Biographia Literaria
occasion to this fiction of a new school of poetry, and to the clamours
against its supposed founders and proselytes.
As little do I believe that Mr. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads were
in themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes so
entitled. A careful and repeated examination of these confirms me in
the belief, that the omission of less than a hundred lines would have
precluded nine-tenths of the criticism on this work. I hazard this
declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader has taken it
up, as he would have done any other collection of poems purporting to
derive their subjects or interests from the incidents of domestic or
ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of meditation which
the poet utters in his own person and character; with the proviso, that
these poems were perused without knowledge of, or reference to,
the author’s peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his
attention previously directed to those peculiarities. In that case,
as actually happened with Mr. Southey’s earlier works, the lines and
passages which might have offended the general taste, would have been
considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to
perversity of judgment. The men of business who had passed their lives
chiefly in cities, and who might therefore be expected to derive the
highest pleasure from acute notices of men and manners conveyed in easy,
yet correct and pointed language; and all those who, reading but little
poetry, are most stimulated with that species of it, which seems
most distant from prose, would probably have passed by the volumes
altogether. Others more catholic in their taste, and yet habituated to
be most pleased when most excited, would have contented themselves
with deciding, that the author had been successful in proportion to the
elevation of his style and subject. Not a few, perhaps, might, by their
admiration of the Lines written near Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the
Wye, those Left upon a Yew Tree Seat, The Old Cumberland Beggar,
and Ruth, have been gradually led to peruse with kindred feeling
The Brothers, the Hart-leap Well, and whatever other poems in that
collection may be described as holding a middle place between those
written in the highest and those in the humblest style; as for instance
between the Tintern Abbey, and The Thorn, or Simon Lee. Should their
taste submit to no further change, and still remain unreconciled to the
colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them, that are, more or less,
scattered through the class last mentioned; yet even from the small
number of the latter, they would have deemed them but an inconsiderable
subtraction from the merit of the whole work; or, what is sometimes not
unpleasing in the publication of a new writer, as serving to ascertain
the natural tendency, and consequently the proper direction of the
author’s genius.
In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the Lyrical
Ballads, I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of the
unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth’s writings have been since
doomed to encounter. The humbler passages in the poems themselves were
dwelt on and cited to justify the rejection of the theory. What in
and for themselves would have been either forgotten or forgiven as
imperfections, or at least comparative failures, provoked direct
hostility when announced as intentional, as the result of choice after
full deliberation. Thus the poems, admitted by all as excellent, joined
with those which had pleased the far greater number, though they formed
two-thirds of the whole work, instead of being deemed (as in all right
they should have been, even if we take for granted that the reader
judged aright) an atonement for the few exceptions, gave wind and fuel
to the animosity against both the poems and the poet. In all perplexity
there is a portion of fear, which predisposes the mind to anger. Not
able to deny that the author possessed both genius and a powerful
intellect, they felt very positive,--but yet were not quite certain
that he might not be in the right, and they themselves in the wrong; an
unquiet state of mind, which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the
occasion of it, and by wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had
written a long and argumentative essay to persuade them, that
Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without
judgment, and were now about to censure without reason. [18]
That this conjecture is not wide from the mark, I am induced to believe
from the noticeable fact, which I can state on my own knowledge, that
the same general censure has been grounded by almost every different
person on some different poem. Among those, whose candour and judgment
I estimate highly, I distinctly remember six who expressed their
objections to the Lyrical Ballads almost in the same words, and
altogether to the same purport, at the same time admitting, that several
of the poems had given them great pleasure; and, strange as it might
seem, the composition which one cited as execrable, another quoted as
his favourite. I am indeed convinced in my own mind, that could the same
experiment have been tried with these volumes, as was made in the well
known story of the picture, the result would have been the same; the
parts which had been covered by black spots on the one day, would be
found equally albo lapide notatae on the succeeding.
However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the
attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much aversion,
as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of
passing them over in silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a
bookseller’s catalogue; especially, as no one pretended to have found
in them any immorality or indelicacy; and the poems, therefore, at the
worst, could only be regarded as so many light or inferior coins in a
rouleau of gold, not as so much alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend
whose talents I hold in the highest respect, but whose judgment and
strong sound sense I have had almost continued occasion to revere,
making the usual complaints to me concerning both the style and subjects
of Mr. Wordsworth’s minor poems; I admitted that there were some few of
the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find a sufficient
cause for their having been recorded in metre. I mentioned Alice Fell as
an instance; “Nay,” replied my friend with more than usual quickness of
manner, “I cannot agree with you there!--that, I own, does seem to me
a remarkably pleasing poem.” In the Lyrical Ballads, (for my experience
does not enable me to extend the remark equally unqualified to the two
subsequent volumes,) I have heard at different times, and from different
individuals, every single poem extolled and reprobated, with the
exception of those of loftier kind, which as was before observed, seem
to have won universal praise. This fact of itself would have made me
diffident in my censures, had not a still stronger ground been furnished
by the strange contrast of the heat and long continuance of the
opposition, with the nature of the faults stated as justifying it. The
seductive faults, the dulcia vitia of Cowley, Marini, or Darwin might
reasonably be thought capable of corrupting the public judgment for half
a century, and require a twenty years war, campaign after campaign, in
order to dethrone the usurper and re-establish the legitimate taste.
But that a downright simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity,
prosaic words in feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and
a preference of mean, degrading, or at best trivial associations and
characters, should succeed in forming a school of imitators, a company
of almost religious admirers, and this too among young men of ardent
minds, liberal education, and not
------with academic laurels unbestowed;
and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is
characterized as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have
well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of
review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph; this is indeed matter
of wonder. Of yet greater is it, that the contest should still continue
as undecided as [19] that between Bacchus and the frogs in Aristophanes;
when the former descended to the realms of the departed to bring back
the spirit of old and genuine poesy;--
CH. Brekekekex, koax, koax.
D. All’ exoloisth’ auto koax.
Ouden gar est’ all’, hae koax.
Oimozet’ ou gar moi melei.
CH. Alla maen kekraxomestha
g’, oposon hae pharynx an haemon
chandanae di’ haemeras,
brekekekex, koax, koax!
D. Touto gar ou nikaesete.
CH. Oude men haemas su pantos.
D. Oude maen humeis ge dae m’
oudepote. Kekraxomai gar,
kan me deae, di’ haemeras,
eos an humon epikrataeso tou koax!
CH. Brekekekex, KO’AX, KOAX!
During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became
acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth’s first publication entitled Descriptive
Sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic
genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In the
form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of
the particular lines and periods, there is a harshness and acerbity
connected and combined with words and images all a-glow, which might
recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms
rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich
fruit is elaborating. The language is not only peculiar and strong, but
at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength; while
the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with
the difficulties of the style, demands always a greater closeness of
attention, than poetry,--at all events, than descriptive poetry--has
a right to claim. It not seldom therefore justified the complaint of
obscurity. In the following extract I have sometimes fancied, that I saw
an emblem of the poem itself, and of the author’s genius as it was then
displayed.--
’Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour,
All day the floods a deepening murmur pour;
The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight
Dark is the region as with coming night;
Yet what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
Glances the fire-clad eagle’s wheeling form;
Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o’er the lake recline;
Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun
The west, that burns like one dilated sun,
Where in a mighty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.
The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as many
changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly [20]. And it is remarkable
how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults and errors of
its earliest products; faults which, in its earliest compositions, are
the more obtrusive and confluent, because as heterogeneous elements,
which had only a temporary use, they constitute the very ferment,
by which themselves are carried off. Or we may compare them to some
diseases, which must work on the humours, and be thrown out on the
surface, in order to secure the patient from their future recurrence.
I was in my twenty-fourth year, when I had the happiness of knowing Mr.
Wordsworth personally, and while memory lasts, I shall hardly forget
the sudden effect produced on my mind, by his recitation of a manuscript