Part 16

Who but Donne would have thought that a good man is a telescope?

Though God be our true glass, through which we see All, since the being of all things is He, Yet are the trunks, which do to us derive Things, in proportion fit, by perspective Deeds of good men; for by their living here, Virtues, indeed remote, seem to be near.

Who would imagine it possible that in a very few lines so many remote ideas could be brought together?

Since't is my doom, Love's undershrieve, Why this reprieve? Why doth my She Advowson fly Incumbency? To sell thyself dost thou intend By candle's end, And hold the contrast thus in doubt, Life's taper out? Think but how soon the market fails, Your sex lives faster than the males; As if to measure age's span, The sober Julian were th' account of man, Whilst you live by the fleet Gregorian. --_Cleveland_.

Of enormous and disgusting hyperboles, these may be examples:

By every wind, that comes this way, Send me at least a sigh or two, Such and so many I'll repay As shall themselves make winds to get to you. --_Cowley_.

In tears I'll waste these eyes, By Love so vainly fed; So lust of old the Deluge punished. --_Cowley_.

All arm'd in brass the richest dress of war, (A dismal glorious sight) he shone afar. The sun himself started with sudden fright, To see his beams return so dismal bright. --_Cowley_.

An universal consternation:

His bloody eyes he hurls round, his sharp paws Tear up the ground; then runs he wild about, Lashing his angry tail and roaring out.

Beasts creep into their dens, and tremble there; Trees, though no wind is stirring, shake with fear; Silence and horror fill the place around: Echo itself dares scarce repeat the sound. --_Cowley_.

Their fictions were often violent and unnatural.

OF HIS MISTRESS BATHING.

The fish around her crowded, as they do To the false light that treacherous fishers shew, And all with as much ease might taken be, As she at first took me: For ne'er did light so clear Among the waves appear, Though every night the sun himself set there. --_Cowley_.

The poetical effect of a lover's name upon glass:

My name engrav'd herein Doth contribute my firmness to this glass; Which, ever since that charm, hath been As hard as that which grav'd it was. --_Donne_.

Their conceits were sometimes slight and trifling.

ON AN INCONSTANT WOMAN.

He enjoys thy calmy sunshine now, And no breath stirring hears, In the clear heaven of thy brow, No smallest cloud appears. He sees thee gentle, fair and gay, And trusts the faithless April of thy May. --_Cowley_.

Upon a paper written with the juice of lemon, and read by the fire:

Nothing yet in thee is seen: But when a genial heat warms thee within, A new-born wood of various lines there grows; Here buds an L, and there a B, Here sprouts a V, and there a T, And all the flourishing letters stand in rows. --_Cowley_

As they sought only for novelty, they did not much inquire whether their allusions were to things high or low, elegant or gross; whether they compared the little to the great, or the great to the little.

PHYSICK AND CHIRURGERY FOR A LOVER.

Gently, ah gently, madam, touch The wound, which you yourself have made; That pain must needs be very much, Which makes me of your hand afraid. Cordials of pity give me now, For I too weak for purgings grow. --_Cowley_.

THE WORLD AND A CLOCK.

Mahol, th' inferior world's fantastic face, Through all the turns of matter's maze did trace; Great Nature's well-set clock in pieces took; On all the springs and smallest wheels did look Of life and motion; and with equal art Made up again the whole of every part. --_Cowley_.

A coal-pit has not often found its poet; but, that it may not want its due honour, Cleveland has paralleled it with the sun:

The moderate value of our guiltless ore Makes no man atheist, and no woman whore; Yet why should hallow'd vestals' sacred shrine Deserve more honour than a flaming mine? These pregnant wombs of heat would fitter be Than a few embers, for a deity.

Had he our pits, the Persian would admire No sun, but warm's devotion at our fire: He'd leave the trotting whipster, and prefer Our profound Vulcan 'bove that waggoner. For wants he heat or light? or would have store Of both? 'tis here: and what can suns give more? Nay, what's the sun but, in a different name, A coal-pit rampant, or a mine on flame! Then let this truth reciprocally run The sun's heaven's coalery, and coals our sun.

DEATH, A VOYAGE.

No family E'er rigg'd a soul for heaven's discovery, With whom more venturers might boldly dare Venture their stakes, with him in joy to share. --_Donne_.

Their thoughts and expressions were sometimes grossly absurd, and such as no figures or licence can reconcile to the understanding.

A LOVER NEITHER DEAD NOR ALIVE.

Then down I laid my head, Down on cold earth; and for a while was dead, And my freed soul to a strange somewhere fled: Ah, sottish soul, said I, When back to its cage again I saw it fly: Fool to resume her broken chain! And row her galley here again! Fool, to that body to return Where it condemn'd and destin'd is to burn! Once dead, how can it be, Death should a thing so pleasant seem to thee, That thou should'st come to live it o'er again in me? --_Cowley_.

A LOVER'S HEART A HAND GRENADO.

Wo to her stubborn heart, if once mine come Into the self-same room, 'T will tear and blow up all within, Like a grenado shot into a magazin.

Then shall Love keep the ashes, and torn parts, Of both our broken hearts: Shall out of both one new one make; From hers th' allay; from mine, the metal take. --_Cowley_.

THE POETICAL PROPAGATION OF LIGHT.

The Prince's favour is diffus'd o'er all, From which all fortunes, names, and natures fall; Then from those wombs of stars, the Bride's bright eyes, At every glance a constellation flies, And sows the court with stars, and doth prevent In light and power, the all-ey'd firmament: First her eye kindles other ladies' eyes, Then from their beams their jewels' lustres rise; And from their jewels torches do take fire, And all is warmth, and light, and good desire. --_Donne_.

They were in very little care to clothe their notions with elegance of dress, and therefore miss the notice and the praise which are often gained by those who think less, but are more diligent to adorn their thoughts.

That a mistress beloved is fairer in idea than in reality is by Cowley thus expressed:

Thou in my fancy dost much higher stand, Than woman can be plac'd by Nature's hand; And I must needs, I'm sure, a loser be, To change thee, as thou 'rt there, for very thee.

That prayer and labour should co-operate are thus taught by Donne:

In none but us, are such mixt engines found, As hands of double office: for the ground We till with them; and them to heaven we raise; Who prayerless labours, or without this, prays, Doth but one half, that's none.

By the same author, a common topic, the danger of procrastination, is thus illustrated:

--That which I should have begun In my youth's morning, now late must be done; And I, as giddy travellers must do, Which stray or sleep all day, and having lost Light and strength, dark and tir'd must then ride post.

All that Man has to do is to live and die; the sum of humanity is comprehended by Donne in the following lines:

Think in how poor a prison thou didst lie; After, enabled but to suck and cry. Think, when't was grown to most, 't was a poor inn, A province pack'd up in two yards of skin, And that usurp'd, or threaten'd with a rage Of sicknesses, or their true mother, age. But think that death hath now enfranchis'd thee; Thou hast thy expansion now, and liberty; Think, that a rusty piece discharg'd is flown In pieces, and the bullet is his own, And freely flies; this to thy soul allow, Think thy shell broke, think thy soul hatched but now.

They were sometimes indelicate and disgusting. Cowley thus apostrophizes beauty:

--Thou tyrant, which leav'st no man free! Thou subtle thief, from whom nought safe can be! Thou murderer, which hast kill'd, and devil, which would'st damn me.

Thus he addresses his mistress:

Thou who, in many a propriety, So truly art the sun to me. Add one more likeness, which I'm sure you can, And let me and my sun beget a man.

Thus he represents the meditations of a lover:

Though in thy thoughts scarce any tracts have been So much as of original sin, Such charms thy beauty wears as might Desires in dying confest saints excite. Thou with strange adultery Dost in each breast a brothel keep; Awake, all men do lust for thee, And some enjoy thee when they sleep.

The true taste of tears:

Hither with crystal vials, lovers, come, And take my tears, which are Love's wine, And try your mistress' tears at home; For all are false, that taste not just like mine. --_Donne_.

This is yet more indelicate:

As the sweet sweat of roses in a still As that which from chaf'd musk-cat's pores doth trill, As th' almighty balm of th' early East, Such are the sweet drops of my mistress' breast. And on her neck her skin such lustre sets, They seem no sweat-drops, but pearl coronets: Rank sweaty froth thy mistress' brow defiles. --_Donne_.

Their expressions sometimes raise horror, when they intend perhaps to be pathetic:

As men in hell are from diseases free, So from all other ills am I. Free from their known formality: But all pains eminently lie in thee. --_Cowley_.

They were not always strictly curious, whether the opinions from which they drew their illustrations were true; it was enough that they were popular. Bacon remarks that some falsehoods are continued by tradition, because they supply commodious allusions.

It gave a piteous groan, and so it broke; In vain it something would have spoke: The love within too strong for't was, Like poison put into a Venice-glass. --_Cowley_.

In forming descriptions, they looked out, not for images, but for conceits. Night has been a common subject, which poets have contended to adorn. Dryden's Night is well known; Donne's is as follows:

Thou seest me here at midnight, now all rest: Time's dead low-water; when all minds divest To-morrow's business, when the labourers have Such rest in bed, that their last church-yard grave, Subject to change, will scarce be a type of this; Now when the client, whose last hearing is To-morrow, sleeps; when the condemned man, Who when he opens his eyes, must shut them then Again by death, although sad watch he keep, Doth practise dying by a little sleep, Thou at this midnight seest me.

It must be, however, confessed of these writers that if they are upon common subjects often unnecessarily and unpoetically subtle, yet where scholastic speculation can be properly admitted, their copiousness and acuteness may justly be admired. What Cowley has written upon Hope shows an unequalled fertility of invention:

Hope, whose weak being ruin'd is, Alike if it succeed, and if it miss; Whom good or ill does equally confound, And both the horns of Fate's dilemma wound. Vain shadow, which dost vanish quite, Both at full noon and perfect night! The stars have not a possibility Of blessing thee; If things then from their end we happy call, 'T is hope is the most hopeless thing of all. Hope, thou bold taster of delight, Who, whilst thou shouldst but taste, devour'st it quite! Thou bring'st us an estate, yet leav'st us poor, By clogging it with legacies before! The joys, which we entire should wed, Come deflower'd virgins to our bed; Good fortune without gain imported be, Such mighty customs paid to thee: For joy, like wine, kept close does better taste; If it take air before, its spirits waste.

To the following comparison of a man that travels and his wife that stays at home, with a pair of compasses, it may be doubted whether absurdity or ingenuity has the better claim:

Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin-compasses are two, Thy soul, the fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must Like th' other foot, obliquely run. Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun._ --Donne._

In all these examples it is apparent that whatever is improper or vicious is produced by a voluntary deviation from nature in pursuit of something new and strange, and that the writers fail to give delight by their desire of exciting admiration.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

(1772-1834)

IV. ON POETIC GENIUS AND POETIC DICTION.

The following passage forms Chapters xiv and xv of Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_, published in 1817 It has been selected as giving a less imperfect impression of his powers as a critic than any other piece that could have been chosen The truth is that, great in talk and supreme in poetry, Coleridge was lost directly he sat down to express himself in prose His style is apt to be cumbrous, and his matter involved. We feel that the critic himself was greater than any criticism recorded either in his writings or his lectures The present extract may be defined as an attempt, and an attempt less inadequate than was common with Coleridge, to state his poetic creed, and to illustrate it by reference to his own poetry and to that of Wordsworth and of Shakespeare. In what he says of Shakespeare he is at his best. He forgets himself, and writes with a single eye to a theme which was thoroughly worthy of his powers. In the earlier part of the piece, and indeed indirectly throughout, he has in mind Wordsworth's famous Preface to the _Lyrical Ballads_, which is to be found in any complete edition of Wordsworth's poems, or in his poise writings, as edited by Dr. Grosart.

During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversation turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset, diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves.

In this idea originated the plan of the _Lyrical Ballads;_ [Footnote: Published in 1798. It opened with the _Ancient Mariner_ and closed with Wordsworth's lines on _Tintern Abbey._ Among other poems written in Wordsworth's simplest style were _The Idiot Boy, The Thorn,_ and _We are Seven._] in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

With this view I wrote the _Ancient Mariner,_ and was preparing, among other poems, the _Dark Ladie,_ and the _Christabel,_ in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction which is characteristic of his genius. In this form the _Lyrical Ballads_ were published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms of style that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy. For from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy I explain the inveteracy, and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the assailants.

Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things which they were for a long time described as being; had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after year increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were found, too, not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their admiration (inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervour. These facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round and round. With many parts of this preface, in the sense attributed to them, and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never concurred; but, on the contrary, objected to them as erroneous in principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface and to the author's own practice in the greater number of the poems themselves. Mr. Wordsworth, in his recent collection, has, I find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume, to be read or not at the reader's choice. But he has not, as far as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic creed. At all events, considering it as the source of a controversy, in which I have been honoured more than I deserve by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient to declare, once for all, in what points I coincide with his opinions, and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render myself intelligible, I must previously, in as few words as possible, explain my ideas, first, of a poem; and secondly, of poetry itself, in kind and in essence.

The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware that distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy.

A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference, therefore, must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object proposed. According to the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination. It is possible that the object may be merely to facilitate the recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is distinguished from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly. In this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months:

Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November, &c.

and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular pleasure is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities, all compositions that have this charm superadded, whatever be their contents, _may_ be entitled poems.

So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents supplies an additional ground of distinction. The immediate purpose may be the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts experienced and recorded, as in history. Pleasure, and that of the highest and most permanent kind, may result from the attainment of the end; but it is not itself the immediate end. In other works the communication of pleasure may be the immediate purpose; and though truth, either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will distinguish the character of the author, not the class to which the work belongs. Blest indeed is that state of society, in which the immediate purpose would be baffled by the perversion of the proper ultimate end; in which no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the Bathyllus even of an Anacreon, or the Alexis of Virgil, from disgust and aversion!