July 21. 1832
Wordsworth
I have often wished that the first two books of the Excursion had been published separately, under the name of “The Deserted Cottage.” They would have formed, what indeed they are, one of the most beautiful poems in the language.
Can dialogues in verse be defended? I cannot but think that a great philosophical poet ought always to teach the reader himself as from himself. A poem does not admit argumentation, though it does admit development of thought. In prose there may be a difference; though I must confess that, even in Plato and Cicero, I am always vexed that the authors do not say what they have to say at once in their own persons. The introductions and little urbanities are, to be sure, very delightful in their way; I would not lose them; but I have no admiration for the practice of ventriloquizing through another man’s mouth.
I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen books on the growth of an individual mind—superior, as I used to think, upon the whole, to the Excursion. You may judge how I felt about them by my own poem upon the occasion.1 Then the plan laid out, and, I believe, partly suggested by me, was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man, —a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration. Something of this sort was, I think, agreed on. It is, in substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy.
I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position, which is peculiarly—perhaps I might say exclusively—fitted for him. His proper title is Spectator ab extra.
July 23. 1832.
French Revolution
No man was more enthusiastic than I was for France and the Revolution: it had all my wishes, none of my expectations. Before 1793, I clearly saw and often enough stated in public, the horrid delusion, the vile mockery, of the whole affair.1
When some one said in my brother James’s presence2 that I was a Jacobin, he very well observed,—“No! Samuel is no Jacobin; he is a hot-headed Moravian!” Indeed, I was in the extreme opposite pole.
Notes
1 Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 206. It is not too much to say of this beautiful poem, and yet it is difficult to say more, that it is at once worthy of the poet, his subject, and his object:—
“An Orphic song indeed,
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts,
To their own music chanted.”—ED.
“Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams!
I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament,
From bleak Helvetia’s icy cavern sent—
I hear thy groans upon her blood-stain’d streams!
Heroes, that for your peaceful country perish’d,
And ye that, fleeing, spot your mountain snows
With bleeding wounds; forgive me, that I cherish’d
One thought that ever blest your cruel foes!
To scatter rage and traitorous guilt,
Where Peace her jealous home had built;
A patriot race to disinherit
Of all that made her stormy wilds so dear:
And with inexpiable spirit
To taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer—
O France, that mockest Heaven, adult’rous, blind,
And patriot only in pernicious toils,
Are these thy boasts, champion of human-kind?
To mix with kings in the low lust of sway,
Yell in the hunt and share the murderous prey—
To insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils
From freemen torn—to tempt and to betray?—
The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain,
Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game
They burst their manacles, and wear the name
Of freedom, graven on a heavier chain!
O Liberty! with profitless endeavour
Have I pursued thee many a weary hour;
But thou nor swell’st the victor’s train, nor ever
Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power.
Alike from all, howe’er they praise thee,
(Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee,)
Alike from priestcraft’s harpy minions,
And factious blasphemy’s obscener slaves,
Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions,
The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!”
France, an Ode. Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 130.
2 A soldier of the old cavalier stamp, to whom the King was the symbol of the majesty, as the Church was of the life, of the nation, and who would most assuredly have taken arms for one or the other against all the Houses of Commons or committees of public safety in the world.—ED.