Biographia Literaria
the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite
purpose. We should therefore transfer this species of amusement--(if
indeed those can be said to retire a musis, who were never in their
company, or relaxation be attributable to those, whose bows are never
bent)--from the genus, reading, to that comprebensive class
characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet
coexisting propensities of human nature, namely, indulgence of sloth,
and hatred of vacancy. In addition to novels and tales of chivalry to
prose or rhyme, (by which last I mean neither rhythm nor metre) this
genus comprises as its species, gaming, swinging, or swaying on a chair
or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tete-a-tete
quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning word by word
all the advertisements of a daily newspaper in a public house on a
rainy day, etc. etc. etc.]
[Footnote 15: Ex. gr. Pediculos e capillis excerptos in arenam jacere
incontusos; eating of unripe fruit; gazing on the clouds, and (in
genere) on movable things suspended in the air; riding among a
multitude of camels; frequent laughter; listening to a series of jests
and humorous anecdotes,--as when (so to modernize the learned Saracen’s
meaning) one man’s droll story of an Irishman inevitably occasions
another’s droll story of a Scotchman, which again, by the same sort of
conjunction disjunctive, leads to some etourderie of a Welshman, and
that again to some sly hit of a Yorkshireman;--the habit of reading
tomb-stones in church-yards, etc. By the bye, this catalogue, strange
as it may appear, is not insusceptible of a sound psychological
commentary.]
[Footnote 16: I have ventured to call it unique; not only because I
know no work of the kind in our language, (if we except a few chapters
of the old translation of Froissart)--none, which uniting the charms of
romance and history, keeps the imagination so constantly on the wing,
and yet leaves so much for after reflection; but likewise, and chiefly,
because it is a compilation, which, in the various excellencies of
translation, selection, and arrangement, required and proves greater
genius in the compiler, as living in the present state of society, than
in the original composers.]
[Footnote 17: It is not easy to estimate the effects which the example
of a young man as highly distinguished for strict purity of disposition
and conduct, as for intellectual power and literary acquirements, may
produce on those of the same age with himself, especially on those of
similar pursuits and congenial minds. For many years, my opportunities
of intercourse with Mr. Southey have been rare, and at long intervals;
but I dwell with unabated pleasure on the strong and sudden, yet I
trust not fleeting, influence, which my moral being underwent on my
acquaintance with him at Oxford, whither I had gone at the commencement
of our Cambridge vacation on a visit to an old school-fellow. Not
indeed on my moral or religious principles, for they had never been
contaminated; but in awakening the sense of the duty and dignity of
making my actions accord with those principles, both in word and deed.
The irregularities only not universal among the young men of my
standing, which I always knew to be wrong, I then learned to feel as
degrading; learned to know that an opposite conduct, which was at that
time considered by us as the easy virtue of cold and selfish prudence,
might originate in the noblest emotions, in views the most
disinterested and imaginative. It is not however from grateful
recollections only, that I have been impelled thus to leave these my
deliberate sentiments on record; but in some sense as a debt of justice
to the man, whose name has been so often connected with mine for evil
to which he is a stranger. As a specimen I subjoin part of a note, from
The Beauties of the Anti-jacobin, in which, having previously informed
the public that I had been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching
Deism, at a time when, for my youthful ardour in defence of
Christianity, I was decried as a bigot by the proselytes of French
phi-(or to speak more truly psi-)-losophy, the writer concludes with
these words; “since this time he has left his native country, commenced
citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless, and his wife
destitute. Ex his disce his friends, LAMB and SOUTHEY.” With severest
truth it may be asserted, that it would not be easy to select two men
more exemplary in their domestic affections than those whose names were
thus printed at full length as in the same rank of morals with a
denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his children fatherless
and his wife destitute! Is it surprising, that many good men remained
longer than perhaps they otherwise would have done adverse to a party,
which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of such atrocious
calumnies? Qualis es, nescio; sed per quales agis, scio et doleo.]
[Footnote 18: In opinions of long continuance, and in which we have
never before been molested by a single doubt, to be suddenly convinced
of an error, is almost like being convicted of a fault. There is a
state of mind, which is the direct antithesis of that, which takes
place when we make a bull. The bull namely consists in the bringing her
two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense,
of their connection. The psychological condition, or that which
constitutes the possibility, of this state, being such disproportionate
vividness of two distant thoughts, as extinguishes or obscures the
consciousness of the intermediate images or conceptions, or wholly
abstracts the attention from them. Thus in the well known bull, “I was
a fine child, but they changed me:” the first conception expressed in
the word “I,” is that of personal identity--Ego contemplans: the second
expressed in the word “me,” is the visual image or object by which the
mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal
identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have
existed,--Ego contemplatus. Now the change of one visual image for
another involves in itself no absurdity, and becomes absurd only by its
immediate juxta-position with the fast thought, which is rendered
possible by the whole attention being successively absorbed to each
singly, so as not to notice the interjacent notion, changed, which by
its incongruity, with the first thought, I, constitutes the bull. Add
only, that this process is facilitated by the circumstance of the words
I, and me, being sometimes equivalent, and sometimes having a distinct
meaning; sometimes, namely, signifying the act of self-consciousness,
sometimes the external image in and by which the mind represents that
act to itself, the result and symbol of its individuality. Now suppose
the direct contrary state, and you will have a distinct sense of the
connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such
connection which is supplied by habit. The man feels as if he were
standing on his head though he cannot but see that he is truly standing
on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course have a
tendency to associate itself with him who occasions it; even as
persons, who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are
known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician.]
[Footnote 19: Without however the apprehensions attributed to the Pagan
reformer of the poetic republic. If we may judge from the preface to
the recent collection of his poems, Mr. W. would have answered with
Xanthias--
su d’ ouk edeisas ton huophon ton rhaematon,
kai tas apeilas; XAN, ou ma Di’, oud’ ephrontisa.--Ranae, 492-3.
And here let me hint to the authors of the numerous parodies, and
pretended imitations of Mr. Wordsworth’s style, that at once to conceal
and convey wit and wisdom in the semblance of folly and dulness, as is
done in the Clowns and Fools, nay even in the Dogberry, of our
Shakespeare, is doubtless a proof of genius, or at all events of
satiric talent; but that the attempt to ridicule a silly and childish
poem, by writing another still sillier and still more childish, can
only prove (if it prove any thing at all) that the parodist is a still
greater blockhead than the original writer, and, what is far worse, a
malignant coxcomb to boot. The talent for mimicry seems strongest where
the human race are most degraded. The poor, naked half human savages of
New Holland were found excellent mimics: and, in civilized society,
minds of the very lowest stamp alone satirize by copying. At least the
difference which must blend with and balance the likeness, in order to
constitute a just imitation, existing here merely in caricature,
detracts from the libeller’s heart, without adding an iota to the
credit of his understanding.]
[Footnote 20: --
The Butterfly the ancient Grecians made
The soul’s fair emblem, and its only name--
But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade
Of mortal life! For to this earthly frame
Ours is the reptile’s lot, much toil, much blame,
Manifold motions making little speed,
And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.]
[Footnote 21: Mr. Wordsworth, even in his two earliest poems, The
Evening Walk and the Descriptive Sketches, is more free from this
latter defect than most of the young poets his contemporaries. It may
however be exemplified, together with the harsh and obscure
construction, in which he more often offended, in the following
lines:--
“’Mid stormy vapours ever driving by,
Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry;
Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer,
Denied the bread of life the foodful ear,
Dwindles the pear on autumn’s latest spray,
And apple sickens pale in summer’s ray;
Ev’n here content has fixed her smiling reign
With independence, child of high disdain.”
I hope, I need not say, that I have quoted these lines for no other
purpose than to make my meaning fully understood. It is to be regretted
that Mr. Wordsworth has not republished these two poems entire.]
[Footnote 22: This is effected either by giving to the one word a
general, and to the other an exclusive use; as “to put on the back” and
“to indorse;” or by an actual distinction of meanings, as “naturalist,”
and “physician;” or by difference of relation, as “I” and “Me” (each of
which the rustics of our different provinces still use in all the cases
singular of the first personal pronoun). Even the mere difference, or
corruption, in the pronunciation of the same word, if it have become
general, will produce a new word with a distinct signification; thus
“property” and “propriety;” the latter of which, even to the time of
Charles II was the written word for all the senses of both. There is a
sort of minim immortal among the animalcula infusoria, which has not
naturally either birth, or death, absolute beginning, or absolute end:
for at a certain period a small point appears on its back, which
deepens and lengthens till the creature divides into two, and the same
process recommences in each of the halves now become integral. This may
be a fanciful, but it is by no means a bad emblem of the formation of
words, and may facilitate the conception, how immense a nomenclature
may be organized from a few simple sounds by rational beings in a
social state. For each new application, or excitement of the same
sound, will call forth a different sensation, which cannot but affect
the pronunciation. The after recollections of the sound, without the
same vivid sensation, will modify it still further till at length all
trace of the original likeness is worn away.]
[Footnote 23: I ought to have added, with the exception of a single