Biographia Literaria

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astra phaeinaen amphi selaenaen
phainet aritretea--

(that is, the stars around, or near the full moon, shine pre-eminently
bright) conveys a just and happy image of a moonlight sky: while it is
difficult to determine whether, in the lines,

Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
And stars unnumber'd gild the glowing pole,

the sense or the diction be the more absurd. My answer was; that,
though I had derived peculiar advantages from my school discipline,
and though my general theory of poetry was the same then as now, I had
yet experienced the same sensations myself, and felt almost as if I
bad been newly couched, when, by Mr. Wordsworth's conversation, I had
been induced to re-examine with impartial strictness Gray's celebrated
Elegy. I had long before detected the defects in The Bard; but the
Elegy I had considered as proof against all fair attacks; and to this
day I cannot read either without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm.
At all events, whatever pleasure I may have lost by the clearer
perception of the faults in certain passages, has been more than
repaid to me by the additional delight with which I read the
remainder.

Another instance in confirmation of these remarks occurs to me in the
Faithful Shepherdess. Seward first traces Fletcher's lines;

More foul diseases than e'er yet the hot
Sun bred thro' his burnings, while the dog
Pursues the raging lion, throwing the fog
And deadly vapour from his angry breath,
Filling the lower world with plague and death,

to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar,

The rampant lion hunts he fast
With dogs of noisome breath;
Whose baleful barking brings, in haste,
Pine, plagues, and dreary death!

He then takes occasion to introduce Homer's simile of the appearance
of Achilles' mail to Priam compared with the Dog Star; literally thus--

"For this indeed is most splendid, but it was made an evil sign, and
brings many a consuming disease to wretched mortals." Nothing can be
more simple as a description, or more accurate as a simile; which,
(says Seward,) is thus finely translated by Mr. Pope

Terrific Glory! for his burning breath
Taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death!

Now here--(not to mention the tremendous bombast)--the Dog Star, so
called, is turned into a real dog, a very odd dog, a fire, fever,
plague, and death-breathing, red. air-tainting dog: and the whole
visual likeness is lost, while the likeness in the effects is rendered
absurd by the exaggeration. In Spenser and Fletcher the thought is
justifiable; for the images are at least consistent, and it was the
intention of the writers to mark the seasons by this allegory of
visualized puns.

[11] Especially in this age of personality, this age of literary and
political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with a
sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned
for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail;--when the most
vapid satires have become the objects of a keen public interest,
purely from the number of contemporary characters named in the patch-
work notes, (which possess, however, the comparative merit of being
more poetical than the text,) and because, to increase the stimulus,
the author has sagaciously left his own name for whispers and
conjectures.

[12] If it were worth while to mix together, as ingredients, half the
anecdotes which I either myself know to be true, or which I have
received from men incapable of intentional falsehood, concerning the
characters, qualifications, and motives of our anonymous critics,
whose decisions are oracles for our reading public; I might safely
borrow the words of the apocryphal Daniel; "Give me leave, O SOVEREIGN
PUBLIC, and I shall slay this dragon without sward or staff." For the
compound would be as the "pitch, and fat, and hair, which Daniel took,
and did seethe them together, and made lumps thereof; this he put in
the dragon's mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder; and Daniel
said, LO, THESE ARE THE GODS YE WORSHIP."

[13] This is one instance among many of deception, by the telling the
half of a fact, and omitting the other half, when it is from their
mutual counteraction and neutralization, that the whole truth arises,
as a tertium aliquid different from either. Thus in Dryden's famous
line

Great wit (meaning genius) to madness sure is near allied.

Now if the profound sensibility, which is doubtless one of the
components of genius, were alone considered, single and unbalanced, it
might be fairly described as exposing the individual to a greater
chance of mental derangement; but then a more than usual rapidity of
association, a more than usual power of passing from thought to
thought, and image to image, is a component equally essential; and to
the due modification of each by the other the genius itself consists;
so that it would be just as fair to describe the earth, as in imminent
danger of exorbitating, or of falling into the sun, according as the
assertor of the absurdity confined his attention either to the
projectile or to the attractive force exclusively.

[14] For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not
compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of
reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which
the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and
a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of
the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura
manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes,
reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one mans delirium, so
as to people the barrenness of a hundred other brains afflicted with
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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[23] I ought to have added, with the exception of a single sheet which
I accidentally met with at the printer's. Even from this scanty
specimen, I found it impossible to doubt the talent, or not to admire
the ingenuity, of the author. That his distinctions were for the
greater part unsatisfactory to my mind, proves nothing against their
accuracy; but it may possibly be serviceable to him, in case of a
second edition, if I take this opportunity of suggesting the query;
whether he may not have been occasionally misled, by having assumed,
as to me he appears to have done, the non-existence of any absolute
synonymes in our language? Now I cannot but think, that there are many
which remain for our posterity to distinguish and appropriate, and
which I regard as so much reversionary wealth in our mother tongue.
When two distinct meanings are confounded under one or more words,--
(and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is progressive
and of course imperfect)--erroneous consequences will be drawn, and
what is true in one sense of the word will be affirmed as true in
toto. Men of research, startled by the consequences, seek in the
things themselves--(whether in or out of the mind)--for a knowledge of
the fact, and having discovered the difference, remove the
equivocation either by the substitution of a new word, or by the
appropriation of one of the two or more words, which had before been
used promiscuously. When this distinction has been so naturalized and
of such general currency that the language does as it were think for
us--(like the sliding rule which is the mechanic's safe substitute for
arithmetical knowledge)--we then say, that it is evident to common
sense. Common sense, therefore, differs in different ages. What was
born and christened in the Schools passes by degrees into the world at
large, and becomes the property of the market and the tea-table. At
least I can discover no other meaning of the term, common sense, if it
is to convey any specific difference from sense and judgment in
genere, and where it is not used scholastically for the universal
reason. Thus in the reign of Charles II the philosophic world was
called to arms by the moral sophisms of Hobbes, and the ablest writers
exerted themselves in the detection of an error, which a school-boy
would now be able to confute by the mere recollection, that compulsion
and obligation conveyed two ideas perfectly disparate, and that what
appertained to the one, had been falsely transferred to the other by a
mere confusion of terms.

[24] I here use the word idea in Mr. Hume's sense on account of its
general currency amongst the English metaphysicians; though against my
own judgment, for I believe that the vague use of this word has been
the cause of much error and more confusion. The word, idea, in its
original sense as used by Pindar, Aristophanes, and in the Gospel of
St. Matthew, represented the visual abstraction of a distant object,
when we see the whole without distinguishing its parts. Plato adopted
it as a technical term, and as the antithesis to eidolon, or sensuous
image; the transient and perishable emblem, or mental word, of the
idea. Ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living,
seminal, formative, and exempt from time. In this sense the word Idea
became the property of the Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in
Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as according to
Plato, or as Plato says. Our English writers to the end of the reign
of Charles II or somewhat later, employed it either in the original
sense, or Platonically, or in a sense nearly correspondent to our
present use of the substantive, Ideal; always however opposing it,
more or less to image, whether of present or absent objects. The
reader will not be displeased with the following interesting
exemplification from Bishop Jeremy Taylor. "St. Lewis the King sent
Ivo Bishop of Chartres on an embassy, and he told, that he met a grave
and stately matron on the way with a censer of fire in one band, and a
vessel of water in the other; and observing her to have a melancholy,
religious, and phantastic deportment and look, he asked her what those
symbols meant, and what she meant to do with her fire and water; she
answered, My purpose is with the fire to burn paradise, and with my
water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God purely for
the love of God. But we rarely meet with such spirits which love
virtue so metaphysically as to abstract her from all sensible
compositions, and love the purity of the idea." Des Cartes having
introduced into his philosophy the fanciful hypothesis of material
ideas, or certain configurations of the brain, which were as so many
moulds to the influxes of the external world,--Locke adopted the term,
but extended its signification to whatever is the immediate object of
the mind's attention or consciousness. Hume, distinguishing those
representations which are accompanied with a sense of a present object
from those reproduced by the mind itself, designated the former by
impressions, and confined the word idea to the latter.

[25] I am aware, that this word occurs neither in Johnson's Dictionary
nor in any classical writer. But the word, to intend, which Newton and
others before him employ in this sense, is now so completely
appropriated to another meaning, that I could not use it without
ambiguity: while to paraphrase the sense, as by render intense, would
often break up the sentence and destroy that harmony of the position
of the words with the logical position of the thoughts, which is a
beauty in all composition, and more especially desirable in a close
philosophical investigation. I have therefore hazarded the word,
intensify: though, I confess, it sounds uncouth to my own ear.

[26] And Coxcombs vanquish Berkeley by a grin.

[27] Videlicet; Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Mode, each consisting
of three subdivisions. See Kritik der reinen Vernunft. See too the
judicious remarks on Locke and Hume.

[28] St. Luke x. 21.

[29] An American Indian with little variety of images, and a still
scantier stock of language, is obliged to turn his few words to many
purposes, by likenesses so clear and analogies so remote as to give
his language the semblance and character of lyric poetry interspersed
with grotesques. Something not unlike this was the case of such men as
Behmen and Fox with regard to the Bible. It was their sole armoury of
expressions, their only organ of thought.

[30] The following burlesque on the Fichtean Egoisnsus may, perhaps,
be amusing to the few who have studied the system, and to those who
are unacquainted with it, may convey as tolerable a likeness of
Fichte's idealism as can be expected from an avowed caricature.

The Categorical Imperative, or the annunciation of the new Teutonic
God, EGOENKAIPAN: a dithyrambic ode, by QUERKOPF VON KLUBSTICK,
Grammarian, and Subrector in Gymmasic.

Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus,
(Speak English, Friend!) the God Imperativus,
Here on this market-cross aloud I cry:
I, I, I! I itself I!
The form and the substance, the what and the why,
The when and the where, and the low and the high,
The inside and outside, the earth and the sky,
I, you and he, and he, you and I,
All souls and all bodies are I itself I!
All I itself I!
(Fools! a truce with this starting!)
All my I! all my I!
He's a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!
Thus cried the God with high imperial tone;
In robe of stiffest state, that scoffed at beauty,
A pronoun-verb imperative he shone--
Then substantive and plural-singular grown
He thus spake on! Behold in I alone
(For ethics boast a syntax of their own)
Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye,
In O! I, you, the vocative of duty!
I of the world's whole Lexicon the root!
Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight
The genitive and ablative to boot:
The accusative of wrong, the nominative of right,
And in all cases the case absolute!
Self-construed, I all other moods decline:
Imperative, from nothing we derive us;
Yet as a super-postulate of mine,
Unconstrued antecedence I assign
To X, Y, Z, the God Infinitivus!

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