of rain came on unexpectedly. Gleim expressed his
regret at the circumstance, because they had meant to drink their
wine in the garden: upon which Lessing in one of his half-earnest,
half-joking moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, “It is I, perhaps, that
am doing that,” i.e. raining!--and Jacobi answered, “or perhaps I;”
Gleim contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for
any explanation.
So with regard to this passage. In what sense can the magnificent
attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not
make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or afield of corn: or
even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The omnipresent
Spirit works equally in them, as in the child; and the child is equally
unconscious of it as they. It cannot surely be, that the four lines,
immediately following, are to contain the explanation?
“To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie;”--
Surely, it cannot be that this wonder-rousing apostrophe is but a
comment on the little poem, “We are Seven?”--that the whole meaning of
the passage is reducible to the assertion, that a child, who by the bye
at six years old would have been better instructed in most Christian
families, has no other notion of death than that of lying in a dark,
cold place? And still, I hope, not as in a place of thought! not the
frightful notion of lying awake in his grave! The analogy between death
and sleep is too simple, too natural, to render so horrid a belief
possible for children; even had they not been in the habit, as all
Christian children are, of hearing the latter term used to express the
former. But if the child’s belief be only, that “he is not dead, but
sleepeth:” wherein does it differ from that of his father and mother,
or any other adult and instructed person? To form an idea of a thing’s
becoming nothing; or of nothing becoming a thing; is impossible to
all finite beings alike, of whatever age, and however educated or
uneducated. Thus it is with splendid paradoxes in general. If the words
are taken in the common sense, they convey an absurdity; and if, in
contempt of dictionaries and custom, they are so interpreted as to avoid
the absurdity, the meaning dwindles into some bald truism. Thus you must
at once understand the words contrary to their common import, in order
to arrive at any sense; and according to their common import, if you are
to receive from them any feeling of sublimity or admiration.
Though the instances of this defect in Mr. Wordsworth’s poems are so
few, that for themselves it would have been scarcely just to attract the
reader’s attention toward them; yet I have dwelt on it, and perhaps the
more for this very reason. For being so very few, they cannot sensibly
detract from the reputation of an author, who is even characterized
by the number of profound truths in his writings, which will stand
the severest analysis; and yet few as they are, they are exactly those
passages which his blind admirers would be most likely, and best able,
to imitate. But Wordsworth, where he is indeed Wordsworth, may be
mimicked by copyists, he may be plundered by plagiarists; but he cannot
be imitated, except by those who are not born to be imitators. For
without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power his sense would
want its vital warmth and peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his
mysticism would become sickly--mere fog, and dimness!
To these defects which, as appears by the extracts, are only occasional,
I may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the dissent of
any candid and intelligent reader, the following (for the most part
correspondent) excellencies. First, an austere purity of language both
grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of
the words to the meaning. Of how high value I deem this, and how
particularly estimable I hold the example at the present day, has been
already stated: and in part too the reasons on which I ground both the
moral and intellectual importance of habituating ourselves to a strict
accuracy of expression. It is noticeable, how limited an acquaintance
with the masterpieces of art will suffice to form a correct and even
a sensitive taste, where none but master-pieces have been seen and
admired: while on the other hand, the most correct notions, and the
widest acquaintance with the works of excellence of all ages and
countries, will not perfectly secure us against the contagious
familiarity with the far more numerous offspring of tastelessness or of
a perverted taste. If this be the case, as it notoriously is, with the
arts of music and painting, much more difficult will it be, to avoid the
infection of multiplied and daily examples in the practice of an art,
which uses words, and words only, as its instruments. In poetry, in
which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and
deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that
ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of
a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same
language without injury to the meaning. Be it observed, however, that I
include in the meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but
likewise all the associations which it recalls. For language is framed
to convey not the object alone but likewise the character, mood and
intentions of the person who is representing it. In poetry it is
practicable to preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affectations
and misappropriations, which promiscuous authorship, and reading not
promiscuous only because it is disproportionally most conversant with
the compositions of the day, have rendered general. Yet even to the
poet, composing in his own province, it is an arduous work: and as
the result and pledge of a watchful good sense of fine and luminous
distinction, and of complete self-possession, may justly claim all the
honour which belongs to an attainment equally difficult and valuable,
and the more valuable for being rare. It is at all times the proper food
of the understanding; but in an age of corrupt eloquence it is both food
and antidote.
In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style
wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere,
from the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator
to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or sentiment.
Our chains rattle, even while we are complaining of them. The poems of
Boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them with those of
his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apollinaris, and others. They might even
be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in which they are
set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age of the
writer. Much however may be effected by education. I believe not only
from grounds of reason, but from having in great measure assured myself
of the fact by actual though limited experience, that, to a youth led
from his first boyhood to investigate the meaning of every word and
the reason of its choice and position, logic presents itself as an old
acquaintance under new names.
On some future occasion, more especially demanding such disquisition, I
shall attempt to prove the close connection between veracity and habits
of mental accuracy; the beneficial after-effects of verbal precision in
the preclusion of fanaticism, which masters the feelings more especially
by indistinct watch-words; and to display the advantages which language
alone, at least which language with incomparably greater ease and
certainty than any other means, presents to the instructor of impressing
modes of intellectual energy so constantly, so imperceptibly, and as it
were by such elements and atoms, as to secure in due time the formation
of a second nature. When we reflect, that the cultivation of the
judgment is a positive command of the moral law, since the reason can
give the principle alone, and the conscience bears witness only to the
motive, while the application and effects must depend on the judgment
when we consider, that the greater part of our success and comfort in
life depends on distinguishing the similar from the same, that which is
peculiar in each thing from that which it has in common with others, so
as still to select the most probable, instead of the merely possible or
positively unfit, we shall learn to value earnestly and with a practical
seriousness a mean, already prepared for us by nature and society,
of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the same
unremembered process and with the same never forgotten results, as those
by which it is taught to speak and converse. Now how much warmer
the interest is, how much more genial the feelings of reality and
practicability, and thence how much stronger the impulses to imitation
are, which a contemporary writer, and especially a contemporary poet,
excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been treated of in the
earlier pages of these sketches. I have only to add, that all the
praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for a purpose so
important, joined with that which must be claimed for the infrequency of
the same excellence in the same perfection, belongs in full right to
Mr. Wordsworth. I am far however from denying that we have poets whose
general style possesses the same excellence, as Mr. Moore, Lord
Byron, Mr. Bowles, and, in all his later and more important works, our
laurel-honouring Laureate. But there are none, in whose works I do not
appear to myself to find more exceptions, than in those of Wordsworth.
Quotations or specimens would here be wholly out of place, and must be
left for the critic who doubts and would invalidate the justice of this
eulogy so applied.
The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth’s work is: a
correspondent weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments,--won,
not from books; but--from the poet’s own meditative observation. They
are fresh and have the dew upon them. His muse, at least when in her
strength of wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element,
Makes audible a linked lay of truth,
Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay,
Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!
Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one, which is not
rendered valuable by some just and original reflection.
See page 25, vol. II.: or the two following passages in one of his
humblest compositions.
“O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in every thing;”
and
“I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Has oftener left me mourning;”
or in a still higher strain the six beautiful quatrains, page 134.
“Thus fares it still in our decay:
And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind.
The Blackbird in the summer trees,
The Lark upon the hill,
Let loose their carols when they please,
Are quiet when they will.
With Nature never do they wage
A foolish strife; they see
A happy youth, and their old age
Is beautiful and free!
But we are pressed by heavy laws;
And often glad no more,
We wear a face of joy, because
We have been glad of yore.
If there is one, who need bemoan
His kindred laid in earth,