Studies in poetry and philosophy

Front matter

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By bequest of

William Lukens Shoemaker

Preface To Second Edition

The Essays on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keble, were, as stated in the former Preface, intended to be in some sort thank-offerings, — single stones contributed to their memorial cairns. Another name I feel should have followed, or rather have preceded these. Of Walter Scott and his poetry, the first poetry I knew, it was my wish to have said something in another essay, and to have added it to this series, or perhaps put it in the first, which would have been its proper place. But before this was done, his Centenary had come, during which so much was spoken, and well spoken, on the subject, that this does not seem the time for saying more. But if, adopting Wordsworth's lines, we say —

" Blessings be with them — and eternal praise, Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares — The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays! "

to Walter Scott will fall a large share in that benediction.

These Essays are in no sense criticisms of the poets they deal with, at least as that word is generally understood. To take the measure of viii PREFACE.

these great and good men, and assign them, as the phrase goes, their place in literature, I would not try if, I could, and I could not if I would. Such attempts seem to me to be generally more pretentious than solid. Enough will have been done, if, by pointing to some of the sources of delight I found in them, others may be induced to study them and find the same.

A hope was expressed that all the four Essays, distinct though they are in subject, might yet be found pervaded by a unity of thought and purpose. Of the reviewers who have noticed the Essays — and all whom I have read have done so very kindly — some have perceived no such unity, others have not failed to find it. One reviewer has so well described this thread of connection, that I cannot do better than give his words : —

" His subjects — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keble, and the Moving Force of the Moral Life — are all, and not slightly, connected. All four subjects may be said to be concerned with the relation of the divine life to that of man : Wordsworth as the prophet of Nature, as the poet who interpreted the relations between the elemental powers of creation and the moral life of man ; Coleridge as the thinker, who tried to find, and partially found, a philosophy of the supersensual life ; Keble as the singer, who applied both these great worlds of thought so far as they fitted into the limitations of his own .... ecclesiastical

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system; and, finally, the subject of Mr. Shairp's last essay — the great moving force which helps man to become what he perceives that he ought to be — is one almost inevitably suggested by the lives of the three men who, from their different points of view, had all been chiefly concerned to discover new links between the life above and the life beneath."

The reviewer in the sequel expresses a doubt whether I have enough insisted on " the affinity of Wordsworth's poetry for the great elemental forces both of nature and of humanity" — "the power which the poet displays of giving a strange elemental vastness to the dominant thread of character in either the human or the natural subject on which he happens to be dwelling, so that his poem yields up not a particular man or a particular place, so much as the same element which, while belonging to either, stretches away into the infinite."

Likely enough I have not dwelt on this with sufficient emphasis, though I certainly have always felt it. But where there is so much room for thought, it is not easy in a short essay to bring out every aspect of the truth with the prominence it deserves. I am therefore grateful to the reviewer for supplying in some measure my deficiency.

The same writer then goes on to object to my defense of Wordsworth against being a merely

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" subjective " poet, as it is called — one who draws no pictures of human character different from his own. Here again, though at the risk of quoting too largely, I must give the reviewer's own words. " If the terrible word c subjective ' means that poetry so described takes no note of external life and nature, it has, of course, no application to Wordsworth. But if it means that the individual imagination of the poet so overbalances the external features of his object that the point of departure seems in the end to have dwindled into insignificance in comparison with the grandeur of the forces which it has called up before him, we should differ with Mr. Shairp. Wordsworth takes a scene or character, and getting it under the magnifying-glass of his meditative genius, he follows out the most striking train of associations it suggests to him, till he describes, not his subject, but what his subject might have been, if these special influences had swept through it as pure and unalloyed as they swept over the heart of the poet who muses thereon."

With much in this account of the matter I • should not disagree. To one part of it only I demur. However great the flood of meditative light which Wordsworth pours around the object he describes, the object itself and its external features are not lost or obliterated before it. No doubt when he describes a man, he shows us much more in him and his character than the

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man was aware of in himself. He paints from the side of the soul rather than that of the body, but the meditative associations called up are universal and catholic, not individual or fanciful ones. And however powerful these are, the external features given remain and agree with the meditations that rise out of them. They answer each to the other. A painter could from Wordsworth's description paint the Cumberland Beggar, Michael, Peter Bell, and each would be a clear individual portrait, differing from the others not only in surroundings, but in every feature, and in the whole expression of countenance. The subjectivity, in short, which I denied to Wordsworth's characters, was that which belongs to so many of Byron's — his Giaour, Corsair, Lara, Alp the Renegade, which are each so many pieces of himself, shadows of his own personality, colored by his own peculiar temperament and destiny. Any painter who tried to render these, vary their outward form and drapery as he might, would still paint but one expression — the same misanthropic scowl would sit on every brow. It was the absence of this kind of subjectivity — this projecting of his own mere individuality into his human characters — that I claimed for Wordsworth. Probably enough, this may have been done too unconditionally ; the limits of his power of representation may not have been carefully enough denned. What I meant was, that within xii PREFACE.

certain limits he truly renders other characters than his own; that his meditations about them lo not so far hide their distinctive features but hat you would know them if you met them on ;he highway.

Further to enter into these matters, and to define the limits of Wordsworth's power in this direction — for limits very definite it has — would require more than a Preface. His characters are meditative representations, not dramatic exhibitions of men. For these last no poet ever had less gift.

The four Essays have all been carefully revised, and here and there retouched. In re-reading the Essay on Coleridge, I feel that in what I said but scant justice has been done to his poetry. But to reopen this subject would be to rewrite the essay. That I have made too little of his poetry may have arisen from this, that my chief intention at the time I wrote was to bring out the contents and tendency of Coleridge's philosophic speculations.

The Essay on Keble has received larger additions than any of the others. Indeed, it would have been easy to have added much more, for hardly a year passes but brings to light something which gives new meaning to the character of Keble and " The Christian Year." But if much enlarged, what was meant as an essay would have become a book.

St. Andrew's, December 7, 1871.

Preface To The First Edition

The contents of this volume, written during leisure weeks of recent summers, originally appeared in the " North British Review." They were put together not hastily at first, and have since been revised, in some places retrenched, in more enlarged. This is true of all the papers, except the third, which stands now much as it did at first. Though each of the four Essays has a distinct subject of its own, it is hoped that they will be found to have a unity both of thought and purpose. The first three were written from a desire to acknowledge, as far as possible, a debt of gratitude long owed to three eminent teachers of the last age. The only way in which that acknowledgment could now be rendered, was by trying to hand on some knowledge of the men and of the work they did to a few at least of the younger generation. Each of these three papers has been introduced by a short biography, in the hope that the concrete facts might throw light on the abstract thoughts, and add to them a human interest.

The thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge is

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of such worth, that too much cannot be done to commend it to those unacquainted with it. They deserve to be known for this, if for nothing else, that they two were the men of most original genius who have been born into England for a century and more. But original genius has sometimes done questionable work, for which perhaps small thanks are due. Theirs, however, was not only original, it was beneficent genius. To a sense-bound age, rejoicing in a mechanical philosophy, they came speaking from the soul to the soul. In time they awakened a response. Younger men, one by one, turned towards them, and found in their teaching that which at once called out and satisfied their aspirations as no other writings of the time did. Whatever is best, deepest, most spiritual in the thinking and feeling of the last thirty years, is either their product or akin to it. But now again the recoil has come, and we are once more in the midst of a way of thinking which excludes the spiritual. As against this compacted system Wordsworth and Coleridge have certainly no complete system, no spiritual theory of life to furnish, but they supply a body of thought which, though unsystematized, is the best counteractive to be found in English literature, till the full spiritual theory gets born.

There is another aspect in which the mental experience of these men is instructive. This is proclaimed on all hands to be an age of disin-

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tegration, when all old things must either be reconstructed or disappear. An uneasy, restless searching after something larger and more satisfying, is no doubt visible on the surface both of books and of society. In this mood of men's minds, is there not something to be learnt from the experience of Wordsworth and Coleridge ? Here were two men of amplest power, born into an age fuller of anarchic change than our own. They threw themselves fearlessly on their time, broke with old faiths and institutions, in search of truth set their faces to the wilderness, and after sojourning for a season there, came out on the other side, and found peace. They have been branded for this as mere timid reactionaries. But this I believe to be no true account of them. If they returned in some sense to their first faiths, they did so not in blind conservatism, not as grasping at mere tradition in despair of truth, but as having, after long soul-travail, discovered a meaning in old truths they had not divined before. After wandering many ways of thought, and having learnt in their wanderings to know themselves, they came back and found in Christian truth that which alone met their need. They held it no longer by hearsay from without, but learned it anew from within, apprehending it not in oldness of the letter, but in newness of the spirit. The spiritual principles, which as thinkers they held, found their complement in xvi PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

evangelical religion, and gave to this last increased depth and expansion. This experience of theirs has not lost its import for our own day.

Keble, the subject of the third essay, was not in mental endowments at all the equal of Wordsworth and Coleridge. But he had gifts of his own as singular and as interesting as theirs. The devoutness and saintly purity, embalmed in his poetry, are as rare among men as their genius. Then he represents the most winning, to wit, the poetical and devotional, side of that great movement which has in so many ways changed the religious, the ecclesiastical, and the sesthetical aspects of English life. Many, no doubt, will think this small praise to him. But without entering on this subject, which has many sides, every religious heart must acknowledge not only the devout depth but the catholic sentiment of " The Christian Year."

His strain, overheard among louder-voiced poets, is like that of his favorite red-breast among the other song-birds, and has added to English poetry the note in which it was most wanting.

The last essay is different from the other three. It does not centre round one man and his teaching, but deals with an abstract subject. But the thoughts it contains are, I believe, in harmony with the views set forth in the first three essays, — are indeed, as it were, but a prolongation of these views. In this country the ground prin-

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ciples of morality and religion haye generally been carefully kept apart. The moralist and the religious teacher have each warned the other off Ins own ground, and resented any attempt to combine the two departments as an interference. Both have suffered from this unnatural estrangement. This foprth essay is an attempt to find the common ground on which these two subjects meet. It is certain that, when seen in their close and vital bearing on each other, moral thought will give substance and steadfastness to religion, and religion will give to morality a transcendent sanction and spiritual energy.

This volume is published chiefly in the hope that it may reach some of the thoughtful young. Older persons do not much affect books of this kind. It is otherwise with those in whom thought is just awakening. If what I have written should lead any of these to acquaint themselves with the men here described, and to assimilate their thought, they will, I am sure, be the better for it, and the happier.

St. Andrew's, March, 1868.