English literary criticism Part 11

Think, when't was grown to most, 't was a poor inn, A province pack'd up in two yards of skin, And that usurp'd, or threaten'd with a rage Of sicknesses, or their true mother, age.

But think that death hath now enfranchis'd thee; Thou hast thy expansion now, and liberty; Think, that a rusty piece discharg'd is flown In pieces, and the bullet is his own, And freely flies; this to thy soul allow, Think thy sh.e.l.l broke, think thy soul hatched but now.

They were sometimes indelicate and disgusting. Cowley thus apostrophizes beauty:

--Thou tyrant, which leav'st no man free! Thou subtle thief, from whom nought safe can be! Thou murderer, which hast kill'd, and devil, which would'st d.a.m.n me.

Thus he addresses his mistress:

Thou who, in many a propriety, So truly art the sun to me.

Add one more likeness, which I'm sure you can, And let me and my sun beget a man.

Thus he represents the meditations of a lover:

Though in thy thoughts scarce any tracts have been So much as of original sin, Such charms thy beauty wears as might Desires in dying confest saints excite.

Thou with strange adultery Dost in each breast a brothel keep; Awake, all men do l.u.s.t for thee, And some enjoy thee when they sleep.

The true taste of tears:

Hither with crystal vials, lovers, come, And take my tears, which are Love's wine, And try your mistress' tears at home; For all are false, that taste not just like mine.

--_Donne_.

This is yet more indelicate:

As the sweet sweat of roses in a still As that which from chaf'd musk-cat's pores doth trill, As th' almighty balm of th' early East, Such are the sweet drops of my mistress' breast.

And on her neck her skin such l.u.s.tre sets, They seem no sweat-drops, but pearl coronets: Rank sweaty froth thy mistress' brow defiles.

--_Donne_.

Their expressions sometimes raise horror, when they intend perhaps to be pathetic:

As men in h.e.l.l are from diseases free, So from all other ills am I.

Free from their known formality: But all pains eminently lie in thee.

--_Cowley_.

They were not always strictly curious, whether the opinions from which they drew their ill.u.s.trations were true; it was enough that they were popular. Bacon remarks that some falsehoods are continued by tradition, because they supply commodious allusions.

It gave a piteous groan, and so it broke; In vain it something would have spoke: The love within too strong for't was, Like poison put into a Venice-gla.s.s.

--_Cowley_.

In forming descriptions, they looked out, not for images, but for conceits. Night has been a common subject, which poets have contended to adorn. Dryden's Night is well known; Donne's is as follows:

Thou seest me here at midnight, now all rest: Time's dead low-water; when all minds divest To-morrow's business, when the labourers have Such rest in bed, that their last church-yard grave, Subject to change, will scarce be a type of this; Now when the client, whose last hearing is To-morrow, sleeps; when the condemned man, Who when he opens his eyes, must shut them then Again by death, although sad watch he keep, Doth practise dying by a little sleep, Thou at this midnight seest me.

It must be, however, confessed of these writers that if they are upon common subjects often unnecessarily and unpoetically subtle, yet where scholastic speculation can be properly admitted, their copiousness and acuteness may justly be admired. What Cowley has written upon Hope shows an unequalled fertility of invention:

Hope, whose weak being ruin'd is, Alike if it succeed, and if it miss; Whom good or ill does equally confound, And both the horns of Fate's dilemma wound.

Vain shadow, which dost vanish quite, Both at full noon and perfect night!

The stars have not a possibility Of blessing thee; If things then from their end we happy call, 'T is hope is the most hopeless thing of all.

Hope, thou bold taster of delight, Who, whilst thou shouldst but taste, devour'st it quite!

Thou bring'st us an estate, yet leav'st us poor, By clogging it with legacies before!

The joys, which we entire should wed, Come deflower'd virgins to our bed; Good fortune without gain imported be, Such mighty customs paid to thee: For joy, like wine, kept close does better taste; If it take air before, its spirits waste.

To the following comparison of a man that travels and his wife that stays at home, with a pair of compa.s.ses, it may be doubted whether absurdity or ingenuity has the better claim:

Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin-compa.s.ses are two, Thy soul, the fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must Like th' other foot, obliquely run.

Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun._ --Donne._

In all these examples it is apparent that whatever is improper or vicious is produced by a voluntary deviation from nature in pursuit of something new and strange, and that the writers fail to give delight by their desire of exciting admiration.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

(1772-1834)

IV. ON POETIC GENIUS AND POETIC DICTION.

The following pa.s.sage forms Chapters xiv and xv of Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_, published in 1817 It has been selected as giving a less imperfect impression of his powers as a critic than any other piece that could have been chosen The truth is that, great in talk and supreme in poetry, Coleridge was lost directly he sat down to express himself in prose His style is apt to be c.u.mbrous, and his matter involved. We feel that the critic himself was greater than any criticism recorded either in his writings or his lectures The present extract may be defined as an attempt, and an attempt less inadequate than was common with Coleridge, to state his poetic creed, and to ill.u.s.trate it by reference to his own poetry and to that of Wordsworth and of Shakespeare. In what he says of Shakespeare he is at his best.

He forgets himself, and writes with a single eye to a theme which was thoroughly worthy of his powers. In the earlier part of the piece, and indeed indirectly throughout, he has in mind Wordsworth's famous Preface to the _Lyrical Ballads_, which is to be found in any complete edition of Wordsworth's poems, or in his poise writings, as edited by Dr.

Grosart.

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

In this idea originated the plan of the _Lyrical Ballads;_ [Footnote: Published in 1798. It opened with the _Ancient Mariner_ and closed with Wordsworth's lines on _Tintern Abbey._ Among other poems written in Wordsworth's simplest style were _The Idiot Boy, The Thorn,_ and _We are Seven._] in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which const.i.tutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling a.n.a.logous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

With this view I wrote the _Ancient Mariner,_ and was preparing, among other poems, the _Dark Ladie,_ and the _Christabel,_ in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt.

But Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impa.s.sioned, lofty, and sustained diction which is characteristic of his genius. In this form the _Lyrical Ballads_ were published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which, notwithstanding some pa.s.sages of apparently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms of style that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life.

From this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy. For from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy I explain the inveteracy, and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious pa.s.sions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the a.s.sailants.

Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things which they were for a long time described as being; had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after year increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were found, too, not in the lower cla.s.ses of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their admiration (inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervour. These facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round and round. With many parts of this preface, in the sense attributed to them, and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never concurred; but, on the contrary, objected to them as erroneous in principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface and to the author's own practice in the greater number of the poems themselves.

Mr. Wordsworth, in his recent collection, has, I find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume, to be read or not at the reader's choice. But he has not, as far as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic creed. At all events, considering it as the source of a controversy, in which I have been honoured more than I deserve by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient to declare, once for all, in what points I coincide with his opinions, and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render myself intelligible, I must previously, in as few words as possible, explain my ideas, first, of a poem; and secondly, of poetry itself, in kind and in essence.

The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware that distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy.

But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy.

A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference, therefore, must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object proposed. According to the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination.

It is possible that the object may be merely to facilitate the recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is distinguished from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly.

In this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months:

Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November, &c.