Biographia Literaria

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Sebomai noeron
Kruphian taxin
Chorei TI MESON
Ou katachuthen. [60]

Des Cartes, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes,
said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe.
We must of course understand him to have meant; I will render the
construction of the universe intelligible. In the same sense the
transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary
forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other
strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause
the world of intelllgences with the whole system of their
representations to rise up before you. Every other science presupposes
intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher
contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history
to the mind from its birth to its maturity.

The venerable sage of Koenigsberg has preceded the march of this
master-thought as an effective pioneer in his essay on the
introduction of negative quantities into philosophy, published 1763.
In this he has shown, that instead of assailing the science of
mathematics by metaphysics, as Berkeley did in his ANALYST, or of
sophisticating it, as Wolf did, by the vain attempt of deducing the
first principles of geometry from supposed deeper grounds of ontology,
it behoved the metaphysician rather to examine whether the only
province of knowledge, which man has succeeded in erecting into a pure
science, might not furnish materials, or at least hints, for
establishing and pacifying the unsettled, warring, and embroiled
domain of philosophy. An imitation of the mathematical method had
indeed been attempted with no better success than attended the essay
of David to wear the armour of Saul. Another use however is possible
and of far greater promise, namely, the actual application of the
positions which had so wonderfully enlarged the discoveries of
geometry, mutatis mutandis, to philosophical subjects. Kant having
briefly illustrated the utility of such an attempt in the questions of
space, motion, and infinitely small quantities, as employed by the
mathematician, proceeds to the idea of negative quantities and the
transfer of them to metaphysical investigation. Opposites, he well
observes, are of two kinds, either logical, that is, such as are
absolutely incompatible; or real, without being contradictory. The
former he denominates Nihil negativum irrepraesentabile, the
connection of which produces nonsense. A body in motion is something--
Aliquid cogitabile; but a body, at one and the same time in motion and
not in motion, is nothing, or, at most, air articulated into nonsense.
But a motory force of a body in one direction, and an equal force of
the same body in an opposite direction is not incompatible, and the
result, namely, rest, is real and representable. For the purposes of
mathematical calculus it is indifferent which force we term negative,
and which positive, and consequently we appropriate the latter to
that, which happens to be the principal object in our thoughts. Thus
if a man's capital be ten and his debts eight, the subtraction will be
the same, whether we call the capital negative debt, or the debt
negative capital. But in as much as the latter stands practically in
reference to the former, we of course represent the sum as 10-8. It is
equally clear that two equal forces acting in opposite directions,
both being finite and each distinguished from the other by its
direction only, must neutralize or reduce each other to inaction. Now
the transcendental philosophy demands; first, that two forces should
be conceived which counteract each other by their essential nature;
not only not in consequence of the accidental direction of each, but
as prior to all direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the
conditions of all possible directions are derivative and deducible:
secondly, that these forces should be assumed to be both alike
infinite, both alike indestructible. The problem will then be to
discover the result or product of two such forces, as distinguished
from the result of those forces which are finite, and derive their
difference solely from the circumstance of their direction. When we
have formed a scheme or outline of these two different kinds of force,
and of their different results, by the process of discursive
reasoning, it will then remain for us to elevate the thesis from
notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively this one power with
its two inherent indestructible yet counteracting forces, and the
results or generations to which their inter-penetration gives
existence, in the living principle and in the process of our own self-
consciousness. By what instrument this is possible the solution itself
will discover, at the same time that it will reveal to and for whom it
is possible. Non omnia possumus omnes. There is a philosophic no less
than a poetic genius, which is differenced from the highest perfection
of talent, not by degree but by kind.

The counteraction then of the two assumed forces does not depend on
their meeting from opposite directions; the power which acts in them
is indestructible; it is therefore inexhaustibly re-ebullient; and as
something must be the result of these two forces, both alike infinite,
and both alike indestructible; and as rest or neutralization cannot be
this result; no other conception is possible, but that the product
must be a tertium aliquid, or finite generation. Consequently this
conception is necessary. Now this tertium aliquid can be no other than
an inter-penetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both.

* * * * * *

Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received
the following letter from a friend, whose practical judgment I have
had ample reason to estimate and revere, and whose taste and
sensibility preclude all the excuses which my self-love might possibly
have prompted me to set up in plea against the decision of advisers of
equal good sense, but with less tact and feeling.

"Dear C.

"You ask my opinion concerning your Chapter on the Imagination,
both as to the impressions it made on myself, and as to those which I
think it will make on the Public, i.e. that part of the public, who,
from the title of the work and from its forming a sort of introduction
to a volume of poems, are likely to constitute the great majority of
your readers.

"As to myself, and stating in the first place the effect on my
understanding, your opinions and method of argument were not only so
new to me, but so directly the reverse of all I had ever been
accustomed to consider as truth, that even if I had comprehended your
premises sufficiently to have admitted them, and had seen the
necessity of your conclusions, I should still have been in that state
of mind, which in your note in Chap. IV you have so ingeniously
evolved, as the antithesis to that in which a man is, when he makes a
bull. In your own words, I should have felt as if I had been standing
on my head.

"The effect on my feelings, on the other hand, I cannot better
represent, than by supposing myself to have known only our light airy
modern chapels of ease, and then for the first time to have been
placed, and left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a
gusty moonlight night of autumn. 'Now in glimmer, and now in gloom;'
often in palpable darkness not without a chilly sensation of terror;
then suddenly emerging into broad yet visionary lights with coloured
shadows of fantastic shapes, yet all decked with holy insignia and
mystic symbols; and ever and anon coming out full upon pictures and
stone-work images of great men, with whose names I was familiar, but
which looked upon me with countenances and an expression, the most
dissimilar to all I had been in the habit of connecting with those
names. Those whom I had been taught to venerate as almost super-human
in magnitude of intellect, I found perched in little fret-work niches,
as grotesque dwarfs; while the grotesques, in my hitherto belief,
stood guarding the high altar with all the characters of apotheosis.
In short, what I had supposed substances were thinned away into
shadows, while everywhere shadows were deepened into substances:

If substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd,
For each seem'd either!

"Yet after all, I could not but repeat the lines which you had quoted
from a MS. poem of your own in the FRIEND, and applied to a work of
Mr. Wordsworth's though with a few of the words altered:

------An Orphic tale indeed,
A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts
To a strange music chanted!

"Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously to your great book
on the CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY, which you have promised and announced:
and that I will do my best to understand it. Only I will not promise
to descend into the dark cave of Trophonius with you, there to rub my
own eyes, in order to make the sparks and figured flashes, which I am
required to see.

"So much for myself. But as for the Public I do not hesitate a moment
in advising and urging you to withdraw the Chapter from the present
work, and to reserve it for your announced treatises on the Logos or
communicative intellect in Man and Deity. First, because imperfectly
as I understand the present Chapter, I see clearly that you have done
too much, and yet not enough. You have been obliged to omit so many
links, from the necessity of compression, that what remains, looks (if
I may recur to my former illustration) like the fragments of the
winding steps of an old ruined tower. Secondly, a still stronger
argument (at least one that I am sure will be more forcible with you)
is, that your readers will have both right and reason to complain of
you. This Chapter, which cannot, when it is printed, amount to so
little as an hundred pages, will of necessity greatly increase the
expense of the work; and every reader who, like myself, is neither
prepared nor perhaps calculated for the study of so abstruse a subject
so abstrusely treated, will, as I have before hinted, be almost
entitled to accuse you of a sort of imposition on him. For who, he
might truly observe, could from your title-page, to wit, "My Literary
Life and Opinions," published too as introductory to a volume of
miscellaneous poems, have anticipated, or even conjectured, a long
treatise on Ideal Realism which holds the same relation in
abstruseness to Plotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato. It will be well,
if already you have not too much of metaphysical disquisition in your
work, though as the larger part of the disquisition is historical, it
will doubtless be both interesting and instructive to many to whose
unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic power would be
utterly unintelligible. Be assured, if you do publish this Chapter in
the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop Berkeley's Siris,
announced as an Essay on Tar-water, which beginning with Tar ends with
the Trinity, the omne scibile forming the interspace. I say in the
present work. In that greater work to which you have devoted so many
years, and study so intense and various, it will be in its proper
place. Your prospectus will have described and announced both its
contents and their nature; and if any persons purchase it, who feel no
interest in the subjects of which it treats, they will have themselves
only to blame.

"I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives,
and particularly from the probable effects on the sale of your present
publication; but they would weigh little with you compared with the
preceding. Besides, I have long observed, that arguments drawn from
your own personal interests more often act on you as narcotics than as
stimulants, and that in money concerns you have some small portion of
pig-nature in your moral idiosyncrasy, and, like these amiable
creatures, must occasionally be pulled backward from the boat in order
to make you enter it. All success attend you, for if hard thinking and
hard reading are merits, you have deserved it.
Your affectionate, etc."

In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete
conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with
stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that
future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will
find at the close of the second volume.

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The
primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of
all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the
eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary
Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the
conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of
its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its
operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate:
or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events
it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even
as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but
fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of
memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is
blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will,
which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary
memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the
law of association.

CHAPTER XIV

Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally proposed--
Preface to the second edition--The ensuing controversy, its causes and
acrimony--Philosophic definitions of a Poem and Poetry with scholia.

During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our
conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,
the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful
adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest
of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm,
which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset
diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent
the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature.
The thought suggested itself--(to which of us I do not recollect)--
that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the
incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and
the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the
affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally
accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense
they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of
delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.
For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life;
the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every
village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind
to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.

In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it
was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and
characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer
from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth
sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing
suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic
faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as
his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and
to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the
mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the
loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible
treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and
selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and
hearts that neither feel nor understand.

With this view I wrote THE ANCIENT MARINER, and was preparing among
other poems, THE DARK LADIE, and the CHRISTABEL, in which I should
have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first
attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more
successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my
compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an
interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or
three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty,
and sustained diction, which is characteristic of his genius. In this
form the LYRICAL BALLADS were published; and were presented by him, as
an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the
usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might
not be so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the
pleasurable interest, which it is the peculiar business of poetry to
impart. To the second edition he added a preface of considerable
length; in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently a
contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of
this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and
indefensible all phrases and forms of speech that were not included in
what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression)
called the language of real life. From this preface, prefixed to poems
in which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius,
however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long-
continued controversy. For from the conjunction of perceived power
with supposed heresy I explain the inveteracy and in some instances, I
grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the controversy
has been conducted by the assailants.

Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things, which
they were for a long time described as being had they been really
distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness
of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing
more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of
them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of
oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after
year increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were
found too not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly
among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their
admiration (inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was
distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, by its religious
fervour. These facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which
was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even
boisterously denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his
opinions, and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of
criticism, which would of itself have borne up the poems by the
violence with which it whirled them round and round. With many parts
of this preface in the sense attributed to them and which the words
undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never concurred; but on the contrary
objected to them as erroneous in principle, and as contradictory (in
appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to
the author's own practice in the greater part of the poems themselves.
Mr. Wordsworth in his recent collection has, I find, degraded this
prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume, to be read or
not at the reader's choice. But he has not, as far as I can discover,
announced any change in his poetic creed. At all events, considering
it as the source of a controversy, in which I have been honoured more
than I deserve by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, I
think it expedient to declare once for all, in what points I coincide
with the opinions supported in that preface, and in what points I
altogether differ. But in order to render myself intelligible I must
previously, in as few words as possible, explain my views, first, of a
Poem; and secondly, of Poetry itself, in kind, and in essence.

The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction;
while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself
constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain
adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its
distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of
philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our
conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is
the result of philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose
composition; the difference therefore must consist in a different
combination of them, in consequence of a different object being
proposed. According to the difference of the object will be the
difference of the combination. It is possible, that the object may be
merely to facilitate the recollection of any given facts or
observations by artificial arrangement; and the composition will be a
poem, merely because it is distinguished from prose by metre, or by
rhyme, or by both conjointly. In this, the lowest sense, a man might
attribute the name of a poem to the well-known enumeration of the days
in the several months;

"Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November," etc.

and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular pleasure
is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities, all
compositions that have this charm super-added, whatever be their
contents, may be entitled poems.

So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents
supplies an additional ground of distinction. The immediate purpose
may be the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and
demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts experienced and
recorded, as in history. Pleasure, and that of the highest and most
permanent kind, may result from the attainment of the end; but it is
not itself the immediate end. In other works the communication of
pleasure may be the immediate purpose; and though truth, either moral
or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will
distinguish the character of the author, not the class to which the
work belongs. Blest indeed is that state of society, in which the
immediate purpose would be baffled by the perversion of the proper
ultimate end; in which no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the
BATHYLLUS even of an Anacreon, or the ALEXIS of Virgil, from disgust
and aversion!

But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a
work not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high
degree attained, as in novels and romances. Would then the mere
superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the
name of poems? The answer is, that nothing can permanently please,
which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not
otherwise. If metre be superadded, all other parts must be made
consonant with it. They must be such, as to justify the perpetual and
distinct attention to each part, which an exact correspondent
recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite. The final
definition then, so deduced, may be thus worded. A poem is that
species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by
proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all
other species--(having this object in common with it)--it is
discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as
is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.

Controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants
attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few
instances has this been more striking, than in disputes concerning the
present subject. If a man chooses to call every composition a poem,
which is rhyme, or measure, or both, I must leave his opinion
uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent to characterize
the writer's intention. If it were subjoined, that the whole is
likewise entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of
interesting reflections; I of course admit this as another fit
ingredient of a poem, and an additional merit. But if the definition
sought for be that of a legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the
parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their
proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known
influences of metrical arrangement. The philosophic critics of all
ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally
denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of
striking lines or distiches, each of which, absorbing the whole
attention of the reader to itself, becomes disjoined from its context,
and forms a separate whole, instead of a harmonizing part; and on the
other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader
collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component
parts. The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by
the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive
at the final solution; but by the pleasureable activity of mind
excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a
serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or
like the path of sound through the air;--at every step he pauses and
half recedes; and from the retrogressive movement collects the force
which again carries him onward. Praecipitandus est liber spiritus,
says Petronius most happily. The epithet, liber, here balances the
preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed
in fewer words.

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