views and opinions was attributed to a personal interview which he
had had a little before his death with Mr. Burke, at his house at
Beaconsfield. In the latter end of the year 1796, appeared the _Regicide
Peace_, from the pen of the great apostate from liberty and betrayer of
his species into the hands of those who claimed it as their property
by divine right--a work imposing, solid in many respects, abounding in
facts and admirable reasoning, and in which all flashy ornaments were
laid aside for a testamentary gravity, (the eloquence of despair
resembling the throes and heaving and muttered threats of an earthquake,
rather than the loud thunder-bolt)--and soon after came out a criticism
on it in _The Monthly Review_, doing justice to the author and the
style, and combating the inferences with force and at much length; but
with candour and with respect, amounting to deference. It was new to Mr.
Burke not to be called names by persons of the opposite party; it was
an additional triumph to him to be spoken well of, to be loaded with
well-earned praise by the author of the _Vindiciæ Gallicæ_. It was a
testimony from an old, a powerful, and an admired antagonist.[B] He sent
an invitation to the writer to come and see him; and in the course of
three days' animated discussion of such subjects, Mr. Mackintosh became
a convert not merely to the graces and gravity of Mr. Burke's style, but
to the liberality of his views, and the solidity of his opinions.--The
Lincoln's-Inn Lectures were the fruit of this interview: such is the
influence exercised by men of genius and imaginative power over those
who have nothing to oppose to their unforeseen flashes of thought and
invention, but the dry, cold, formal deductions of the understanding.
Our politician had time, during a few years of absence from his native
country, and while the din of war and the cries of party-spirit "were
lost over a wide and unhearing ocean," to recover from his surprise and
from a temporary alienation of mind; and to return in spirit, and in the
mild and mellowed maturity of age, to the principles and attachments of
his early life.
The appointment of Sir James Mackintosh to a Judgeship in India was one,
which, however flattering to his vanity or favourable to his interests,
was entirely foreign to his feelings and habits. It was an honourable
exile. He was out of his element among black slaves and sepoys, and
Nabobs and cadets, and writers to India. He had no one to exchange ideas
with. The "unbought grace of life," the charm of literary conversation
was gone. It was the habit of his mind, his ruling passion to enter into
the shock and conflict of opinions on philosophical, political, and
critical questions--not to dictate to raw tyros or domineer over persons
in subordinate situations--but to obtain the guerdon and the laurels of
superior sense and information by meeting with men of equal standing, to
have a fair field pitched, to argue, to distinguish, to reply, to
hunt down the game of intellect with eagerness and skill, to push an
advantage, to cover a retreat, to give and take a fall--
"And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach."
It is no wonder that this sort of friendly intellectual gladiatorship is
Sir James's greatest pleasure, for it is his peculiar _forte_. He has
not many equals, and scarcely any superior in it. He is too indolent for
an author; too unimpassioned for an orator: but in society he is just
vain enough to be pleased with immediate attention, good-humoured
enough to listen with patience to others, with great coolness and
self-possession, fluent, communicative, and with a manner equally free
from violence and insipidity. Few subjects can be started, on which he
is not qualified to appear to advantage as the gentleman and scholar. If
there is some tinge of pedantry, it is carried off by great affability
of address and variety of amusing and interesting topics. There is
scarce an author that he has not read; a period of history that he is
not conversant with; a celebrated name of which he has not a number of
anecdotes to relate; an intricate question that he is not prepared
to enter upon in a popular or scientific manner. If an opinion in an
abstruse metaphysical author is referred to, he is probably able to
repeat the passage by heart, can tell the side of the page on which it
is to be met with, can trace it back through various descents to Locke,
Hobbes, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, to a place in some obscure folio of
the School-men or a note in one of the commentators on Aristotle or
Plato, and thus give you in a few moments' space, and without any effort
or previous notice, a chronological table of the progress of the human
mind in that particular branch of inquiry. There is something, we think,
perfectly admirable and delightful in an exhibition of this kind, and
which is equally creditable to the speaker and gratifying to the hearer.
But this kind of talent was of no use in India: the intellectual wares,
of which the Chief Judge delighted to make a display, were in no request
there. He languished after the friends and the society he had left
behind; and wrote over incessantly for books from England. One that was
sent him at this time was an _Essay on the Principles of Human Action_;
and the way in which he spoke of that dry, tough, metaphysical
_choke-pear_, shewed the dearth of intellectual intercourse in which he
lived, and the craving in his mind after those studies which had once
been his pride, and to which he still turned for consolation in his
remote solitude.--Perhaps to another, the novelty of the scene, the
differences of mind and manners might have atoned for a want of social
and literary _agrèmens_: but Sir James is one of those who see nature
through the spectacles of books. He might like to read an account of
India; but India itself with its burning, shining face would be a mere
blank, an endless waste to him. To persons of this class of mind things
must be translated into words, visible images into abstract propositions
to meet their refined apprehensions, and they have no more to say to a
matter-of-fact staring them in the face without a label in its mouth,
than they would to a hippopotamus!--We may add, before we quit this
point, that we cannot conceive of any two persons more different in
colloquial talents, in which they both excel, than Sir James Mackintosh
and Mr. Coleridge. They have nearly an equal range of reading and of
topics of conversation: but in the mind of the one we see nothing but
_fixtures_, in the other every thing is fluid. The ideas of the one
are as formal and tangible, as those of the other are shadowy and
evanescent. Sir James Mackintosh walks over the ground, Mr. Coleridge is
always flying off from it. The first knows all that has been said upon
a subject; the last has something to say that was never said before. If
the one deals too much in learned _common-places_, the other teems with
idle fancies. The one has a good deal of the _caput mortuum_ of genius,
the other is all volatile salt. The conversation of Sir James Mackintosh
has the effect of reading a well-written book, that of his friend
is like hearing a bewildered dream. The one is an Encyclopedia of
knowledge, the other is a succession of _Sybilline Leaves_!
As an author, Sir James Mackintosh may claim the foremost rank among
those who pride themselves on artificial ornaments and acquired
learning, or who write what may be termed a _composite_ style. His
_Vindciae Gallicae_ is a work of great labour, great ingenuity, great
brilliancy, and great vigour. It is a little too antithetical in the
structure of its periods, too dogmatical in the announcement of its
opinions. Sir James has, we believe, rejected something of the
_false brilliant_ of the one, as he has retracted some of the abrupt
extravagance of the other. We apprehend, however, that our author is not
one of those who draw from their own resources and accumulated feelings,
or who improve with age. He belongs to a class (common in Scotland
and elsewhere) who get up school-exercises on any given subject in
a masterly manner at twenty, and who at forty are either where they
were--or retrograde, if they are men of sense and modesty. The reason
is, their vanity is weaned, after the first hey-day and animal spirits
of youth are flown, from making an affected display of knowledge, which,
however useful, is not their own, and may be much more simply stated;
they are tired of repeating the same arguments over and over again,
after having exhausted and rung the changes on their whole stock for a
number of times. Sir James Mackintosh is understood to be a writer in
the Edinburgh Review; and the articles attributed to him there are full
of matter of great pith and moment. But they want the trim, pointed
expression, the ambitious ornaments, the ostentatious display and rapid
volubility of his early productions. We have heard it objected to his
later compositions, that his style is good as far as single words and
phrases are concerned, but that his sentences are clumsy and disjointed,
and that these make up still more awkward and sprawling paragraphs. This
is a nice criticism, and we cannot speak to its truth: but if the fact
be so, we think we can account for it from the texture and obvious
process of the author's mind. All his ideas may be said to be given
preconceptions. They do not arise, as it were, out of the subject, or
out of one another at the moment, and therefore do not flow naturally
and gracefully from one another. They have been laid down beforehand in
a sort of formal division or frame-work of the understanding; and the
connexion between the premises and the conclusion, between one branch
of a subject and another, is made out in a bungling and unsatisfactory
manner. There is no principle of fusion in the work: he strikes after
the iron is cold, and there is a want of malleability in the style. Sir
James is at present said to be engaged in writing a _History of England_
after the downfall of the house of Stuart. May it be worthy of the
talents of the author, and of the principles of the period it is
intended to illustrate!
[Footnote A: The late Rev. Joseph Fawcett, of Walthamstow.]
[Footnote B: At the time when the _Vindiciae Gallicae_ first made its
appearance, as a reply to the _Reflections on the French Revolution_, it
was cried up by the partisans of the new school, as a work superior in
the charms of composition to its redoubted rival: in acuteness, depth,
and soundness of reasoning, of course there was supposed to be no
comparison.]
* * * * *
MR. WORDSWORTH.
Mr. Wordsworth's genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age.
Had he lived in any other period of the world, he would never have been
heard of. As it is, he has some difficulty to contend with the hebetude
of his intellect, and the meanness of his subject. With him "lowliness
is young ambition's ladder:" but he finds it a toil to climb in this way
the steep of Fame. His homely Muse can hardly raise her wing from the
ground, nor spread her hidden glories to the sun. He has "no figures nor
no fantasies, which busy _passion_ draws in the brains of men:" neither
the gorgeous machinery of mythologic lore, nor the splendid colours of
poetic diction. His style is vernacular: he delivers household truths.
He sees nothing loftier than human hopes; nothing deeper than the human
heart. This he probes, this he tampers with, this he poises, with all
its incalculable weight of thought and feeling, in his hands; and at the
same time calms the throbbing pulses of his own heart, by keeping his
eye ever fixed on the face of nature. If he can make the life-blood flow
from the wounded breast, this is the living colouring with which he
paints his verse: if he can assuage the pain or close up the wound with
the balm of solitary musing, or the healing power of plants and herbs
and "skyey influences," this is the sole triumph of his art. He takes
the simplest elements of nature and of the human mind, the mere abstract
conditions inseparable from our being, and tries to compound a new
system of poetry from them; and has perhaps succeeded as well as any one
could. "_Nihil humani a me alienum puto_"--is the motto of his works. He
thinks nothing low or indifferent of which this can be affirmed: every
thing that professes to be more than this, that is not an absolute
essence of truth and feeling, he holds to be vitiated, false, and
spurious. In a word, his poetry is founded on setting up an opposition
(and pushing it to the utmost length) between the natural and the
artificial: between the spirit of humanity, and the spirit of fashion
and of the world!
It is one of the innovations of the time. It partakes of, and is carried
along with, the revolutionary movement of our age: the political changes
of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical
experiments. His Muse (it cannot be denied, and without this we cannot
explain its character at all) is a levelling one. It proceeds on a
principle of equality, and strives to reduce all things to the same
standard. It is distinguished by a proud humility. It relies upon its
own resources, and disdains external shew and relief. It takes the
commonest events and objects, as a test to prove that nature is always
interesting from its inherent truth and beauty, without any of the
ornaments of dress or pomp of circumstances to set it off. Hence the
unaccountable mixture of seeming simplicity and real abstruseness in the
_Lyrical Ballads_. Fools have laughed at, wise men scarcely understand
them. He takes a subject or a story merely as pegs or loops to hang
thought and feeling on; the incidents are trifling, in proportion to
his contempt for imposing appearances; the reflections are profound,
according to the gravity and the aspiring pretensions of his mind. His
popular, inartificial style gets rid (at a blow) of all the trappings
of verse, of all the high places of poetry: "the cloud-capt towers, the
solemn temples, the gorgeous palaces," are swept to the ground, and
"like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wreck behind."
All the traditions of learning, all the superstitions of age, are
obliterated and effaced. We begin _de novo_, on a _tabula rasa_ of
poetry. The purple pall, the nodding plume of tragedy are exploded as
mere pantomime and trick, to return to the simplicity of truth and
nature. Kings, queens, priests, nobles, the altar and the throne, the
distinctions of rank, birth, wealth, power, "the judge's robe, the
marshall's truncheon, the ceremony that to great ones 'longs," are not
to be found here. The author tramples on the pride of art with greater
pride. The Ode and Epode, the Strophe and the Antistrophe, he laughs to
scorn. The harp of Homer, the trump of Pindar and of Alcaeus are still.
The decencies of costume, the decorations of vanity are stripped off
without mercy as barbarous, idle, and Gothic. The jewels in the crisped
hair, the diadem on the polished brow are thought meretricious,
theatrical, vulgar; and nothing contents his fastidious taste beyond
a simple garland of flowers. Neither does he avail himself of the
advantages which nature or accident holds out to him. He chooses to have
his subject a foil to his invention, to owe nothing but to himself. He
gathers manna in the wilderness, he strikes the barren rock for the
gushing moisture. He elevates the mean by the strength of his own
aspirations; he clothes the naked with beauty and grandeur from the
store of his own recollections. No cypress-grove loads his verse with
perfumes: but his imagination lends a sense of joy
"To the bare trees and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field."
No storm, no shipwreck startles us by its horrors: but the rainbow lifts
its head in the cloud, and the breeze sighs through the withered fern.
No sad vicissitude of fate, no overwhelming catastrophe in nature
deforms his page: but the dew-drop glitters on the bending flower, the
tear collects in the glistening eye.
"Beneath the hills, along the flowery vales,
The generations are prepared; the pangs,
The internal pangs are ready; the dread strife
Of poor humanity's afflicted will,
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny."
As the lark ascends from its low bed on fluttering wing, and salutes the
morning skies; so Mr. Wordsworth's unpretending Muse, in russet guise,
scales the summits of reflection, while it makes the round earth its
footstool, and its home!
Possibly a good deal of this may be regarded as the effect of
disappointed views and an inverted ambition. Prevented by native pride
and indolence from climbing the ascent of learning or greatness, taught
by political opinions to say to the vain pomp and glory of the world, "I
hate ye," seeing the path of classical and artificial poetry blocked up
by the cumbrous ornaments of style and turgid _common-places_, so
that nothing more could be achieved in that direction but by the most
ridiculous bombast or the tamest servility; he has turned back partly
from the bias of his mind, partly perhaps from a judicious policy--has
struck into the sequestered vale of humble life, sought out the Muse
among sheep-cotes and hamlets and the peasant's mountain-haunts, has
discarded all the tinsel pageantry of verse, and endeavoured (not in
vain) to aggrandise the trivial and add the charm of novelty to the
familiar. No one has shewn the same imagination in raising trifles into
importance: no one has displayed the same pathos in treating of the
simplest feelings of the heart. Reserved, yet haughty, having no unruly
or violent passions, (or those passions having been early suppressed,)
Mr. Wordsworth has passed his life in solitary musing, or in daily
converse with the face of nature. He exemplifies in an eminent degree
the power of _association_; for his poetry has no other source or
character. He has dwelt among pastoral scenes, till each object has
become connected with a thousand feelings, a link in the chain of
thought, a fibre of his own heart. Every one is by habit and familiarity
strongly attached to the place of his birth, or to objects that recal
the most pleasing and eventful circumstances of his life. But to the
author of the _Lyrical Ballads_, nature is a kind of home; and he may be
said to take a personal interest in the universe. There is no image so
insignificant that it has not in some mood or other found the way into
his heart: no sound that does not awaken the memory of other years.--
"To him the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
The daisy looks up to him with sparkling eye as an old acquaintance:
the cuckoo haunts him with sounds of early youth not to be expressed: a
linnet's nest startles him with boyish delight: an old withered thorn is
weighed down with a heap of recollections: a grey cloak, seen on some
wild moor, torn by the wind, or drenched in the rain, afterwards becomes
an object of imagination to him: even the lichens on the rock have a
life and being in his thoughts. He has described all these objects in a
way and with an intensity of feeling that no one else had done before
him, and has given a new view or aspect of nature. He is in this sense
the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the
least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere. The vulgar do
not read them, the learned, who see all things through books, do not
understand them, the great despise, the fashionable may ridicule them:
but the author has created himself an interest in the heart of the
retired and lonely student of nature, which can never die. Persons
of this class will still continue to feel what he has felt: he has
expressed what they might in vain wish to express, except with
glistening eye and faultering tongue! There is a lofty philosophic tone,
a thoughtful humanity, infused into his pastoral vein. Remote from the
passions and events of the great world, he has communicated interest and
dignity to the primal movements of the heart of man, and ingrafted his
own conscious reflections on the casual thoughts of hinds and shepherds.
Nursed amidst the grandeur of mountain scenery, he has stooped to have
a nearer view of the daisy under his feet, or plucked a branch of
white-thorn from the spray: but in describing it, his mind seems imbued
with the majesty and solemnity of the objects around him--the tall rock
lifts its head in the erectness of his spirit; the cataract roars in the
sound of his verse; and in its dim and mysterious meaning, the mists
seem to gather in the hollows of Helvellyn, and the forked Skiddaw
hovers in the distance. There is little mention of mountainous scenery
in Mr. Wordsworth's poetry; but by internal evidence one might be almost
sure that it was written in a mountainous country, from its bareness,
its simplicity, its loftiness and its depth!
His later philosophic productions have a somewhat different character.
They are a departure from, a dereliction of his first principles. They
are classical and courtly. They are polished in style, without being
gaudy; dignified in subject, without affectation. They seem to have
been composed not in a cottage at Grasmere, but among the half-inspired
groves and stately recollections of Cole-Orton. We might allude in
particular, for examples of what we mean, to the lines on a Picture by
Claude Lorraine, and to the exquisite poem, entitled _Laodamia_. The
last of these breathes the pure spirit of the finest fragments of
antiquity--the sweetness, the gravity, the strength, the beauty and the
langour of death--
"Calm contemplation and majestic pains."
Its glossy brilliancy arises from the perfection of the finishing, like
that of careful sculpture, not from gaudy colouring--the texture of the
thoughts has the smoothness and solidity of marble. It is a poem that
might be read aloud in Elysium, and the spirits of departed heroes and
sages would gather round to listen to it! Mr. Wordsworth's philosophic
poetry, with a less glowing aspect and less tumult in the veins than
Lord Byron's on similar occasions, bends a calmer and keener eye
on mortality; the impression, if less vivid, is more pleasing and
permanent; and we confess it (perhaps it is a want of taste and proper
feeling) that there are lines and poems of our author's, that we think
of ten times for once that we recur to any of Lord Byron's. Or if there
are any of the latter's writings, that we can dwell upon in the same
way, that is, as lasting and heart-felt sentiments, it is when laying
aside his usual pomp and pretension, he descends with Mr. Wordsworth to
the common ground of a disinterested humanity. It may be considered
as characteristic of our poet's writings, that they either make no
impression on the mind at all, seem mere _nonsense-verses_, or that they
leave a mark behind them that never wears out. They either
"Fall blunted from the indurated breast"--
without any perceptible result, or they absorb it like a passion. To
one class of readers he appears sublime, to another (and we fear the
largest) ridiculous. He has probably realised Milton's wish,--"and fit
audience found, though few:" but we suspect he is not reconciled to the
alternative. There are delightful passages in the EXCURSION, both of
natural description and of inspired reflection (passages of the latter
kind that in the sound of the thoughts and of the swelling language
resemble heavenly symphonies, mournful _requiems_ over the grave of
human hopes); but we must add, in justice and in sincerity, that we
think it impossible that this work should ever become popular, even in
the same degree as the _Lyrical Ballads_. It affects a system without
having any intelligible clue to one; and instead of unfolding a
principle in various and striking lights, repeats the same conclusions
till they become flat and insipid. Mr. Wordsworth's mind is obtuse,
except as it is the organ and the receptacle of accumulated feelings:
it is not analytic, but synthetic; it is reflecting, rather than
theoretical. The EXCURSION, we believe, fell stillborn from the press.
There was something abortive, and clumsy, and ill-judged in the attempt.
It was long and laboured. The personages, for the most part, were low,
the fare rustic: the plan raised expectations which were not fulfilled,
and the effect was like being ushered into a stately hall and invited
to sit down to a splendid banquet in the company of clowns, and with
nothing but successive courses of apple-dumplings served up. It was not
even _toujours perdrix_!