Biographia Literaria

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How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!
(Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6.)

to the imitation in the Bard;

Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows
While proudly riding o'er the azure realm
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm;
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
That hush'd in grim repose, expects it's evening prey.

(in which, by the bye, the words "realm" and "sway" are rhymes dearly
purchased)--I preferred the original on the ground, that in the
imitation it depended wholly on the compositor's putting, or not
putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many other passages of
the same poet, whether the words should be personifications, or mere
abstractions. I mention this, because, in referring various lines in
Gray to their original in Shakespeare and Milton, and in the clear
perception how completely all the propriety was lost in the transfer,
I was, at that early period, led to a conjecture, which, many years
afterwards was recalled to me from the same thought having been
started in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more fully,
by Mr. Wordsworth;--namely, that this style of poetry, which I have
characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic
language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the
custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to
these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been the
case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue was so
general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have forgotten his
native language; yet in the present day it is not to be supposed, that
a youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other reliance on
the force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer
from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his
thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps
more compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in
which to embody them.

I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man
from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided
I find him always arguing on one side of the question. The
controversies, occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a
favourite contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of
great advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and
critical opinions. In my defence of the lines running into each other,
instead of closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither
bookish, nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel,
such as I will remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up
in the rag-fair finery of,

------thy image on her wing
Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring,--

I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets,
from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder
English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was
my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets
of great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth,
Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my
former passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid
foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the
component faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative
dignity and importance. According to the faculty or source, from which
the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the
merit of such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and
meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to
comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style;--first, that not
the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the
greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of
essential poetry;--secondly, that whatever lines can be translated
into other words of the same language, without diminution of their
significance, either in sense or association, or in any worthy
feeling, are so far vicious in their diction. Be it however observed,
that I excluded from the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived
from mere novelty in the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment
at his powers in the author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing French
tragedies, I have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each
line, as hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own
cleverness. Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous
undercurrent of feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere
as a separate excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would
be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with
the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in
Milton or Shakespeare, (in their most important works at least,)
without making the poet say something else, or something worse, than
he does say. One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see
plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and
the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley,
we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most
pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious
thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty
elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to
the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to
the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous
imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image,
and half of abstract [5] meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the
head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.

The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of
composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to
understand and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets,
the Monody at Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar
to original genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to
its success in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries.
The poems of West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction;
but they were cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured;
while in the best of Warton's there is a stiffness, which too often
gives them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever
relation, therefore, of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads
may bear to the most popular poems of the present day; yet in a more
sustained and elevated style, of the then living poets, Cowper and
Bowles [6] were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined
natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the
heart with the head.

It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own
powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction,
which I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior
worth. Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better
judgment; and the compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth
years--(for example, the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which
now form the middle and conclusion of the poem entitled the Destiny of
Nations, and the tragedy of Remorse)--are not more below my present
ideal in respect of the general tissue of the style than those of the
latest date. Their faults were at least a remnant of the former
leaven, and among the many who have done me the honour of putting my
poems in the same class with those of my betters, the one or two, who
have pretended to bring examples of affected simplicity from my
volume, have been able to adduce but one instance, and that out of a
copy of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic, which I intended, and
had myself characterized, as sermoni propiora.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an
excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader will excuse me
for noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the
three sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to
beset a young writer. So long ago as the publication of the second
number of the Monthly Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah
Higginbottom, I contributed three sonnets, the first of which had for
its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful
egotism, and at the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double
defect of being at once trite and licentious;--the second was on low
creeping language and thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the
third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems,
on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and
imagery. The reader will find them in the note [7] below, and will I
trust regard them as reprinted for biographical purposes alone, and
not for their poetic merits. So general at that time, and so decided
was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style, that
a celebrated physician (now, alas! no more) speaking of me in other
respects with his usual kindness, to a gentleman, who was about to
meet me at a dinner party, could not however resist giving him a hint
not to mention 'The house that Jack built' in my presence, for "that I
was as sore as a boil about that sonnet;" he not knowing that I was
myself the author of it.

CHAPTER II

Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of facts--
Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice.

I have often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor
unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness,
that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against
the author, in favour of the critic; and the readiness with which they
apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of
his time

------genus irritabile vatum.

A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent
necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do,
we know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism.
Having a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of
this class seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which
they do not possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature,
like damp hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees
they become restless and irritable through the increased temperature
of collected multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism, (such
at least was its original import,) is derived from the swarming of
bees, namely, schwaermen, schwaermerey. The passion being in an
inverse proportion to the insight,--that the more vivid, as this the
less distinct--anger is the inevitable consequence. The absense of all
foundation within their own minds for that, which they yet believe
both true and indispensable to their safety and happiness, cannot but
produce an uneasy state of feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from
which nature has no means of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience
informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.

There's no philosopher but sees,
That rage and fear are one disease;
Tho' that may burn, and this may freeze,
They're both alike the ague.

But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of
combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more
easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects
of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by
things; and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most
important events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have
passed into thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition
with fanaticism on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and
a diseased slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the
mind may be so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the
realizing of them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who
possess more than mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and
applying the knowledge of others,)--yet still want something of the
creative and self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this reason
therefore, they are men of commanding genius. While the former rest
content between thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of
which their own living spirit supplies the substance, and their
imagination the ever-varying form; the latter must impress their
preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to
their own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness,
and individuality. These in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a
perfect poem in palace, or temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of
romance in canals that join sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which,
shouldering back the billows, imitate the power, and supply the
benevolence of nature to sheltered navies; or in aqueducts that,
arching the wide vale from mountain to mountain, give a Palmyra to the
desert. But alas! in times of tumult they are the men destined to come
forth as the shaping spirit of ruin, to destroy the wisdom of ages in
order to substitute the fancies of a day, and to change kings and
kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds [8]. The records of
biography seem to confirm this theory. The men of the greatest genius,
as far as we can judge from their own works or from the accounts of
their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper
in all that related to themselves. In the inward assurance of
permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned
with regard to immediate reputation. Through all the works of Chaucer
there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which makes it almost
impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author
himself. Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost
proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance of
his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his Sonnets,
which could scarcely have been known to Pope [9], when he asserted,
that our great bard--

------grew immortal in his own despite.
(Epist. to Augustus.)

Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration
of his works with that of his personal existence, Shakespeare adds:

Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Tho' I once gone to all the world must die;
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead:
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, e'en in the mouth of men.
SONNET LXXXI.

I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakespeare's readiness to
praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own equality
with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike
manifested in another Sonnet.

Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost,
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence!
But when your countenance fill'd up his line,
Then lack'd I matter, that enfeebled mine.
S. LXXXVI.

In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate,
and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said,
effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution
of Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter
days. These causes have diffused over all his compositions "a
melancholy grace," and have drawn forth occasional strains, the more
pathetic from their gentleness. But no where do we find the least
trace of irritability, and still less of quarrelsome or affected
contempt of his censurers.

The same calmness, and even greater self-possession, may be affirmed
of Milton, as far as his poems, and poetic character are concerned. He
reserved his anger for the enemies of religion, freedom, and his
country. My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception,
than arises from the contemplation of this great man in his latter
days;--poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted,--

Darkness before, and danger's voice behind,--

in an age in which he was as little understood by the party, for whom,
as by that against whom, he had contended; and among men before whom
he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still
listening to the music of his own thoughts, or if additionally
cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three
solitary individuals, he did nevertheless

------argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer'd
Right onward.

From others only do we derive our knowledge that Milton, in his latter
day, had his scorners and detractors; and even in his day of youth and
hope, that he had enemies would have been unknown to us, had they not
been likewise the enemies of his country.

I am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when there
exist many and excellent models, a high degree of talent, combined
with taste and judgment, and employed in works of imagination, will
acquire for a man the name of a great genius; though even that
analogon of genius, which, in certain states of society, may even
render his writings more popular than the absolute reality could have
done, would be sought for in vain in the mind and temper of the author
himself. Yet even in instances of this kind, a close examination will
often detect, that the irritability, which has been attributed to the
author's genius as its cause, did really originate in an ill
conformation of body, obtuse pain, or constitutional defect of
pleasurable sensation. What is charged to the author, belongs to the
man, who would probably have been still more impatient, but for the
humanizing influences of the very pursuit, which yet bears the blame
of his irritability.

How then are we to explain the easy credence generally given to this
charge, if the charge itself be not, as I have endeavoured to show,
supported by experience? This seems to me of no very difficult
solution. In whatever country literature is widely diffused, there
will be many who mistake an intense desire to possess the reputation
of poetic genius, for the actual powers, and original tendencies which
constitute it. But men, whose dearest wishes are fixed on objects
wholly out of their own power, become in all cases more or less
impatient and prone to anger. Besides, though it may be paradoxical to
assert, that a man can know one thing and believe the opposite, yet
assuredly a vain person may have so habitually indulged the wish, and
persevered in the attempt, to appear what he is not, as to become
himself one of his own proselytes. Still, as this counterfeit and
artificial persuasion must differ, even in the person's own feelings,
from a real sense of inward power, what can be more natural, than that
this difference should betray itself in suspicious and jealous
irritability? Even as the flowery sod, which covers a hollow, may be
often detected by its shaking and trembling.

But, alas! the multitude of books and the general diffusion of
literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects in the
world of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, though by no
means to justify, the contempt with which the best grounded complaints
of injured genius are rejected as frivolous, or entertained as matter
of merriment. In the days of Chaucer and Gower, our language might
(with due allowance for the imperfections of a simile) be compared to
a wilderness of vocal reeds, from which the favourites only of Pan or
Apollo could construct even the rude syrinx; and from this the
constructors alone could elicit strains of music. But now, partly by
the labours of successive poets, and in part by the more artificial
state of society and social intercourse, language, mechanized as it
were into a barrel-organ, supplies at once both instrument and tune.
Thus even the deaf may play, so as to delight the many. Sometimes (for
it is with similes, as it is with jests at a wine table, one is sure
to suggest another) I have attempted to illustrate the present state
of our language, in its relation to literature, by a press-room of
larger and smaller stereotype pieces, which, in the present Anglo-
Gallican fashion of unconnected, epigrammatic periods, it requires but
an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary indefinitely, and yet still
produce something, which, if not sense, will be so like it as to do as
well. Perhaps better: for it spares the reader the trouble of
thinking; prevents vacancy, while it indulges indolence; and secures
the memory from all danger of an intellectual plethora. Hence of all
trades, literature at present demands the least talent or information;
and, of all modes of literature, the manufacturing of poems. The
difference indeed between these and the works of genius is not less
than between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look
alike.

Now it is no less remarkable than true, with how little examination
works of polite literature are commonly perused, not only by the mass
of readers, but by men of first rate ability, till some accident or
chance [10] discussion have roused their attention, and put them on
their guard. And hence individuals below mediocrity not less in
natural power than in acquired knowledge; nay, bunglers who have
failed in the lowest mechanic crafts, and whose presumption is in due
proportion to their want of sense and sensibility; men, who being
first scribblers from idleness and ignorance, next become libellers
from envy and malevolence,--have been able to drive a successful trade
in the employment of the booksellers, nay, have raised themselves into
temporary name and reputation with the public at large, by that most
powerful of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and malignant
passions of mankind [11]. But as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and
all malignant propensities to require a quick change of objects, such
writers are sure, sooner or later, to awake from their dream of vanity
to disappointment and neglect with embittered and envenomed feelings.
Even during their short-lived success, sensible in spite of themselves
on what a shifting foundation it rests, they resent the mere refusal
of praise as a robbery, and at the justest censures kindle at once
into violent and undisciplined abuse; till the acute disease changing
into chronical, the more deadly as the less violent, they become the
fit instruments of literary detraction and moral slander. They are
then no longer to be questioned without exposing the complainant to
ridicule, because, forsooth, they are anonymous critics, and
authorized, in Andrew Marvell's phrase, as "synodical individuals" to
speak of themselves plurali majestatico! As if literature formed a
caste, like that of the Paras in Hindostan, who, however maltreated,
must not dare to deem themselves wronged! As if that, which in all
other cases adds a deeper dye to slander, the circumstance of its
being anonymous, here acted only to make the slanderer inviolable!
[12] Thus, in part, from the accidental tempers of individuals--(men
of undoubted talent, but not men of genius)--tempers rendered yet more
irritable by their desire to appear men of genius; but still more
effectively by the excesses of the mere counterfeits both of talent
and genius; the number too being so incomparably greater of those who
are thought to be, than of those who really are men of genius; and in
part from the natural, but not therefore the less partial and unjust
distinction, made by the public itself between literary and all other
property; I believe the prejudice to have arisen, which considers an
unusual irascibility concerning the reception of its products as
characteristic of genius.

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