Appreciations, With An Essay on Style

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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 akhromatos,
askhematistos, anaphes+--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 Stael 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.

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