In writing about Shakespeare and Coleridge, I have showed that poems from their hand, however short, had the three essentials of art—that is, the three parallels, not more or less—namely, the statement of the subject, the development of it in detail, and the climax. The bare statement of the subject is the basis of the whole; the development employs the retrospective imagination which embraces an acquaintance with all nature and human life; finally, the climax involves the moral by means of the prospective imagination or the circumspective, and rises into the incommensurable.
An analysis of the parables shows that these three parallels are invariably to be found in each. A poet who cares little or nothing for nature uses the introspective imagination, substituting himself for the universe, whence his climax often sinks into a mere reflection.
I would say a few more words on the subject of parables.
Dr. Angus, the masterly author of an English Grammar, defines the allegory, parable, and fable. He says of the parable that it is an allegory of something that might happen, written in metaphoric language. This is an instance in which a great scholar may err by dispensing with scrutiny and relying on his instinctive belief.
XL.
But I must not forget that these records are meant to be about myself, the author of poems and other effusions let loose when from time to time he drew out the spigot. The author’s insurance policy is still under discussion. His trial is still going on, as did that of Warren Hastings; it has gone into a new generation, and some say that when, like the traditional door-nail, he is dead, it will terminate in his acquittal, it being found at last that he did not make himself, but was planned out by Nature to serve her purpose; having fulfilled which, she withdrew the chemical compound of which he consisted, and utilized his waste materials.
As said before, I had the “Piromides” printed and published; it was by Saunders and Ottley, in 1839, while I resided in Gordon Square on my return from Paris, where I had spent twelve months in making the acquaintance of scientific physicians, naturalists, and others; going round the wards of La Charité with Andral every morning at six o’clock; attending the lectures on chemistry of Thénard at a later hour, and revelling in the bones of Cuvier’s osteological museum. I was much with Milne-Edwards; and with Dujardin, whose éclairage for the microscope I introduced into London, lending mine to Ross and to Powell as a pattern, and these opticians and their successors have supplied the scientific profession with it ever since. It consisted of an achromatic illuminator, the invention of which Wollaston pronounced impossible, and which Dujardin achieved.
In that year I made the discovery of an animalcule in the liver; it was a time when such things were unknown, now fifty years ago. This discovery has recently attracted the attention of the Pathological Society, who have given an account of it in their “Transactions” for 1890, in a eulogistic tone.
In that year, too, I published “Vates.”