Biographia Literaria
Oh I do love thee, meek Simplicity!
For of thy lays the lulling simpleness
Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress,
Distress the small, yet haply great to me.
’Tis true on Lady Fortune’s gentlest pad
I amble on; and yet I know not why
So sad I am! but should a friend and I
Frown, pout and part, then I am very sad.
And then with sonnets and with sympathy
My dreamy bosom’s mystic woes I pall:
Now of my false friend plaining plaintively,
Now raving at mankind in general;
But whether sad or fierce, ’tis simple all,
All very simple, meek Simplicity!
SONNET III
And this reft house is that, the which he built,
Lamented Jack! and here his malt he pil’d,
Cautious in vain! these rats, that squeak so wild,
Squeak not unconscious of their father’s guilt.
Did he not see her gleaming thro’ the glade!
Belike ’twas she, the maiden all forlorn.
What the she milk no cow with crumpled horn,
Yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she stray’d:
And aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight
Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
And thro’ those brogues, still tatter’d and betorn,
His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white.
Ah! thus thro’ broken clouds at night’s high noon
Peeps to fair fragments forth the full-orb’d harvest-moon!
The following anecdote will not be wholly out of place here, and may
perhaps amuse the reader. An amateur performer in verse expressed to a
common friend a strong desire to be introduced to me, but hesitated in
accepting my friend’s immediate offer, on the score that “he was, he
must acknowledge, the author of a confounded severe epigram on my
Ancient Mariner, which had given me great pain.” I assured my friend
that, if the epigram was a good one, it would only increase my desire
to become acquainted with the author, and begged to hear it recited:
when, to my no less surprise than amusement, it proved to be one which
I had myself some time before written and inserted in the “Morning
Post,” to wit--
To the Author of the Ancient Mariner.
Your poem must eternal be,
Dear sir! it cannot fail,
For ’tis incomprehensible,
And without head or tail.]
[Footnote 8: --
Of old things all are over old,
Of good things none are good enough;--
We’ll show that we can help to frame
A world of other stuff.
I too will have my kings, that take
From me the sign of life and death:
Kingdoms shall shift about, like clouds,
Obedient to my breath.
Wordsworth’s Rob Roy.--Poet. Works, vol. III. p. 127.]
[Footnote 9: Pope was under the common error of his age, an error far
from being sufficiently exploded even at the present day. It consists
(as I explained at large, and proved in detail in my public lectures,)
in mistaking for the essentials of the Greek stage certain rules, which
the wise poets imposed upon themselves, in order to render all the
remaining parts of the drama consistent with those, that had been
forced upon them by circumstances independent of their will; out of
which circumstances the drama itself arose. The circumstances in the
time of Shakespeare, which it was equally out of his power to alter,
were different, and such as, in my opinion, allowed a far wider sphere,
and a deeper and more human interest. Critics are too apt to forget,
that rules are but means to an end; consequently, where the ends are
different, the rules must be likewise so. We must have ascertained what
the end is, before we can determine what the rules ought to be. Judging
under this impression, I did not hestitate to declare my full
conviction, that the consummate judgment of Shakespeare, not only in
the general construction, but in all the details, of his dramas,
impressed me with greater wonder, than even the might of his genius, or
the depth of his philosophy. The substance of these lectures I hope
soon to publish; and it is but a debt of justice to myself and my
friends to notice, that the first course of lectures, which differed
from the following courses only, by occasionally varying the
illustrations of the same thoughts, was addressed to very numerous, and
I need not add, respectable audiences at the Royal institution, before
Mr. Schlegel gave his lectures on the same subjects at Vienna.]
[Footnote 10: In the course of one of my Lectures, I had occasion to
point out the almost faultless position and choice of words, in Pope’s
original compositions, particularly in his Satires and moral Essays,
for the purpose of comparing them with his translation of Homer, which,
I do not stand alone in regarding, as the main source of our
pseudo-poetic diction. And this, by the bye, is an additional
confirmation of a remark made, I believe, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, that
next to the man who forms and elevates the taste of the public, he that
corrupts it, is commonly the greatest genius. Among other passages, I
analyzed sentence by sentence, and almost word by word, the popular
lines,
As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, etc.
(Iliad. B. viii.)
much in the same way as has been since done, in an excellent article on
Chalmers’s British Poets in the Quarterly Review. The impression on the
audience in general was sudden and evident: and a number of enlightened
and highly educated persons, who at different times afterwards addressed
me on the subject, expressed their wonder, that truth so obvious should
not have struck them before; but at the same time acknowledged--(so much
had they been accustomed, in reading poetry, to receive pleasure from
the separate images and phrases successively, without asking themselves
whether the collective meaning was sense or nonsense)--that they might
in all probability have read the same passage again twenty times with
undiminished admiration, and without once reflecting, that
astra phaeinaen amphi selaenaen
phainet aritretea--
(that is, the stars around, or near the full moon, shine pre-eminently
bright) conveys a just and happy image of a moonlight sky: while it is
difficult to determine whether, in the lines,
Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
And stars unnumber’d gild the glowing pole,
the sense or the diction be the more absurd. My answer was; that, though
I had derived peculiar advantages from my school discipline, and
though my general theory of poetry was the same then as now, I had yet
experienced the same sensations myself, and felt almost as if I had
been newly couched, when, by Mr. Wordsworth’s conversation, I had been
induced to re-examine with impartial strictness Gray’s celebrated Elegy.
I had long before detected the defects in The Bard; but the Elegy I had
considered as proof against all fair attacks; and to this day I cannot
read either without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm. At all events,
whatever pleasure I may have lost by the clearer perception of the
faults in certain passages, has been more than repaid to me by the
additional delight with which I read the remainder.
Another instance in confirmation of these remarks occurs to me in the
Faithful Shepherdess. Seward first traces Fletcher’s lines;
More foul diseases than e’er yet the hot
Sun bred thro’ his burnings, while the dog
Pursues the raging lion, throwing the fog
And deadly vapour from his angry breath,
Filling the lower world with plague and death,
to Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar,
The rampant lion hunts he fast
With dogs of noisome breath;
Whose baleful barking brings, in haste,
Pine, plagues, and dreary death!
He then takes occasion to introduce Homer’s simile of the appearance of
Achilles’ mail to Priam compared with the Dog Star; literally thus--
“For this indeed is most splendid, but it was made an evil sign, and
brings many a consuming disease to wretched mortals.” Nothing can be
more simple as a description, or more accurate as a simile; which, (says
Seward,) is thus finely translated by Mr. Pope
Terrific Glory! for his burning breath
Taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death!
Now here--(not to mention the tremendous bombast)--the Dog Star, so
called, is turned into a real dog, a very odd dog, a fire, fever,
plague, and death-breathing, red, air-tainting dog: and the whole
visual likeness is lost, while the likeness in the effects is rendered
absurd by the exaggeration. In Spenser and Fletcher the thought is
justifiable; for the images are at least consistent, and it was the
intention of the writers to mark the seasons by this allegory of
visualized puns.]
[Footnote 11: Especially in this age of personality, this age of
literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are
worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless
head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the
tail;--when the most vapid satires have become the objects of a keen
public interest, purely from the number of contemporary characters
named in the patch-work notes, (which possess, however, the comparative
merit of being more poetical than the text,) and because, to increase
the stimulus, the author has sagaciously left his own name for whispers
and conjectures.]
[Footnote 12: If it were worth while to mix together, as ingredients,
half the anecdotes which I either myself know to be true, or which I
have received from men incapable of intentional falsehood, concerning
the characters, qualifications, and motives of our anonymous critics,
whose decisions are oracles for our reading public; I might safely
borrow the words of the apocryphal Daniel; “Give me leave, O SOVEREIGN
PUBLIC, and I shall slay this dragon without sward or staff.” For the
compound would be as the “pitch, and fat, and hair, which Daniel took,
and did seethe them together, and made lumps thereof; this he put in
the dragon’s mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder; and Daniel said,
LO, THESE ARE THE GODS YE WORSHIP.”]
[Footnote 13: This is one instance among many of deception, by the
telling the half of a fact, and omitting the other half, when it is
from their mutual counteraction and neutralization, that the whole
truth arises, as a tertium aliquid different from either. Thus in
Dryden’s famous line
Great wit (meaning genius) to madness sure is near allied.
Now if the profound sensibility, which is doubtless one of the
components of genius, were alone considered, single and unbalanced, it
might be fairly described as exposing the individual to a greater
chance of mental derangement; but then a more than usual rapidity of
association, a more than usual power of passing from thought to
thought, and image to image, is a component equally essential; and to
the due modification of each by the other the genius itself consists;
so that it would be just as fair to describe the earth, as in imminent
danger of exorbitating, or of falling into the sun, according as the
assertor of the absurdity confined his attention either to the
projectile or to the attractive force exclusively.]
[Footnote 14: For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I
dare not compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name
of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during
which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but
laziness, and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel
and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera
obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes,
reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one mans delirium, so
as to people the barrenness of a hundred other brains afflicted with