Biographia Literaria - Chapter III (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Biographia Literaria
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Chapter III [of XXII]
The Author's obligations to critics, and the probable occasion—
Principles of modern criticism—Mr. Southey's works and character.
various name and rank, and to satirists with or without a name in
verse or prose, or in verse-text aided by prose-comment, I do
seriously believe and profess, that I owe full two-thirds of whatever
reputation and publicity I happen to possess. For when the name of an
individual has occurred so frequently, in so many works, for so great
a length of time, the readers of these works—(which with a shelf or
two of beauties, elegant Extracts and Anas, form nine-tenths of the
reading of the reading Public [14])—cannot but be familiar with the
name, without distinctly remembering whether it was introduced for
eulogy or for censure. And this becomes the more likely, if (as I
believe) the habit of perusing periodical works may be properly added
to Averroes' catalogue of Anti-Mnemonics, or weakeners of the memory
[15]. But where this has not been the case, yet the reader will be apt
to suspect that there must be something more than usually strong and
extensive in a reputation, that could either require or stand so
merciless and long-continued a cannonading. Without any feeling of
anger therefore—(for which indeed, on my own account, I have no
pretext)—I may yet be allowed to express some degree of surprise,
that, after having run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of
faults which I had, nothing having come before the judgment-seat in
the interim, I should, year after year, quarter after quarter, month
after month—(not to mention sundry petty periodicals of still quicker
revolution, "or weekly or diurnal")—have been, for at least seventeen
years consecutively, dragged forth by them into the foremost ranks of
the proscribed, and forced to abide the brunt of abuse, for faults
directly opposite, and which I certainly had not. How shall I explain
this?
Whatever may have been the case with others, I certainly cannot
attribute this persecution to personal dislike, or to envy, or to
feelings of vindictive animosity. Not to the former, for with the
exception of a very few who are my intimate friends, and were so
before they were known as authors, I have had little other
acquaintance with literary characters, than what may be implied in an
accidental introduction, or casual meeting in a mixed company. And as
far as words and looks can be trusted, I must believe that, even in
these instances, I had excited no unfriendly disposition. Neither by
letter, nor in conversation, have I ever had dispute or controversy
beyond the common social interchange of opinions. Nay, where I had
reason to suppose my convictions fundamentally different, it has been
my habit, and I may add, the impulse of my nature, to assign the
grounds of my belief, rather than the belief itself; and not to
express dissent, till I could establish some points of complete
sympathy, some grounds common to both sides, from which to commence
its explanation.
Still less can I place these attacks to the charge of envy. The few
pages which I have published, are of too distant a date, and the
extent of their sale a proof too conclusive against their having been
popular at any time, to render probable, I had almost said possible,
the excitement of envy on their account; and the man who should envy
me on any other, verily he must be envy-mad!
Lastly, with as little semblance of reason, could I suspect any
animosity towards me from vindictive feelings as the cause. I have
before said, that my acquaintance with literary men has been limited
and distant; and that I have had neither dispute nor controversy. From
my first entrance into life, I have, with few and short intervals,
lived either abroad or in retirement. My different essays on subjects
of national interest, published at different times, first in the
Morning Post and then in the Courier, with my courses of Lectures on
the principles of criticism as applied to Shakespeare and Milton,
constitute my whole publicity; the only occasions on which I could
offend any member of the republic of letters. With one solitary
exception in which my words were first misstated and then wantonly
applied to an individual, I could never learn that I had excited the
displeasure of any among my literary contemporaries. Having announced
my intention to give a course of Lectures on the characteristic merits
and defects of English poetry in its different aeras; first, from
Chaucer to Milton; second, from Dryden inclusively to Thomson; and
third, from Cowper to the present day; I changed my plan, and confined
my disquisition to the former two periods, that I might furnish no
possible pretext for the unthinking to misconstrue, or the malignant
to misapply my words, and having stamped their own meaning on them, to
pass them as current coin in the marts of garrulity or detraction.
Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the
deserving; and it is too true, and too frequent, that Bacon,
Harrington, Machiavel, and Spinoza, are not read, because Hume,
Condillac, and Voltaire are. But in promiscuous company no prudent man
will oppugn the merits of a contemporary in his own supposed
department; contenting himself with praising in his turn those whom he
deems excellent. If I should ever deem it my duty at all to oppose the
pretensions of individuals, I would oppose them in books which could
be weighed and answered, in which I could evolve the whole of my
reasons and feelings, with their requisite limits and modifications;
not in irrecoverable conversation, where however strong the reasons
might be, the feelings that prompted them would assuredly be
attributed by some one or other to envy and discontent. Besides I well
know, and, I trust, have acted on that knowledge, that it must be the
ignorant and injudicious who extol the unworthy; and the eulogies of
critics without taste or judgment are the natural reward of authors
without feeling or genius. Sint unicuique sua praemia.
How then, dismissing, as I do, these three causes, am I to account for
attacks, the long continuance and inveteracy of which it would require
all three to explain? The solution seems to be this— I was in habits
of intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey! This, however,
transfers, rather than removes the difficulty. Be it, that, by an
unconscionable extension of the old adage, noscitur a socio, my
literary friends are never under the water-fall of criticism, but I
must be wet through with the spray; yet how came the torrent to
descend upon them?
First then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the general
reception of his earlier publications; namely, the poems published
with Mr. Lovell under the names of Moschus and Bion; the two volumes
of poems under his own name, and the Joan of Arc. The censures of the
critics by profession are extant, and may be easily referred to:—
careless lines, inequality in the merit of the different poems, and
(in the lighter works) a predilection for the strange and whimsical;
in short, such faults as might have been anticipated in a young and
rapid writer, were indeed sufficiently enforced. Nor was there at that
time wanting a party spirit to aggravate the defects of a poet, who
with all the courage of uncorrupted youth had avowed his zeal for a
cause, which he deemed that of liberty, and his abhorrence of
oppression by whatever name consecrated. But it was as little objected
by others, as dreamed of by the poet himself, that he preferred
careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or indeed that
he pretended to any other art or theory of poetic diction, except that
which we may all learn from Horace, Quinctilian, the admirable
dialogue, De Oratoribus, generally attributed to Tacitus, or Strada's
Prolusions; if indeed natural good sense and the early study of the
best models in his own language had not infused the same maxims more
securely, and, if I may venture the expression, more vitally. All that
could have been fairly deduced was, that in his taste and estimation
of writers Mr. Southey agreed far more with Thomas Warton, than with
Dr. Johnson. Nor do I mean to deny, that at all times Mr. Southey was
of the same mind with Sir Philip Sidney in preferring an excellent
ballad in the humblest style of poetry to twenty indifferent poems
that strutted in the highest. And by what have his works, published
since then, been characterized, each more strikingly than the
preceding, but by greater splendour, a deeper pathos, profounder
reflections, and a more sustained dignity of language and of metre?
Distant may the period be, but whenever the time shall come, when all
his works shall be collected by some editor worthy to be his
biographer, I trust that an appendix of excerpta of all the passages,
in which his writings, name, and character have been attacked, from
the pamphlets and periodical works of the last twenty years, may be an
accompaniment. Yet that it would prove medicinal in after times I dare
not hope; for as long as there are readers to be delighted with
calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate. And such readers
will become in all probability more numerous, in proportion as a still
greater diffusion of literature shall produce an increase of
sciolists, and sciolism bring with it petulance and presumption. In
times of old, books were as religious oracles; as literature advanced,
they next became venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank
of instructive friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sank
still lower to that of entertaining companions; and at present they
seem degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every
self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, who chooses to write
from humour or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to abide the
decision "of him that reads in malice, or him that reads after
dinner."
The same retrograde movement may be traced, in the relation which the
authors themselves have assumed towards their readers. From the lofty
address of Bacon: "these are the meditations of Francis of Verulam,
which that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed their
interest:" or from dedication to Monarch or Pontiff, in which the
honour given was asserted in equipoise to the patronage acknowledged:
from Pindar's
———'ep' alloi-
-si d'alloi megaloi: to d'eschaton kory-
phoutai basilensi. Maeketi
paptaine porsion.
Eiae se te touton
upsou chronon patein, eme
te tossade nikaphorois
omilein, prophanton sophian kath' El-
lanas eonta panta.—OLYMP. OD. I.
there was a gradual sinking in the etiquette or allowed style of
pretension.
Poets and Philosophers, rendered diffident by their very number,
addressed themselves to "learned readers;" then aimed to conciliate
the graces of "the candid reader;" till, the critic still rising as
the author sank, the amateurs of literature collectively were erected
into a municipality of judges, and addressed as the Town! And now,
finally, all men being supposed able to read, and all readers able to
judge, the multitudinous Public, shaped into personal unity by the
magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism.
But, alas! as in other despotisms, it but echoes the decisions of its
invisible ministers, whose intellectual claims to the guardianship of
the Muses seem, for the greater part, analogous to the physical
qualifications which adapt their oriental brethren for the
superintendence of the Harem. Thus it is said, that St. Nepomuc was
installed the guardian of bridges, because he had fallen over one, and
sunk out of sight; thus too St. Cecilia is said to have been first
propitiated by musicians, because, having failed in her own attempts,
she had taken a dislike to the art and all its successful professors.
But I shall probably have occasion hereafter to deliver my convictions
more at large concerning this state of things, and its influences on
taste, genius and morality.
In the Thalaba, the Madoc, and still more evidently in the unique [16]
Cid, in the Kehama, and, as last, so best, the Roderick; Southey has
given abundant proof, se cogitare quam sit magnum dare aliquid in
manus hominum: nec persuadere sibi posse, non saepe tractandum quod
placere et semper et omnibus cupiat [Pliny, Ep. Lib. 7, Ep. 17]. But on the other
hand, I conceive, that Mr. Southey was quite unable to comprehend, wherein
could consist the crime or mischief of printing half a dozen or more
playful poems; or to speak more generally, compositions which would be
enjoyed or passed over, according as the taste and humour of the
reader might chance to be; provided they contained nothing immoral. In
the present age periturae parcere chartae is emphatically an
unreasonable demand. The merest trifle he ever sent abroad had tenfold
better claims to its ink and paper than all the silly criticisms on
it, which proved no more than that the critic was not one of those,
for whom the trifle was written; and than all the grave exhortations
to a greater reverence for the public—as if the passive page of a
book, by having an epigram or doggerel tale impressed on it, instantly
assumed at once loco-motive power and a sort of ubiquity, so as to
flutter and buz in the ear of the public to the sore annoyance of the
said mysterious personage. But what gives an additional and more
ludicrous absurdity to these lamentations is the curious fact, that if
in a volume of poetry the critic should find poem or passage which he
deems more especially worthless, he is sure to select and reprint it
in the review; by which, on his own grounds, he wastes as much more
paper than the author, as the copies of a fashionable review are more
numerous than those of the original book; in some, and those the most
prominent instances, as ten thousand to five hundred. I know nothing
that surpasses the vileness of deciding on the merits of a poet or
painter,—(not by characteristic defects; for where there is genius,
these always point to his characteristic beauties; but)—by accidental
failures or faulty passages; except the impudence of defending it, as
the proper duty, and most instructive part, of criticism. Omit or pass
slightly over the expression, grace, and grouping of Raffael's
figures; but ridicule in detail the knitting-needles and broom-twigs,
that are to represent trees in his back grounds; and never let him
hear the last of his galli-pots! Admit that the Allegro and Penseroso
of Milton are not without merit; but repay yourself for this
concession, by reprinting at length the two poems on the University
Carrier! As a fair specimen of his Sonnets, quote
A Book was writ of late called Tetrachordon;
and, as characteristic of his rhythm and metre, cite his literal
translation of the first and second Psalm! In order to justify
yourself, you need only assert, that had you dwelt chiefly on the
beauties and excellencies of the poet, the admiration of these might
seduce the attention of future writers from the objects of their love
and wonder, to an imitation of the few poems and passages in which the
poet was most unlike himself.
But till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far
other motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant
sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed
canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the
nature of man; reflecting minds will pronounce it arrogance in them
thus to announce themselves to men of letters, as the guides of their
taste and judgment. To the purchaser and mere reader it is, at all
events, an injustice. He who tells me that there are defects in a new
work, tells me nothing which I should not have taken for granted
without his information. But he, who points out and elucidates the
beauties of an original work does indeed give me interesting
information, such as experience would not have authorized me in
anticipating. And as to compositions which the authors themselves
announce with
Haec ipsi novimus esse nihil,
why should we judge by a different rule two printed works, only
because the one author is alive, and the other in his grave? What
literary man has not regretted the prudery of Spratt in refusing to
let his friend Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing gown? I am
not perhaps the only one who has derived an innocent amusement from
the riddles, conundrums, tri-syllable lines, and the like, of Swift
and his correspondents, in hours of languor, when to have read his
more finished works would have been useless to myself, and, in some
sort, an act of injustice to the author. But I am at a loss to
conceive by what perversity of judgment, these relaxations of his
genius could be employed to diminish his fame as the writer of
Gulliver's Travels and the Tale of a Tub. Had Mr. Southey written twice as
many poems of inferior merit, or partial interest, as have enlivened the
journals of the day, they would have added to his honour with good and
wise men, not merely or principally as proving the versatility of his
talents, but as evidences of the purity of that mind, which even in
its levities never dictated a line which it need regret on any moral
account.
I have in imagination transferred to the future biographer the duty of
contrasting Southey's fixed and well-earned fame, with the abuse and
indefatigable hostility of his anonymous critics from his early youth
to his ripest manhood. But I cannot think so ill of human nature as
not to believe, that these critics have already taken shame to
themselves, whether they consider the object of their abuse in his
moral or his literary character. For reflect but on the variety and
extent of his acquirements! He stands second to no man, either as an
historian or as a bibliographer; and when I regard him as a popular
essayist,—(for the articles of his compositions in the reviews are,
for the greater part, essays on subjects of deep or curious interest
rather than criticisms on particular works)—I look in vain for any
writer, who has conveyed so much information, from so many and such
recondite sources, with so many just and original reflections, in a
style so lively and poignant, yet so uniformly classical and
perspicuous; no one, in short, who has combined so much wisdom with so
much wit; so much truth and knowledge with so much life and fancy. His
prose is always intelligible and always entertaining. In poetry he has
attempted almost every species of composition known before, and he has
added new ones; and if we except the highest lyric,—(in which how
few, how very few even of the greatest minds have been fortunate)—he
has attempted every species successfully; from the political song of
the day, thrown off in the playful overflow of honest joy and
patriotic exultation, to the wild ballad; from epistolary ease and
graceful narrative, to austere and impetuous moral declamation; from
the pastoral charms and wild streaming lights of the Thalaba, in which
sentiment and imagery have given permanence even to the excitement of
curiosity; and from the full blaze of the Kehama,—(a gallery of
finished pictures in one splendid fancy piece, in which,
notwithstanding, the moral grandeur rises gradually above the
brilliance of the colouring and the boldness and novelty of the
machinery)—to the more sober beauties of the Madoc; and lastly, from
the Madoc to his Roderick, in which, retaining all his former
excellencies of a poet eminently inventive and picturesque, he has
surpassed himself in language and metre, in the construction of the
whole, and in the splendour of particular passages.
Here then shall I conclude? No! The characters of the deceased, like
the encomia on tombstones, as they are described with religious
tenderness, so are they read, with allowing sympathy indeed, but yet
with rational deduction. There are men, who deserve a higher record;
men with whose characters it is the interest of their contemporaries,
no less than that of posterity, to be made acquainted; while it is yet
possible for impartial censure, and even for quick-sighted envy, to
cross-examine the tale without offence to the courtesies of humanity;
and while the eulogist, detected in exaggeration or falsehood, must
pay the full penalty of his baseness in the contempt which brands the
convicted flatterer. Publicly has Mr. Southey been reviled by men,
who, as I would fain hope for the honour of human nature, hurled fire-
brands against a figure of their own imagination; publicly have his
talents been depreciated, his principles denounced; as publicly do I
therefore, who have known him intimately, deem it my duty to leave
recorded, that it is Southey's almost unexampled felicity, to possess
the best gifts of talent and genius free from all their characteristic
defects. To those who remember the state of our public schools and
universities some twenty years past, it will appear no ordinary praise
in any man to have passed from innocence into virtue, not only free
from all vicious habit, but unstained by one act of intemperance, or
the degradations akin to intemperance. That scheme of head, heart, and
habitual demeanour, which in his early manhood, and first
controversial writings, Milton, claiming the privilege of self-
defence, asserts of himself, and challenges his calumniators to
disprove; this will his school-mates, his fellow-collegians, and his
maturer friends, with a confidence proportioned to the intimacy of
their knowledge, bear witness to, as again realized in the life of
Robert Southey. But still more striking to those, who by biography or
by their own experience are familiar with the general habits of
genius, will appear the poet's matchless industry and perseverance in
his pursuits; the worthiness and dignity of those pursuits; his
generous submission to tasks of transitory interest, or such as his
genius alone could make otherwise; and that having thus more than
satisfied the claims of affection or prudence, he should yet have made
for himself time and power, to achieve more, and in more various
departments, than almost any other writer has done, though employed
wholly on subjects of his own choice and ambition. But as Southey
possesses, and is not possessed by, his genius, even so is he master
even of his virtues. The regular and methodical tenor of his daily
labours, which would be deemed rare in the most mechanical pursuits,
and might be envied by the mere man of business, loses all semblance
of formality in the dignified simplicity of his manners, in the spring
and healthful cheerfulness of his spirits. Always employed, his
friends find him always at leisure. No less punctual in trifles, than
steadfast in the performance of highest duties, he inflicts none of
those small pains and discomforts which irregular men scatter about
them, and which in the aggregate so often become formidable obstacles
both to happiness and utility; while on the contrary he bestows all
the pleasures, and inspires all that ease of mind on those around him
or connected with him, which perfect consistency, and (if such a word
might be framed) absolute reliability, equally in small as in great
concerns, cannot but inspire and bestow; when this too is softened
without being weakened by kindness and gentleness. I know few men who
so well deserve the character which an antient attributes to Marcus
Cato, namely, that he was likest virtue, in as much as he seemed to
act aright, not in obedience to any law or outward motive, but by the
necessity of a happy nature, which could not act otherwise. As son,
brother, husband, father, master, friend, he moves with firm yet light
steps, alike unostentatious, and alike exemplary. As a writer, he has
uniformly made his talents subservient to the best interests of
humanity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever
been the cause of pure religion and of liberty, of national
independence and of national illumination. When future critics shall
weigh out his guerdon of praise and censure, it will be Southey the
poet only, that will supply them with the scanty materials for the
latter. They will likewise not fail to record, that as no man was ever
a more constant friend, never had poet more friends and honourers
among the good of all parties; and that quacks in education, quacks in
politics, and quacks in criticism were his only enemies. [17]
[Here ends chapter 3. To read other chapters of Biographia Literaria, click here.]
* * *
FOOTNOTES [by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]
[14] For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not
compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of
reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which
the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and
a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of
the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura
manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes,
reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one mans delirium, so
as to people the barrenness of a hundred other brains afflicted with
the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite
purpose. We should therefore transfer this species of amusement—(if
indeed those can be said to retire a musis, who were never in their
company, or relaxation be attributable to those, whose bows are never
bent)—from the genus, reading, to that comprebensive class
characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet
coexisting propensities of human nature, namely, indulgence of sloth,
and hatred of vacancy. In addition to novels and tales of chivalry to
prose or rhyme, (by which last I mean neither rhythm nor metre) this
genus comprises as its species, gaming, swinging, or swaying on a
chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tete-a-
tete quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning word by
word all the advertisements of a daily newspaper in a public house on
a rainy day, etc. etc. etc.
[15] Ex. gr. Pediculos e capillis excerptos in arenam jacere
incontusos; eating of unripe fruit; gazing on the clouds, and (in
genere) on movable things suspended in the air; riding among a
multitude of camels; frequent laughter; listening to a series of jests
and humorous anecdotes,—as when (so to modernize the learned
Saracen's meaning) one man's droll story of an Irishman inevitably
occasions another's droll story of a Scotchman, which again, by the
same sort of conjunction disjunctive, leads to some etourderie of a
Welshman, and that again to some sly hit of a Yorkshireman;—the habit
of reading tomb-stones in church-yards, etc. By the bye, this
catalogue, strange as it may appear, is not insusceptible of a sound
psychological commentary.
[16] I have ventured to call it unique; not only because I know no
work of the kind in our language, (if we except a few chapters of the
old translation of Froissart)—none, which uniting the charms of
romance and history, keeps the imagination so constantly on the wing,
and yet leaves so much for after reflection; but likewise, and
chiefly, because it is a compilation, which, in the various
excellencies of translation, selection, and arrangement, required and
proves greater genius in the compiler, as living in the present state
of society, than in the original composers.
[17] It is not easy to estimate the effects which the example of a
young man as highly distinguished for strict purity of disposition and
conduct, as for intellectual power and literary acquirements, may
produce on those of the same age with himself, especially on those of
similar pursuits and congenial minds. For many years, my opportunities
of intercourse with Mr. Southey have been rare, and at long intervals;
but I dwell with unabated pleasure on the strong and sudden, yet I
trust not fleeting, influence, which my moral being underwent on my
acquaintance with him at Oxford, whither I had gone at the
commencement of our Cambridge vacation on a visit to an old school-
fellow. Not indeed on my moral or religious principles, for they had
never been contaminated; but in awakening the sense of the duty and
dignity of making my actions accord with those principles, both in
word and deed. The irregularities only not universal among the young
men of my standing, which I always knew to be wrong, I then learned to
feel as degrading; learned to know that an opposite conduct, which was
at that time considered by us as the easy virtue of cold and selfish
prudence, might originate in the noblest emotions, in views the most
disinterested and imaginative. It is not however from grateful
recollections only, that I have been impelled thus to leave these my
deliberate sentiments on record; but in some sense as a debt of
justice to the man, whose name has been so often connected with mine
for evil to which he is a stranger. As a specimen I subjoin part of a
note, from The Beauties of the Anti-jacobin, in which, having
previously informed the public that I had been dishonoured at
Cambridge for preaching Deism, at a time when, for my youthful ardour
in defence of Christianity, I was decried as a bigot by the proselytes
of French phi-(or to speak more truly psi-)-losophy, the writer
concludes with these words; "since this time he has left his native
country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor children
fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex his disce his friends, LAMB and
SOUTHEY." With severest truth it may be asserted, that it would not be
easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic affections
than those whose names were thus printed at full length as in the same
rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his
children fatherless and his wife destitute! Is it surprising, that
many good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would have
done adverse to a party, which encouraged and openly rewarded the
authors of such atrocious calumnies? Qualis es, nescio; sed per quales
agis, scio et doleo.
Posted by Jesus Crisis at 7/8/2009 4:29 AM 
Categories: Coleridge (Samuel T), British, Autobiography, Writing, Philosophy, 1800s
Tags: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria
Categories: Coleridge (Samuel T), British, Autobiography, Writing, Philosophy, 1800s
Tags: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria
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