Biographia Literaria

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Here then shall I conclude? No! The characters of the deceased, like
the encomia on tombstones, as they are described with religious
tenderness, so are they read, with allowing sympathy indeed, but yet
with rational deduction. There are men, who deserve a higher record;
men with whose characters it is the interest of their contemporaries,
no less than that of posterity, to be made acquainted; while it is yet
possible for impartial censure, and even for quick-sighted envy, to
cross-examine the tale without offence to the courtesies of humanity;
and while the eulogist, detected in exaggeration or falsehood, must
pay the full penalty of his baseness in the contempt which brands the
convicted flatterer. Publicly has Mr. Southey been reviled by men,
who, as I would fain hope for the honour of human nature, hurled fire-
brands against a figure of their own imagination; publicly have his
talents been depreciated, his principles denounced; as publicly do I
therefore, who have known him intimately, deem it my duty to leave
recorded, that it is Southey's almost unexampled felicity, to possess
the best gifts of talent and genius free from all their characteristic
defects. To those who remember the state of our public schools and
universities some twenty years past, it will appear no ordinary praise
in any man to have passed from innocence into virtue, not only free
from all vicious habit, but unstained by one act of intemperance, or
the degradations akin to intemperance. That scheme of head, heart, and
habitual demeanour, which in his early manhood, and first
controversial writings, Milton, claiming the privilege of self-
defence, asserts of himself, and challenges his calumniators to
disprove; this will his school-mates, his fellow-collegians, and his
maturer friends, with a confidence proportioned to the intimacy of
their knowledge, bear witness to, as again realized in the life of
Robert Southey. But still more striking to those, who by biography or
by their own experience are familiar with the general habits of
genius, will appear the poet's matchless industry and perseverance in
his pursuits; the worthiness and dignity of those pursuits; his
generous submission to tasks of transitory interest, or such as his
genius alone could make otherwise; and that having thus more than
satisfied the claims of affection or prudence, he should yet have made
for himself time and power, to achieve more, and in more various
departments, than almost any other writer has done, though employed
wholly on subjects of his own choice and ambition. But as Southey
possesses, and is not possessed by, his genius, even so is he master
even of his virtues. The regular and methodical tenor of his daily
labours, which would be deemed rare in the most mechanical pursuits,
and might be envied by the mere man of business, loses all semblance
of formality in the dignified simplicity of his manners, in the spring
and healthful cheerfulness of his spirits. Always employed, his
friends find him always at leisure. No less punctual in trifles, than
steadfast in the performance of highest duties, he inflicts none of
those small pains and discomforts which irregular men scatter about
them, and which in the aggregate so often become formidable obstacles
both to happiness and utility; while on the contrary he bestows all
the pleasures, and inspires all that ease of mind on those around him
or connected with him, which perfect consistency, and (if such a word
might be framed) absolute reliability, equally in small as in great
concerns, cannot but inspire and bestow; when this too is softened
without being weakened by kindness and gentleness. I know few men who
so well deserve the character which an antient attributes to Marcus
Cato, namely, that he was likest virtue, in as much as he seemed to
act aright, not in obedience to any law or outward motive, but by the
necessity of a happy nature, which could not act otherwise. As son,
brother, husband, father, master, friend, he moves with firm yet light
steps, alike unostentatious, and alike exemplary. As a writer, he has
uniformly made his talents subservient to the best interests of
humanity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever
been the cause of pure religion and of liberty, of national
independence and of national illumination. When future critics shall
weigh out his guerdon of praise and censure, it will be Southey the
poet only, that will supply them with the scanty materials for the
latter. They will likewise not fail to record, that as no man was ever
a more constant friend, never had poet more friends and honourers
among the good of all parties; and that quacks in education, quacks in
politics, and quacks in criticism were his only enemies. [17]

CHAPTER IV

The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface--Mr. Wordsworth's earlier poems--
On fancy and imagination--The investigation of the distinction
important to the Fine Arts.

I have wandered far from the object in view, but as I fancied to
myself readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted me from
the main road; so I dare calculate on not a few, who will warmly
sympathize with them. At present it will be sufficient for my purpose,
if I have proved, that Mr. Southey's writings no more than my own
furnished the original occasion to this fiction of a new school of
poetry, and to the clamours against its supposed founders and
proselytes.

As little do I believe that Mr. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads were in
themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes so
entitled. A careful and repeated examination of these confirms me in
the belief, that the omission of less than a hundred lines would have
precluded nine-tenths of the criticism on this work. I hazard this
declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader has taken it
up, as he would have done any other collection of poems purporting to
derive their subjects or interests from the incidents of domestic or
ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of meditation which
the poet utters in his own person and character; with the proviso,
that these poems were perused without knowledge of, or reference to,
the author's peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his
attention previously directed to those peculiarities. In that case, as
actually happened with Mr. Southey's earlier works, the lines and
passages which might have offended the general taste, would have been
considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to
perversity of judgment. The men of business who had passed their lives
chiefly in cities, and who might therefore be expected to derive the
highest pleasure from acute notices of men and manners conveyed in
easy, yet correct and pointed language; and all those who, reading but
little poetry, are most stimulated with that species of it, which
seems most distant from prose, would probably have passed by the
volumes altogether. Others more catholic in their taste, and yet
habituated to be most pleased when most excited, would have contented
themselves with deciding, that the author had been successful in
proportion to the elevation of his style and subject. Not a few,
perhaps, might, by their admiration of the Lines written near Tintern
Abbey, on revisiting the Wye, those Left upon a Yew Tree Seat, The Old
Cumberland Beggar, and Ruth, have been gradually led to peruse with
kindred feeling The Brothers, the Hart-leap Well, and whatever other
poems in that collection may be described as holding a middle place
between those written in the highest and those in the humblest style;
as for instance between the Tintern Abbey, and The Thorn, or Simon
Lee. Should their taste submit to no further change, and still remain
unreconciled to the colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them,
that are, more or less, scattered through the class last mentioned;
yet even from the small number of the latter, they would have deemed
them but an inconsiderable subtraction from the merit of the whole
work; or, what is sometimes not unpleasing in the publication of a new
writer, as serving to ascertain the natural tendency, and consequently
the proper direction of the author's genius.

In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the
Lyrical Ballads, I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of
the unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth's writings have been
since doomed to encounter. The humbler passages in the poems
themselves were dwelt on and cited to justify the rejection of the
theory. What in and for themselves would have been either forgotten or
forgiven as imperfections, or at least comparative failures, provoked
direct hostility when announced as intentional, as the result of
choice after full deliberation. Thus the poems, admitted by all as
excellent, joined with those which had pleased the far greater number,
though they formed two-thirds of the whole work, instead of being
deemed (as in all right they should have been, even if we take for
granted that the reader judged aright) an atonement for the few
exceptions, gave wind and fuel to the animosity against both the poems
and the poet. In all perplexity there is a portion of fear, which
predisposes the mind to anger. Not able to deny that the author
possessed both genius and a powerful intellect, they felt very
positive,--but yet were not quite certain that he might not be in the
right, and they themselves in the wrong; an unquiet state of mind,
which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the occasion of it, and by
wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had written a long and
argumentative essay to persuade them, that

Fair is foul, and foul is fair;

in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without
judgment, and were now about to censure without reason. [18]

That this conjecture is not wide from the mark, I am induced to
believe from the noticeable fact, which I can state on my own
knowledge, that the same general censure has been grounded by almost
every different person on some different poem. Among those, whose
candour and judgment I estimate highly, I distinctly remember six who
expressed their objections to the Lyrical Ballads almost in the same
words, and altogether to the same purport, at the same time admitting,
that several of the poems had given them great pleasure; and, strange
as it might seem, the composition which one cited as execrable,
another quoted as his favourite. I am indeed convinced in my own mind,
that could the same experiment have been tried with these volumes, as
was made in the well known story of the picture, the result would have
been the same; the parts which had been covered by black spots on the
one day, would be found equally albo lapide notatae on the succeeding.

However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the
attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much aversion,
as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of
passing them over in silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a
bookseller's catalogue; especially, as no one pretended to have found
in them any immorality or indelicacy; and the poems, therefore, at the
worst, could only be regarded as so many light or inferior coins in a
rouleau of gold, not as so much alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend
whose talents I hold in the highest respect, but whose judgment and
strong sound sense I have had almost continued occasion to revere,
making the usual complaints to me concerning both the style and
subjects of Mr. Wordsworth's minor poems; I admitted that there were
some few of the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find
a sufficient cause for their having been recorded in metre. I
mentioned Alice Fell as an instance; "Nay," replied my friend with
more than usual quickness of manner, "I cannot agree with you there!--
that, I own, does seem to me a remarkably pleasing poem." In the
Lyrical Ballads, (for my experience does not enable me to extend the
remark equally unqualified to the two subsequent volumes,) I have
heard at different times, and from different individuals, every single
poem extolled and reprobated, with the exception of those of loftier
kind, which as was before observed, seem to have won universal praise.
This fact of itself would have made me diffident in my censures, had
not a still stronger ground been furnished by the strange contrast of
the heat and long continuance of the opposition, with the nature of
the faults stated as justifying it. The seductive faults, the dulcia
vitia of Cowley, Marine, or Darwin might reasonably be thought capable
of corrupting the public judgment for half a century, and require a
twenty years war, campaign after campaign, in order to dethrone the
usurper and re-establish the legitimate taste. But that a downright
simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity, prosaic words in
feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and a preference of
mean, degrading, or at best trivial associations and characters,
should succeed in forming a school of imitators, a company of almost
religious admirers, and this too among young men of ardent minds,
liberal education, and not

------with academic laurels unbestowed;

and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is
characterized as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have
well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of
review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph; this is indeed matter
of wonder. Of yet greater is it, that the contest should still
continue as undecided as [19] that between Bacchus and the frogs in
Aristophanes; when the former descended to the realms of the departed
to bring back the spirit of old and genuine poesy;--

CH. Brekekekex, koax, koax.
D. All' exoloisth' auto koax.
Ouden gar est' all', hae koax.
Oimozet' ou gar moi melei.
CH. Alla maen kekraxomestha
g', oposon hae pharynx an haemon
chandanae di' haemeras,
brekekekex, koax, koax!
D. Touto gar ou nikaesete.
CH. Oude men haemas su pantos.
D. Oude maen humeis ge dae m'
oudepote. Kekraxomai gar,
kan me deae, di' haemeras,
eos an humon epikrataeso tou koax!
CH. Brekekekex, KO'AX, KOAX!

During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became
acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication entitled
Descriptive Sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an
original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently
announced. In the form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in
the structure of the particular lines and periods, there is a
harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images
all a-glow, which might recall those products of the vegetable world,
where gorgeous blossoms rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell,
within which the rich fruit is elaborating. The language is not only
peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own
impatient strength; while the novelty and struggling crowd of images,
acting in conjunction with the difficulties of the style, demands
always a greater closeness of attention, than poetry,--at all events,
than descriptive poetry--has a right to claim. It not seldom therefore
justified the complaint of obscurity. In the following extract I have
sometimes fancied, that I saw an emblem of the poem itself, and of the
author's genius as it was then displayed.--

'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour,
All day the floods a deepening murmur pour;
The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight
Dark is the region as with coming night;
Yet what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;
Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;
Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun
The west, that burns like one dilated sun,
Where in a mighty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.

The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as
many changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly [20]. And it is
remarkable how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults
and errors of its earliest products; faults which, in its earliest
compositions, are the more obtrusive and confluent, because as
heterogeneous elements, which had only a temporary use, they
constitute the very ferment, by which themselves are carried off. Or
we may compare them to some diseases, which must work on the humours,
and be thrown out on the surface, in order to secure the patient from
their future recurrence. I was in my twenty-fourth year, when I had
the happiness of knowing Mr. Wordsworth personally, and while memory
lasts, I shall hardly forget the sudden effect produced on my mind, by
his recitation of a manuscript poem, which still remains unpublished,
but of which the stanza and tone of style were the same as those of
The Female Vagrant, as originally printed in the first volume of the
Lyrical Ballads. There was here no mark of strained thought, or forced
diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery; and, as the poet hath
himself well described in his Lines on revisiting the Wye, manly
reflection and human associations had given both variety, and an
additional interest to natural objects, which, in the passion and
appetite of the first love, they had seemed to him neither to need nor
permit. The occasional obscurities, which had risen from an imperfect
control over the resources of his native language, had almost wholly
disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and
illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so
distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will,
more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless the
attention has been specially directed to their worthlessness and
incongruity [21]. I did not perceive anything particular in the mere
style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed such
difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the
Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's
mind Spenser's own style, would doubtless have authorized, in my then
opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life, than
could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet.
It was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to common
defects, or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an
impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my
judgment. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the
fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in
modifying, the objects observed; and above all the original gift of
spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height
of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which,
for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up
the sparkle and the dew drops.

This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or
less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I
no sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led
me first to suspect,--(and a more intimate analysis of the human
faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my
conjecture into full conviction,)--that Fancy and Imagination were two
distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according
to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at
furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. It is
not, I own, easy to conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek
phantasia than the Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in
all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain
collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to
desynonymize [22] those words originally of the same meaning, which
the conflux of dialects supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as
the Greek and German: and which the same cause, joined with accidents
of translation from original works of different countries, occasion in
mixed languages like our own. The first and most important point to be
proved is, that two conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under
one and the same word, and--this done--to appropriate that word
exclusively to the one meaning, and the synonyme, should there be one,
to the other. But if,--(as will be often the case in the arts and
sciences,)--no synonyme exists, we must either invent or borrow a
word. In the present instance the appropriation has already begun, and
been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a highly
imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should
succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties
generally different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To
the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the
term 'imagination;' while the other would be contra-distinguished as
'fancy.' Now were it once fully ascertained, that this division is no
less grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania, or Otway's

Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber,

from Shakespeare's

What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?

or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements; the theory of the
fine arts, and of poetry in particular, could not but derive some
additional and important light. It would in its immediate effects
furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic; and
ultimately to the poet himself. In energetic minds, truth soon changes
by domestication into power; and from directing in the discrimination
and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production.
To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of
originality.

It has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology have long
been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it,
are so commonly found together, that they pass almost for the same. I
trust therefore, that there will be more good humour than contempt, in
the smile with which the reader chastises my self-complacency, if I
confess myself uncertain, whether the satisfaction from the perception
of a truth new to myself may not have been rendered more poignant by
the conceit, that it would be equally so to the public. There was a
time, certainly, in which I took some little credit to myself, in the
belief that I had been the first of my countrymen, who had pointed out
the diverse meaning of which the two terms were capable, and analyzed
the faculties to which they should be appropriated. Mr. W. Taylor's
recent volume of synonymes I have not yet seen [23]; but his
specification of the terms in question has been clearly shown to be
both insufficient and erroneous by Mr. Wordsworth in the Preface added
to the late collection of his Poems. The explanation which Mr.
Wordsworth has himself given, will be found to differ from mine,
chiefly, perhaps as our objects are different. It could scarcely
indeed happen otherwise, from the advantage I have enjoyed of frequent
conversation with him on a subject to which a poem of his own first
directed my attention, and my conclusions concerning which he had made
more lucid to myself by many happy instances drawn from the operation
of natural objects on the mind. But it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose to
consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are
manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude their
diversity in kind; while it is my object to investigate the seminal
principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has
drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I
wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift
themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our
common consciousness.

Yet even in this attempt I am aware that I shall be obliged to draw
more largely on the reader's attention, than so immethodical a
miscellany as this can authorize; when in such a work (the
Ecclesiasical Polity) of such a mind as Hooker's, the judicious
author, though no less admirable for the perspicuity than for the port
and dignity of his language,--and though he wrote for men of learning
in a learned age,--saw nevertheless occasion to anticipate and guard
against "complaints of obscurity," as often as he was to trace his
subject "to the highest well-spring and fountain." Which, (continues
he) "because men are not accustomed to, the pains we take are more
needful a great deal, than acceptable; and the matters we handle, seem
by reason of newness (till the mind grow better acquainted with them)
dark and intricate." I would gladly therefore spare both myself and
others this labour, if I knew how without it to present an
intelligible statement of my poetic creed,--not as my opinions, which
weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established premises
conveyed in such a form, as is calculated either to effect a
fundamental conviction, or to receive a fundamental confutation. If I
may dare once more adopt the words of Hooker, "they, unto whom we
shall seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, because it is in
their own hands to spare that labour, which they are not willing to
endure." Those at least, let me be permitted to add, who have taken so
much pains to render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and have
supported the charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other
authority than their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as
to me not to refuse their attention to my own statement of the theory
which I do acknowledge; or shrink from the trouble of examining the
grounds on which I rest it, or the arguments which I offer in its
justification.

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