Biographia Literaria - Chapter II (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Biographia Literaria
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Chapter II [of XXII]
Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of facts—
Causes and occasions of the charge—Its injustice.
unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness,
that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against
the author, in favour of the critic; and the readiness with which they
apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of
his time
———genus irritabile vatum.
A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent
necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do,
we know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism.
Having a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of
this class seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which
they do not possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature,
like damp hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees
they become restless and irritable through the increased temperature
of collected multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism, (such
at least was its original import,) is derived from the swarming of
bees, namely, schwärmen, Schwärmerey. The passion being in an
inverse proportion to the insight,—that the more vivid, as this the
less distinct—anger is the inevitable consequence. The absense of all
foundation within their own minds for that, which they yet believe
both true and indispensable to their safety and happiness, cannot but
produce an uneasy state of feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from
which nature has no means of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience
informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.
There's no philosopher but sees,
That rage and fear are one disease;
Tho' that may burn, and this may freeze,
They're both alike the ague.
Mad Ox.
But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of
combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more
easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects
of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by
things; and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most
important events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have
passed into thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition
with fanaticism on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and
a diseased slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the
mind may be so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the
realizing of them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who
possess more than mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and
applying the knowledge of others,)—yet still want something of the
creative and self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this reason
therefore, they are men of commanding genius. While the former rest
content between thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of
which their own living spirit supplies the substance, and their
imagination the ever-varying form; the latter must impress their
preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to
their own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness,
and individuality. These in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a
perfect poem in palace, or temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of
romance in canals that join sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which,
shouldering back the billows, imitate the power, and supply the
benevolence of nature to sheltered navies; or in aqueducts that,
arching the wide vale from mountain to mountain, give a Palmyra to the
desert. But alas! in times of tumult they are the men destined to come
forth as the shaping spirit of ruin, to destroy the wisdom of ages in
order to substitute the fancies of a day, and to change kings and
kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds [8]. The records of
biography seem to confirm this theory. The men of the greatest genius,
as far as we can judge from their own works or from the accounts of
their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper
in all that related to themselves. In the inward assurance of
permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned
with regard to immediate reputation. Through all the works of Chaucer
there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which makes it almost
impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author
himself. Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost
proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance of
his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his Sonnets,
which could scarcely have been known to Pope [9], when he asserted,
that our great bard—
———grew immortal in his own despite.
(Epist. to Augustus.)
Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration
of his works with that of his personal existence, Shakespeare adds:
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Tho' I once gone to all the world must die;
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead:
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, e'en in the mouth of men.
SONNET LXXXI.
I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakespeare's readiness to
praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own equality
with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike
manifested in another Sonnet.
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost,
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence!
But when your countenance fill'd up his line,
Then lack'd I matter, that enfeebled mine.
S. LXXXVI.
In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate,
and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said,
effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution
of Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter
days. These causes have diffused over all his compositions "a
melancholy grace," and have drawn forth occasional strains, the more
pathetic from their gentleness. But no where do we find the least
trace of irritability, and still less of quarrelsome or affected
contempt of his censurers.
The same calmness, and even greater self-possession, may be affirmed
of Milton, as far as his poems, and poetic character are concerned. He
reserved his anger for the enemies of religion, freedom, and his
country. My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception,
than arises from the contemplation of this great man in his latter
days;—poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted,—
Darkness before, and danger's voice behind,—
in an age in which he was as little understood by the party, for whom,
as by that against whom, he had contended; and among men before whom
he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still
listening to the music of his own thoughts, or if additionally
cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three
solitary individuals, he did nevertheless
—argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer'd
Right onward.
From others only do we derive our knowledge that Milton, in his latter
day, had his scorners and detractors; and even in his day of youth and
hope, that he had enemies would have been unknown to us, had they not
been likewise the enemies of his country.
I am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when there
exist many and excellent models, a high degree of talent, combined
with taste and judgment, and employed in works of imagination, will
acquire for a man the name of a great genius; though even that
analogon of genius, which, in certain states of society, may even
render his writings more popular than the absolute reality could have
done, would be sought for in vain in the mind and temper of the author
himself. Yet even in instances of this kind, a close examination will
often detect, that the irritability, which has been attributed to the
author's genius as its cause, did really originate in an ill
conformation of body, obtuse pain, or constitutional defect of
pleasurable sensation. What is charged to the author, belongs to the
man, who would probably have been still more impatient, but for the
humanizing influences of the very pursuit, which yet bears the blame
of his irritability.
How then are we to explain the easy credence generally given to this
charge, if the charge itself be not, as I have endeavoured to show,
supported by experience? This seems to me of no very difficult
solution. In whatever country literature is widely diffused, there
will be many who mistake an intense desire to possess the reputation
of poetic genius, for the actual powers, and original tendencies which
constitute it. But men, whose dearest wishes are fixed on objects
wholly out of their own power, become in all cases more or less
impatient and prone to anger. Besides, though it may be paradoxical to
assert, that a man can know one thing and believe the opposite, yet
assuredly a vain person may have so habitually indulged the wish, and
persevered in the attempt, to appear what he is not, as to become
himself one of his own proselytes. Still, as this counterfeit and
artificial persuasion must differ, even in the person's own feelings,
from a real sense of inward power, what can be more natural, than that
this difference should betray itself in suspicious and jealous
irritability? Even as the flowery sod, which covers a hollow, may be
often detected by its shaking and trembling.
But, alas! the multitude of books and the general diffusion of
literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects in the
world of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, though by no
means to justify, the contempt with which the best grounded complaints
of injured genius are rejected as frivolous, or entertained as matter
of merriment. In the days of Chaucer and Gower, our language might
(with due allowance for the imperfections of a simile) be compared to
a wilderness of vocal reeds, from which the favourites only of Pan or
Apollo could construct even the rude syrinx; and from this the
constructors alone could elicit strains of music. But now, partly by
the labours of successive poets, and in part by the more artificial
state of society and social intercourse, language, mechanized as it
were into a barrel-organ, supplies at once both instrument and tune.
Thus even the deaf may play, so as to delight the many. Sometimes (for
it is with similes, as it is with jests at a wine table, one is sure
to suggest another) I have attempted to illustrate the present state
of our language, in its relation to literature, by a press-room of
larger and smaller stereotype pieces, which, in the present Anglo-
Gallican fashion of unconnected, epigrammatic periods, it requires but
an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary indefinitely, and yet still
produce something, which, if not sense, will be so like it as to do as
well. Perhaps better: for it spares the reader the trouble of
thinking; prevents vacancy, while it indulges indolence; and secures
the memory from all danger of an intellectual plethora. Hence of all
trades, literature at present demands the least talent or information;
and, of all modes of literature, the manufacturing of poems. The
difference indeed between these and the works of genius is not less
than between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look
alike.
Now it is no less remarkable than true, with how little examination
works of polite literature are commonly perused, not only by the mass
of readers, but by men of first rate ability, till some accident or
chance [10] discussion have roused their attention, and put them on
their guard. And hence individuals below mediocrity not less in
natural power than in acquired knowledge; nay, bunglers who have
failed in the lowest mechanic crafts, and whose presumption is in due
proportion to their want of sense and sensibility; men, who being
first scribblers from idleness and ignorance, next become libellers
from envy and malevolence,—have been able to drive a successful trade
in the employment of the booksellers, nay, have raised themselves into
temporary name and reputation with the public at large, by that most
powerful of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and malignant
passions of mankind [11]. But as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and
all malignant propensities to require a quick change of objects, such
writers are sure, sooner or later, to awake from their dream of vanity
to disappointment and neglect with embittered and envenomed feelings.
Even during their short-lived success, sensible in spite of themselves
on what a shifting foundation it rests, they resent the mere refusal
of praise as a robbery, and at the justest censures kindle at once
into violent and undisciplined abuse; till the acute disease changing
into chronical, the more deadly as the less violent, they become the
fit instruments of literary detraction and moral slander. They are
then no longer to be questioned without exposing the complainant to
ridicule, because, forsooth, they are anonymous critics, and
authorized, in Andrew Marvell's phrase, as "synodical individuals" to
speak of themselves plurali majestatico! As if literature formed a
caste, like that of the Paras in Hindostan, who, however maltreated,
must not dare to deem themselves wronged! As if that, which in all
other cases adds a deeper dye to slander, the circumstance of its
being anonymous, here acted only to make the slanderer inviolable!
[12] Thus, in part, from the accidental tempers of individuals—(men
of undoubted talent, but not men of genius)—tempers rendered yet more
irritable by their desire to appear men of genius; but still more
effectively by the excesses of the mere counterfeits both of talent
and genius; the number too being so incomparably greater of those who
are thought to be, than of those who really are men of genius; and in
part from the natural, but not therefore the less partial and unjust
distinction, made by the public itself between literary and all other
property; I believe the prejudice to have arisen, which considers an
unusual irascibility concerning the reception of its products as
characteristic of genius.
It might correct the moral feelings of a numerous class of readers, to
suppose a Review set on foot, the object of which should be to
criticise all the chief works presented to the public by our ribbon-
weavers, calico-printers, cabinet-makers, and china-manufacturers;
which should be conducted in the same spirit, and take the same
freedom with personal character, as our literary journals. They would
scarcely, I think, deny their belief, not only that the genus
irritabile would be found to include many other species besides that
of bards; but that the irritability of trade would soon reduce the
resentments of poets into mere shadow-fights in the comparison. Or is
wealth the only rational object of human interest? Or even if this
were admitted, has the poet no property in his works? Or is it a rare,
or culpable case, that he who serves at the altar of the Muses, should
be compelled to derive his maintenance from the altar, when too he has
perhaps deliberately abandoned the fairest prospects of rank and
opulence in order to devote himself, an entire and undistracted man,
to the instruction or refinement of his fellow-citizens? Or, should we
pass by all higher objects and motives, all disinterested benevolence,
and even that ambition of lasting praise which is at once the crutch
and ornament, which at once supports and betrays, the infirmity of
human virtue,—is the character and property of the man, who labours
for our intellectual pleasures, less entitled to a share of our fellow
feeling, than that of the wine-merchant or milliner? Sensibility
indeed, both quick and deep, is not only a characteristic feature, but
may be deemed a component part, of genius. But it is not less an
essential mark of true genius, that its sensibility is excited by any
other cause more powerfully than by its own personal interests; for
this plain reason, that the man of genius lives most in the ideal
world, in which the present is still constituted by the future or the
past; and because his feelings have been habitually associated with
thoughts and images, to the number, clearness, and vivacity of which
the sensation of self is always in an inverse proportion. And yet,
should he perchance have occasion to repel some false charge, or to
rectify some erroneous censure, nothing is more common than for the
many to mistake the general liveliness of his manner and language,
whatever is the subject, for the effects of peculiar irritation from
its accidental relation to himself. [13]
For myself, if from my own feelings, or from the less suspicious test
of the observations of others, I had been made aware of any literary
testiness or jealousy; I trust, that I should have been, however,
neither silly nor arrogant enough to have burthened the imperfection
on genius. But an experience—(and I should not need documents in
abundance to prove my words, if I added)—a tried experience of twenty
years, has taught me, that the original sin of my character consists
in a careless indifference to public opinion, and to the attacks of
those who influence it; that praise and admiration have become yearly
less and less desirable, except as marks of sympathy; nay that it is
difficult and distressing to me to think with any interest even about
the sale and profit of my works, important as, in my present
circumstances, such considerations must needs be. Yet it never
occurred to me to believe or fancy, that the quantum of intellectual
power bestowed on me by nature or education was in any way connected
with this habit of my feelings; or that it needed any other parents or
fosterers than constitutional indolence, aggravated into languor by
ill-health; the accumulating embarrassments of procrastination; the
mental cowardice, which is the inseparable companion of
procrastination, and which makes us anxious to think and converse on
any thing rather than on what concerns ourselves; in fine, all those
close vexations, whether chargeable on my faults or my fortunes, which
leave me but little grief to spare for evils comparatively distant and
alien.
Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier
stars. I cannot afford it. But so far from condemning those who can, I
deem it a writer's duty, and think it creditable to his heart, to feel
and express a resentment proportioned to the grossness of the
provocation, and the importance of the object. There is no profession
on earth, which requires an attention so early, so long, or so
unintermitting as that of poetry; and indeed as that of literary
composition in general, if it be such as at all satisfies the demands
both of taste and of sound logic. How difficult and delicate a task
even the mere mechanism of verse is, may be conjectured from the
failure of those, who have attempted poetry late in life. Where then a
man has, from his earliest youth, devoted his whole being to an
object, which by the admission of all civilized nations in all ages is
honourable as a pursuit, and glorious as an attainment; what of all
that relates to himself and his family, if only we except his moral
character, can have fairer claims to his protection, or more authorize
acts of self-defence, than the elaborate products of his intellect and
intellectual industry? Prudence itself would command us to show, even
if defect or diversion of natural sensibility had prevented us from
feeling, a due interest and qualified anxiety for the offspring and
representatives of our nobler being. I know it, alas! by woful
experience. I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this
wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion.
The greater part indeed have been trod under foot, and are forgotten;
but yet no small number have crept forth into life, some to furnish
feathers for the caps of others, and still more to plume the shafts in
the quivers of my enemies, of them that unprovoked have lain in wait
against my soul.
Sic vos, non vobis, mellificatis, apes!
[Here ends chapter 2. To read other chapters of Biographia Literaria, click here.]
* * *
FOOTNOTES [by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]
[8] Of old things all are over old,
Of good things none are good enough;—
We'll show that we can help to frame
A world of other stuff.
I too will have my kings, that take
From me the sign of life and death:
Kingdoms shall shift about, like clouds,
Obedient to my breath.
Wordsworth's Rob Roy.—Poet. Works, vol. III. p. 127.
[9] Pope was under the common error of his age, an error far from
being sufficiently exploded even at the present day. It consists (as I
explained at large, and proved in detail in my public lectures,) in
mistaking for the essentials of the Greek stage certain rules, which
the wise poets imposed upon themselves, in order to render all the
remaining parts of the drama consistent with those, that had been
forced upon them by circumstances independent of their will; out of
which circumstances the drama itself arose. The circumstances in the
time of Shakespeare, which it was equally out of his power to alter,
were different, and such as, in my opinion, allowed a far wider
sphere, and a deeper and more human interest. Critics are too apt to
forget, that rules are but means to an end; consequently, where the
ends are different, the rules must be likewise so. We must have
ascertained what the end is, before we can determine what the rules
ought to be. Judging under this impression, I did not hestitate to
declare my full conviction, that the consummate judgment of
Shakespeare, not only in the general construction, but in all the
details, of his dramas, impressed me with greater wonder, than even
the might of his genius, or the depth of his philosophy. The substance
of these lectures I hope soon to publish; and it is but a debt of
justice to myself and my friends to notice, that the first course of
lectures, which differed from the following courses only, by
occasionally varying the illustrations of the same thoughts, was
addressed to very numerous, and I need not add, respectable audiences
at the Royal institution, before Mr. Schlegel gave his lectures on the
same subjects at Vienna.
[10] In the course of one of my Lectures, I had occasion to point out
the almost faultless position and choice of words, in Pope's original
compositions, particularly in his Satires and moral Essays, for the
purpose of comparing them with his translation of Homer, which, I do
not stand alone in regarding, as the main source of our pseudo-poetic
diction. And this, by the bye, is an additional confirmation of a
remark made, I believe, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, that next to the man
who forms and elevates the taste of the public, he that corrupts it,
is commonly the greatest genius. Among other passages, I analyzed
sentence by sentence, and almost word by word, the popular lines,
As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, etc.
(Iliad. B. viii.)
much in the same way as has been since done, in an excellent article
on Chalmers's British Poets in the Quarterly Review. The impression on
the audience in general was sudden and evident: and a number of
enlightened and highly educated persons, who at different times
afterwards addressed me on the subject, expressed their wonder, that
truth so obvious should not have struck them before; but at the same
time acknowledged—(so much had they been accustomed, in reading
poetry, to receive pleasure from the separate images and phrases
successively, without asking themselves whether the collective meaning
was sense or nonsense)—that they might in all probability have read
the same passage again twenty times with undiminished admiration, and
without once reflecting, that
astra phaeinaen amphi selaenaen
phainet aritretea—
(that is, the stars around, or near the full moon, shine pre-eminently
bright) conveys a just and happy image of a moonlight sky: while it is
difficult to determine whether, in the lines,
Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
And stars unnumber'd gild the glowing pole,
the sense or the diction be the more absurd. My answer was; that,
though I had derived peculiar advantages from my school discipline,
and though my general theory of poetry was the same then as now, I had
yet experienced the same sensations myself, and felt almost as if I
bad been newly couched, when, by Mr. Wordsworth's conversation, I had
been induced to re-examine with impartial strictness Gray's celebrated
Elegy. I had long before detected the defects in The Bard; but the
Elegy I had considered as proof against all fair attacks; and to this
day I cannot read either without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm.
At all events, whatever pleasure I may have lost by the clearer
perception of the faults in certain passages, has been more than
repaid to me by the additional delight with which I read the
remainder.
Another instance in confirmation of these remarks occurs to me in the
Faithful Shepherdess. Seward first traces Fletcher's lines;
More foul diseases than e'er yet the hot
Sun bred thro' his burnings, while the dog
Pursues the raging lion, throwing the fog
And deadly vapour from his angry breath,
Filling the lower world with plague and death,
to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar,
The rampant lion hunts he fast
With dogs of noisome breath;
Whose baleful barking brings, in haste,
Pine, plagues, and dreary death!
He then takes occasion to introduce Homer's simile of the appearance
of Achilles' mail to Priam compared with the Dog Star; literally thus—
"For this indeed is most splendid, but it was made an evil sign, and
brings many a consuming disease to wretched mortals." Nothing can be
more simple as a description, or more accurate as a simile; which,
(says Seward,) is thus finely translated by Mr. Pope
Terrific Glory! for his burning breath
Taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death!
Now here—(not to mention the tremendous bombast)—the Dog Star, so
called, is turned into a real dog, a very odd dog, a fire, fever,
plague, and death-breathing, red. air-tainting dog: and the whole
visual likeness is lost, while the likeness in the effects is rendered
absurd by the exaggeration. In Spenser and Fletcher the thought is
justifiable; for the images are at least consistent, and it was the
intention of the writers to mark the seasons by this allegory of
visualized puns.
[11] Especially in this age of personality, this age of literary and
political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with a
sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned
for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail;—when the most
vapid satires have become the objects of a keen public interest,
purely from the number of contemporary characters named in the patch-
work notes, (which possess, however, the comparative merit of being
more poetical than the text,) and because, to increase the stimulus,
the author has sagaciously left his own name for whispers and
conjectures.
[12] If it were worth while to mix together, as ingredients, half the
anecdotes which I either myself know to be true, or which I have
received from men incapable of intentional falsehood, concerning the
characters, qualifications, and motives of our anonymous critics,
whose decisions are oracles for our reading public; I might safely
borrow the words of the apocryphal Daniel; "Give me leave, O SOVEREIGN
PUBLIC, and I shall slay this dragon without sward or staff." For the
compound would be as the "pitch, and fat, and hair, which Daniel took,
and did seethe them together, and made lumps thereof; this he put in
the dragon's mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder; and Daniel
said, LO, THESE ARE THE GODS YE WORSHIP."
[13] This is one instance among many of deception, by the telling the
half of a fact, and omitting the other half, when it is from their
mutual counteraction and neutralization, that the whole truth arises,
as a tertium aliquid different from either. Thus in Dryden's famous
line
Great wit (meaning genius) to madness sure is near allied.
Now if the profound sensibility, which is doubtless one of the
components of genius, were alone considered, single and unbalanced, it
might be fairly described as exposing the individual to a greater
chance of mental derangement; but then a more than usual rapidity of
association, a more than usual power of passing from thought to
thought, and image to image, is a component equally essential; and to
the due modification of each by the other the genius itself consists;
so that it would be just as fair to describe the earth, as in imminent
danger of exorbitating, or of falling into the sun, according as the
assertor of the absurdity confined his attention either to the
projectile or to the attractive force exclusively.
Categories: British,Autobiography,Poetry,Coleridge (Samuel T.),1800s,Philosophy
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