Lectures on the English Poets | Page 5

or
loathes."
Not that we like what we loathe; but we like to indulge our hatred and
scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every
refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration; to make it a
bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of
deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatise it by name, to

grapple with it in thought, in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm our
will against it, to know the worst we have to contend with, and to
contend with it to the utmost. Poetry is only the highest eloquence of
passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our
conception of any thing, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or
dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the
image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot
get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the
thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and
tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic. When Pope says of the Lord
Mayor's shew,--
"Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,
But lives in Settle's
numbers one day more!"
--when Collins makes Danger, "with limbs of giant mould,"
------"Throw him on the steep
Of some loose hanging rock asleep:"
when Lear calls out in extreme anguish,
"Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
How much more hideous
shew'st in a child
Than the sea-monster!"
--the passion of contempt in the one case, of terror in the other, and of
indignation in the last, is perfectly satisfied. We see the thing ourselves,
and shew it to others as we feel it to exist, and as, in spite of ourselves,
we are compelled to think of it. The imagination, by thus embodying
and turning them to shape, gives an obvious relief to the indistinct and
importunate cravings of the will.--We do not wish the thing to be so;
but we wish it to appear such as it is. For knowledge is conscious
power; and the mind is no longer, in this case, the dupe, though it may
be the victim of vice or folly.
Poetry is in all its shapes the language of the imagination and the
passions, of fancy and will. Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd
than the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic

critics, for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common
sense and reason: for the end and use of poetry, "both at the first and
now, was and is to hold the mirror up to nature," seen through the
medium of passion and imagination, not divested of that medium by
means of literal truth or abstract reason. The painter of history might as
well be required to represent the face of a person who has just trod
upon a serpent with the still-life expression of a common portrait, as
the poet to describe the most striking and vivid impressions which
things can be supposed to make upon the mind, in the language of
common conversation. Let who will strip nature of the colours and the
shapes of fancy, the poet is not bound to do so; the impressions of
common sense and strong imagination, that is, of passion and
indifference, cannot be the same, and they must have a separate
language to do justice to either. Objects must strike differently upon the
mind, independently of what they are in themselves, as long as we have
a different interest in them, as we see them in a different point of view,
nearer or at a greater distance (morally or physically speaking) from
novelty, from old acquaintance, from our ignorance of them, from our
fear of their consequences, from contrast, from unexpected likeness.
We can no more take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can
see all objects without light or shade. Some things must dazzle us by
their preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our
curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these
various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their stead,
are not very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm,
carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a
little grey worm; let the poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening,
when beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescent moon it has built
itself a palace of emerald light. This is also one part of nature, one
appearance which the glow-worm presents, and that not the least
interesting; so poetry is one part of the history of the human mind,
though it is neither science nor philosophy. It cannot