Anima Poetae Part 15

I seem to feel that if France had been for ages a Protestant nation, and a Milton had been born in it, the French language would not have precluded the production of a "Paradise Lost," though it might, perhaps, that of a Hamlet or a Lear.

[Sidenote: THE ABSTRACT SELF On Friday night, Feb. 8, 1805]

On Friday Night, 8th Feb. 1805, my feeling, in sleep, of exceeding great love for my infant, seen by me in the dream!--yet so as it might be Sara, Derwent, or Berkley, and still it was an individual babe and mine.

"All look or likeness caught from earth, All accident of kin or birth, Had pa.s.s'd away. There seem'd no trace Of aught upon her brighten'd face, Upraised beneath the rifted stone, Save of one spirit all her own; She, she herself, and only she, Shone through her body visibly."

_Poetical Works_, 1893, p. 172.

This abstract self is, indeed, in its nature a Universal personified, as Life, Soul, Spirit, etc. Will not this _prove_ it to be a _deeper_ feeling, and of such intimate affinity with ideas, so as to modify them and become one with them; whereas the appet.i.tes and the feelings of revenge and anger co-exist with the ideas, not combine with them, and alter the apparent effect of this form, not the forms themselves?

Certain modifications of fear seem to approach nearest to this love-sense in its manner of acting.

Those whispers just as you have fallen asleep--what are they, and whence?

[Sidenote: LITERA SCRIPTA MANET Monday, Feb 11, 1805]

I must own to a superst.i.tious dread of the destruction of paper worthy of a Mahometan. But I am also ashamed to confess to myself what pulling back of heart I feel whenever I wish to light a candle or kindle a fire with a Hospital or Harbour Report, and what a c.u.mulus lies on my table, I not able to conjecture of what use they can ever be, and yet trembling lest what I then destroyed might be of some use in the way of knowledge.

This seems to be the excess of a good feeling, but it is ridiculous.

[Sidenote: COWPER'S "LINES TO MRS. UNWIN"]

It is not without a certain sense of self-reproof, as well as self-distrust, that I ask, or, rather, that my understanding suggests to me the query, whether this divine poem (in so original a strain of thought and feeling honourable to human nature) would not have been more perfect if the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas had been omitted, and the tenth and eleventh transposed so as to stand as the third and fourth. It is not, perhaps not at all, but, certainly, not princ.i.p.ally that I feel any meanness in the "needles;" but, not to mention that the words "once a shining store" is a speck in the diamond (in a less dear poem I might, perhaps, have called it more harshly a _rhyme-botch_), and that the word "restless" is rather too strong an impersonation for the serious tone, the _real_ness of the poem, and seems to tread too closely on the mock-heroic; but that it seems not true to poetic feeling to introduce the affecting circ.u.mstance of dimness of sight from decay of nature on an occasion so remote from the [Greek: to katholou], and that the fifth stanza, graceful and even affecting as the spirit of the playfulness is or would be, at least, in a poem having less depth of feeling, breaks in painfully here--the age and afflicting infirmities both of the writer and his subject seem abhorrent from such trifling of--scarcely fancy, for I fear, if it were a.n.a.lysed, that the whole effect would be found to depend on phrases hackneyed, and taken from the alms-house of the Muses. The test would be this: read the poem to a well-educated but natural woman, an unaffected, gentle being, endued with sense and sensibility--subst.i.tuting the tenth and eleventh stanzas for those three, and some days after shew her the poem as it now stands.

I seem to be sure that she would be shocked--an alien would have intruded himself, and be found sitting in a circle of dear friends whom she expected to have found _all to themselves_.

[Sidenote: ETYMOLOGY]

To say that etymology is a science--is to use this word in its laxest and improper sense. But our language, except, at least, in poetry, has dropped the word "lore"--the _lehre_ of the Germans, the _logos_ of the Greek. Either we should have retained the word and ventured on _Root-lore_, _verse-lore_, etc., or have adopted the Greek as a single word as well as a word in combination. All novelties appear or are rather felt as ridiculous in language; but, if it had been once adopted, it would have been no stranger to have said that etymo_logy_ is a _logy_ which perishes from a plethora of probability, than that the _art_ of war is an _art_ apparently for the destruction and subjugation of particular states, but really for the lessening of bloodshed and the preservation of the liberties of mankind. Art and Science are both too much appropriated--our language wants terms of comprehensive generality, implying the kind, not the degree or species, as in that good and necessary word _sensuous_, which we have likewise dropped, opposed to sensual, sensitive, sensible, etc., etc. Chymistry has felt this difficulty, and found the necessity of having one word for the supposed cause, another for the effect, as in caloric or calorific, opposed to heat; and psychology has still more need of the reformation.

[Sidenote: SENTIMENT, AN ANTIDOTE TO CASUISTRY]

The Queen-bee in the hive of Popish Error, the great mother of the swarm, seems to me their tenet concerning Faith and Works, placing the former wholly in the rect.i.tude, nay, in the rightness of intellectual conviction, and the latter in the definite and, most often, the material action, and, consequently, the a.s.sertion of the dividuous nature and self-existence of works. Hence the doctrine of d.a.m.nation out of the Church of Rome--of the one visible Church--of the absolute efficiency _in se_ of all the Sacraments and the absolute merit of ceremonial observances. Consider the incalculable advantage of chiefly dwelling on the virtues of the heart, of habits of feeling and harmonious action, the music of the adjusted string at the impulse of the breeze, and, on the other hand, the evils of books concerning particular actions, minute cases of conscience, hair-splitting directions and decisions, O how ill.u.s.trated by the detestable character of most of the Roman Catholic casuists! No actions should be distinctly described but such as manifestly tend to awaken the heart to efficient feeling, whether of fear or of love--actions that, falling back on the fountain, keep it full, or clear out the mud from its pipes, and make it play in its abundance, shining in that purity in which, at once, the purity and the light is each the cause of the other, the light purifying, and the purified receiving and reflecting the light, sending it off to others; not, like the polished mirror, by reflection from itself, but by transmission through itself.

[Sidenote: THE EMPYREAN]

Friday + Sat.u.r.day, 12-1 o'clock [March 2, 1805.]

What a sky! the not yet orbed moon, the spotted oval, blue at one edge from the deep utter blue of the sky--a Ma.s.s of _pearl_-white cloud below, distant, and travelling to the horizon, but all the upper part of the ascent and all the height such _profound_ blue, deep as a deep river, and deep in colour, and those two depths so entirely _one_, _as_ to give the meaning and explanation of the two different significations of the epithet. Here, so far from _divided_, they were scarcely _distinct_, scattered over with thin pearl-white cloudlets--hands and fingers--the largest not larger than a floating veil! Unconsciously I stretched forth my arms as to embrace the sky, and in a trance I had worshipped G.o.d in the moon--the spirit, not the form. I felt in how innocent a feeling Sabeism might have begun. Oh! not only the moon, but the depths of the sky! The moon was the _idea_; but deep sky is, of all visual impressions, the nearest akin to a feeling. It is more a feeling than a sight, or, rather, it is the melting away and entire union of feeling and sight!

[Sidenote: DISTEMPER'S WORST CALAMITY]

Monday morning, which I ought not to have known not to be Sunday night, 2 o'clock, March 4, 1805.

My dreams to-night were interfused with struggle and fear, though, till the very last, not victors; but the very last, which awoke me, was a completed night-mare, as it gave the _idea_ and _sensation_ of actual grasp or touch contrary to _my_ will and in apparent consequence of the malignant will of the external form, whether actually appearing or, as sometimes happened, believed to exist--in which latter case I have two or three times felt a horrid touch of hatred, a grasp, or a weight of hate and horror abstracted from all [conscious] form or supposal of form, an _abstract touch_, an _abstract_ grasp, an _abstract_ weight!

_Quam nihil ad genium Papiliane tuum!_ or, in other words, _This Mackintosh would prove to be nonsense by a Scotch smile._ The last [dream], that woke me, though a true night-mare, was, however, a mild one. I cried out early, like a scarcely-hurt child who knows himself within hearing of his mother. But, anterior to this, I had been playing with children, especially with one most lovely child, about two years or two and a half, and had repeated to her, in my dream, "The dews were falling fast," &c., and I was sorely frightened by the sneering and fiendish malignity of the beautiful creature, but from the beginning there had been a terror about it and proceeding from it. I shall hereafter, read the Vision in "Macbeth" with increased admiration.

["_Quam nihil ad genium Papiniane tuum_," was the motto of _The Lyrical Ballads_.]

That deep intuition of our _one_ness, is it not at the bottom of many of our faults as well as virtues? the dislike that a bad man should have any virtues, a good man any faults? And yet, too, a something n.o.ble and incentive is in this.

[Sidenote: THE OMNISCIENT THE COMFORTER]

What comfort in the silent eye upraised to G.o.d! "_Thou_ knowest." O!

what a thought! Never to be friendless, never to be unintelligible! The omnipresence has been generally represented as a spy, a sort of Bentham's Panopticon.[D] O to feel what the pain is to be utterly unintelligible and then--"O G.o.d, thou understandest!"

[Sidenote: POETS AS CRITICS OF POETS]

The question should be fairly stated, how far a man can be an adequate, or even a good (as far as he goes) though inadequate critic of poetry who is not a poet, at least, _in posse_? Can he be an adequate, can he be a good critic, though not commensurate [with the poet criticised]?

But there is yet another distinction. Supposing he is not only not a poet, but is a bad poet! What then?

[Sidenote: IMMATURE CRITICS March 16, 1805]

[The] cause of the offence or disgust received by the _mean_ in good poems when we are young, and its diminution and occasional evanescence when we are older in true taste [is] that, at first, we are from various causes delighted with _generalities_ of nature which can all be expressed in dignified words; but, afterwards, becoming more intimately acquainted with Nature in her detail, we are delighted with _distinct_, vivid ideas, and with vivid ideas most when made distinct, and can most often forgive and sometimes be delighted with even a low image from art or low life when it gives you the very thing by an ill.u.s.tration, as, for instance, Cowper's stream "inlaying" the level vale as with silver, and even Shakspere's "shrill-tongued Tapster's answering shallow wits"

applied to echoes in an _echofull_ place.

[Sidenote: ATTENTION AND SENSATION March 17, 1805]

Of the not being able to know whether you are smoking in the dark or when your eyes are shut: item, of the ignorance in that state of the difference of beef, veal, &c.--it is all attention. Your ideas being shut, other images arise which you must _attend to_, it being the habit of a _seeing_ man to attend chiefly to _sight_. So close your eyes, (and) you attend to the ideal images, and, attending to them, you abstract your _attention_. It is the same when deeply thinking in a reverie, you no longer hear distinct sound made to you. But what a strange inference that there were no sounds!

[Sidenote: ST. COLUMBA]

I love St. Combe or Columba and he shall be my saint. For he is not in the Catalogue of Romish Saints, having never been canonised at Rome, and because this Apostle of the Picts lived and gave his name to an island on the Hebrides, and from him Switzerland was christianised.

[Sidenote: EXPERIENCE AND BOOK KNOWLEDGE Midnight, April 5, 1805]

"I will write," I said, "as truly as I can from experience, actual individual experience, not from book-knowledge." But yet it is wonderful how exactly the knowledge from good books coincides with the experience of men of the world. How often, when I was younger, have I noticed the deep delight of men of the world who have taken late in life to literature, on coming across a pa.s.sage the force of which had either escaped me altogether, or which I knew to be true from books only and at second hand! Experience is necessary, no doubt, if only to give a light and shade in the mind, to give to some one idea a greater vividness than to others, and thereby to make it a _Thing_ of _Time_ and actual reality. For all ideas being equally vivid, the whole becomes a dream.

But, notwithstanding this and other reasons, I yet believe that the saws against book-knowledge are handed down to us from times when books conveyed only abstract science or abstract morality and religion.

Whereas, in the present day, what is there of real life, in all its goings on, trades, manufactures, high life, low life, animate and inanimate that is not to be found in books? In these days books are conversation. And this, I know, is for evil as well as good, but for good, too, as well as evil.

[Sidenote: DUTY AND SELF INTEREST Sunday morning 4 o'clock, April 7, 1805]

How feebly, how unlike an English c.o.c.k, that c.o.c.k crows and the other answers! Did I not particularly notice the _un_likeness on my first arrival at Malta? Well, to-day I will disburthen my mind. Yet one thing strikes me, the difference I find in myself during the past year or two.

My enthusiasm for the happiness of mankind in particular places and countries, and my eagerness to promote it, seems to decrease, and my sense of duty, my hauntings of conscience, from any stain of thought or action to increase in the same ratio. I remember having written a strong letter to my most dear and honoured Wordsworth in consequence of his "Ode to Duty," and in that letter explained this as the effect of selfness in a mind incapable of gross self-interest--I mean, the decrease of hope and joy, the soul in its round and round flight forming narrower circles, till at every gyre its wings beat against the _personal self_. But let me examine this more accurately. It may be that the phenomena will come out more honourable to our nature.