CHAPTER XVIII

Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially different

from that of prose--Origin and elements of metre--Its necessary

consequences, and the conditions thereby imposed on the metrical writer

in the choice of his diction.

I conclude, therefore, that the attempt is impracticable; and that, were

it not impracticable, it would still be useless. For the very power of

making the selection implies the previous possession of the language

selected. Or where can the poet have lived? And by what rules could

he direct his choice, which would not have enabled him to select and

arrange his words by the light of his own judgment? We do not adopt the

language of a class by the mere adoption of such words exclusively, as

that class would use, or at least understand; but likewise by following

the order, in which the words of such men are wont to succeed each

other. Now this order, in the intercourse of uneducated men, is

distinguished from the diction of their superiors in knowledge and

power, by the greater disjunction and separation in the component parts

of that, whatever it be, which they wish to communicate. There is a want

of that prospectiveness of mind, that surview, which enables a man

to foresee the whole of what he is to convey, appertaining to any one

point; and by this means so to subordinate and arrange the different

parts according to their relative importance, as to convey it at once,

and as an organized whole.

Now I will take the first stanza, on which I have chanced to open, in

the Lyrical Ballads. It is one the most simple and the least peculiar in

its language.

“In distant countries have I been,

And yet I have not often seen

A healthy man, a man full grown,

Weep in the public roads, alone.

But such a one, on English ground,

And in the broad highway, I met;

Along the broad highway he came,

His cheeks with tears were wet

Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad;

And in his arms a lamb he had.”

The words here are doubtless such as are current in all ranks of life;

and of course not less so in the hamlet and cottage than in the shop,

manufactory, college, or palace. But is this the order, in which the

rustic would have placed the words? I am grievously deceived, if the

following less compact mode of commencing the same tale be not a far

more faithful copy. “I have been in a many parts, far and near, and I

don’t know that I ever saw before a man crying by himself in the public

road; a grown man I mean, that was neither sick nor hurt,” etc., etc.

But when I turn to the following stanza in The Thorn:

“At all times of the day and night

This wretched woman thither goes;

And she is known to every star,

And every wind that blows

And there, beside the Thorn, she sits,

When the blue day-light’s in the skies,

And when the whirlwind’s on the hill,

Or frosty air is keen and still,

And to herself she cries,

Oh misery! Oh misery!

Oh woe is me! Oh misery!”

and compare this with the language of ordinary men; or with that which

I can conceive at all likely to proceed, in real life, from such a

narrator, as is supposed in the note to the poem; compare it either in

the succession of the images or of the sentences; I am reminded of the

sublime prayer and hymn of praise, which Milton, in opposition to an

established liturgy, presents as a fair specimen of common extemporary

devotion, and such as we might expect to hear from every self-inspired

minister of a conventicle! And I reflect with delight, how little a mere

theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the processes of

genuine imagination in a man of true poetic genius, who possesses, as

Mr. Wordsworth, if ever man did, most assuredly does possess,

“The Vision and the Faculty divine.”

One point then alone remains, but that the most important; its

examination having been, indeed, my chief inducement for the preceding

inquisition. “There neither is nor can be any essential difference

between the language of prose and metrical composition.” Such is Mr.

Wordsworth’s assertion. Now prose itself, at least in all argumentative

and consecutive works, differs, and ought to differ, from the language

of conversation; even as [66] reading ought to differ from talking.

Unless therefore the difference denied be that of the mere words, as

materials common to all styles of writing, and not of the style itself

in the universally admitted sense of the term, it might be naturally

presumed that there must exist a still greater between the ordonnance

of poetic composition and that of prose, than is expected to distinguish

prose from ordinary conversation.

There are not, indeed, examples wanting in the history of literature,

of apparent paradoxes that have summoned the public wonder as new and

startling truths, but which, on examination, have shrunk into tame and

harmless truisms; as the eyes of a cat, seen in the dark, have been

mistaken for flames of fire. But Mr. Wordsworth is among the last men,

to whom a delusion of this kind would be attributed by anyone, who

had enjoyed the slightest opportunity of understanding his mind and

character. Where an objection has been anticipated by such an author as

natural, his answer to it must needs be interpreted in some sense which

either is, or has been, or is capable of being controverted. My object

then must be to discover some other meaning for the term “essential

difference” in this place, exclusive of the indistinction and community

of the words themselves. For whether there ought to exist a class of

words in the English, in any degree resembling the poetic dialect of

the Greek and Italian, is a question of very subordinate importance. The

number of such words would be small indeed, in our language; and even in

the Italian and Greek, they consist not so much of different words, as

of slight differences in the forms of declining and conjugating the same

words; forms, doubtless, which having been, at some period more or less

remote, the common grammatic flexions of some tribe or province, had

been accidentally appropriated to poetry by the general admiration of

certain master intellects, the first established lights of inspiration,

to whom that dialect happened to be native.

Essence, in its primary signification, means the principle of

individuation, the inmost principle of the possibility of any thing, as

that particular thing. It is equivalent to the idea of a thing, whenever

we use the word, idea, with philosophic precision. Existence, on the

other hand, is distinguished from essence, by the superinduction of

reality. Thus we speak of the essence, and essential properties of a

circle; but we do not therefore assert, that any thing, which really

exists, is mathematically circular. Thus too, without any tautology we

contend for the existence of the Supreme Being; that is, for a reality

correspondent to the idea. There is, next, a secondary use of the word

essence, in which it signifies the point or ground of contra-distinction

between two modifications of the same substance or subject. Thus we

should be allowed to say, that the style of architecture of Westminster

Abbey is essentially different from that of St. Paul, even though both

had been built with blocks cut into the same form, and from the same

quarry. Only in this latter sense of the term must it have been denied

by Mr. Wordsworth (for in this sense alone is it affirmed by the general

opinion) that the language of poetry (that is the formal construction,

or architecture, of the words and phrases) is essentially different from

that of prose. Now the burden of the proof lies with the oppugner,

not with the supporters of the common belief. Mr. Wordsworth, in

consequence, assigns as the proof of his position, “that not only

the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most

elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the

metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but likewise that

some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be

strictly the language of prose, when prose is well written. The truth of

this assertion might be demonstrated by innumerable passages from almost

all the poetical writings, even of Milton himself.” He then quotes

Gray’s sonnet--

“In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,

And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;

The birds in vain their amorous descant join,

Or cheerful fields resume their green attire.

These ears, alas! for other notes repine;

_A different object do these eyes require;

My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;

And in my breast the imperfect joys expire._

Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,

And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;

The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;

To warm their little loves the birds complain:

_I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,

And weep the more, because I weep in vain.”_

and adds the following remark:--“It will easily be perceived, that the

only part of this Sonnet which is of any value, is the lines printed in

italics; it is equally obvious, that, except in the rhyme, and in the

use of the single word `fruitless’ for fruitlessly, which is so far a

defect, the language of these lines does in no respect differ from that

of prose.”

An idealist defending his system by the fact, that when asleep we often

believe ourselves awake, was well answered by his plain neighbour, “Ah,

but when awake do we ever believe ourselves asleep?” Things identical

must be convertible. The preceding passage seems to rest on a similar

sophism. For the question is not, whether there may not occur in prose

an order of words, which would be equally proper in a poem; nor whether

there are not beautiful lines and sentences of frequent occurrence in

good poems, which would be equally becoming as well as beautiful in good

prose; for neither the one nor the other has ever been either denied

or doubted by any one. The true question must be, whether there are not

modes of expression, a construction, and an order of sentences, which

are in their fit and natural place in a serious prose composition, but

would be disproportionate and heterogeneous in metrical poetry; and,

vice versa, whether in the language of a serious poem there may not be

an arrangement both of words and sentences, and a use and selection

of (what are called) figures of speech, both as to their kind, their

frequency, and their occasions, which on a subject of equal weight would

be vicious and alien in correct and manly prose. I contend, that in both

cases this unfitness of each for the place of the other frequently will

and ought to exist.

And first from the origin of metre. This I would trace to the balance

in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in

check the workings of passion. It might be easily explained likewise

in what manner this salutary antagonism is assisted by the very state,

which it counteracts; and how this balance of antagonists became

organized into metre (in the usual acceptation of that term), by a

supervening act of the will and judgment, consciously and for the

foreseen purpose of pleasure. Assuming these principles, as the data of

our argument, we deduce from them two legitimate conditions, which the

critic is entitled to expect in every metrical work. First, that, as

the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of increased

excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural

language of excitement. Secondly, that as these elements are formed

into metre artificially, by a voluntary act, with the design and for

the purpose of blending delight with emotion, so the traces of present

volition should throughout the metrical language be proportionately

discernible. Now these two conditions must be reconciled and co-

present. There must be not only a partnership, but a union; an

interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and

of voluntary purpose. Again, this union can be manifested only in a

frequency of forms and figures of speech, (originally the offspring of

passion, but now the adopted children of power), greater than would be

desired or endured, where the emotion is not voluntarily encouraged and

kept up for the sake of that pleasure, which such emotion, so tempered

and mastered by the will, is found capable of communicating. It not only

dictates, but of itself tends to produce a more frequent employment of

picturesque and vivifying language, than would be natural in any other

case, in which there did not exist, as there does in the present, a

previous and well understood, though tacit, compact between the poet and

his reader, that the latter is entitled to expect, and the former bound

to supply this species and degree of pleasurable excitement. We may

in some measure apply to this union the answer of Polixenes, in the

Winter’s Tale, to Perdita’s neglect of the streaked gilliflowers,

because she had heard it said,

“There is an art, which, in their piedness, shares

With great creating nature.

POL. Say there be;

Yet nature is made better by no mean,

But nature makes that mean; so, o’er that art,

Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art,

That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry

A gentler scion to the wildest stock;

And make conceive a bark of baser kind

By bud of nobler race. This is an art,

Which does mend nature,--change it rather; but

The art itself is nature.”

Secondly, I argue from the effects of metre. As far as metre acts in and

for itself, it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both

of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by

the continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations

of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight

indeed to be at any one moment objects of distinct consciousness,

yet become considerable in their aggregate influence. As a medicated

atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation, they act

powerfully, though themselves unnoticed. Where, therefore, correspondent

food and appropriate matter are not provided for the attention and

feelings thus roused there must needs be a disappointment felt; like

that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair-case, when we

had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.

The discussion on the powers of metre in the preface is highly ingenious

and touches at all points on truth. But I cannot find any statement of

its powers considered abstractly and separately. On the contrary Mr.

Wordsworth seems always to estimate metre by the powers, which it exerts

during, (and, as I think, in consequence of) its combination with other

elements of poetry. Thus the previous difficulty is left unanswered,

what the elements are, with which it must be combined, in order

to produce its own effects to any pleasurable purpose. Double and

tri-syllable rhymes, indeed, form a lower species of wit, and, attended

to exclusively for their own sake, may become a source of momentary

amusement; as in poor Smart’s distich to the Welsh Squire who had

promised him a hare:

“Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader!

Hast sent the hare? or hast thou swallow’d her?”

But for any poetic purposes, metre resembles, (if the aptness of the

simile may excuse its meanness), yeast, worthless or disagreeable by

itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is

proportionally combined.

The reference to THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD by no means satisfies my

judgment. We all willingly throw ourselves back for awhile into the

feelings of our childhood. This ballad, therefore, we read under such

recollections of our own childish feelings, as would equally endear to

us poems, which Mr. Wordsworth himself would regard as faulty in the

opposite extreme of gaudy and technical ornament. Before the invention

of printing, and in a still greater degree, before the introduction of

writing, metre, especially alliterative metre, (whether alliterative at

the beginning of the words, as in PIERCE PLOUMAN, or at the end, as in

rhymes) possessed an independent value as assisting the recollection,

and consequently the preservation, of any series of truths or incidents.

But I am not convinced by the collation of facts, that THE CHILDREN

IN THE WOOD owes either its preservation, or its popularity, to its

metrical form. Mr. Marshal’s repository affords a number of tales in

prose inferior in pathos and general merit, some of as old a date, and

many as widely popular. TOM HICKATHRIFT, JACK THE GIANT-KILLER, GOODY

TWO-SHOES, and LITTLE RED RIDING-HOOD are formidable rivals. And

that they have continued in prose, cannot be fairly explained by the

assumption, that the comparative meanness of their thoughts and images

precluded even the humblest forms of metre. The scene of GOODY TWO-SHOES

in the church is perfectly susceptible of metrical narration; and, among

the thaumata thaumastotata even of the present age, I do not recollect a

more astonishing image than that of the “whole rookery, that flew out

of the giant’s beard,” scared by the tremendous voice, with which this

monster answered the challenge of the heroic TOM HICKATHRIFT!

If from these we turn to compositions universally, and independently of

all early associations, beloved and admired; would the MARIA, THE MONK,

or THE POOR MAN’S ASS of Sterne, be read with more delight, or have a

better chance of immortality, had they without any change in the diction

been composed in rhyme, than in their present state? If I am not grossly

mistaken, the general reply would be in the negative. Nay, I will

confess, that, in Mr. Wordsworth’s own volumes, the ANECDOTE FOR

FATHERS, SIMON LEE, ALICE FELL, BEGGARS, and THE SAILOR’S MOTHER,

notwithstanding the beauties which are to be found in each of them where

the poet interposes the music of his own thoughts, would have been more

delightful to me in prose, told and managed, as by Mr. Wordsworth they

would have been, in a moral essay or pedestrian tour.

Metre in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention, and therefore

excites the question: Why is the attention to be thus stimulated? Now

the question cannot be answered by the pleasure of the metre itself;

for this we have shown to be conditional, and dependent on the

appropriateness of the thoughts and expressions, to which the metrical

form is superadded. Neither can I conceive any other answer that can be

rationally given, short of this: I write in metre, because I am about to

use a language different from that of prose. Besides, where the language

is not such, how interesting soever the reflections are, that are

capable of being drawn by a philosophic mind from the thoughts or

incidents of the poem, the metre itself must often become feeble. Take

the last three stanzas of THE SAILOR’S MOTHER, for instance. If I could

for a moment abstract from the effect produced on the author’s feelings,

as a man, by the incident at the time of its real occurrence, I would

dare appeal to his own judgment, whether in the metre itself he found a

sufficient reason for their being written metrically?

And, thus continuing, she said,

“I had a Son, who many a day

Sailed on the seas; but he is dead;

In Denmark he was cast away;

And I have travelled far as Hull to see

What clothes he might have left, or other property.

The Bird and Cage they both were his

’Twas my Son’s Bird; and neat and trim

He kept it: many voyages

This Singing-bird hath gone with him;

When last he sailed he left the Bird behind;

As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind.

He to a Fellow-lodger’s care

Had left it, to be watched and fed,

Till he came back again; and there

I found it when my Son was dead;

And now, God help me for my little wit!

I trail it with me, Sir! he took so much delight in it.”

If disproportioning the emphasis we read these stanzas so as to make the

rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely produce an

equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in finding rhymes

at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would further ask

whether, but for that visionary state, into which the figure of the

woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had placed the poet’s

imagination,--(a state, which spreads its influence and colouring over

all, that co-exists with the exciting cause, and in which

“The simplest, and the most familiar things

Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them,”) [67]

I would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt downfall

in these verses from the preceding stanza?

“The ancient spirit is not dead;

Old times, thought I, are breathing there;

Proud was I that my country bred

Such strength, a dignity so fair:

She begged an alms, like one in poor estate;

I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate.”

It must not be omitted, and is besides worthy of notice, that those

stanzas furnish the only fair instance that I have been able to discover

in all Mr. Wordsworth’s writings, of an actual adoption, or true

imitation, of the real and very language of low and rustic life, freed

from provincialisms.

Thirdly, I deduce the position from all the causes elsewhere assigned,

which render metre the proper form of poetry, and poetry imperfect and

defective without metre. Metre, therefore, having been connected with

poetry most often and by a peculiar fitness, whatever else is combined

with metre must, though it be not itself essentially poetic, have

nevertheless some property in common with poetry, as an intermedium

of affinity, a sort, (if I may dare borrow a well-known phrase from

technical chemistry), of mordaunt between it and the super-added metre.

Now poetry, Mr. Wordsworth truly affirms, does always imply passion:

which word must be here understood in its most general sense, as an

excited state of the feelings and faculties. And as every passion has

its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its characteristic modes

of expression. But where there exists that degree of genius and talent

which entitles a writer to aim at the honours of a poet, the very act of

poetic composition itself is, and is allowed to imply and to produce,

an unusual state of excitement, which of course justifies and demands a

correspondent difference of language, as truly, though not perhaps in as

marked a degree, as the excitement of love, fear, rage, or jealousy. The

vividness of the descriptions or declamations in Donne or Dryden, is as

much and as often derived from the force and fervour of the describer,

as from the reflections, forms or incidents, which constitute their

subject and materials. The wheels take fire from the mere rapidity of

their motion. To what extent, and under what modifications, this may

be admitted to act, I shall attempt to define in an after remark on Mr.

Wordsworth’s reply to this objection, or rather on his objection to this

reply, as already anticipated in his preface.

Fourthly, and as intimately connected with this, if not the same

argument in a more general form, I adduce the high spiritual instinct of

the human being impelling us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and

thus establishing the principle that all the parts of an organized whole

must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts. This and

the preceding arguments may be strengthened by the reflection, that the

composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation,

as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the same

throughout the radically different, or of the different throughout a

base radically the same.

Lastly, I appeal to the practice of the best poets, of all countries

and in all ages, as authorizing the opinion, (deduced from all the

foregoing,) that in every import of the word essential, which would

not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and ought to be an

essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical

composition.

In Mr. Wordsworth’s criticism of Gray’s Sonnet, the reader’s sympathy

with his praise or blame of the different parts is taken for granted

rather perhaps too easily. He has not, at least, attempted to win or

compel it by argumentative analysis. In my conception at least, the

lines rejected as of no value do, with the exception of the two first,

differ as much and as little from the language of common life, as those

which he has printed in italics as possessing genuine excellence. Of the

five lines thus honourably distinguished, two of them differ from prose

even more widely, than the lines which either precede or follow, in the

position of the words.

“A different object do these eyes require;

My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;

And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.”

But were it otherwise, what would this prove, but a truth, of which no

man ever doubted?--videlicet, that there are sentences, which would be

equally in their place both in verse and prose. Assuredly it does not

prove the point, which alone requires proof; namely, that there are not

passages, which would suit the one and not suit the other. The first

line of this sonnet is distinguished from the ordinary language of

men by the epithet to morning. For we will set aside, at present, the

consideration, that the particular word “smiling” is hackneyed, and,

as it involves a sort of personification, not quite congruous with

the common and material attribute of “shining.” And, doubtless, this

adjunction of epithets for the purpose of additional description, where

no particular attention is demanded for the quality of the thing, would

be noticed as giving a poetic cast to a man’s conversation. Should the

sportsman exclaim, “Come boys! the rosy morning calls you up:” he will

be supposed to have some song in his head. But no one suspects this,

when he says, “A wet morning shall not confine us to our beds.” This

then is either a defect in poetry, or it is not. Whoever should decide

in the affirmative, I would request him to re-peruse any one poem, of

any confessedly great poet from Homer to Milton, or from Aeschylus to

Shakespeare; and to strike out, (in thought I mean), every instance of

this kind. If the number of these fancied erasures did not startle him;

or if he continued to deem the work improved by their total omission;

he must advance reasons of no ordinary strength and evidence, reasons

grounded in the essence of human nature. Otherwise, I should not

hesitate to consider him as a man not so much proof against all

authority, as dead to it.

The second line,

“And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;--”

has indeed almost as many faults as words. But then it is a bad line,

not because the language is distinct from that of prose; but because

it conveys incongruous images; because it confounds the cause and the

effect; the real thing with the personified representative of the thing;

in short, because it differs from the language of good sense! That the

“Phoebus” is hackneyed, and a school-boy image, is an accidental fault,

dependent on the age in which the author wrote, and not deduced from

the nature of the thing. That it is part of an exploded mythology, is an

objection more deeply grounded. Yet when the torch of ancient learning

was re-kindled, so cheering were its beams, that our eldest poets, cut

off by Christianity from all accredited machinery, and deprived of all

acknowledged guardians and symbols of the great objects of nature,

were naturally induced to adopt, as a poetic language, those fabulous

personages, those forms of the [68]supernatural in nature, which had

given them such dear delight in the poems of their great masters. Nay,

even at this day what scholar of genial taste will not so far sympathize

with them, as to read with pleasure in Petrarch, Chaucer, or Spenser,

what he would perhaps condemn as puerile in a modern poet?

I remember no poet, whose writings would safelier stand the test of Mr.

Wordsworth’s theory, than Spenser. Yet will Mr. Wordsworth say, that the

style of the following stanza is either undistinguished from prose,

and the language of ordinary life? Or that it is vicious, and that the

stanzas are blots in THE FAERY QUEEN?

“By this the northern wagoner had set

His sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre,

That was in ocean waves yet never wet,

But firme is fixt and sendeth light from farre

To all that in the wild deep wandering arre

And chearfull chaunticlere with his note shrill

Had warned once that Phoebus’ fiery carre

In hast was climbing up the easterne hill,

Full envious that night so long his roome did fill.”

“At last the golden orientall gate

Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,

And Phoebus fresh, as brydegrome to his mate,

Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,

And hurl’d his glist’ring beams through gloomy ayre:

Which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streightway

He started up, and did him selfe prepayre

In sun-bright armes and battailous array;

For with that pagan proud he combat will that day.”

On the contrary to how many passages, both in hymn books and in blank

verse poems, could I, (were it not invidious), direct the reader’s

attention, the style of which is most unpoetic, because, and only

because, it is the style of prose? He will not suppose me capable of

having in my mind such verses, as

“I put my hat upon my head

And walk’d into the Strand;

And there I met another man,

Whose hat was in his hand.”

To such specimens it would indeed be a fair and full reply, that these

lines are not bad, because they are unpoetic; but because they are empty

of all sense and feeling; and that it were an idle attempt to prove that

“an ape is not a Newton, when it is self-evident that he is not a

man.” But the sense shall be good and weighty, the language correct and

dignified, the subject interesting and treated with feeling; and yet

the style shall, notwithstanding all these merits, be justly blamable as

prosaic, and solely because the words and the order of the words would

find their appropriate place in prose, but are not suitable to metrical

composition. The CIVIL WARS of Daniel is an instructive, and even

interesting work; but take the following stanzas, (and from the hundred

instances which abound I might probably have selected others far more

striking):

“And to the end we may with better ease

Discern the true discourse, vouchsafe to shew

What were the times foregoing near to these,

That these we may with better profit know.

Tell how the world fell into this disease;

And how so great distemperature did grow;

So shall we see with what degrees it came;

How things at full do soon wax out of frame.”

“Ten kings had from the Norman Conqu’ror reign’d

With intermix’d and variable fate,

When England to her greatest height attain’d

Of power, dominion, glory, wealth, and state;

After it had with much ado sustain’d

The violence of princes, with debate

For titles and the often mutinies

Of nobles for their ancient liberties.”

“For first, the Norman, conqu’ring all by might,

By might was forc’d to keep what he had got;

Mixing our customs and the form of right

With foreign constitutions, he had brought;

Mast’ring the mighty, humbling the poorer wight,

By all severest means that could be wrought;

And, making the succession doubtful, rent

His new-got state, and left it turbulent.”

Will it be contended on the one side, that these lines are mean and

senseless? Or on the other, that they are not prosaic, and for that

reason unpoetic? This poet’s well-merited epithet is that of the

“well-languaged Daniel;” but likewise, and by the consent of his

contemporaries no less than of all succeeding critics, “the prosaic

Daniel.” Yet those, who thus designate this wise and amiable writer

from the frequent incorrespondency of his diction to his metre in

the majority of his compositions, not only deem them valuable and

interesting on other accounts; but willingly admit, that there are to

be found throughout his poems, and especially in his EPISTLES and in his

HYMEN’S TRIUMPH, many and exquisite specimens of that style which, as

the neutral ground of prose and verse, is common to both. A fine and

almost faultless extract, eminent as for other beauties, so for its

perfection in this species of diction, may be seen in Lamb’s DRAMATIC

SPECIMENS, a work of various interest from the nature of the selections

themselves, (all from the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries),--and

deriving a high additional value from the notes, which are full of just

and original criticism, expressed with all the freshness of originality.

Among the possible effects of practical adherence to a theory, that aims

to identify the style of prose and verse,--(if it does not indeed claim

for the latter a yet nearer resemblance to the average style of men

in the viva voce intercourse of real life)--we might anticipate the

following as not the least likely to occur. It will happen, as I have

indeed before observed, that the metre itself, the sole acknowledged

difference, will occasionally become metre to the eye only. The

existence of prosaisms, and that they detract from the merit of a poem,

must at length be conceded, when a number of successive lines can be

rendered, even to the most delicate ear, unrecognizable as verse, or

as having even been intended for verse, by simply transcribing them as

prose; when if the poem be in blank verse, this can be effected without

any alteration, or at most by merely restoring one or two words to

their proper places, from which they have been transplanted [69] for no

assignable cause or reason but that of the author’s convenience; but if

it be in rhyme, by the mere exchange of the final word of each line

for some other of the same meaning, equally appropriate, dignified and

euphonic.

The answer or objection in the preface to the anticipated remark

“that metre paves the way to other distinctions,” is contained in the

following words. “The distinction of rhyme and metre is regular and

uniform, and not, like that produced by (what is usually called) poetic

diction, arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices, upon which no

calculation whatever can be made. In the one case the reader is utterly

at the mercy of the poet respecting what imagery or diction he may

choose to connect with the passion.” But is this a poet, of whom a poet

is speaking? No surely! rather of a fool or madman: or at best of a vain

or ignorant phantast! And might not brains so wild and so deficient

make just the same havoc with rhymes and metres, as they are supposed to

effect with modes and figures of speech? How is the reader at the mercy

of such men? If he continue to read their nonsense, is it not his own

fault? The ultimate end of criticism is much more to establish the

principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pass judgment on

what has been written by others; if indeed it were possible that the two

could be separated. But if it be asked, by what principles the poet is

to regulate his own style, if he do not adhere closely to the sort

and order of words which he hears in the market, wake, high-road, or

plough-field? I reply; by principles, the ignorance or neglect of which

would convict him of being no poet, but a silly or presumptuous usurper

of the name. By the principles of grammar, logic, psychology. In one

word by such a knowledge of the facts, material and spiritual, that most

appertain to his art, as, if it have been governed and applied by good

sense, and rendered instinctive by habit, becomes the representative and

reward of our past conscious reasonings, insights, and conclusions, and

acquires the name of Taste. By what rule that does not leave the

reader at the poet’s mercy, and the poet at his own, is the latter

to distinguish between the language suitable to suppressed, and the

language, which is characteristic of indulged, anger? Or between that of

rage and that of jealousy? Is it obtained by wandering about in search

of angry or jealous people in uncultivated society, in order to copy

their words? Or not far rather by the power of imagination proceeding

upon the all in each of human nature? By meditation, rather than by

observation? And by the latter in consequence only of the former? As

eyes, for which the former has pre-determined their field of vision, and

to which, as to its organ, it communicates a microscopic power? There

is not, I firmly believe, a man now living, who has, from his own inward

experience, a clearer intuition, than Mr. Wordsworth himself, that the

last mentioned are the true sources of genial discrimination. Through

the same process and by the same creative agency will the poet

distinguish the degree and kind of the excitement produced by the very

act of poetic composition. As intuitively will he know, what differences

of style it at once inspires and justifies; what intermixture of

conscious volition is natural to that state; and in what instances

such figures and colours of speech degenerate into mere creatures of an

arbitrary purpose, cold technical artifices of ornament or connection.

For, even as truth is its own light and evidence, discovering at once

itself and falsehood, so is it the prerogative of poetic genius

to distinguish by parental instinct its proper offspring from the

changelings, which the gnomes of vanity or the fairies of fashion may

have laid in its cradle or called by its names. Could a rule be

given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a

mechanical art. It would be morphosis, not poiaesis. The rules of the

Imagination are themselves the very powers of growth and production.

The words to which they are reducible, present only the outlines

and external appearance of the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of the

superficial form and colours may be elaborated; but the marble peach

feels cold and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths. We find

no difficulty in admitting as excellent, and the legitimate language of

poetic fervour self-impassioned, Donne’s apostrophe to the Sun in the

second stanza of his PROGRESS OF THE SOUL.

“Thee, eye of heaven! this great Soul envies not;

By thy male force is all, we have, begot.

In the first East thou now beginn’st to shine,

Suck’st early balm and island spices there,

And wilt anon in thy loose-rein’d career

At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine,

And see at night this western world of mine:

Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she,

Who before thee one day began to be,

And, thy frail light being quench’d, shall long, long outlive

thee.”

Or the next stanza but one:

“Great Destiny, the commissary of God,

That hast mark’d out a path and period

For every thing! Who, where we offspring took,

Our ways and ends see’st at one instant: thou

Knot of all causes! Thou, whose changeless brow

Ne’er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look,

And shew my story in thy eternal book,” etc.

As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of

unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudopoesy, or

the startling hysteric of weakness over-exerting itself, which bursts on

the unprepared reader in sundry odes and apostrophes to abstract terms.

Such are the Odes to jealousy, to Hope, to Oblivion, and the like, in

Dodsley’s collection and the magazines of that day, which seldom fail

to remind me of an Oxford copy of verses on the two SUTTONS, commencing

with

“Inoculation, heavenly maid! descend!”

It is not to be denied that men of undoubted talents, and even poets

of true, though not of first-rate, genius, have from a mistaken theory

deluded both themselves and others in the opposite extreme. I once read

to a company of sensible and well-educated women the introductory period

of Cowley’s preface to his “Pindaric Odes,” written in imitation of

the style and manner of the odes of Pindar. “If,” (says Cowley), “a man

should undertake to translate Pindar, word for word, it would be thought

that one madman had translated another as may appear, when he, that

understands not the original, reads the verbal traduction of him into

Latin prose, than which nothing seems more raving.” I then proceeded

with his own free version of the second Olympic, composed for the

charitable purpose of rationalizing the Theban Eagle.

“Queen of all harmonious things,

Dancing words and speaking strings,

What god, what hero, wilt thou sing?

What happy man to equal glories bring?

Begin, begin thy noble choice,

And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice.

Pisa does to Jove belong,

Jove and Pisa claim thy song.

The fair first-fruits of war, th’ Olympic games,

Alcides, offer’d up to Jove;

Alcides, too, thy strings may move,

But, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove?

Join Theron boldly to their sacred names;

Theron the next honour claims;

Theron to no man gives place,

Is first in Pisa’s and in Virtue’s race;

Theron there, and he alone,

Ev’n his own swift forefathers has outgone.”

One of the company exclaimed, with the full assent of the rest, that

if the original were madder than this, it must be incurably mad. I then

translated the ode from the Greek, and as nearly as possible, word

for word; and the impression was, that in the general movement of the

periods, in the form of the connections and transitions, and in the

sober majesty of lofty sense, it appeared to them to approach more

nearly, than any other poetry they had heard, to the style of our Bible,

in the prophetic books. The first strophe will suffice as a specimen:

“Ye harp-controlling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps!

What God? what Hero?

What Man shall we celebrate?

Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove,

But the Olympiad (or the Olympic games) did Hercules establish,

The first-fruits of the spoils of war.

But Theron for the four-horsed car,

That bore victory to him,

It behoves us now to voice aloud:

The Just, the Hospitable,

The Bulwark of Agrigentum,

Of renowned fathers

The Flower, even him

Who preserves his native city erect and safe.”

But are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their deviation

from the language of real life? and are they by no other means to be

precluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose and

verse, save that of metre? Surely good sense, and a moderate insight

into the constitution of the human mind, would be amply sufficient to

prove, that such language and such combinations are the native product

neither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation

consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxta-position and

apparent reconciliation of widely different or incompatible things. As

when, for instance, the hills are made to reflect the image of a

voice. Surely, no unusual taste is requisite to see clearly, that

this compulsory juxtaposition is not produced by the presentation of

impressive or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any sympathy

with the modifying powers with which the genius of the poet had united

and inspirited all the objects of his thought; that it is therefore

a species of wit, a pure work of the will, and implies a leisure and

self-possession both of thought and of feeling, incompatible with the

steady fervour of a mind possessed and filled with the grandeur of its

subject. To sum up the whole in one sentence. When a poem, or a part of

a poem, shall be adduced, which is evidently vicious in the figures and

centexture of its style, yet for the condemnation of which no reason can

be assigned, except that it differs from the style in which men actually

converse, then, and not till then, can I hold this theory to be either

plausible, or practicable, or capable of furnishing either rule,

guidance, or precaution, that might not, more easily and more safely, as

well as more naturally, have been deduced in the author’s own mind from

considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of things,

confirmed by the authority of works, whose fame is not of one country

nor of one age.