The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey Volume Ii Part 8

At first it was received with great approbation, as presenting a decisive front against Papal a.s.sumption; the Pope having recently issued a Bull, dividing England into twelve Sees, and appointing Dr. Wiseman, who was made a Cardinal, Archbishop of Westminster. But some expressions in Lord John's letter, especially the expression 'unworthy sons,'

applied to High Churchmen, aroused the active opposition of a cla.s.s, with whom, he never had much sympathy, looking on the att.i.tude and spirit of Drs. Pusey and Newman with unaffected dislike. Catholics, of course, and with them many moderate Roman Catholics, set up an agitation, and soon the Durham Letter was in everybody's mouth. De Quincey, of course, writes from his own peculiar philosophic point of view; and when he somewhat sarcastically alludes to the informality of addressing such a letter to the Bishop of Durham, and not to one or other of the Archbishops, he was either ignorant of, or of set purpose ignored, the exceptionally intimate relations in which Lord John had for many years stood to Dr. Maltby, such relations as might well have been accepted as explaining, if not justifying, such a departure from strict formal propriety. Lord Russell's biographer writes:

'Dr. Maltby, who in 1850 held the See of Durham, to which he had been promoted on Lord John's own recommendation in 1836, was one of Lord John's oldest and closest friends. He had been his constant correspondent for more than twenty years; he had supplied him with much information for the religious chapters of the "Affairs of Europe," and he had been his frequent counsellor on questions affecting the Church, and on the qualifications and characters of the men who were candidates for promotion in it. It was natural, therefore, to Lord John, to open his mind freely to the Bishop' (ii. 119, 120).

Lord John had added in a postscript: 'If you think it will be of any use, you have my full permission to publish this letter.'

FOOTNOTES:

[47] 'A houseless fugitive.' No one expression of petty malice has struck the generous as more unworthy, amongst the many insolences levelled at the Pope, than the ridicule so falsely fastened upon the mode of his escape from Rome, and upon the apparently tottering tenure of his temporal throne. His throne rocked with subterraneous heavings.

True, and was _his_ the only throne that rocked? Or which was it amongst continental thrones that did _not_ rock? But he escaped in the disguise of a livery servant. What odious folly! In such emergencies, no disguise can be a degradation. Do we remember our own Charles II. a.s.suming as many varieties of servile disguise as might have glorified a pantomime?

Do we remember Napoleon reduced to the abject resource of entreating one of the Commissioners to _whistle_, by way of misleading the infuriated mob into the belief that _l'empereur_ could not be supposed present in that carriage when such an indecency was attempted? As to the insecurity of his throne, we must consider that other thrones, and amongst them some of the first rank (as those of Turkey and Persia) redress their own weakness by means of alien strength. In the jealousies of England and France is found a bulwark against the overshadowing ambition of Russia.

_IX. THEORY AND PRACTICE:_

_Review of Kant's Essay on the Common Saying, that such and such a thing may be true in theory, but does not hold good in practice._

What was the value of Kant's essay upon this popular saying? Did it do much to clear up the confusion? Did it exterminate the vice in the language by subst.i.tuting a better _formula_? Not at all. Immanuel Kant was, we admit, the most potent amongst all known intellects for functions of pure abstraction. But also, viewed in two separate relations: first, in relation to all _practical_ interests (manners, legislation, government, spiritual religion); secondly, in relation to the arts of teaching, of explaining, of communicating any man's meaning where it happened to be dark or perplexed (above all, if that meaning were his own)--this same Kant was merely impotent; absolutely, and 'no mistake,' a child of darkness. Were it not that veneration and grat.i.tude cause us to suspend harsh words with regard to such a man, who has upon the greatest question affecting our human reason almost, we might say, _revealed_ the truth (viz., in his theory of the categories), we should describe him, and continually we are tempted to describe him as the most superhuman of recorded blockheads. Would it be credited, that at this time of day, actually in the very closing years of the eighteenth century, a man armed with some reading, but not too much study--and sixty years' profound meditation should treat it as a matter of obvious good sense that crowns and the succession to mighty empires ought to travel along the line of 'merit'; not exactly on the ground of personal beauty, or because the pretender was taller by the head than most of his subjects--no, _that_ would be the idea of a barbarous nation. Thank G.o.d!

a royal professor of Koenigsberg was above _that_. But on the a.s.sumption of an _appropriate_ merit, as if, for instance, he were wiser, if he were well grounded in Transcendentalism, if he had gained a prize for 'virtue,' surely, surely, such graces ought to ensure a sceptre to their honoured professor. Especially when we consider how _readily_ these personal qualities _prove_ themselves to the general understanding, and how cheerfully they are always _allowed_ by jealous and abominating compet.i.tors! Now turn from this haughty philosopher to a plain but most sensible and reflecting scholar--Isaac Casaubon. This man pretended to no philosophy, but a sincere, docile heart, much good sense, and patient observation of his own country's annals, which in the midst of belligerent papists, and very much against his own interest, had made him a good Church of England Protestant, made him also intensely attached to the doctrine of fixed succession under closer and clearer limitations than exist even in England. For a thousand years this one plain rule had been the amulet for liberating France (else so const.i.tutionally disposed to war) from the bloodiest of intestine contests. The man's career was pretty nearly concurrent as to its two limits with that of our own Shakespeare. Both he and Shakespeare were patronized, or, at least, countenanced by James the First, and both died many years before their patron. More than two centuries by a good deal have therefore pa.s.sed away since he spoke, but this is the emphatic testimony which even at that time, wanting the political experience superadded, he bore to the peace and consequently to the civilization won for his country by this divine maxim, this _lex trabalis_ (as so powerfully Casaubon calls it) of hereditary succession, the cornerstone, the main beam, in the framework of Gallic polity. These are the words: '_Occidebant et occidebantur_' (_i.e._, in those days of Roman Caesars) '_immanitate pari; c.u.m in armis esset jus omne regnandi_'--in the sword lay the arbitration of the t.i.tle. He speaks of the horrid murderous uniformity by which the Western Empire moved through five centuries (for it commenced in murder 42 years B.C. and lasted for 477 after Christ).

But why? Simply by default of any conventional rule, and the consequent necessity that men should fall back upon the t.i.tle of the strongest. For that ridiculous plausibility of Kant's superscribed with _Detur meliori_, it should never be forgotten, is so far from having any pacific tendencies, that originally, according to the eldest of Greek fables, it was [Greek: Eris], Eris, the G.o.ddess of dissension, no peace-making divinity, who threw upon a wedding-table the fatal apple thus ominously labelled. _Meliori_! in that one word went to wreck the harmony of the company. But for France, for the famous kingdom of the Fleur-de-lys, for the first-born child of Christianity, always so p.r.o.ne by her gentry to this sword-right, Nature herself had been silenced through a long millennium by this one almighty amulet. 'Inde' (that is, from this standing appeal made to personal vanity or to ambition amongst Roman n.o.bles)--'_inde_ haec tam sp.i.s.sa princ.i.p.atuum mutatio: qua re nulla alia miseris populis ne dici quidem aut fingi queat perniciosior.' So often, he goes on to say, as this dreadful curse entailed upon Rome Imperial comes into my mind, so often 'Franciae patriae meae felicitatem non possim non praedicare; quae sub imperio Regum s.e.xaginta trium (LXIII)--non dicam CLX annos' (which had been the upshot of time, the 'tottle,' upon sixty-three Imperatores) sed paullo minus CIO (one clear thousand, observe) 'et CC--rem omnibus seculis inauditam!--egit beata; fared prosperously; et egisset beatior, si sua semper bona intellexisset. Tanti est, jura regiae successionis trabali lege semel fixisse.' Aye, faithful and sagacious Casaubon! there lies the secret. In that word '_fixisse_'--the having settled once and for ever, the having laid down as beams and main timbers those adamantine rules of polity which leave no opening to doubt, no licence to caprice, and no temptation to individual ambition. We are all interested, Christendom to her very depths is interested, in the well-being and progress of this glorious realm--the kingdom of the lilies, the kingdom of Charlemagne and his paladins; from the very fierceness and angry vigilance of whose constant hostility to ourselves has arisen one chief re-agent in sustaining our own concurrent advancement. Under the torpor of a German patriotism, under the languor of a _sensus communis_ which is hardly at all developed, our own unrivalled energy would partially have gone to sleep. We are, therefore, deeply indebted to the rancorous animosity of France. And in this one article of a sound political creed we must be sensible that France, so dreadfully in arrear as to all other political wisdom, has run ahead of ourselves. For to what else was owing our ruinous war of the Two Roses than to an original demur in our courts of law whether the descendant of an elder son through the female line had a t.i.tle preferable or inferior to that of a descendant in the male line from a son confessedly _junior_? Whether the element to the right hand of uncontested superiority balanced or did _not_ balance that element to the left hand of undenied inferiority? How well for us English, and for the interests of our literature so cruelly barbarized within fifty years from the death of Chaucer (A.D. 1400), had we been able to intercept the murderous conflicts of Barnet, Towcester, Tewkesbury, St. Albans! How happy for Spain, had no modern line of French c.o.xcombs (not succeeding by any claim of blood, but under the arbitrary testament of a paralytic dotard) interfered to tamper with the old Castilian rules, so that no man knew whether the Spanish custom or the French innovation really governed. The Salic law or the interested abrogation of that law were the governing principle in strict const.i.tutional practice. To this point had the French dynasty brought matters, that no lawyer even could say on which side the line of separation lay the _onus_ of treason. We have ultimately so far improved our law of succession by continued limitations, that now even the religion of a prince has become one amongst his indispensable qualifications. But how matters once stood, we see written in letters of blood. And yet to this state of perilous uncertainty would Kant have reduced every nation under the conceit of mending their politics. 'Orbis terrarum dominatio'--_that_, says Casaubon, was the prize at stake. And how was it awarded? '_In parricidii praemium cedebat._' By tendency, by usage, by natural gravitation, this Imperial dignity pa.s.sed into a bounty upon murder, upon treasonable murder, upon parricidal murder. For the oath of fealty to the _sacra Caesaria majestas_ was of awful obligation, although the previous t.i.tle of the particular Caesar had been worth nothing at all. And the consequent condition of insecurity, the shadowy tenure of all social blessings, is described by Casaubon in language truly forcible.

Kant's purpose, as elsewhere we shall show, was not primarily with the maxim: that was but a secondary purpose. His direct and real object lay in one or two of the ill.u.s.trative cases under the maxim. With this particular obliquity impressed upon the movement of his own essay, we can have no right to quarrel. Kant had an author's right to deal with the question as best suited his own views. But with one feature of his treatment we quarrel determinately. He speaks of this most popular (and, we venture to add, most wise and beneficial) maxim, which arms men's suspicions against all that is merely speculative, on the ground that it is continually at war with the truth of practical results, as though it were merely and blankly a vulgar error, as though _sans phrase_ it might be dismissed for nonsense. But, because there is a casual inaccuracy in the wording of a great truth, we are not at liberty to deny that truth, to evade it, to 'ignore' it, or to confound a faulty expression with a meaning originally untenable. Professor Kant, of all men, was least ent.i.tled to plead blindness as to the substance in virtue of any vice affecting the form. No man knew better the art of translating so wise and beneficial a sentiment, though slightly disfigured by popular usage, into the appropriate philosophic terms. To this very sentiment it is, this eternal _protest_ against the plausible and the speculative, not as a flash sentiment for a gala dinner, but as a principle of action operative from age to age in all parts of the national conduct, that England is indebted more than she is to any other known influence for her stupendous prosperity on two separate lines of progress: first, on that of commercial enterprise; secondly, on that of political improvement. At this moment there are two forces acting upon Christendom which const.i.tute the principles of movement all over Europe: these are, the questions incident to representative government, and the mighty interests combined by commercial enterprise. Both have radiated from England as their centre. There only did the early models of either activity prosper. Through North America, as the daughter of England, these two forces have transplanted themselves to every princ.i.p.al region (except one) of the vast Southern American continent. Thus, to push our view no further, we behold one-half of the habitable globe henceforth yoked to the two sole forces of _permanent_ movement for nations, since war and religious contests are but intermitting forces; and these two principles, we repeat, have grown to what we now behold chiefly through the protection of this one great maxim which throws the hopes of the world, not upon what the scheming understanding can suggest, but upon what the most faithful experiment can prove.

_X. POPE AND DIDACTIC POETRY._

The 'Essay on Criticism' ill.u.s.trates the same profound misconception of the principle working at the root of Didactic Poetry as operated originally to disturb the conduct of the 'Essay on Man' by its author, and to disturb the judgments upon it by its critics. This 'Essay on Criticism' no more aims at unfolding the grounds and theory of critical rules applied to poetic composition, than does the _Epistola ad Pisones_ of Horace. But what if Horace and Pope both believed themselves the professional expounders _ex cathedra_ of these very grounds and this very theory? No matter if they did. n.o.body was less likely to understand their own purposes than themselves. Their real purposes were _immanent_, hidden in their poems; and from the poems they must be sought, not from the poets; who, generally, in proportion as the problem is one of a.n.a.lysis and evolution, for which, simply as the authors of the work, Horace and Pope were no better qualified than other people, and, as authors having that particular const.i.tution of intellect which notoriously they had, were much worse qualified than other people. We cannot possibly allow a man to argue upon the meaning or tendency of his own book, as against the evidence of the book itself. The book is unexceptionable authority: and, as against _that_, the author has no _locus standi_. Both Horace and Pope, however little they might be aware of it, were secretly governed by the same moving principle--viz., not to teach (which was impossible for two reasons)--but to use this very impossibility, this very want of flexibility in the subject to the ostensible purpose of the writers, as the resistance of the atmosphere from which they would derive the motion of their wings. That it was impossible in a poem seriously to teach the principles of criticism, we venture to affirm on a double argument: 1st, that the teaching, if in earnest, must be _polemic_: and how alien from the spirit of poetry to move eternally through controversial discussions! 2ndly, that the teaching, from the very necessities of metre, must be _eclectic_; innumerable things must be suppressed; and how alien from the spirit of science to move by discontinuous links according to the capricious bidding of poetic decorum! Divinity itself is not more entangled in the necessities of fighting for every step in advance, and maintaining the ground by eternal preparation for hostility, than is philosophic criticism; a discipline so little matured, that at this day we possess in any language nothing but fragments and hints towards its construction. To dispute in verse has been celebrated as the accomplishment of Lucretius, of Sir John Davies, of Dryden: but then this very disputation has always been eclectic; not exhausting even the _essential_ arguments; but playing gracefully with those only which could promise a brilliant effect. Such a mimic disputation is like a histrionic fencing match, where the object of the actor is not in good earnest to put his antagonist to the sword, but to exhibit a few elegant pa.s.ses in _carte_ and _tierce_, not forgetting the secondary object of displaying to advantage any diamonds and rubies that may chance to scintillate upon his sword-hand.

Had Pope, or had Horace, been requested to explain the _rationale_ of his own poem on Criticism, it is pretty certain that each (and from the same causes) would have talked nonsense. The very gifts so rare and so exquisite by which these extraordinary men were adorned--the graceful negligence, the delicacy of tact, the impa.s.sioned _abandon_[48] upon subjects suited to their _modes_ of geniality, though not absolutely or irreversibly incompatible with the sterner gifts of energetic attention and powerful abstraction, were undoubtedly not in alliance with them.

The two sets of gifts did not exert a reciprocal stimulation. As well might one expect from a man, because he was a capital shot, that he should write the best essay on the theory of projectiles. Horace and Pope, therefore, would have talked so absurdly in justifying or explaining their own works, that we--naturally impatient of nonsense on the subject of criticism, as our own _metier_--should have said, 'Oh, dear gentlemen, stand aside for a moment, and we will right you in the eyes of posterity: at which bar, if either of you should undertake to be his own advocate, he will have a fool for his client.'

We do and must concede consideration even to the one-sided pleadings of an advocate. But it is under the secret a.s.sumption of the concurrent pleadings equally exaggerated on the adverse side. Without this counterweight, how false would be our final summation of the evidence upon most of the great state trials! Nay, even with both sides of the equation before us, how perplexing would be that summation generally, unless under the moderating guidance of a neutral and indifferent eye; the eye of the judge in the first instance, and subsequently of the upright historian--whether watching the case from the station of a contemporary, or reviewing it from his place in some later generation.

Now what we wish to observe about Criticism is, that with just the same temptation to personal partiality and even injustice in extremity, it offers a much wider lat.i.tude to the distortion of things, facts, grounds, and inferences. In fact, with the very same motives to a personal bias swerving from the equatorial truth, it makes a much wider opening for giving effect to those motives. Insincerity in short, and every mode of contradicting the truth, is far more possible under a professed devotion to a general principle than any personal expression could possibly be.

If the logic of the case be steadily examined, a definition of didactic poetry will emerge the very opposite to that popularly held: it will appear that in didactic poetry the teaching is not the _power_, but the _resistance_. It is difficult to teach even playfully or mimically in reconciliation with poetic effect: and the object is to wrestle with this difficulty. It is as when a man selects an absurd or nearly impracticable subject, his own chin,[49] suppose, for the organ of a new music: he does not select it as being naturally allied to music, but for the very opposite reason--as being eminently alien from music, that his own art will have the greater triumph in taming this reluctancy into any sort of obedience to a musical purpose. It is a wrestle with all but physical impossibility. Many arts and mechanic processes in human life present intermitting aspects of beauty, scattered amongst others that are utterly without interest of that sort. For instance, in husbandry, where many essential processes are too mean to allow of any poetic treatment or transfiguration, others are picturesque, and recommended by remembrances of childhood to most hearts. How beautiful, for instance, taken in all its variety of circ.u.mstances, the gorgeous summer, the gay noontide repast, the hiding of children in the hay, the little toy of a rake in the hands of infancy, is the hay-harvest from first to last!

Such cases wear a Ja.n.u.s aspect, one face connecting them with gross uses of necessity, another connecting them with the gay or tender sentiments that accidents of a.s.sociation, or some purpose of Providence, may have thrown about them as a robe of beauty. Selecting therefore what meets his own purpose, the poet proceeds by _resisting_ and rejecting all those parts of the subject which would tend to defeat it. But at least, it will be said, he does not resist those parts of the subject which he selects. Yes, he _does_; even those parts he resists utterly in their real and primary character, viz., as uses indispensable to the machinery of man's animal life; and adopts them only for a collateral beauty attached to the accidents of their evolution; a beauty oftentimes not even guessed by those who are most familiar with them as practical operations. It is as if a man, having a learned eye, should follow the track of armies--careless of the political changes which they created, or of the interests (all neutral as regarded any opinion of _his_) which they disturbed--but alive to every form of beauty connected with these else unmeaning hostilities--alive to the beauty of their battle-array, to the pomp of their manoeuvres, to the awning of smoke-wreaths surging above the artilleries, to the gleaming of sabres and bayonets at intervals through loopholes in these gathering smoky ma.s.ses. This man would abstract from the politics and doctrines of the hostile armies, as much as the didactic poet from the doctrinal part of his theme.

From this attempt to rectify the idea of didactic poetry, it will be seen at once why Pope failed utterly and inevitably in the 'Essay on Man.' The subject was too directly and commandingly interesting to furnish any opening to that secondary and playful interest which arises from the management by art and the subjugation of an intractable theme.

The ordinary interest of didactic poetry is derived from the _repellent_ qualities of the subject, and consequently from the dexterities of the conflict with what is doubtful, indifferent, unpromising. Not only was there no _resistance_ in the subject to the grandeur of poetry, but, on the contrary, this subject offered so much grandeur, was so pathetic and the amplitude of range so vast as to overwhelm the powers of any poet and any audience, by its exactions. That was a fault in one direction.

But a different fault was--that the subject allowed no power of selection. In ordinary didactic poetry, as we have just been insisting, you sustain the interest by ignoring all the parts which will not bear a steady gaze. Whatever fascinates the eye, or agitates the heart by mimicry of life is selected and emphasized, and what is felt to be intractable or repellent is authoritatively set aside. The poet has an unlimited discretion. But on a theme so great as man he has no discretion at all. This resource is denied. You _can_ give the truth only by giving the whole truth. In treating a common didactic theme you may neglect merely transitional parts with as much ease as benefit, because they are familiar enough to be pre-supposed, and are besides essential only in the real process, but not at all in the mimic process of description; since A and C, that in the _reality_ could reach one another only through B, may yet be intelligible as regards their beauty without any intermediation of B. The ellipsis withdraws a deformity, and does not generally create an obscurity: either the obscurity is none at all, or is irrelevant to the real purpose of beauty, or may be treated sufficiently by a line or two of adroit explanation. But in a poem treating so vast a theme as man's relations to his own race, to his habitation the world, to G.o.d his maker, and to all the commands of the conscience, to the hopes of the believing heart, and to the eternal self-conflicts of the intellect, it is clear that the purely transitional parts, essential to the understanding of the whole, cannot be omitted or dispensed with at the beck of the fancy or the necessities of the metre and rhyme.

There is also an objection to Man (or any other theme of that grandeur) as the subject of a didactic poem, which is more subtle, and which for that reason we have reserved to the last. In the ordinary specimens of didactic poetry, the theme and its sub-divisions wear (as we have already observed) a double-faced or Ja.n.u.s aspect; one derived from the direct experience of life, the other from the reflex experience of it.

And the very reason why one face _does_ affect you is because the other does _not_. Thus a Morland farmyard, a Flemish tavern, or a clean kitchen in an unpretending house seen by ruddy firelight reflected from pewter ware, scarcely interests the eye at all in the reality; but for that very reason it _does_ interest us all in the mimicry. The very fact of seeing an object framed as it were, insulated, suddenly _relieved_ to the steady consciousness, which all one's life has been seen _un_framed, _not_ called into relief, but depressed into the universal level of subconsciousness, awakens a pleasurable sense of surprise. But now Man is too great a subject to allow of any unrelieved aspects. What the reader sees he must see directly and without insulation, else falseness and partiality are immediately apparent.

FOOTNOTES:

[48] We speak here of Horace in his lyrical character, and of Pope as he revealed himself in his tender and pathetic sincerities, not in his false, counterfeit scorn. Horace, a good-natured creature, that laughed eternally in his satire, was probably sincere. Pope, a benign one, could not have been sincere in the bitter and stinging personalities of his satires. Horace seems to be personal, but is not. Neither is Juvenal; the names he employs are mere allegoric names. _Draco_ is any b.l.o.o.d.y fellow; _Favonius_ is any sycophant: but Pope is very different.

[49] 'His own chin,' chin-chopping, as practised in our days, was not an original invention; it was simply a restoration from the days of Queen Anne.

_XI. SHAKSPEARE AND WORDSWORTH_.

I take the opportunity of referring to the work of a very eloquent Frenchman, who has brought the names of Wordsworth and Shakspeare into connection, partly for the sake of pointing out an important error in the particular criticism on Wordsworth, but still more as an occasion for expressing the grat.i.tude due to the French author for the able, anxious, and oftentimes generous justice which he has rendered to English literature. It is most gratifying to a thoughtful Englishman--that precisely from that period when the mighty drama of the French Revolution, like the Deluge, or like the early growth of Christianity, or like the Reformation, had been in operation long enough to form a new and more thoughtful generation in France, has the English literature been first studied in France, and first appreciated. Since 1810, when the generation moulded by the Revolution was beginning to come forward on the stage of national action, a continued series of able writers amongst the French--ardent, n.o.ble, profound--have laid aside their nationality in the most generous spirit for the express purpose of investigating the great English models of intellectual power, locally so near to their own native models, and virtually in such polar remoteness.

Chateaubriand's intense enthusiasm for Milton, almost monomaniac in the opinion of some people, is notorious. This, however, was less astonis.h.i.+ng: the pure marble grandeur of Milton, and his cla.s.sical severity, naturally recommended themselves to the French taste, which can always understand the beauty of proportion and regular or teleologic tendencies. It was with regard to the anomalous, and to that sort of vaster harmonies which from moving upon a wider scale are apt at first sight to pa.s.s for discords, that a new taste needed to be created in France. Here Chateaubriand showed himself a Frenchman of the old leaven.

Milton would always have been estimated in France. He needed only to be better known. Shakspeare was the _natural_ stone of offence: and with regard to _him_ Chateaubriand has shown himself eminently blind. His reference to Shakspeare's _female_ gallery, so divine as that Pantheon really is, by way of most forcibly expressing his supposed inferiority to Racine (who strictly speaking has no female pictures at all, but merely _umrisse_ or outlines in pencil) is the very perfection of human blindness. But many years ago the writers in _Le Globe_, either by direct papers on the drama or indirectly by way of references to the acting of Kean, etc., showed that even as to Shakspeare a new heart was arising in France. M. Raymond de Vericour, though necessarily called off to a more special consideration of the Miltonic poetry by the very promise of his t.i.tle (_Milton, et la Poesie Epique_: Paris et Londres, 1838), has in various places shown a far more comprehensive sense of poetic truth than Chateaubriand. His sensibility, being originally deeper and trained to move upon a larger compa.s.s, vibrates equally under the chords of the Shakspearian music. Even he, however, has made a serious mistake as to Wordsworth in his relation to Shakspeare. At p.

420 he says: 'Wordsworth qui (de meme que Byron) sympathise pen cordialement avec Shakspeare, se prosterne cependant comme Byron devant le _Paradis perdu_; Milton est la grande idole de Wordsworth; il ne craint pas quelquefois de se comparer lui-meme a son geant;' (never unless in the single accident of praying for a similar audience--'fit audience let me find though few'); 'et en verite ses sonnets ont souvent le meme esprit prophetique, la meme elevation sacree que ceux de l'Homere anglais.' There cannot be graver mistakes than are here brought into one focus. Lord Byron cared little for the 'Paradise Lost,' and had studied it not at all. On the other hand, Lord Byron's pretended disparagement of Shakspeare by comparison with the meagre, hungry and bloodless Alfieri was a pure stage trick, a momentary device for expressing his Apemantus misanthropy towards the English people. It happened at the time he had made himself unpopular by the circ.u.mstances of his private life: these, with a morbid appet.i.te for engaging public attention, he had done his best to publish and to keep before the public eye; whilst at the same time he was very angry at the particular style of comments which they provoked. There was no fixed temper of anger towards him in the public mind of England: but he believed that there was. And he took his revenge through every channel by which he fancied himself to have a chance for reaching and stinging the national pride; 1st, by ridiculing the English pretensions to higher principle and national morality; but _that_ failing, 2ndly, by disparaging Shakspeare; 3rdly, on the same principle which led Dean Swift to found the first lunatic hospital in Ireland, viz.:

'To shew by one satiric touch No nation wanted it so much.'

Lord Byron, without any _sincere_ opinion or care upon the subject one way or other, directed in his will--that his daughter should not marry an Englishman: this bullet, he fancied, would take effect, even though the Shakspeare bullet had failed. Now, as to Wordsworth, he values both in the highest degree. In a philosophic poem, like the 'Excursion,' he is naturally led to speak more pointedly of Milton: but his own affinities are every way more numerous and striking to Shakspeare. For this reason I have myself been led to group him with Shakspeare. In those two poets alike is seen the infinite of Painting: in aeschylus and Milton alike are seen the simplicities and stern sublimiities of Sculpture.

_XII. CRITICISM ON SOME OF COLERIDGE'S CRITICISMS OF WORDSWORTH._

One fault in Wordsworth's 'Excursion' suggested by Coleridge, but luckily quite beyond all the resources of tinkering open to William Wordsworth, is--in the choice of a Pedlar as the presiding character who connects the s.h.i.+fting scenes and persons in the 'Excursion.' Why should not some man of more authentic station have been complimented with that place, seeing that the appointment lay altogether in Wordsworth's gift?

But really now who could this have been? Garter King-at-Arms would have been a great deal too showy for a working hero. A railway-director, liable at any moment to abscond with the funds of the company, would have been viewed by all readers with far too much suspicion for the tranquillity desirable in a philosophic poem. A colonel of Horse Marines seems quite out of the question: what his proper functions may be, is still a question for the learned; but no man has supposed them to be philosophic. Yet on the other hand, argues Coleridge, would not '_any_ wise and beneficent old man,' without specifying his rank, have met the necessities of the case? Why, certainly, if it is _our_ opinion that Coleridge wishes to have, we conceive that such an old gentleman, advertising in the _Times_ as 'willing to make himself generally useful,' might have had a chance of dropping a line to William Wordsworth. But still we don't know. Beneficent old gentlemen are sometimes great scamps. Men, who give themselves the best of characters in morning papers, are watched occasionally in a disagreeable manner by the police. Itinerant philosophers are absolutely not understood in England. Intruders into private premises, even for grand missionary purposes, are constantly served with summary notices to quit. Mrs.

Quickly gave a first-rate character to Simple; but for all _that_, Dr.

Caius with too much show of reason demanded, 'Vat shall de honest young man do in my closet?' And we fear that Coleridge's beneficent old man, lecturing _gratis_ upon things in general, would be regarded with illiberal jealousy by the female servants of any establishment, if he chose to lecture amongst the family linen. 'What shall de wise beneficent old Monsieur do amongst our was.h.i.+ng-tubs?' We are perfectly confounded by the excessive blindness of Coleridge and nearly all other critics on this matter. 'Need the rank,' says Coleridge, 'have been at all particularized, when nothing follows which the knowledge of that rank is to explain or ill.u.s.trate?' Nothing to explain or ill.u.s.trate!

Why, good heavens! it is only by the most distinct and positive information lodged with the constable as to who and what the vagrant was, that the leading philosopher in the 'Excursion' could possibly have saved himself over and over again from pa.s.sing the night in the village 'lock-up,' and generally speaking in handcuffs, as one having too probably a design upon the village hen-roosts. In the sixth and seventh books, where the scene lies in the churchyard amongst the mountains, it is evident that the philosopher would have been arrested as a resurrection-man, had he not been known to substantial farmers as a pedlar 'with some money.' To be clothed therefore with an intelligible character and a local calling was as indispensable to the free movements of the Wanderer when out upon a philosophical spree, as a pa.s.sport is to each and every traveller in France. Dr. Franklin, who was a very indifferent philosopher, but very great as a pedlar, and as cunning as Niccolo Machiavelli (which means as cunning as old Nick), was quite aware of this necessity as a tax upon travellers; and at every stage, on halting, he used to stand upright in his stirrups, crying aloud, 'Gentlemen and Ladies, here I am at your service; Benjamin Franklin by name; once (but _that_ was in boyhood) a devil; viz., in the service of a printer; next a compositor and reader to the press; at present a master-printer. My object in this journey is--to arrest a knave who will else be off to Europe with 200 of my money in his breeches-pocket: that is my final object: my immediate one is--dinner; which, if there is no just reason against it, I beg that you will no longer interrupt.' Yet still, though it is essential to the free circulation of a philosopher that he should be known for what he is, the reader thinks that at least the philosopher might be known advantageously as regards his social standing. No, he could not. And we speak seriously. How _could_ Coleridge and so many other critics overlook the overruling necessities of the situation? They argue as though Wordsworth had selected a pedlar under some abstract regard for his office of buying and selling: in which case undoubtedly a wholesale man would have a better chance for doing a 'large stroke of business' in philosophy than this huckstering retailer. Wordsworth however fixed on a pedlar--not for his commercial relations--but in spite of them. It was not for the _essential_ of his calling that a pedlar was promoted to the post of central philosopher in his philosophic poem, but for an accident indirectly arising out of it.

This accident lay in the natural privilege which a pedlar once had through all rural districts of common access to rich and poor, and secondly, in the leisurely nature of his intercourse. Three conditions there were for fulfilling that ministry of philosophic intercourse which Wordsworth's plan supposed. First, the philosopher must be clothed with a _real_ character, known to the actual usages of the land, and not imaginary: else this postulate of fiction at starting would have operated with an unrealizing effect upon all that followed. Next, it must be a character that was naturally fitted to carry the bearer through a large circuit of districts and villages; else the _arena_ would be too narrow for the large survey of life and conflict demanded: lastly, the character must be one recommending itself alike to all ranks in tracts remote from towns, and procuring an admission ready and gracious to him who supports that character. Now this supreme advantage belonged in a degree absolutely unique to the character of pedlar, or (as Wordsworth euphemistically terms it) of 'wandering merchant.' In past generations the _materfamilias_, the young ladies, and the visitors within their gates, were as anxious for his periodic visit as the humblest of the domestics. They received him therefore with the condescending kindness of persons in a state of joyous expectation: young hearts beat with the antic.i.p.ation of velvets and brocades from Genoa, lace veils from the Netherlands, jewels and jewelled trinkets; for you are not to think that, like Autolycus, he carried only one trinket. They were sincerely kind to him, being sincerely pleased.

Besides, it was politic to a.s.sume a gracious manner, since else the pedlar might take out his revenge in the price of his wares; fifteen per cent. would be the least he could reasonably clap on as a premium and _solatium_ to himself for any extra hauteur. This gracious style of intercourse, already favourable to a tone of conversation more liberal and unreserved than would else have been conceded to a vagrant huckster, was further improved by the fact that the pedlar was also the main retailer of news. Here it was that a real advantage offered itself to any mind having that philosophic interest in human characters, struggles, and calamities, which is likely enough to arise amongst a cla.s.s of men contemplating long records of chance and change through their wanderings, and so often left to their own meditations upon them by long tracts of solitude. The gossip of the neighbouring districts, whether tragic or comic, would have a natural interest from its locality. And such records would lead to ill.u.s.tration from other cases more remote--losing the interest of neighbourhood, but compensating that loss by their deeper intrinsic hold upon the sensibilities. Ladies of the highest rank would suffer their reserve to thaw in such interviews; besides that, before unresisting humility and inferiority too apparent even haughtiness the most intractable usually abates its fervour.

Coleridge also allows himself, for the sake of argument, not merely to a.s.sume too hastily, but to magnify too inordinately. Daniel, the poet, really _was_ called the 'well-languaged' (p. 83, vol. ii.), but by whom?

Not, as Hooker was called the 'judicious,' or Bede the 'venerable,' by whole generations; but by an individual. And as to the epithet of 'prosaic,' we greatly doubt if so much as one individual ever connected it with Daniel's name.

But the whole dispute on Poetic Diction is too deep and too broad for an occasional or parenthetic notice. It is a dispute which renews itself in every cultivated language;[50] and even, in its application to different authors within the same language, as for instance, to Milton, to Shakspeare, or to Wordsworth, it takes a special and varied aspect.

Declining this, as far too ample a theme, we wish to say one word, but an urgent word and full of clamorous complaint, upon the other branch.

This dispute, however, is but one of two paths upon which the Biographical Literature approaches the subject of Wordsworth: the other lies in the direct critical examination of Wordsworth's poems. As to this, we wish to utter one word, but a word full of clamorous complaint.

That the criticisms of Coleridge on William Wordsworth were often false, and that they betrayed fatally the temper of one who never _had_ sympathized heartily with the most exquisite parts of the Lyrical Ballads, might have been a record injurious only to Coleridge himself.

But unhappily these perverse criticisms have proved the occasions of ruin to some admirable poems; and, as if that were not enough, have memorialized a painful feature of weakness in Wordsworth's judgment. If ever on this earth there was a man that in his prime, when saluted with contumely from all quarters, manifested a stern deafness to criticism--it was William Wordsworth. And we thought the better of him by much for this haughty defiance to groundless judgments. But the cloak, which Boreas could not tear away from the traveller's resistance, oftentimes the too genial Phoebus has filched from his amiable spirit of compliance. These criticisms of Coleridge, generally so wayward and one-sided, but sometimes desperately opposed to every mode of truth, have been the means of exposing in William Wordsworth a weakness of resistance--almost a criminal facility in surrendering his own rights--which else would never have been suspected. We will take one of the worst cases. Readers acquainted with Wordsworth as a poet, are of course acquainted with his poem (originally so fine) upon Gipseys. To a poetic mind it is inevitable--that every spectacle, embodying any remarkable quality in a remarkable excess, should be unusually impressive, and should seem to justify a poetic record. For instance, the solitary life of one[51] who should tend a lighthouse could not fail to move a very deep sympathy with his situation. Here for instance we read the ground of Wordsworth's 'Glen Almain.' Did he care for torpor again, lethargic inertia? Such a spectacle as _that_ in the midst of a nation so morbidly energetic as our own, was calculated to strike some few chords from the harp of a poet so vigilantly keeping watch over human life.

FOOTNOTES:

[50] Valckenaer, in his famous 'Dissertation on the Phoenissae,' notices such a dispute as having arisen upon the diction of Euripides. The question is old and familiar as to the quality of the pa.s.sion in Euripides, by comparison with that in Sophocles. But there was a separate dispute far less notorious as to the quality of the _lexis_.