Wordsworth & Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems. William Wordsworth
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As in a Chinese painting, there are no distances, no perspective, but all is in the foreground; and this is nothing but vanity. I am pleased to think that, when a mere stripling, I had formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad feeling.
A PLEA FOR POETIC LICENSE
The desire of carrying things to a greater height of pleasure and admiration than, omnibus trutinatis, they are susceptible of, is one great cause of the corruption of poetry. Both to understand my own reasoning and to communicate it, ponder on Catullus' hexameters and pentameters, his "numine abusum homines" [Carmen, lxxvi. 4] [and similar harsh expressions]. It is not whether or no the very same ideas expressed with the very same force and the very same naturalness and simplicity in the versification of Ovid and Tibullus, would not be still more delightful (though even that, for any number of poems, may well admit a doubt), but whether it is possible so to express them and whether, in every attempt, the result has not been to substitute manner for matter, and point that will not bear reflection (so fine that it breaks the moment you try it) for genuine sense and true feeling, and, lastly, to confine both the subjects, thoughts, and even words of poetry within a most beggarly cordon. N.B.—The same criticism applies to Metastasio, and, in Pope, to his quaintness, perversion, unnatural metaphors, and, still more, the cold-blooded use, for artifice or connection, of language justifiable only by enthusiasm and passion.
RICHARDSON
I confess that it has cost, and still costs, my philosophy some exertion not to be vexed that I must admire, aye, greatly admire, Richardson. His mind is so very vile a mind, so oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent! But to understand and draw him would be to produce a work almost equal to his own; and, in order to do this, "down, proud Heart, down" (as we teach little children to say to themselves, bless them!), all hatred down! and, instead thereof, charity, calmness, a heart fixed on the good part, though the understanding is surveying all. Richardson felt truly the defect of Fielding, or what was not his excellence, and made that his defect—a trick of uncharitableness often played, though not exclusively, by contemporaries. Fielding's talent was observation, not meditation. But Richardson was not philosopher enough to know the difference—say, rather, to understand and develop it.
HIS NEED OF EXTERNAL SOLACE
O there are some natures which under the most cheerless all-threatening nothing-promising circumstances can draw hope from the invisible, as the tropical trees that in the sandy desolation produce their own lidded vessels full of the waters from air and dew! Alas! to my root not a drop trickles down but from the watering-pot of immediate friends. And, even so, it seems much more a sympathy with their feeling rather than hope of my own. So should I feel sorrow, if Allston's mother, whom I have never seen, were to die?
MINUTE CRITICISM
Stoddart passes over a poem as one of those tiniest of tiny night-flies runs over a leaf, casting its shadow, three times as long as itself, yet only just shading one, or at most two letters at a time.
DR. PRICE
A maidservant of Mrs. Clarkson's parents had a great desire to hear Dr. Price, and accordingly attended his congregation. On her return, being asked "Well, what do you think?" &c., "Ai—i," replied she, "there was neither the poor nor the Gospel." Excellent that on the fine respectable attendants of Unitarian chapels, and the moonshine, heartless head-work of the sermons.
A DOCUMENT HUMAIN
The mahogany tables, all, but especially the large dining-table, [marked] with the segments of circles (deep according to the passion of the dice-box plunger), chiefly half-circles, O the anger and spite with which many have been thrown! It is truly a written history of the fiendish passion of gambling. Oct. 12, 1806. Newmarket.
PINDAR
The odes of Pindar (with few exceptions, and these chiefly in the shorter ones) seem by intention to die away by soft gradations into a languid interest, like most of the landscapes of the great elder painters. Modern ode-writers have commonly preferred a continued rising of interest.
"ONE MUSIC AS BEFORE, BUT VASTER"
The shattering of long and deep-rooted associations always places the mind in an angry state, and even when our own understandings have effected the revolution, it still holds good, only we apply the feeling to and against our former faith and those who still hold it—[a tendency] shown in modern infidels. Great good, therefore, of such revolution as alters, not by exclusion, but by an enlargement that includes the former, though it places it in a new point of view.
TO ALLSTON
After the formation of a new acquaintance, found, by some weeks' or months' unintermitted communion, worthy of all our esteem, affection and, perhaps, admiration, an intervening absence, whether we meet again or only write, raises it into friendship, and encourages the modesty of our nature, impelling us to assume the language and express all the feelings of an established attachment.
MORBID SENTIMENT
The thinking disease is that in which the feelings, instead of embodying themselves in acts, ascend and become materials of general reasoning and intellectual pride. The dreadful consequences of this perversion [may be] instanced in Germany, e.g., in Fichte versus Kant, Schelling versus Fichte and in Verbidigno [Wordsworth] versus S. T. C. Ascent where nature meant descent, and thus shortening the process—viz., feelings made the subjects and tangible substance of thought, instead of actions, realizations, things done, and as such externalised and remembered. On such meagre diet as feelings, evaporated embryos in their progress to birth, no moral being ever becomes healthy.
"PHANTOMS OF SUBLIMITY"
Empires, states, &c., may be beautifully illustrated by a large clump of coal placed on a fire—Russia, for instance—or of small coal moistened, and by the first action of the heat of any government not absolutely lawless, formed into a cake, as the northern nations under Charlemagne—then a slight impulse from the fall of accident, or the hand of patriotic foresight, splits [the one] into many, and makes each [fragment] burn with its own flame, till at length all burning equally, it becomes again one by universal similar action—then burns low, cinerises, and without accession of rude materials goes out.
A MILD WINTER
Winter slumbering soft, seemed to smile at visions of buds and blooms, and dreamt so livelily of spring, that his stern visage had relaxed and softened itself into a dim likeness of his dream. The soul of the vision breathed through and lay like light upon his face.
But, heavens! what an outrageous day of winter this is and has been! Terrible weather for the last two months, but this is horrible! Thunder and lightning, floods of rain, and volleys of hail, with such frantic winds. December 1806.
[This note was written when S. T. C. was staying with Wordsworth at the Hall Farm, Coleorton.]
MOONLIGHT GLEAMS AND MASSY GLORIES
In the first [entrance to the wood] the spots of moonlight of the wildest outlines, not unfrequently approaching so near to the shape of man and the domestic animals most attached to him as to be easily confused with them by fancy and mistaken by terror, moved and started as the wind stirred the branches, so that it almost seemed like a flight of recent spirits, sylphs and sylphids dancing and capering in a world of shadows. Once, when our path was over-canopied by the meeting boughs, as I halloed to those a stone-throw behind me, a sudden flash of light dashed down, as it were, upon the path close before me, with such rapid and indescribable effect that my life seemed snatched away from me—not by terror but by the whole attention being suddenly and unexpectedly seized hold of—if one could conceive a violent blow given by an unseen hand, yet without pain or local sense of injury, of the weight falling here or there, it might assist in conceiving the feeling. This I found was occasioned by some very large bird, who, scared by my noise, had suddenly flown upward, and by the spring of his feet or body had driven down the branch on which he was aperch.
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