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Appreciations, with an Essay on Style

by Walter Pater · English · Gutenberg #4037 · 393,427 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Appreciations, with an Essay on Style

Author: Walter Pater


        
Release date: May 1, 2003 [eBook #4037]
                Most recently updated: December 27, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4037

Credits: Produced by Alfred J. Drake.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK APPRECIATIONS, WITH AN ESSAY ON STYLE ***




Produced by Alfred J. Drake.  HTML version by Al Haines.









APPRECIATIONS, WITH AN ESSAY ON STYLE

By WALTER HORATIO PATER




E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Electronic Version 1.0 / Date
10-12-01


NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:

Reliability: Although I have done my best to ensure that the text you
read is error-free in comparison with an exact reprint of the standard
edition--Macmillan's 1910 Library Edition--please exercise scholarly
caution in using it.  It is not intended as a substitute for the
printed original but rather as a searchable supplement. My e-texts may
prove convenient substitutes for hard-to-get works in a course where
both instructor and students accept the possibility of some
imperfections in the text, but if you are writing a scholarly article,
dissertation, or book, you should use the standard hard-copy editions
of any works you cite.

Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I
have transferred original pagination to brackets.  A bracketed numeral
such as [22] indicates that the material immediately following the
number marks the beginning of the relevant page.  I have preserved
paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.

Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-text
does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.

Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
Pater's Greek quotations.  If there is a need for the original Greek,
it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a
Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater
and many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.




CONTENTS

Style: 5-38

Wordsworth: 39-64

Coleridge: 65-104

Charles Lamb: 105-123

Sir Thomas Browne: 124-160

"Love's Labours Lost": 161-169

"Measure for Measure": 170-184

Shakespeare's English Kings: 185-204

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: 205-218

Feuillet's "La Morte": 219-240

Postscript: 241-261




APPRECIATIONS


STYLE

[5] SINCE all progress of mind consists for the most part in
differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object
into its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses to
confuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense of
achieved distinctions, the distinction between poetry and prose, for
instance, or, to speak more exactly, between the laws and
characteristic excellences of verse and prose composition.  On the
other hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction
between prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have been
tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and this
again is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the renunciation
of a certain means or faculty, in a world where after all we must needs
make the most of things.  Critical efforts to limit art a priori, by
anticipations regarding the natural incapacity of the material with
which this or that artist works, as the sculptor with solid form, or
the prose-writer with the ordinary [6] language of men, are always
liable to be discredited by the facts of artistic production; and while
prose is actually found to be a coloured thing with Bacon, picturesque
with Livy and Carlyle, musical with Cicero and Newman, mystical and
intimate with Plato and Michelet and Sir Thomas Browne, exalted or
florid, it may be, with Milton and Taylor, it will be useless to
protest that it can be nothing at all, except something very tamely and
narrowly confined to mainly practical ends--a kind of  "good
round-hand;" as useless as the protest that poetry might not touch
prosaic subjects as with Wordsworth, or an abstruse matter as with
Browning, or treat contemporary life nobly as with Tennyson.  In
subordination to one essential beauty in all good literary style, in
all literature as a fine art, as there are many beauties of poetry so
the beauties of prose are many, and it is the business of criticism to
estimate them as such; as it is good in the criticism of verse to look
for those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excellences which that too
has, or needs.  To find in the poem, amid the flowers, the allusions,
the mixed perspectives, of Lycidas for instance, the thought, the
logical structure:--how wholesome! how delightful! as to identify in
prose what we call the poetry, the imaginative power, not treating it
as out of place and a kind of vagrant intruder, but by way of an
estimate of its rights, that is, of its achieved powers, there.

[7] Dryden, with the characteristic instinct of his age, loved to
emphasise the distinction between poetry and prose, the protest against
their confusion with each other, coming with somewhat diminished effect
from one whose poetry was so prosaic.  In truth, his sense of prosaic
excellence affected his verse rather than his prose, which is not only
fervid, richly figured, poetic, as we say, but vitiated, all
unconsciously, by many a scanning line.  Setting up correctness, that
humble merit of prose, as the central literary excellence, he is really
a less correct writer than he may seem, still with an imperfect mastery
of the relative pronoun.  It might have been foreseen that, in the
rotations of mind, the province of poetry in prose would find its
assertor; and, a century after Dryden, amid very different intellectual
needs, and with the need therefore of great modifications in literary
form, the range of the poetic force in literature was effectively
enlarged by Wordsworth.  The true distinction between prose and poetry
he regarded as the almost technical or accidental one of the absence or
presence of metrical beauty, or, say! metrical restraint; and for him
the opposition came to be between verse and prose of course; but, as
the essential dichotomy in this matter, between imaginative and
unimaginative writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between
"the literature of power and the literature of knowledge," in the
former of which the composer gives us [8] not fact, but his peculiar
sense of fact, whether past or present.

Dismissing then, under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher opposition
of poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary psychology of
the last century, and with it the prejudice that there can be but one
only beauty of prose style, I propose here to point out certain
qualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they apply to the
literature of fact, apply still more to the literature of the
imaginative sense of fact, while they apply indifferently to verse and
prose, so far as either is really imaginative--certain conditions of
true art in both alike, which conditions may also contain in them the
secret of the proper discrimination and guardianship of the peculiar
excellences of either.

The line between fact and something quite different from external fact
is, indeed, hard to draw.  In Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive
writers generally, how difficult to define the point where, from time
to time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, must
consist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading--a theorem no
longer, but essentially an appeal to the reader to catch the writer's
spirit, to think with him, if one can or will--an expression no longer
of fact but of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world,
prospective, or discerned below the faulty conditions of the present,
in either case changed somewhat from the actual [9] world.  In science,
on the other hand, in history so far as it conforms to scientific rule,
we have a literary domain where the imagination may be thought to be
always an intruder.  And as, in all science, the functions of
literature reduce themselves eventually to the transcribing of fact, so
all the excellences of literary form in regard to science are reducible
to various kinds of pains-taking; this good quality being involved in
all "skilled work" whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament,
as in sewing.  Yet here again, the writer's sense of fact, in history
especially, and in all those complex subjects which do but lie on the
borders of science, will still take the place of fact, in various
degrees.  Your historian, for instance, with absolutely truthful
intention, amid the multitude of facts presented to him must needs
select, and in selecting assert something of his own humour, something
that comes not of the world without but of a vision within.  So Gibbon
moulds his unwieldy material to a preconceived view.  Livy, Tacitus,
Michelet, moving full of poignant sensibility amid the records of the
past, each, after his own sense, modifies--who can tell where and to
what degree?--and becomes something else than a transcriber; each, as
he thus modifies, passing into the domain of art proper.  For just in
proportion as the writer's aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to
be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his
sense [10] of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art; and good art
(as I hope ultimately to show) in proportion to the truth of his
presentment of that sense; as in those humbler or plainer functions of
literature also, truth--truth to bare fact, there--is the essence of
such artistic quality as they may have.  Truth! there can be no merit,
no craft at all, without that.  And further, all beauty is in the long
run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer
accommodation of speech to that vision within.

--The transcript of his sense of fact rather than the fact, as being
preferable, pleasanter, more beautiful to the writer himself.  In
literature, as in every other product of human skill, in the moulding
of a bell or a platter for instance, wherever this sense asserts
itself, wherever the producer so modifies his work as, over and above
its primary use or intention, to make it pleasing (to himself, of
course, in the first instance) there, "fine" as opposed to merely
serviceable art, exists.  Literary art, that is, like all art which is
in any way imitative or reproductive of fact--form, or colour, or
incident--is the representation of such fact as connected with soul, of
a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power.

Such is the matter of imaginative or artistic literature--this
transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, as
modified by human preference in all its infinitely varied [11] forms.
It will be good literary art not because it is brilliant or sober, or
rich, or impulsive, or severe, but just in proportion as its
representation of that sense, that soul-fact, is true, verse being only
one department of such literature, and imaginative prose, it may be
thought, being the special art of the modern world.  That imaginative
prose should be the special and opportune art of the modern world
results from two important facts about the latter: first, the chaotic
variety and complexity of its interests, making the intellectual issue,
the really master currents of the present time incalculable--a
condition of mind little susceptible of the restraint proper to verse
form, so that the most characteristic verse of the nineteenth century
has been lawless verse; and secondly, an all-pervading naturalism, a
curiosity about everything whatever as it really is, involving a
certain humility of attitude, cognate to what must, after all, be the
less ambitious form of literature.  And prose thus asserting itself as
the special and privileged artistic faculty of the present day, will
be, however critics may try to narrow its scope, as varied in its
excellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its latest
experience--an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant,
descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid.  Its beauties will
be not exclusively "pedestrian": it will exert, in due measure, all the
varied charms of poetry, down to the rhythm which, as in Cicero, [12]
or Michelet, or Newman, at their best, gives its musical value to every
syllable.*

The literary artist is of necessity a scholar, and in what he .
proposes to do will have in mind, first of all, the scholar and the
scholarly conscience--the male conscience in this matter, as we must
think it, under a system of education which still to so large an extent
limits real scholarship to men.  In his self-criticism, he supposes
always that sort of reader who will go (full of eyes) warily,
considerately, though without consideration for him, over the ground
which the female conscience traverses so lightly, so amiably. For the
material in which he works is no more a creation of his own than the
sculptor's marble.  Product of a myriad various minds and contending
tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its
own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary
recognition of which scholarship consists.  A writer, full of a matter
he is before all things anxious to express, may think of those laws,
the limitations of vocabulary, structure, and the like, as a
restriction, but if a [13] real artist will find in them an
opportunity. His punctilious observance of the proprieties of his
medium will diffuse through all he writes a general air of sensibility,
of refined usage.  Exclusiones debitae--the exclusions, or rejections,
which nature demands--we know how large a part these play, according to
Bacon, in the science of nature.  In a somewhat changed sense, we might
say that the art of the scholar is summed up in the observance of those
rejections demanded by the nature of his medium, the material he must
use.  Alive to the value of an atmosphere in which every term finds its
utmost degree of expression, and with all the jealousy of a lover of
words, he will resist a constant tendency on the part of the majority
of those who use them to efface the distinctions of language, the
facility of writers often reinforcing in this respect the work of the
vulgar.  He will feel the obligation not of the laws only, but of those
affinities, avoidances, those mere preferences, of his language, which
through the associations of literary history have become a part of its
nature, prescribing the rejection of many a neology, many a license,
many a gipsy phrase which might present itself as actually expressive.
His appeal, again, is to the scholar, who has great experience in
literature, and will show no favour to short-cuts, or hackneyed
illustration, or an affectation of learning designed for the unlearned.
Hence a contention, a sense [14] of self-restraint and renunciation,
having for the susceptible reader the effect of a challenge for minute
consideration; the attention of the writer, in every minutest detail,
being a pledge that it is worth the reader's while to be attentive too,
that the writer is dealing scrupulously with his instrument, and
therefore, indirectly, with the reader himself also, that he has the
science of the instrument he plays on, perhaps, after all, with a
freedom which in such case will be the freedom of a master.

For meanwhile, braced only by those restraints, he is really
vindicating his liberty in the making of a vocabulary, an entire system
of composition, for himself, his own true manner; and when we speak of
the manner of a true master we mean what is essential in his art.
Pedantry being only the scholarship of le cuistre (we have no English
equivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his intelligence of the
rules of language in his freedoms with it, addition or expansion, which
like the spontaneities of manner in a well-bred person will still
further illustrate good taste.--The right vocabulary!  Translators have
not invariably seen how all-important that is in the work of
translation, driving for the most part at idiom or construction;
whereas, if the original be first-rate, one's first care should be with
its elementary particles, Plato, for instance, being often reproducible
by an exact following, with no variation in structure, of word after
word, as [15] the pencil follows a drawing under tracing-paper, so only
each word or syllable be not of false colour, to change my illustration
a little.

Well! that is because any writer worth translating at all has winnowed
and searched through his vocabulary, is conscious of the words he would
select in systematic reading of a dictionary, and still more of the
words he would reject were the dictionary other than Johnson's; and
doing this with his peculiar sense of the world ever in view, in search
of an instrument for the adequate expression of that, he begets a
vocabulary faithful to the colouring of his own spirit, and in the
strictest sense original.  That living authority which language needs
lies, in truth, in its scholars, who recognising always that every
language possesses a genius, a very fastidious genius, of its own,
expand at once and purify its very elements, which must needs change
along with the changing thoughts of living people.  Ninety years ago,
for instance, great mental force, certainly, was needed by Wordsworth,
to break through the consecrated poetic associations of a century, and
speak the language that was his, that was to become in a measure the
language of the next generation.  But he did it with the tact of a
scholar also.  English, for a quarter of a century past, has been
assimilating the phraseology of pictorial art; for half a century, the
phraseology of the great German metaphysical movement of eighty years
ago; in part also the [16] language of mystical theology: and none but
pedants will regret a great consequent increase of its resources.  For
many years to come its enterprise may well lie in the naturalisation of
the vocabulary of science, so only it be under the eye of a sensitive
scholarship--in a liberal naturalisation of the ideas of science too,
for after all the chief stimulus of good style is to possess a full,
rich, complex matter to grapple with.  The literary artist, therefore,
will be well aware of physical science; science also attaining, in its
turn, its true literary ideal.  And then, as the scholar is nothing
without the historic sense, he will be apt to restore not really
obsolete or really worn-out words, but the finer edge of words still in
use: ascertain, communicate, discover--words like these it has been
part of our "business" to misuse.  And still, as language was made for
man, he will be no authority for correctnesses which, limiting freedom
of utterance, were yet but accidents in their origin; as if one vowed
not to say "its," which ought to have been in Shakespeare; "his"
"hers," for inanimate objects, being but a barbarous and really
inexpressive survival.  Yet we have known many things like this.  Racy
Saxon monosyllables, close to us as touch and sight, he will intermix
readily with those long, savoursome, Latin words, rich in "second
intention."  In this late day certainly, no critical process can be
conducted reasonably without eclecticism.  Of [17] such eclecticism we
have a justifying example in one of the first poets of our time.  How
illustrative of monosyllabic effect, of sonorous Latin, of the
phraseology of science, of metaphysic, of colloquialism even, are the
writings of Tennyson; yet with what a fine, fastidious scholarship
throughout!

A scholar writing for the scholarly, he will of course leave something
to the willing intelligence of his reader.  "To go preach to the first
passer-by," says Montaigne, "to become tutor to the ignorance of the
first I meet, is a thing I abhor;" a thing, in fact, naturally
distressing to the scholar, who will therefore ever be shy of offering
uncomplimentary assistance to the reader's wit.  To really strenuous
minds there is a pleasurable stimulus in the challenge for a continuous
effort on their part, to be rewarded by securer and more intimate grasp
of the author's sense.  Self-restraint, a skilful economy of means,
ascêsis, that too has a beauty of its own; and for the reader supposed
there will be an aesthetic satisfaction in that frugal closeness of
style which makes the most of a word, in the exaction from every
sentence of a precise relief, in the just spacing out of word to
thought, in the logically filled space connected always with the
delightful sense of difficulty overcome.

Different classes of persons, at different times, make, of course, very
various demands upon literature.  Still, scholars, I suppose, and not
[18] only scholars, but all disinterested lovers of books, will always
look to it, as to all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort of cloistral
refuge, from a certain vulgarity in the actual world.  A perfect poem
like Lycidas, a perfect fiction like Esmond, the perfect handling of a
theory like Newman's Idea of a University, has for them something of
the uses of a religious "retreat."  Here, then, with a view to the
central need of a select few, those "men of a finer thread" who have
formed and maintain the literary ideal, everything, every component
element, will have undergone exact trial, and, above all, there will be
no uncharacteristic or tarnished or vulgar decoration, permissible
ornament being for the most part structural, or necessary.  As the
painter in his picture, so the artist in his book, aims at the
production by honourable artifice of a peculiar atmosphere.  "The
artist," says Schiller, "may be known rather by what he omits"; and in
literature, too, the true artist may be best recognised by his tact of
omission.  For to the grave reader words too are grave; and the
ornamental word, the figure, the accessory form or colour or reference,
is rarely content to die to thought precisely at the right moment, but
will inevitably linger awhile, stirring a long "brain-wave" behind it
of perhaps quite alien associations.

Just there, it may be, is the detrimental tendency of the sort of
scholarly attentiveness [19] of mind I am recommending.  But the true
artist allows for it.  He will remember that, as the very word ornament
indicates what is in itself non-essential, so the "one beauty" of all
literary style is of its very essence, and independent, in prose and
verse alike, of all removable decoration; that it may exist in its
fullest lustre, as in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, for instance, or in
Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, in a composition utterly unadorned,
with hardly a single suggestion of visibly beautiful things.  Parallel,
allusion, the allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden:--he
knows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent intelligence to
which any diversion, literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder,
because one can go wandering away with it from the immediate subject.
Jealous, if he have a really quickening motive within, of all that does
not hold directly to that, of the facile, the otiose, he will never
depart from the strictly pedestrian process, unless he gains a
ponderable something thereby.  Even assured of its congruity, he will
still question its serviceableness.  Is it worth while, can we afford,
to attend to just that, to just that figure or literary reference, just
then?--Surplusage! he will dread that, as the runner on his muscles.
For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage,
from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle
of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of [20] the finished
work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo's fancy, in the
rough-hewn block of stone.

And what applies to figure or flower must be understood of all other
accidental or removable ornaments of writing whatever; and not of
specific ornament only, but of all that latent colour and imagery which
language as such carries in it.  A lover of words for their own sake,
to whom nothing about them is unimportant, a minute and constant
observer of their physiognomy, he will be on the alert not only for
obviously mixed metaphors of course, but for the metaphor that is mixed
in all our speech, though a rapid use may involve no cognition of it.
Currently recognising the incident, the colour, the physical elements
or particles in words like absorb, consider, extract, to take the first
that occur, he will avail himself of them, as further adding to the
resources of expression.  The elementary particles of language will be
realised as colour and light and shade through his scholarly living in
the full sense of them.  Still opposing the constant degradation of
language by those who use it carelessly, he will not treat coloured
glass as if it were clear; and while half the world is using figure
unconsciously, will be fully aware not only of all that latent
figurative texture in speech, but of the vague, lazy, half-formed
personification--a rhetoric, depressing, and worse than nothing, [21]
because it has no really rhetorical motive--which plays so large a part
there, and, as in the case of more ostentatious ornament, scrupulously
exact of it, from syllable to syllable, its precise value.

So far I have been speaking of certain conditions of the literary art
arising out of the medium or material in or upon which it works, the
essential qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingent
ornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and good
taste respectively.  They are both subservient to a more intimate
quality of good style: more intimate, as coming nearer to the artist
himself.  The otiose, the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrent
to the true literary artist, except because, in literary as in all
other art, structure is all-important, felt, or painfully missed,
everywhere?--that architectural conception of work, which foresees the
end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is
conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with
undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first--a condition of
literary art, which, in contradistinction to another quality of the
artist himself, to be spoken of later, I shall call the necessity of
mind in style.

An acute philosophical writer, the late Dean Mansel (a writer whose
works illustrate the literary beauty there may be in closeness, and
with obvious repression or economy of a fine [22] rhetorical gift)
wrote a book, of fascinating precision in a very obscure subject, to
show that all the technical laws of logic are but means of securing, in
each and all of its apprehensions, the unity, the strict identity with
itself, of the apprehending mind.  All the laws of good writing aim at
a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which
the word is associated to its import.  The term is right, and has its
essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, as
with the names of simple sensations.  To give the phrase, the sentence,
the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a
similar unity with its subject and with itself:--style is in the right
way when it tends towards that.  All depends upon the original unity,
the vital wholeness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension or
view.  So much is true of all art, which therefore requires always its
logic, its comprehensive reason--insight, foresight, retrospect, in
simultaneous action--true, most of all, of the literary art, as being
of all the arts most closely cognate to the abstract intelligence.
Such logical coherency may be evidenced not merely in the lines of
composition as a whole, but in the choice of a single word, while it by
no means interferes with, but may even prescribe, much variety, in the
building of the sentence for instance, or in the manner, argumentative,
descriptive, discursive, of this or that [23] part or member of the
entire design. The blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a child's
expression of its needs, may alternate with the long-contending,
victoriously intricate sentence; the sentence, born with the integrity
of a single word, relieving the sort of sentence in which, if you look
closely, you can see much contrivance, much adjustment, to bring a
highly qualified matter into compass at one view.  For the literary
architecture, if it is to be rich and expressive, involves not only
foresight of the end in the beginning, but also development or growth
of design, in the process of execution, with many irregularities,
surprises, and afterthoughts; the contingent as well as the necessary
being subsumed under the unity of the whole.  As truly, to the lack of
such architectural design, of a single, almost visual, image,
vigorously informing an entire, perhaps very intricate, composition,
which shall be austere, ornate, argumentative, fanciful, yet true from
first to last to that vision within, may be attributed those weaknesses
of conscious or unconscious repetition of word, phrase, motive, or
member of the whole matter, indicating, as Flaubert was aware, an
original structure in thought not organically complete.  With such
foresight, the actual conclusion will most often get itself written out
of hand, before, in the more obvious sense, the work is finished. With
some strong and leading sense of the world, the [24] tight hold of
which secures true composition and not mere loose accretion, the
literary artist, I suppose, goes on considerately, setting joint to
joint, sustained by yet restraining the productive ardour, retracing
the negligences of his first sketch, repeating his steps only that he
may give the reader a sense of secure and restful progress, readjusting
mere assonances even, that they may soothe the reader, or at least not
interrupt him on his way; and then, somewhere before the end comes, is
burdened, inspired, with his conclusion, and betimes delivered of it,
leaving off, not in weariness and because he finds himself at an end,
but in all the freshness of volition.  His work now structurally
complete, with all the accumulating effect of secondary shades of
meaning, he finishes the whole up to the just proportion of that
ante-penultimate conclusion, and all becomes expressive.  The house he
has built is rather a body he has informed. And so it happens, to its
greater credit, that the better interest even of a narrative to be
recounted, a story to be told, will often be in its second reading.
And though there are instances of great writers who have been no
artists, an unconscious tact sometimes directing work in which we may
detect, very pleasurably, many of the effects of conscious art, yet one
of the greatest pleasures of really good prose literature is in the
critical tracing out of that conscious artistic structure, and the
pervading sense of it [25] as we read.  Yet of poetic literature too;
for, in truth, the kind of constructive intelligence here supposed is
one of the forms of the imagination.

That is the special function of mind, in style.  Mind and soul:--hard
to ascertain philosophically, the distinction is real enough
practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes in conflict, with
each other.  Blake, in the last century, is an instance of
preponderating soul, embarrassed, at a loss, in an era of
preponderating mind.  As a quality of style, at all events, soul is a
fact, in certain writers--the way they have of absorbing language, of
attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety
which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration.
By mind, the literary artist reaches us, through static and objective
indications of design in his work, legible to all.  By soul, he reaches
us, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not another, through vagrant
sympathy and a kind of immediate contact. Mind we cannot choose but
approve where we recognise it; soul may repel us, not because we
misunderstand it.  The way in which theological interests sometimes
avail themselves of language is perhaps the best illustration of the
force I mean to indicate generally in literature, by the word soul.
Ardent religious persuasion may exist, may make its way, without
finding any equivalent heat in language: or, again, it may enkindle
[26] words to various degrees, and when it really takes hold of them
doubles its force.  Religious history presents many remarkable
instances in which, through no mere phrase-worship, an unconscious
literary tact has, for the sensitive, laid open a privileged pathway
from one to another.  "The altar-fire," people say, "has touched those
lips!" The Vulgate, the English Bible, the English Prayer-Book, the
writings of Swedenborg, the Tracts for the Times:--there, we have
instances of widely different and largely diffused phases of religious
feeling in operation as soul in style.  But something of the same kind
acts with similar power in certain writers of quite other than
theological literature, on behalf of some wholly personal and peculiar
sense of theirs.  Most easily illustrated by theological literature,
this quality lends to profane writers a kind of religious influence.
At their best, these writers become, as we say sometimes, "prophets";
such character depending on the effect not merely of their matter, but
of their matter as allied to, in "electric affinity" with, peculiar
form, and working in all cases by an immediate sympathetic contact, on
which account it is that it may be called soul, as opposed to mind, in
style.  And this too is a faculty of choosing and rejecting what is
congruous or otherwise, with a drift towards unity--unity of atmosphere
here, as there of design--soul securing colour (or perfume, might [27]
we say?) as mind secures form, the latter being essentially finite, the
former vague or infinite, as the influence of a living person is
practically infinite.  There are some to whom nothing has any real
interest, or real meaning, except as operative in a given person; and
it is they who best appreciate the quality of soul in literary art.
They seem to know a person, in a book, and make way by intuition: yet,
although they thus enjoy the completeness of a personal information, it
is still a characteristic of soul, in this sense of the word, that it
does but suggest what can never be uttered, not as being different
from, or more obscure than, what actually gets said, but as containing
that plenary substance of which there is only one phase or facet in
what is there expressed.

If all high things have their martyrs, Gustave Flaubert might perhaps
rank as the martyr of literary style.  In his printed correspondence, a
curious series of letters, written in his twenty-fifth year, records
what seems to have been his one other passion--a series of letters
which, with its fine casuistries, its firmly repressed anguish, its
tone of harmonious grey, and the sense of disillusion in which the
whole matter ends, might have been, a few slight changes supposed, one
of his own fictions.  Writing to Madame X. certainly he does display,
by "taking thought" mainly, by constant and delicate pondering, as in
his love for literature, a heart really moved, but [28] still more, and
as the pledge of that emotion, a loyalty to his work.  Madame X., too,
is a literary artist, and the best gifts he can send her are precepts
of perfection in art, counsels for the effectual pursuit of that better
love.  In his love-letters it is the pains and pleasures of art he
insists on, its solaces: he communicates secrets, reproves, encourages,
with a view to that. Whether the lady was dissatisfied with such
divided or indirect service, the reader is not enabled to see; but sees
that, on Flaubert's part at least, a living person could be no rival of
what was, from first to last, his leading passion, a somewhat solitary
and exclusive one.

I must scold you (he writes) for one thing, which shocks, scandalises
me, the small concern, namely, you show for art just now.  As regards
glory be it so: there, I approve.  But for art!--the one thing in life
that is good and real--can you compare with it an earthly love?--prefer
the adoration of a relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty?
Well! I tell you the truth.  That is the one thing good in me: the one
thing I have, to me estimable.  For yourself, you blend with the
beautiful a heap of alien things, the useful, the agreeable, what not?--

The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and count
everything else as nothing.  Pride takes the place of all beside when
it is established on a large basis.  Work!  God wills it.  That, it
seems to me, is clear.--+

I am reading over again the Aeneid, certain verses of which I repeat to
myself to satiety.  There are phrases there which stay in one's head,
by which I find myself beset, as with those musical airs which are for
ever returning, and cause you pain, you love them so much.  I observe
that I no longer laugh much, and am no longer depressed.  I am ripe.
You talk of my serenity, and envy me.  It may well surprise you.  Sick,
[29] irritated, the prey a thousand times a day of cruel pain, I
continue my labour like a true working-man, who, with sleeves turned
up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, never troubling
himself whether it rains or blows, for hail or thunder.  I was not like
that formerly.  The change has taken place naturally, though my will
has counted for something in the matter.--

Those who write in good style are sometimes accused of a neglect of
ideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the physician were
something else than healing, of the painter than painting-as if the end
of art were not, before all else, the beautiful.

What, then, did Flaubert understand by beauty, in the art he pursued
with so much fervour, with so much self-command?  Let us hear a
sympathetic commentator:--

Possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of
expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify,
one verb to animate it, he gave himself to superhuman labour for the
discovery, in every phrase, of that word, that verb, that epithet.  In
this way, he believed in some mysterious harmony of expression, and
when a true word seemed to him to lack euphony still went on seeking
another, with invincible patience, certain that he had not yet got hold
of the unique word....  A thousand preoccupations would beset him at
the same moment, always with this desperate certitude fixed in his
spirit: Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of
expression, there is but one--one form, one mode--to express what I
want to say.

The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of
words, terms, that might just do: the problem of style was there!--the
unique word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, or song, absolutely
proper to the single mental presentation or vision within.

[30] In that perfect justice, over and above the many contingent and
removable beauties with which beautiful style may charm us, but which
it can exist without, independent of them yet dexterously availing
itself of them, omnipresent in good work, in function at every point,
from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific,
indispensable, very intellectual, beauty of literature, the possibility
of which constitutes it a fine art.

One seems to detect the influence of a philosophic idea there, the idea
of a natural economy, of some pre-existent adaptation, between a
relative, somewhere in the world of thought, and its correlative,
somewhere in the world of language--both alike, rather, somewhere in
the mind of the artist, desiderative, expectant, inventive--meeting
each other with the readiness of "soul and body reunited," in Blake's
rapturous design; and, in fact, Flaubert was fond of giving his theory
philosophical expression.--

There are no beautiful thoughts (he would say) without beautiful forms,
and conversely.  As it is impossible to extract from a physical body
the qualities which really constitute it--colour, extension, and the
like--without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in a word, without
destroying it; just so it is impossible to detach the form from the
idea, for the idea only exists by virtue of the form.

All, the recognised flowers, the removable ornaments of literature
(including harmony and ease in reading aloud, very carefully considered
[31] by him) counted, certainly; for these too are part of the actual
value of what one says.  But still, after all, with Flaubert, the
search, the unwearied research, was not for the smooth, or winsome, or
forcible word, as such, as with false Ciceronians, but quite simply and
honestly, for the word's adjustment to its meaning. The first condition
of this must be, of course, to know yourself, to have ascertained your
own sense exactly.  Then, if we suppose an artist, he says to the
reader,--I want you to see precisely what I see.  Into the mind
sensitive to "form," a flood of random sounds, colours, incidents, is
ever penetrating from the world without, to become, by sympathetic
selection, a part of its very structure, and, in turn, the visible
vesture and expression of that other world it sees so steadily within,
nay, already with a partial conformity thereto, to be refined,
enlarged, corrected, at a hundred points; and it is just there, just at
those doubtful points that the function of style, as tact or taste,
intervenes.  The unique term will come more quickly to one than
another, at one time than another, according also to the kind of matter
in question.  Quickness and slowness, ease and closeness alike, have
nothing to do with the artistic character of the true word found at
last.  As there is a charm of ease, so there is also a special charm in
the signs of discovery, of effort and contention towards a due end, as
so often with Flaubert himself--in the style which has [32] been
pliant, as only obstinate, durable metal can be, to the inherent
perplexities and recusancy of a certain difficult thought.

If Flaubert had not told us, perhaps we should never have guessed how
tardy and painful his own procedure really was, and after reading his
confession may think that his almost endless hesitation had much to do
with diseased nerves.  Often, perhaps, the felicity supposed will be
the product of a happier, a more exuberant nature than Flaubert's.
Aggravated, certainly, by a morbid physical condition, that anxiety in
"seeking the phrase," which gathered all the other small ennuis of a
really quiet existence into a kind of battle, was connected with his
lifelong contention against facile poetry, facile art--art, facile and
flimsy; and what constitutes the true artist is not the slowness or
quickness of the process, but the absolute success of the result.  As
with those labourers in the parable, the prize is independent of the
mere length of the actual day's work.  "You talk," he writes, odd,
trying lover, to Madame X.--

"You talk of the exclusiveness of my literary tastes.  That might have
enabled you to divine what kind of a person I am in the matter of love.
I grow so hard to please as a literary artist, that I am driven to
despair.  I shall end by not writing another line."

"Happy," he cries, in a moment of discouragement at that patient
labour, which for him, certainly, was the condition of a great
success--[33]

Happy those who have no doubts of themselves! who lengthen out, as the
pen runs on, all that flows forth from their brains.  As for me, I
hesitate, I disappoint myself, turn round upon myself in despite: my
taste is augmented in proportion as my natural vigour decreases, and I
afflict my soul over some dubious word out of all proportion to the
pleasure I get from a whole page of good writing.  One would have to
live two centuries to attain a true idea of any matter whatever.  What
Buffon said is a big blasphemy: genius is not long-continued patience.
Still, there is some truth in the statement, and more than people
think, especially as regards our own day.  Art! art! art! bitter
deception! phantom that glows with light, only to lead one on to
destruction...

Again--

I am growing so peevish about my writing.  I am like a man whose ear is
true but who plays falsely on the violin: his fingers refuse to
reproduce precisely those sounds of which he has the inward sense.
Then the tears come rolling down from the poor scraper's eyes and the
bow falls from his hand.

Coming slowly or quickly, when it comes, as it came with so much labour
of mind, but also with so much lustre, to Gustave Flaubert, this
discovery of the word will be, like all artistic success and felicity,
incapable of strict analysis: effect of an intuitive condition of mind,
it must be recognised by like intuition on the part of the reader, and
a sort of immediate sense.  In every one of those masterly sentences of
Flaubert there was, below all mere contrivance, shaping and
afterthought, by some happy instantaneous concourse of the various
faculties of the mind with each other, the exact apprehension of what
was needed to carry the meaning.  And that it fits with absolute
justice will be a judgment of [34] immediate sense in the appreciative
reader.  We all feel this in what may be called inspired translation.
Well! all language involves translation from inward to outward.  In
literature, as in all forms of art, there are the absolute and the
merely relative or accessory beauties; and precisely in that exact
proportion of the term to its purpose is the absolute beauty of style,
prose or verse.  All the good qualities, the beauties, of verse also,
are such, only as precise expression.

In the highest as in the lowliest literature, then, the one
indispensable beauty is, after all, truth:--truth to bare fact in the
latter, as to some personal sense of fact, diverted somewhat from men's
ordinary sense of it, in the former; truth there as accuracy, truth
here as expression, that finest and most intimate form of truth, the
vraie vérité. And what an eclectic principle this really is! employing
for its one sole purpose--that absolute accordance of expression to
idea--all other literary beauties and excellences whatever: how many
kinds of style it covers, explains, justifies, and at the same time
safeguards!  Scott's facility, Flaubert's deeply pondered evocation of
"the phrase," are equally good art.  Say what you have to say, what you
have a will to say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact manner
possible, with no surplusage:--there, is the justification of the
sentence so fortunately born, "entire, smooth, and round," that it
needs no punctuation, and also [35] (that is the point!) of the most
elaborate period, if it be right in its elaboration.  Here is the
office of ornament: here also the purpose of restraint in ornament.  As
the exponent of truth, that austerity (the beauty, the function, of
which in literature Flaubert understood so well) becomes not the
correctness or purism of the mere scholar, but a security against the
otiose, a jealous exclusion of what does not really tell towards the
pursuit of relief, of life and vigour in the portraiture of one's
sense.  License again, the making free with rule, if it be indeed, as
people fancy, a habit of genius, flinging aside or transforming all
that opposes the liberty of beautiful production, will be but faith to
one's own meaning.  The seeming baldness of Le Rouge et Le Noir is
nothing in itself; the wild ornament of Les Misérables is nothing in
itself; and the restraint of Flaubert, amid a real natural opulence,
only redoubled beauty--the phrase so large and so precise at the same
time, hard as bronze, in service to the more perfect adaptation of
words to their matter. Afterthoughts, retouchings, finish, will be of
profit only so far as they too really serve to bring out the original,
initiative, generative, sense in them.

In this way, according to the well-known saying, "The style is the
man," complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of
what he really has to say, his sense of the world; all cautions
regarding style arising out of so many [36] natural scruples as to the
medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things,
the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing is
to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that.
Style in all its varieties, reserved or opulent, terse, abundant,
musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is really characteristic
or expressive, finds thus its justification, the sumptuous good taste
of Cicero being as truly the man himself, and not another, justified,
yet insured inalienably to him, thereby, as would have been his
portrait by Raffaelle, in full consular splendour, on his ivory chair.

A relegation, you may say perhaps--a relegation of style to the
subjectivity, the mere caprice, of the individual, which must soon
transform it into mannerism.  Not so! since there is, under the
conditions supposed, for those elements of the man, for every lineament
of the vision within, the one word, the one acceptable word,
recognisable by the sensitive, by others "who have intelligence" in the
matter, as absolutely as ever anything can be in the evanescent and
delicate region of human language.  The style, the manner, would be the
man, not in his unreasoned and really uncharacteristic caprices,
involuntary or affected, but in absolutely sincere apprehension of what
is most real to him.  But let us hear our French guide again.--

Styles (says Flaubert's commentator), Styles, as so many [37] peculiar
moulds, each of which bears the mark of a particular writer, who is to
pour into it the whole content of his ideas, were no part of his
theory.  What he believed in was Style: that is to say, a certain
absolute and unique manner of expressing a thing, in all its intensity
and colour.  For him the form was the work itself.  As in living
creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour
and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a
work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the
measure, the rhythm--the form in all its characteristics.

If the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritable
apprehension, it will be in a real sense "impersonal."

I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, that prose
literature was the characteristic art of the nineteenth century, as
others, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, have assigned
that place to music.  Music and prose literature are, in one sense, the
opposite terms of art; the art of literature presenting to the
imagination, through the intelligence, a range of interests, as free
and various as those which music presents to it through sense.  And
certainly the tendency of what has been here said is to bring
literature too under those conditions, by conformity to which music
takes rank as the typically perfect art.  If music be the ideal of all
art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to
distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the
expression, then, literature, by finding its specific excellence in the
absolute correspondence of the term to its import, will be [38] but
fulfilling the condition of all artistic quality in things everywhere,
of all good art.

Good art, but not necessarily great art; the distinction between great
art and good art depending immediately, as regards literature at all
events, not on its form, but on the matter.  Thackeray's Esmond,
surely, is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater dignity of its
interests.  It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls,
its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of
the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness
of literary art depends, as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les
Misérables, The English Bible, are great art. Given the conditions I
have tried to explain as constituting good art;--then, if it be devoted
further to the increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the
oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to
such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation
to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or
immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also great
art; if, over and above those qualities I summed up as mind and
soul--that colour and mystic perfume, and that reasonable structure, it
has something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its
architectural place, in the great structure of human life.

1888.

NOTES

12. *Mr. Saintsbury, in his Specimens of English Prose, from Malory to
Macaulay, has succeeded in tracing, through successive English
prose-writers, the tradition of that severer beauty in them, of which
this admirable scholar of our literature is known to be a lover.
English Prose, from Mandeville to Thackeray, more recently "chosen and
edited" by a younger scholar, Mr. Arthur Galton, of New College,
Oxford, a lover of our literature at once enthusiastic and discreet,
aims at a more various illustration of the eloquent powers of English
prose, and is a delightful companion.

28. +In the original, the quoted material is not indented but instead
appears in a smaller typeface; I have chosen to indent the material
half an inch to make it easier to read.



WORDSWORTH

[39] SOME English critics at the beginning of the present century had a
great deal to say concerning a distinction, of much importance, as they
thought, in the true estimate of poetry, between the Fancy, and another
more powerful faculty--the Imagination.  This metaphysical distinction,
borrowed originally from the writings of German philosophers, and
perhaps not always clearly apprehended by those who talked of it,
involved a far deeper and more vital distinction, with which indeed all
true criticism more or less directly has to do, the distinction,
namely, between higher and lower degrees of intensity in the poet's
perception of his subject, and in his concentration of himself upon his
work.  Of those who dwelt upon the metaphysical distinction between the
Fancy and the Imagination, it was Wordsworth who made the most of it,
assuming it as the basis for the final classification of his poetical
writings; and it is in these writings that the deeper and more vital
distinction, which, as I have said, underlies the metaphysical [40]
distinction, is most needed, and may best be illustrated.

For nowhere is there so perplexed a mixture as in Wordsworth's own
poetry, of work touched with intense and individual power, with work of
almost no character at all.  He has much conventional sentiment, and
some of that insincere poetic diction, against which his most serious
critical efforts were directed: the reaction in his political ideas,
consequent on the excesses of 1795, makes him, at times, a mere
declaimer on moral and social topics; and he seems, sometimes, to force
an unwilling pen, and write by rule.  By making the most of these
blemishes it is possible to obscure the true aesthetic value of his
work, just as his life also, a life of much quiet delicacy and
independence, might easily be placed in a false focus, and made to
appear a somewhat tame theme in illustration of the more obvious
parochial virtues.  And those who wish to understand his influence, and
experience his peculiar savour, must bear with patience the presence of
an alien element in Wordsworth's work, which never coalesced with what
is really delightful in it, nor underwent his special power.  Who that
values his writings most has not felt the intrusion there, from time to
time, of something tedious and prosaic? Of all poets equally great, he
would gain most by a skilfully made anthology.  Such a selection would
show, in truth, not so much what he was, or to himself or others [41]
seemed to be, as what, by the more energetic and fertile quality in his
writings, he was ever tending to become.  And the mixture in his work,
as it actually stands, is so perplexed, that one fears to miss the
least promising composition even, lest some precious morsel should be
lying hidden within--the few perfect lines, the phrase, the single word
perhaps, to which he often works up mechanically through a poem, almost
the whole of which may be tame enough.  He who thought that in all
creative work the larger part was given passively, to the recipient
mind, who waited so dutifully upon the gift, to whom so large a measure
was sometimes given, had his times also of desertion and relapse; and
he has permitted the impress of these too to remain in his work.  And
this duality there--the fitfulness with which the higher qualities
manifest themselves in it, gives the effect in his poetry of a power
not altogether his own, or under his control, which comes and goes when
it will, lifting or lowering a matter, poor in itself; so that that old
fancy which made the poet's art an enthusiasm, a form of divine
possession, seems almost literally true of him.

This constant suggestion of an absolute duality between higher and
lower moods, and the work done in them, stimulating one always to look
below the surface, makes the reading of Wordsworth an excellent sort of
training towards the things of art and poetry.  It begets in those,
[42] who, coming across him in youth, can bear him at all, a habit of
reading between the lines, a faith in the effect of concentration and
collectedness of mind in the right appreciation of poetry, an
expectation of things, in this order, coming to one by means of a right
discipline of the temper as well as of the intellect.  He meets us with
the promise that he has much, and something very peculiar, to give us,
if we will follow a certain difficult way, and seems to have the secret
of a special and privileged state of mind.  And those who have
undergone his influence, and followed this difficult way, are like
people who have passed through some initiation, a disciplina arcani, by
submitting to which they become able constantly to distinguish in art,
speech, feeling, manners, that which is organic, animated, expressive,
from that which is only conventional, derivative, inexpressive.

But although the necessity of selecting these precious morsels for
oneself is an opportunity for the exercise of Wordsworth's peculiar
influence, and induces a kind of just criticism and true estimate of
it, yet the purely literary product would have been more excellent, had
the writer himself purged away that alien element.  How perfect would
have been the little treasury, shut between the covers of how thin a
book!  Let us suppose the desired separation made, the electric thread
untwined, the golden pieces, [43] great and small, lying apart
together.*  What are the peculiarities of this residue? What special
sense does Wordsworth exercise, and what instincts does he satisfy?
What are the subjects and the motives which in him excite the
imaginative faculty?  What are the qualities in things and persons
which he values, the impression and sense of which he can convey to
others, in an extraordinary way?

An intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things, which
weighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier mind passed roughly by,
is a large element in the complexion of modern poetry.  It has been
remarked as a fact in mental history again and again.  It reveals
itself in many forms; but is strongest and most attractive in what is
strongest and most attractive in modern literature.  It is exemplified,
almost equally, by writers as unlike each other as Senancour and
Théophile Gautier: as a singular chapter in the history of the human
mind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau to Chateaubriand, from
Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo: it has doubtless some latent connexion
with those pantheistic theories which locate an intelligent soul in
material things, and have largely exercised men's minds in some modern
systems of philosophy: it is traceable even in [44] the graver writings
of historians: it makes as much difference between ancient and modern
landscape art, as there is between the rough masks of an early mosaic
and a portrait by Reynolds or Gainsborough.  Of this new sense, the
writings of Wordsworth are the central and elementary expression: he is
more simply and entirely occupied with it than any other poet, though
there are fine expressions of precisely the same thing in so different
a poet as Shelley.  There was in his own character a certain
contentment, a sort of inborn religious placidity, seldom found united
with a sensibility so mobile as his, which was favourable to the quiet,
habitual observation of inanimate, or imperfectly animate, existence.
His life of eighty years is divided by no very profoundly felt
incidents: its changes are almost wholly inward, and it falls into
broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous spaces.  What it most
resembles is the life of one of those early Italian or Flemish
painters, who, just because their minds were full of heavenly visions,
passed, some of them, the better part of sixty years in quiet,
systematic industry.  This placid life matured a quite unusual
sensibility, really innate in him, to the sights and sounds of the
natural world--the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and
its echo.  The poem of Resolution and Independence is a storehouse of
such records: for its fulness of imagery it may be compared to Keats's
Saint Agnes' Eve.  To [45] read one of his longer pastoral poems for
the first time, is like a day spent in a new country: the memory is
crowded for a while with its precise and vivid incidents--

  The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze
  On some grey rock;--

  The single sheep and the one blasted tree
  And the bleak music from that old stone wall;--

  In the meadows and the lower ground
  Was all the sweetness of a common dawn;--

  And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears.

Clear and delicate at once, as he is in the outlining of visible
imagery, he is more clear and delicate still, and finely scrupulous, in
the noting of sounds; so that he conceives of noble sound as even
moulding the human countenance to nobler types, and as something
actually "profaned" by colour, by visible form, or image.

He has a power likewise of realising, and conveying to the
consciousness of the reader, abstract and elementary
impressions--silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness: or, again, the
whole complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression
of desolation in the long white road, of peacefulness in a particular
folding of the hills.  In the airy building of the brain, a special day
or hour even, comes to have for him a sort of personal identity, a
spirit or angel given to it, by which, for its exceptional [46]
insight, or the happy light upon it, it has a presence in one's
history, and acts there, as a separate power or accomplishment; and he
has celebrated in many of his poems the "efficacious spirit," which, as
he says, resides in these "particular spots" of time.

It is to such a world, and to a world of congruous meditation thereon,
that we see him retiring in his but lately published poem of The
Recluse--taking leave, without much count of costs, of the world of
business, of action and ambition; as also of all that for the majority
of mankind counts as sensuous enjoyment.*

And so it came about that this sense of a life in natural objects,
which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, is with Wordsworth
the assertion of what for him is almost literal fact.  To him every
natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual
life, to be [47] capable of a companionship with man, full of
expression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse.
An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged, not to the moving leaves
or water only, but to the distant peak of the hills arising suddenly,
by some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon, to the passing
space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even,
for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men.  It was
like a "survival," in the peculiar intellectual temperament of a man of
letters at the end of the eighteenth century, of that primitive
condition, which some philosophers have traced in the general history
of human culture, wherein all outward objects [48] alike, including
even the works of men's hands, were believed to be endowed with
animation, and the world was "full of souls"--that mood in which the
old Greek gods were first begotten, and which had many strange
aftergrowths.

In the early ages, this belief, delightful as its effects on poetry
often are, was but the result of a crude intelligence.  But, in
Wordsworth, such power of seeing life, such perception of a soul, in
inanimate things, came of an exceptional susceptibility to the
impressions of eye and ear, and was, in its essence, a kind of
sensuousness.  At least, it is only in a temperament exceptionally
susceptible on the sensuous side, that this sense of the expressiveness
of outward things comes to be so large a part of life. That he awakened
"a sort of thought in sense," is Shelley's just estimate of this
element in Wordsworth's poetry.

And it was through nature, thus ennobled by a semblance of passion and
thought, that he approached the spectacle of human life.  Human life,
indeed, is for him, at first, only an additional, accidental grace on
an expressive landscape.  When he thought of man, it was of man as in
the presence and under the influence of these effective natural
objects, and linked to them by many associations.  The close connexion
of man with natural objects, the habitual association of his thoughts
and feelings with a particular spot of earth, has sometimes seemed to
[49] degrade those who are subject to its influence, as if it did but
reinforce that physical connexion of our nature with the actual lime
and clay of the soil, which is always drawing us nearer to our end.
But for Wordsworth, these influences tended to the dignity of human
nature, because they tended to tranquillise it.  By raising nature to
the level of human thought he gives it power and expression: he subdues
man to the level of nature, and gives him thereby a certain breadth and
coolness and solemnity. The leech-gatherer on the moor, the woman
"stepping westward," are for him natural objects, almost in the same
sense as the aged thorn, or the lichened rock on the heath.  In this
sense the leader of the "Lake School," in spite of an earnest
preoccupation with man, his thoughts, his destiny, is the poet of
nature.  And of nature, after all, in its modesty.  The English lake
country has, of course, its grandeurs.  But the peculiar function of
Wordsworth's genius, as carrying in it a power to open out the soul of
apparently little or familiar things, would have found its true test
had he become the poet of Surrey, say! and the prophet of its life.
The glories of Italy and Switzerland, though he did write a little
about them, had too potent a material life of their own to serve
greatly his poetic purpose.

Religious sentiment, consecrating the affections and natural regrets of
the human heart, above all, that pitiful awe and care for the [50]
perishing human clay, of which relic-worship is but the corruption, has
always had much to do with localities, with the thoughts which attach
themselves to actual scenes and places.  Now what is true of it
everywhere, is truest of it in those secluded valleys where one
generation after another maintains the same abiding-place; and it was
on this side, that Wordsworth apprehended religion most strongly.
Consisting, as it did so much, in the recognition of local sanctities,
in the habit of connecting the stones and trees of a particular spot of
earth with the great events of life, till the low walls, the green
mounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs seemed full of voices, and a sort
of natural oracles, the very religion of these people of the dales
appeared but as another link between them and the earth, and was
literally a religion of nature.  It tranquillised them by bringing them
under the placid rule of traditional and narrowly localised
observances.  "Grave livers," they seemed to him, under this aspect,
with stately speech, and something of that natural dignity of manners,
which underlies the highest courtesy.

And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnised in
proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into
companionship with permanent natural objects, his very religion forming
new links for him with the narrow limits of the valley, the low vaults
of his church, the rough stones of his [51] home, made intense for him
now with profound sentiment, Wordsworth was able to appreciate passion
in the lowly.  He chooses to depict people from humble life, because,
being nearer to nature than others, they are on the whole more
impassioned, certainly more direct in their expression of passion, than
other men: it is for this direct expression of passion, that he values
their humble words. In much that he said in exaltation of rural life,
he was but pleading indirectly for that sincerity, that perfect
fidelity to one's own inward presentations, to the precise features of
the picture within, without which any profound poetry is impossible.
It was not for their tameness, but for this passionate sincerity, that
he chose incidents and situations from common life, "related in a
selection of language really used by men."  He constantly endeavours to
bring his language near to the real language of men: to the real
language of men, however, not on the dead level of their ordinary
intercourse, but in select moments of vivid sensation, when this
language is winnowed and ennobled by excitement.  There are poets who
have chosen rural life as their subject, for the sake of its
passionless repose, and times when Wordsworth himself extols the mere
calm and dispassionate survey of things as the highest aim of poetical
culture.  But it was not for such passionless calm that he preferred
the scenes of pastoral life; and the meditative poet, sheltering [52]
himself, as it might seem, from the agitations of the outward world, is
in reality only clearing the scene for the great exhibitions of
emotion, and what he values most is the almost elementary expression of
elementary feelings.

And so he has much for those who value highly the concentrated
presentment of passion, who appraise men and women by their
susceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle
of it.  Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of their
daily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those great
elementary feelings, lifting and solemnising their language and giving
it a natural music.  The great, distinguishing passion came to Michael
by the sheepfold, to Ruth by the wayside, adding these humble children
of the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionate souls. In this
respect, Wordsworth's work resembles most that of George Sand, in those
of her novels which depict country life.  With a penetrative pathos,
which puts him in the same rank with the masters of the sentiment of
pity in literature, with Meinhold and Victor Hugo, he collects all the
traces of vivid excitement which were to be found in that pastoral
world--the girl who rung her father's knell; the unborn infant feeling
about its mother's heart; the instinctive touches of children; the
sorrows of the wild creatures, even--their home-sickness, their strange
yearnings; the tales of passionate regret that hang [53] by a ruined
farm-building, a heap of stones, a deserted sheepfold; that gay, false,
adventurous, outer world, which breaks in from time to time to bewilder
and deflower these quiet homes; not "passionate sorrow" only, for the
overthrow of the soul's beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness for
personal beauty even, in those whom men have wronged--their pathetic
wanness; the sailor "who, in his heart, was half a shepherd on the
stormy seas"; the wild woman teaching her child to pray for her
betrayer; incidents like the making of the shepherd's staff, or that of
the young boy laying the first stone of the sheepfold;--all the
pathetic episodes of their humble existence, their longing, their
wonder at fortune, their poor pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures of
children, won so hardly in the struggle for bare existence; their
yearning towards each other, in their darkened houses, or at their
early toil.  A sort of biblical depth and solemnity hangs over this
strange, new, passionate, pastoral world, of which he first raised the
image, and the reflection of which some of our best modern fiction has
caught from him.

He pondered much over the philosophy of his poetry, and reading deeply
in the history of his own mind, seems at times to have passed the
borders of a world of strange speculations, inconsistent enough, had he
cared to note such inconsistencies, with those traditional beliefs,
which [54] were otherwise the object of his devout acceptance.
Thinking of the high value he set upon customariness, upon all that is
habitual, local, rooted in the ground, in matters of religious
sentiment, you might sometimes regard him as one tethered down to a
world, refined and peaceful indeed, but with no broad outlook, a world
protected, but somewhat narrowed, by the influence of received ideas.
But he is at times also something very different from this, and
something much bolder.  A chance expression is overheard and placed in
a new connexion, the sudden memory of a thing long past occurs to him,
a distant object is relieved for a while by a random gleam of
light--accidents turning up for a moment what lies below the surface of
our immediate experience--and he passes from the humble graves and
lowly arches of "the little rock-like pile" of a Westmoreland church,
on bold trains of speculative thought, and comes, from point to point,
into strange contact with thoughts which have visited, from time to
time, far more venturesome, perhaps errant, spirits.

He had pondered deeply, for instance, on those strange reminiscences
and forebodings, which seem to make our lives stretch before and behind
us, beyond where we can see or touch anything, or trace the lines of
connexion.  Following the soul, backwards and forwards, on these
endless ways, his sense of man's dim, potential powers became a pledge
to him, indeed, of a future life, [55] but carried him back also to
that mysterious notion of an earlier state of existence--the fancy of
the Platonists--the old heresy of Origen.  It was in this mood that he
conceived those oft-reiterated regrets for a half-ideal childhood, when
the relics of Paradise still clung about the soul--a childhood, as it
seemed, full of the fruits of old age, lost for all, in a degree, in
the passing away of the youth of the world, lost for each one, over
again, in the passing away of actual youth.  It is this ideal childhood
which he celebrates in his famous Ode on the Recollections of
Childhood, and some other poems which may be grouped around it, such as
the lines on Tintern Abbey, and something like what he describes was
actually truer of himself than he seems to have understood; for his own
most delightful poems were really the instinctive productions of
earlier life, and most surely for him, "the first diviner influence of
this world" passed away, more and more completely, in his contact with
experience.

Sometimes as he dwelt upon those moments of profound, imaginative
power, in which the outward object appears to take colour and
expression, a new nature almost, from the prompting of the observant
mind, the actual world would, as it were, dissolve and detach itself,
flake by flake, and he himself seemed to be the creator, and when he
would the destroyer, of the world in which he lived--that old isolating
thought of many a brain-sick mystic of ancient and modern times.

[56] At other times, again, in those periods of intense susceptibility,
in which he appeared to himself as but the passive recipient of
external influences, he was attracted by the thought of a spirit of
life in outward things, a single, all-pervading mind in them, of which
man, and even the poet's imaginative energy, are but moments--that old
dream of the anima mundi, the mother of all things and their grave, in
which some had desired to lose themselves, and others had become
indifferent to the distinctions of good and evil. It would come,
sometimes, like the sign of the macrocosm to Faust in his cell: the
network of man and nature was seen to be pervaded by a common,
universal life: a new, bold thought lifted him above the furrow, above
the green turf of the Westmoreland churchyard, to a world altogether
different in its vagueness and vastness, and the narrow glen was full
of the brooding power of one universal spirit.

And so he has something, also, for those who feel the fascination of
bold speculative ideas, who are really capable of rising upon them to
conditions of poetical thought.  He uses them, indeed, always with a
very fine apprehension of the limits within which alone philosophical
imaginings have any place in true poetry; and using them only for
poetical purposes, is not too careful even to make them consistent with
each other.  To him, theories which for other men [57] bring a world of
technical diction, brought perfect form and expression, as in those two
lofty books of The Prelude, which describe the decay and the
restoration of Imagination and Taste.  Skirting the borders of this
world of bewildering heights and depths, he got but the first exciting
influence of it, that joyful enthusiasm which great imaginative
theories prompt, when the mind first comes to have an understanding of
them; and it is not under the influence of these thoughts that his
poetry becomes tedious or loses its blitheness.  He keeps them, too,
always within certain ethical bounds, so that no word of his could
offend the simplest of those simple souls which are always the largest
portion of mankind.  But it is, nevertheless, the contact of these
thoughts, the speculative boldness in them, which constitutes, at least
for some minds, the secret attraction of much of his best poetry--the
sudden passage from lowly thoughts and places to the majestic forms of
philosophical imagination, the play of these forms over a world so
different, enlarging so strangely the bounds of its humble churchyards,
and breaking such a wild light on the graves of christened children.

And these moods always brought with them faultless expression.  In
regard to expression, as with feeling and thought, the duality of the
higher and lower moods was absolute.  It belonged to the higher, the
imaginative mood, and was the pledge of its reality, to bring the [58]
appropriate language with it.  In him, when the really poetical motive
worked at all, it united, with absolute justice, the word and the idea;
each, in the imaginative flame, becoming inseparably one with the
other, by that fusion of matter and form, which is the characteristic
of the highest poetical expression.  His words are themselves thought
and feeling; not eloquent, or musical words merely, but that sort of
creative language which carries the reality of what it depicts,
directly, to the consciousness.

The music of mere metre performs but a limited, yet a very peculiar and
subtly ascertained function, in Wordsworth's poetry.  With him, metre
is but an additional grace, accessory to that deeper music of words and
sounds, that moving power, which they exercise in the nobler prose no
less than in formal poetry.  It is a sedative to that excitement, an
excitement sometimes almost painful, under which the language, alike of
poetry and prose, attains a rhythmical power, independent of metrical
combination, and dependent rather on some subtle adjustment of the
elementary sounds of words themselves to the image or feeling they
convey.  Yet some of his pieces, pieces prompted by a sort of
half-playful mysticism, like the Daffodils and The Two April Mornings,
are distinguished by a certain quaint gaiety of metre, and rival by
their perfect execution, in this respect, similar pieces among our own
Elizabethan, or contemporary French poetry.

[59] And those who take up these poems after an interval of months, or
years perhaps, may be surprised at finding how well old favourites
wear, how their strange, inventive turns of diction or thought still
send through them the old feeling of surprise.  Those who lived about
Wordsworth were all great lovers of the older English literature, and
oftentimes there came out in him a noticeable likeness to our earlier
poets.  He quotes unconsciously, but with new power of meaning, a
clause from one of Shakespeare's sonnets; and, as with some other men's
most famous work, the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood had its
anticipator.*  He drew something too from the unconscious mysticism of
the old English language itself, drawing out the inward significance of
its racy idiom, and the not wholly unconscious poetry of the language
used by the simplest people under strong excitement--language,
therefore, at its origin.

The office of the poet is not that of the moralist, and the first aim
of Wordsworth's poetry is to give the reader a peculiar kind of
pleasure.  But through his poetry, and through this pleasure in it, he
does actually convey to the reader an extraordinary wisdom in the
things of practice.  One lesson, if men must have lessons, he conveys
more clearly than all, the supreme importance of contemplation in the
conduct of life.

[60] Contemplation--impassioned contemplation--that, is with Wordsworth
the end-in-itself, the perfect end.  We see the majority of mankind
going most often to definite ends, lower or higher ends, as their own
instincts may determine; but the end may never be attained, and the
means not be quite the right means, great ends and little ones alike
being, for the most part, distant, and the ways to them, in this dim
world, somewhat vague.  Meantime, to higher or lower ends, they move
too often with something of a sad countenance, with hurried and ignoble
gait, becoming, unconsciously, something like thorns, in their anxiety
to bear grapes; it being possible for people, in the pursuit of even
great ends, to become themselves thin and impoverished in spirit and
temper, thus diminishing the sum of perfection in the world, at its
very sources.  We understand this when it is a question of mean, or of
intensely selfish ends--of Grandet, or Javert.  We think it bad
morality to say that the end justifies the means, and we know how false
to all higher conceptions of the religious life is the type of one who
is ready to do evil that good may come.  We contrast with such dark,
mistaken eagerness, a type like that of Saint Catherine of Siena, who
made the means to her ends so attractive, that she has won for herself
an undying place in the House Beautiful, not by her rectitude of soul
only, but by its "fairness"--by those quite different qualities [61]
which commend themselves to the poet and the artist.

Yet, for most of us, the conception of means and ends covers the whole
of life, and is the exclusive type or figure under which we represent
our lives to ourselves.  Such a figure, reducing all things to
machinery, though it has on its side the authority of that old Greek
moralist who has fixed for succeeding generations the outline of the
theory of right living, is too like a mere picture or description of
men's lives as we actually find them, to be the basis of the higher
ethics.  It covers the meanness of men's daily lives, and much of the
dexterity with which they pursue what may seem to them the good of
themselves or of others; but not the intangible perfection of those
whose ideal is rather in being than in doing--not those manners which
are, in the deepest as in the simplest sense, morals, and without which
one cannot so much as offer a cup of water to a poor man without
offence--not the part of  "antique Rachel," sitting in the company of
Beatrice; and even the moralist might well endeavour rather to withdraw
men from the too exclusive consideration of means and ends, in life.

Against this predominance of machinery in our existence, Wordsworth's
poetry, like all great art and poetry, is a continual protest. Justify
rather the end by the means, it seems to say: whatever may become of
the fruit, make sure of [62] the flowers and the leaves. It was justly
said, therefore, by one who had meditated very profoundly on the true
relation of means to ends in life, and on the distinction between what
is desirable in itself and what is desirable only as machinery, that
when the battle which he and his friends were waging had been won, the
world would need more than ever those qualities which Wordsworth was
keeping alive and nourishing.*

That the end of life is not action but contemplation--being as distinct
from doing--a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some shape or
other, the principle of all the higher morality.  In poetry, in art, if
you enter into their true spirit at all; you touch this principle, in a
measure: these, by their very sterility, are a type of beholding for
the mere joy of beholding.  To treat life in the spirit of art, is to
make life a thing in which means and ends are identified: to encourage
such treatment, the true moral significance of art and poetry.
Wordsworth, and other poets who have been like him in ancient or more
recent times, are the masters, the experts, in this art of impassioned
contemplation.  Their work is, not to teach lessons, or enforce rules,
or even to stimulate us to noble ends; but to withdraw the thoughts for
a little while from the mere machinery of life, to fix [63] them, with
appropriate emotions, on the spectacle of those great facts in man's
existence which no machinery affects, "on the great and universal
passions of men, the most general and interesting of their occupations,
and the entire world of nature,"--on "the operations of the elements
and the appearances of the visible universe, on storm and sunshine, on
the revolutions of the seasons, on cold and heat, on loss of friends
and kindred, on injuries and resentments, on gratitude and hope, on
fear and sorrow."  To witness this spectacle with appropriate emotions
is the aim of all culture; and of these emotions poetry like
Wordsworth's is a great nourisher and stimulant.  He sees nature full
of sentiment and excitement; he sees men and women as parts of nature,
passionate, excited, in strange grouping and connexion with the
grandeur and beauty of the natural world:--images, in his own words,
"of man suffering, amid awful forms and powers."

Such is the figure of the more powerful and original poet, hidden away,
in part, under those weaker elements in Wordsworth's poetry, which for
some minds determine their entire character; a poet somewhat bolder and
more passionate than might at first sight be supposed, but not too bold
for true poetical taste; an unimpassioned writer, you might sometimes
fancy, yet thinking the chief aim, in life and art alike, to be a
certain deep emotion; seeking most often the great [64] elementary
passions in lowly places; having at least this condition of all
impassioned work, that he aims always at an absolute sincerity of
feeling and diction, so that he is the true forerunner of the deepest
and most passionate poetry of our own day; yet going back also, with
something of a protest against the conventional fervour of much of the
poetry popular in his own time, to those older English poets, whose
unconscious likeness often comes out in him.

1874.

NOTES

43. *Since this essay was written, such selections have been made, with
excellent taste, by Matthew Arnold and Professor Knight.

46-47. *In Wordsworth's prefatory advertisement to the first edition of
The Prelude, published in 1850, it is stated that that work was
intended to be introductory to The Recluse; and that The Recluse, if
completed, would have consisted of three parts.  The second part is The
Excursion.  The third part was only planned; but the first book of the
first part was left in manuscript by Wordsworth--though in manuscript,
it is said, in no great condition of forwardness for the printers.
This book, now for the first time printed  in extenso (a very noble
passage from it found place in that prose advertisement to The
Excursion), is included in the latest edition of Wordsworth by Mr. John
Morley.  It was well worth adding to the poet's great bequest to
English literature.  A true student of his work, who has formulated for
himself what he supposes to be the leading characteristics of
Wordsworth's genius, will feel, we think, lively interest in testing
them by the various fine passages in what is here presented for the
first time.  Let the following serve for a sample:--

  Thickets full of songsters, and the voice
  Of lordly birds, an unexpected sound
  Heard now and then from morn to latest eve,
  Admonishing the man who walks below
  Of solitude and silence in the sky:--
  These have we, and a thousand nooks of earth
  Have also these, but nowhere else is found,
  Nowhere (or is it fancy?) can be found
  The one sensation that is here; 'tis here,
  Here as it found its way into my heart
  In childhood, here as it abides by day,
  By night, here only; or in chosen minds
  That take it with them hence, where'er they go.
  --'Tis, but I cannot name it, 'tis the sense
  Of majesty, and beauty, and repose,
  A blended holiness of earth and sky,
  Something that makes this individual spot,
  This small abiding-place of many men,
  A termination, and a last retreat,
  A centre, come from wheresoe'er you will,
  A whole without dependence or defect,
  Made for itself, and happy in itself,
  Perfect contentment, Unity entire.


59. *Henry Vaughan, in The Retreat.

62. *See an interesting paper, by Mr. John Morley, on "The Death of Mr.
Mill," Fortnightly Review, June 1873.



COLERIDGE*

[65] FORMS of intellectual and spiritual culture sometimes exercise
their subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing from
them. Searching and irresistible as are the changes of the human spirit
on its way to perfection, there is yet so much elasticity of temper
that what must pass away sooner or later is not disengaged all at once,
even from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by one law of
development evolves ideas, hypotheses, modes of inward life, and
represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier
growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the
whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the
spectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined by
the antagonism of the new.  That current of new life chastens them
while they contend against it. Weaker minds fail to perceive the
change: the clearest minds abandon themselves to it.  To [66] feel the
change everywhere, yet not abandon oneself to it, is a situation of
difficulty and contention.  Communicating, in this way, to the passing
stage of culture, the charm of what is chastened, high-strung,
athletic, they yet detach the highest minds from the past, by pressing
home its difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such has been
the charm of many leaders of lost causes in philosophy and in religion.
It is the special charm of Coleridge, in connexion with those older
methods of philosophic inquiry, over which the empirical philosophy of
our day has triumphed.

Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the
"relative" spirit in place of the "absolute."  Ancient philosophy
sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in
a necessary formula, and the varieties of life in a classification by
"kinds," or genera.  To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly
known, except relatively and under conditions.  The philosophical
conception of the relative has been developed in modern times through
the influence of the sciences of observation.  Those sciences reveal
types of life evanescing into each other by inexpressible refinements
of change.  Things pass into their opposites by accumulation of
undefinable quantities.  The growth of those sciences consists in a
continual analysis of facts of rough and general observation into
groups of facts more precise and minute.

[67] The faculty for truth is recognised as a power of distinguishing
and fixing delicate and fugitive detail.  The moral world is ever in
contact with the physical, and the relative spirit has invaded moral
philosophy from the ground of the inductive sciences.  There it has
started a new analysis of the relations of body and mind, good and
evil, freedom and necessity.  Hard and abstract moralities are yielding
to a more exact estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life.
Always, as an organism increases in perfection, the conditions of its
life become more complex.  Man is the most complex of the products of
nature.  Character merges into temperament: the nervous system refines
itself into intellect.  Man's physical organism is played upon not only
by the physical conditions about it, but by remote laws of inheritance,
the vibration of long-past acts reaching him in the midst of the new
order of things in which he lives.  When we have estimated these
conditions he is still not yet simple and isolated; for the mind of the
race, the character of the age, sway him this way or that through the
medium of language and current ideas.  It seems as if the most opposite
statements about him were alike true: he is so receptive, all the
influences of nature and of society ceaselessly playing upon him, so
that every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a stray
word, or glance, or touch.  It is the truth of these relations that
experience [68] gives us, not the truth of eternal outlines ascertained
once for all, but a world of fine gradations and subtly linked
conditions, shifting intricately as we ourselves change--and bids us,
by a constant clearing of the organs of observation and perfecting of
analysis, to make what we can of these.  To the intellect, the critical
spirit, just these subtleties of effect are more precious than anything
else. What is lost in precision of form is gained in intricacy of
expression.  It is no vague scholastic abstraction that will satisfy
the speculative instinct in our modern minds.  Who would change the
colour or curve of a rose-leaf for that ousia akhrômatos,
askhêmatistos, anaphês+--that colourless, formless, intangible,
being--Plato put so high?  For the true illustration of the speculative
temper is not the Hindoo mystic, lost to sense, understanding,
individuality, but one such as Goethe, to whom every moment of life
brought its contribution of experimental, individual knowledge; by whom
no touch of the world of form, colour, and passion was disregarded.

Now the literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle against
the relative spirit. With a strong native bent towards the tracking of
all questions, critical or practical, to first principles, he is ever
restlessly scheming to "apprehend the absolute," to affirm it
effectively, to get it acknowledged.  It was an effort, surely, an
effort of sickly thought, that saddened his [69] mind, and limited the
operation of his unique poetic gift.

So what the reader of our own generation will least find in Coleridge's
prose writings is the excitement of the literary sense. And yet, in
those grey volumes, we have the larger part of the production of one
who made way ever by a charm, the charm of voice, of aspect, of
language, above all by the intellectual charm of new, moving, luminous
ideas.  Perhaps the chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of
seriousness, a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but
from a misconception of the perfect manner.  There is a certain shade
of unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which may
be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract
questions.  The humanist, the possessor of that complete culture, does
not "weep" over the failure of "a theory of the quantification of the
predicate," nor "shriek" over the fall of a philosophical formula.  A
kind of humour is, in truth, one of the conditions of the just mental
attitude, in the criticism of by-past stages of thought.  Humanity
cannot afford to be too serious about them, any more than a man of good
sense can afford to be too serious in looking back upon his own
childhood.  Plato, whom Coleridge claims as the first of his spiritual
ancestors, Plato, as we remember him, a true humanist, holds his
theories lightly, glances with a somewhat blithe and naive
inconsequence from [70] one view to another, not anticipating the
burden of importance "views" will one day have for men.  In reading him
one feels how lately it was that Croesus thought it a paradox to say
that external prosperity was not necessarily happiness.  But on
Coleridge lies the whole weight of the sad reflection that has since
come into the world, with which for us the air is full, which the
"children in the market-place" repeat to each other.  His very language
is forced and broken lest some saving formula should be
lost--distinctities, enucleation, pentad of operative Christianity; he
has a whole armoury of these terms, and expects to turn the tide of
human thought by fixing the sense of such expressions as "reason,"
"understanding," "idea."  Again, he lacks the jealousy of a true artist
in excluding all associations that have no colour, or charm, or
gladness in them; and everywhere allows the impress of a somewhat
inferior theological literature.

"I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation:" so
Coleridge sums up his childhood, with its delicacy, its sensitiveness,
and passion.  But at twenty-five he was exercising a wonderful charm,
and had already defined for himself his peculiar line of intellectual
activity.  He had an odd, attractive gift of conversation, or rather of
monologue, as Madame de Staël observed of him, full of bizarreries,
with the rapid alternations of a dream, and here or there an unexpected
summons into a world [71] strange to the hearer, abounding in images
drawn from a sort of divided imperfect life, the consciousness of the
opium-eater, as of one to whom the external world penetrated only in
part, and, blent with all this, passages of deep obscurity, precious,
if at all, only for their musical cadence, echoes in Coleridge of the
eloquence of those older English writers of whom he was so ardent a
lover.  And all through this brilliant early manhood we may discern the
power of the "Asiatic" temperament, of that voluptuousness, which is
connected perhaps with his appreciation of the intimacy, the almost
mystical communion of touch, between nature and man.  "I am much
better," he writes, "and my new and tender health is all over me like a
voluptuous feeling."  And whatever fame, or charm, or life-inspiring
gift he has had as a speculative thinker, is the vibration of the
interest he excited then, the propulsion into years which clouded his
early promise of that first buoyant, irresistible, self-assertion. So
great is even the indirect power of a sincere effort towards the ideal
life, of even a temporary escape of the spirit from routine.

In 1798 he visited Germany, then, the only half-known, "promised land,"
of the metaphysical, the "absolute," philosophy.  A beautiful fragment
of this period remains, describing a spring excursion to the Brocken.
His excitement still vibrates in it.  Love, all joyful states [72] of
mind, are self-expressive: they loosen the tongue, they fill the
thoughts with sensuous images, they harmonise one with the world of
sight.  We hear of the "rich graciousness and courtesy" of Coleridge's
manner, of the white and delicate skin, the abundant black hair, the
full, almost animal lips--that whole physiognomy of the dreamer,
already touched with narcotism.  One says, of the beginning of one of
his Unitarian sermons: "His voice rose like a stream of rich, distilled
perfumes;" another, "He talks like an angel, and does--nothing!"

The Aids to Reflection, The Friend, The Biographia Literaria: those
books came from one whose vocation was in the world of the imagination,
the theory and practice of poetry.  And yet, perhaps, of all books that
have been influential in modern times, they are furthest from artistic
form--bundles of notes; the original matter inseparably mixed up with
that borrowed from others; the whole, just that mere preparation for an
artistic effect which the finished literary artist would be careful one
day to destroy.  Here, again, we have a trait profoundly characteristic
of Coleridge.  He sometimes attempts to reduce a phase of thought,
subtle and exquisite, to conditions too rough for it.  He uses a purely
speculative gift for direct moral edification.  Scientific truth is a
thing fugitive, relative, full of fine gradations: he tries to fix it
in absolute formulas.  The Aids to Reflection, The Friend, are [73]
efforts to propagate the volatile spirit of conversation into the less
ethereal fabric of a written book; and it is only here or there that
the poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really lifted by the spirit.

De Quincey said of him that "he wanted better bread than can be made
with wheat:" Lamb, that from childhood he had "hungered for eternity."
Yet the faintness, the continuous dissolution, whatever its cause,
which soon supplanted the buoyancy of his first wonderful years, had
its own consumptive refinements, and even brought, as to the "Beautiful
Soul" in Wilhelm Meister, a faint religious ecstasy--that "singing in
the sails" which is not of the breeze.  Here again is one of his
occasional notes:--

"In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at yonder
moon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem rather to be
seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within
me, that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new.
Even when the latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure
feeling, as if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten
or hidden truth of my inner nature.  While I was preparing the pen to
make this remark, I lost the train of thought which had led me to it."

What a distemper of the eye of the mind!  What an almost bodily
distemper there is in that!

Coleridge's intellectual sorrows were many; [74] but he had one
singular intellectual happiness.  With an inborn taste for
transcendental philosophy, he lived just at the time when that
philosophy took an immense spring in Germany, and connected itself with
an impressive literary movement.  He had the good luck to light upon it
in its freshness, and introduce it to his countrymen.  What an
opportunity for one reared on the colourless analytic English
philosophies of the last century, but who feels an irresistible
attraction towards bold metaphysical synthesis!  How rare are such
occasions of intellectual contentment!  This transcendental philosophy,
chiefly as systematised by the mystic Schelling, Coleridge applied with
an eager, unwearied subtlety, to the questions of theology, and poetic
or artistic criticism.  It is in his theory of poetry, of art, that he
comes nearest to principles of permanent truth and importance: that is
the least fugitive part of his prose work.  What, then, is the essence
of his philosophy of art--of imaginative production?

Generally, it may be described as an attempt to reclaim the world of
art as a world of fixed laws, to show that the creative activity of
genius and the simplest act of thought are but higher and lower
products of the laws of a universal logic.  Criticism, feeling its own
inadequacy in dealing with the greater works of art, is sometimes
tempted to make too much of those dark and capricious suggestions of
genius, which even [75] the intellect possessed by them is unable to
explain or recall.  It has seemed due to the half-sacred character of
those works to ignore all analogy between the productive process by
which they had their birth, and the simpler processes of mind.
Coleridge, on the other hand, assumes that the highest phases of
thought must be more, not less, than the lower, subject to law.

With this interest, in the Biographia Literaria, he refines Schelling's
"Philosophy of Nature" into a theory of art.  "There can be no
plagiarism in philosophy," says Heine:--Es giebt kein Plagiat in der
Philosophie, in reference to the charge brought against Schelling of
unacknowledged borrowing from Bruno; and certainly that which is common
to Coleridge and Schelling and Bruno alike is of far earlier origin
than any of them.  Schellingism, the "Philosophy of Nature," is indeed
a constant tradition in the history of thought: it embodies a permanent
type of the speculative temper.  That mode of conceiving nature as a
mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man may be traced up to the
first beginnings of Greek speculation.  There are two ways of
envisaging those aspects of nature which seem to bear the impress of
reason or intelligence.  There is the deist's way, which regards them
merely as marks of design, which separates the informing mind from its
result in nature, as the mechanist from the machine; and there is the
pantheistic way, which identifies the two, which [76] regards nature
itself as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as
though vaster in scope than the human.  Partly through the influence of
mythology, the Greek mind became early possessed with the conception of
nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to the mind of man.  This
unfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an abstract form, petrified
into an idea, is the force which gives unity of aim to Greek
philosophy.  Little by little, it works out the substance of the
Hegelian formula: "Whatever is, is according to reason: whatever is
according to reason, that is."  Experience, which has gradually
saddened the earth's colours for us, stiffened its motions, withdrawn
from it some blithe and debonair presence, has quite changed the
character of the science of nature, as we understand it.  The
"positive" method, in truth, makes very little account of marks of
intelligence in nature: in its wider view of phenomena, it sees that
those instances are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences: it
absorbs them in the larger conception of universal mechanical law.  But
the suspicion of a mind latent in nature, struggling for release, and
intercourse with the intellect of man through true ideas, has never
ceased to haunt a certain class of minds.  Started again and again in
successive periods by enthusiasts on the antique pattern, in each case
the thought may have seemed paler and more fantastic amid the growing
[77] consistency and sharpness of outline of other and more positive
forms of knowledge.  Still, wherever the speculative instinct has been
united with a certain poetic inwardness of temperament, as in Bruno, in
Schelling, there that old Greek conception, like some seed floating in
the air, has taken root and sprung up anew.  Coleridge, thrust inward
upon himself, driven from "life in thought and sensation" to life in
thought only, feels already, in his dark London school, a thread of the
Greek mind on this matter vibrating strongly in him.  At fifteen he is
discoursing on Plotinus, as in later years he reflects from Schelling
that flitting intellectual tradition. He supposes a subtle, sympathetic
co-ordination between the ideas of the human reason and the laws of the
natural world.  Science, the real knowledge of that natural world, is
to be attained, not by observation, experiment, analysis, patient
generalisation, but by the evolution or recovery of those ideas
directly from within, by a sort of Platonic "recollection"; every group
of observed facts remaining an enigma until the appropriate idea is
struck upon them from the mind of a Newton, or a Cuvier, the genius in
whom sympathy with the universal reason becomes entire.  In the next
place, he conceives that this reason or intelligence in nature becomes
reflective, or self-conscious.  He fancies he can trace, through all
the simpler forms of life, fragments of an eloquent prophecy about the
[78] human mind.  The whole of nature he regards as a development of
higher forms out of the lower, through shade after shade of systematic
change.  The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the axis of crystal
form, the trance-like life of plants, the animal troubled by strange
irritabilities, are stages which anticipate consciousness.  All through
the ever-increasing movement of life that was shaping itself; every
successive phase of life, in its unsatisfied susceptibilities, seeming
to be drawn out of its own limits by the more pronounced current of
life on its confines, the "shadow of approaching humanity" gradually
deepening, the latent intelligence winning a way to the surface.  And
at this point the law of development does not lose itself in caprice:
rather it becomes more constraining and incisive. From the lowest to
the very highest acts of the conscious intelligence, there is another
series of refining shades.  Gradually the mind concentrates itself,
frees itself from the limitations of the particular, the individual,
attains a strange power of modifying and centralising what it receives
from without, according to the pattern of an inward ideal.  At last, in
imaginative genius, ideas become effective: the intelligence of nature,
all its discursive elements now connected and justified, is clearly
reflected; the interpretation of its latent purposes being embodied in
the great central products of creative art.  The secret of creative
[79] genius would be an exquisitely purged sympathy with nature, with
the reasonable soul antecedent there.  Those associative conceptions of
the imagination, those eternally fixed types of action and passion,
would come, not so much from the conscious invention of the artist, as
from his self-surrender to the suggestions of an abstract reason or
ideality in things: they would be evolved by the stir of nature itself,
realising the highest reach of its dormant reason: they would have a
kind of prevenient necessity to rise at some time to the surface of the
human mind.

It is natural that Shakespeare should be the favourite illustration of
such criticism, whether in England or Germany.  The first suggestion in
Shakespeare is that of capricious detail, of a waywardness that plays
with the parts careless of the impression of the whole; what supervenes
is the constraining unity of effect, the ineffaceable impression, of
Hamlet or Macbeth.  His hand moving freely is curved round as if by
some law of gravitation from within: an energetic unity or identity
makes itself visible amid an abounding variety.  This unity or identity
Coleridge exaggerates into something like the identity of a natural
organism, and the associative act which effected it into something
closely akin to the primitive power of nature itself.  "In the
Shakespearian drama," he says, "there is a vitality which grows and
evolves itself from within."

[80] Again--

He, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the germ from
within, by the imaginative power, according to the idea. For as the
power of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind to a law in nature.
They are correlatives which suppose each other.

Again--

The organic form is innate: it shapes, as it develops, itself from
within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the
perfection of its outward form.  Such as the life is, such is the form.
Nature, the prime, genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is
equally inexhaustible in forms: each exterior is the physiognomy of the
being within, and even such is the appropriate excellence of
Shakespeare, himself a nature humanised, a genial understanding,
directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even
than our consciousness.+

In this late age we are become so familiarised with the greater works
of art as to be little sensitive of the act of creation in them: they
do not impress us as a new presence in the world.  Only sometimes, in
productions which realise immediately a profound influence and enforce
a change in taste, we are actual witnesses of the moulding of an
unforeseen type by some new principle of association; and to that
phenomenon Coleridge wisely recalls our attention.  What makes his view
a one-sided one is, that in it the artist has become almost a
mechanical agent: instead of the most luminous and self-possessed phase
of consciousness, the associative act in art or poetry is made to look
like some blindly organic process of assimilation.  The work of art is
likened to a living organism.  That expresses [81] truly the sense of a
self-delighting, independent life which the finished work of art gives
us: it hardly figures the process by which such work was produced.
Here there is no blind ferment of lifeless elements towards the
realisation of a type.  By exquisite analysis the artist attains
clearness of idea; then, through many stages of refining, clearness of
expression.  He moves slowly over his work, calculating the tenderest
tone, and restraining the subtlest curve, never letting hand or fancy
move at large, gradually enforcing flaccid spaces to the higher degree
of expressiveness.  The philosophic critic, at least, will value, even
in works of imagination, seemingly the most intuitive, the power of the
understanding in them, their logical process of construction, the
spectacle of a supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.

Coleridge's prose writings on philosophy, politics, religion, and
criticism, were, in truth, but one element in a whole lifetime of
endeavours to present the then recent metaphysics of Germany to English
readers, as a legitimate expansion of the older, classical and native
masters of what has been variously called the a priori, or absolute, or
spiritual, or Platonic, view of things.  His criticism, his challenge
for recognition in the concrete, visible, finite work of art, of the
dim, unseen, comparatively infinite, soul or power of the artist, may
well be [82] remembered as part of the long pleading of German culture
for the things "behind the veil."  To introduce that spiritual
philosophy, as represented by the more transcendental parts of Kant,
and by Schelling, into all subjects, as a system of reason in them, one
and ever identical with itself, however various the matter through
which it was diffused, became with him the motive of an unflagging
enthusiasm, which seems to have been the one thread of continuity in a
life otherwise singularly wanting in unity of purpose, and in which he
was certainly far from uniformly at his best.  Fragmentary and obscure,
but often eloquent, and always at once earnest and ingenious, those
writings, supplementing his remarkable gift of conversation, were
directly and indirectly influential, even on some the furthest removed
from Coleridge's own masters; on John Stuart Mill, for instance, and
some of the earlier writers of the "high-church" school.  Like his
verse, they display him also in two other characters--as a student of
words, and as a psychologist, that is, as a more minute observer or
student than other men of the phenomena of mind.  To note the recondite
associations of words, old or new; to expound the logic, the reasonable
soul, of their various uses; to recover the interest of older writers
who had had a phraseology of their own--this was a vein of inquiry
allied to his undoubted gift of tracking out and analysing curious
modes of thought.  A [83] quaint fragment of verse on Human Life might
serve to illustrate his study of the earlier English philosophical
poetry.  The latter gift, that power of the "subtle-souled
psychologist," as Shelley calls him, seems to have been connected with
some tendency to disease in the physical temperament, something of a
morbid want of balance in those parts where the physical and
intellectual elements mix most closely together, with a kind of languid
visionariness, deep-seated in the very constitution of the "narcotist,"
who had quite a gift for "plucking the poisons of self-harm," and which
the actual habit of taking opium, accidentally acquired, did but
reinforce.  This morbid languor of nature, connected both with his
fitfulness of purpose and his rich delicate dreaminess, qualifies
Coleridge's poetic composition even more than his prose; his verse,
with the exception of his avowedly political poems, being, unlike that
of the "Lake School," to which in some respects he belongs, singularly
unaffected by any moral, or professional, or personal effort or
ambition,--"written," as he says, "after the more violent emotions of
sorrow, to give him pleasure, when perhaps nothing else could;" but
coming thus, indeed, very close to his own most intimately personal
characteristics, and having a certain languidly soothing grace or
cadence, for its most fixed quality, from first to last.  After some
Platonic soliloquy on a flower opening on a fine day in February, he
goes on-- [84]

  Dim similitudes
  Weaving in mortal strains, I've stolen one hour
  From anxious self, life's cruel taskmaster!
  And the warm wooings of this sunny day
  Tremble along my frame and harmonise
  The attempered organ, that even saddest thoughts
  Mix with some sweet sensations, like harsh tunes
  Played deftly on a sweet-toned instrument.

The expression of two opposed, yet allied, elements of sensibility in
these lines, is very true to Coleridge:--the grievous agitation, the
grievous listlessness, almost never entirely relieved, together with a
certain physical voluptuousness.  He has spoken several times of the
scent of the bean-field in the air:--the tropical touches in a chilly
climate; his is a nature that will make the most of these, which finds
a sort of caress in such things.  Kubla Khan, the fragment of a poem
actually composed in some certainly not quite healthy sleep, is perhaps
chiefly of interest as showing, by the mode of its composition, how
physical, how much of a diseased or valetudinarian temperament, in its
moments of relief, Coleridge's happiest gift really was; and side by
side with Kubla Khan should be read, as Coleridge placed it, the Pains
of Sleep, to illustrate that retarding physical burden in his
temperament, that "unimpassioned grief," the source of which lay so
near the source of those pleasures.  Connected also with this, and
again in contrast with Wordsworth, is the limited quantity of his
poetical performance, as he himself [85] regrets so eloquently in the
lines addressed to Wordsworth after his recitation of The Prelude.  It
is like some exotic plant, just managing to blossom a little in the
somewhat un-english air of Coleridge's own south-western birthplace,
but never quite well there.

In 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the composition of a volume of
poems--the Lyrical Ballads.  What Wordsworth then wrote already
vibrates with that blithe impulse which carried him to final happiness
and self-possession.  In Coleridge we feel already that faintness and
obscure dejection which clung like some contagious damp to all his
work.  Wordsworth was to be distinguished by a joyful and penetrative
conviction of the existence of certain latent affinities between nature
and the human mind, which reciprocally gild the mind and nature with a
kind of "heavenly alchemy."

  My voice proclaims
  How exquisitely the individual mind
  (And the progressive powers, perhaps, no less
  Of the whole species) to the external world
  Is fitted; and how exquisitely, too,
  The external world is fitted to the mind;
  And the creation, by no lower name
  Can it be called, which they with blended might
  Accomplish.

In Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken dreaming over the
aspects and transitions of nature--a reflective, though altogether
unformulated, analysis of them.

[86] There are in Coleridge's poems expressions of this conviction as
deep as Wordsworth's.  But Coleridge could never have abandoned himself
to the dream, the vision, as Wordsworth did, because the first
condition of such abandonment must be an unvexed quietness of heart.
No one can read the Lines composed above Tintern without feeling how
potent the physical element was among the conditions of Wordsworth's
genius--"felt in the blood and felt along the heart."

  My whole life I have lived in quiet thought!

The stimulus which most artists require of nature he can renounce. He
leaves the ready-made glory of the Swiss mountains that he may reflect
glory on a mouldering leaf.  He loves best to watch the floating
thistledown, because of its hint at an unseen life in the air.
Coleridge's temperament, aei en sphodra orexei,+ with its faintness,
its grieved dejection, could never have been like that.

  My genial spirits fail;
  And what can these avail
  To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
  It were a vain endeavour,
  Though I should gaze for ever
  On that green light that lingers in the west
  I may not hope from outward forms to win
  The passion and the life whose fountains are within.

Wordsworth's flawless temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of
mind, that calm, sabbatic, mystic, wellbeing which De Quincey, [87] a
little cynically, connected with worldly (that is to say, pecuniary)
good fortune, kept his conviction of a latent intelligence in nature
within the limits of sentiment or instinct, and confined it to those
delicate and subdued shades of expression which alone perfect art
allows.  In Coleridge's sadder, more purely intellectual, cast of
genius, what with Wordsworth was sentiment or instinct became a
philosophical idea, or philosophical formula, developed, as much as
possible, after the abstract and metaphysical fashion of the
transcendental schools of Germany.

The period of Coleridge's residence at Nether Stowey, 1797-1798, was
for him the annus mirabilis.  Nearly all the chief works by which his
poetic fame will live were then composed or planned.  What shapes
itself for criticism as the main phenomenon of Coleridge's poetic life,
is not, as with most true poets, the gradual development of a poetic
gift, determined, enriched, retarded, by the actual circumstances of
the poet's life, but the sudden blossoming, through one short season,
of such a gift already perfect in its kind, which thereafter
deteriorates as suddenly, with something like premature old age.
Connecting this phenomenon with the leading motive of his prose
writings, we might note it as the deterioration of a productive or
creative power into one merely metaphysical or discursive.  In his
unambitious conception of his function as a poet, and in the very
limited quantity of his [88] poetical performance, as I have said, he
was a contrast to his friend Wordsworth.  That friendship with
Wordsworth, the chief "developing" circumstance of his poetic life,
comprehended a very close intellectual sympathy; and in such
association chiefly, lies whatever truth there may be in the popular
classification of Coleridge as a member of what is called the "Lake
School."  Coleridge's philosophical speculations do really turn on the
ideas which underlay Wordsworth's poetical practice.  His prose works
are one long explanation of all that is involved in that famous
distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination.  Of what is
understood by both writers as the imaginative quality in the use of
poetic figures, we may take some words of Shakespeare as an example.--

  My cousin Suffolk,
  My soul shall thine keep company to heaven
  Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly abreast.

The complete infusion here of the figure into the thought, so vividly
realised, that, though birds are not actually mentioned, yet the sense
of their flight, conveyed to us by the single word "abreast," comes to
be more than half of the thought itself:--this, as the expression of
exalted feeling, is an instance of what Coleridge meant by Imagination.
And this sort of identification of the poet's thought, of himself, with
the image or figure which serves him, is the secret, sometimes, [89] of
a singularly entire realisation of that image, such as makes these
lines of Coleridge, for instance, "imaginative"--

  Amid the howl of more than wintry storms,
  The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours
  Already on the wing.

There are many such figures both in Coleridge's verse and prose.  He
has, too, his passages of that sort of impassioned contemplation on the
permanent and elementary conditions of nature and humanity, which
Wordsworth held to be the essence of a poet; as it would be his proper
function to awaken such contemplation in other men--those "moments," as
Coleridge says, addressing him--

  Moments awful,
  Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,
  When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received
  The light reflected, as a light bestowed.

The entire poem from which these lines are taken, "composed on the
night after Wordsworth's recitation of a poem on the growth of an
individual mind," is, in its high-pitched strain of meditation, and in
the combined justice and elevation of its philosophical expression--

  high and passionate thoughts
  To their own music chanted;

wholly sympathetic with The Prelude which it celebrates, and of which
the subject is, in effect, the generation of the spirit of the "Lake
poetry." [90] The Lines to Joseph Cottle have the same philosophically
imaginative character; the Ode to Dejection being Coleridge's most
sustained effort of this kind.

It is in a highly sensitive apprehension of the aspects of external
nature that Coleridge identifies himself most closely with one of the
main tendencies of the "Lake School"; a tendency instinctive, and no
mere matter of theory, in him as in Wordsworth.  That record of the

  green light
  Which lingers in the west,

and again, of

  the western sky,
  And its peculiar tint of yellow green,

which Byron found ludicrously untrue, but which surely needs no
defence, is a characteristic example of a singular watchfulness for the
minute fact and expression of natural scenery pervading all he wrote--a
closeness to the exact physiognomy of nature, having something to do
with that idealistic philosophy which sees in the external world no
mere concurrence of mechanical agencies, but an animated body, informed
and made expressive, like the body of man, by an indwelling
intelligence.  It was a tendency, doubtless, in the air, for Shelley
too is affected by it, and Turner, with the school of landscape which
followed him.  "I had found," Coleridge tells us,

[91]

  That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive
  Their finer influence from the world within;
  Fair ciphers of vague import, where the eye
  Traces no spot, in which the heart may read
  History and prophecy:...

and this induces in him no indifference to actual colour and form and
process, but such minute realism as this--

  The thin grey cloud is spread on high,
  It covers but not hides the sky.
  The moon is behind and at the full;
  And yet she looks both small and dull;

or this, which has a touch of "romantic" weirdness--

  Nought was green upon the oak
  But moss and rarest misletoe

or this--

  There is not wind enough to twirl
  The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
  That dances as often as dance it can,
  Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
  On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky

or this, with a weirdness, again, like that of some wild French etcher--

  Lo! the new-moon winter-bright!
  And overspread with phantom light
  (With swimming phantom light o'erspread,
  But rimmed and circled with a silver thread)
  I see the old moon in her lap, foretelling
  The coming on of rain and squally blast.

He has a like imaginative apprehension of the silent and unseen
processes of nature, its "ministries" [92] of dew and frost, for
instance; as when he writes, in April--

  A balmy night! and though the stars be dim,
  Yet let us think upon the vernal showers
  That gladden the green earth, and we shall find
  A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.

Of such imaginative treatment of landscape there is no better instance
than the description of The Dell, in Fears in Solitude--

  A green and silent spot amid the hills,
  A small and silent dell!  O'er stiller place
  No singing skylark ever poised himself--
  But the dell,
  Bathed by the mist is fresh and delicate
  As vernal cornfield, or the unripe flax
  When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve,
  The level sunshine glimmers with green light:--

  The gust that roared and died away
  To the distant tree--

  heard and only heard
  In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass.

This curious insistence of the mind on one particular spot, till it
seems to attain actual expression and a sort of soul in it--a mood so
characteristic of the "Lake School"--occurs in an earnest political
poem, "written in April 1798, during the alarm of an invasion"; and
that silent dell is the background against which the tumultuous fears
of the poet are in strong relief, while the quiet sense of the place,
maintained all through them, gives a true poetic unity to the piece.
Good political poetry--[93] political poetry that shall be permanently
moving--can, perhaps, only be written on motives which, for those they
concern, have ceased to be open questions, and are really beyond
argument; while Coleridge's political poems are for the most part on
open questions.  For although it was a great part of his intellectual
ambition to subject political questions to the action of the
fundamental ideas of his philosophy, he was nevertheless an ardent
partisan, first on one side, then on the other, of the actual politics
proper to the end of the last and the beginning of the present century,
where there is still room for much difference of opinion.  Yet The
Destiny of Nations, though formless as a whole, and unfinished,
presents many traces of his most elevated manner of speculation, cast
into that sort of imaginative philosophical expression, in which, in
effect, the language itself is inseparable from, or essentially a part
of, the thought.  France, an Ode, begins with a famous apostrophe to
Liberty--

  Ye Clouds! that far above me float and pause,
  Whose pathless march no mortal may control!
  Ye Ocean-waves! that wheresoe'er ye roll,
  Yield homage only to eternal laws!
  Ye Woods! that listen to the night-bird's singing,
  Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined,
  Save when your own imperious branches swinging,
  Have made a solemn music of the wind!
  Where like a man beloved of God,
  Through glooms which never woodman trod,
  How oft, pursuing fancies holy,

[94]

  My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound,
  Inspired, beyond the guess of folly,
  By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound!
  O ye loud Waves! and O ye Forests high!
  And O ye Clouds that far above me soar'd!

  Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky!
  Yea, everything that is and will be free!
  Bear witness for me, wheresoe'er ye be,
  With what deep worship I have still adored
  The spirit of divinest liberty.

And the whole ode, though, after Coleridge's way, not quite equal to
that exordium, is an example of strong national sentiment, partly in
indignant reaction against his own earlier sympathy with the French
Republic, inspiring a composition which, in spite of some turgid lines,
really justifies itself as poetry, and has that true unity of effect
which the ode requires.  Liberty, after all his hopes of young France,
is only to be found in nature:--

  Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions,
  The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!

In his changes of political sentiment, Coleridge was associated with
the "Lake School"; and there is yet one other very different sort of
sentiment in which he is one with that school, yet all himself, his
sympathy, namely, with the animal world.  That was a sentiment
connected at once with the love of outward nature in himself and in the
"Lake School," and its assertion of the natural affections in their
simplicity; with the homeliness and pity, consequent upon [95] that
assertion.  The Lines to a Young Ass, tethered--

  Where the close-eaten grass is scarcely seen,
  While sweet around her waves the tempting green,

which had seemed merely whimsical in their day, indicate a vein of
interest constant in Coleridge's poems, and at its height in his
greatest poems--in Christabel, where it has its effect, as it were
antipathetically, in the vivid realisation of the serpentine element in
Geraldine's nature; and in The Ancient Mariner, whose fate is
interwoven with that of the wonderful bird, at whose blessing of the
water-snakes the curse for the death of the albatross passes away, and
where the moral of the love of all creatures, as a sort of religious
duty, is definitely expressed.

Christabel, though not printed till 1816, was written mainly in the
year 1797: The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner was printed as a
contribution to the Lyrical Ballads in 1798; and these two poems belong
to the great year of Coleridge's poetic production, his twenty-fifth
year.  In poetic quality, above all in that most poetic of all
qualities, a keen sense of, and delight in beauty, the infection of
which lays hold upon the reader, they are quite out of proportion to
all his other compositions.  The form in both is that of the ballad,
with some of its terminology, and some also of its quaint conceits.
They connect themselves with that revival of ballad literature, of
which Percy's Relics, and, in another [96] way, Macpherson's Ossian are
monuments, and which afterwards so powerfully affected Scott--

  Young-eyed poesy
  All deftly masked as hoar antiquity.

The Ancient Mariner, as also, in its measure, Christabel, is a
"romantic" poem, impressing us by bold invention, and appealing to that
taste for the supernatural, that longing for le frisson, a shudder, to
which the "romantic" school in Germany, and its derivations in England
and France, directly ministered.  In Coleridge, personally, this taste
had been encouraged by his odd and out-of-the-way reading in the
old-fashioned literature of the marvellous--books like Purchas's
Pilgrims, early voyages like Hakluyt's, old naturalists and visionary
moralists, like Thomas Burnet, from whom he quotes the motto of "The
Ancient Mariner, Facile credo, plures esse naturas invisibiles quam
visibiles in rerum universitate, etc."  Fancies of the strange things
which may very well happen, even in broad daylight, to men shut up
alone in ships far off on the sea, seem to have occurred to the human
mind in all ages with a peculiar readiness, and often have about them,
from the story of the stealing of Dionysus downwards, the fascination
of a certain dreamy grace, which distinguishes them from other kinds of
marvellous inventions.  This sort of fascination The Ancient Mariner
brings to its highest degree: it is the delicacy, the dreamy [97]
grace, in his presentation of the marvellous, which makes Coleridge's
work so remarkable.  The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world
in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a
kind of crudity or coarseness.  Coleridge's power is in the very
fineness with which, as by some really ghostly finger, he brings home
to our inmost sense his inventions, daring as they are--the skeleton
ship, the polar spirit, the inspiriting of the dead corpses of the
ship's crew.  The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner has the plausibility,
the perfect adaptation to reason and the general aspect of life, which
belongs to the marvellous, when actually presented as part of a
credible experience in our dreams.  Doubtless, the mere experience of
the opium-eater, the habit he must almost necessarily fall into of
noting the more elusive phenomena of dreams, had something to do with
that: in its essence, however, it is connected with a more purely
intellectual circumstance in the development of Coleridge's poetic
gift.  Some one once asked William Blake, to whom Coleridge has many
resemblances, when either is at his best (that whole episode of the
re-inspiriting of the ship's crew in The Ancient Mariner being
comparable to Blake's well-known design of the "Morning Stars singing
together") whether he had ever seen a ghost, and was surprised when the
famous seer, who ought, one might think, to have seen so many, answered
frankly, "Only [98] once!"  His "spirits," at once more delicate, and
so much more real, than any ghost--the burden, as they were the
privilege, of his temperament--like it, were an integral element in his
everyday life.  And the difference of mood expressed in that question
and its answer, is indicative of a change of temper in regard to the
supernatural which has passed over the whole modern mind, and of which
the true measure is the influence of the writings of Swedenborg.  What
that change is we may see if we compare the vision by which Swedenborg
was "called," as he thought, to his work, with the ghost which called
Hamlet, or the spells of Marlowe's Faust with those of Goethe's.  The
modern mind, so minutely self-scrutinising, if it is to be affected at
all by a sense of the supernatural, needs to be more finely touched
than was possible in the older, romantic presentment of it.  The
spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has become plausible, as

  The blot upon the brain,
  That will show itself without;

and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for which,
according to the scepticism, latent at least, in so much of our modern
philosophy, the so-called real things themselves are but spectra after
all.

It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, fruit of
his more delicate [99] psychology, that Coleridge infuses into romantic
adventure, itself also then a new or revived thing in English
literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in The Ancient Mariner,
unknown in those older, more simple, romantic legends and ballads.  It
is a flower of medieval or later German romance, growing up in the
peculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation,
and putting forth in it wholly new qualities.  The quaint prose
commentary, which runs side by side with the verse of The Ancient
Mariner, illustrates this--a composition of quite a different shade of
beauty and merit from that of the verse which it accompanies,
connecting this, the chief poem of Coleridge, with his philosophy, and
emphasising therein that psychological interest of which I have spoken,
its curious soul-lore.

Completeness, the perfectly rounded wholeness and unity of the
impression it leaves on the mind of a reader who fairly gives himself
to it--that, too, is one of the characteristics of a really excellent
work, in the poetic as in every other kind of art; and by this
completeness, The Ancient Mariner certainly gains upon Christabel--a
completeness, entire as that of Wordsworth's Leech-gatherer, or Keats's
Saint Agnes' Eve, each typical in its way of such wholeness or entirety
of effect on a careful reader.  It is Coleridge's one great complete
work, the one really finished thing, in a life of many beginnings.
Christabel remained a fragment.  In The Ancient Mariner [100] this
unity is secured in part by the skill with which the incidents of the
marriage-feast are made to break in dreamily from time to time upon the
main story.  And then, how pleasantly, how reassuringly, the whole
nightmare story itself is made to end, among the clear fresh sounds and
lights of the bay, where it began, with

  The moon-light steeped in silentness,
  The steady weather-cock.

So different from The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in regard to this
completeness of effect, Christabel illustrates the same complexion of
motives, a like intellectual situation.  Here, too, the work is of a
kind peculiar to one who touches the characteristic motives of the old
romantic ballad, with a spirit made subtle and fine by modern
reflection; as we feel, I think, in such passages as--

  But though my slumber had gone by,
  This dream it would not pass away--
  It seems to live upon mine eye;

and--

  For she, belike, hath drunken deep
  Of all the blessedness of sleep;

and again--

  With such perplexity of mind
  As dreams too lively leave behind.

And that gift of handling the finer passages of human feeling, at once
with power and delicacy, which was another result of his finer
psychology, [101] of his exquisitely refined habit of self-reflection,
is illustrated by a passage on Friendship in the Second Part--

  Alas! they had been friends in youth;
  But whispering tongues can poison truth;
  And constancy lives in realms above;
  And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
  And to be wroth with one we love,
  Doth work like madness in the brain.
  And thus it chanced, as I divine,
  With Roland and Sir Leoline.
  Each spake words of high disdain
  And insult to his heart's best brother
  They parted--ne'er to meet again!
  But never either found another
  To free the hollow heart from paining--
  They stood aloof the scars remaining,
  Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
  A dreary sea now flows between;
  But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
  Shall wholly do away, I ween,
  The marks of that which once hath been.

I suppose these lines leave almost every reader with a quickened sense
of the beauty and compass of human feeling; and it is the sense of such
richness and beauty which, in spite of his "dejection," in spite of
that burden of his morbid lassitude, accompanies Coleridge himself
through life.  A warm poetic joy in everything beautiful, whether it be
a moral sentiment, like the friendship of Roland and Leoline, or only
the flakes of falling light from the water-snakes--this joy, visiting
him, now and again, after sickly dreams, in sleep or waking, as a
relief not to be forgotten, [102] and with such a power of felicitous
expression that the infection of it passes irresistibly to the
reader--such is the predominant element in the matter of his poetry, as
cadence is the predominant quality of its form.  "We bless thee for our
creation!" he might have said, in his later period of definite
religious assent, "because the world is so beautiful: the world of
ideas--living spirits, detached from the divine nature itself, to
inform and lift the heavy mass of material things; the world of man,
above all in his melodious and intelligible speech; the world of living
creatures and natural scenery; the world of dreams."  What he really
did say, by way of A Tombless Epitaph, is true enough of himself--

  Sickness, 'tis true,
  Whole years of weary days, besieged him close,
  Even to the gates and inlets of his life!
  But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm,
  And with a natural gladness, he maintained
  The citadel unconquered, and in joy
  Was strong to follow the delightful Muse.
  For not a hidden path, that to the shades
  Of the beloved Parnassian forest leads,
  Lurked undiscovered by him; not a rill
  There issues from the fount of Hippocrene,
  But he had traced it upward to its source,
  Through open glade, dark glen, and secret dell,
  Knew the gay wild flowers on its banks, and culled
  Its med'cinable herbs.  Yea, oft alone,
  Piercing the long-neglected holy cave,
  The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,
  He bade with lifted torch its starry walls
  Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame

[103]

  Of odorous lamps tended by saint and sage.
  O framed for calmer times and nobler hearts!
  O studious Poet, eloquent for truth!
  Philosopher! contemning wealth and death,
  Yet docile, childlike, full of Life and Love.

The student of empirical science asks, Are absolute principles
attainable?  What are the limits of knowledge?  The answer he receives
from science itself is not ambiguous.  What the moralist asks is, Shall
we gain or lose by surrendering human life to the relative spirit?
Experience answers that the dominant tendency of life is to turn
ascertained truth into a dead letter, to make us all the phlegmatic
servants of routine.  The relative spirit, by its constant dwelling on
the more fugitive conditions or circumstances of things, breaking
through a thousand rough and brutal classifications, and giving
elasticity to inflexible principles, begets an intellectual finesse of
which the ethical result is a delicate and tender justice in the
criticism of human life.  Who would gain more than Coleridge by
criticism in such a spirit?  We know how his life has appeared when
judged by absolute standards.  We see him trying to apprehend the
"absolute," to stereotype forms of faith and philosophy, to attain, as
he says, "fixed principles" in politics, morals, and religion, to fix
one mode of life as the essence of life, refusing to see the parts as
parts only; and all the time his own pathetic history pleads for a more
[104] elastic moral philosophy than his, and cries out against every
formula less living and flexible than life itself.

"From his childhood he hungered for eternity."  There, after all, is
the incontestable claim of Coleridge.  The perfect flower of any
elementary type of life must always be precious to humanity, and
Coleridge is a true flower of the ennuyé, of the type of René.  More
than Childe Harold, more than Werther, more than René himself,
Coleridge, by what he did, what he was, and what he failed to do,
represents that inexhaustible discontent, languor, and homesickness,
that endless regret, the chords of which ring all through our modern
literature.  It is to the romantic element in literature that those
qualities belong.  One day, perhaps, we may come to forget the distant
horizon, with full knowledge of the situation, to be content with "what
is here and now"; and herein is the essence of classical feeling.  But
by us of the present moment, certainly--by us for whom the Greek
spirit, with its engaging naturalness, simple, chastened, debonair,
tryphês, habrotêtos, khlidês, kharitôn, himerou, pothou patêr+, is
itself the Sangrail of an endless pilgrimage, Coleridge, with his
passion for the absolute, for something fixed where all is moving, his
faintness, his broken memory, his intellectual disquiet, may still be
ranked among the interpreters of one of the constituent elements of our
life.

1865, 1880.

NOTES

65. *The latter part of this paper, like that on Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, was contributed to Mr. T. H. Ward's English Poets.

68. +Transliteration: ousia akhrômatos, askhêmatistos, anaphês.
Translation:  "the colorless, utterly formless, intangible essence."
Phaedrus 247C.

80. +The two passages are not indented in the original; they are in
smaller typeface that makes for difficult reading.

86. +Transliteration: aei en sphodra orexei.  Translation: "always
greatly yearning."

104. +Transliteration: tryphês, habrotêtos, khlidês, kharitôn, himerou,
pothou patêr.  Translation: "Of daintiness, delicacy, luxury, graces,
father of desire."



CHARLES LAMB

[105] THOSE English critics who at the beginning of the present century
introduced from Germany, together with some other subtleties of thought
transplanted hither not without advantage, the distinction between the
Fancy and the Imagination, made much also of the cognate distinction
between Wit and Humour, between that unreal and transitory mirth, which
is as the crackling of thorns under the pot, and the laughter which
blends with tears and even with the sublimities of the imagination, and
which, in its most exquisite motives, is one with pity--the laughter of
the comedies of Shakespeare, hardly less expressive than his moods of
seriousness or solemnity, of that deeply stirred soul of sympathy in
him, as flowing from which both tears and laughter are alike genuine
and contagious.

This distinction between wit and humour, Coleridge and other kindred
critics applied, with much effect, in their studies of some of our
older English writers.  And as the distinction between imagination and
fancy, made popular by Wordsworth, [106] found its best justification
in certain essential differences of stuff in Wordsworth's own writings,
so this other critical distinction, between wit and humour, finds a
sort of visible interpretation and instance in the character and
writings of Charles Lamb;--one who lived more consistently than most
writers among subtle literary theories, and whose remains are still
full of curious interest for the student of literature as a fine art.

The author of the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, coming
to the humourists of the nineteenth, would have found, as is true
preeminently of Thackeray himself, the springs of pity in them deepened
by the deeper subjectivity, the intenser and closer living with itself,
which is characteristic of the temper of the later generation; and
therewith, the mirth also, from the amalgam of which with pity humour
proceeds, has become, in Charles Dickens, for example, freer and more
boisterous.

To this more high-pitched feeling, since predominant in our literature,
the writings of Charles Lamb, whose life occupies the last quarter of
the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, are a
transition; and such union of grave, of terrible even, with gay, we may
note in the circumstances of his life, as reflected thence into his
work.  We catch the aroma of a singular, homely sweetness about his
first years, spent on Thames' side, amid the red [107] bricks and
terraced gardens, with their rich historical memories of old-fashioned
legal London.  Just above the poorer class, deprived, as he says, of
the "sweet food of academic institution," he is fortunate enough to be
reared in the classical languages at an ancient school, where he
becomes the companion of Coleridge, as at a later period he was his
enthusiastic disciple.  So far, the years go by with less than the
usual share of boyish difficulties; protected, one fancies, seeing what
he was afterwards, by some attraction of temper in the quaint child,
small and delicate, with a certain Jewish expression in his clear,
brown complexion, eyes not precisely of the same colour, and a slow
walk adding to the staidness of his figure; and whose infirmity of
speech, increased by agitation, is partly engaging.

And the cheerfulness of all this, of the mere aspect of Lamb's quiet
subsequent life also, might make the more superficial reader think of
him as in himself something slight, and of his mirth as cheaply bought.
Yet we know that beneath this blithe surface there was something of the
fateful domestic horror, of the beautiful heroism and devotedness too,
of old Greek tragedy.  His sister Mary, ten years his senior, in a
sudden paroxysm of madness, caused the death of her mother, and was
brought to trial for what an overstrained justice might have construed
as the greatest of crimes.  She was [108] released on the brother's
pledging himself to watch over her; and to this sister, from the age of
twenty-one, Charles Lamb sacrificed himself, "seeking thenceforth,"
says his earliest biographer, "no connexion which could interfere with
her supremacy in his affections, or impair his ability to sustain and
comfort her." The "feverish, romantic tie of love," he cast away in
exchange for the "charities of home."  Only, from time to time, the
madness returned, affecting him too, once; and we see the brother and
sister voluntarily yielding to restraint.  In estimating the humour of
Elia, we must no more forget the strong undercurrent of this great
misfortune and pity, than one could forget it in his actual story. So
he becomes the best critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, a
dramatist of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre.
Rosamund Grey, written in his twenty-third year, a story with something
bitter and exaggerated, an almost insane fixedness of gloom perceptible
in it, strikes clearly this note in his work.

For himself, and from his own point of view, the exercise of his gift,
of his literary art, came to gild or sweeten a life of monotonous
labour, and seemed, as far as regarded others, no very important thing;
availing to give them a little pleasure, and inform them a little,
chiefly in a retrospective manner, but in no way concerned with the
turning of the tides of the great world.  And yet this very modesty,
this unambitious [109] way of conceiving his work, has impressed upon
it a certain exceptional enduringness.  For of the remarkable English
writers contemporary with Lamb, many were greatly preoccupied with
ideas of practice--religious, moral, political--ideas which have since,
in some sense or other, entered permanently into the general
consciousness; and, these having no longer any stimulus for a
generation provided with a different stock of ideas, the writings of
those who spent so much of themselves in their propagation have lost,
with posterity, something of what they gained by them in immediate
influence.  Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley even--sharing so largely in
the unrest of their own age, and made personally more interesting
thereby, yet, of their actual work, surrender more to the mere course
of time than some of those who may have seemed to exercise themselves
hardly at all in great matters, to have been little serious, or a
little indifferent, regarding them.

Of this number of the disinterested servants of literature, smaller in
England than in France, Charles Lamb is one.  In the making of prose he
realises the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats
in the making of verse.  And, working ever close to the concrete, to
the details, great or small, of actual things, books, persons, and with
no part of them blurred to his vision by the intervention of mere
abstract theories, he has reached an enduring moral effect [110] also,
in a sort of boundless sympathy. Unoccupied, as he might seem, with
great matters, he is in immediate contact with what is real, especially
in its caressing littleness, that littleness in which there is much of
the whole woeful heart of things, and meets it more than half-way with
a perfect understanding of it.  What sudden, unexpected touches of
pathos in him!--bearing witness how the sorrow of humanity, the
Weltschmerz, the constant aching of its wounds, is ever present with
him: but what a gift also for the enjoyment of life in its subtleties,
of enjoyment actually refined by the need of some thoughtful economies
and making the most of things!  Little arts of happiness he is ready to
teach to others. The quaint remarks of children which another would
scarcely have heard, he preserves--little flies in the priceless amber
of his Attic wit--and has his "Praise of chimney-sweepers" (as William
Blake has written, with so much natural pathos, the Chimney-sweeper's
Song) valuing carefully their white teeth, and fine enjoyment of white
sheets in stolen sleep at Arundel Castle, as he tells the story,
anticipating something of the mood of our deep humourists of the last
generation.  His simple mother-pity for those who suffer by accident,
or unkindness of nature, blindness for instance, or fateful disease of
mind like his sister's, has something primitive in its largeness; and
on behalf of ill-used animals he is early in composing a Pity's Gift.

[111] And if, in deeper or more superficial sense, the dead do care at
all for their name and fame, then how must the souls of Shakespeare and
Webster have been stirred, after so long converse with things that
stopped their ears, whether above or below the soil, at his exquisite
appreciations of them; the souls of Titian and of Hogarth too; for,
what has not been observed so generally as the excellence of his
literary criticism, Charles Lamb is a fine critic of painting also.  It
was as loyal, self-forgetful work for others, for Shakespeare's self
first, for instance, and then for Shakespeare's readers, that that too
was done: he has the true scholar's way of forgetting himself in his
subject.  For though "defrauded," as we saw, in his young years, "of
the sweet food of academic institution," he is yet essentially a
scholar, and all his work mainly retrospective, as I said; his own
sorrows, affections, perceptions, being alone real to him of the
present.  "I cannot make these present times," he says once, "present
to me."

Above all, he becomes not merely an expositor, permanently valuable,
but for Englishmen almost the discoverer of the old English drama. "The
book is such as I am glad there should be," he modestly says of the
Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of
Shakespeare; to which, however, he adds in a series of notes the very
quintessence of criticism, the choicest savour and perfume of
Elizabethan poetry being [112] sorted, and stored here, with a sort of
delicate intellectual epicureanism, which has had the effect of winning
for these, then almost forgotten, poets, one generation after another
of enthusiastic students.  Could he but have known how fresh a source
of culture he was evoking there for other generations, through all
those years in which, a little wistfully, he would harp on the
limitation of his time by business, and sigh for a better fortune in
regard to literary opportunities!

To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist, the literary
charm of Burton, for instance, or Quarles, or The Duchess of Newcastle;
and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others--he seeming to
himself but to hand on to others, in mere humble ministration, that of
which for them he is really the creator--this is the way of his
criticism; cast off in a stray letter often, or passing note, or
lightest essay or conversation.  It is in such a letter, for instance,
that we come upon a singularly penetrative estimate of the genius and
writings of Defoe.

Tracking, with an attention always alert, the whole process of their
production to its starting-point in the deep places of the mind, he
seems to realise the but half-conscious intuitions of Hogarth or
Shakespeare, and develops the great ruling unities which have swayed
their actual work; or "puts up," and takes, the one morsel of good
stuff in an old, forgotten writer.  Even [113] in what he says casually
there comes an aroma of old English; noticeable echoes, in chance turn
and phrase, of the great masters of style, the old masters.  Godwin,
seeing in quotation a passage from John Woodvil, takes it for a choice
fragment of an old dramatist, and goes to Lamb to assist him in finding
the author.  His power of delicate imitation in prose and verse reaches
the length of a fine mimicry even, as in those last essays of Elia on
Popular Fallacies, with their gentle reproduction or caricature of Sir
Thomas Browne, showing, the more completely, his mastery, by
disinterested study, of those elements of the man which were the real
source of style in that great, solemn master of old English, who, ready
to say what he has to say with fearless homeliness, yet continually
overawes one with touches of a strange utterance from worlds afar.  For
it is with the delicacies of fine literature especially, its gradations
of expression, its fine judgment, its pure sense of words, of
vocabulary--things, alas! dying out in the English literature of the
present, together with the appreciation of them in our literature of
the past--that his literary mission is chiefly concerned.  And yet,
delicate, refining, daintily epicurean, as he may seem, when he writes
of giants, such as Hogarth or Shakespeare, though often but in a stray
note, you catch the sense of veneration with which those great names in
past literature and art brooded over his intelligence, his undiminished
[114] impressibility by the great effects in them.  Reading, commenting
on Shakespeare, he is like a man who walks alone under a grand stormy
sky, and among unwonted tricks of light, when powerful spirits might
seem to be abroad upon the air; and the grim humour of Hogarth, as he
analyses it, rises into a kind of spectral grotesque; while he too
knows the secret of fine, significant touches like theirs.

There are traits, customs, characteristics of houses and dress,
surviving morsels of old life, such as Hogarth has transferred so
vividly into The Rake's Progress, or Marriage à la Mode, concerning
which we well understand how, common, uninteresting, or even worthless
in themselves, they have come to please us at last as things
picturesque, being set in relief against the modes of our different
age.  Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture--types of
cast-off fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever meant to
preserve--we contemplate with more than good-nature, as having in them
the veritable accent of a time, not altogether to be replaced by its
more solemn and self-conscious deposits; like those tricks of
individuality which we find quite tolerable in persons, because they
convey to us the secret of lifelike expression, and with regard to
which we are all to some extent humourists.  But it is part of the
privilege of the genuine humourist to anticipate this pensive mood with
regard to the ways and things [115] of his own day; to look upon the
tricks in manner of the life about him with that same refined, purged
sort of vision, which will come naturally to those of a later
generation, in observing whatever may have survived by chance of its
mere external habit.  Seeing things always by the light of an
understanding more entire than is possible for ordinary minds, of the
whole mechanism of humanity, and seeing also the manner, the outward
mode or fashion, always in strict connexion with the spiritual
condition which determined it, a humourist such as Charles Lamb
anticipates the enchantment of distance; and the characteristics of
places, ranks, habits of life, are transfigured for him, even now and
in advance of time, by poetic light; justifying what some might condemn
as mere sentimentality, in the effort to hand on unbroken the tradition
of such fashion or accent.  "The praise of beggars," "the cries of
London," the traits of actors just grown "old," the spots in "town"
where the country, its fresh green and fresh water, still lingered on,
one after another, amidst the bustle; the quaint, dimmed, just
played-out farces, he had relished so much, coming partly through them
to understand the earlier English theatre as a thing once really alive;
those fountains and sun-dials of old gardens, of which he entertains
such dainty discourse:--he feels the poetry of these things, as the
poetry of things old indeed, but surviving [116] as an actual part of
the life of the present; and as something quite different from the
poetry of things flatly gone from us and antique, which come back to
us, if at all, as entire strangers, like Scott's old Scotch-border
personages, their oaths and armour.  Such gift of appreciation depends,
as I said, on the habitual apprehension of men's life as a whole--its
organic wholeness, as extending even to the least things in it--of its
outward manner in connexion with its inward temper; and it involves a
fine perception of the congruities, the musical accordance between
humanity and its environment of custom, society, personal intercourse;
as if all this, with its meetings, partings, ceremonies, gesture, tones
of speech, were some delicate instrument on which an expert performer
is playing.

These are some of the characteristics of Elia, one essentially an
essayist, and of the true family of Montaigne, "never judging," as he
says, "system-wise of things, but fastening on particulars;" saying all
things as it were on chance occasion only, and by way of pastime, yet
succeeding thus, "glimpse-wise," in catching and recording more
frequently than others "the gayest, happiest attitude of things;" a
casual writer for dreamy readers, yet always giving the reader so much
more than he seemed to propose.  There is something of the follower of
George Fox about him, and the Quaker's belief in the inward light
coming to one passive, [117] to the mere wayfarer, who will be sure at
all events to lose no light which falls by the way--glimpses,
suggestions, delightful half-apprehensions, profound thoughts of old
philosophers, hints of the innermost reason in things, the full
knowledge of which is held in reserve; all the varied stuff, that is,
of which genuine essays are made.

And with him, as with Montaigne, the desire of self-portraiture is,
below all more superficial tendencies, the real motive in writing at
all--a desire closely connected with that intimacy, that modern
subjectivity, which may be called the Montaignesque element in
literature.  What he designs is to give you himself, to acquaint you
with his likeness; but must do this, if at all, indirectly, being
indeed always more or less reserved, for himself and his friends;
friendship counting for so much in his life, that he is jealous of
anything that might jar or disturb it, even to the length of a sort of
insincerity, to which he assigns its quaint "praise"; this lover of
stage plays significantly welcoming a little touch of the artificiality
of play to sweeten the intercourse of actual life.

And, in effect, a very delicate and expressive portrait of him does put
itself together for the duly meditative reader.  In indirect touches of
his own work, scraps of faded old letters, what others remembered of
his talk, the man's likeness emerges; what he laughed and wept at,
[118] his sudden elevations, and longings after absent friends, his
fine casuistries of affection and devices to jog sometimes, as he says,
the lazy happiness of perfect love, his solemn moments of higher
discourse with the young, as they came across him on occasion, and went
along a little way with him, the sudden, surprised apprehension of
beauties in old literature, revealing anew the deep soul of poetry in
things, and withal the pure spirit of fun, having its way again;
laughter, that most short-lived of all things (some of Shakespeare's
even being grown hollow) wearing well with him.  Much of all this comes
out through his letters, which may be regarded as a department of his
essays.  He is an old-fashioned letter-writer, the essence of the old
fashion of letter-writing lying, as with true essay-writing, in the
dexterous availing oneself of accident and circumstance, in the
prosecution of deeper lines of observation; although, just as with the
record of his conversation, one loses something, in losing the actual
tones of the stammerer, still graceful in his halting, as he halted
also in composition, composing slowly and by fits, "like a Flemish
painter," as he tells us, so "it is to be regretted," says the editor
of his letters, "that in the printed letters the reader will lose the
curious varieties of writing with which the originals abound, and which
are scrupulously adapted to the subject."

Also, he was a true "collector," delighting [119] in the personal
finding of a thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him by
the little accidents which attest previous ownership.  Wither's
Emblems, "that old book and quaint," long-desired, when he finds it at
last, he values none the less because a child had coloured the plates
with his paints.  A lover of household warmth everywhere, of that
tempered atmosphere which our various habitations get by men's living
within them, he "sticks to his favourite books as he did to his
friends," and loved the "town," with a jealous eye for all its
characteristics, "old houses" coming to have souls for him.  The
yearning for mere warmth against him in another, makes him content, all
through life, with pure brotherliness, "the most kindly and natural
species of love," as he says, in place of the passion of love.  Brother
and sister, sitting thus side by side, have, of course, their
anticipations how one of them must sit at last in the faint sun alone,
and set us speculating, as we read, as to precisely what amount of
melancholy really accompanied for him the approach of old age, so
steadily foreseen; make us note also, with pleasure, his successive
wakings up to cheerful realities, out of a too curious musing over what
is gone and what remains, of life.  In his subtle capacity for enjoying
the more refined points of earth, of human relationship, he could throw
the gleam of poetry or humour on what seemed common or threadbare; has
a care for the [120] sighs, and the weary, humdrum preoccupations of
very weak people, down to their little pathetic "gentilities," even;
while, in the purely human temper, he can write of death, almost like
Shakespeare.

And that care, through all his enthusiasm of discovery, for what is
accustomed, in literature, connected thus with his close clinging to
home and the earth, was congruous also with that love for the
accustomed in religion, which we may notice in him.  He is one of the
last votaries of that old-world sentiment, based on the feelings of
hope and awe, which may be described as the religion of men of letters
(as Sir Thomas Browne has his Religion of the Physician) religion as
understood by the soberer men of letters in the last century, Addison,
Gray, and Johnson; by Jane Austen and Thackeray, later.  A high way of
feeling developed largely by constant intercourse with the great things
of literature, and extended in its turn to those matters greater still,
this religion lives, in the main retrospectively, in a system of
received sentiments and beliefs; received, like those great things of
literature and art, in the first instance, on the authority of a long
tradition, in the course of which they have linked themselves in a
thousand complex ways to the conditions of human life, and no more
questioned now than the feeling one keeps by one of the greatness--say!
of Shakespeare.  For Charles Lamb, such form of religion becomes [121]
the solemn background on which the nearer and more exciting objects of
his immediate experience relieve themselves, borrowing from it an
expression of calm; its necessary atmosphere being indeed a profound
quiet, that quiet which has in it a kind of sacramental efficacy,
working, we might say, on the principle of the opus operatum, almost
without any co-operation of one's own, towards the assertion of the
higher self. And, in truth, to men of Lamb's delicately attuned
temperament mere physical stillness has its full value; such natures
seeming to long for it sometimes, as for no merely negative thing, with
a sort of mystical sensuality.

The writings of Charles Lamb are an excellent illustration of the value
of reserve in literature.  Below his quiet, his quaintness, his humour,
and what may seem the slightness, the occasional or accidental
character of his work, there lies, as I said at starting, as in his
life, a genuinely tragic element.  The gloom, reflected at its darkest
in those hard shadows of Rosamund Grey, is always there, though not
always realised either for himself or his readers, and restrained
always in utterance.  It gives to those lighter matters on the surface
of life and literature among which he for the most part moved, a
wonderful force of expression, as if at any moment these slight words
and fancies might pierce very far into the deeper soul of things.  In
his writing, as in his [122] life, that quiet is not the low-flying of
one from the first drowsy by choice, and needing the prick of some
strong passion or worldly ambition, to stimulate him into all the
energy of which he is capable; but rather the reaction of nature, after
an escape from fate, dark and insane as in old Greek tragedy, following
upon which the sense of mere relief becomes a kind of passion, as with
one who, having narrowly escaped earthquake or shipwreck, finds a thing
for grateful tears in just sitting quiet at home, under the wall, till
the end of days.

He felt the genius of places; and I sometimes think he resembles the
places he knew and liked best, and where his lot fell--London,
sixty-five years ago, with Covent Garden and the old theatres, and the
Temple gardens still unspoiled, Thames gliding down, and beyond to
north and south the fields at Enfield or Hampton, to which, "with their
living trees," the thoughts wander "from the hard wood of the
desk"--fields fresher, and coming nearer to town then, but in one of
which the present writer remembers, on a brooding early summer's day,
to have heard the cuckoo for the first time.  Here, the surface of
things is certainly humdrum, the streets dingy, the green places, where
the child goes a-maying, tame enough.  But nowhere are things more apt
to respond to the brighter weather, nowhere is there so much difference
between rain and sunshine, nowhere do the [123] clouds roll together
more grandly; those quaint suburban pastorals gathering a certain
quality of grandeur from the background of the great city, with its
weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid light on dome and
bleached stone steeples.

1878.



SIR THOMAS BROWNE

[124] ENGLISH prose literature towards the end of the seventeenth
century, in the hands of Dryden and Locke, was becoming, as that of
France had become at an earlier date, a matter of design and skilled
practice, highly conscious of itself as an art, and, above all,
correct.  Up to that time it had been, on the whole, singularly
informal and unprofessional, and by no means the literature of the "man
of letters," as we understand him.  Certain great instances there had
been of literary structure or architecture--The Ecclesiastical Polity,
The Leviathan--but for the most part that earlier prose literature is
eminently occasional, closely determined by the eager practical aims of
contemporary politics and theology, or else due to a man's own native
instinct to speak because he cannot help speaking.  Hardly aware of the
habit, he likes talking to himself; and when he writes (still in
undress) he does but take the "friendly reader" into his confidence.
The type of this literature, obviously, is not Locke or Gibbon, but,
above all others, Sir Thomas [125] Browne; as Jean Paul is a good
instance of it in German literature, always in its developments so much
later than the English; and as the best instance of it in French
literature, in the century preceding Browne, is Montaigne, from whom
indeed, in a great measure, all those tentative writers, or essayists,
derive.

It was a result, perhaps, of the individualism and liberty of personal
development, which, even for a Roman Catholic, were effects of the
Reformation, that there was so much in Montaigne of the "subjective,"
as people say, of the singularities of personal character.  Browne,
too, bookish as he really is claims to give his readers a matter, "not
picked from the leaves of any author, but bred amongst the weeds and
tares" of his own brain.  The faults of such literature are what we all
recognise in it: unevenness, alike in thought and style; lack of
design; and caprice--the lack of authority; after the full play of
which, there is so much to refresh one in the reasonable transparency
of Hooker, representing thus early the tradition of a classical
clearness in English literature, anticipated by Latimer and More, and
to be fulfilled afterwards in Butler and Hume.  But then, in recompense
for that looseness and whim, in Sir Thomas Browne for instance, we have
in those "quaint" writers, as they themselves understood the term
(coint, adorned, but adorned with all the curious ornaments of their
own predilection, provincial [126] or archaic, certainly unfamiliar,
and selected without reference to the taste or usages of other people)
the charm of an absolute sincerity, with all the ingenuous and racy
effect of what is circumstantial and peculiar in their growth.

The whole creation is a mystery and particularly that of man. At the
blast of His mouth were the rest of the creatures made, and at His bare
word they started out of nothing.  But in the frame of man He played
the sensible operator, and seemed not so much to create as to make him.
When He had separated the materials of other creatures, there
consequently resulted a form and soul: but having raised the walls of
man, He was driven to a second and harder creation--of a substance like
Himself, an incorruptible and immortal soul.

There, we have the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, in exact expression of
his mind!--minute and curious in its thinking; but with an effect, on
the sudden, of a real sublimity or depth.  His style is certainly an
unequal one.  It has the monumental aim which charmed, and perhaps
influenced, Johnson--a dignity that can be attained only in such mental
calm as follows long and learned pondering on the high subjects Browne
loves to deal with.  It has its garrulity, its various levels of
painstaking, its mannerism, pleasant of its kind or tolerable, together
with much, to us intolerable, but of which he was capable on a lazy
summer afternoon down at Norwich.  And all is so oddly mixed, showing,
in its entire ignorance of self, how much he, and the sort of
literature he represents, really stood in need of technique, [127] of a
formed taste in literature, of a literary architecture.

And yet perhaps we could hardly wish the result different, in him, any
more than in the books of Burton and Fuller, or some other similar
writers of that age--mental abodes, we might liken, after their own
manner, to the little old private houses of some historic town grouped
about its grand public structures, which, when they have survived at
all, posterity is loth to part with.  For, in their absolute sincerity,
not only do these authors clearly exhibit themselves ("the unique
peculiarity of the writer's mind," being, as Johnson says of Browne,
"faithfully reflected in the form and matter of his work") but, even
more than mere professionally instructed writers, they belong to, and
reflect, the age they lived in.  In essentials, of course, even Browne
is by no means so unique among his contemporaries, and so singular, as
he looks.  And then, as the very condition of their work, there is an
entire absence of personal restraint in dealing with the public, whose
humours they come at last in a great measure to reproduce.  To speak
more properly, they have no sense of a "public" to deal with, at
all--only a full confidence in the "friendly reader," as they love to
call him.  Hence their amazing pleasantry, their indulgence in their
own conceits; but hence also those unpremeditated wildflowers of speech
we should [128] never have the good luck to find in any more formal
kind of literature.

It is, in truth, to the literary purpose of the humourist, in the
old-fashioned sense of the term, that this method of writing naturally
allies itself--of the humourist to whom all the world is but a
spectacle in which nothing is really alien from himself, who has hardly
a sense of the distinction between great and little among things that
are at all, and whose half-pitying, half-amused sympathy is called out
especially by the seemingly small interests and traits of character in
the things or the people around him.  Certainly, in an age stirred by
great causes, like the age of Browne in England, of Montaigne in
France, that is not a type to which one would wish to reduce all men of
letters.  Still, in an age apt also to become severe, or even cruel
(its eager interest in those great causes turning sour on occasion) the
character of the humourist may well find its proper influence, through
that serene power, and the leisure it has for conceiving second
thoughts, on the tendencies, conscious or unconscious, of the fierce
wills around it.  Something of such a humourist was Browne--not callous
to men and their fortunes; certainly not without opinions of his own
about them; and yet, undisturbed by the civil war, by the fall, and
then the restoration, of the monarchy, through that long quiet life
(ending at last on the day [129] himself had predicted, as if at the
moment he had willed) in which "all existence," as he says, "had been
but food for contemplation."

Johnson, in beginning his Life of Browne, remarks that Browne "seems to
have had the fortune, common among men of letters, of raising little
curiosity after their private life."  Whether or not, with the example
of Johnson himself before us, we can think just that, it is certain
that Browne's works are of a kind to directly stimulate curiosity about
himself--about himself, as being manifestly so large a part of those
works; and as a matter of fact we know a great deal about his life,
uneventful as in truth it was.  To himself, indeed, his life at
Norwich, as he gives us to understand, seemed wonderful enough.  "Of
these wonders," says Johnson, "the view that can now be taken of his
life offers no appearance."  But "we carry with us," as Browne writes,
"the wonders we seek without us," and we may note on the other hand, a
circumstance which his daughter, Mrs. Lyttleton, tells us of his
childhood: "His father used to open his breast when he was asleep, and
kiss it in prayers over him, as 'tis said of Origen's father, that the
Holy Ghost would take possession there." It was perhaps because the son
inherited an aptitude for a like profound kindling of sentiment in the
taking of his life, that, uneventful as it was, [130] commonplace as it
seemed to Johnson, to Browne himself it was so full of wonders, and so
stimulates the curiosity of his more careful reader of to-day.  "What
influence," says Johnson again, "learning has had on its possessors may
be doubtful."  Well! the influence of his great learning, of his
constant research on Browne, was its imaginative influence--that it
completed his outfit as a poetic visionary, stirring all the strange
"conceit" of his nature to its depths.

Browne himself dwells, in connexion with the first publication
(extorted by circumstance) of the Religio Medici, on the natural
"inactivity of his disposition"; and he does, as I have said, pass very
quietly through an exciting time.  Born in the year of the Gunpowder
Plot, he was not, in truth, one of those clear and clarifying souls
which, in an age alike of practical and mental confusion, can
anticipate and lay down the bases of reconstruction, like Bacon or
Hooker.  His mind has much of the perplexity which was part of the
atmosphere of the time.  Not that he is without his own definite
opinions on events.  For him, Cromwell is a usurper, the death of
Charles an abominable murder.  In spite of what is but an affectation,
perhaps, of the sceptical mood, he is a Churchman too; one of those who
entered fully into the Anglican position, so full of sympathy with
those ceremonies and observances [131] which "misguided zeal terms
superstition," that there were some Roman Catholics who thought that
nothing but custom and education kept him from their communion.  At the
Restoration he rejoices to see the return of the comely Anglican order
in old episcopal Norwich, with its ancient churches; the antiquity, in
particular, of the English Church being, characteristically, one of the
things he most valued in it, vindicating it, when occasion came,
against the "unjust scandal" of those who made that Church a creation
of Henry the Eighth.  As to Romanists--he makes no scruple to "enter
their churches in defect of ours."  He cannot laugh at, but rather
pities, "the fruitless journeys of pilgrims--for there is something in
it of devotion."  He could never "hear the Ave Mary! bell without an
oraison."  At a solemn procession he has "wept abundantly."  How
English, in truth, all this really is!  It reminds one how some of the
most popular of English writers, in many a half-conscious expression,
have witnessed to a susceptibility in the English mind itself, in spite
of the Reformation, to what is affecting in religious ceremony.  Only,
in religion as in politics, Browne had no turn for disputes; was
suspicious of them, indeed; knowing, as he says with true acumen, that
"a man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be
forced to surrender," even in controversies not [132] necessarily
maladroit--an image in which we may trace a little contemporary
colouring.

The Enquiries into Vulgar Errors appeared in the year 1646; a year
which found him very hard on "the vulgar."  His suspicion, in the
abstract, of what Bacon calls Idola Fori, the Idols of the
Market-place, takes a special emphasis from the course of events about
him: "being erroneous in their single numbers, once huddled together,
they will be error itself."  And yet, congruously with a dreamy
sweetness of character we may find expressed in his very features, he
seems not greatly concerned at the temporary suppression of the
institutions he values so much.  He seems to possess some inward
Platonic reality of them--church or monarchy--to hold by in idea, quite
beyond the reach of Roundhead or unworthy Cavalier.  In the power of
what is inward and inviolable in his religion, he can still take note:
"In my solitary and retired imagination (neque enim cum porticus aut me
lectulus accepit, desum mihi) I remember I am not alone, and therefore
forget not to contemplate Him and His attributes who is ever with me."

His father, a merchant of London, with some claims to ancient descent,
left him early in possession of ample means.  Educated at Winchester
and Oxford, he visited Ireland, France, and Italy; and in the year
1633, at the age of twenty-eight, became Doctor of Medicine at Leyden.
Three years later he established himself as a physician [133] at
Norwich for the remainder of his life, having married a lady, described
as beautiful and attractive, and affectionate also, as we may judge
from her letters and postscripts to those of her husband, in an
orthography of a homeliness amazing even for that age. Dorothy Browne
bore him ten children, six of whom he survived.

Their house at Norwich, even then an old one it would seem, must have
grown, through long years of acquisition, into an odd cabinet of
antiquities--antiquities properly so called; his old Roman, or
Romanised British urns, from Walsingham or Brampton, for instance, and
those natural objects which he studied somewhat in the temper of a
curiosity-hunter or antiquary.  In one of the old churchyards of
Norwich he makes the first discovery of adipocere, of which grim
substance "a portion still remains with him."  For his multifarious
experiments he must have had his laboratory.  The old window-stanchions
had become magnetic, proving, as he thinks, that iron "acquires
verticity" from long lying in one position.  Once we find him re-tiling
the place.  It was then, perhaps, that he made the observation that
bricks and tiles also acquire "magnetic alliciency"--one's whole house,
one might fancy; as indeed, he holds the earth itself to be a vast
lodestone.

The very faults of his literary work, its desultoriness, the time it
costs his readers, that [134] slow Latinity which Johnson imitated from
him, those lengthy leisurely terminations which busy posterity will
abbreviate, all breathe of the long quiet of the place.  Yet he is by
no means indolent.  Besides wide book-learning, experimental research
at home, and indefatigable observation in the open air, he prosecutes
the ordinary duties of a physician; contrasting himself indeed with
other students, "whose quiet and unmolested doors afford no such
distractions."  To most persons of mind sensitive as his, his chosen
studies would have seemed full of melancholy, turning always, as they
did, upon death and decay.  It is well, perhaps, that life should be
something of a "meditation upon death": but to many, certainly,
Browne's would have seemed too like a lifelong following of one's own
funeral.  A museum is seldom a cheerful place--oftenest induces the
feeling that nothing could ever have been young; and to Browne the
whole world is a museum; all the grace and beauty it has being of a
somewhat mortified kind.  Only, for him (poetic dream, or philosophic
apprehension, it was this which never failed to evoke his wonderful
genius for exquisitely impassioned speech) over all those ugly
anatomical preparations, as though over miraculous saintly relics,
there was the perpetual flicker of a surviving spiritual ardency, one
day to reassert itself--stranger far than any fancied odylic
gravelights!

[135] When Browne settled at Norwich, being then about thirty-six years
old, he had already completed the Religio Medici; a desultory
collection of observations designed for himself only and a few friends,
at all events with no purpose of immediate publication.  It had been
lying by him for seven years, circulating privately in his own
extraordinarily perplexed manuscript, or in manuscript copies, when, in
1642, an incorrect printed version from one of those copies, "much
corrupted by transcription at various hands," appeared anonymously.
Browne, decided royalist as he was in spite of seeming indifference,
connects this circumstance with the unscrupulous use of the press for
political purposes, and especially against the king, at that time.
Just here a romantic figure comes on the scene.  Son of the unfortunate
young Everard Digby who perished on the scaffold for some half-hearted
participation in the Gunpowder Plot, Kenelm Digby, brought up in the
reformed religion, had returned in manhood to the religion of his
father.  In his intellectual composition he had, in common with Browne,
a scientific interest, oddly tinged with both poetry and scepticism: he
had also a strong sympathy with religious reaction, and a more than
sentimental love for a seemingly vanishing age of faith, which he, for
one, would not think of as vanishing.  A copy of that surreptitious
edition of the Religio Medici found him a prisoner on suspicion of a
too active [136] royalism, and with much time on his hands.

The Roman Catholic, although, secure in his definite orthodoxy, he
finds himself indifferent on many points (on the reality of witchcraft,
for instance) concerning which Browne's more timid, personally grounded
faith might indulge no scepticism, forced himself, nevertheless, to
detect a vein of rationalism in a book which on the whole much
attracted him, and hastily put forth his "animadversions" upon it.
Browne, with all his distaste for controversy, thus found himself
committed to a dispute, and his reply came with the correct edition of
the Religio Medici published at last with his name.  There have been
many efforts to formulate the "religion of the layman," which might be
rightly understood, perhaps, as something more than what is called
"natural," yet less than ecclesiastical, or "professional" religion.
Though its habitual mode of conceiving experience is on a different
plane, yet it would recognise the legitimacy of the traditional
religious interpretation of that experience, generally and by
implication; only, with a marked reserve as to religious particulars,
both of thought and language, out of a real reverence or awe, as proper
only for a special place. Such is the lay religion, as we may find it
in Addison, in Gray, in Thackeray; and there is something of a
concession--a concession, on second thoughts--about it.  Browne's
Religio Medici is designed as the expression of a mind [137] more
difficult of belief than that of the mere "layman," as above described;
it is meant for the religion of the man of science.  Actually, it is
something less to the point, in any balancing of the religious against
the worldly view of things, than the religion of the layman, as just
now defined.  For Browne, in spite of his profession of boisterous
doubt, has no real difficulties, and his religion, certainly, nothing
of the character of a concession.  He holds that there has never
existed an atheist. Not that he is credulous; but that his religion is
only the correlative of himself, his peculiar character and education,
a religion of manifold association.  For him, the wonders of religion,
its supernatural events or agencies, are almost natural facts or
processes.  "Even in this material fabric, the spirits walk as freely
exempt from the affection of time, place and motion, as beyond the
extremest circumference."  Had not Divine interference designed to
raise the dead, nature herself is in act to do it--to lead out the
"incinerated soul" from the retreats of her dark laboratory. Certainly
Browne has not, like Pascal, made the "great resolution," by the
apprehension that it is just in the contrast of the moral world to the
world with which science deals that religion finds its proper basis.
It is from the homelessness of the world which science analyses so
victoriously, its dark unspirituality, wherein the soul he is conscious
of seems such a [138] stranger, that Pascal "turns again to his rest,"
in the conception of a world of wholly reasonable and moral agencies.
For Browne, on the contrary, the light is full, design everywhere
obvious, its conclusion easy to draw, all small and great things marked
clearly with the signature of the "Word."  The adhesion, the difficult
adhesion, of men such as Pascal, is an immense contribution to
religious controversy; the concession, again, of a man like Addison, of
great significance there.  But in the adhesion of Browne, in spite of
his crusade against "vulgar errors," there is no real significance.
The Religio Medici is a contribution, not to faith, but to piety; a
refinement and correction, such as piety often stands in need of; a
help, not so much to religious belief in a world of doubt, as to the
maintenance of the religious mood amid the interests of a secular
calling.

From about this time Browne's letters afford a pretty clear view of his
life as it passed in the house at Norwich.  Many of these letters
represent him in correspondence with the singular men who shared his
own half poetic, half scientific turn of mind, with that impressibility
towards what one might call the thaumaturgic elements in nature which
has often made men dupes, and which is certainly an element in the
somewhat atrabiliar mental complexion of that age in England.  He
corresponds seriously with William Lily, the astrologer; is acquainted
[139] with Dr.  Dee, who had some connexion with Norwich, and has
"often heard him affirm, sometimes with oaths, that he had seen
transmutation of pewter dishes and flagons into silver (at least) which
the goldsmiths at Prague bought of him."  Browne is certainly an honest
investigator; but it is still with a faint hope of something like that
upon fitting occasion, and on the alert always for surprises in nature
(as if nature had a rhetoric, at times, to deliver to us, like those
sudden and surprising flowers of his own poetic style) that he listens
to her everyday talk so attentively. Of strange animals, strange cures,
and the like, his correspondence is full.  The very errors he combats
are, of course, the curiosities of error--those fascinating,
irresistible, popular, errors, which various kinds of people have
insisted on gliding into because they like them.  Even his heresies
were old ones--the very fossils of capricious opinion.

It is as an industrious local naturalist that Browne comes before us
first, full of the fantastic minute life in the fens and "Broads"
around Norwich, its various sea and marsh birds.  He is something of a
vivisectionist also, and we may not be surprised at it, perhaps, in an
age which, for the propagation of truth, was ready to cut off men's
ears.  He finds one day "a Scarabaus capricornus odoratus," which he
takes "to be mentioned by Monfetus, folio 150.  He saith, 'Nucem
moschatam et cinnamomum vere spirat'--[140] but to me it smelt like
roses, santalum, and ambergris."  "Musca tuliparum moschata," again,
"is a small bee-like fly of an excellent fragrant odour, which I have
often found at the bottom of the flowers of tulips."  Is this within
the experience of modern entomologists?

The Garden of Cyrus, though it ends indeed with a passage of wonderful
felicity, certainly emphasises (to say the least) the defects of
Browne's literary good qualities.  His chimeric fancy carries him here
into a kind of frivolousness, as if he felt almost too safe with his
public, and were himself not quite serious, or dealing fairly with it;
and in a writer such as Browne levity must of necessity be a little
ponderous.  Still, like one of those stiff gardens, half-way between
the medieval garden and the true "English" garden of Temple or Walpole,
actually to be seen in the background of some of the conventional
portraits of that day, the fantasies of this indescribable exposition
of the mysteries of the quincunx form part of the complete portrait of
Browne himself; and it is in connexion with it that, once or twice, the
quaintly delightful pen of Evelyn comes into the correspondence--in
connexion with the "hortulane pleasure."  "Norwich," he writes to
Browne, "is a place, I understand, much addicted to the flowery part."
Professing himself a believer in the operation "of the air and genius
of gardens upon human spirits, towards virtue and sanctity," he is all
for [141] natural gardens as against "those which appear like gardens
of paste-board and march-pane, and smell more of paint than of flowers
and verdure."  Browne is in communication also with Ashmole and
Dugdale, the famous antiquaries; to the latter of whom, who had written
a work on the history of the embanking of fens, he communicates the
discovery of certain coins, on a piece of ground "in the nature of an
island in the fens."

Far more interesting certainly than those curious scientific letters is
Browne's "domestic correspondence."  Dobson, Charles the First's
"English Tintoret," would seem to have painted a life-sized picture of
Sir Thomas Browne and his family, after the manner of those big,
urbane, family groups, then coming into fashion with the Dutch Masters.
Of such a portrait nothing is now known.  But in these old-fashioned,
affectionate letters, transmitted often, in those troublous times, with
so much difficulty, we have what is almost as graphic--a numerous
group, in which, although so many of Browne's children died young, he
was happy; with Dorothy Browne, occasionally adding her charming,
ill-spelt postscripts to her husband's letters; the religious daughter
who goes to daily prayers after the Restoration, which brought Browne
the honour of knighthood; and, above all, two Toms, son and grandson of
Sir Thomas, the latter being the son of Dr. Edward Browne, [142] now
become distinguished as a physician in London (he attended John, Earl
of Rochester, in his last illness at Woodstock) and his childish
existence as he lives away from his proper home in London, in the old
house at Norwich, two hundred years ago, we see like a thing of to-

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