Biographia Literaria

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Who lives, that's not
Depraved or depraves? Who dies, that bears
Not one spurn to the grave of their friends' gift?

Strange as the delusion may appear, yet it is most true, that three
years ago I did not know or believe that I had an enemy in the world:
and now even my strongest sensations of gratitude are mingled with
fear, and I reproach myself for being too often disposed to ask,--Have
I one friend?--During the many years which intervened between the
composition and the publication of the CHRISTABEL, it became almost as
well known among literary men as if it had been on common sale; the
same references were made to it, and the same liberties taken with it,
even to the very names of the imaginary persons in the poem. From
almost all of our most celebrated poets, and from some with whom I had
no personal acquaintance, I either received or heard of expressions of
admiration that, (I can truly say,) appeared to myself utterly
disproportionate to a work, that pretended to be nothing more than a
common Faery Tale. Many, who had allowed no merit to my other poems,
whether printed or manuscript, and who have frankly told me as much,
uniformly made an exception in favour of the CHRISTABEL and the poem
entitled LOVE. Year after year, and in societies of the most different
kinds, I had been entreated to recite it and the result was still the
same in all, and altogether different in this respect from the effect
produced by the occasional recitation of any other poems I had
composed.--This before the publication. And since then, with very few
exceptions, I have heard nothing but abuse, and this too in a spirit
of bitterness at least as disproportionate to the pretensions of the
poem, had it been the most pitiably below mediocrity, as the previous
eulogies, and far more inexplicable.--This may serve as a warning to
authors, that in their calculations on the probable reception of a
poem, they must subtract to a large amount from the panegyric, which
may have encouraged them to publish it, however unsuspicious and
however various the sources of this panegyric may have been. And,
first, allowances must be made for private enmity, of the very
existence of which they had perhaps entertained no suspicion--for
personal enmity behind the mask of anonymous criticism: secondly for
the necessity of a certain proportion of abuse and ridicule in a
Review, in order to make it saleable, in consequence of which, if they
have no friends behind the scenes, the chance must needs be against
them; but lastly and chiefly, for the excitement and temporary
sympathy of feeling, which the recitation of the poem by an admirer,
especially if he be at once a warm admirer and a man of acknowledged
celebrity, calls forth in the audience. For this is really a species
of animal magnetism, in which the enkindling reciter, by perpetual
comment of looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive
faculty to his auditors. They live for the time within the dilated
sphere of his intellectual being. It is equally possible, though not
equally common, that a reader left to himself should sink below the
poem, as that the poem left to itself should flag beneath the feelings
of the reader.--But, in my own instance, I had the additional
misfortune of having been gossiped about, as devoted to metaphysics,
and worse than all, to a system incomparably nearer to the visionary
flights of Plato, and even to the jargon of the Mystics, than to the
established tenets of Locke. Whatever therefore appeared with my name
was condemned beforehand, as predestined metaphysics. In a dramatic
poem, which had been submitted by me to a gentleman of great influence
in the theatrical world, occurred the following passage:--

"O we are querulous creatures! Little less
Than all things can suffice to make us happy:
And little more than nothing is enough
To make us wretched."

Aye, here now! (exclaimed the critic) here come Coleridge's
metaphysics! And the very same motive (that is, not that the lines
were unfit for the present state of our immense theatres; but that
they were metaphysics [87]) was assigned elsewhere for the rejection
of the two following passages. The first is spoken in answer to a
usurper, who had rested his plea on the circumstance, that he had been
chosen by the acclamations of the people.--

"What people? How convened? or, if convened,
Must not the magic power that charms together
Millions of men in council, needs have power
To win or wield them? Rather, O far rather
Shout forth thy titles to yon circling mountains,
And with a thousand-fold reverberation
Make the rocks flatter thee, and the volleying air,
Unbribed, shout back to thee, King Emerick!
By wholesome laws to embank the sovereign power,
To deepen by restraint, and by prevention
Of lawless will to amass and guide the flood
In its majestic channel, is man's task
And the true patriot's glory! In all else
Men safelier trust to Heaven, than to themselves
When least themselves: even in those whirling crowds
Where folly is contagious, and too oft
Even wise men leave their better sense at home,
To chide and wonder at them, when returned."

The second passage is in the mouth of an old and experienced courtier,
betrayed by the man in whom he had most trusted.

"And yet Sarolta, simple, inexperienced,
Could see him as he was, and often warned me.
Whence learned she this?--O she was innocent!
And to be innocent is Nature's wisdom!
The fledge-dove knows the prowlers of the air,
Feared soon as seen, and flutters back to shelter.
And the young steed recoils upon his haunches,
The never-yet-seen adder's hiss first heard.
O surer than suspicion's hundred eyes
Is that fine sense, which to the pure in heart,
By mere oppugnancy of their own goodness,
Reveals the approach of evil."

As therefore my character as a writer could not easily be more injured
by an overt act than it was already in consequence of the report, I
published a work, a large portion of which was professedly
metaphysical. A long delay occurred between its first annunciation and
its appearance; it was reviewed therefore by anticipation with a
malignity, so avowedly and exclusively personal, as is, I believe,
unprecedented even in the present contempt of all common humanity that
disgraces and endangers the liberty of the press. After its
appearance, the author of this lampoon undertook to review it in the
Edinburgh Review; and under the single condition, that he should have
written what he himself really thought, and have criticised the work
as he would have done had its author been indifferent to him, I should
have chosen that man myself, both from the vigour and the originality
of his mind, and from his particular acuteness in speculative
reasoning, before all others.--I remembered Catullus's lines.

Desine de quoquam quicquam bene velle mereri,
Aut aliquem fieri posse putare pium.
Omnia sunt ingrata: nihil fecisse benigne est:
Immo, etiam taedet, taedet obestque magis;
Ut mihi, quem nemo gravius nec acerbius urget,
Quam modo qui me unum atque unicum amicum habuit.

But I can truly say, that the grief with which I read this rhapsody of
predetermined insult, had the rhapsodist himself for its whole and
sole object.

* * * * * *

I refer to this review at present, in consequence of information
having been given me, that the inuendo of my "potential infidelity,"
grounded on one passage of my first Lay Sermon, has been received and
propagated with a degree of credence, of which I can safely acquit the
originator of the calumny. I give the sentences, as they stand in the
sermon, premising only that I was speaking exclusively of miracles
worked for the outward senses of men. "It was only to overthrow the
usurpation exercised in and through the senses, that the senses were
miraculously appealed to. REASON AND RELIGION ARE THEIR OWN EVIDENCE.
The natural sun is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual. Ere he
is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under veil, he calls
up the breeze to chase away the usurping vapours of the night-season,
and thus converts the air itself into the minister of its own
purification: not surely in proof or elucidation of the light from
heaven, but to prevent its interception."

"Wherever, therefore, similar circumstances co-exist with the same
moral causes, the principles revealed, and the examples recorded, in
the inspired writings, render miracles superfluous: and if we neglect
to apply truths in expectation of wonders, or under pretext of the
cessation of the latter, we tempt God, and merit the same reply which
our Lord gave to the Pharisees on a like occasion."

In the sermon and the notes both the historical truth and the
necessity of the miracles are strongly and frequently asserted. "The
testimony of books of history (that is, relatively to the signs and
wonders, with which Christ came) is one of the strong and stately
pillars of the church: but it is not the foundation!" Instead,
therefore, of defending myself, which I could easily effect by a
series of passages, expressing the same opinion, from the Fathers and
the most eminent Protestant Divines, from the Reformation to the
Revolution, I shall merely state what my belief is, concerning the
true evidences of Christianity. 1. Its consistency with right Reason,
I consider as the outer court of the temple--the common area, within
which it stands. 2. The miracles, with and through which the Religion
was first revealed and attested, I regard as the steps, the vestibule,
and the portal of the temple. 3. The sense, the inward feeling, in
the soul of each believer of its exceeding desirableness--the
experience, that he needs something, joined with the strong
foretokening, that the redemption and the graces propounded to us in
Christ are what he needs--this I hold to be the true foundation of the
spiritual edifice. With the strong a priori probability that flows in
from 1 and 3 on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man can
refuse or neglect to make the experiment without guilt. But, 4, it is
the experience derived from a practical conformity to the conditions
of the Gospel--it is the opening eye; the dawning light: the terrors
and the promises of spiritual growth; the blessedness of loving God as
God, the nascent sense of sin hated as sin, and of the incapability of
attaining to either without Christ; it is the sorrow that still rises
up from beneath and the consolation that meets it from above; the
bosom treacheries of the principal in the warfare and the exceeding
faithfulness and long-suffering of the uninteresting ally;--in a word,
it is the actual trial of the faith in Christ, with its accompaniments
and results, that must form the arched roof, and the faith itself is
the completing key-stone. In order to an efficient belief in
Christianity, a man must have been a Christian, and this is the
seeming argumentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual Truths, to
every subject not presentable under the forms of Time and Space, as
long as we attempt to master by the reflex acts of the Understanding
what we can only know by the act of becoming. Do the will of my
Father, and ye shall know whether I am of God. These four evidences I
believe to have been and still to be, for the world, for the whole
Church, all necessary, all equally necessary: but at present, and for
the majority of Christians born in Christian countries, I believe the
third and the fourth evidences to be the most operative, not as
superseding but as involving a glad undoubting faith in the two
former. Credidi, ideoque intellexi, appears to me the dictate equally
of Philosophy and Religion, even as I believe Redemption to be the
antecedent of Sanctification, and not its consequent. All spiritual
predicates may be construed indifferently as modes of Action or as
states of Being, Thus Holiness and Blessedness are the same idea, now
seen in relation to act and now to existence. The ready belief which
has been yielded to the slander of my "potential infidelity," I
attribute in part to the openness with which I have avowed my doubts,
whether the heavy interdict, under which the name of Benedict Spinoza
lies, is merited on the whole or to the whole extent. Be this as it
may, I wish, however, that I could find in the books of philosophy,
theoretical or moral, which are alone recommended to the present
students of theology in our established schools, a few passages as
thoroughly Pauline, as completely accordant with the doctrines of the
Established Church, as the following sentences in the concluding page
of Spinoza's Ethics. Deinde quo mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine
magis gaudet, eo plus intelligit, hoc est, eo majorem in affectus
habet potentiam, et eo minus ab affectibus, qui mali sunt, patitur;
atque adeo ex eo, quod mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine gaudet,
potestatem habet libidines coercendi; et quia humana potentia ad
coercendos affectus in solo intellectu consistit; ergo nemo
beatitudine gaudet, quia affectus coercuit, sed contra potestas
libidines coercendi ex ipsa beatitudine oritur.

With regard to the Unitarians, it has been shamelessly asserted, that
I have denied them to be Christians. God forbid! For how should I
know, what the piety of the heart may be, or what quantum of error in
the understanding may consist with a saving faith in the intentions
and actual dispositions of the whole moral being in any one
individual? Never will God reject a soul that sincerely loves him: be
his speculative opinions what they may: and whether in any given
instance certain opinions, be they unbelief, or misbelief, are
compatible with a sincere love of God, God can only know.--But this I
have said, and shall continue to say: that if the doctrines, the sum
of which I believe to constitute the truth in Christ, be Christianity,
then Unitarianism is not, and vice versa: and that, in speaking
theologically and impersonally, i.e. of Psilanthropism and
Theanthropism as schemes of belief, without reference to individuals,
who profess either the one or the other, it will be absurd to use a
different language as long as it is the dictate of common sense, that
two opposites cannot properly be called by the same name. I should
feel no offence if a Unitarian applied the same to me, any more than
if he were to say, that two and two being four, four and four must be
eight.

alla broton
ton men keneophrones auchai
ex agathon ebalon;
ton d' au katamemphthent' agan
ischun oikeion paresphalen kalon,
cheiros elkon opisso, thumos atolmos eon.

This has been my object, and this alone can be my defence--and O! that
with this my personal as well as my LITERARY LIFE might conclude!--the
unquenched desire I mean, not without the consciousness of having
earnestly endeavoured to kindle young minds, and to guard them against
the temptations of scorners, by showing that the scheme of
Christianity, as taught in the liturgy and homilies of our Church,
though not discoverable by human reason, is yet in accordance with it;
that link follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes
out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its
own horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as the
day softens away into the sweet twilight, and twilight, hushed and
breathless, steals into the darkness. It is night, sacred night! the
upraised eye views only the starry heaven which manifests itself
alone: and the outward beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in
the awful depth, though suns of other worlds, only to preserve the
soul steady and collected in its pure act of inward adoration to the
great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from eternity
to eternity, whose choral echo is the universe.

THEO, MONO, DOXA.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The authority of Milton and Shakespeare may be usefully pointed
out to young authors. In the Comus and other early poems of Milton
there is a superfluity of double epithets; while in the Paradise Lost
we find very few, in the Paradise Regained scarce any. The same remark
holds almost equally true of the Love's Labour Lost, Romeo and Juliet,
Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece, compared with the Lear, Macbeth,
Othello, and Hamlet of our great Dramatist. The rule for the admission
of double epithets seems to be this: either that they should be
already denizens of our language, such as blood-stained, terror-
stricken, self-applauding: or when a new epithet, or one found in
books only, is hazarded, that it, at least, be one word, not two words
made one by mere virtue of the printers hyphen. A language which, like
the English, is almost without cases, is indeed in its very genius
unfitted for compounds. If a writer, every time a compounded word
suggests itself to him, would seek for some other mode of expressing
the same sense, the chances are always greatly in favour of his
finding a better word. Ut tanquam scopulum sic fugias insolens verbum,
is the wise advice of Caesar to the Roman Orators, and the precept
applies with double force to the writers in our own language. But it
must not be forgotten, that the same Caesar wrote a Treatise for the
purpose of reforming the ordinary language by bringing it to a greater
accordance with the principles of logic or universal grammar.

[2] See the criticisms on the Ancient Mariner, in the Monthly and
Critical Reviews of the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads.

[3] This is worthy of ranking as a maxim, (regula maxima,) of
criticism. Whatever is translatable in other and simpler words of the
same language, without loss of sense or dignity, is bad. N.B.--By
dignity I mean the absence of ludicrous and debasing associations.

[4] The Christ's Hospital phrase, not for holidays altogether, but for
those on which the boys are permitted to go beyond the precincts of
the school.

[5] I remember a ludicrous instance in the poem of a young tradesman:

"No more will I endure love's pleasing pain,
Or round my heart's leg tie his galling chain."

[6] Cowper's Task was published some time before the Sonnets of Mr.
Bowles; but I was not familiar with it till many years afterwards. The
vein of satire which runs through that excellent poem, together with
the sombre hue of its religious opinions, would probably, at that
time, have prevented its laying any strong hold on my affections. The
love of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion; and a
gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature. The one would
carry his fellow-men along with him into nature; the other flies to
nature from his fellow-men. In chastity of diction however, and the
harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him;
yet still I feel the latter to have been the born poet.

[7] SONNET I

Pensive at eve, on the hard world I mused,
And m poor heart was sad; so at the Moon
I gazed and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon
Eve saddens into night! mine eyes perused
With tearful vacancy the dampy grass
That wept and glitter'd in the paly ray
And I did pause me on my lonely way
And mused me on the wretched ones that pass
O'er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas!
Most of myself I thought! when it befel,
That the soothe spirit of the breezy wood
Breath'd in mine ear: "All this is very well,
But much of one thing, is for no thing good."
Oh my poor heart's inexplicable swell!

SONNET II

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.

[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.

[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.

[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

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