CHAPTER IV

The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface--Mr. Wordsworth’s earlier poems--On

fancy and imagination--The investigation of the distinction important to

the Fine Arts.

I have wandered far from the object in view, but as I fancied to myself

readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted me from the main

road; so I dare calculate on not a few, who will warmly sympathize with

them. At present it will be sufficient for my purpose, if I have proved,

that Mr. Southey’s writings no more than my own furnished the original

occasion to this fiction of a new school of poetry, and to the clamours

against its supposed founders and proselytes.

As little do I believe that Mr. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads were

in themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes so

entitled. A careful and repeated examination of these confirms me in

the belief, that the omission of less than a hundred lines would have

precluded nine-tenths of the criticism on this work. I hazard this

declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader has taken it

up, as he would have done any other collection of poems purporting to

derive their subjects or interests from the incidents of domestic or

ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of meditation which

the poet utters in his own person and character; with the proviso, that

these poems were perused without knowledge of, or reference to,

the author’s peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his

attention previously directed to those peculiarities. In that case,

as actually happened with Mr. Southey’s earlier works, the lines and

passages which might have offended the general taste, would have been

considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to

perversity of judgment. The men of business who had passed their lives

chiefly in cities, and who might therefore be expected to derive the

highest pleasure from acute notices of men and manners conveyed in easy,

yet correct and pointed language; and all those who, reading but little

poetry, are most stimulated with that species of it, which seems

most distant from prose, would probably have passed by the volumes

altogether. Others more catholic in their taste, and yet habituated to

be most pleased when most excited, would have contented themselves

with deciding, that the author had been successful in proportion to the

elevation of his style and subject. Not a few, perhaps, might, by their

admiration of the Lines written near Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the

Wye, those Left upon a Yew Tree Seat, The Old Cumberland Beggar,

and Ruth, have been gradually led to peruse with kindred feeling

The Brothers, the Hart-leap Well, and whatever other poems in that

collection may be described as holding a middle place between those

written in the highest and those in the humblest style; as for instance

between the Tintern Abbey, and The Thorn, or Simon Lee. Should their

taste submit to no further change, and still remain unreconciled to the

colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them, that are, more or less,

scattered through the class last mentioned; yet even from the small

number of the latter, they would have deemed them but an inconsiderable

subtraction from the merit of the whole work; or, what is sometimes not

unpleasing in the publication of a new writer, as serving to ascertain

the natural tendency, and consequently the proper direction of the

author’s genius.

In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the Lyrical

Ballads, I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of the

unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth’s writings have been since

doomed to encounter. The humbler passages in the poems themselves were

dwelt on and cited to justify the rejection of the theory. What in

and for themselves would have been either forgotten or forgiven as

imperfections, or at least comparative failures, provoked direct

hostility when announced as intentional, as the result of choice after

full deliberation. Thus the poems, admitted by all as excellent, joined

with those which had pleased the far greater number, though they formed

two-thirds of the whole work, instead of being deemed (as in all right

they should have been, even if we take for granted that the reader

judged aright) an atonement for the few exceptions, gave wind and fuel

to the animosity against both the poems and the poet. In all perplexity

there is a portion of fear, which predisposes the mind to anger. Not

able to deny that the author possessed both genius and a powerful

intellect, they felt very positive,--but yet were not quite certain

that he might not be in the right, and they themselves in the wrong; an

unquiet state of mind, which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the

occasion of it, and by wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had

written a long and argumentative essay to persuade them, that

Fair is foul, and foul is fair;

in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without

judgment, and were now about to censure without reason. [18]

That this conjecture is not wide from the mark, I am induced to believe

from the noticeable fact, which I can state on my own knowledge, that

the same general censure has been grounded by almost every different

person on some different poem. Among those, whose candour and judgment

I estimate highly, I distinctly remember six who expressed their

objections to the Lyrical Ballads almost in the same words, and

altogether to the same purport, at the same time admitting, that several

of the poems had given them great pleasure; and, strange as it might

seem, the composition which one cited as execrable, another quoted as

his favourite. I am indeed convinced in my own mind, that could the same

experiment have been tried with these volumes, as was made in the well

known story of the picture, the result would have been the same; the

parts which had been covered by black spots on the one day, would be

found equally albo lapide notatae on the succeeding.

However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the

attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much aversion,

as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of

passing them over in silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a

bookseller’s catalogue; especially, as no one pretended to have found

in them any immorality or indelicacy; and the poems, therefore, at the

worst, could only be regarded as so many light or inferior coins in a

rouleau of gold, not as so much alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend

whose talents I hold in the highest respect, but whose judgment and

strong sound sense I have had almost continued occasion to revere,

making the usual complaints to me concerning both the style and subjects

of Mr. Wordsworth’s minor poems; I admitted that there were some few of

the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find a sufficient

cause for their having been recorded in metre. I mentioned Alice Fell as

an instance; “Nay,” replied my friend with more than usual quickness of

manner, “I cannot agree with you there!--that, I own, does seem to me

a remarkably pleasing poem.” In the Lyrical Ballads, (for my experience

does not enable me to extend the remark equally unqualified to the two

subsequent volumes,) I have heard at different times, and from different

individuals, every single poem extolled and reprobated, with the

exception of those of loftier kind, which as was before observed, seem

to have won universal praise. This fact of itself would have made me

diffident in my censures, had not a still stronger ground been furnished

by the strange contrast of the heat and long continuance of the

opposition, with the nature of the faults stated as justifying it. The

seductive faults, the dulcia vitia of Cowley, Marini, or Darwin might

reasonably be thought capable of corrupting the public judgment for half

a century, and require a twenty years war, campaign after campaign, in

order to dethrone the usurper and re-establish the legitimate taste.

But that a downright simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity,

prosaic words in feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and

a preference of mean, degrading, or at best trivial associations and

characters, should succeed in forming a school of imitators, a company

of almost religious admirers, and this too among young men of ardent

minds, liberal education, and not

------with academic laurels unbestowed;

and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is

characterized as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have

well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of

review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph; this is indeed matter

of wonder. Of yet greater is it, that the contest should still continue

as undecided as [19] that between Bacchus and the frogs in Aristophanes;

when the former descended to the realms of the departed to bring back

the spirit of old and genuine poesy;--

CH. Brekekekex, koax, koax.

D. All’ exoloisth’ auto koax.

Ouden gar est’ all’, hae koax.

Oimozet’ ou gar moi melei.

CH. Alla maen kekraxomestha

g’, oposon hae pharynx an haemon

chandanae di’ haemeras,

brekekekex, koax, koax!

D. Touto gar ou nikaesete.

CH. Oude men haemas su pantos.

D. Oude maen humeis ge dae m’

oudepote. Kekraxomai gar,

kan me deae, di’ haemeras,

eos an humon epikrataeso tou koax!

CH. Brekekekex, KO’AX, KOAX!

During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became

acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth’s first publication entitled Descriptive

Sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic

genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In the

form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of

the particular lines and periods, there is a harshness and acerbity

connected and combined with words and images all a-glow, which might

recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms

rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich

fruit is elaborating. The language is not only peculiar and strong, but

at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength; while

the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with

the difficulties of the style, demands always a greater closeness of

attention, than poetry,--at all events, than descriptive poetry--has

a right to claim. It not seldom therefore justified the complaint of

obscurity. In the following extract I have sometimes fancied, that I saw

an emblem of the poem itself, and of the author’s genius as it was then

displayed.--

’Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour,

All day the floods a deepening murmur pour;

The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight

Dark is the region as with coming night;

Yet what a sudden burst of overpowering light!

Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,

Glances the fire-clad eagle’s wheeling form;

Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine

The wood-crowned cliffs that o’er the lake recline;

Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,

At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;

Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun

The west, that burns like one dilated sun,

Where in a mighty crucible expire

The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.

The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as many

changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly [20]. And it is remarkable

how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults and errors of

its earliest products; faults which, in its earliest compositions, are

the more obtrusive and confluent, because as heterogeneous elements,

which had only a temporary use, they constitute the very ferment,

by which themselves are carried off. Or we may compare them to some

diseases, which must work on the humours, and be thrown out on the

surface, in order to secure the patient from their future recurrence.

I was in my twenty-fourth year, when I had the happiness of knowing Mr.

Wordsworth personally, and while memory lasts, I shall hardly forget

the sudden effect produced on my mind, by his recitation of a manuscript

poem, which still remains unpublished, but of which the stanza and tone

of style were the same as those of The Female Vagrant, as originally

printed in the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads. There was here no

mark of strained thought, or forced diction, no crowd or turbulence of

imagery; and, as the poet hath himself well described in his Lines on

revisiting the Wye, manly reflection and human associations had given

both variety, and an additional interest to natural objects, which,

in the passion and appetite of the first love, they had seemed to him

neither to need nor permit. The occasional obscurities, which had risen

from an imperfect control over the resources of his native language, had

almost wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary

and illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so

distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will,

more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless

the attention has been specially directed to their worthlessness and

incongruity [21]. I did not perceive anything particular in the mere

style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed such

difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the

Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to the reader’s

mind Spenser’s own style, would doubtless have authorized, in my then

opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life, than

could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet.

It was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to common

defects, or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an

impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgment.

It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance

of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying, the

objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone,

the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world

around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view,

custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew

drops.

This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth’s writings is more or

less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I no

sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led me

first to suspect,--(and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties,

their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my conjecture

into full conviction,)--that Fancy and Imagination were two distinct and

widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general

belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower

and higher degree of one and the same power. It is not, I own, easy to

conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek phantasia than the

Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in all societies there

exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good

sense working progressively to desynonymize [22] those words originally

of the same meaning, which the conflux of dialects supplied to the

more homogeneous languages, as the Greek and German: and which the

same cause, joined with accidents of translation from original works of

different countries, occasion in mixed languages like our own. The first

and most important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly

distinct are confused under one and the same word, and--this done--to

appropriate that word exclusively to the one meaning, and the synonyme,

should there be one, to the other. But if,--(as will be often the case

in the arts and sciences,)--no synonyme exists, we must either invent

or borrow a word. In the present instance the appropriation has already

begun, and been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a

highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should

succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties generally

different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To the

faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the term

‘imagination;’ while the other would be contra-distinguished as ‘fancy.’

Now were it once fully ascertained, that this division is no less

grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania, or Otway’s

Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber,

from Shakespeare’s

What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?

or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements; the theory of the fine

arts, and of poetry in particular, could not but derive some additional

and important light. It would in its immediate effects furnish a torch

of guidance to the philosophical critic; and ultimately to the poet

himself. In energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into

power; and from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the

product, becomes influencive in the production. To admire on principle,

is the only way to imitate without loss of originality.

It has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology have long

been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it,

are so commonly found together, that they pass almost for the same. I

trust therefore, that there will be more good humour than contempt,

in the smile with which the reader chastises my self-complacency, if I

confess myself uncertain, whether the satisfaction from the perception

of a truth new to myself may not have been rendered more poignant by the

conceit, that it would be equally so to the public. There was a time,

certainly, in which I took some little credit to myself, in the belief

that I had been the first of my countrymen, who had pointed out the

diverse meaning of which the two terms were capable, and analyzed the

faculties to which they should be appropriated. Mr. W. Taylor’s recent

volume of synonymes I have not yet seen [23]; but his specification of

the terms in question has been clearly shown to be both insufficient and

erroneous by Mr. Wordsworth in the Preface added to the late collection

of his Poems. The explanation which Mr. Wordsworth has himself given,

will be found to differ from mine, chiefly, perhaps as our objects are

different. It could scarcely indeed happen otherwise, from the advantage

I have enjoyed of frequent conversation with him on a subject to which

a poem of his own first directed my attention, and my conclusions

concerning which he had made more lucid to myself by many happy

instances drawn from the operation of natural objects on the mind. But

it was Mr. Wordsworth’s purpose to consider the influences of fancy and

imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the different

effects to conclude their diversity in kind; while it is my object to

investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the

degree. My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their

poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as

they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of

our common consciousness.

Yet even in this attempt I am aware that I shall be obliged to draw more

largely on the reader’s attention, than so immethodical a miscellany as

this can authorize; when in such a work (the Ecclesiasical Polity) of

such a mind as Hooker’s, the judicious author, though no less admirable

for the perspicuity than for the port and dignity of his language,--and

though he wrote for men of learning in a learned age,--saw nevertheless

occasion to anticipate and guard against “complaints of obscurity,” as

often as he was to trace his subject “to the highest well-spring and

fountain.” Which, (continues he) “because men are not accustomed to, the

pains we take are more needful a great deal, than acceptable; and the

matters we handle, seem by reason of newness (till the mind grow better

acquainted with them) dark and intricate.” I would gladly therefore

spare both myself and others this labour, if I knew how without it

to present an intelligible statement of my poetic creed,--not as my

opinions, which weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established

premises conveyed in such a form, as is calculated either to effect a

fundamental conviction, or to receive a fundamental confutation. If I

may dare once more adopt the words of Hooker, “they, unto whom we shall

seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, because it is in their own

hands to spare that labour, which they are not willing to endure.” Those

at least, let me be permitted to add, who have taken so much pains to

render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and have supported the

charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other authority than

their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as to me not to

refuse their attention to my own statement of the theory which I do

acknowledge; or shrink from the trouble of examining the grounds on

which I rest it, or the arguments which I offer in its justification.