we admire in The Deserted Village of Goldsmith, or The Vanity of Human Wishes of Johnson. If he can be said to have imitated the manner of any author, it is Goldsmith, indeed, who has been the object of his imitation; and yet his general train of thinking, and his views of society, are so extremely opposite, that, when The Village was first published, it was commonly considered as an antidote or an answer to the more captivating representations of The Deserted Village. Compared with this celebrated author, he will be found, we think, to have more vigor and less delicacy; and while he must be admitted to be inferior in the fine finish and uniform beauty of his composition, we cannot help considering him superior, both in the variety and the truth of his pictures. Instead of that uniform tint of pensive tenderness which overspreads the whole poetry of Goldsmith, we find in Mr. Crabbe many gleams of gaiety and humor. Though his habitual views of life are more gloomy than those of his rival, his poetical temperament seems far more cheerful; and when the occasions of sorrow and rebuke are gone by, he can collect himself for sarcastic pleasantry, or unbend in innocent playfulness. His diction, though generally pure and powerful, is sometimes harsh, and sometimes quaint; and he has occasionally admitted a couplet or two in a state so unfinished as to give a character of inelegance to the passages in which they occur. With a taste less disciplined and less fastidious than that of Goldsmith, he has, in our apprehension, a keener eye for observation, and a readier hand for the delineation of what he has observed. There is less poetical keeping in his whole performance; but the groups of which it consists are conceived, we think, with equal genius, and drawn with greater spirit as well as far greater fidelity. 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 It is not quite fair, perhaps, thus to draw a detailed parallel between a living poet, and one whose reputation has been sealed by death, and by the immutable sentence of a surviving generation. Yet there are so few of his contemporaries to whom Mr. Crabbe bears any resemblance that we can 50 scarcely explain our opinion of his merit without comparing him to some of his predecessors. There is one set of writers, indeed, from whose works those of Mr. Crabbe might receive all that elucidation which results from contrast, and from an entire opposition in all points of taste and opinion. We allude now to the Wordsworths, and the Southeys, and Coleridges, 55 885 and all that ambitious fraternity, that, with good intentions and extraordinary talents, are laboring to bring back our poetry to the fantastical oddity and puling childishness of Withers, Quarles, or Marvel. These gentlemen write a great deal about rustic life, as well as Mr. Crabbe; and they even agree with him in dwelling much on its discomforts; but nothing can be more opposite than the views they take of the subject, or the manner in which they execute their representations of them. Mr. Crabbe exhibits the common people of England pretty much as they are, and as they must appear to every one who will take the trouble of examining into their condition, at the same time that he renders his sketches in a very high degree interesting and beautiful by selecting what is most fit for description, by grouping them into such forms as must catch the attention or awake the memory, and by scattering over the whole such traits of moral sensibility, of sarcasm, and of deep reflection, as every one must feel to be natural, and own to be powerful. The gentlemen of the new school, on the other hand, scarcely ever condescend to take their subjects from any description of persons at all known to the common inhabitants of the world; but invent for themselves certain whimsical and unheard-of beings, to whom they impute some fantastical combination of feelings, and then labor to excite our sympathy for them, either by placing them in incredible situations, or by some strained and exaggerated moralization of a vague and tragical description. Mr. Crabbe, in short, shows us something which we have all seen, or may see, in real life; and draws from it such feelings and such reflections as every human being must acknowledge that it is calculated to excite. He delights us by the truth, and vivid and picturesque beauty of his representations, and by the force and pathos of the sensations with which we feel that they are connected. Mr. Wordsworth and his associates, on the other hand, introduce us to beings whose existence was not previously suspected by the acutest observers of nature; and excite an interest for them— where they do excite any interest-more by an eloquent and refined analysis of their own capricious feelings, than by any obvious or intelligible ground of sympathy in their situation. Those who are acquainted with the Lyrical Ballads, or the more recent publications of Mr. Wordsworth, will scarcely deny the justice of this representation; but in order to vindicate it to such as do not enjoy that advantage, we must beg leave to make a few hasty references to the former, and by far the least exceptionable of those productions. 4 3 5 10 A village schoolmaster, for instance, is a The sighs which Matthew heav'd were sighs Yet sometimes, when the secret cup Of still and serious thought went round He seem'd as if he drank it up, He felt with spirit so profound. Thou soul of God's best earthly mould, etc. 20 25 30 The sports of childhood, and the untimely death of promising youth, is also a common topic of poetry. Mr. Wordsworth has made some blank verse about it; but, instead of the delightful and picturesque sketches with which so many authors of modern talents have presented us on this inviting subject, all that he is pleased to communicate of his rustic child is, that he used to amuse himself with shouting to the owls, and hearing them answer. To make amends for this brevity, the process of his mimicry is most accurately described. -With fingers interwoven, both hands This is all we hear of him; and for the sake of this one accomplishment, we are told that the author has frequently stood mute, and gazed on his grave for half an hour together! Love, and the fantasies of lovers, have afforded an ample theme to poets of all ages. Mr. Wordsworth, however, has thought fit to compose a piece, illustrating this copious subject by one single thought. A lover trots away to see his mistress one fine evening, gazing all the way on the moon; when he comes to her door, O mercy! to myself I cried, 35 And there the poem ends! 40 A frail damsel again is a character common enough in all poems, and one upon which many fine and pathetic lines have been expended. Mr. Wordsworth has written more than three hundred on the subject; but, instead of new images of tenderness, or deli- 45 cate representation of intelligible feelings, he has contrived to tell us nothing whatever of the unfortunate fair one, but that her name is Martha Ray, and that she goes up to the top of a hill, in a red cloak, and cries, "O misery!" All the rest of the poem is filled with a description of an old thorn and a pond, and of the silly stories which the neighboring old women told about them. 1 See The Deserted Village, 193-218. 2 See The Schoolmistress (p. 40). 3 See The Village, 1, 296 ff. (p. 159). See Matthew, The Two April Mornings, and The Matthew, 21 ff. (p. 239). The Thorn (p. 224). 50 55 Now, we leave it to any reader of common candor and discernment to say whether these representations of character and sentiment are drawn from that eternal and universal standard of truth and nature, which every one is knowing enough to recognize, and no one great enough to depart from with impunity; or whether they are not formed, as we have ventured to allege, upon certain fantastic and affected peculiarities in the mind or fancy of the author, into which it is most improbable that many of his readers will enter, and which cannot, in some cases, be comprehended without much effort and explanation. Instead of multiplying instances of these wide and wilful aberrations from ordinary nature, it may be more satisfactory to produce the author's own admission of the narrowness of the plan upon which he writes, and of the very extraordinary circumstances which he himself 1 The Boy of Winander (There Was a Boy), The Prelude, 5, 364 ff. (p. 247). Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known (p. 237). sometimes thinks it necessary for his readers to keep in view, if they would wish to understand the beauty or propriety of his delineations. A pathetic tale of guilt or superstition may be told, we are apt to fancy, by the poet himself, in his general character of poet, with full as much effect as by any other person. An old nurse, at any rate, or a monk or parish clerk, is always at hand to 10 give grace to such a narration. None of these, however, would satisfy Mr. Wordsworth. He has written a long poem of this sort, in which he thinks it indispensably necessary to apprise the reader, that he has 15 endeavored to represent the language and sentiments of a particular character-of which character, he adds, "the reader will have a general notion, if he has ever known a man, a captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who being past the middle age of life, has retired upon an annuity, or small independent income, to some village or country town, of which he was not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live!' '2 20 25 30 Now, we must be permitted to doubt whether, among all the readers of Mr. Wordsworth (few or many), there is a single individual who has had the happiness of knowing a person of this very peculiar description; or who is capable of forming any sort of conjecture of the particular disposition and turn of thinking such a combination of attributes would be apt to pro- 35 duce. To us, we will confess, the annonces appears as ludicrous and absurd as it would be in the author of an ode or an epic to say, "Of this piece the reader will necessarily form a very erroneous judgment unless he 40 is apprised that it was written by a pale man in a green coat-sitting cross-legged on an oaken stool-with a scratch on his nose, and a spelling dictionary on the table.'' 1 The Thorn (p. 225). See Coleridge's Biographia Quoted from Wordsworth's note to The Thorn "Some of our readers may have a curiosity to From these childish and absurd affectations, we turn with pleasure to the manly sense and correct picturing of Mr. Crabbe; and, after being dazzled and made giddy with the elaborate raptures and obscure originalities of these new artists, it is refreshing to meet again with the spirit and nature of our old masters, in the nervous pages of the author now before us. From ALISON'S ESSAYS ON THE NATURE AND PRINCIPLES OF TASTE 1 It is unnecessary, however, to pursue these criticisms, or, indeed, this hasty review of the speculation of other writers, any farther. The few observations we have already made, will enable the intelligent reader, both to understand in a general way what has been already done on the subject, and in some degree prepare him to appreciate the merits of that theory, substantially the same with Mr. Alison 's, which we shall now proceed to illustrate somewhat more in detail. The basis of it is, that the beauty which we impute to outward objects is nothing more than the reflection of our own inward emotions, and is made up entirely of certain little portions of love, pity, or other affections, which have been connected with these objects, and still adhere, as it were, to them, and move us anew whenever they are pre There is a thorn-it looks so old, In truth you'd find it hard to say A wretched thing forlorn. Like rock or stone, it is o'ergrown Up from the earth these mosses creep, To drag it to the ground; And this, it seems, is Nature, and Pathos, and 1 Jeffrey has pointed out the objections to the most important theories of beauty from the earliest times to his own day. He has given especial attention to the theories advanced by Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) in his Philosophical Essays. and by Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824) in his Analytical Inquiry Into the Nature and Principles of Taste. 15 20 25 35 With regard to the first of these points, it fortunately is not necessary either to enter into any tedious details, or to have recourse to any nice distinctions. All sensations that are not absolutely indifferent, and are, at the same time, either agreeable when experienced by ourselves, or attractive when contemplated in others, may form the foundation of the emotions of sublimity or beauty. The love of sensation seems to be the ruling appetite of human nature; and many sensations, in which the painful may be thought to predominate, are consequently sought for with avidity, and recollected with interest, even in our own persons. In the persons of others, emotions still more painful are contemplated with eagerness and delight: and therefore we must not be surprised to find that many of the pleasing sensations of 30 beauty or sublimity resolve themselves ultimately into recollections of feelings that may appear to have a very opposite character. The sum of the whole is, that every feeling which it is agreeable to experience, to recall, or to witness, may become the source of beauty in external objects, when it is so connected with them as that their appearance reminds us of that feeling. Now, in real life, and from daily experience and 40 observation, we know that it is agreeable, in the first place, to recollect our own pleasurable sensations, or to be enabled to form a lively conception of the pleasures of other men, or even of sentient beings of any description. We know likewise, from the same sure authority, that there is a certain delight in the remembrance of our past, or the conception of our future emotions, even though attended with great pain, provided the pain be not forced too rudely on the mind, and be softened by the accompaniment of any milder feeling. And finally, we know, in the same manner, that the spectacle or conception of the emotions of others, even when in a high degree painful, is extremely interesting and attractive, and draws us away, not only from the consideration of indifferent objects, but even from the pursuit of 45 50 55 light or frivolous enjoyments. All these are plain and familiar facts, of the existence of which, however they may be explained, no one can entertain the slightest doubt-and into which, therefore, we shall have made no inconsiderable progress, if we can resolve the more mysterious fact of the emotions we receive from the contemplation of sublimity or beauty. Our proposition then is, that these emotions are not original emotions, nor produced directly by any material qualities in the objects which excite them; but are reflections, or images, of the more radical and familiar emotions to which we have already alluded; and are occasioned, not by any inherent virtue in the objects before us, but by the accidents, if we may so express ourselves, by which these may have been enabled to suggest or recall to us our past sensations or sympathies. We might almost venture, indeed, to lay it down as an axiom, that, except in the plain and palpable case of bodily pain or pleasure, we can never be interested in anything but the fortunes of sentient beings;-and that everything partaking of the nature of mental emotion, must have for its object the feelings, past, present, or possible, of something capable of sensation. Independent, therefore, of all evidence, and without the help of any explanation, we should have been apt to conclude that the emotions of beauty and sublimity must have for their objects the sufferings or enjoyments of sentient beings; and to reject, as intrinsically absurd and incredible, the supposition that material objects, which obviously do neither hurt nor delight the body, should yet excite, by their mere physical qualities, the very powerful emotions which are sometimes excited by the spectacle of beauty. Of the feelings, by their connection with which external objects become beautiful, we do not think it necessary to speak more minutely; and, therefore, it only remains, under this preliminary view of the subject, to explain the nature of that connection by which we conceive this effect to be produced. Here, also, there is but little need for minuteness, or fulness of enumeration. Almost every tie, by which two objects can be bound together in the imagination, in such a manner as that the presentment of the one shall recall the memory of the other;-or, in other words, almost every possible relation which can subsist between such objects, may serve to connect the things we call sublime and beautiful, with feelings that are interesting 5 or delightful. It may be useful, however, to class these bonds of association between mind and matter in a rude and general way. It appears to us, then, that objects are sublime or beautiful, first, when they are the natural signs and perpetual concomitants of pleasurable sensations, or, at any rate, of some lively feeling of emotion in ourselves or in some other sentient beings; or, secondly, when they are the arbitrary or 10 accidental concomitants of such feelings; or, thirdly, when they bear some analogy or fanciful resemblance to things with which these emotions are necessarily connected. In endeavoring to illustrate the nature of these several relations, we shall be led to lay before our readers some proofs that appear to us satisfactory of the truth of the general theory. 15 25 30 The most obvious and the strongest asso- 20 ciation that can be established between inward feelings and external objects is where the object is necessarily and universally connected with the feeling by the law of nature, so that it is always presented to the senses when the feeling is impressed upon the mind -as the sight or the sound of laughter, with the feeling of gaiety-of weeping, with distress-of the sound of thunder, with ideas of danger and power. Let us dwell for a moment on the last instance.-Nothing, perhaps, in the whole range of nature, is more strikingly and universally sublime than the sound we have just mentioned; yet it seems obvious that the sense of sublimity is pro- 35 duced, not by any quality that is perceived by the ear, but altogether by the impression of power and of danger that is necessarily made upon the mind, whenever that sound is heard. That it is not produced by any 40 peculiarity in the sound itself, is certain, from the mistakes that are frequently made with regard to it. The noise of a cart rattling over the stones, is often mistaken for thunder; and as long as the mistake lasts, this very vulgar and insignificant noise is actually felt to be prodigiously sublime. It is so felt, however, it is perfectly plain, merely because it is then associated with ideas of prodigious power and undefined danger; and the sublimity is accordingly destroyed, the moment the association is dissolved, though the sound itself and its effect on the organ, continue exactly the same. This, therefore, is an instance in which sublimity is distinctly proved to consist, not in any physical quality of the object to which it is ascribed, but in its necessary connection with that vast and un 45 50 55 controlled Power which is the natural object of awe and veneration. Hitherto we have spoken of the beauty of external objects only. But the whole difficulty of the theory consists in its application to them. If that be once adjusted, the beauty of immaterial objects can occasion no perplexity. Poems and other compositions in words are beautiful in proportion as they are conversant with beautiful objects or as they suggest to us, in a more direct way, the moral and social emotions. on which the beauty of all objects depends. Theorems and demonstrations, again, are beautiful according as they excite in us emotions of admiration for the genius and intellectual power of their inventors, and images of the magnificent and beneficial ends to which such discoveries may be applied;-and mechanical contrivances are beautiful when they remind us of similar talents and ingenuity, and at the same time impress us with a more direct sense of their vast utility to mankind, and of the great additional conveniences with which life is consequently adorned. In all cases, therefore, there is the suggestion of some interesting conception or emotion associated with a present perception, in which it is apparently confounded and embodiedand this, according to the whole of the preceding deduction, is the distinguishing characteristic of beauty. Having now explained, as fully as we think necessary, the grounds of that opinion as to the nature of beauty which appears to be most conformable to the truth, we have only to add a word or two as to the necessary consequences of its adoption upon several other controversies of a kindred description. In the first place, then, we conceive that it establishes the substantial identity of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque; and consequently puts an end to all controversy that is not purely verbal, as to the difference of those several qualities. Every material object that interests us, without actually hurting or gratifying our bodily feelings, must do so, according to this theory, in one and the same manner,-that is, by suggesting or recalling some emotion or affection of ourselves or some other sentient being, and presenting, to our imagination at least, some natural object of love, pity, admiration, or awe. The interest of material objects, therefore, is |
