English Poetry and Prose of the Romantic Movement

nation, and have been spoken in his own character, are those which have given, and which will continue to give, universal delight; and that the passages exclusively appropriate to the supposed narrator, such as the last couplet of the third stanza, the seven last lines of the tenth, and the five following stanzas, with the exception of the four admirable lines at the commencement of the fourteenth, are felt by many un- 10 prejudiced and unsophisticated hearts, as sudden and unpleasant sinkings from the height to which the poet had previously lifted them, and to which he again reelevates both himself and his reader.

If then I am compelled to doubt the theory, by which the choice of characters was to be directed, not only a priori, from grounds of reason, but both from the few instances in which the poet himself need be supposed to have been governed by it, and from the comparative inferiority of these instances; still more must I hesitate in my assent to the sentence which immediately follows the former citation, and which I can neither admit as particular fact, nor as general rule. "The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the action of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions." To this I reply that a rustic's language, purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so får reconstructed as to be made consistent with the rules of grammar (which are in essence no other than the laws of universal logic, applied to psychological materials) will not differ from the language of any other man of common sense, however learned or refined he may be, except as far as the. notions, which the rustic has to convey, are fewer and more indiscriminate. This will become still clearer, if we add the consideration (equally important though less obvious) that the rustic, from the more imperfect development of his faculties, and from the lower state of their cultivation, aims almost solely to convey insulated facts, either those of his scanty experience or his traditional belief; while the educated man chiefly seeks to discover and express those connections of

things, or those relative bearings of fact to fact, from which some more or less general law is deducible. For facts are valuable to a wise man, chiefly as they lead to the discovery of the indwelling law, which is the true being of things, the sole solution of their modes of existence, and in the knowledge of which consists our dignity and our power.

Sec

As little can I agree with the assertion that from the objects with which the rustic hourly communicates, the best part of language is formed. For first, if to, communicate with an object implies such an acquaintance with it as renders it capable of being discriminately reflected on, the distinct knowledge of an uneducated rustic would furnish a very scanty vocabulary. The few things and modes of action requisite for his bodily conveniences would alone be individualized; while all the rest of nature would be expressed by a small number of confused general terms. ondly, I deny that the words and combinations of words derived from the objects with which the rustic is familiar, whether with distinct or confused knowledge, can be justly said to form the best part of language. It is more than probable that many classes of the brute creation possess discriminating sounds, by which they can convey to each other notices of such objects as concern their food, shelter, or safety. Yet we hesitate to call the aggregate of such sounds a language, otherwise than metaphorically. The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself. It is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of imagination, the greater part of which have no place in the consciousness of uneducated man; though in civilized society, by imitation and passive remembrance of what they hear from their religious instructors and other superiors, the most uneducated share in the harvest which they neither sowed nor reaped. If the history of the phrases in hourly currency among our peasants were traced, a person not previously aware of the fact would be surprised at finding so large a number which three or four centuries ago were the exclusive property of the universities and the schools, and at the commencement of the Reformation had been transferred from the school to the pulpit, and thus gradually passed into common life. The extreme difficulty, and often the impossibility. of finding words for the sim

plest moral and intellectual processes of the languages of uncivilized tribes has proved perhaps the weightiest obstacle to the progress of our most zealous and adroit missionaries. Yet these tribes are surrounded by the same nature as our peasants are, but in still more impressive forms; and they are, moreover, obliged to particularize many more of them. When, therefore, Mr. Wordsworth adds, "accordingly, such a language" (meaning, as before, the language of rustic life purified from provincialism) "arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets, who think that they are conferring honor upon themselves and their art in proportion as they indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression," it may be answered that the language which he has in view can be attributed to rustics with no greater right than the style of Hooker or Bacon to Tom Brown or Sir Roger L'Estrange.1 Doubtless, if what is peculiar to each were omitted in each, the result must needs be the same. Further, that the poet who uses an illogical diction, or a style fitted to excite only the low and changeable pleasure of wonder by means of groundless novelty, substitutes a language of folly and vanity, not for that of the rustic, but for that of good sense and natural feeling.

Here let me be permitted to remind the reader that the positions which I contro- 35 vert are contained in the sentences-"a selection of the real language of men;""the language of these men" (that is, men in low and rustic life) "has been adopted; I have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men. "Between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there neither is nor can be any essential difference." It is against these exclusively that my opposition is directed.

I object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation in the use of the word "real." Every man's language varies according to the extent of his knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and the depth or quickness of his feelings. Every man's language has, first, its individualities; secondly, the common properties of the class to which he belongs; and thirdly, words and phrases of universal use. The language of Hooker,

1 Brown's writings are almost entirely valueless imitations of the ancient writers; L'Estrange's writings are noted for their vulgarity.

Bacon, Bishop Taylor, and Burke differs from the common language of the learned class only by the superior number and novelty of the thoughts and relations which they had to convey. The language of Algernon Sidney differs not at all from that which every well-educated gentleman would wish to write, and (with due allowances for the undeliberateness, and less connected train, of thinking natural and proper to conversation) such as he would wish to talk. Neither one nor the other differ half as much from the general language of cultivated society, as the language of Mr. Wordsworth's homeliest composition differs from that of a common peasant. For "real," therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or lingua communis. And this, we have proved, is no more to be found in the phraseology of low and rustic life than in that of any other class. Omit the peculiarities of each, and the result of course must be common to all. And assuredly the omissions and changes to be made in the language of rustics, before it could be transferred to any species of poem, except the drama or other professed imitation, are at least as numerous and weighty as would be required in adapting to the same purpose the ordinary language of tradesmen manufacturers. Not to mention that the language so highly extolled by Mr. Wordsworth varies in every county, nay, in every village, according to the accidental character of the clergyman, the existence or nonexistence of schools; or even, perhaps, as the exciseman, publican, and barber happen to be, or not to be, zealous politicians and readers of the weekly newspaper pro bono publico. Anterior to cultivation the lingua communis of every country, as Dante has well observed,1 exists everywhere in parts, and nowhere as a whole.

Neither is the case rendered at all more tenable by the addition of the words, "in a state of excitement." For the nature of a man's words, where he is strongly affected by joy, grief, or anger, must necessarily depend on the number and quality of the general truths, conceptions, and images, and of the words expressing them, with which his mind had been previously stored. For the property of passion is not to create, but to set in increased activity. At least, whatever new connections of thoughts or images, or (which is equally, if not more than equally, the appropriate effect of

1 See De Vulgari Eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Speech), 1, 19.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

strong excitement) whatever generalizations of truth or experience the heat of passion may produce, yet the terms of their conveyance must have pre-existed in his former conversations, and are only collected and 5 crowded together by the unusual stimulation. It is indeed very possible to adopt in a poem the unmeaning repetitions, habitual phrases, and other blank counters, which an unfurnished or confused understanding 10 interposes at short intervals, in order to keep hold of his subject, which is still slipping from him, and to give him time for recollection; or, in mere aid of vacancy, as in the scanty companies of a country 15 stage the same player pops backwards and forwards, in order to prevent the appearance of empty spaces, in the processions of Macbeth, or Henry VIII. But what assistance to the poet, or ornament to the poem, these can supply, I am at a loss to conjecture. Nothing assuredly can differ either in origin or in mode more widely from the apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling, in which the passion is greater and of longer endurance than to be exhausted or satisfied by a single representation of the image or incident exciting it. Such repetitions I admit to be a beauty of the highest kind, as illustrated by Mr. Wordsworth himself from the song of Deborah. "At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead."'1

From CHAPTER XVIII

I conclude, therefore, that the attempt is impracticable; and that, were it not impracticable, it would still be useless. For 40 the very power of making the selection implies the previous possession of the language selected. Or where can the poet have lived? And by what rules could he direct his choice, which would not have enabled him to select and arrange his words by the light of his own judgment? We do not adopt the language of a class by the mere adoption of such words exclusively as that class would use, or at least understand; but likewise by following the order in which the words of such men are wont to succeed each other. Now this order, in the intercourse of uneducated men, is distinguished from the diction of their superiors in 55 knowledge and power, by the greater disjunction and separation in the component parts of that, whatever it be, which they 1 Judges, 5 :27,

wish to communicate. There is a want of
that prospectiveness of mind, that surview,
which enables a man to foresee the whole of
what he is to convey, appertaining to any
one point; and by this means so to subordi-
nate and arrange the different parts accord-
ing to their relative importance, as to convey
it at once, and as an organized whole.

Now I will take the first stanza, on which
I have chanced to open, in the Lyrical
Ballads. It is one of the most simple and
the least peculiar in its language:

In distant countries have I been,
And yet I have not often seen
A healthy man, a man full grown,
Weep in the public roads, alone.
But such a one, on English ground,
And in the broad highway, I met;
Along the broad highway he came,
His cheeks with tears were wet:
Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad;
And in his arms a lamb he had.1

The words here are doubtless such as are
current in all ranks of life; and of course
not less so in the hamlet and cottage than in
the shop, manufactory, college, or palace.
But is this the order in which the rustic
would have placed the words? I am griev-
ously deceived, if the following less compact
mode of commencing the same tale be not a
far more faithful copy. "I have been in a
and I don't know
many parts, far and near,
that I ever saw before a man crying by
himself in the public road; a grown man I
mean, that was neither sick nor hurt," etc.,
etc. But when I turn to the following
stanza in The Thorn:

At all times of the day and night
This wretched woman thither goes;
And she is known to every star,
And every wind that blows:

And there, beside the thorn, she sits,
When the blue day-light's in the skies,
And when the whirlwind's on the hill,
Or frosty air is keen and still,
And to herself she cries,

"Oh misery! Oh misery!
Oh woe is me! Oh misery!"

and compare this with the language of ordi-
nary men, or with that which I can conceive
at all likely to proceed, in real life, from
such a narrator as is supposed in the note
to the poem-compare it either in the suc-
cession of the images or of the sentences-I
am reminded of the sublime prayer and
hymn of praise which Milton, in opposition
to an established liturgy, presents as a fair
specimen of common extemporary devotion.
and such as we might expect to hear from
every self-inspired minister of a conventiele !2

1 The Last of the Flock, 1-10.

2 See Paradise Lost, 5, 152-208; also, Eikonoklastes, 16.

If Mr. Wordsworth have set forth principles of poetry which his arguments are 10 insufficient to support, let him and those who have adopted his sentiments be set right by the confutation of those arguments, and by the substitution of more philosophical principles. And still let the due credit be 15 given to the portion and importance of the truths which are blended with his theory; truths, the too exclusive attention to which had occasioned its errors by tempting him to carry those truths beyond their proper limits. If his mistaken theory have at all influenced his poetic compositions, let the effects be pointed out, and the instances given. But let it likewise be shown, how far the influence has acted; whether diffusively, or only by starts; whether the number and importance of the poems and passages thus infected be great or trifling compared with the sound portion; and lastly, whether they are inwoven into the texture of his works, or are loose and separable. The result of such a trial would evince beyond a doubt, what it is high time to announce decisively and aloud, that the supposed characteristics of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, whether ad- 35 mired or reprobated; whether they are simplicity or simpleness; faithful adherence to essential nature, or wilful selections from human nature of its meanest forms and under the least attractive associations; are 40 as little the real characteristics of his poetry at large, as of his genius and the constitution of his mind.

In a comparatively small number of poems, he chose to try an experiment; and 45 this experiment we will suppose to have failed. Yet even in these poems it is impossible not to perceive that the natural tend-. ency of the poet's mind is to great objects and elevated conceptions. The poem entitled 50 Fidelity is for the greater part written in language as unraised and naked as any per

1 The Excursion, I, 79.

haps in the two volumes. Yet take the following stanza and compare it with the preceding stanzas of the same poem.

There sometimes doth a leaping fish
Send through the tarn a lonely cheer;
The crags repeat the raven's croak,
In symphony austere;

Thither the rainbow comes-the cloud-
And mists that spread the flying shroud;
And sun-beams; and the sounding blast,
That, if it could, would hurry past;
But that enormous barrier holds it fast.

Or compare the four last lines of the concluding stanza with the former half.

Yes, proof was plain that, since the day
On which the traveller thus had died,
The dog had watched about the spot,
Or by his master's side:

How nourish'd there through such long time
He knows, who gave that love sublime,
And gave that strength of feeling, great
Above all human estimate!

Can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining which of these best represents the tendency and native character of the poet's genius? Will he not decide that the one was written because the poet would so write, and the other because he could not so entirely repress the force and grandeur of his mind, but that he must in some part or other of every composition write otherwise? In short, that his only disease is the being out of his element; like the swan, that, having amused himself, for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river's bank, soon returns to his own majestic movements on its reflecting and sustaining surface. Let it be observed that I am here supposing the imagined judge, to whom I appeal, to have already decided against the poet's theory, as far as it is different from the principles of the art, generally acknowledged.

I cannot here enter into a detailed examination of Mr. Wordsworth's works; but I will attempt to give the main results of my own judgment, after an acquaintance of many years, and repeated perusals. And though to appreciate the defects of a great mind it is necessary to understand previously its characteristic excellences, yet I have already expressed myself with sufficient fulness to preclude most of the ill effects that might arise from my pursuing a contrary arrangement. I will therefore commence with what I deem the prominent defects of his poems hitherto published.

The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I appear to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. Under this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

sentences of peculiar felicity (at all events striking and original) to a style, not only unimpassioned but undistinguished. He sinks too often and too abruptly to that style which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species; first, that which is peculiar to poetry; second, that which is only proper in prose; and third, the neutral or common to both. There have been works, such as Cowley's 10 Essay on Cromwell, in which prose and verse are intermixed (not as in the Consolation of Boetius, or the Argenis of Barclay, by the insertion of poems supposed to have been spoken or composed on occasions previously related in prose, but) the poet passing from one to the other, as the nature of the thoughts or his own feelings dictated. Yet this mode of composition does not satisfy a There is something un- 20 cultivated taste. pleasant in the being thus obliged to alternate states of feeling so dissimilar, and this too in a species of writing, the pleasure from which is in part derived from the preparation and previous expectation of the reader. A portion of that awkwardness is felt which hangs upon the introduction of songs in our modern comic operas; and to prevent which the judicious Metastasio (as to whose exquisite taste there can be no hesitation, whatever doubts may be entertained as to his poetic genius) uniformly placed the aria1 at the end of the scene, at the same time that he almost always raises and impassions the style of the recitative immediately preced- 35 ing. Even in real life, the difference is great and evident between words used as the arbitrary marks of thought, our smooth marketcoin of intercourse, with the image and

what in a different style would be the com-
manding colors, are here used as the means
of that gentle degradation requisite in order
to produce the effect of a whole. Where this
is not achieved in a poem, the metre merely
reminds the reader of his claims in order to
disappoint them; and where this defect oc-
curs frequently, his feelings are alternately
startled by anticlimax and hyperclimax.

I refer the reader to the exquisite stanzas
cited for another purpose1 from The Blind
Highland Boy; and then annex, as being in
my opinion instances of this disharmony in
style, the two following:

And one, the rarest, was a shell.

Which he, poor child, had studied well:
The shell of a green turtle, thin
And hollow;--you might sit therein,
It was so wide, and deep.

Our Highland Boy oft visited
The house which held this prize; and, led
By choice or chance, did thither come
One day, when no one was at home,
And found the door unbarred.

Or page 172, vol. I.2

"Tis gone-forgotten-let me do

My best. There was a smile or two

I can remember them, I see

The smiles worth all the world to me.

Dear Baby, I must lay thee down:

Thou troublest me with strange alarms;

Smiles hast thou, sweet ones of thine own;
I cannot keep thee in my arms;

For they confound me as it is,

I have forgot those smiles of his !

Or page 269, vol. I.3

And though little troubled with sloth,
Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest,
Drunken lark! thou would'st be loth
To be such a traveller as I.

Happy, happy liver!

With a soul as strong as a mountain river
Pouring out praise to th' Almighty Giver;
Joy and jollity be with us both!

superscription worn out by currency; and 40 Hearing thee or else some other,

those which convey pictures either borrowed
from one outward object to enliven and par-
ticularize some other; or used allegorically
to body forth the inward state of the person
speaking; or such as are at least the expo-
nents of his peculiar turn and unusual extent
of faculty. So much so indeed, that in the
social circles of private life we often find a
striking use of the latter put a stop to the
general flow of conversation, and by the ex-
citement arising from concentered attention
produce a sort of damp and interruption for
some minutes after. But in the perusal of
works of literary art, we prepare ourselves
for such language; and the business of the 551
writer, like that of a painter whose subject
requires unusual splendor and prominence,
is so to raise the lower and neutral tints, that
1 An elaborate melody sung by a single voice.

As merry a brother

I on the earth will go plodding on

By myself cheerfully till the day is done.

The incongruity which I appear to find in this passage, is that of the two noble lines in italics with the preceding and following. So vol. II, page 30.*

Close by a pond, upon the further side,
He stood alone; a minute's space I guess,
I watch'd him, he continuing motionless:
To the pool's further margin then I drew;
He being all the while before me full in view.

Compare this with the repetition of the same image, in the next stanza but two.

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