Chapter 23
Section 23. SOUTHY AND PORSON. i suspect mr southey you are angry with me for the freedom with which i have spoken of your poetry and wordsworth's what could have induced you to imagine it mr professor You have indeed bent your eyes upon me, since we have been together, with somewhat of fierceness and defiance. I presume you fancied me to be a commentator. You wrong me in your belief that any opinion on my poetical works hath molested me, but you afford me more than compensation
in supposing me acutely sensible of injustice done to Wordsworth. If we must converse on these topics, we will converse on him. What man ever existed who spent a more inoffensive life or adorned it with nobler studies? I believe so, and they who attack him with virulence are men of as little morality as reflection. I have demonstrated that one of them, he who wrote the pursuits of literature, could not construe a Greek sentence or scan a verse, and I have fallen on the very index from
which he drew out his forlorn hope on the parade. This is incomparably the most impudent fellow I have met within the course of my reading, which has lain, you know, in a province where impudence is no rarity. I had visited a friend in King's Road when he entered. Have you seen the review? cried he. Worse than ever, I am resolved to insert a paragraph in the papers, declaring that I have no concern in the last number. Is it so very bad? said I quietly. Infamous, detestable, exclaimed he.
Sit down then, nobody will believe you, was my answer. Since that morning he has discovered that I drink harder than usual, that my faculties are wearing fast away, that once indeed I had some Greek in my head. But, he then claps the forefinger to the side of his nose, turns his eye slowly upward and looks compassionately and calmly. Come, Mr. Porson, grant him his merits. No critic is better contrived to make any work a monthly one, no writer more dexterous in giving a finishing touch.
The plagiary has a greater latitude of choice than we, and if he brings home a parsnip or turnip top when he could as easily have pocketed a nectarine or a pineapple, he must be a blockhead. I never heard the name of the pursuer of literature, who has little more merit in having stolen than he would have had if he had never stolen at all, and I have forgotten that other man's, who evinced his fitness to be the censor of our age by a translation of the most naked and impure satires of antiquity,
those of juvenile which owe their preservation to the partiality of the friars. I shall entertain an unfavourable opinion of him, if he has translated them well. Pray, has he? Indeed, I do not know. I read poets for their poetry, and to extract that nutriment of the intellect and of the heart which poetry should contain. I never listen to the swans of the cesspool, and must declare that nothing is heavier to me than rottenness and corruption.
You are right, sir, perfectly right. A translator of Juvenal would open a public drain, to look for a needle and may miss it my nose is not easily offended but i must have something to fill my belly come we will lay aside the scrip of the transpositor and the pouch of the pursuer in reserve for the days of unleavened bread and again if you please to the lakes and mountains now we are both in better humour i must bring you to a confession that in your friend wordsworth there is occasionally a little trash a haunch of venison would be trash to a brahmin a bottle of burgundy to the seraph of mecca we are guided by precept by habit by taste by constitution hitherto our sentiments on poetry have been delivered down to us from authority and if it can be demonstrated as i think it may be that the authority is inadequate and that the dictates are often inapplicable and often misinterpreted you will allow me to remove the cause out of court every man can see what is very bad in a poem almost every one can see what is good but you mr porson who have turned over all the volumes of all the commentators
will inform me whether i am right or wrong in asserting that no critic hath yet appeared who hath been able to fix or to discern the exact degrees of excellence above a certain point none the reason is because the eyes of no one have been upon a level with it supposing for the sake of argument the contest of her soed and homer to have taken place the judges who decided in favour of the worse and he indeed in the poetry has little merit may have been elegant wise and conscientious men their decision was in favour of that to the species of which they had been the most accustomed corinna was preferred to pindar no fewer than five times and the best judges in greece gave her the preference yet whatever were her powers and beyond question they were extraordinary we may assure ourselves that she stood many degrees below pindar nothing is more absurd than to report that the judges were prepossessed by her beauty plutarch tells us that she was much older than her competitor who consulted her judgment in his earlier odes
now granting their first competition to have been when pindar was twenty years old and that the others were in their years succeeding her beauty must have been somewhat on the decline for in greece there are few women who retain the graces none who retain the bloom of youth beyond the twenty-third year her countenance i doubt not was expressive but expression although it gives beauty to men makes women pay dearly for its stamp and pays soon nature seems in protection to their loveliness to have ordered that they who are our superiors in quickness and sensibility should be little disposed to laborious thought or to long excursions in the labyrinths of fancy we may be convinced that the verdict of the judges was biassed by nothing else than the habitudes of thinking we may be convinced too that living in an age when poetry was cultivated highly and selected from the most acute and the most dispassionate they were subject to no greater errors of opinion than are the learned mess-mates of our english colleges you are more liberal in your largeness to the fair greeks than a friend of mine was who resided in athens to acquire the language
he assured me that beauty there was in bud at thirteen in full blossom at fifteen losing a leaf or two every day at seventeen trembling on the thorn at nineteen and under the tree at twenty mr porson it does not appear to me that anything more is necessary in the first instance than to interrogate our hearts in what manner they may have been effected if the ear is satisfied if at one moment a tumult is aroused in the breast and tranquillized at another with a perfect consciousness of equal power exerted in both cases if we rise up from the perusal of the work with a strong excitement to thought to imagination to sensibility above all if we sat down with some propensities toward evil and walk away with much stronger toward good in the midst of a world which we never had entered and of which we never had dreamed before shall we perversely put on again the old man of criticism and dissemble that we have been conducted by a most beneficent and most potent genius
nothing proves to me so manifestly in what a pestiferous condition are its lazarettoes as when i observe how little hath been objected against those who have substituted words for things and how much against those who have reinstated things for words let wordsworth prove to the world that there may be animation without blood and broken bones and tenderness remote from the stews some will doubt it for even things the most evident are often but little perceived and strangely estimated swift ridiculed the music of handel and the generalship of marlborough pope the perspicacity and the scholarship of bentley gray the abilities of shaftesbury and the eloquence of rousseau Shakespeare hardly found those who would collect his tragedies. Milton was read from godliness. Virgil was antiquated and rustic. Cicero? Asiatic? What a rabble has persecuted my friend!
An elephant is born to be consumed by ants in the midst of his unapproachable solitudes. Wordsworth is the prey of Geoffrey. Why repine? Let us rather amuse ourselves with allegories, and recollect that God in the creation left his noblest creature at the mercy of a serpent. Wordsworth goes out of his way to be attacked. He picks up a piece of dirt, throws it on the carpet in the midst of the company and cries, This is a better man than any of you. He does
indeed mould the base material into what form he chooses, but why not rather invite us to contemplate it, than challenge us to condemn it. Here surely is false taste. The principle and the most general accusation against him is that the vehicle of his thoughts is unequal to them. Now did ever the judges at the Olympic Games say, We would have awarded to you the mead of victory if your chariot had been equal to your horses?
It is true they have won, but the people are displeased at a car neither new nor richly gilt, and without a griffin or sphinx engraved on the axle. You admire simplicity in Euripides, you censure it in Wordsworth. Believe me, sir, it arises in neither from punery of thought, which seldom has produced it, but from the strength of temperance and at the suggestion of principle. Take up a poem of Wordsworth's and read it. I would rather say read them all,
and, knowing that a mind like yours must grasp closely what comes within it, I will then appeal to you whether any poet of our country, since Milton, hath exerted greater powers with less strain and less of ostentation. I would, however, by his permission, lay before you for this purpose a poem which is yet unpublished and incomplete. Pity with such abilities. He does not imitate the ancients somewhat more. Whom did they imitate? If his genius is equal to theirs, he has no need
of a guide. He also will be an ancient, and the very counterparts of those who now decry him will extol him a thousand years hence, in malignity to the moderns.
