1 (return)
[ The authority of Milton and
Shakespeare may be usefully pointed out to young authors. In the Comus and
other early poems of Milton there is a superfluity of double epithets;
while in the Paradise Lost we find very few, in the Paradise Regained
scarce any. The same remark holds almost equally true of the Love’s Labour
Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece, compared with the
Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet of our great Dramatist. The rule for
the admission of double epithets seems to be this: either that they should
be already denizens of our language, such as blood-stained,
terror-stricken, self-applauding: or when a new epithet, or one found in
books only, is hazarded, that it, at least, be one word, not two words
made one by mere virtue of the printers hyphen. A language which, like the
English, is almost without cases, is indeed in its very genius unfitted
for compounds. If a writer, every time a compounded word suggests itself
to him, would seek for some other mode of expressing the same sense, the
chances are always greatly in favour of his finding a better word. Ut
tanquam scopulum sic fugias insolens verbum, is the wise advice of Caesar
to the Roman Orators, and the precept applies with double force to the
writers in our own language. But it must not be forgotten, that the same
Caesar wrote a Treatise for the purpose of reforming the ordinary language
by bringing it to a greater accordance with the principles of logic or
universal grammar.]
2 (return)
[ See the criticisms on the
Ancient Mariner, in the Monthly and Critical Reviews of the first volume
of the Lyrical Ballads.]
3 (return)
[ This is worthy of ranking
as a maxim, (regula maxima,) of criticism. Whatever is translatable in
other and simpler words of the same language, without loss of sense or
dignity, is bad. N.B.—By dignity I mean the absence of ludicrous and
debasing associations.]
4 (return)
[ The Christ’s Hospital
phrase, not for holidays altogether, but for those on which the boys are
permitted to go beyond the precincts of the school.]
5 (return)
[ I remember a ludicrous
instance in the poem of a young tradesman:
“No more will I endure love’s pleasing pain,
Or round my heart’s leg tie his galling chain.”]
6 (return)
[ Cowper’s Task was published
some time before the Sonnets of Mr. Bowles; but I was not familiar with it
till many years afterwards. The vein of satire which runs through that
excellent poem, together with the sombre hue of its religious opinions,
would probably, at that time, have prevented its laying any strong hold on
my affections. The love of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful
religion; and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature.
The one would carry his fellow-men along with him into nature; the other
flies to nature from his fellow-men. In chastity of diction however, and
the harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him;
yet still I feel the latter to have been the born poet.]
7 (return)
[ SONNET I
Pensive at eve, on the hard world I mused,
And m poor heart was sad; so at the Moon
I gazed and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon
Eve saddens into night! mine eyes perused
With tearful vacancy the dampy grass
That wept and glitter’d in the paly ray
And I did pause me on my lonely way
And mused me on the wretched ones that pass
O’er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas!
Most of myself I thought! when it befel,
That the soothe spirit of the breezy wood
Breath’d in mine ear: “All this is very well,
But much of one thing, is for no thing good.”
Oh my poor heart’s inexplicable swell!
SONNET II
Oh I do love thee, meek Simplicity!
For of thy lays the lulling simpleness
Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress,
Distress the small, yet haply great to me.
’Tis true on Lady Fortune’s gentlest pad
I amble on; and yet I know not why
So sad I am! but should a friend and I
Frown, pout and part, then I am very sad.
And then with sonnets and with sympathy
My dreamy bosom’s mystic woes I pall:
Now of my false friend plaining plaintively,
Now raving at mankind in general;
But whether sad or fierce, ’tis simple all,
All very simple, meek Simplicity!
SONNET III
And this reft house is that, the which he built,
Lamented Jack! and here his malt he pil’d,
Cautious in vain! these rats, that squeak so wild,
Squeak not unconscious of their father’s guilt.
Did he not see her gleaming thro’ the glade!
Belike ’twas she, the maiden all forlorn.
What the she milk no cow with crumpled horn,
Yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she stray’d:
And aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight
Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
And thro’ those brogues, still tatter’d and betorn,
His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white.
Ah! thus thro’ broken clouds at night’s high noon
Peeps to fair fragments forth the full-orb’d harvest-moon!
The following anecdote will not be wholly out of place here, and may perhaps amuse the reader. An amateur performer in verse expressed to a common friend a strong desire to be introduced to me, but hesitated in accepting my friend’s immediate offer, on the score that “he was, he must acknowledge, the author of a confounded severe epigram on my Ancient Mariner, which had given me great pain.” I assured my friend that, if the epigram was a good one, it would only increase my desire to become acquainted with the author, and begged to hear it recited: when, to my no less surprise than amusement, it proved to be one which I had myself some time before written and inserted in the “Morning Post,” to wit—
To the Author of the Ancient Mariner.
Your poem must eternal be,
Dear sir! it cannot fail,
For ’tis incomprehensible,
And without head or tail.]
8 (return)
[ —
Of old things all are over old,
Of good things none are good enough;—
We’ll show that we can help to frame
A world of other stuff.
I too will have my kings, that take
From me the sign of life and death:
Kingdoms shall shift about, like clouds,
Obedient to my breath.
Wordsworth’s Rob Roy.—Poet. Works, vol. III. p. 127.]
9 (return)
[ Pope was under the common
error of his age, an error far from being sufficiently exploded even at
the present day. It consists (as I explained at large, and proved in
detail in my public lectures,) in mistaking for the essentials of the
Greek stage certain rules, which the wise poets imposed upon themselves,
in order to render all the remaining parts of the drama consistent with
those, that had been forced upon them by circumstances independent of
their will; out of which circumstances the drama itself arose. The
circumstances in the time of Shakespeare, which it was equally out of his
power to alter, were different, and such as, in my opinion, allowed a far
wider sphere, and a deeper and more human interest. Critics are too apt to
forget, that rules are but means to an end; consequently, where the ends
are different, the rules must be likewise so. We must have ascertained
what the end is, before we can determine what the rules ought to be.
Judging under this impression, I did not hestitate to declare my full
conviction, that the consummate judgment of Shakespeare, not only in the
general construction, but in all the details, of his dramas, impressed me
with greater wonder, than even the might of his genius, or the depth of
his philosophy. The substance of these lectures I hope soon to publish;
and it is but a debt of justice to myself and my friends to notice, that
the first course of lectures, which differed from the following courses
only, by occasionally varying the illustrations of the same thoughts, was
addressed to very numerous, and I need not add, respectable audiences at
the Royal institution, before Mr. Schlegel gave his lectures on the same
subjects at Vienna.]
10 (return)
[ In the course of one of
my Lectures, I had occasion to point out the almost faultless position and
choice of words, in Pope’s original compositions, particularly in his
Satires and moral Essays, for the purpose of comparing them with his
translation of Homer, which, I do not stand alone in regarding, as the
main source of our pseudo-poetic diction. And this, by the bye, is an
additional confirmation of a remark made, I believe, by Sir Joshua
Reynolds, that next to the man who forms and elevates the taste of the
public, he that corrupts it, is commonly the greatest genius. Among other
passages, I analyzed sentence by sentence, and almost word by word, the
popular lines,
As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, etc.
(Iliad. B. viii.)
much in the same way as has been since done, in an excellent article on Chalmers’s British Poets in the Quarterly Review. The impression on the audience in general was sudden and evident: and a number of enlightened and highly educated persons, who at different times afterwards addressed me on the subject, expressed their wonder, that truth so obvious should not have struck them before; but at the same time acknowledged—(so much had they been accustomed, in reading poetry, to receive pleasure from the separate images and phrases successively, without asking themselves whether the collective meaning was sense or nonsense)—that they might in all probability have read the same passage again twenty times with undiminished admiration, and without once reflecting, that
astra phaeinaen amphi selaenaen
phainet aritretea—
(that is, the stars around, or near the full moon, shine pre-eminently bright) conveys a just and happy image of a moonlight sky: while it is difficult to determine whether, in the lines,
Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
And stars unnumber’d gild the glowing pole,
the sense or the diction be the more absurd. My answer was; that, though I had derived peculiar advantages from my school discipline, and though my general theory of poetry was the same then as now, I had yet experienced the same sensations myself, and felt almost as if I had been newly couched, when, by Mr. Wordsworth’s conversation, I had been induced to re-examine with impartial strictness Gray’s celebrated Elegy. I had long before detected the defects in The Bard; but the Elegy I had considered as proof against all fair attacks; and to this day I cannot read either without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm. At all events, whatever pleasure I may have lost by the clearer perception of the faults in certain passages, has been more than repaid to me by the additional delight with which I read the remainder.
Another instance in confirmation of these remarks occurs to me in the Faithful Shepherdess. Seward first traces Fletcher’s lines;
More foul diseases than e’er yet the hot
Sun bred thro’ his burnings, while the dog
Pursues the raging lion, throwing the fog
And deadly vapour from his angry breath,
Filling the lower world with plague and death,
to Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar,
The rampant lion hunts he fast
With dogs of noisome breath;
Whose baleful barking brings, in haste,
Pine, plagues, and dreary death!
He then takes occasion to introduce Homer’s simile of the appearance of Achilles’ mail to Priam compared with the Dog Star; literally thus—
“For this indeed is most splendid, but it was made an evil sign, and brings many a consuming disease to wretched mortals.” Nothing can be more simple as a description, or more accurate as a simile; which, (says Seward,) is thus finely translated by Mr. Pope
Terrific Glory! for his burning breath
Taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death!
Now here—(not to mention the tremendous bombast)—the Dog Star, so called, is turned into a real dog, a very odd dog, a fire, fever, plague, and death-breathing, red, air-tainting dog: and the whole visual likeness is lost, while the likeness in the effects is rendered absurd by the exaggeration. In Spenser and Fletcher the thought is justifiable; for the images are at least consistent, and it was the intention of the writers to mark the seasons by this allegory of visualized puns.]
11 (return)
[ Especially in this age of
personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the
meanest insects are worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if
only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity
in the tail;—when the most vapid satires have become the objects of
a keen public interest, purely from the number of contemporary characters
named in the patch-work notes, (which possess, however, the comparative
merit of being more poetical than the text,) and because, to increase the
stimulus, the author has sagaciously left his own name for whispers and
conjectures.]
12 (return)
[ If it were worth while to
mix together, as ingredients, half the anecdotes which I either myself
know to be true, or which I have received from men incapable of
intentional falsehood, concerning the characters, qualifications, and
motives of our anonymous critics, whose decisions are oracles for our
reading public; I might safely borrow the words of the apocryphal Daniel;
“Give me leave, O SOVEREIGN PUBLIC, and I shall slay this dragon without
sward or staff.” For the compound would be as the “pitch, and fat, and
hair, which Daniel took, and did seethe them together, and made lumps
thereof; this he put in the dragon’s mouth, and so the dragon burst in
sunder; and Daniel said, LO, THESE ARE THE GODS YE WORSHIP.”]
13 (return)
[ This is one instance
among many of deception, by the telling the half of a fact, and omitting
the other half, when it is from their mutual counteraction and
neutralization, that the whole truth arises, as a tertium aliquid
different from either. Thus in Dryden’s famous line
Great wit (meaning genius) to madness sure is near allied.
Now if the profound sensibility, which is doubtless one of the components of genius, were alone considered, single and unbalanced, it might be fairly described as exposing the individual to a greater chance of mental derangement; but then a more than usual rapidity of association, a more than usual power of passing from thought to thought, and image to image, is a component equally essential; and to the due modification of each by the other the genius itself consists; so that it would be just as fair to describe the earth, as in imminent danger of exorbitating, or of falling into the sun, according as the assertor of the absurdity confined his attention either to the projectile or to the attractive force exclusively.]
14 (return)
[ For as to the devotees of
the circulating libraries, I dare not compliment their pass-time, or
rather kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of
beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for
itself nothing but laziness, and a little mawkish sensibility; while the
whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of
mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro
tempore fixes, reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one mans
delirium, so as to people the barrenness of a hundred other brains
afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all
definite purpose. We should therefore transfer this species of amusement—(if
indeed those can be said to retire a musis, who were never in their
company, or relaxation be attributable to those, whose bows are never
bent)—from the genus, reading, to that comprebensive class
characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet coexisting
propensities of human nature, namely, indulgence of sloth, and hatred of
vacancy. In addition to novels and tales of chivalry to prose or rhyme,
(by which last I mean neither rhythm nor metre) this genus comprises as
its species, gaming, swinging, or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting
over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tete-a-tete quarrels after dinner
between husband and wife; conning word by word all the advertisements of a
daily newspaper in a public house on a rainy day, etc. etc. etc.]
15 (return)
[ Ex. gr. Pediculos e
capillis excerptos in arenam jacere incontusos; eating of unripe fruit;
gazing on the clouds, and (in genere) on movable things suspended in the
air; riding among a multitude of camels; frequent laughter; listening to a
series of jests and humorous anecdotes,—as when (so to modernize the
learned Saracen’s meaning) one man’s droll story of an Irishman inevitably
occasions another’s droll story of a Scotchman, which again, by the same
sort of conjunction disjunctive, leads to some etourderie of a Welshman,
and that again to some sly hit of a Yorkshireman;—the habit of
reading tomb-stones in church-yards, etc. By the bye, this catalogue,
strange as it may appear, is not insusceptible of a sound psychological
commentary.]
16 (return)
[ I have ventured to call
it unique; not only because I know no work of the kind in our language,
(if we except a few chapters of the old translation of Froissart)—none,
which uniting the charms of romance and history, keeps the imagination so
constantly on the wing, and yet leaves so much for after reflection; but
likewise, and chiefly, because it is a compilation, which, in the various
excellencies of translation, selection, and arrangement, required and
proves greater genius in the compiler, as living in the present state of
society, than in the original composers.]
17 (return)
[ It is not easy to
estimate the effects which the example of a young man as highly
distinguished for strict purity of disposition and conduct, as for
intellectual power and literary acquirements, may produce on those of the
same age with himself, especially on those of similar pursuits and
congenial minds. For many years, my opportunities of intercourse with Mr.
Southey have been rare, and at long intervals; but I dwell with unabated
pleasure on the strong and sudden, yet I trust not fleeting, influence,
which my moral being underwent on my acquaintance with him at Oxford,
whither I had gone at the commencement of our Cambridge vacation on a
visit to an old school-fellow. Not indeed on my moral or religious
principles, for they had never been contaminated; but in awakening the
sense of the duty and dignity of making my actions accord with those
principles, both in word and deed. The irregularities only not universal
among the young men of my standing, which I always knew to be wrong, I
then learned to feel as degrading; learned to know that an opposite
conduct, which was at that time considered by us as the easy virtue of
cold and selfish prudence, might originate in the noblest emotions, in
views the most disinterested and imaginative. It is not however from
grateful recollections only, that I have been impelled thus to leave these
my deliberate sentiments on record; but in some sense as a debt of justice
to the man, whose name has been so often connected with mine for evil to
which he is a stranger. As a specimen I subjoin part of a note, from The
Beauties of the Anti-jacobin, in which, having previously informed the
public that I had been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching Deism, at a
time when, for my youthful ardour in defence of Christianity, I was
decried as a bigot by the proselytes of French phi-(or to speak more truly
psi-)-losophy, the writer concludes with these words; “since this time he
has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor
children fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex his disce his friends,
LAMB and SOUTHEY.” With severest truth it may be asserted, that it would
not be easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic affections
than those whose names were thus printed at full length as in the same
rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his
children fatherless and his wife destitute! Is it surprising, that many
good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would have done
adverse to a party, which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of
such atrocious calumnies? Qualis es, nescio; sed per quales agis, scio et
doleo.]
18 (return)
[ In opinions of long
continuance, and in which we have never before been molested by a single
doubt, to be suddenly convinced of an error, is almost like being
convicted of a fault. There is a state of mind, which is the direct
antithesis of that, which takes place when we make a bull. The bull namely
consists in the bringing her two incompatible thoughts, with the
sensation, but without the sense, of their connection. The psychological
condition, or that which constitutes the possibility, of this state, being
such disproportionate vividness of two distant thoughts, as extinguishes
or obscures the consciousness of the intermediate images or conceptions,
or wholly abstracts the attention from them. Thus in the well known bull,
“I was a fine child, but they changed me:” the first conception expressed
in the word “I,” is that of personal identity—Ego contemplans: the
second expressed in the word “me,” is the visual image or object by which
the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal
identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have
existed,—Ego contemplatus. Now the change of one visual image for
another involves in itself no absurdity, and becomes absurd only by its
immediate juxta-position with the fast thought, which is rendered possible
by the whole attention being successively absorbed to each singly, so as
not to notice the interjacent notion, changed, which by its incongruity,
with the first thought, I, constitutes the bull. Add only, that this
process is facilitated by the circumstance of the words I, and me, being
sometimes equivalent, and sometimes having a distinct meaning; sometimes,
namely, signifying the act of self-consciousness, sometimes the external
image in and by which the mind represents that act to itself, the result
and symbol of its individuality. Now suppose the direct contrary state,
and you will have a distinct sense of the connection between two
conceptions, without that sensation of such connection which is supplied
by habit. The man feels as if he were standing on his head though he
cannot but see that he is truly standing on his feet. This, as a painful
sensation, will of course have a tendency to associate itself with him who
occasions it; even as persons, who have been by painful means restored
from derangement, are known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their
physician.]
19 (return)
[ Without however the
apprehensions attributed to the Pagan reformer of the poetic republic. If
we may judge from the preface to the recent collection of his poems, Mr.
W. would have answered with Xanthias—
su d’ ouk edeisas ton huophon ton rhaematon,
kai tas apeilas; XAN, ou ma Di’, oud’ ephrontisa.—Ranae, 492-3.
And here let me hint to the authors of the numerous parodies, and pretended imitations of Mr. Wordsworth’s style, that at once to conceal and convey wit and wisdom in the semblance of folly and dulness, as is done in the Clowns and Fools, nay even in the Dogberry, of our Shakespeare, is doubtless a proof of genius, or at all events of satiric talent; but that the attempt to ridicule a silly and childish poem, by writing another still sillier and still more childish, can only prove (if it prove any thing at all) that the parodist is a still greater blockhead than the original writer, and, what is far worse, a malignant coxcomb to boot. The talent for mimicry seems strongest where the human race are most degraded. The poor, naked half human savages of New Holland were found excellent mimics: and, in civilized society, minds of the very lowest stamp alone satirize by copying. At least the difference which must blend with and balance the likeness, in order to constitute a just imitation, existing here merely in caricature, detracts from the libeller’s heart, without adding an iota to the credit of his understanding.]
20 (return)
[ —
The Butterfly the ancient Grecians made
The soul’s fair emblem, and its only name—
But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade
Of mortal life! For to this earthly frame
Ours is the reptile’s lot, much toil, much blame,
Manifold motions making little speed,
And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.]
21 (return)
[ Mr. Wordsworth, even in
his two earliest poems, The Evening Walk and the Descriptive Sketches, is
more free from this latter defect than most of the young poets his
contemporaries. It may however be exemplified, together with the harsh and
obscure construction, in which he more often offended, in the following
lines:—
“’Mid stormy vapours ever driving by,
Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry;
Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer,
Denied the bread of life the foodful ear,
Dwindles the pear on autumn’s latest spray,
And apple sickens pale in summer’s ray;
Ev’n here content has fixed her smiling reign
With independence, child of high disdain.”
I hope, I need not say, that I have quoted these lines for no other purpose than to make my meaning fully understood. It is to be regretted that Mr. Wordsworth has not republished these two poems entire.]
22 (return)
[ This is effected either
by giving to the one word a general, and to the other an exclusive use; as
“to put on the back” and “to indorse;” or by an actual distinction of
meanings, as “naturalist,” and “physician;” or by difference of relation,
as “I” and “Me” (each of which the rustics of our different provinces
still use in all the cases singular of the first personal pronoun). Even
the mere difference, or corruption, in the pronunciation of the same word,
if it have become general, will produce a new word with a distinct
signification; thus “property” and “propriety;” the latter of which, even
to the time of Charles II was the written word for all the senses of both.
There is a sort of minim immortal among the animalcula infusoria, which
has not naturally either birth, or death, absolute beginning, or absolute
end: for at a certain period a small point appears on its back, which
deepens and lengthens till the creature divides into two, and the same
process recommences in each of the halves now become integral. This may be
a fanciful, but it is by no means a bad emblem of the formation of words,
and may facilitate the conception, how immense a nomenclature may be
organized from a few simple sounds by rational beings in a social state.
For each new application, or excitement of the same sound, will call forth
a different sensation, which cannot but affect the pronunciation. The
after recollections of the sound, without the same vivid sensation, will
modify it still further till at length all trace of the original likeness
is worn away.]
23 (return)
[ I ought to have added,
with the exception of a single sheet which I accidentally met with at the
printer’s. Even from this scanty specimen, I found it impossible to doubt
the talent, or not to admire the ingenuity, of the author. That his
distinctions were for the greater part unsatisfactory to my mind, proves
nothing against their accuracy; but it may possibly be serviceable to him,
in case of a second edition, if I take this opportunity of suggesting the
query; whether he may not have been occasionally misled, by having
assumed, as to me he appears to have done, the non-existence of any
absolute synonymes in our language? Now I cannot but think, that there are
many which remain for our posterity to distinguish and appropriate, and
which I regard as so much reversionary wealth in our mother tongue. When
two distinct meanings are confounded under one or more words,—(and
such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is progressive and of
course imperfect)—erroneous consequences will be drawn, and what is
true in one sense of the word will be affirmed as true in toto. Men of
research, startled by the consequences, seek in the things themselves—(whether
in or out of the mind)—for a knowledge of the fact, and having
discovered the difference, remove the equivocation either by the
substitution of a new word, or by the appropriation of one of the two or
more words, which had before been used promiscuously. When this
distinction has been so naturalized and of such general currency that the
language does as it were think for us—(like the sliding rule which
is the mechanic’s safe substitute for arithmetical knowledge)—we
then say, that it is evident to common sense. Common sense, therefore,
differs in different ages. What was born and christened in the Schools
passes by degrees into the world at large, and becomes the property of the
market and the tea-table. At least I can discover no other meaning of the
term, common sense, if it is to convey any specific difference from sense
and judgment in genere, and where it is not used scholastically for the
universal reason. Thus in the reign of Charles II the philosophic world
was called to arms by the moral sophisms of Hobbes, and the ablest writers
exerted themselves in the detection of an error, which a school-boy would
now be able to confute by the mere recollection, that compulsion and
obligation conveyed two ideas perfectly disparate, and that what
appertained to the one, had been falsely transferred to the other by a
mere confusion of terms.]
24 (return)
[ I here use the word idea
in Mr. Hume’s sense on account of its general currency amongst the English
metaphysicians; though against my own judgment, for I believe that the
vague use of this word has been the cause of much error and more
confusion. The word, idea, in its original sense as used by Pindar,
Aristophanes, and in the Gospel of St. Matthew, represented the visual
abstraction of a distant object, when we see the whole without
distinguishing its parts. Plato adopted it as a technical term, and as the
antithesis to eidolon, or sensuous image; the transient and perishable
emblem, or mental word, of the idea. Ideas themselves he considered as
mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative, and exempt from time. In
this sense the word Idea became the property of the Platonic school; and
it seldom occurs in Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as
according to Plato, or as Plato says. Our English writers to the end of
the reign of Charles II or somewhat later, employed it either in the
original sense, or Platonically, or in a sense nearly correspondent to our
present use of the substantive, Ideal; always however opposing it, more or
less to image, whether of present or absent objects. The reader will not
be displeased with the following interesting exemplification from Bishop
Jeremy Taylor. “St. Lewis the King sent Ivo Bishop of Chartres on an
embassy, and he told, that he met a grave and stately matron on the way
with a censer of fire in one band, and a vessel of water in the other; and
observing her to have a melancholy, religious, and phantastic deportment
and look, he asked her what those symbols meant, and what she meant to do
with her fire and water; she answered, My purpose is with the fire to burn
paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may
serve God purely for the love of God. But we rarely meet with such spirits
which love virtue so metaphysically as to abstract her from all sensible
compositions, and love the purity of the idea.” Des Cartes having
introduced into his philosophy the fanciful hypothesis of material ideas,
or certain configurations of the brain, which were as so many moulds to
the influxes of the external world,—Locke adopted the term, but
extended its signification to whatever is the immediate object of the
mind’s attention or consciousness. Hume, distinguishing those
representations which are accompanied with a sense of a present object
from those reproduced by the mind itself, designated the former by
impressions, and confined the word idea to the latter.]
25 (return)
[ I am aware, that this
word occurs neither in Johnson’s Dictionary nor in any classical writer.
But the word, to intend, which Newton and others before him employ in this
sense, is now so completely appropriated to another meaning, that I could
not use it without ambiguity: while to paraphrase the sense, as by render
intense, would often break up the sentence and destroy that harmony of the
position of the words with the logical position of the thoughts, which is
a beauty in all composition, and more especially desirable in a close
philosophical investigation. I have therefore hazarded the word,
intensify: though, I confess, it sounds uncouth to my own ear.]
26 (return)
[ And Coxcombs vanquish
Berkeley by a grin.]
27 (return)
[ Videlicet; Quantity,
Quality, Relation, and Mode, each consisting of three subdivisions. See
Kritik der reinen Vernunft. See too the judicious remarks on Locke and
Hume.]
28 (return)
[ St. Luke x. 21.]
29 (return)
[ An American Indian with
little variety of images, and a still scantier stock of language, is
obliged to turn his few words to many purposes, by likenesses so clear and
analogies so remote as to give his language the semblance and character of
lyric poetry interspersed with grotesques. Something not unlike this was
the case of such men as Behmen and Fox with regard to the Bible. It was
their sole armoury of expressions, their only organ of thought.]
30 (return)
[ The following burlesque
on the Fichtean Egoisnsus may, perhaps, be amusing to the few who have
studied the system, and to those who are unacquainted with it, may convey
as tolerable a likeness of Fichte’s idealism as can be expected from an
avowed caricature.
The Categorical Imperative, or the annunciation of the new Teutonic God, EGOENKAIPAN: a dithyrambic ode, by QUERKOPF VON KLUBSTICK, Grammarian, and Subrector in Gymmasic.
Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus,
(Speak English, Friend!) the God Imperativus,
Here on this market-cross aloud I cry:
I, I, I! I itself I!
The form and the substance, the what and the why,
The when and the where, and the low and the high,
The inside and outside, the earth and the sky,
I, you and he, and he, you and I,
All souls and all bodies are I itself I!
All I itself I!
(Fools! a truce with this starting!)
All my I! all my I!
He’s a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!
Thus cried the God with high imperial tone;
In robe of stiffest state, that scoffed at beauty,
A pronoun-verb imperative he shone—
Then substantive and plural-singular grown
He thus spake on! Behold in I alone
(For ethics boast a syntax of their own)
Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye,
In O! I, you, the vocative of duty!
I of the world’s whole Lexicon the root!
Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight
The genitive and ablative to boot:
The accusative of wrong, the nominative of right,
And in all cases the case absolute!
Self-construed, I all other moods decline:
Imperative, from nothing we derive us;
Yet as a super-postulate of mine,
Unconstrued antecedence I assign
To X, Y, Z, the God Infinitivus!]
31 (return)
[ It would be an act of
high and almost criminal injustice to pass over in silence the name of Mr.
Richard Saumarez, a gentleman equally well known as a medical man and as a
philanthropist, but who demands notice on the present occasion as the
author of “A new System of Physiology” in two volumes octavo, published
1797; and in 1812 of “An Examination of the natural and artificial Systems
of Philosophy which now prevail” in one volume octavo, entitled, “The
Principles of physiological and physical Science.” The latter work is not
quite equal to the former in style or arrangement; and there is a greater
necessity of distinguishing the principles of the author’s philosophy from
his conjectures concerning colour, the atmospheric matter, comets, etc.
which, whether just or erroneous, are by no means necessary consequences
of that philosophy. Yet even in this department of this volume, which I
regard as comparatively the inferior work, the reasonings by which Mr.
Saumarez invalidates the immanence of an infinite power in any finite
substance are the offspring of no common mind; and the experiment on the
expansibility of the air is at least plausible and highly ingenious. But
the merit, which will secure both to the book and to the writer a high and
honourable name with posterity, consists in the masterly force of
reasoning, and the copiousness of induction, with which he has assailed,
and (in my opinion) subverted the tyranny of the mechanic system in
physiology; established not only the existence of final causes, but their
necessity and efficiency to every system that merits the name of
philosophical; and, substituting life and progressive power for the
contradictory inert force, has a right to be known and remembered as the
first instaurator of the dynamic philosophy in England. The author’s
views, as far as concerns himself, are unborrowed and completely his own,
as he neither possessed nor do his writings discover, the least
acquaintance with the works of Kant, in which the germs of the philosophy
exist: and his volumes were published many years before the full
development of these germs by Schelling. Mr. Saumarez’s detection of the
Braunonian system was no light or ordinary service at the time; and I
scarcely remember in any work on any subject a confutation so thoroughly
satisfactory. It is sufficient at this time to have stated the fact; as in
the preface to the work, which I have already announced on the Logos, I
have exhibited in detail the merits of this writer, and genuine
philosopher, who needed only have taken his foundation somewhat deeper and
wider to have superseded a considerable part of my labours.]
32 (return)
[ But for sundry notes on
Shakespeare, and other pieces which have fallen in my way, I should have
deemed it unnecessary to observe; that discourse here, or elsewhere does
not mean what we now call discoursing; but the discursion of the mind, the
processes of generalization and subsumption, of deduction and conclusion.
Thus, Philosophy has hitherto been discursive; while Geometry is always
and essentially intuitive.]
33 (return)
[ Revelation xx. 3.]
34 (return)
[ See Laing’s History of
Scotland.—Walter Scott’s bards, ballads, etc.]
35 (return)
[ Thus organization, and
motion are regarded as from God, not in God.]
36 (return)
[ Job, chap. xxviii.]
37 (return)
[ Wherever A=B, and A is
not=B, are equally demonstrable, the premise in each undeniable, the
induction evident, and the conclusion legitimate—the result must be,
either that contraries can both be true, (which is absurd,) or that the
faculty and forms of reasoning employed are inapplicable to the subject—i.e.
that there is a metabasis eis allo genos. Thus, the attributes of Space
and time applied to Spirit are heterogeneous—and the proof of this
is, that by admitting them explicite or implicite contraries may be
demonstrated true—i.e. that the same, taken in the same sense, is
true and not true.—That the world had a beginning in Time and a
bound in Space; and That the world had not a beginning and has no limit;—That
a self originating act is, and is not possible, are instances.]
38 (return)
[ To those, who design to
acquire the language of a country in the country itself, it may be useful,
if I mention the incalculable advantage which I derived from learning all
the words, that could possibly be so learned, with the objects before me,
and without the intermediation of the English terms. It was a regular part
of my morning studies for the first six weeks of my residence at
Ratzeburg, to accompany the good and kind old pastor, with whom I lived,
from the cellar to the roof, through gardens, farmyard, etc. and to call
every, the minutest, thing by its German name. Advertisements, farces,
jest books, and the conversation of children while I was at play with
them, contributed their share to a more home-like acquaintance with the
language than I could have acquired from works of polite literature alone,
or even from polite society. There is a passage of hearty sound sense in
Luther’s German Letter on interpretation, to the translation of which I
shall prefix, for the sake of those who read the German, yet are not
likely to have dipped often in the massive folios of this heroic reformer,
the simple, sinewy, idiomatic words of the original. “Denn man muss nicht
die Buchstaben in der Lateinischen Sprache fragen wie man soll Deutsch
reden: sondern man muss die Mutter in Hause, die Kinder auf den Gassen,
den gemeinen Mann auf dem Markte, darum fragen: und denselbigen auf das
Maul sehen wie sie reden, und darnach dolmetschen. So verstehen sie es
denn, und merken dass man Deutsch mit ihnen redet.”
TRANSLATION:
For one must not ask the letters in the Latin tongue, how one ought to speak German; but one must ask the mother in the house, the children in the lanes and alleys, the common man in the market, concerning this; yea, and look at the moves of their mouths while they are talking, and thereafter interpret. They understand you then, and mark that one talks German with them.]
39 (return)
[ This paraphrase, written
about the time of Charlemagne, is by no means deficient in occasional
passages of considerable poetic merit. There is a flow, and a tender
enthusiasm in the following lines (at the conclusion of Chapter XI.)
which, even in the translation will not, I flatter myself, fail to
interest the reader. Ottfried is describing the circumstances immediately
following the birth of our Lord.
She gave with joy her virgin breast;
She hid it not, she bared the breast,
Which suckled that divinest babe!
Blessed, blessed were the breasts
Which the Saviour infant kiss’d;
And blessed, blessed was the mother
Who wrapp’d his limbs in swaddling clothes,
Singing placed him on her lap,
Hung o’er him with her looks of love,
And sooth’d him with a lulling motion.
Blessed; for she shelter’d him
From the damp and chilling air;
Blessed, blessed! for she lay
With such a babe in one blest bed,
Close as babes and mothers lie!
Blessed, blessed evermore,
With her virgin lips she kiss’d,
With her arms, and to her breast
She embraced the babe divine,
Her babe divine the virgin mother!
There lives not on this ring of earth
A mortal, that can sing her praise.
Mighty mother, virgin pure,
In the darkness and the night
For us she bore the heavenly Lord!
Most interesting is it to consider the effect, when the feelings are wrought above the natural pitch by the belief of something mysterious, while all the images are purely natural. Then it is, that religion and poetry strike deepest.]
40 (return)
[ Lord Grenville has lately
re-asserted (in the House of Lords) the imminent danger of a revolution in
the earlier part of the war against France. I doubt not, that his Lordship
is sincere; and it must be flattering to his feelings to believe it. But
where are the evidences of the danger, to which a future historian can
appeal? Or must he rest on an assertion? Let me be permitted to extract a
passage on the subject from The Friend. “I have said that to withstand the
arguments of the lawless, the anti-Jacobins proposed to suspend the law,
and by the interposition of a particular statute to eclipse the blessed
light of the universal sun, that spies and informers might tyrannize and
escape in the ominous darkness. Oh! if these mistaken men, intoxicated
with alarm and bewildered by that panic of property, which they themselves
were the chief agents in exciting, had ever lived in a country where there
really existed a general disposition to change and rebellion! Had they
ever travelled through Sicily; or through France at the first coming on of
the revolution; or even alas! through too many of the provinces of a
sister island; they could not but have shrunk from their own declarations
concerning the state of feeling and opinion at that time predominant
throughout Great Britain. There was a time—(Heaven grant that that
time may have passed by!)—when by crossing a narrow strait, they
might have learned the true symptoms of approaching danger, and have
secured themselves from mistaking the meetings and idle rant of such
sedition, as shrank appalled from the sight of a constable, for the dire
murmuring and strange consternation which precedes the storm or earthquake
of national discord. Not only in coffee-houses and public theatres, but
even at the tables of the wealthy, they would have heard the advocates of
existing Government defend their cause in the language and with the tone
of men, who are conscious that they are in a minority. But in England,
when the alarm was at its highest, there was not a city, no, not a town or
village, in which a man suspected of holding democratic principles could
move abroad without receiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred in which
his supposed opinions were held by the great majority of the people; and
the only instances of popular excess and indignation were on the side of
the government and the established church. But why need I appeal to these
invidious facts? Turn over the pages of history and seek for a single
instance of a revolution having been effected without the concurrence of
either the nobles, or the ecclesiastics, or the monied classes, in any
country, in which the influences of property had ever been predominant,
and where the interests of the proprietors were interlinked! Examine the
revolution of the Belgic provinces under Philip II; the civil wars of
France in the preceding generation; the history of the American
revolution, or the yet more recent events in Sweden and in Spain; and it
will be scarcely possible not to perceive that in England from 1791 to the
peace of Amiens there were neither tendencies to confederacy nor actual
confederacies, against which the existing laws had not provided both
sufficient safeguards and an ample punishment. But alas! the panic of
property had been struck in the first instance for party purposes; and
when it became general, its propagators caught it themselves and ended in
believing their own lie; even as our bulls to Borrowdale sometimes run mad
with the echo of their own bellowing. The consequences were most
injurious. Our attention was concentrated on a monster, which could not
survive the convulsions, in which it had been brought forth,—even
the enlightened Burke himself too often talking and reasoning, as if a
perpetual and organized anarchy had been a possible thing! Thus while we
were warring against French doctrines, we took little heed whether the
means by which we attempted to overthrow them, were not likely to aid and
augment the far more formidable evil of French ambition. Like children we
ran away from the yelping of a cur, and took shelter at the heels of a
vicious war horse.” (Vol. II. Essay i. p. 21, 4th edit.)]
41 (return)
[ I seldom think of the
murder of this illustrious Prince without recollecting the lines of
Valerius Flaccus:
———super ipsius ingens
Instat fama viri, virtusque haud laeta tyranno;
Ergo anteire metus, juvenemque exstinguere pergit.
Argonaut, I. 29.]
42 (return)
[ —
Theara de kai ton chaena kai taen dorkada,
Kai ton lagoon, kai to ton tauron genos.
Manuel Phile, De Animal. Proprietat. sect. I. i. 12.]
43 (return)
[ Paradise Regained. Book
IV. I. 261.]
44 (return)
[ Vita e Costumi di Dante.]
45 (return)
[ TRANSLATION: “With the
greatest possible solicitude avoid authorship. Too early or immoderately
employed, it makes the head waste and the heart empty; even were there no
other worse consequences. A person, who reads only to print, to all
probability reads amiss; and he, who sends away through the pen and the
press every thought, the moment it occurs to him, will in a short time
have sent all away, and will become a mere journeyman of the
printing-office, a compositor.”
To which I may add from myself, that what medical physiologists affirm of certain secretions applies equally to our thoughts; they too must be taken up again into the circulation, and be again and again re-secreted to order to ensure a healthful vigour, both to the mind and to its intellectual offspring.]
46 (return)
[ This distinction between
transcendental and transcendent is observed by our elder divines and
philosophers, whenever they express themselves scholastically. Dr. Johnson
indeed has confounded the two words; but his own authorities do not bear
him out. Of this celebrated dictionary I will venture to remark once for
all, that I should suspect the man of a morose disposition who should
speak of it without respect and gratitude as a most instructive and
entertaining book, and hitherto, unfortunately, an indispensable book; but
I confess, that I should be surprised at hearing from a philosophic and
thorough scholar any but very qualified praises of it, as a dictionary. I
am not now alluding to the number of genuine words omitted; for this is
(and perhaps to a greater extent) true, as Mr. Wakefield has noticed, of
our best Greek Lexicons, and this too after the successive labours of so
many giants in learning. I refer at present both to omissions and
commissions of a more important nature. What these are, me saltem judice,
will be stated at full in The Friend, re-published and completed.
I had never heard of the correspondence between Wakefield and Fox till I saw the account of it this morning (16th September 1815) in the Monthly Review. I was not a little gratified at finding, that Mr. Wakefield had proposed to himself nearly the same plan for a Greek and English Dictionary, which I had formed, and began to execute, now ten years ago. But far, far more grieved am I, that he did not live to complete it. I cannot but think it a subject of most serious regret, that the same heavy expenditure, which is now employing in the republication of STEPHANUS augmented, had not been applied to a new Lexicon on a more philosophical plan, with the English, German, and French synonymes as well as the Latin. In almost every instance the precise individual meaning might be given in an English or German word; whereas in Latin we must too often be contented with a mere general and inclusive term. How indeed can it be otherwise, when we attempt to render the most copious language of the world, the most admirable for the fineness of its distinctions, into one of the poorest and most vague languages? Especially when we reflect on the comparative number of the works, still extant, written while the Greek and Latin were living languages. Were I asked what I deemed the greatest and most unmixed benefit, which a wealthy individual, or an association of wealthy individuals could bestow on their country and on mankind, I should not hesitate to answer, “a philosophical English dictionary; with the Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish, and Italian synonymes, and with correspondent indexes.” That the learned languages might thereby be acquired, better, in half the time, is but a part, and not the most important part, of the advantages which would accrue from such a work. O! if it should be permitted by Providence, that without detriment to freedom and independence our government might be enabled to become more than a committee for war and revenue! There was a time, when every thing was to be done by Government. Have we not flown off to the contrary extreme?]
47 (return)
[ April, 1825. If I did not
see it with my own eyes, I should not believe that I had been guilty of so
many hydrostatic Bulls as bellow in this unhappy allegory or string of
metaphors! How a river was to travel up hill from a vale far inward, over
the intervening mountains, Morpheus, the Dream weaver, can alone unriddle.
I am ashamed and humbled. S. T. Coleridge.]
48 (return)
[ Ennead, III. 8. 3. The
force of the Greek sunienai is imperfectly expressed by “understand;” our
own idiomatic phrase “to go along with me” comes nearest to it. The
passage, that follows, full of profound sense, appears to me evidently
corrupt; and in fact no writer more wants, better deserves, or is less
likely to obtain, a new and more correct edition-ti oun sunienai; oti to
genomenon esti theama emon, siopaesis (mallem, theama, emon sioposaes,)
kai physei genomenon theoraema, kai moi genomenae ek theorias taes odi,
taen physin echein philotheamona uparkei. (mallem, kai moi hae genomenae
ek theorias autaes odis). “What then are we to understand? That whatever
is produced is an intuition, I silent; and that, which is thus generated,
is by its nature a theorem, or form of contemplation; and the birth; which
results to me from this contemplation, attains to have a contemplative
nature.” So Synesius:
‘Odis hiera
‘Arraeta gona
The after comparison of the process of the natura naturans with that of the geometrician is drawn from the very heart of philosophy.]
49 (return)
[ This is happily effected
in three lines by Synesius, in his THIRD HYMN:
‘En kai Pan’ta—(taken by itself) is Spinozism.
‘En d’ ’Apan’ton—a mere Anima Mundi.
‘En te pro panton—is mechanical Theism.
But unite all three, and the result is the Theism of Saint Paul and Christianity. Synesius was censured for his doctrine of the pre- existence of the soul; but never, that I can find, arraigned or deemed heretical for his Pantheism, though neither Giordano Bruno, nor Jacob Behmen ever avowed it more broadly.
Mystas de Noos,
Ta te kai ta legei,
Buthon arraeton
Amphichoreuon.
Su to tikton ephus,
Su to tiktomenon;
Su to photizon,
Su to lampomenon;
Su to phainomenon,
Su to kryptomenon
Idiais augais.
‘En kai panta,
‘En kath’ heauto,
Kai dia panton.
Pantheism is therefore not necessarily irreligious or heretical; though it may be taught atheistically. Thus Spinoza would agree with Synesius in calling God Physis en Noerois, the Nature in Intelligences; but he could not subscribe to the preceding Nous kai noeros, i.e. Himself Intelligence and intelligent.
In this biographical sketch of my literary life I may be excused, if I mention here, that I had translated the eight Hymns of Synesius from the Greek into English Anacreontics before my fifteenth year.]
50 (return)
[ See Schell. Abhandl. zur
Erlaeuter. des Id. der Wissenschafslehre.]
51 (return)
[ Des Cartes, Diss. de
Methodo.]
52 (return)
[ The impossibility of an
absolute thing (substantia unica) as neither genus, species, nor
individuum: as well as its utter unfitness for the fundamental position of
a philosophic system, will be demonstrated in the critique on Spinozism in
the fifth treatise of my Logosophia.]
53 (return)
[ It is most worthy of
notice, that in the first revelation of himself, not confined to
individuals; indeed in the very first revelation of his absolute being,
Jehovah at the same time revealed the fundamental truth of all philosophy,
which must either commence with the absolute, or have no fixed
commencement; that is, cease to be philosophy. I cannot but express my
regret, that in the equivocal use of the word that, for in that, or
because, our admirable version has rendered the passage susceptible of a
degraded interpretation in the mind of common readers or hearers, as if it
were a mere reproof to an impertinent question, I am what I am, which
might be equally affirmed of himself by any existent being.
The Cartesian Cogito ergo sum is objectionable, because either the Cogito is used extra gradum, and then it is involved to the sum and is tautological; or it is taken as a particular mode or dignity, and then it is subordinated to the sum as the species to the genus, or rather as a particular modification to the subject modified; and not pre- ordinated as the arguments seem to require. For Cogito is Sum Cogitans. This is clear by the inevidence of the converse. Cogitat, ergo est is true, because it is a mere application of the logical rule: Quicquid in genere est, est et in specie. Est (cogitans), ergo est. It is a cherry tree; therefore it is a tree. But, est ergo cogitat, is illogical: for quod est in specie, non NBCESSARIO in genere est. It may be true. I hold it to be true, that quicquid vere est, est per veram sui affirmationem; but it is a derivative, not an immediate truth. Here then we have, by anticipation, the distinction between the conditional finite! (which, as known in distinct consciousness by occasion of experience, is called by Kant’s followers the empirical!) and the absolute I AM, and likewise the dependence or rather the inherence of the former in the latter; in whom “we live, and move, and have our being,” as St. Paul divinely asserts, differing widely from the Theists of the mechanic school (as Sir J. Newton, Locke, and others) who must say from whom we had our being, and with it life and the powers of life.]
54 (return)
[ TRANSLATION. “Hence it is
clear, from what cause many reject the notion of the continuous and the
infinite. They take, namely, the words irrepresentable and impossible in
one and the same meaning; and, according to the forms of sensuous
evidence, the notion of the continuous and the infinite is doubtless
impossible. I am not now pleading the cause of these laws, which not a few
schools have thought proper to explode, especially the former (the law of
continuity). But it is of the highest importance to admonish the reader,
that those, who adopt so perverted a mode of reasoning, are under a
grievous error. Whatever opposes the formal principles of the
understanding and the reason is confessedly impossible; but not therefore
that, which is therefore not amenable to the forms of sensuous evidence,
because it is exclusively an object of pure intellect. For this
non-coincidence of the sensuous and the intellectual (the nature of which
I shall presently lay open) proves nothing more, but that the mind cannot
always adequately represent to the concrete, and transform into distinct
images, abstract notions derived from the pure intellect. But this
contradiction, which is in itself merely subjective (i.e. an incapacity in
the nature of man), too often passes for an incongruity or impossibility
in the object (i.e. the notions themselves), and seduces the incautious to
mistake the limitations of the human faculties for the limits of things,
as they really exist.”
I take this occasion to observe, that here and elsewhere Kant uses the term intuition, and the verb active (intueri Germanice anschauen) for which we have unfortunately no correspondent word, exclusively for that which can be represented in space and time. He therefore consistently and rightly denies the possibility of intellectual intuitions. But as I see no adequate reason for this exclusive sense of the term, I have reverted to its wider signification, authorized by our elder theologians and metaphysicians, according to whom the term comprehends all truths known to us without a medium.
From Kant’s Treatise De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma et principiis. 1770.]
55 (return)
[ Franc. Baconis de
Verulam, NOVUM ORGANUM.]
56 (return)
[ This phrase, a priori, is
in common, most grossly misunderstood, and as absurdity burdened on it,
which it does not deserve. By knowledge a priori, we do not mean, that we
can know anything previously to experience, which would be a contradiction
in terms; but that having once known it by occasion of experience (that
is, something acting upon us from without) we then know, that it must have
existed, or the experience itself would have been impossible. By
experience only now, that I have eyes; but then my reason convinces me,
that I must have had eyes in order to the experience.]
57 (return)
[ Jer. Taylor’s Via Pacis.]
58 (return)
[ Par. Lost. Book V. I.
469.]
59 (return)
[ Leibnitz. Op. T. II. P.
II. p. 53.—T. III. p. 321.]
60 (return)
[ Synesii Episcop. Hymn.
III. I. 231]
61 (return)
[ ‘Anaer morionous, a
phrase which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a
Patriarch of Constantinople. I might have said, that I have reclaimed,
rather than borrowed, it: for it seems to belong to Shakespeare, de jure
singulari, et ex privilegio naturae.]
62 (return)
[ First published in 1803.]
63 (return)
[ These thoughts were
suggested to me during the perusal of the Madrigals of Giovambatista
Strozzi published in Florence in May, 1593, by his sons Lorenzo and
Filippo Strozzi, with a dedication to their paternal uncle, Signor Leone
Strozzi, Generale delle battaglie di Santa Chiesa. As I do not remember to
have seen either the poems or their author mentioned in any English work,
or to have found them in any of the common collections of Italian poetry;
and as the little work is of rare occurrence; I will transcribe a few
specimens. I have seldom met with compositions that possessed, to my
feelings, more of that satisfying entireness, that complete adequateness
of the manner to the matter which so charms us in Anacreon, joined with
the tenderness, and more than the delicacy of Catullus. Trifles as they
are, they were probably elaborated with great care; yet to the perusal we
refer them to a spontaneous energy rather than to voluntary effort. To a
cultivated taste there is a delight in perfection for its own sake,
independently of the material in which it is manifested, that none but a
cultivated taste can understand or appreciate.
After what I have advanced, it would appear presumption to offer a translation; even if the attempt were not discouraged by the different genius of the English mind and language, which demands a denser body of thought as the condition of a high polish, than the Italian. I cannot but deem it likewise an advantage in the Italian tongue, in many other respects inferior to our own, that the language of poetry is more distinct from that of prose than with us. From the earlier appearance and established primacy of the Tuscan poets, concurring with the number of independent states, and the diversity of written dialects, the Italians have gained a poetic idiom, as the Greeks before them had obtained from the same causes with greater and more various discriminations, for example, the Ionic for their heroic verses; the Attic for their iambic; and the two modes of the Doric for the lyric or sacerdotal, and the pastoral, the distinctions of which were doubtless more obvious to the Greeks themselves than they are to us.
I will venture to add one other observation before I proceed to the transcription. I am aware that the sentiments which I have avowed concerning the points of difference between the poetry of the present age, and that of the period between 1500 and 1650, are the reverse of the opinion commonly entertained. I was conversing on this subject with a friend, when the servant, a worthy and sensible woman, coming in, I placed before her two engravings, the one a pinky-coloured plate of the day, the other a masterly etching by Salvator Rosa from one of his own pictures. On pressing her to tell us, which she preferred, after a little blushing and flutter of feeling, she replied “Why, that, Sir, to be sure! (pointing to the ware from the Fleet-street print shops);—it’s so neat and elegant. T’other is such a scratchy slovenly thing.” An artist, whose writings are scarcely less valuable than his pictures, and to whose authority more deference will be willingly paid, than I could even wish should be shown to mine, has told us, and from his own experience too, that good taste must be acquired, and like all other good things, is the result of thought and the submissive study of the best models. If it be asked, “But what shall I deem such?”—the answer is; presume those to be the best, the reputation of which has been matured into fame by the consent of ages. For wisdom always has a final majority, if not by conviction, yet by acquiescence. In addition to Sir J. Reynolds I may mention Harris of Salisbury; who in one of his philosophical disquisitions has written on the means of acquiring a just taste with the precision of Aristotle, and the elegance of Quinctilian.
MADRIGALI.
Gelido suo ruscel chiaro, e tranquillo
M’insegno Amor di state a mezzo’l giorno;
Ardean le solve, ardean le piagge, e i colli.
Ond’ io, ch’ al piu gran gielo ardo e sfavillo,
Subito corsi; ma si puro adorno
Girsene il vidi, che turbar no’l volli:
Sol mi specchiava, e’n dolce ombrosa sponda
Mi stava intento al mormorar dell’ onda.
Aure dell’ angoscioso viver mio
Refrigerio soave,
E dolce si, che piu non mi par grave
Ne’l ardor, ne’l morir, anz’ il desio;
Deh voil ghiaccio, e le nubi, e’l tempo rio
Discacciatene omai, che londa chiara,
E l’ombra non men cara
A scherzare, a cantar per suoi boschetti,
E prati festa et allegrezza alletti.
Pacifiche, ma spesso in amorosa
Guerra co’fiori, e l’erba
Alla stagione acerba
Verdi insegne del giglio e della rosa,
Movete, Aure, pian pian; che tregua o posa,
Se non pace, io ritrove;
E so ben dove:—Oh vago, a mansueto
Sguardo, oh labbra d’ambrosia, oh rider, lieto!
Hor come un scoglio stassi,
Hor come un rio se’n fugge,
Ed hor crud’ orsa rugge,
Hor canta angelo pio: ma che non fassi!
E che non fammi, O sassi,
O rivi, o belue, o Dii, questa mia vaga
Non so, se ninfa, o magna,
Non so, se donna, o Dea,
Non so, se dolce o rea?
Piangendo mi baciaste,
E ridendo il negaste:
In doglia hebbivi pin,
In festa hebbivi ria:
Nacque gioia di pianti,
Dolor di riso: O amanti
Miseri, habbiate insieme
Ognor paura e speme.
Bel Fior, tu mi rimembri
La rugiadosa guancia del bet viso;
E si vera l’assembri,
Che’n te sovente, come in lei m’affiso:
Et hor del vago riso,
Hor del serene sguardo
Io pur cieco riguardo. Ma qual fugge,
O Rosa, il mattin lieve!
E chi te, come neve,
E’l mio cor teco, e la mia vita strugge!
Anna mia, Anna dolce, oh sempre nuovo
E piu chiaro concento,
Quanta dolcezza sento
In sol Anna dicendo? Io mi pur pruovo,
Ne qui tra noi ritruovo,
Ne tra cieli armonia,
Che del bel nome suo piu dolce sia:
Altro il Cielo, altro Amore,
Altro non suona l’Ecco del mio core.
Hor che’l prato, e la selva si scoiora,
Al tuo serena ombroso
Muovine, alto Riposo,
Deh ch’io riposi una sol notte, un hora:
Han le fere, e git augelli, ognun talora
Ha qualche pace; io quando,
Lasso! non vonne errando,
E non piango, e non grido? e qual pur forte?
Ma poiche, non sent’ egli, odine, Morte.
Risi e piansi d’Amor; ne pero mai
Se non in fiamma, o’n onda, o’n vento scrissi
Spesso msrce trovai
Crudel; sempre in me morto, in altri vissi:
Hor da’ piu scuri Abissi al ciel m’aizai,
Hor ne pur caddi giuso;
Stance al fin qui son chiuso.
64 (return)
[ —
“I’ve measured it from side to side;
’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.”]
65 (return)
[ —
“Nay, rack your brain—’tis all in vain,
I’ll tell you every thing I know;
But to the Thorn, and to the Pond
Which is a little step beyond,
I wish that you would go:
Perhaps, when you are at the place,
You something of her tale may trace.
I’ll give you the best help I can
Before you up the mountain go,
Up to the dreary mountain-top,
I’ll tell you all I know.
’Tis now some two-and-twenty years
Since she (her name is Martha Ray)
Gave, with a maiden’s true good will,
Her company to Stephen Hill;
And she was blithe and gay,
And she was happy, happy still
Whene’er she thought of Stephen Hill.
And they had fixed the wedding-day,
The morning that must wed them both
But Stephen to another maid
Had sworn another oath;
And, with this other maid, to church
Unthinking Stephen went—
Poor Martha! on that woeful day
A pang of pitiless dismay
Into her soul was sent;
A fire was kindled in her breast,
Which might not burn itself to rest.
They say, full six months after this,
While yet the summer leaves were green,
She to the mountain-top would go,
And there was often seen;
’Tis said a child was in her womb,
As now to any eye was plain;
She was with child, and she was mad;
Yet often she was sober sad
From her exceeding pain.
Oh me! ten thousand times I’d rather
That he had died, that cruel father!
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
Last Christmas when they talked of this,
Old Farmer Simpson did maintain,
That in her womb the infant wrought
About its mother’s heart, and brought
Her senses back again:
And, when at last her time drew near,
Her looks were calm, her senses clear.
No more I know, I wish I did,
And I would tell it all to you
For what became of this poor child
There’s none that ever knew
And if a child was born or no,
There’s no one that could ever tell;
And if ’twas born alive or dead,
There’s no one knows, as I have said:
But some remember well,
That Martha Ray about this time
Would up the mountain often climb.”]
66 (return)
[ It is no less an error in
teachers, than a torment to the poor children, to enforce the necessity of
reading as they would talk. In order to cure them of singing as it is
called, that is, of too great a difference, the child is made to repeat
the words with his eyes from off the book; and then, indeed, his tones
resemble talking, as far as his fears, tears and trembling will permit.
But as soon as the eye is again directed to the printed page, the spell
begins anew; for an instinctive sense tells the child’s feelings, that to
utter its own momentary thoughts, and to recite the written thoughts of
another, as of another, and a far wiser than himself, are two widely
different things; and as the two acts are accompanied with widely
different feelings, so must they justify different modes of enunciation.
Joseph Lancaster, among his other sophistications of the excellent Dr.
Bell’s invaluable system, cures this fault of singing, by hanging fetters
and chains on the child, to the music of which one of his school-fellows,
who walks before, dolefully chants out the child’s last speech and
confession, birth, parentage, and education. And this soul-benumbing
ignominy, this unholy and heart-hardening burlesque on the last fearful
infliction of outraged law, in pronouncing the sentence to which the stern
and familiarized judge not seldom bursts into tears, has been extolled as
a happy and ingenious method of remedying—what? and how?—why,
one extreme in order to introduce another, scarce less distant from good
sense, and certainly likely to have worse moral effects, by enforcing a
semblance of petulant ease and self-sufficiency, in repression and
possible after-perversion of the natural feelings. I have to beg Dr.
Bell’s pardon for this connection of the two names, but he knows that
contrast is no less powerful a cause of association than likeness.]
67 (return)
[ Altered from the
description of Night-Mair in the REMORSE.
“Oh Heaven! ’twas frightful! Now ran down and stared at
By hideous shapes that cannot be remembered;
Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing;
But only being afraid—stifled with fear!
While every goodly or familiar form
Had a strange power of spreading terror round me!”
N.B.—Though Shakespeare has, for his own all justifying purposes, introduced the Night-Mare with her own foals, yet Mair means a Sister, or perhaps a Hag.]
68 (return)
[ But still more by the
mechanical system of philosophy which has needlessly infected our
theological opinions, and teaching us to consider the world in its
relation to god, as of a building to its mason, leaves the idea of
omnipresence a mere abstract notion in the stateroom of our reason.]
69 (return)
[ As the ingenious
gentleman under the influence of the Tragic Muse contrived to dislocate,
“I wish you a good morning, Sir! Thank you, Sir, and I wish you the same,”
into two blank-verse heroics:—
To you a morning good, good Sir! I wish.
You, Sir! I thank: to you the same wish I.
In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth’s works which I have thoroughly studied, I find fewer instances in which this would be practicable than I have met to many poems, where an approximation of prose has been sedulously and on system guarded against. Indeed excepting the stanzas already quoted from THE SAILOR’S MOTHER, I can recollect but one instance: that is to say, a short passage of four or five lines in THE BROTHERS, that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read with unclouded eye.—“James, pointing to its summit, over which they had all purposed to return together, informed them that he would wait for them there. They parted, and his comrades passed that way some two hours after, but they did not find him at the appointed place, a circumstance of which they took no heed: but one of them, going by chance into the house, which at this time was James’s house, learnt there, that nobody had seen him all that day.” The only change which has been made is in the position of the little word there in two instances, the position in the original being clearly such as is not adopted in ordinary conversation. The other words printed in italics were so marked because, though good and genuine English, they are not the phraseology of common conversation either in the word put in apposition, or in the connection by the genitive pronoun. Men in general would have said, “but that was a circumstance they paid no attention to, or took no notice of;” and the language is, on the theory of the preface, justified only by the narrator’s being the Vicar. Yet if any ear could suspect, that these sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words alone could the suspicion have been grounded.]
70 (return)
[ I had in my mind the
striking but untranslatable epithet, which the celebrated Mendelssohn
applied to the great founder of the Critical Philosophy “Der
alleszermalmende KANT,” that is, the all-becrushing, or rather the
all-to-nothing-crushing Kant. In the facility and force of compound
epithets, the German from the number of its cases and inflections
approaches to the Greek, that language so
“Bless’d in the happy marriage of sweet words.”
It is in the woful harshness of its sounds alone that the German need shrink from the comparison.]
71 (return)
[ Sammlung einiger
Abhandlungen von Christian Garve.]
72 (return)
[ Sonnet IX.]
73 (return)
[ Mr. Wordsworth’s having
judiciously adopted “concourse wild” in this passage for “a wild scene” as
it stood to the former edition, encourages me to hazard a remark, which I
certainly should not have made in the works of a poet less austerely
accurate in the use of words, than he is, to his own great honour. It
respects the propriety of the word, “scene,” even in the sentence in which
it is retained. Dryden, and he only in his more careless verses, was the
first, as far as my researches have discovered, who for the convenience of
rhyme used this word in the vague sense, which has been since too current
even in our best writers, and which (unfortunately, I think) is given as
its first explanation in Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary and therefore would be
taken by an incautious reader as its proper sense. In Shakespeare and
Milton the word is never used without some clear reference, proper or
metaphorical, to the theatre. Thus Milton:
“Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm
A sylvan scene; and, as the ranks ascend
Shade above shade, a woody theatre
Of stateliest view.”
I object to any extension of its meaning, because the word is already more equivocal than might be wished; inasmuch as to the limited use, which I recommend, it may still signify two different things; namely, the scenery, and the characters and actions presented on the stage during the presence of particular scenes. It can therefore be preserved from obscurity only by keeping the original signification full in the mind. Thus Milton again,
———“Prepare thee for another scene.”]
74 (return)
[ —
Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every hill,
Upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring vallies fill;
Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw,
From whom as soon again, the sound Dunbalrase drew,
From whose stone-trophied head, it on the Windross went,
Which tow’rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent.
That Brodwater, therewith within her banks astound,
In sailing to the sea, told it to Egremound,
Whose buildings, walks, and streets, with echoes loud and long,
Did mightily commend old Copland for her song.
Drayton’s POLYOLBION: Song XXX.]
75 (return)
[ Translation. It behoves
me to side with my friends, but only as far as the gods.]
76 (return)
[ “Slender. I bruised my
shin with playing with sword and dagger for a dish of stewed prunes, and
by my troth I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since.”—So again,
Evans. “I will make an end of my dinner: there’s pippins and cheese to
come.”]
77 (return)
[ This was accidentally
confirmed to me by an old German gentleman at Helmstadt, who had been
Klopstock’s school and bed-fellow. Among other boyish anecdotes, he
related that the young poet set a particular value on a translation of the
PARADISE LOST, and always slept with it under his pillow.]
78 (return)
[ Klopstock’s observation
was partly true and partly erroneous. In the literal sense of his words,
and, if we confine the comparison to the average of space required for the
expression of the same thought in the two languages, it is erroneous. I
have translated some German hexameters into English hexameter; and find,
that on the average three English lines will express four lines German.
The reason is evident: our language abounds in monosyllables and
dissyllables. The German, not less than the Greek, is a polysyllable
language. But in another point of view the remark was not without
foundation. For the German possessing the same unlimited privilege of
forming compounds, both with prepositions and with epithets, as the Greek,
it can express the richest single Greek word in a single German one, and
is thus freed from the necessity of weak or ungraceful paraphrases. I will
content myself with one at present, viz. the use of the prefixed
participles ver, zer, ent, and weg: thus reissen to rend, verreissen to
rend away, zerreissen to rend to pieces, entreissen to rend off or out of
a thing, in the active sense: or schmelzen to melt—ver, zer, ent,
schmelzen—and in like manner through all the verbs neuter and
active. If you consider only how much we should feel the loss of the
prefix be, as in bedropt, besprinkle, besot, especially in our poetical
language, and then think that this same mode of composition is carved
through all their simple and compound prepositions, and many of their
adverbs; and that with most of these the Germans have the same privilege
as we have of dividing them from the verb and placing them at the end of
the sentence; you will have no difficulty in comprehending the reality and
the cause of this superior power in the German of condensing meaning, in
which its great poet exulted. It is impossible to read half a dozen pages
of Wieland without perceiving that in this respect the German has no rival
but the Greek. And yet I feel, that concentration or condensation is not
the happiest mode of expressing this excellence, which seems to consist
not so much in the less time required for conveying an impression, as in
the unity and simultaneousness with which the impression is conveyed. It
tends to make their language more picturesque: it depictures images
better. We have obtained this power in part by our compound verbs derived
from the Latin: and the sense of its great effect no doubt induced our
Milton both to the use and the abuse of Latin derivatives. But still these
prefixed particles, conveying no separate or separable meaning to the mere
English reader, cannot possibly act on the mind with the force or
liveliness of an original and homogeneous language such as the German is,
and besides are confined to certain words.]
79 (return)
[ Praecludere calumniam, in
the original.]
80 (return)
[ Better thus: Forma
specifica per formam individualem translucens: or better yet—Species
individualisata, sive Individuum cuilibet Speciei determinatae in omni
parte correspondens et quasi versione quadam eam interpretans et
repetens.]
81 (return)
[ —
———“The big round tears
Cours’d one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase,”
says Shakespeare of a wounded stag hanging its head over a stream: naturally, from the position of the head, and most beautifully, from the association of the preceding image, of the chase, in which “the poor sequester’d stag from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt.” In the supposed position of Bertram, the metaphor, if not false, loses all the propriety of the original.]
82 (return)
[ Among a number of other
instances of words chosen without reason, Imogine in the first act
declares, that thunder-storms were not able to intercept her prayers for
“the desperate man, in desperate ways who dealt”——
“Yea, when the launched bolt did sear her sense,
Her soul’s deep orisons were breathed for him;”
that is, when a red-hot bolt, launched at her from a thunder-cloud, had cauterized her sense, to plain English, burnt her eyes out of her head, she kept still praying on.
“Was not this love? Yea, thus doth woman love!”]
83 (return)
[ This sort of repetition
is one of this writers peculiarities, and there is scarce a page which
does not furnish one or more instances—Ex. gr. in the first page or
two. Act I, line 7th, “and deemed that I might sleep.”—Line 10, “Did
rock and quiver in the bickering glare.”—Lines 14, 15, 16, “But by
the momently gleams of sheeted blue, Did the pale marbles dare so sternly
on me, I almost deemed they lived.”—Line 37, “The glare of Hell.”—Line
35, “O holy Prior, this is no earthly storm.”—Line 38, “This is no
earthly storm.”—Line 42, “Dealing with us.”—Line 43, “Deal
thus sternly:”—Line 44, “Speak! thou hast something seen?”—“A
fearful sight!”—Line 45, “What hast thou seen! A piteous, fearful
sight.”—Line 48, “quivering gleams.”—Line 50, “In the hollow
pauses of the storm.”—Line 61, “The pauses of the storm, etc.”]
84 (return)
[ The child is an important
personage, for I see not by what possible means the author could have
ended the second and third acts but for its timely appearance. How
ungrateful then not further to notice its fate!]
85 (return)
[ Classically too, as far
as consists with the allegorizing fancy of the modern, that still striving
to project the inward, contradistinguishes itself from the seeming ease
with which the poetry of the ancients reflects the world without. Casimir
affords, perhaps, the most striking instance of this characteristic
difference.—For his style and diction are really classical: while
Cowley, who resembles Casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his
Latinity, and even his metre, by the heterogeneous nature of his thoughts.
That Dr. Johnson should have passed a contrary judgment, and have even
preferred Cowley’s Latin Poems to Milton’s, is a caprice that has, if I
mistake not, excited the surprise of all scholars. I was much amused last
summer with the laughable affright, with which an Italian poet perused a
page of Cowley’s Davideis, contrasted with the enthusiasm with which he
first ran through, and then read aloud, Milton’s Mansus and Ad Patrem.]
86 (return)
[ Flectit, or if the metre
had allowed, premit would have supported the metaphor better.]
87 (return)
[ Poor unlucky
Metaphysicks! and what are they? A single sentence expresses the object
and thereby the contents of this science. Gnothi seauton:
Nosce te ipsum,
Tuque Deum, quantum licet, inque Deo omnia noscas.]
Know thyself: and so shalt thou know God, as far as is permitted to a creature, and in God all things.—Surely, there is a strange—nay, rather too natural—aversion to many to know themselves.]
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