Appreciations, With An Essay on Style
by
Walter Horatio Pater
Part 1 out of 4
Produced by Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
APPRECIATIONS, WITH AN ESSAY ON STYLE
By WALTER HORATIO PATER
E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
Electronic Version 1.0 / Date 10-12-01
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APPRECIATIONS, WITH AN ESSAY ON STYLE
NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
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Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
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CONTENTS
Style: 5-38
Wordsworth: 39-64
Coleridge: 65-104
Charles Lamb: 105-123
Sir Thomas Browne: 124-160
"Love's Labours Lost": 161-169
"Measure for Measure": 170-184
Shakespeare's English Kings: 185-204
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: 205-218
Feuillet's "La Morte": 219-240
Postscript: 241-261
APPRECIATIONS
STYLE
[5] SINCE all progress of mind consists for the most part in
differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object
into its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses to
confuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense
of achieved distinctions, the distinction between poetry and prose,
for instance, or, to speak more exactly, between the laws and
characteristic excellences of verse and prose composition. On the
other hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction
between prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have been
tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and this
again is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the
renunciation of a certain means or faculty, in a world where after
all we must needs make the most of things. Critical efforts to limit
art a priori, by anticipations regarding the natural incapacity of
the material with which this or that artist works, as the sculptor
with solid form, or the prose-writer with the ordinary [6] language
of men, are always liable to be discredited by the facts of artistic
production; and while prose is actually found to be a coloured thing
with Bacon, picturesque with Livy and Carlyle, musical with Cicero
and Newman, mystical and intimate with Plato and Michelet and Sir
Thomas Browne, exalted or florid, it may be, with Milton and Taylor,
it will be useless to protest that it can be nothing at all, except
something very tamely and narrowly confined to mainly practical ends-
-a kind of "good round-hand;" as useless as the protest that poetry
might not touch prosaic subjects as with Wordsworth, or an abstruse
matter as with Browning, or treat contemporary life nobly as with
Tennyson. In subordination to one essential beauty in all good
literary style, in all literature as a fine art, as there are many
beauties of poetry so the beauties of prose are many, and it is the
business of criticism to estimate them as such; as it is good in the
criticism of verse to look for those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic
excellences which that too has, or needs. To find in the poem, amid
the flowers, the allusions, the mixed perspectives, of Lycidas for
instance, the thought, the logical structure:--how wholesome! how
delightful! as to identify in prose what we call the poetry, the
imaginative power, not treating it as out of place and a kind of
vagrant intruder, but by way of an estimate of its rights, that is,
of its achieved powers, there.
[7] Dryden, with the characteristic instinct of his age, loved to
emphasise the distinction between poetry and prose, the protest
against their confusion with each other, coming with somewhat
diminished effect from one whose poetry was so prosaic. In truth,
his sense of prosaic excellence affected his verse rather than his
prose, which is not only fervid, richly figured, poetic, as we say,
but vitiated, all unconsciously, by many a scanning line. Setting up
correctness, that humble merit of prose, as the central literary
excellence, he is really a less correct writer than he may seem,
still with an imperfect mastery of the relative pronoun. It might
have been foreseen that, in the rotations of mind, the province of
poetry in prose would find its assertor; and, a century after Dryden,
amid very different intellectual needs, and with the need therefore
of great modifications in literary form, the range of the poetic
force in literature was effectively enlarged by Wordsworth. The true
distinction between prose and poetry he regarded as the almost
technical or accidental one of the absence or presence of metrical
beauty, or, say! metrical restraint; and for him the opposition came
to be between verse and prose of course; but, as the essential
dichotomy in this matter, between imaginative and unimaginative
writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between "the literature
of power and the literature of knowledge," in the former of which the
composer gives us [8] not fact, but his peculiar sense of fact,
whether past or present.
Dismissing then, under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher
opposition of poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary
psychology of the last century, and with it the prejudice that there
can be but one only beauty of prose style, I propose here to point
out certain qualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they
apply to the literature of fact, apply still more to the literature
of the imaginative sense of fact, while they apply indifferently to
verse and prose, so far as either is really imaginative--certain
conditions of true art in both alike, which conditions may also
contain in them the secret of the proper discrimination and
guardianship of the peculiar excellences of either.
The line between fact and something quite different from external
fact is, indeed, hard to draw. In Pascal, for instance, in the
persuasive writers generally, how difficult to define the point
where, from time to time, argument which, if it is to be worth
anything at all, must consist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a
pleading--a theorem no longer, but essentially an appeal to the
reader to catch the writer's spirit, to think with him, if one can or
will--an expression no longer of fact but of his sense of it, his
peculiar intuition of a world, prospective, or discerned below the
faulty conditions of the present, in either case changed somewhat
from the actual [9] world. In science, on the other hand, in history
so far as it conforms to scientific rule, we have a literary domain
where the imagination may be thought to be always an intruder. And
as, in all science, the functions of literature reduce themselves
eventually to the transcribing of fact, so all the excellences of
literary form in regard to science are reducible to various kinds of
pains-taking; this good quality being involved in all "skilled work"
whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament, as in sewing. Yet
here again, the writer's sense of fact, in history especially, and in
all those complex subjects which do but lie on the borders of
science, will still take the place of fact, in various degrees. Your
historian, for instance, with absolutely truthful intention, amid the
multitude of facts presented to him must needs select, and in
selecting assert something of his own humour, something that comes
not of the world without but of a vision within. So Gibbon moulds
his unwieldy material to a preconceived view. Livy, Tacitus,
Michelet, moving full of poignant sensibility amid the records of the
past, each, after his own sense, modifies--who can tell where and to
what degree?--and becomes something else than a transcriber; each, as
he thus modifies, passing into the domain of art proper. For just in
proportion as the writer's aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes
to be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of
his sense [10] of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art; and
good art (as I hope ultimately to show) in proportion to the truth of
his presentment of that sense; as in those humbler or plainer
functions of literature also, truth--truth to bare fact, there--is
the essence of such artistic quality as they may have. Truth! there
can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And further, all
beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call
expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within.
--The transcript of his sense of fact rather than the fact, as being
preferable, pleasanter, more beautiful to the writer himself. In
literature, as in every other product of human skill, in the moulding
of a bell or a platter for instance, wherever this sense asserts
itself, wherever the producer so modifies his work as, over and above
its primary use or intention, to make it pleasing (to himself, of
course, in the first instance) there, "fine" as opposed to merely
serviceable art, exists. Literary art, that is, like all art which
is in any way imitative or reproductive of fact--form, or colour, or
incident--is the representation of such fact as connected with soul,
of a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and
power.
Such is the matter of imaginative or artistic literature--this
transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, as
modified by human preference in all its infinitely varied [11] forms.
It will be good literary art not because it is brilliant or sober, or
rich, or impulsive, or severe, but just in proportion as its
representation of that sense, that soul-fact, is true, verse being
only one department of such literature, and imaginative prose, it may
be thought, being the special art of the modern world. That
imaginative prose should be the special and opportune art of the
modern world results from two important facts about the latter:
first, the chaotic variety and complexity of its interests, making
the intellectual issue, the really master currents of the present
time incalculable--a condition of mind little susceptible of the
restraint proper to verse form, so that the most characteristic verse
of the nineteenth century has been lawless verse; and secondly, an
all-pervading naturalism, a curiosity about everything whatever as it
really is, involving a certain humility of attitude, cognate to what
must, after all, be the less ambitious form of literature. And prose
thus asserting itself as the special and privileged artistic faculty
of the present day, will be, however critics may try to narrow its
scope, as varied in its excellence as humanity itself reflecting on
the facts of its latest experience--an instrument of many stops,
meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive,
fervid. Its beauties will be not exclusively "pedestrian": it will
exert, in due measure, all the varied charms of poetry, down to the
rhythm which, as in Cicero, [12] or Michelet, or Newman, at their
best, gives its musical value to every syllable.*
The literary artist is of necessity a scholar, and in what he .
proposes to do will have in mind, first of all, the scholar and the
scholarly conscience--the male conscience in this matter, as we must
think it, under a system of education which still to so large an
extent limits real scholarship to men. In his self-criticism, he
supposes always that sort of reader who will go (full of eyes)
warily, considerately, though without consideration for him, over the
ground which the female conscience traverses so lightly, so amiably.
For the material in which he works is no more a creation of his own
than the sculptor's marble. Product of a myriad various minds and
contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a
language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the
habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists. A
writer, full of a matter he is before all things anxious to express,
may think of those laws, the limitations of vocabulary, structure,
and the like, as a restriction, but if a [13] real artist will find
in them an opportunity. His punctilious observance of the proprieties
of his medium will diffuse through all he writes a general air of
sensibility, of refined usage. Exclusiones debitae--the exclusions,
or rejections, which nature demands--we know how large a part these
play, according to Bacon, in the science of nature. In a somewhat
changed sense, we might say that the art of the scholar is summed up
in the observance of those rejections demanded by the nature of his
medium, the material he must use. Alive to the value of an
atmosphere in which every term finds its utmost degree of expression,
and with all the jealousy of a lover of words, he will resist a
constant tendency on the part of the majority of those who use them
to efface the distinctions of language, the facility of writers often
reinforcing in this respect the work of the vulgar. He will feel the
obligation not of the laws only, but of those affinities, avoidances,
those mere preferences, of his language, which through the
associations of literary history have become a part of its nature,
prescribing the rejection of many a neology, many a license, many a
gipsy phrase which might present itself as actually expressive. His
appeal, again, is to the scholar, who has great experience in
literature, and will show no favour to short-cuts, or hackneyed
illustration, or an affectation of learning designed for the
unlearned. Hence a contention, a sense [14] of self-restraint and
renunciation, having for the susceptible reader the effect of a
challenge for minute consideration; the attention of the writer, in
every minutest detail, being a pledge that it is worth the reader's
while to be attentive too, that the writer is dealing scrupulously
with his instrument, and therefore, indirectly, with the reader
himself also, that he has the science of the instrument he plays on,
perhaps, after all, with a freedom which in such case will be the
freedom of a master.
For meanwhile, braced only by those restraints, he is really
vindicating his liberty in the making of a vocabulary, an entire
system of composition, for himself, his own true manner; and when we
speak of the manner of a true master we mean what is essential in his
art. Pedantry being only the scholarship of le cuistre (we have no
English equivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his
intelligence of the rules of language in his freedoms with it,
addition or expansion, which like the spontaneities of manner in a
well-bred person will still further illustrate good taste.--The right
vocabulary! Translators have not invariably seen how all-important
that is in the work of translation, driving for the most part at
idiom or construction; whereas, if the original be first-rate, one's
first care should be with its elementary particles, Plato, for
instance, being often reproducible by an exact following, with no
variation in structure, of word after word, as [15] the pencil
follows a drawing under tracing-paper, so only each word or syllable
be not of false colour, to change my illustration a little.
Well! that is because any writer worth translating at all has
winnowed and searched through his vocabulary, is conscious of the
words he would select in systematic reading of a dictionary, and
still more of the words he would reject were the dictionary other
than Johnson's; and doing this with his peculiar sense of the world
ever in view, in search of an instrument for the adequate expression
of that, he begets a vocabulary faithful to the colouring of his own
spirit, and in the strictest sense original. That living authority
which language needs lies, in truth, in its scholars, who recognising
always that every language possesses a genius, a very fastidious
genius, of its own, expand at once and purify its very elements,
which must needs change along with the changing thoughts of living
people. Ninety years ago, for instance, great mental force,
certainly, was needed by Wordsworth, to break through the consecrated
poetic associations of a century, and speak the language that was
his, that was to become in a measure the language of the next
generation. But he did it with the tact of a scholar also. English,
for a quarter of a century past, has been assimilating the
phraseology of pictorial art; for half a century, the phraseology of
the great German metaphysical movement of eighty years ago; in part
also the [16] language of mystical theology: and none but pedants
will regret a great consequent increase of its resources. For many
years to come its enterprise may well lie in the naturalisation of
the vocabulary of science, so only it be under the eye of a sensitive
scholarship--in a liberal naturalisation of the ideas of science too,
for after all the chief stimulus of good style is to possess a full,
rich, complex matter to grapple with. The literary artist,
therefore, will be well aware of physical science; science also
attaining, in its turn, its true literary ideal. And then, as the
scholar is nothing without the historic sense, he will be apt to
restore not really obsolete or really worn-out words, but the finer
edge of words still in use: ascertain, communicate, discover--words
like these it has been part of our "business" to misuse. And still,
as language was made for man, he will be no authority for
correctnesses which, limiting freedom of utterance, were yet but
accidents in their origin; as if one vowed not to say "its," which
ought to have been in Shakespeare; "his" "hers," for inanimate
objects, being but a barbarous and really inexpressive survival. Yet
we have known many things like this. Racy Saxon monosyllables, close
to us as touch and sight, he will intermix readily with those long,
savoursome, Latin words, rich in "second intention." In this late
day certainly, no critical process can be conducted reasonably
without eclecticism. Of [17] such eclecticism we have a justifying
example in one of the first poets of our time. How illustrative of
monosyllabic effect, of sonorous Latin, of the phraseology of
science, of metaphysic, of colloquialism even, are the writings of
Tennyson; yet with what a fine, fastidious scholarship throughout!
A scholar writing for the scholarly, he will of course leave
something to the willing intelligence of his reader. "To go preach
to the first passer-by," says Montaigne, "to become tutor to the
ignorance of the first I meet, is a thing I abhor;" a thing, in fact,
naturally distressing to the scholar, who will therefore ever be shy
of offering uncomplimentary assistance to the reader's wit. To
really strenuous minds there is a pleasurable stimulus in the
challenge for a continuous effort on their part, to be rewarded by
securer and more intimate grasp of the author's sense. Self-
restraint, a skilful economy of means, ascêsis, that too has a beauty
of its own; and for the reader supposed there will be an aesthetic
satisfaction in that frugal closeness of style which makes the most
of a word, in the exaction from every sentence of a precise relief,
in the just spacing out of word to thought, in the logically filled
space connected always with the delightful sense of difficulty
overcome.
Different classes of persons, at different times, make, of course,
very various demands upon literature. Still, scholars, I suppose,
and not [18] only scholars, but all disinterested lovers of books,
will always look to it, as to all other fine art, for a refuge, a
sort of cloistral refuge, from a certain vulgarity in the actual
world. A perfect poem like Lycidas, a perfect fiction like Esmond,
the perfect handling of a theory like Newman's Idea of a University,
has for them something of the uses of a religious "retreat." Here,
then, with a view to the central need of a select few, those "men of
a finer thread" who have formed and maintain the literary ideal,
everything, every component element, will have undergone exact trial,
and, above all, there will be no uncharacteristic or tarnished or
vulgar decoration, permissible ornament being for the most part
structural, or necessary. As the painter in his picture, so the
artist in his book, aims at the production by honourable artifice of
a peculiar atmosphere. "The artist," says Schiller, "may be known
rather by what he omits"; and in literature, too, the true artist may
be best recognised by his tact of omission. For to the grave reader
words too are grave; and the ornamental word, the figure, the
accessory form or colour or reference, is rarely content to die to
thought precisely at the right moment, but will inevitably linger
awhile, stirring a long "brain-wave" behind it of perhaps quite alien
associations.
Just there, it may be, is the detrimental tendency of the sort of
scholarly attentiveness [19] of mind I am recommending. But the true
artist allows for it. He will remember that, as the very word
ornament indicates what is in itself non-essential, so the "one
beauty" of all literary style is of its very essence, and
independent, in prose and verse alike, of all removable decoration;
that it may exist in its fullest lustre, as in Flaubert's Madame
Bovary, for instance, or in Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, in a
composition utterly unadorned, with hardly a single suggestion of
visibly beautiful things. Parallel, allusion, the allusive way
generally, the flowers in the garden:--he knows the narcotic force of
these upon the negligent intelligence to which any diversion,
literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder, because one can go
wandering away with it from the immediate subject. Jealous, if he
have a really quickening motive within, of all that does not hold
directly to that, of the facile, the otiose, he will never depart
from the strictly pedestrian process, unless he gains a ponderable
something thereby. Even assured of its congruity, he will still
question its serviceableness. Is it worth while, can we afford, to
attend to just that, to just that figure or literary reference, just
then?--Surplusage! he will dread that, as the runner on his muscles.
For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage,
from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last
particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of [20]
the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo's
fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone.
And what applies to figure or flower must be understood of all other
accidental or removable ornaments of writing whatever; and not of
specific ornament only, but of all that latent colour and imagery
which language as such carries in it. A lover of words for their own
sake, to whom nothing about them is unimportant, a minute and
constant observer of their physiognomy, he will be on the alert not
only for obviously mixed metaphors of course, but for the metaphor
that is mixed in all our speech, though a rapid use may involve no
cognition of it. Currently recognising the incident, the colour, the
physical elements or particles in words like absorb, consider,
extract, to take the first that occur, he will avail himself of them,
as further adding to the resources of expression. The elementary
particles of language will be realised as colour and light and shade
through his scholarly living in the full sense of them. Still
opposing the constant degradation of language by those who use it
carelessly, he will not treat coloured glass as if it were clear; and
while half the world is using figure unconsciously, will be fully
aware not only of all that latent figurative texture in speech, but
of the vague, lazy, half-formed personification--a rhetoric,
depressing, and worse than nothing, [21] because it has no really
rhetorical motive--which plays so large a part there, and, as in the
case of more ostentatious ornament, scrupulously exact of it, from
syllable to syllable, its precise value.
So far I have been speaking of certain conditions of the literary art
arising out of the medium or material in or upon which it works, the
essential qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingent
ornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and good
taste respectively. They are both subservient to a more intimate
quality of good style: more intimate, as coming nearer to the artist
himself. The otiose, the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrent
to the true literary artist, except because, in literary as in all
other art, structure is all-important, felt, or painfully missed,
everywhere?--that architectural conception of work, which foresees
the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every
part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but,
with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first--a condition
of literary art, which, in contradistinction to another quality of
the artist himself, to be spoken of later, I shall call the necessity
of mind in style.
An acute philosophical writer, the late Dean Mansel (a writer whose
works illustrate the literary beauty there may be in closeness, and
with obvious repression or economy of a fine [22] rhetorical gift)
wrote a book, of fascinating precision in a very obscure subject, to
show that all the technical laws of logic are but means of securing,
in each and all of its apprehensions, the unity, the strict identity
with itself, of the apprehending mind. All the laws of good writing
aim at a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes
by which the word is associated to its import. The term is right,
and has its essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it
signifies, as with the names of simple sensations. To give the
phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition,
song, or essay, a similar unity with its subject and with itself:--
style is in the right way when it tends towards that. All depends
upon the original unity, the vital wholeness and identity, of the
initiatory apprehension or view. So much is true of all art, which
therefore requires always its logic, its comprehensive reason--
insight, foresight, retrospect, in simultaneous action--true, most of
all, of the literary art, as being of all the arts most closely
cognate to the abstract intelligence. Such logical coherency may be
evidenced not merely in the lines of composition as a whole, but in
the choice of a single word, while it by no means interferes with,
but may even prescribe, much variety, in the building of the sentence
for instance, or in the manner, argumentative, descriptive,
discursive, of this or that [23] part or member of the entire design.
The blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a child's expression of its
needs, may alternate with the long-contending, victoriously intricate
sentence; the sentence, born with the integrity of a single word,
relieving the sort of sentence in which, if you look closely, you can
see much contrivance, much adjustment, to bring a highly qualified
matter into compass at one view. For the literary architecture, if
it is to be rich and expressive, involves not only foresight of the
end in the beginning, but also development or growth of design, in
the process of execution, with many irregularities, surprises, and
afterthoughts; the contingent as well as the necessary being subsumed
under the unity of the whole. As truly, to the lack of such
architectural design, of a single, almost visual, image, vigorously
informing an entire, perhaps very intricate, composition, which shall
be austere, ornate, argumentative, fanciful, yet true from first to
last to that vision within, may be attributed those weaknesses of
conscious or unconscious repetition of word, phrase, motive, or
member of the whole matter, indicating, as Flaubert was aware, an
original structure in thought not organically complete. With such
foresight, the actual conclusion will most often get itself written
out of hand, before, in the more obvious sense, the work is finished.
With some strong and leading sense of the world, the [24] tight hold
of which secures true composition and not mere loose accretion, the
literary artist, I suppose, goes on considerately, setting joint to
joint, sustained by yet restraining the productive ardour, retracing
the negligences of his first sketch, repeating his steps only that he
may give the reader a sense of secure and restful progress,
readjusting mere assonances even, that they may soothe the reader, or
at least not interrupt him on his way; and then, somewhere before the
end comes, is burdened, inspired, with his conclusion, and betimes
delivered of it, leaving off, not in weariness and because he finds
himself at an end, but in all the freshness of volition. His work
now structurally complete, with all the accumulating effect of
secondary shades of meaning, he finishes the whole up to the just
proportion of that ante-penultimate conclusion, and all becomes
expressive. The house he has built is rather a body he has informed.
And so it happens, to its greater credit, that the better interest
even of a narrative to be recounted, a story to be told, will often
be in its second reading. And though there are instances of great
writers who have been no artists, an unconscious tact sometimes
directing work in which we may detect, very pleasurably, many of the
effects of conscious art, yet one of the greatest pleasures of really
good prose literature is in the critical tracing out of that
conscious artistic structure, and the pervading sense of it [25] as
we read. Yet of poetic literature too; for, in truth, the kind of
constructive intelligence here supposed is one of the forms of the
imagination.
That is the special function of mind, in style. Mind and soul:--hard
to ascertain philosophically, the distinction is real enough
practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes in conflict,
with each other. Blake, in the last century, is an instance of
preponderating soul, embarrassed, at a loss, in an era of
preponderating mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul is a
fact, in certain writers--the way they have of absorbing language, of
attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety
which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable
inspiration. By mind, the literary artist reaches us, through static
and objective indications of design in his work, legible to all. By
soul, he reaches us, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not
another, through vagrant sympathy and a kind of immediate contact.
Mind we cannot choose but approve where we recognise it; soul may
repel us, not because we misunderstand it. The way in which
theological interests sometimes avail themselves of language is
perhaps the best illustration of the force I mean to indicate
generally in literature, by the word soul. Ardent religious
persuasion may exist, may make its way, without finding any
equivalent heat in language: or, again, it may enkindle [26] words to
various degrees, and when it really takes hold of them doubles its
force. Religious history presents many remarkable instances in
which, through no mere phrase-worship, an unconscious literary tact
has, for the sensitive, laid open a privileged pathway from one to
another. "The altar-fire," people say, "has touched those lips!"
The Vulgate, the English Bible, the English Prayer-Book, the writings
of Swedenborg, the Tracts for the Times:--there, we have instances of
widely different and largely diffused phases of religious feeling in
operation as soul in style. But something of the same kind acts with
similar power in certain writers of quite other than theological
literature, on behalf of some wholly personal and peculiar sense of
theirs. Most easily illustrated by theological literature, this
quality lends to profane writers a kind of religious influence. At
their best, these writers become, as we say sometimes, "prophets";
such character depending on the effect not merely of their matter,
but of their matter as allied to, in "electric affinity" with,
peculiar form, and working in all cases by an immediate sympathetic
contact, on which account it is that it may be called soul, as
opposed to mind, in style. And this too is a faculty of choosing and
rejecting what is congruous or otherwise, with a drift towards unity-
-unity of atmosphere here, as there of design--soul securing colour
(or perfume, might [27] we say?) as mind secures form, the latter
being essentially finite, the former vague or infinite, as the
influence of a living person is practically infinite. There are some
to whom nothing has any real interest, or real meaning, except as
operative in a given person; and it is they who best appreciate the
quality of soul in literary art. They seem to know a person, in a
book, and make way by intuition: yet, although they thus enjoy the
completeness of a personal information, it is still a characteristic
of soul, in this sense of the word, that it does but suggest what can
never be uttered, not as being different from, or more obscure than,
what actually gets said, but as containing that plenary substance of
which there is only one phase or facet in what is there expressed.
If all high things have their martyrs, Gustave Flaubert might perhaps
rank as the martyr of literary style. In his printed correspondence,
a curious series of letters, written in his twenty-fifth year,
records what seems to have been his one other passion--a series of
letters which, with its fine casuistries, its firmly repressed
anguish, its tone of harmonious grey, and the sense of disillusion in
which the whole matter ends, might have been, a few slight changes
supposed, one of his own fictions. Writing to Madame X. certainly he
does display, by "taking thought" mainly, by constant and delicate
pondering, as in his love for literature, a heart really moved, but
[28] still more, and as the pledge of that emotion, a loyalty to his
work. Madame X., too, is a literary artist, and the best gifts he
can send her are precepts of perfection in art, counsels for the
effectual pursuit of that better love. In his love-letters it is the
pains and pleasures of art he insists on, its solaces: he
communicates secrets, reproves, encourages, with a view to that.
Whether the lady was dissatisfied with such divided or indirect
service, the reader is not enabled to see; but sees that, on
Flaubert's part at least, a living person could be no rival of what
was, from first to last, his leading passion, a somewhat solitary and
exclusive one.
I must scold you (he writes) for one thing, which shocks,
scandalises me, the small concern, namely, you show for art
just now. As regards glory be it so: there, I approve. But
for art!--the one thing in life that is good and real--can you
compare with it an earthly love?--prefer the adoration of a
relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty? Well! I tell
you the truth. That is the one thing good in me: the one thing
I have, to me estimable. For yourself, you blend with the
beautiful a heap of alien things, the useful, the agreeable,
what not?--
The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art,
and count everything else as nothing. Pride takes the place of
all beside when it is established on a large basis. Work! God
wills it. That, it seems to me, is clear.--+
I am reading over again the Aeneid, certain verses of which I
repeat to myself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay
in one's head, by which I find myself beset, as with those musical
airs which are for ever returning, and cause you pain, you love
them so much. I observe that I no longer laugh much, and am no
longer depressed. I am ripe. You talk of my serenity, and envy
me. It may well surprise you. Sick, [29] irritated, the prey
a thousand times a day of cruel pain, I continue my labour like
a true working-man, who, with sleeves turned up, in the sweat of
his brow, beats away at his anvil, never troubling himself whether
it rains or blows, for hail or thunder. I was not like that
formerly. The change has taken place naturally, though my will
has counted for something in the matter.--
Those who write in good style are sometimes accused of a neglect
of ideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the physician
were something else than healing, of the painter than painting-
as if the end of art were not, before all else, the beautiful.
What, then, did Flaubert understand by beauty, in the art he pursued
with so much fervour, with so much self-command? Let us hear a
sympathetic commentator :--
Possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of
expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to
qualify, one verb to animate it, he gave himself to superhuman
labour for the discovery, in every phrase, of that word, that
verb, that epithet. In this way, he believed in some mysterious
harmony of expression, and when a true word seemed to him to
lack euphony still went on seeking another, with invincible
patience, certain that he had not yet got hold of the unique
word.... A thousand preoccupations would beset him at the
same moment, always with this desperate certitude fixed in his
spirit: Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and
turns of expression, there is but one--one form, one mode--to
express what I want to say.
The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude
of words, terms, that might just do: the problem of style was there!-
-the unique word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, or song,
absolutely proper to the single mental presentation or vision within.
[30] In that perfect justice, over and above the many contingent and
removable beauties with which beautiful style may charm us, but which
it can exist without, independent of them yet dexterously availing
itself of them, omnipresent in good work, in function at every point,
from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific,
indispensable, very intellectual, beauty of literature, the
possibility of which constitutes it a fine art.
One seems to detect the influence of a philosophic idea there, the
idea of a natural economy, of some pre-existent adaptation, between a
relative, somewhere in the world of thought, and its correlative,
somewhere in the world of language--both alike, rather, somewhere in
the mind of the artist, desiderative, expectant, inventive--meeting
each other with the readiness of "soul and body reunited," in Blake's
rapturous design; and, in fact, Flaubert was fond of giving his
theory philosophical expression.--
There are no beautiful thoughts (he would say) without beautiful
forms, and conversely. As it is impossible to extract from a
physical body the qualities which really constitute it--colour,
extension, and the like--without reducing it to a hollow
abstraction, in a word, without destroying it; just so it is
impossible to detach the form from the idea, for the idea only
exists by virtue of the form.
All, the recognised flowers, the removable ornaments of literature
(including harmony and ease in reading aloud, very carefully
considered [31] by him) counted, certainly; for these too are part
of the actual value of what one says. But still, after all, with
Flaubert, the search, the unwearied research, was not for the smooth,
or winsome, or forcible word, as such, as with false Ciceronians, but
quite simply and honestly, for the word's adjustment to its meaning.
The first condition of this must be, of course, to know yourself, to
have ascertained your own sense exactly. Then, if we suppose an
artist, he says to the reader,--I want you to see precisely what I
see. Into the mind sensitive to "form," a flood of random sounds,
colours, incidents, is ever penetrating from the world without, to
become, by sympathetic selection, a part of its very structure, and,
in turn, the visible vesture and expression of that other world it
sees so steadily within, nay, already with a partial conformity
thereto, to be refined, enlarged, corrected, at a hundred points; and
it is just there, just at those doubtful points that the function of
style, as tact or taste, intervenes. The unique term will come more
quickly to one than another, at one time than another, according also
to the kind of matter in question. Quickness and slowness, ease and
closeness alike, have nothing to do with the artistic character of
the true word found at last. As there is a charm of ease, so there
is also a special charm in the signs of discovery, of effort and
contention towards a due end, as so often with Flaubert himself--in
the style which has [32] been pliant, as only obstinate, durable
metal can be, to the inherent perplexities and recusancy of a certain
difficult thought.
If Flaubert had not told us, perhaps we should never have guessed how
tardy and painful his own procedure really was, and after reading his
confession may think that his almost endless hesitation had much to
do with diseased nerves. Often, perhaps, the felicity supposed will
be the product of a happier, a more exuberant nature than Flaubert's.
Aggravated, certainly, by a morbid physical condition, that anxiety
in "seeking the phrase," which gathered all the other small ennuis of
a really quiet existence into a kind of battle, was connected with
his lifelong contention against facile poetry, facile art--art,
facile and flimsy; and what constitutes the true artist is not the
slowness or quickness of the process, but the absolute success of the
result. As with those labourers in the parable, the prize is
independent of the mere length of the actual day's work. "You talk,"
he writes, odd, trying lover, to Madame X.--
"You talk of the exclusiveness of my literary tastes. That
might have enabled you to divine what kind of a person I am in
the matter of love. I grow so hard to please as a literary
artist, that I am driven to despair. I shall end by not
writing another line."
"Happy," he cries, in a moment of discouragement at that patient labour,
which for him, certainly, was the condition of a great success--[33]
Happy those who have no doubts of themselves! who lengthen out,
as the pen runs on, all that flows forth from their brains. As
for me, I hesitate, I disappoint myself, turn round upon myself
in despite: my taste is augmented in proportion as my natural
vigour decreases, and I afflict my soul over some dubious word
out of all proportion to the pleasure I get from a whole page
of good writing. One would have to live two centuries to attain
a true idea of any matter whatever. What Buffon said is a big
blasphemy: genius is not long-continued patience. Still, there
is some truth in the statement, and more than people think,
especially as regards our own day. Art! art! art! bitter
deception! phantom that glows with light, only to lead one on
to destruction...
Again--
I am growing so peevish about my writing. I am like a man whose
ear is true but who plays falsely on the violin: his fingers
refuse to reproduce precisely those sounds of which he has the
inward sense. Then the tears come rolling down from the poor
scraper's eyes and the bow falls from his hand.
Coming slowly or quickly, when it comes, as it came with so much
labour of mind, but also with so much lustre, to Gustave Flaubert,
this discovery of the word will be, like all artistic success and
felicity, incapable of strict analysis: effect of an intuitive
condition of mind, it must be recognised by like intuition on the
part of the reader, and a sort of immediate sense. In every one of
those masterly sentences of Flaubert there was, below all mere
contrivance, shaping and afterthought, by some happy instantaneous
concourse of the various faculties of the mind with each other, the
exact apprehension of what was needed to carry the meaning. And that
it fits with absolute justice will be a judgment of [34] immediate
sense in the appreciative reader. We all feel this in what may be
called inspired translation. Well! all language involves translation
from inward to outward. In literature, as in all forms of art, there
are the absolute and the merely relative or accessory beauties; and
precisely in that exact proportion of the term to its purpose is the
absolute beauty of style, prose or verse. All the good qualities,
the beauties, of verse also, are such, only as precise expression.
In the highest as in the lowliest literature, then, the one
indispensable beauty is, after all, truth:--truth to bare fact in the
latter, as to some personal sense of fact, diverted somewhat from
men's ordinary sense of it, in the former; truth there as accuracy,
truth here as expression, that finest and most intimate form of
truth, the vraie vérité. And what an eclectic principle this really
is! employing for its one sole purpose--that absolute accordance of
expression to idea--all other literary beauties and excellences
whatever: how many kinds of style it covers, explains, justifies, and
at the same time safeguards! Scott's facility, Flaubert's deeply
pondered evocation of "the phrase," are equally good art. Say what
you have to say, what you have a will to say, in the simplest, the
most direct and exact manner possible, with no surplusage:--there, is
the justification of the sentence so fortunately born, "entire,
smooth, and round," that it needs no punctuation, and also [35] (that
is the point!) of the most elaborate period, if it be right in its
elaboration. Here is the office of ornament: here also the purpose
of restraint in ornament. As the exponent of truth, that austerity
(the beauty, the function, of which in literature Flaubert understood
so well) becomes not the correctness or purism of the mere scholar,
but a security against the otiose, a jealous exclusion of what does
not really tell towards the pursuit of relief, of life and vigour in
the portraiture of one's sense. License again, the making free with
rule, if it be indeed, as people fancy, a habit of genius, flinging
aside or transforming all that opposes the liberty of beautiful
production, will be but faith to one's own meaning. The seeming
baldness of Le Rouge et Le Noir is nothing in itself; the wild
ornament of Les Misérables is nothing in itself; and the restraint of
Flaubert, amid a real natural opulence, only redoubled beauty--the
phrase so large and so precise at the same time, hard as bronze, in
service to the more perfect adaptation of words to their matter.
Afterthoughts, retouchings, finish, will be of profit only so far as
they too really serve to bring out the original, initiative,
generative, sense in them.
In this way, according to the well-known saying, "The style is the
man," complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of
what he really has to say, his sense of the world; all cautions
regarding style arising out of so many [36] natural scruples as to
the medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of
things, the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction:
nothing is to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter
save that. Style in all its varieties, reserved or opulent, terse,
abundant, musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is really
characteristic or expressive, finds thus its justification, the
sumptuous good taste of Cicero being as truly the man himself, and
not another, justified, yet insured inalienably to him, thereby, as
would have been his portrait by Raffaelle, in full consular
splendour, on his ivory chair.
A relegation, you may say perhaps--a relegation of style to the
subjectivity, the mere caprice, of the individual, which must soon
transform it into mannerism. Not so! since there is, under the
conditions supposed, for those elements of the man, for every
lineament of the vision within, the one word, the one acceptable
word, recognisable by the sensitive, by others "who have
intelligence" in the matter, as absolutely as ever anything can be in
the evanescent and delicate region of human language. The style, the
manner, would be the man, not in his unreasoned and really
uncharacteristic caprices, involuntary or affected, but in absolutely
sincere apprehension of what is most real to him. But let us hear
our French guide again.--
Styles (says Flaubert's commentator), Styles, as so many [37]
peculiar moulds, each of which bears the mark of a particular
writer, who is to pour into it the whole content of his ideas,
were no part of his theory. What he believed in was Style:
that is to say, a certain absolute and unique manner of
expressing a thing, in all its intensity and colour. For him
the form was the work itself. As in living creatures, the
blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and
external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis,
in a work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just
expression, the measure, the rhythm--the form in all its
characteristics.
If the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a
veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense "impersonal."
I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, that
prose literature was the characteristic art of the nineteenth
century, as others, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach,
have assigned that place to music. Music and prose literature are,
in one sense, the opposite terms of art; the art of literature
presenting to the imagination, through the intelligence, a range of
interests, as free and various as those which music presents to it
through sense. And certainly the tendency of what has been here said
is to bring literature too under those conditions, by conformity to
which music takes rank as the typically perfect art. If music be the
ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is
impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the
subject from the expression, then, literature, by finding its
specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the term to its
import, will be [38] but fulfilling the condition of all artistic
quality in things everywhere, of all good art.
Good art, but not necessarily great art; the distinction between
great art and good art depending immediately, as regards literature
at all events, not on its form, but on the matter. Thackeray's
Esmond, surely, is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater
dignity of its interests. It is on the quality of the matter it
informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great
ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in
it, that the greatness of literary art depends, as The Divine Comedy,
Paradise Lost, Les Misérables, The English Bible, are great art.
Given the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting good
art;--then, if it be devoted further to the increase of men's
happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of
our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old
truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble
and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to
the glory of God, it will be also great art; if, over and above those
qualities I summed up as mind and soul--that colour and mystic
perfume, and that reasonable structure, it has something of the soul
of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural place, in
the great structure of human life.
1888.
NOTES
12. *Mr. Saintsbury, in his Specimens of English Prose, from Malory
to Macaulay, has succeeded in tracing, through successive English
prose-writers, the tradition of that severer beauty in them, of which
this admirable scholar of our literature is known to be a lover.
English Prose, from Mandeville to Thackeray, more recently "chosen
and edited" by a younger scholar, Mr. Arthur Galton, of New College,
Oxford, a lover of our literature at once enthusiastic and discreet,
aims at a more various illustration of the eloquent powers of English
prose, and is a delightful companion.
28. +In the original, the quoted material is not indented but instead
appears in a smaller typeface; I have chosen to indent the material
half an inch to make it easier to read.
WORDSWORTH
[39] SOME English critics at the beginning of the present century had
a great deal to say concerning a distinction, of much importance, as
they thought, in the true estimate of poetry, between the Fancy, and
another more powerful faculty--the Imagination. This metaphysical
distinction, borrowed originally from the writings of German
philosophers, and perhaps not always clearly apprehended by those who
talked of it, involved a far deeper and more vital distinction, with
which indeed all true criticism more or less directly has to do, the
distinction, namely, between higher and lower degrees of intensity in
the poet's perception of his subject, and in his concentration of
himself upon his work. Of those who dwelt upon the metaphysical
distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination, it was Wordsworth
who made the most of it, assuming it as the basis for the final
classification of his poetical writings; and it is in these writings
that the deeper and more vital distinction, which, as I have said,
underlies the metaphysical [40] distinction, is most needed, and may
best be illustrated.
For nowhere is there so perplexed a mixture as in Wordsworth's own
poetry, of work touched with intense and individual power, with work
of almost no character at all. He has much conventional sentiment,
and some of that insincere poetic diction, against which his most
serious critical efforts were directed: the reaction in his political
ideas, consequent on the excesses of 1795, makes him, at times, a
mere declaimer on moral and social topics; and he seems, sometimes,
to force an unwilling pen, and write by rule. By making the most of
these blemishes it is possible to obscure the true aesthetic value of
his work, just as his life also, a life of much quiet delicacy and
independence, might easily be placed in a false focus, and made to
appear a somewhat tame theme in illustration of the more obvious
parochial virtues. And those who wish to understand his influence,
and experience his peculiar savour, must bear with patience the
presence of an alien element in Wordsworth's work, which never
coalesced with what is really delightful in it, nor underwent his
special power. Who that values his writings most has not felt the
intrusion there, from time to time, of something tedious and prosaic?
Of all poets equally great, he would gain most by a skilfully made
anthology. Such a selection would show, in truth, not so much what
he was, or to himself or others [41] seemed to be, as what, by the
more energetic and fertile quality in his writings, he was ever
tending to become. And the mixture in his work, as it actually
stands, is so perplexed, that one fears to miss the least promising
composition even, lest some precious morsel should be lying hidden
within--the few perfect lines, the phrase, the single word perhaps,
to which he often works up mechanically through a poem, almost the
whole of which may be tame enough. He who thought that in all
creative work the larger part was given passively, to the recipient
mind, who waited so dutifully upon the gift, to whom so large a
measure was sometimes given, had his times also of desertion and
relapse; and he has permitted the impress of these too to remain in
his work. And this duality there--the fitfulness with which the
higher qualities manifest themselves in it, gives the effect in his
poetry of a power not altogether his own, or under his control, which
comes and goes when it will, lifting or lowering a matter, poor in
itself; so that that old fancy which made the poet's art an
enthusiasm, a form of divine possession, seems almost literally true
of him.
This constant suggestion of an absolute duality between higher and
lower moods, and the work done in them, stimulating one always to
look below the surface, makes the reading of Wordsworth an excellent
sort of training towards the things of art and poetry. It begets in
those, [42] who, coming across him in youth, can bear him at all, a
habit of reading between the lines, a faith in the effect of
concentration and collectedness of mind in the right appreciation of
poetry, an expectation of things, in this order, coming to one by
means of a right discipline of the temper as well as of the
intellect. He meets us with the promise that he has much, and
something very peculiar, to give us, if we will follow a certain
difficult way, and seems to have the secret of a special and
privileged state of mind. And those who have undergone his
influence, and followed this difficult way, are like people who have
passed through some initiation, a disciplina arcani, by submitting to
which they become able constantly to distinguish in art, speech,
feeling, manners, that which is organic, animated, expressive, from
that which is only conventional, derivative, inexpressive.
But although the necessity of selecting these precious morsels for
oneself is an opportunity for the exercise of Wordsworth's peculiar
influence, and induces a kind of just criticism and true estimate of
it, yet the purely literary product would have been more excellent,
had the writer himself purged away that alien element. How perfect
would have been the little treasury, shut between the covers of how
thin a book! Let us suppose the desired separation made, the
electric thread untwined, the golden pieces, [43] great and small,
lying apart together.* What are the peculiarities of this residue?
What special sense does Wordsworth exercise, and what instincts does
he satisfy? What are the subjects and the motives which in him
excite the imaginative faculty? What are the qualities in things and
persons which he values, the impression and sense of which he can
convey to others, in an extraordinary way?
An intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things, which
weighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier mind passed roughly
by, is a large element in the complexion of modern poetry. It has
been remarked as a fact in mental history again and again. It
reveals itself in many forms; but is strongest and most attractive in
what is strongest and most attractive in modern literature. It is
exemplified, almost equally, by writers as unlike each other as
Senancour and Théophile Gautier: as a singular chapter in the history
of the human mind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau to
Chateaubriand, from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo: it has doubtless
some latent connexion with those pantheistic theories which locate an
intelligent soul in material things, and have largely exercised men's
minds in some modern systems of philosophy: it is traceable even in
[44] the graver writings of historians: it makes as much difference
between ancient and modern landscape art, as there is between the
rough masks of an early mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or
Gainsborough. Of this new sense, the writings of Wordsworth are the
central and elementary expression: he is more simply and entirely
occupied with it than any other poet, though there are fine
expressions of precisely the same thing in so different a poet as
Shelley. There was in his own character a certain contentment, a
sort of inborn religious placidity, seldom found united with a
sensibility so mobile as his, which was favourable to the quiet,
habitual observation of inanimate, or imperfectly animate, existence.
His life of eighty years is divided by no very profoundly felt
incidents: its changes are almost wholly inward, and it falls into
broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous spaces. What it most
resembles is the life of one of those early Italian or Flemish
painters, who, just because their minds were full of heavenly
visions, passed, some of them, the better part of sixty years in
quiet, systematic industry. This placid life matured a quite unusual
sensibility, really innate in him, to the sights and sounds of the
natural world--the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and
its echo. The poem of Resolution and Independence is a storehouse of
such records: for its fulness of imagery it may be compared to
Keats's Saint Agnes' Eve. To [45] read one of his longer pastoral
poems for the first time, is like a day spent in a new country: the
memory is crowded for a while with its precise and vivid incidents--
The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze
On some grey rock ;--
The single sheep and the one blasted tree
And the bleak music from that old stone wall;--
In the meadows and the lower ground
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn;--
And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears.
Clear and delicate at once, as he is in the outlining of visible
imagery, he is more clear and delicate still, and finely scrupulous,
in the noting of sounds; so that he conceives of noble sound as even
moulding the human countenance to nobler types, and as something
actually "profaned" by colour, by visible form, or image.
He has a power likewise of realising, and conveying to the
consciousness of the reader, abstract and elementary impressions--
silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness: or, again, the whole
complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of
desolation in the long white road, of peacefulness in a particular
folding of the hills. In the airy building of the brain, a special
day or hour even, comes to have for him a sort of personal identity,
a spirit or angel given to it, by which, for its exceptional [46]
insight, or the happy light upon it, it has a presence in one's
history, and acts there, as a separate power or accomplishment; and
he has celebrated in many of his poems the "efficacious spirit,"
which, as he says, resides in these "particular spots" of time.
It is to such a world, and to a world of congruous meditation
thereon, that we see him retiring in his but lately published poem of
The Recluse--taking leave, without much count of costs, of the world
of business, of action and ambition; as also of all that for the
majority of mankind counts as sensuous enjoyment.*
And so it came about that this sense of a life in natural objects,
which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, is with Wordsworth
the assertion of what for him is almost literal fact. To him every
natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual
life, to be [47] capable of a companionship with man, full of
expression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse.
An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged, not to the moving leaves
or water only, but to the distant peak of the hills arising suddenly,
by some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon, to the
passing space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic
stone even, for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of
men. It was like a "survival," in the peculiar intellectual
temperament of a man of letters at the end of the eighteenth century,
of that primitive condition, which some philosophers have traced in
the general history of human culture, wherein all outward objects
[48] alike, including even the works of men's hands, were believed to
be endowed with animation, and the world was "full of souls"--that
mood in which the old Greek gods were first begotten, and which had
many strange aftergrowths.
In the early ages, this belief, delightful as its effects on poetry
often are, was but the result of a crude intelligence. But, in
Wordsworth, such power of seeing life, such perception of a soul, in
inanimate things, came of an exceptional susceptibility to the
impressions of eye and ear, and was, in its essence, a kind of
sensuousness. At least, it is only in a temperament exceptionally
susceptible on the sensuous side, that this sense of the
expressiveness of outward things comes to be so large a part of life.
That he awakened "a sort of thought in sense," is Shelley's just
estimate of this element in Wordsworth's poetry.
And it was through nature, thus ennobled by a semblance of passion
and thought, that he approached the spectacle of human life. Human
life, indeed, is for him, at first, only an additional, accidental
grace on an expressive landscape. When he thought of man, it was of
man as in the presence and under the influence of these effective
natural objects, and linked to them by many associations. The close
connexion of man with natural objects, the habitual association of
his thoughts and feelings with a particular spot of earth, has
sometimes seemed to [49] degrade those who are subject to its
influence, as if it did but reinforce that physical connexion of our
nature with the actual lime and clay of the soil, which is always
drawing us nearer to our end. But for Wordsworth, these influences
tended to the dignity of human nature, because they tended to
tranquillise it. By raising nature to the level of human thought he
gives it power and expression: he subdues man to the level of nature,
and gives him thereby a certain breadth and coolness and solemnity.
The leech-gatherer on the moor, the woman "stepping westward," are
for him natural objects, almost in the same sense as the aged thorn,
or the lichened rock on the heath. In this sense the leader of the
"Lake School," in spite of an earnest preoccupation with man, his
thoughts, his destiny, is the poet of nature. And of nature, after
all, in its modesty. The English lake country has, of course, its
grandeurs. But the peculiar function of Wordsworth's genius, as
carrying in it a power to open out the soul of apparently little or
familiar things, would have found its true test had he become the
poet of Surrey, say! and the prophet of its life. The glories of
Italy and Switzerland, though he did write a little about them, had
too potent a material life of their own to serve greatly his poetic
purpose.
Religious sentiment, consecrating the affections and natural regrets
of the human heart, above all, that pitiful awe and care for the [50]
perishing human clay, of which relic-worship is but the corruption,
has always had much to do with localities, with the thoughts which
attach themselves to actual scenes and places. Now what is true of
it everywhere, is truest of it in those secluded valleys where one
generation after another maintains the same abiding-place; and it was
on this side, that Wordsworth apprehended religion most strongly.
Consisting, as it did so much, in the recognition of local
sanctities, in the habit of connecting the stones and trees of a
particular spot of earth with the great events of life, till the low
walls, the green mounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs seemed full of
voices, and a sort of natural oracles, the very religion of these
people of the dales appeared but as another link between them and the
earth, and was literally a religion of nature. It tranquillised them
by bringing them under the placid rule of traditional and narrowly
localised observances. "Grave livers," they seemed to him, under
this aspect, with stately speech, and something of that natural
dignity of manners, which underlies the highest courtesy.
And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnised in
proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into
companionship with permanent natural objects, his very religion
forming new links for him with the narrow limits of the valley, the
low vaults of his church, the rough stones of his [51] home, made
intense for him now with profound sentiment, Wordsworth was able to
appreciate passion in the lowly. He chooses to depict people from
humble life, because, being nearer to nature than others, they are on
the whole more impassioned, certainly more direct in their expression
of passion, than other men: it is for this direct expression of
passion, that he values their humble words. In much that he said in
exaltation of rural life, he was but pleading indirectly for that
sincerity, that perfect fidelity to one's own inward presentations,
to the precise features of the picture within, without which any
profound poetry is impossible. It was not for their tameness, but
for this passionate sincerity, that he chose incidents and situations
from common life, "related in a selection of language really used by
men." He constantly endeavours to bring his language near to the
real language of men: to the real language of men, however, not on
the dead level of their ordinary intercourse, but in select moments
of vivid sensation, when this language is winnowed and ennobled by
excitement. There are poets who have chosen rural life as their
subject, for the sake of its passionless repose, and times when
Wordsworth himself extols the mere calm and dispassionate survey of
things as the highest aim of poetical culture. But it was not for
such passionless calm that he preferred the scenes of pastoral life;
and the meditative poet, sheltering [52] himself, as it might seem,
from the agitations of the outward world, is in reality only clearing
the scene for the great exhibitions of emotion, and what he values
most is the almost elementary expression of elementary feelings.
And so he has much for those who value highly the concentrated
presentment of passion, who appraise men and women by their
susceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle
of it. Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of
their daily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those great
elementary feelings, lifting and solemnising their language and
giving it a natural music. The great, distinguishing passion came to
Michael by the sheepfold, to Ruth by the wayside, adding these humble
children of the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionate souls.
In this respect, Wordsworth's work resembles most that of George
Sand, in those of her novels which depict country life. With a
penetrative pathos, which puts him in the same rank with the masters
of the sentiment of pity in literature, with Meinhold and Victor
Hugo, he collects all the traces of vivid excitement which were to be
found in that pastoral world--the girl who rung her father's knell;
the unborn infant feeling about its mother's heart; the instinctive
touches of children; the sorrows of the wild creatures, even--their
home-sickness, their strange yearnings; the tales of passionate
regret that hang [53] by a ruined farm-building, a heap of stones, a
deserted sheepfold; that gay, false, adventurous, outer world, which
breaks in from time to time to bewilder and deflower these quiet
homes; not "passionate sorrow" only, for the overthrow of the soul's
beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness for personal beauty even, in
those whom men have wronged--their pathetic wanness; the sailor "who,
in his heart, was half a shepherd on the stormy seas"; the wild woman
teaching her child to pray for her betrayer; incidents like the
making of the shepherd's staff, or that of the young boy laying the
first stone of the sheepfold;--all the pathetic episodes of their
humble existence, their longing, their wonder at fortune, their poor
pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures of children, won so hardly in
the struggle for bare existence; their yearning towards each other,
in their darkened houses, or at their early toil. A sort of biblical
depth and solemnity hangs over this strange, new, passionate,
pastoral world, of which he first raised the image, and the
reflection of which some of our best modern fiction has caught from
him.
He pondered much over the philosophy of his poetry, and reading
deeply in the history of his own mind, seems at times to have passed
the borders of a world of strange speculations, inconsistent enough,
had he cared to note such inconsistencies, with those traditional
beliefs, which [54] were otherwise the object of his devout
acceptance. Thinking of the high value he set upon customariness,
upon all that is habitual, local, rooted in the ground, in matters of
religious sentiment, you might sometimes regard him as one tethered
down to a world, refined and peaceful indeed, but with no broad
outlook, a world protected, but somewhat narrowed, by the influence
of received ideas. But he is at times also something very different
from this, and something much bolder. A chance expression is
overheard and placed in a new connexion, the sudden memory of a thing
long past occurs to him, a distant object is relieved for a while by
a random gleam of light--accidents turning up for a moment what lies
below the surface of our immediate experience--and he passes from the
humble graves and lowly arches of "the little rock-like pile" of a
Westmoreland church, on bold trains of speculative thought, and
comes, from point to point, into strange contact with thoughts which
have visited, from time to time, far more venturesome, perhaps
errant, spirits.
He had pondered deeply, for instance, on those strange reminiscences
and forebodings, which seem to make our lives stretch before and
behind us, beyond where we can see or touch anything, or trace the
lines of connexion. Following the soul, backwards and forwards, on
these endless ways, his sense of man's dim, potential powers became a
pledge to him, indeed, of a future life, [55] but carried him back
also to that mysterious notion of an earlier state of existence--the
fancy of the Platonists--the old heresy of Origen. It was in this
mood that he conceived those oft-reiterated regrets for a half-ideal
childhood, when the relics of Paradise still clung about the soul--a
childhood, as it seemed, full of the fruits of old age, lost for all,
in a degree, in the passing away of the youth of the world, lost for
each one, over again, in the passing away of actual youth. It is
this ideal childhood which he celebrates in his famous Ode on the
Recollections of Childhood, and some other poems which may be grouped
around it, such as the lines on Tintern Abbey, and something like
what he describes was actually truer of himself than he seems to have
understood; for his own most delightful poems were really the
instinctive productions of earlier life, and most surely for him,
"the first diviner influence of this world" passed away, more and
more completely, in his contact with experience.
Sometimes as he dwelt upon those moments of profound, imaginative
power, in which the outward object appears to take colour and
expression, a new nature almost, from the prompting of the observant
mind, the actual world would, as it were, dissolve and detach itself,
flake by flake, and he himself seemed to be the creator, and when he
would the destroyer, of the world in which he lived--that old
isolating thought of many a brain-sick mystic of ancient and modern
times.
[56] At other times, again, in those periods of intense
susceptibility, in which he appeared to himself as but the passive
recipient of external influences, he was attracted by the thought of
a spirit of life in outward things, a single, all-pervading mind in
them, of which man, and even the poet's imaginative energy, are but
moments--that old dream of the anima mundi, the mother of all things
and their grave, in which some had desired to lose themselves, and
others had become indifferent to the distinctions of good and evil.
It would come, sometimes, like the sign of the macrocosm to Faust in
his cell: the network of man and nature was seen to be pervaded by a
common, universal life: a new, bold thought lifted him above the
furrow, above the green turf of the Westmoreland churchyard, to a
world altogether different in its vagueness and vastness, and the
narrow glen was full of the brooding power of one universal spirit.
And so he has something, also, for those who feel the fascination of
bold speculative ideas, who are really capable of rising upon them to
conditions of poetical thought. He uses them, indeed, always with a
very fine apprehension of the limits within which alone philosophical
imaginings have any place in true poetry; and using them only for
poetical purposes, is not too careful even to make them consistent
with each other. To him, theories which for other men [57] bring a
world of technical diction, brought perfect form and expression, as
in those two lofty books of The Prelude, which describe the decay and
the restoration of Imagination and Taste. Skirting the borders of
this world of bewildering heights and depths, he got but the first
exciting influence of it, that joyful enthusiasm which great
imaginative theories prompt, when the mind first comes to have an
understanding of them; and it is not under the influence of these
thoughts that his poetry becomes tedious or loses its blitheness. He
keeps them, too, always within certain ethical bounds, so that no
word of his could offend the simplest of those simple souls which are
always the largest portion of mankind. But it is, nevertheless, the
contact of these thoughts, the speculative boldness in them, which
constitutes, at least for some minds, the secret attraction of much
of his best poetry--the sudden passage from lowly thoughts and places
to the majestic forms of philosophical imagination, the play of these
forms over a world so different, enlarging so strangely the bounds of
its humble churchyards, and breaking such a wild light on the graves
of christened children.
And these moods always brought with them faultless expression. In
regard to expression, as with feeling and thought, the duality of the
higher and lower moods was absolute. It belonged to the higher, the
imaginative mood, and was the pledge of its reality, to bring the
[58] appropriate language with it. In him, when the really poetical
motive worked at all, it united, with absolute justice, the word and
the idea; each, in the imaginative flame, becoming inseparably one
with the other, by that fusion of matter and form, which is the
characteristic of the highest poetical expression. His words are
themselves thought and feeling; not eloquent, or musical words
merely, but that sort of creative language which carries the reality
of what it depicts, directly, to the consciousness.
The music of mere metre performs but a limited, yet a very peculiar
and subtly ascertained function, in Wordsworth's poetry. With him,
metre is but an additional grace, accessory to that deeper music of
words and sounds, that moving power, which they exercise in the
nobler prose no less than in formal poetry. It is a sedative to that
excitement, an excitement sometimes almost painful, under which the
language, alike of poetry and prose, attains a rhythmical power,
independent of metrical combination, and dependent rather on some
subtle adjustment of the elementary sounds of words themselves to the
image or feeling they convey. Yet some of his pieces, pieces
prompted by a sort of half-playful mysticism, like the Daffodils and
The Two April Mornings, are distinguished by a certain quaint gaiety
of metre, and rival by their perfect execution, in this respect,
similar pieces among our own Elizabethan, or contemporary French
poetry.
[59] And those who take up these poems after an interval of months,
or years perhaps, may be surprised at finding how well old favourites
wear, how their strange, inventive turns of diction or thought still
send through them the old feeling of surprise. Those who lived about
Wordsworth were all great lovers of the older English literature, and
oftentimes there came out in him a noticeable likeness to our earlier
poets. He quotes unconsciously, but with new power of meaning, a
clause from one of Shakespeare's sonnets; and, as with some other
men's most famous work, the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood had
its anticipator.* He drew something too from the unconscious
mysticism of the old English language itself, drawing out the inward
significance of its racy idiom, and the not wholly unconscious poetry
of the language used by the simplest people under strong excitement--
language, therefore, at its origin.
The office of the poet is not that of the moralist, and the first aim
of Wordsworth's poetry is to give the reader a peculiar kind of
pleasure. But through his poetry, and through this pleasure in it,
he does actually convey to the reader an extraordinary wisdom in the
things of practice. One lesson, if men must have lessons, he conveys
more clearly than all, the supreme importance of contemplation in the
conduct of life.
[60] Contemplation--impassioned contemplation--that, is with
Wordsworth the end-in-itself, the perfect end. We see the majority
of mankind going most often to definite ends, lower or higher ends,
as their own instincts may determine; but the end may never be
attained, and the means not be quite the right means, great ends and
little ones alike being, for the most part, distant, and the ways to
them, in this dim world, somewhat vague. Meantime, to higher or
lower ends, they move too often with something of a sad countenance,
with hurried and ignoble gait, becoming, unconsciously, something
like thorns, in their anxiety to bear grapes; it being possible for
people, in the pursuit of even great ends, to become themselves thin
and impoverished in spirit and temper, thus diminishing the sum of
perfection in the world, at its very sources. We understand this
when it is a question of mean, or of intensely selfish ends--of
Grandet, or Javert. We think it bad morality to say that the end
justifies the means, and we know how false to all higher conceptions
of the religious life is the type of one who is ready to do evil that
good may come. We contrast with such dark, mistaken eagerness, a
type like that of Saint Catherine of Siena, who made the means to her
ends so attractive, that she has won for herself an undying place in
the House Beautiful, not by her rectitude of soul only, but by its
"fairness"--by those quite different qualities [61] which commend
themselves to the poet and the artist.
Yet, for most of us, the conception of means and ends covers the
whole of life, and is the exclusive type or figure under which we
represent our lives to ourselves. Such a figure, reducing all things
to machinery, though it has on its side the authority of that old
Greek moralist who has fixed for succeeding generations the outline
of the theory of right living, is too like a mere picture or
description of men's lives as we actually find them, to be the basis
of the higher ethics. It covers the meanness of men's daily lives,
and much of the dexterity with which they pursue what may seem to
them the good of themselves or of others; but not the intangible
perfection of those whose ideal is rather in being than in doing--not
those manners which are, in the deepest as in the simplest sense,
morals, and without which one cannot so much as offer a cup of water
to a poor man without offence--not the part of "antique Rachel,"
sitting in the company of Beatrice; and even the moralist might well
endeavour rather to withdraw men from the too exclusive consideration
of means and ends, in life.
Against this predominance of machinery in our existence, Wordsworth's
poetry, like all great art and poetry, is a continual protest.
Justify rather the end by the means, it seems to say: whatever may
become of the fruit, make sure of [62] the flowers and the leaves.
It was justly said, therefore, by one who had meditated very
profoundly on the true relation of means to ends in life, and on the
distinction between what is desirable in itself and what is desirable
only as machinery, that when the battle which he and his friends were
waging had been won, the world would need more than ever those
qualities which Wordsworth was keeping alive and nourishing.*
That the end of life is not action but contemplation--being as
distinct from doing--a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some
shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality. In poetry,
in art, if you enter into their true spirit at all; you touch this
principle, in a measure: these, by their very sterility, are a type
of beholding for the mere joy of beholding. To treat life in the
spirit of art, is to make life a thing in which means and ends are
identified: to encourage such treatment, the true moral significance
of art and poetry. Wordsworth, and other poets who have been like
him in ancient or more recent times, are the masters, the experts, in
this art of impassioned contemplation. Their work is, not to teach
lessons, or enforce rules, or even to stimulate us to noble ends; but
to withdraw the thoughts for a little while from the mere machinery
of life, to fix [63] them, with appropriate emotions, on the
spectacle of those great facts in man's existence which no machinery
affects, "on the great and universal passions of men, the most
general and interesting of their occupations, and the entire world of
nature,"--on "the operations of the elements and the appearances of
the visible universe, on storm and sunshine, on the revolutions of
the seasons, on cold and heat, on loss of friends and kindred, on
injuries and resentments, on gratitude and hope, on fear and
sorrow." To witness this spectacle with appropriate emotions is the
aim of all culture; and of these emotions poetry like Wordsworth's is
a great nourisher and stimulant. He sees nature full of sentiment
and excitement; he sees men and women as parts of nature, passionate,
excited, in strange grouping and connexion with the grandeur and
beauty of the natural world:--images, in his own words, "of man
suffering, amid awful forms and powers."
Such is the figure of the more powerful and original poet, hidden
away, in part, under those weaker elements in Wordsworth's poetry,
which for some minds determine their entire character; a poet
somewhat bolder and more passionate than might at first sight be
supposed, but not too bold for true poetical taste; an unimpassioned
writer, you might sometimes fancy, yet thinking the chief aim, in
life and art alike, to be a certain deep emotion; seeking most often
the great [64] elementary passions in lowly places; having at least
this condition of all impassioned work, that he aims always at an
absolute sincerity of feeling and diction, so that he is the true
forerunner of the deepest and most passionate poetry of our own day;
yet going back also, with something of a protest against the
conventional fervour of much of the poetry popular in his own time,
to those older English poets, whose unconscious likeness often comes
out in him.
1874.
NOTES
43. *Since this essay was written, such selections have been made,
with excellent taste, by Matthew Arnold and Professor Knight.
46-47. *In Wordsworth's prefatory advertisement to the first edition
of The Prelude, published in 1850, it is stated that that work was
intended to be introductory to The Recluse; and that The Recluse, if
completed, would have consisted of three parts. The second part is
The Excursion. The third part was only planned; but the first book
of the first part was left in manuscript by Wordsworth--though in
manuscript, it is said, in no great condition of forwardness for the
printers. This book, now for the first time printed in extenso (a
very noble passage from it found place in that prose advertisement to
The Excursion), is included in the latest edition of Wordsworth by
Mr. John Morley. It was well worth adding to the poet's great
bequest to English literature. A true student of his work, who has
formulated for himself what he supposes to be the leading
characteristics of Wordsworth's genius, will feel, we think, lively
interest in testing them by the various fine passages in what is
here presented for the first time. Let the following serve for
a sample:--
Thickets full of songsters, and the voice
Of lordly birds, an unexpected sound
Heard now and then from morn to latest eve,
Admonishing the man who walks below
Of solitude and silence in the sky:--
These have we, and a thousand nooks of earth
Have also these, but nowhere else is found,
Nowhere (or is it fancy?) can be found
The one sensation that is here; 'tis here,
Here as it found its way into my heart
In childhood, here as it abides by day,
By night, here only; or in chosen minds
That take it with them hence, where'er they go.
--'Tis, but I cannot name it, 'tis the sense
Of majesty, and beauty, and repose,
A blended holiness of earth and sky,
Something that makes this individual spot,
This small abiding-place of many men,
A termination, and a last retreat,
A centre, come from wheresoe'er you will,
A whole without dependence or defect,
Made for itself, and happy in itself,
Perfect contentment, Unity entire.
59. *Henry Vaughan, in The Retreat.
62. *See an interesting paper, by Mr. John Morley, on "The Death of
Mr. Mill," Fortnightly Review, June 1873.
COLERIDGE*
[65] FORMS of intellectual and spiritual culture sometimes exercise
their subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing
from them. Searching and irresistible as are the changes of the human
spirit on its way to perfection, there is yet so much elasticity of
temper that what must pass away sooner or later is not disengaged all
at once, even from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by one
law of development evolves ideas, hypotheses, modes of inward life,
and represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier
growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the
whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the
spectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined
by the antagonism of the new. That current of new life chastens them
while they contend against it. Weaker minds fail to perceive the
change: the clearest minds abandon themselves to it. To [66] feel
the change everywhere, yet not abandon oneself to it, is a situation
of difficulty and contention. Communicating, in this way, to the
passing stage of culture, the charm of what is chastened, high-
strung, athletic, they yet detach the highest minds from the past, by
pressing home its difficulties and finally proving it impossible.
Such has been the charm of many leaders of lost causes in philosophy
and in religion. It is the special charm of Coleridge, in connexion
with those older methods of philosophic inquiry, over which the
empirical philosophy of our day has triumphed.
Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of
the "relative" spirit in place of the "absolute." Ancient philosophy
sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought
in a necessary formula, and the varieties of life in a classification
by "kinds," or genera. To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be
rightly known, except relatively and under conditions. The
philosophical conception of the relative has been developed in modern
times through the influence of the sciences of observation. Those
sciences reveal types of life evanescing into each other by
inexpressible refinements of change. Things pass into their
opposites by accumulation of undefinable quantities. The growth of
those sciences consists in a continual analysis of facts of rough and
general observation into groups of facts more precise and minute.
[67] The faculty for truth is recognised as a power of distinguishing
and fixing delicate and fugitive detail. The moral world is ever in
contact with the physical, and the relative spirit has invaded moral
philosophy from the ground of the inductive sciences. There it has
started a new analysis of the relations of body and mind, good and
evil, freedom and necessity. Hard and abstract moralities are
yielding to a more exact estimate of the subtlety and complexity of
our life. Always, as an organism increases in perfection, the
conditions of its life become more complex. Man is the most complex
of the products of nature. Character merges into temperament: the
nervous system refines itself into intellect. Man's physical
organism is played upon not only by the physical conditions about it,
but by remote laws of inheritance, the vibration of long-past acts
reaching him in the midst of the new order of things in which he
lives. When we have estimated these conditions he is still not yet
simple and isolated; for the mind of the race, the character of the
age, sway him this way or that through the medium of language and
current ideas. It seems as if the most opposite statements about him
were alike true: he is so receptive, all the influences of nature and
of society ceaselessly playing upon him, so that every hour in his
life is unique, changed altogether by a stray word, or glance, or
touch. It is the truth of these relations that experience [68] gives
us, not the truth of eternal outlines ascertained once for all, but a
world of fine gradations and subtly linked conditions, shifting
intricately as we ourselves change--and bids us, by a constant
clearing of the organs of observation and perfecting of analysis, to
make what we can of these. To the intellect, the critical spirit,
just these subtleties of effect are more precious than anything else.
What is lost in precision of form is gained in intricacy of
expression. It is no vague scholastic abstraction that will satisfy
the speculative instinct in our modern minds. Who would change the
colour or curve of a rose-leaf for that ousia akhrômatos,
askhêmatistos, anaphês+--that colourless, formless, intangible,
being--Plato put so high? For the true illustration of the
speculative temper is not the Hindoo mystic, lost to sense,
understanding, individuality, but one such as Goethe, to whom every
moment of life brought its contribution of experimental, individual
knowledge; by whom no touch of the world of form, colour, and passion
was disregarded.
Now the literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle
against the relative spirit. With a strong native bent towards the
tracking of all questions, critical or practical, to first
principles, he is ever restlessly scheming to "apprehend the
absolute," to affirm it effectively, to get it acknowledged. It was
an effort, surely, an effort of sickly thought, that saddened his
[69] mind, and limited the operation of his unique poetic gift.
So what the reader of our own generation will least find in
Coleridge's prose writings is the excitement of the literary sense.
And yet, in those grey volumes, we have the larger part of the
production of one who made way ever by a charm, the charm of voice,
of aspect, of language, above all by the intellectual charm of new,
moving, luminous ideas. Perhaps the chief offence in Coleridge is an
excess of seriousness, a seriousness arising not from any moral
principle, but from a misconception of the perfect manner. There is
a certain shade of unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth
century, which may be thought to mark complete culture in the
handling of abstract questions. The humanist, the possessor of that
complete culture, does not "weep" over the failure of "a theory of
the quantification of the predicate," nor "shriek" over the fall of a
philosophical formula. A kind of humour is, in truth, one of the
conditions of the just mental attitude, in the criticism of by-past
stages of thought. Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about
them, any more than a man of good sense can afford to be too serious
in looking back upon his own childhood. Plato, whom Coleridge claims
as the first of his spiritual ancestors, Plato, as we remember him, a
true humanist, holds his theories lightly, glances with a somewhat
blithe and naive inconsequence from [70] one view to another, not
anticipating the burden of importance "views" will one day have for
men. In reading him one feels how lately it was that Croesus thought
it a paradox to say that external prosperity was not necessarily
happiness. But on Coleridge lies the whole weight of the sad
reflection that has since come into the world, with which for us the
air is full, which the "children in the market-place" repeat to each
other. His very language is forced and broken lest some saving
formula should be lost--distinctities, enucleation, pentad of
operative Christianity; he has a whole armoury of these terms, and
expects to turn the tide of human thought by fixing the sense of such
expressions as "reason," "understanding," "idea." Again, he lacks
the jealousy of a true artist in excluding all associations that have
no colour, or charm, or gladness in them; and everywhere allows the
impress of a somewhat inferior theological literature.
"I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation:"
so Coleridge sums up his childhood, with its delicacy, its
sensitiveness, and passion. But at twenty-five he was exercising a
wonderful charm, and had already defined for himself his peculiar
line of intellectual activity. He had an odd, attractive gift of
conversation, or rather of monologue, as Madame de Staël observed of
him, full of bizarreries, with the rapid alternations of a dream, and
here or there an unexpected summons into a world [71] strange to the
hearer, abounding in images drawn from a sort of divided imperfect
life, the consciousness of the opium-eater, as of one to whom the
external world penetrated only in part, and, blent with all this,
passages of deep obscurity, precious, if at all, only for their
musical cadence, echoes in Coleridge of the eloquence of those older
English writers of whom he was so ardent a lover. And all through
this brilliant early manhood we may discern the power of the
"Asiatic" temperament, of that voluptuousness, which is connected
perhaps with his appreciation of the intimacy, the almost mystical
communion of touch, between nature and man. "I am much better," he
writes, "and my new and tender health is all over me like a
voluptuous feeling." And whatever fame, or charm, or life-inspiring
gift he has had as a speculative thinker, is the vibration of the
interest he excited then, the propulsion into years which clouded his
early promise of that first buoyant, irresistible, self-assertion.
So great is even the indirect power of a sincere effort towards the
ideal life, of even a temporary escape of the spirit from routine.
In 1798 he visited Germany, then, the only half-known, "promised
land," of the metaphysical, the "absolute," philosophy. A beautiful
fragment of this period remains, describing a spring excursion to the
Brocken. His excitement still vibrates in it. Love, all joyful
states [72] of mind, are self-expressive: they loosen the tongue,
they fill the thoughts with sensuous images, they harmonise one with
the world of sight. We hear of the "rich graciousness and courtesy"
of Coleridge's manner, of the white and delicate skin, the abundant
black hair, the full, almost animal lips--that whole physiognomy of
the dreamer, already touched with narcotism. One says, of the
beginning of one of his Unitarian sermons: "His voice rose like a
stream of rich, distilled perfumes;" another, "He talks like an
angel, and does--nothing!"
The Aids to Reflection, The Friend, The Biographia Literaria: those
books came from one whose vocation was in the world of the
imagination, the theory and practice of poetry. And yet, perhaps, of
all books that have been influential in modern times, they are
furthest from artistic form--bundles of notes; the original matter
inseparably mixed up with that borrowed from others; the whole, just
that mere preparation for an artistic effect which the finished
literary artist would be careful one day to destroy. Here, again, we
have a trait profoundly characteristic of Coleridge. He sometimes
attempts to reduce a phase of thought, subtle and exquisite, to
conditions too rough for it. He uses a purely speculative gift for
direct moral edification. Scientific truth is a thing fugitive,
relative, full of fine gradations: he tries to fix it in absolute
formulas. The Aids to Reflection, The Friend, are [73] efforts to
propagate the volatile spirit of conversation into the less ethereal
fabric of a written book; and it is only here or there that the
poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really lifted by the spirit.
De Quincey said of him that "he wanted better bread than can be made
with wheat:" Lamb, that from childhood he had "hungered for
eternity." Yet the faintness, the continuous dissolution, whatever
its cause, which soon supplanted the buoyancy of his first wonderful
years, had its own consumptive refinements, and even brought, as to
the "Beautiful Soul" in Wilhelm Meister, a faint religious ecstasy--
that "singing in the sails" which is not of the breeze. Here again
is one of his occasional notes:--
"In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at yonder
moon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem rather to be
seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something
within me, that already and for ever exists, than observing anything
new. Even when the latter is the case, yet still I have always an
obscure feeling, as if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a
forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature. While I was preparing
the pen to make this remark, I lost the train of thought which had
led me to it."
What a distemper of the eye of the mind! What an almost bodily
distemper there is in that!
Coleridge's intellectual sorrows were many; [74] but he had one
singular intellectual happiness. With an inborn taste for
transcendental philosophy, he lived just at the time when that
philosophy took an immense spring in Germany, and connected itself
with an impressive literary movement. He had the good luck to light
upon it in its freshness, and introduce it to his countrymen. What
an opportunity for one reared on the colourless analytic English
philosophies of the last century, but who feels an irresistible
attraction towards bold metaphysical synthesis! How rare are such
occasions of intellectual contentment! This transcendental
philosophy, chiefly as systematised by the mystic Schelling,
Coleridge applied with an eager, unwearied subtlety, to the questions
of theology, and poetic or artistic criticism. It is in his theory
of poetry, of art, that he comes nearest to principles of permanent
truth and importance: that is the least fugitive part of his prose
work. What, then, is the essence of his philosophy of art--of
imaginative production?
Generally, it may be described as an attempt to reclaim the world of
art as a world of fixed laws, to show that the creative activity of
genius and the simplest act of thought are but higher and lower
products of the laws of a universal logic. Criticism, feeling its
own inadequacy in dealing with the greater works of art, is sometimes
tempted to make too much of those dark and capricious suggestions of
genius, which even [75] the intellect possessed by them is unable to
explain or recall. It has seemed due to the half-sacred character of
those works to ignore all analogy between the productive process by
which they had their birth, and the simpler processes of mind.
Coleridge, on the other hand, assumes that the highest phases of
thought must be more, not less, than the lower, subject to law.
With this interest, in the Biographia Literaria, he refines
Schelling's "Philosophy of Nature" into a theory of art. "There can
be no plagiarism in philosophy," says Heine:--Es giebt kein Plagiat
in der Philosophie, in reference to the charge brought against
Schelling of unacknowledged borrowing from Bruno; and certainly that
which is common to Coleridge and Schelling and Bruno alike is of far
earlier origin than any of them. Schellingism, the "Philosophy of
Nature," is indeed a constant tradition in the history of thought: it
embodies a permanent type of the speculative temper. That mode of
conceiving nature as a mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man
may be traced up to the first beginnings of Greek speculation. There
are two ways of envisaging those aspects of nature which seem to bear
the impress of reason or intelligence. There is the deist's way,
which regards them merely as marks of design, which separates the
informing mind from its result in nature, as the mechanist from the
machine; and there is the pantheistic way, which identifies the two,
which [76] regards nature itself as the living energy of an
intelligence of the same kind as though vaster in scope than the
human. Partly through the influence of mythology, the Greek mind
became early possessed with the conception of nature as living,
thinking, almost speaking to the mind of man. This unfixed poetical
prepossession, reduced to an abstract form, petrified into an idea,
is the force which gives unity of aim to Greek philosophy. Little by
little, it works out the substance of the Hegelian formula: "Whatever
is, is according to reason: whatever is according to reason, that
is." Experience, which has gradually saddened the earth's colours
for us, stiffened its motions, withdrawn from it some blithe and
debonair presence, has quite changed the character of the science of
nature, as we understand it. The "positive" method, in truth, makes
very little account of marks of intelligence in nature: in its wider
view of phenomena, it sees that those instances are a minority, and
may rank as happy coincidences: it absorbs them in the larger
conception of universal mechanical law. But the suspicion of a mind
latent in nature, struggling for release, and intercourse with the
intellect of man through true ideas, has never ceased to haunt a
certain class of minds. Started again and again in successive
periods by enthusiasts on the antique pattern, in each case the
thought may have seemed paler and more fantastic amid the growing
[77] consistency and sharpness of outline of other and more positive
forms of knowledge. Still, wherever the speculative instinct has
been united with a certain poetic inwardness of temperament, as in
Bruno, in Schelling, there that old Greek conception, like some seed
floating in the air, has taken root and sprung up anew. Coleridge,
thrust inward upon himself, driven from "life in thought and
sensation" to life in thought only, feels already, in his dark London
school, a thread of the Greek mind on this matter vibrating strongly
in him. At fifteen he is discoursing on Plotinus, as in later years
he reflects from Schelling that flitting intellectual tradition. He
supposes a subtle, sympathetic co-ordination between the ideas of the
human reason and the laws of the natural world. Science, the real
knowledge of that natural world, is to be attained, not by
observation, experiment, analysis, patient generalisation, but by the
evolution or recovery of those ideas directly from within, by a sort
of Platonic "recollection"; every group of observed facts remaining
an enigma until the appropriate idea is struck upon them from the
mind of a Newton, or a Cuvier, the genius in whom sympathy with the
universal reason becomes entire. In the next place, he conceives
that this reason or intelligence in nature becomes reflective, or
self-conscious. He fancies he can trace, through all the simpler
forms of life, fragments of an eloquent prophecy about the [78] human
mind. The whole of nature he regards as a development of higher
forms out of the lower, through shade after shade of systematic
change. The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the axis of crystal
form, the trance-like life of plants, the animal troubled by strange
irritabilities, are stages which anticipate consciousness. All
through the ever-increasing movement of life that was shaping itself;
every successive phase of life, in its unsatisfied susceptibilities,
seeming to be drawn out of its own limits by the more pronounced
current of life on its confines, the "shadow of approaching humanity"
gradually deepening, the latent intelligence winning a way to the
surface. And at this point the law of development does not lose
itself in caprice: rather it becomes more constraining and incisive.
From the lowest to the very highest acts of the conscious
intelligence, there is another series of refining shades. Gradually
the mind concentrates itself, frees itself from the limitations of
the particular, the individual, attains a strange power of modifying
and centralising what it receives from without, according to the
pattern of an inward ideal. At last, in imaginative genius, ideas
become effective: the intelligence of nature, all its discursive
elements now connected and justified, is clearly reflected; the
interpretation of its latent purposes being embodied in the great
central products of creative art. The secret of creative [79] genius
would be an exquisitely purged sympathy with nature, with the
reasonable soul antecedent there. Those associative conceptions of
the imagination, those eternally fixed types of action and passion,
would come, not so much from the conscious invention of the artist,
as from his self-surrender to the suggestions of an abstract reason
or ideality in things: they would be evolved by the stir of nature
itself, realising the highest reach of its dormant reason: they would
have a kind of prevenient necessity to rise at some time to the
surface of the human mind.
It is natural that Shakespeare should be the favourite illustration
of such criticism, whether in England or Germany. The first
suggestion in Shakespeare is that of capricious detail, of a
waywardness that plays with the parts careless of the impression of
the whole; what supervenes is the constraining unity of effect, the
ineffaceable impression, of Hamlet or Macbeth. His hand moving
freely is curved round as if by some law of gravitation from within:
an energetic unity or identity makes itself visible amid an abounding
variety. This unity or identity Coleridge exaggerates into something
like the identity of a natural organism, and the associative act
which effected it into something closely akin to the primitive power
of nature itself. "In the Shakespearian drama," he says, "there is a
vitality which grows and evolves itself from within."
[80] Again--
He, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the germ
from within, by the imaginative power, according to the idea.
For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind
to a law in nature. They are correlatives which suppose
each other.
Again--
The organic form is innate: it shapes, as it develops, itself from
within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with
the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the
form. Nature, the prime, genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse
powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms: each exterior is the
physiognomy of the being within, and even such is the appropriate
excellence of Shakespeare, himself a nature humanised, a genial
understanding, directing self-consciously a power and an implicit
wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.+
In this late age we are become so familiarised with the greater works
of art as to be little sensitive of the act of creation in them: they
do not impress us as a new presence in the world. Only sometimes, in
productions which realise immediately a profound influence and
enforce a change in taste, we are actual witnesses of the moulding of
an unforeseen type by some new principle of association; and to that
phenomenon Coleridge wisely recalls our attention. What makes his
view a one-sided one is, that in it the artist has become almost a
mechanical agent: instead of the most luminous and self-possessed
phase of consciousness, the associative act in art or poetry is made
to look like some blindly organic process of assimilation. The work
of art is likened to a living organism. That expresses [81] truly
the sense of a self-delighting, independent life which the finished
work of art gives us: it hardly figures the process by which such
work was produced. Here there is no blind ferment of lifeless
elements towards the realisation of a type. By exquisite analysis
the artist attains clearness of idea; then, through many stages of
refining, clearness of expression. He moves slowly over his work,
calculating the tenderest tone, and restraining the subtlest curve,
never letting hand or fancy move at large, gradually enforcing
flaccid spaces to the higher degree of expressiveness. The
philosophic critic, at least, will value, even in works of
imagination, seemingly the most intuitive, the power of the
understanding in them, their logical process of construction, the
spectacle of a supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.
Coleridge's prose writings on philosophy, politics, religion, and
criticism, were, in truth, but one element in a whole lifetime of
endeavours to present the then recent metaphysics of Germany to
English readers, as a legitimate expansion of the older, classical
and native masters of what has been variously called the a priori, or
absolute, or spiritual, or Platonic, view of things. His criticism,
his challenge for recognition in the concrete, visible, finite work
of art, of the dim, unseen, comparatively infinite, soul or power of
the artist, may well be [82] remembered as part of the long pleading
of German culture for the things "behind the veil." To introduce
that spiritual philosophy, as represented by the more transcendental
parts of Kant, and by Schelling, into all subjects, as a system of
reason in them, one and ever identical with itself, however various
the matter through which it was diffused, became with him the motive
of an unflagging enthusiasm, which seems to have been the one thread
of continuity in a life otherwise singularly wanting in unity of
purpose, and in which he was certainly far from uniformly at his
best. Fragmentary and obscure, but often eloquent, and always at
once earnest and ingenious, those writings, supplementing his
remarkable gift of conversation, were directly and indirectly
influential, even on some the furthest removed from Coleridge's own
masters; on John Stuart Mill, for instance, and some of the earlier
writers of the "high-church" school. Like his verse, they display
him also in two other characters--as a student of words, and as a
psychologist, that is, as a more minute observer or student than
other men of the phenomena of mind. To note the recondite
associations of words, old or new; to expound the logic, the
reasonable soul, of their various uses; to recover the interest of
older writers who had had a phraseology of their own--this was a vein
of inquiry allied to his undoubted gift of tracking out and analysing
curious modes of thought. A [83] quaint fragment of verse on Human
Life might serve to illustrate his study of the earlier English
philosophical poetry. The latter gift, that power of the "subtle-
souled psychologist," as Shelley calls him, seems to have been
connected with some tendency to disease in the physical temperament,
something of a morbid want of balance in those parts where the
physical and intellectual elements mix most closely together, with a
kind of languid visionariness, deep-seated in the very constitution
of the "narcotist," who had quite a gift for "plucking the poisons of
self-harm," and which the actual habit of taking opium, accidentally
acquired, did but reinforce. This morbid languor of nature,
connected both with his fitfulness of purpose and his rich delicate
dreaminess, qualifies Coleridge's poetic composition even more than
his prose; his verse, with the exception of his avowedly political
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