Anima Poetae Part 6

[Sidenote: October, 1803]

A smile, as foreign or alien to, as detached from the gloom of the countenance, as I have seen a small spot of light travel slowly and sadly along the mountain's breast, when all beside has been dark with the storm.

[Sidenote: A PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM.]

Never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former--we know it _a priori_--but every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them, tells you something that you could not with certainty, or even with probability, have antic.i.p.ated.

[Sidenote: WORDSWORTH AND THE PRELUDE]

I am sincerely glad that he has bidden farewell to all small poems, and is devoting himself to his great work, grandly imprisoning, while it deifies, his attention and feelings within the sacred circle and temple-walls of great objects and elevated conceptions. In those little poems, his own corrections coming of necessity so often--at the end of every fourteen or twenty lines, or whatever the poem might chance to be--wore him out; difference of opinion with his best friends irritated him, and he wrote, at times, too much with a sectarian spirit, in a sort of bravado. But now he is at the helm of a n.o.ble bark; now he sails right onward; it is all open ocean and a steady breeze, and he drives before it, unfretted by short tacks, reefing and unreefing the sails, hauling and disentangling the ropes. His only disease is the having been out of his element; his return to it is food to famine; it is both the specific remedy and the condition of health.

[Sidenote: THE INCOMMUNICABLE]

Without drawing, I feel myself but half invested with language. Music, too, is wanting to me. But yet, though one should unite poetry, draftsman's skill, and music, the greater and, perhaps, n.o.bler, certainly _all_ the subtler, parts of one's nature must be _solitary_.

Man exists herein to himself and to G.o.d alone--yea! in how much only to G.o.d! how much lies _below_ his own consciousness!

The tree or sea-weed like appearance of the side of the mountain, all white with snow, made by little bits of snow loosened. Introduce this and the stones leaping rabbit-like down on my sopha of sods. [_Vide_ p.

60.]

The sunny mist, the luminous gloom of Plato.

[Sidenote: TIME AN ELEMENT OF GRIEF]

Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens. It either stupefies me, and I, perhaps, look at a merry-make and dance-the-hay of flies, or listen entirely to the loud click of the great clock, or I am simply indifferent, not without some sense of philosophical self-complacency.

For a thing at the moment is but a thing of the moment; it must be taken up into the mind, diffuse itself through the whole mult.i.tude of shapes and thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged, between [not one of]

which and it some new thought is not engendered. Now this is a work of time, but the body feels it quicker with me.

[Sidenote: THE POET AND THE SPIDER]

On St. Herbert's Island, I saw a large spider with most beautiful legs, floating in the air on his back by a single thread which he was spinning out, and still, as he spun, heaving on the air, as if the air beneath was a pavement elastic to his strokes. From the top of a very high tree he had spun his line; at length reached the bottom, tied his thread round a piece of gra.s.s, and reascended to spin another--a net to hang, as a fisherman's sea-net hangs, in the sun and wind to dry.

[Sidenote: THE COMMUNICABLE]

One excellent use of communication of sorrow to a friend is this, that in relating what ails us, we ourselves first know exactly what the real grief is, and see it for itself in its own form and limits. Unspoken grief is a misty medley of which the real affliction only plays the first fiddle, blows the horn to a scattered mob of obscure feelings.

Perhaps, at certain moments, a single, almost insignificant sorrow may, by a.s.sociation, bring together all the little relicts of pain and discomfort, bodily and mental, that we have endured even from infancy.

[Sidenote: NOSCITUR A SOCIIS]

One may best judge of men by their pleasures. Who has not known men who have pa.s.sed the day in honourable toil with honour and ability, and at night sought the vilest pleasure in the vilest society? This is the man's self. The other is a trick learnt by heart (for we may even learn the power of extemporaneous elocution and instant action as an automatic trick); but a man's pleasures--children, books, friends, nature, the Muse--O these deceive not.

[Sidenote: TEMPERAMENT AND MORALS October, 1803]

Even among good and sensible men, how common it is that one attaches himself scrupulously to the rigid performance of some minor virtue or makes a point of carrying some virtue into all its minutiae, and is just as lax in a similar point, _professedly_ lax. What this is depends, seemingly, on temperament. _A_ makes no conscience of a little flattery in cases where he is certain that he is not acting from base or interested motives--in short, whenever his only motives are the amus.e.m.e.nt, the momentary pleasure given, &c., a medley of good nature, diseased p.r.o.neness to sympathy, and a habit of _being wiser_ behind the curtain than his own actions before it. _B_ would die rather than deviate from truth and sincerity in this instance, but permits himself to utter, nay, publish the harshest censure of men as moralists and as literati, and that, too, on his simple _ipse dixit_, without a.s.signing any reason, and often without having any, save that he himself _believes_ it--believes it because he _dislikes_ the man, and dislikes him probably for his looks, or, at best, for some one fault without any collation of the sum total of the man's qualities. Yet _A_ and _B_ are both good men, as the world goes. They do not act from conscious self-love, and are amenable to principles in their own minds.

[Sidenote: BRIGHT OCTOBER October 21, 1803, Friday morning]

A drizzling rain. Heavy ma.s.ses of shapeless vapour upon the mountains (O the perpetual forms of Borrowdale!) yet it is no unbroken tale of dull sadness. Slanting pillars travel across the lake at long intervals, the vaporous ma.s.s whitens in large stains of light--on the lakeward ridge of that huge arm-chair of Lodore fell a gleam of softest light, that brought out the rich hues of the late autumn. The woody Castle Crag between me and Lodore is a rich flower-garden of colours--the brightest yellows with the deepest crimsons and the infinite shades of brown and green, the _infinite_ diversity of which blends the whole, so that the brighter colours seem to be colours upon a ground, not coloured things.

Little woolpacks of white bright vapour rest on different summits and declivities. The vale is narrowed by the mist and cloud, yet through the wall of mist you can see into a bower of sunny light, in Borrowdale; the birds are singing in the tender rain, as if it were the rain of April, and the decaying foliage were flowers and blossoms. The pillar of smoke from the chimney rises up in the mist, and is just distinguishable from it, and the mountain forms in the gorge of Borrowdale consubstantiate with the mist and cloud, even as the pillar'd smoke--a shade deeper and a determinate form.

[Sidenote: TELEOLOGY AND NATURE WORs.h.i.+P A PROTEST October 26, 1803]

A most unpleasant dispute with Wordsworth and Hazlitt. I spoke, I fear, too contemptuously; but they spoke so irreverently, so malignantly of the Divine Wisdom that it overset me. Hazlitt, how easily raised to rage and hatred self-projected! but who shall find the force that can drag him up out of the depth into one expression of kindness, into the showing of one gleam of the light of love on his countenance. Peace be with him! But _thou_, dearest Wordsworth--and what if Ray, Durham, Paley have carried the observation of the apt.i.tude of things too far, too habitually into pedantry? O how many worse pedantries! how few so harmless, with so much efficient good! Dear William, pardon pedantry in others, and avoid it in yourself, instead of scoffing and reviling at pedantry in good men and a good cause and _becoming_ a pedant yourself in a bad cause--even by that very act becoming one. But, surely, always to look at the superficies of objects for the purpose of taking delight in their beauty, and sympathy with their real or imagined life, is as deleterious to the health and manhood of intellect as, always to be peering and unravelling contrivance may be to the simplicity of the affection and the grandeur and unity of the imagination. O dearest William! would Ray or Durham have spoken of G.o.d as you spoke of Nature?

[Sidenote: W. H.]

Hazlitt to the feelings of anger and hatred, phosphorus--it is but to open the cork and it flames--but to love and serviceable friends.h.i.+p, let them, like Nebuchadnezzar, heat the furnace with a sevenfold heat, this triune, Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego, will s.h.i.+ver in the midst of it.

[Sidenote: THE ORIGIN OF EVIL Thursday October 27, 1803]

I sate for my picture [to Hazlitt]--heard from Southey the "Inst.i.tution of the Jesuits," during which some interesting idea occurred to me, and has escaped. I made out, however, the whole business of the origin of evil satisfactorily to my own mind, and forced H. to confess that the metaphysical argument reduced itself to this, Why did not infinite Power _always exclusively_ produce such beings as in each moment of their duration were infinite? why, in short, did not the Almighty create an absolutely infinite number of Almighties? The hollowness and impiety of the argument will be felt by considering that, suppose a universal happiness, a perfection of the moral as well as natural world, still the whole objection applies just as forcibly as at this moment. The malignity of the Deity (I shudder even at the a.s.sumption of this affrightful and Satanic language) is manifested in the creation of archangels and cherubs and the whole company of pure Intelligences burning in their unquenchable felicity, equally as in the creation of Neros and Tiberiuses, of stone and leprosy. Suppose yourself perfectly happy, yet, according to this argument, you _ought_ to charge G.o.d with malignity for having created you--your own life and all its comforts are in the indictment against the Creator--for surely even a child would be ashamed to answer, "No! I should still exist, only in that case, instead of being a man, I should be an infinite being." As if the word _I_ here had even the remotest semblance of a meaning. Infinitely more absurd than if I should write the fraction 1/1000 on a slate, then rub it out with my sponge, and write in the same place the integral number 555,666,879, and then observe that the former figure was _greatly_ improved by the measure, that _it_ was grown a far finer figure!--conceiting a _change_ where there had been positive subst.i.tution. Thus, then, it appears that the sole justification of those who, offended by the vice and misery of the created world, as far as we know it, impeach the power and goodness of the Almighty, making the proper cause of such vice and misery to have been a defect either of power or goodness--it appears, I say, that their sole justification rests on an argument which has nothing to do with vice and misery, as vice and misery--on an argument which would hold equally good in heaven as in h.e.l.l--on an argument which it might be demonstrated no human being in a state of happiness could ever have conceived--an argument which a millennium would annihilate, and which yet would hold equally good then as now! But even in point of metaphysic the whole rests at last on the conceivable. Now, I appeal to every man's internal consciousness, if he will but sincerely and in brotherly simplicity silence the bustle of argument in his mind and the ungenial feelings that mingle with and fill up the mob, and then ask his own intellect whether, supposing he could conceive the creation of positively infinite and co-equal beings, and whether, supposing this not only possible but real, this has exhausted his notion of _creatability_? whether the intellect, by an unborn and original law of its essence, does not demand of infinite power more than merely infinity of number, infinity of sorts and orders? Let him have created this infinity of infinites, still there is s.p.a.ce in the imagination for the creation of finites; but instead of these, let him again create infinites; yet still the same s.p.a.ce is left, it is no way filled up. I feel, too, that the whole rests on a miserable sophism of applying to an Almighty Being such words as _all_. Why were not _all_ G.o.ds? But there is no _all_ in creation. It is composed of infinites, and the imagination, bewildered by heaping infinites on infinites and wearying of demanding increase of number to a number which it conceives already infinite, deserted by images and mocked by words, whose sole substance is the inward sense of difficulty that accompanies all our notions of infinity applied to numbers--turns with delight to distinct images and clear ideas, contemplates a _world_, an harmonious system, where an infinity of kinds subsist each in a mult.i.tude of individuals apportionate to its kind in conformity to laws existing in the divine nature, and therefore in the nature of things. We cannot, indeed, _prove_ this in any other way than by finding it as impossible to deny omniform, as eternal, agency to G.o.d--by finding it impossible to conceive that an omniscient Being should not have a distinct idea of finite beings, or that distinct ideas in the mind of G.o.d should be without the perfection of real existence, that is, imperfect. But this is a proof subtle indeed, yet not more so than the difficulty. The intellect that can start the one can understand the other, if his vices do not prevent him. Admit for a moment that "conceive" is equivalent to creation in the divine nature, synonymous with "to beget" (a feeling of which has given to marriage a mysterious sanct.i.ty and sacramental significance in the mind of many great and good men)--admit this, and all difficulty ceases, all tumult is hushed, all is clear and beautiful.

We sit in the dark, but each by the side of his little fire, in his own group, and lo! the summit of the distant mountain is smitten with light.

All night long it has dwelt there, and we look at it and know that the sun is not extinguished, that he is elsewhere bright and vivifying, that he is coming to us, to make our fires needless; yet, even now, that our cold and darkness are so called only in comparison with the heat and light of the coming day, never wholly deserted of the rays.

This I wrote on Friday morning, forty minutes past three o'clock, the sky covered with one cloud that yet lies in dark and light shades, and though one smooth cloud, by the dark colour, it appears to be _steppy_.

[Sidenote: A DREAM AND A PARENTHESIS Friday morning, 5 o'clock]

Dozing, dreamt of Hartley as at his christening--how, as he was asked who redeemed him, and was to say, "G.o.d the Son," he went on humming and hawing in one hum and haw (like a boy who knows a thing and will not make the effort to recollect) so as to irritate me greatly. Awakening gradually, I was able completely to detect that it was the ticking of my watch, which lay in the pen-place in my desk, on the round table close by my ear, and which, in the diseased state of my nerves, had fretted on my ears. I caught the fact while Hartley's face and moving lips were yet before my eyes, and his hum and haw and the ticking of the watch were each the other, as often happens in the pa.s.sing off of sleep--that curious modification of ideas by each other which is the element of _bulls_. I arose instantly and wrote it down. It is now ten minutes past five.

To return to the question of evil--woe to the man to whom it is an uninteresting question, though many a mind over-wearied by it may shun it with dread. And here--N.B.--scourge with deserved and lofty scorn those critics who laugh at the discussion of old questions: G.o.d, right and wrong, necessity and arbitrement, evil, &c. No! forsooth, the question must be _new, spicy hot_ gingerbread, from a French const.i.tution to a balloon, change of ministry, or, Which had the best of it in the parliamentary duel, Wyndham or Sheridan? or, at the best, a chymical thing [or] whether the new celestial bodies shall be called planets or asteroids--something new [it must be], something out of themselves--for whatever is _in_ them is deep within them--must be old as elementary nature [but] to find no contradiction in the union of old and novel--to contemplate the Ancient of Days with feelings new as if they _then_ sprang forth at His own Fiat--this marks the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. But to return to the question. The whole rests on the sophism of imaginary change in a case of positive subst.i.tution. This, I fully believe, settles the question. The a.s.sertion that there is in the essence of the divine nature a necessity of omniform harmonious action, and that order and system (not number--in itself base, disorderly and irrational) define the creative energy, determine and employ it, and that number is subservient to order, regulated, organised, made beautiful and rational, an object both of imagination and intellect by order--this is no mere a.s.sertion, it is strictly in harmony with the fact. For the world appears so, and it is proved by whatever proves the being of G.o.d.

Indeed, it is involved in the idea of G.o.d.

[Sidenote: THE AIM OF HIS METAPHYSIC]

What is it that I employ my metaphysics on? To perplex our clearest notions and living moral instincts? To extinguish the light of love and of conscience, to put out the life of arbitrement, to make myself and others _worthless, soulless, G.o.dless_? No, to expose the folly and the legerdemain of those who have thus abused the blessed organ of language, to support all old and venerable truths, to support, to kindle, to project, to make the reason spread light over our feelings, to make our feelings diffuse vital warmth through our reason--these are my objects and these my subjects. Is this the metaphysic that bad spirits in h.e.l.l delight in?

[Sidenote: IN THE VISIONS OF THE NIGHT Nov. 2, 1803, Wednesday morning, 20 minutes past 2 o'clock]

The voice of the Greta and the c.o.c.k-crowing. The voice seems to grow like a flower on or about the water beyond the bridge, while the c.o.c.k-crowing is nowhere particular--it is at any place I imagine and do not distinctly see. A most remarkable sky! the moon, now waned to a perfect ostrich egg, hangs over our house almost, only so much beyond it, garden-ward, that I can see it, holding my head out of the smaller study window. The sky is covered with whitish and with dingy cloudage, thin dingiest scud close under the moon, and one side of it moving, all else moveless; but there are two great breaks of blue sky, the one stretches over our house and away toward Castlerigg, and this is speckled and blotched with white cloud; the other hangs over the road, in the line of the road, in the shape of an ellipse or shuttle, I do not know what to call it--this is unspeckled, all blue, three stars in it--more in the former break, all unmoving. The water leaden-white, even as the grey gleam of water is in latest twilight. Now while I have been writing this and gazing between-whiles (it is forty minutes past two), the break over the road is swallowed up, and the stars gone; the break over the house is narrowed into a rude circle, and on the edge of its circ.u.mference one very bright star. See! already the white ma.s.s, thinning at its edge, _fights_ with its brilliance. See! it has bedimmed it, and now it is gone, and the moon is gone. The c.o.c.k-crowing too has ceased. The Greta sounds on for ever. But I hear only the ticking of my watch in the pen-place of my writing-desk and the far lower note of the noise of the fire, perpetual, yet seeming uncertain. It is the low voice of quiet change, of destruction doing its work by little and little.