in all parts having some, I felt it to be impossible that I should
familiarly associate with those who had none at all; not so much as a
mere historical knowledge of the literature in its capital names and
their chronological succession. Do I mention this in disparagement of
Oxford? By no means. Among the undergraduates of higher standing, and
occasionally, perhaps, of my own, I have since learned that many might
have been found eminently accomplished in this particular. But seniors
do not seek after juniors; they must be sought; and, with my previous
bias to solitude, a bias equally composed of impulses and motives, I had
no disposition to take trouble in seeking any man for any purpose.
But, on this subject, a fact still remains to be told, of which I am
justly proud; and it will serve, beyond anything else that I can say, to
measure the degree of my intellectual development. On coming to Oxford,
I had taken up one position in advance of my age by full thirty years:
that appreciation of Wordsworth, which it has taken full thirty years to
establish amongst the public, I had already made, and had made operative
to my own intellectual culture in the same year when I clandestinely
quitted school. Already, in 1802, I had addressed a letter of fervent
admiration to Mr. Wordsworth. I did not send it until the spring of
1803; and, from misdirection, it did not come into his hands for some
months. But I had an answer from Mr. Wordsworth before I was eighteen;
and that my letter was thought to express the homage of an enlightened
admirer, may be inferred from the fact that his answer was long and
full. On this anecdote I do not mean to dwell; but I cannot allow the
reader to overlook the circumstances of the case. At this day, it is
true, no journal can be taken up which does not habitually speak of Mr.
Wordsworth as of a great if not _the_ great poet of the age. Mr. Bulwer,
living in the intensest pressure of the world, and, though recoiling
continually from the judgments of the world, yet never in any violent
degree, ascribes to Mr. Wordsworth (in his _England and the English_,
p. 308) "an influence of a more noble and purely intellectual character,
than _any_ writer of our age or nation has exercised." Such is the
opinion held of this great poet in 1835; but what were those of
1805-15,--nay, of 1825? For twenty years after the date of that letter
to Mr. Wordsworth above referred to, language was exhausted, ingenuity
was put on the rack, in the search after images and expressions vile
enough--insolent enough--to convey the unutterable contempt avowed for
all that he had written, by the fashionable critics. One critic--who
still, I believe, edits a rather popular journal, and who belongs to
that class, feeble, fluttering, ingenious, who make it their highest
ambition not to lead, but, with a slave's adulation, to obey and to
follow all the caprices of the public mind--described Mr. Wordsworth
as resembling, in the quality of his mind, an old nurse babbling in her
paralytic dotage to sucking babies. If this insult was peculiarly felt
by Mr. Wordsworth, it was on a consideration of the unusual imbecility
of him who offered it, and not because in itself it was baser or more
insolent than the language held by the majority of journalists who then
echoed the public voice. _Blackwood's Magazine_ (1817) first accustomed
the public ear to the language of admiration coupled with the name of
Wordsworth. This began with Professor Wilson; and well I remember--nay,
the proofs are still easy to hunt up--that, for eight or ten years, this
singularity of opinion, having no countenance from other journals, was
treated as a whim, a paradox, a bold extravagance, of the _Blackwood_
critics. Mr. Wordsworth's neighbors in Westmoreland, who had (generally
speaking) a profound contempt for him, used to rebut the testimony of
_Blackwood_ by one constant reply--"Ay, _Blackwood_ praises Wordsworth,
but who else praises him?" In short, up to 1820, the name of Wordsworth
was trampled under foot; from 1820 to 1830, it was militant; from 1830
to 1835, it has been triumphant. In 1803, when I entered at Oxford, that
name was absolutely unknown; and the finger of scorn, pointed at it in
1802 by the first or second number of the _Edinburgh Review_, failed
to reach its mark from absolute defect of knowledge in the public
mind. Some fifty beside myself knew who was meant by "that poet who had
cautioned his friend against growing double," etc.; to all others it was
a profound secret.
These things must be known and understood properly to value the
prophetic eye and the intrepidity of two persons, like Professor Wilson
and myself, who, in 1802-3, attached themselves to a banner not yet
raised and planted; who outran, in fact, their contemporaries by one
entire generation; and did _that_ about 1802 which the rest of the world
are doing in chorus about 1832.
Professor Wilson's period at Oxford exactly coincided with my own; yet,
in that large world, we never met. I know, therefore, but little of his
policy in regard to such opinions or feelings as tended to dissociate
him from the mass of his coevals. This only I know, that he lived as it
were in public; and must, therefore, I presume, have practised a
studied reserve as to his deepest admirations; and, perhaps, at that day
(1803-8) the occasions would be rare in which much dissimulation would
be needed. Until Lord Byron had begun to pilfer from Wordsworth and to
abuse him, allusions to Wordsworth were not frequent in conversation;
and it was chiefly on occasion of some question arising about poetry
in general, or about the poets of the day, that it became difficult to
dissemble. For my part, hating the necessity for dissimulation as much
as the dissimulation itself, I drew from this peculiarity also of my own
mind a fresh reinforcement of my other motives for sequestering myself;
and, for the first two years of my residence in Oxford, I compute that I
did not utter one hundred words.
I remember distinctly the first (which happened also to be the last)
conversation that I ever held with my tutor. It consisted of three
sentences, two of which fell to his share, one to mine. On a fine
morning, he met me in the Quadrangle, and, having then no guess of
the nature of my pretensions, he determined (I suppose) to probe them.
Accordingly, he asked me, "What I had been lately reading?" Now, the
fact was, that I, at that time immersed in metaphysics, had really been
reading and studying very closely the _Parmenides_, of which obscure
work some Oxford men, early in the last century, published a separate
edition. Yet, so profound was the benignity of my nature, that, in those
days, I could not bear to witness, far less to cause, the least pain or
mortification to any human being. I recoiled, indeed, from the society
of most men, but not with any feelings of dislike. On the contrary, in
order that I _might_ like all men, I wished to associate with none. Now,
then, to have mentioned the _Parmenides_ to one who, fifty thousand to
one, was a perfect stranger to its whole drift and purpose, looked too
_méchant_, too like a trick of malice, in an age when such reading was
so very unusual. I felt that it would be taken for an express stratagem
for stopping my tutor's mouth. All this passing rapidly through my mind,
I replied, without hesitation, that I had been reading Paley. My tutor's
rejoinder I have never forgotten: "Ah! an excellent author; excellent
for his matter; only you must be on your guard as to his style; he is
very vicious _there_." Such was the colloquy; we bowed, parted, and
never more (I apprehend) exchanged one word. Now, trivial and trite as
this comment on Paley may appear to the reader, it struck me forcibly
that more falsehood, or more absolute falsehood, or more direct
inversion of the truth, could not, by any artifice of ingenuity, have
been crowded into one short sentence. Paley, as a philosopher, is a
jest, the disgrace of the age; and, as regards the two universities,
and the enormous responsibility they undertake for the books which they
sanction by their official examinations for degrees, the name of Paley
is their great opprobrium. But, on the other hand, for style, Paley is
a master. Homely, racy, vernacular English, the rustic vigor of a style
which intentionally foregoes the graces of polish on the one hand, and
of scholastic precision on the other--that quality of merit has never
been attained in a degree so eminent. This first interchange of
thought upon a topic of literature did not tend to slacken my previous
disposition to retreat into solitude; a solitude, however, which at no
time was tainted with either the moroseness or the pride of a cynic.
Neither must the reader suppose that, even in that day, I belonged to
the party who disparage the classical writers, or the classical training
of the great English schools. The Greek drama I loved and revered. But,
to deal frankly, because it is a subject which I shall hereafter
bring before the public, I made great distinctions. I was not that
indiscriminate admirer of Greek and Roman literature, which those too
generally are who admire it at all. This protesting spirit, against
a false and blind idolatry, was with me, at that time, a matter of
enthusiasm--almost of bigotry. I was a bigot against bigots. Let us take
the Greek oratory, for example:--What section of the Greek literature is
more fanatically exalted, and studiously in depreciation of our own? Let
us judge of the sincerity at the base of these hollow affectations, by
the downright facts and the producible records. To admire, in any sense
which can give weight and value to your admiration, presupposes, I
presume, some acquaintance with its object. As the earliest title to
an opinion, one way or other, of the Greek eloquence, we ought to have
studied some of its most distinguished artists; or, say _one_, at least;
and this one, we may be sure, will be, as it ought to be, Demosthenes.
Now, it is a fact, that all the copies of Demosthenes sold within the
last hundred years would not meet the demand of one considerable town,
were that orator a subject of study amongst even classical scholars. I
doubt whether, at this day, there exist twenty men in Europe who can be
said to have even once read Demosthenes; and, therefore, it was that,
when Mr. Mitford, in his "History of Greece," took a new view of this
orator's political administration--a view which lowered his character
for integrity--he found an unresisting acceder to his doctrines in a
public having no previous opinion upon the subject, and, therefore, open
to any casual impression of malice or rash judgment. Had there been
any acquaintance with the large remains which we still possess of this
famous orator, no such wrong could have been done. I, from my childhood,
had been a reader, nay, a student of Demosthenes; and, simply, for
this reason, that, having meditated profoundly on the true laws and
philosophy of diction, and of what is vaguely denominated style, and
finding nothing of any value in modern writers upon this subject, and
not much as regards the grounds and ultimate principles even in the
ancient rhetoricians, I have been reduced to collect my opinions from
the great artists and practitioners, rather than from the theorists;
and, among those artists, in the most plastic of languages, I hold
Demosthenes to have been the greatest.
The Greek is, beyond comparison, the most plastic of languages. It was
a material which bent to the purposes of him who used it beyond the
material of other languages; it was an instrument for a larger compass
of modulations; and it happens that the peculiar theme of an orator
imposes the very largest which is consistent with a prose diction. One
step further in passion, and the orator would become a poet. An orator
can exhaust the capacities of a language--an historian, never.
Moreover, the age of Demosthenes was, in my judgment, the age of highest
development for arts dependent upon social refinement. That generation
had fixed and ascertained the use of words; whereas, the previous
generation of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, &c., was a transitional
period: the language was still moving, and tending to a meridian not
yet attained; and the public eye had been directed consciously upon
language, as in and for itself an organ of intellectual delight, for too
short a time, to have mastered the whole art of managing its resources.
All these were reasons for studying Demosthenes, as the one great model
and standard of Attic prose; and, studied him I _had_, more than any
other prose writer whatever. _Paripassu_, I had become sensible that
others had _not_ studied him. One monotonous song of applause I found
raised on every side; something about being "like a torrent, that
carries everything before it." This original image is all we get in the
shape of criticism; and never any attempt even at illustrating what
is greatest in him, or characterizing what is most peculiar. The same
persons who discovered that Lord Brougham was the modern Bacon have also
complimented him with the title of the English Demosthenes. Upon this
hint, Lord Brougham, in his address to the Glasgow students, has deluged
the great Athenian with wordy admiration. There is an obvious prudence
in lodging your praise upon an object from which you count upon a
rebound to yourself. But here, as everywhere else, you look in vain for
any marks or indications of a personal and _direct_ acquaintance with
the original orations. The praise is built rather upon the popular idea
of Demosthenes, than upon the real Demosthenes. And not only so, but
even upon style itself, and upon the art of composition _in
abstracto_, Lord Brougham does not seem to have formed any clear
conceptions--principles he has none. Now, it is useless to judge of
an artist until you have some principles on the art. The two capital
secrets in the art of prose composition are these: 1st, The philosophy
of transition and connection, or the art by which one step in an
evolution of thought is made to arise out of another: all fluent and
effective composition depends on the _connections_; --2dly, The way in
which sentences are made to modify each other; for, the most powerful
effects in written eloquence arise out of this reverberation, as it
were, from each other in a rapid succession of sentences; and, because
some limitation is necessary to the length and complexity of sentences,
in order to make this interdependency felt, hence it is that the Germans
have no eloquence. The construction of German prose tends to such
immoderate length of sentences, that no effect of intermodification can
ever be apparent. Each sentence, stuffed with innumerable clauses of
restriction, and other parenthetical circumstances, becomes a separate
section--an independent whole. But, without insisting on Lord Brougham's
oversights, or errors of defect, I will digress a moment to one positive
caution of his, which will measure the value of his philosophy on this
subject. He lays it down for a rule of indefinite application, that the
Saxon part of our English idiom is to be favored at the expense of that
part which has so happily coalesced with the language from the Latin
or Greek. This fancy, often patronized by other writers, and even acted
upon, resembles that restraint which some metrical writers have imposed
upon themselves--of writing a long copy of verses, from which some
particular letter, or from each line of which some different letter,
should be carefully excluded. What followed? Was the reader sensible, in
the practical effect upon his ear, of any beauty attained? By no
means; all the difference, sensibly perceived, lay in the occasional
constraints and affectations to which the writer had been driven by his
self-imposed necessities. The same chimera exists in Germany; and so
much further is it carried, that one great puritan in this heresy (Wolf)
has published a vast dictionary, the rival of Adelung's, for the purpose
of expelling every word of foreign origin and composition out of the
language, by assigning some equivalent term spun out from pure native
Teutonic materials. _Bayonet_, for example, is patriotically rejected,
because a word may be readily compounded tantamount to _musket-dirk_;
and this sort of composition thrives showily in the German, as a
language running into composition with a fusibility only surpassed by
the Greek.
But what good purpose is attained by such caprices? In three sentences
the sum of the philosophy may be stated. It has been computed (see
_Duclos_) that the Italian opera has not above six hundred words in its
whole vocabulary: so narrow is the range of its emotions, and so little
are these emotions disposed to expand themselves into any variety of
thinking. The same remark applies to that class of simple, household,
homely passion, which belongs to the early ballad poetry. Their passion
is of a quality more venerable, it is true, and deeper than that of the
opera, because more permanent and coextensive with human life; but it
is not much wider in its sphere, nor more apt to coalesce with
contemplative or philosophic thinking. Pass from these narrow fields of
the intellect, where the relations of the objects are so few and simple,
and the whole prospect so bounded, to the immeasurable and sea-like
arena upon which Shakspeare careers--co-infinite with life itself--yes,
and with something more than life. Here is the other pole, the opposite
extreme. And what is the choice of diction? What is the _lexis_? Is it
Saxon exclusively, or is it Saxon by preference? So far from that, the
Latinity is intense--not, indeed, in his construction, but in his choice
of words; and so continually are these Latin words used, with a critical
respect to their earliest (and, where _that_ happens to have existed, to
their unfigurative) meaning, that, upon this one argument I would
rely for upsetting the else impregnable thesis of Dr. Farmer as to
Shakspeare's learning. Nay, I will affirm that, out of this regard to
the Latin acceptation of Latin words, may be absolutely explained the
Shakspearian meaning of certain words, which has hitherto baffled all
his critics. For instance, the word _modern_, of which Dr. Johnson
professes himself unable to explain the _rationale_ or principle
regulating its Shakspearian use, though he felt its value, it is to
be deduced thus: First of all, change the pronunciation a little, by
substituting for the short _o_, as we pronounce it in _modern_, the
long _o_, as heard in _modish_, and you will then, perhaps, perceive
the process of analogy by which it passed into the Shakspearian use.
The _matter_ or substance of a thing is, usually, so much more important
than its fashion or _manner_, that we have hence adopted, as one way
for expressing what is important as opposed to what is trivial, the word
_material_. Now, by parity of reason, we are entitled to invert this
order, and to express what is unimportant by some word indicating
the mere fashion or external manner of an object as opposed to its
substance. This is effected by the word _modal_ or _modern_, as
the adjective from _modus_, a fashion or manner; and in that sense
Shakspeare employs the word. Thus, Cleopatra, undervaluing to Caesar's
agent the bijouterie which she has kept back from inventory, and which
her treacherous steward had betrayed, describes them as mere trifles
"Such gifts as we greet modern friends withal;"
where all commentators have _felt_ that modern must form the position,
mean, slight, and inconsiderable, though perplexed to say how it came
by such a meaning. A _modern_ friend is, in the Shakspearian sense, with
relation to a real and serviceable friend, that which the fashion of
a thing is, by comparison with its substance. But a still better
illustration may be taken from a common line, quoted every day, and
ludicrously misinterpreted. In the famous picture of life--"All the
world's a stage"--the justice of the piece is described as
"Full of wise saws and modern instances;"
which (_horrendum dictu!_) has been explained, and, I verily believe,
is generally understood to mean, _full of wise sayings and modern
illustrations_. The true meaning is--full of proverbial maxims of
conduct and of trivial arguments; that is, of petty distinctions,
or verbal disputes, such as never touch the point at issue. The word
_modern_ I have already deduced; the word _instances_ is equally Latin,
and equally used by Shakspeare in its Latin sense. It is originally
the word _instantia_, which, by the monkish and scholastic writers,
is uniformly used in the sense of an argument, and originally of an
argument urged in objection to some previous argument. [Footnote: I
cannot for a moment believe that the original and most eloquent critic
in _Blackwood_ is himself the dupe of an argument, which he has alleged
against this passage, under too open a hatred of Shakspeare, as though
it involved a contradiction to common sense, by representing _all_
human beings of such an age as school-boys, all of such another age as
soldiers, of such another as magistrates, &c. Evidently the logic of
the famous passage is this that whereas every age has its peculiar and
appropriate temper, that profession or employment is selected for the
exemplification which seems best fitted, in each case, to embody the
characteristic or predominating quality. Thus, because impetuosity,
self-esteem, and animal or irreflective courage, are qualities most
intense in youth, next it is considered in what profession those
qualities find their most unlimited range; and because that is obviously
the military profession, therefore it is that the soldier is selected as
the representative of young men. For the same reason, as best embodying
the peculiar temper of garrulous old age, the magistrate comes forward
as supporting the part of that age. Not that old men are not also
soldiers; but that the military profession, so far from strengthening,
moderates and tempers the characteristic temper of old age.]
I affirm, therefore, that Lord Brougham's counsel to the Glasgow
students is not only bad counsel,--and bad counsel for the result, as
well as for the grounds, which are either capricious or nugatory,--but
also that, in the exact proportion in which the range of thought
expands, it is an impossible counsel, an impracticable counsel--a
counsel having for its purpose to embarrass and lay the mind in fetters,
where even its utmost freedom and its largest resources will be
found all too little for the growing necessities of the intellect.
"Long-tailed words in _osity_ and _ation_!" What does _that_ describe?
Exactly the Latin part of our language. Now, those very terminations
speak for themselves:--All high abstractions end in _ation_; that is,
they are Latin; and, just in proportion as the abstracting power extends
and widens, do the circles of thought widen, and the horizon or boundary
(contradicting its own Grecian name) melts into the infinite. On this
account it was that Coleridge (_Biographia Literaria_) remarks on
Wordsworth's philosophical poetry, that, in proportion as it goes into
the profound of passion and of thought, do the words increase which
are vulgarly called "_dictionary_ words." Now, these words, these
"dictionary" words, what are they? Simply words of Latin or Greek
origin: no other words, no Saxon words, are ever called by illiterate
persons dictionary words. And these dictionary words are indispensable
to a writer, not only in the proportion by which he transcends other
writers as to extent and as to subtility of thinking, but also as to
elevation and sublimity. Milton was not an extensive or discursive
thinker, as Shakspeare was; for the motions of his mind were
slow, solemn, sequacious, like those of the planets; not agile and
assimilative; not attracting all things within its own sphere; not
multiform: repulsion was the law of his intellect--he moved in solitary
grandeur. Yet, merely from this quality of grandeur, unapproachable
grandeur, his intellect demanded a larger infusion of Latinity into his
diction.