You quote my definition of poetry, and say that it is not a definition of anything, because it is completely unintelligible. To prove this, you take one word which occurs in it, and is no way important, the word sympathy, which you tell us has two significations, one anatomical, and the other moral; and poetry, according to you, ‘has no skill in surgery or ethics.’ I do not think this shews a want of clearness in my definition, but a want of good faith or understanding in you.
You say that I get at a number of extravagant conclusions ‘by means sufficiently simple and common. He employs the term poetry in three distinct meanings, and his legerdemain consists in substituting one of these for the other. Sometimes it is the general appellation of a certain class of compositions, as when he says that poetry is graver than history. Secondly, it denotes the talent by which these compositions are produced; and it is in this sense that he calls poetry that fine particle within us, which produces in our being rarefaction, expansion, elevation and purification.’ [This is Mr. Gifford’s academic style, not mine.] ‘Thirdly, it denotes the subjects of which these compositions treat. It is in this meaning that he uses the term, when he says that all that is worth remembering in life is the poetry of it; that fear is poetry, that hope is poetry, that love is poetry; and in the very same sense he might assert that fear is sculpture and painting and music; that the crimes of Verres are the eloquence of Cicero, and the poetry of Milton the criticism of Mr. Hazlitt.’ It is true I have used the word poetry in the three senses above imputed to me, and I have done so, because the word has these three distinct meanings in the English language, that is, it signifies the composition produced, the state of mind or faculty producing it, and, in certain cases, the subject-matter proper to call forth that state of mind. Your objection amounts to this, that in reasoning on a difficult question I write common English, and this is the whole secret of my extravagance and obscurity.—Do you mean that the distinguishing between the compositions of poetry, the talent for poetry, or the subject-matter of poetry, would have told us what poetry is? This is what you would say, or you have no meaning at all. I have expressly treated the subject according to this very division, and I have endeavoured to define that common something which belongs to these several views of it, and determines us in the application of the same common name, viz. an unusual vividness in external objects or in our immediate impressions, exciting a movement of imagination in the mind, and leading by natural association or sympathy to harmony of sound and the modulation of verse in expressing it. This is what you, Sir, cannot understand. I could not ‘assert in the same sense that fear is sculpture and painting, etc.’ because this would be an abuse of the English language: we talk of the poetry of painting, etc. which could not be, if poetry was confined to the technical sense of ‘lines in ten syllables.’ The crimes of Verres, I also grant, were not the same thing as the eloquence of Cicero, though I suspect you confound the crimes of revolutionary France with Mr. Pitt’s speeches; and as to Milton’s poetry and my criticisms, there is almost as much difference between them as between Milton’s poetry and your verses. You say, ‘the principal subjects of which poetry treats, are the passions and affections of mankind; we are all under the influence of our passions and affections, that is, in Mr. Hazlitt’s new language, we all act on the principles of poetry, and are in truth all poets. We all exert our muscles and limbs, therefore we are anatomists and surgeons; we have teeth which we employ in chewing, therefore we are dentists,’ etc. Not at all; we are all poets, inasmuch as we are under the influence of the passions and imagination, that is, as we have certain common feelings, and undergo the same process of mind with the poet, who only expresses in a particular manner what he and all feel alike; but in exerting our muscles, we do not dissect them; in chewing with our teeth, we do not perform the part of dentists, etc. There is nothing parallel in the two cases. ‘You anticipate,’ you say, ‘these brilliant conclusions for me’; and do not perceive the difference between the extension of a logical principle, and an abuse of common language.—You proceed, ‘As another specimen of his definitions, we may take the following. “Poetry does not define the limits of sense, nor analyse the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling.” Poetry was at the beginning of the book asserted to be an impression; it is now the excess of the imagination beyond an impression; what this excess is we cannot tell, but at least it must be something very unlike an impression.’ Poetry at the beginning of the book was asserted to be not simply an impression, ‘but an impression by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of the imagination: now, you say it is the excess of the imagination beyond an impression; and you bring this as a proof of a contradiction in terms. An impression, by its vividness exciting a movement of the imagination, you discover, must be something very unlike an impression, and as to the imagination itself, you cannot tell what it is; it is an unknown power in your poetical creed. What is most extraordinary is, that you had quoted the very passage which you here represent as a total contradiction to the latter, only two pages before. What, Sir, do you think of your readers? What must they think of you!—‘Though the total want of meaning,’ you add, ‘is the weightiest objection to such writing, yet the abuse which it involves of particular words and phrases’ (in addition to a total want of meaning) ‘is very remarkable,’ (it must be so,) ‘and will not be overlooked by those who are aware of the inseparable connexion between justness of thought and precision of language.’ (You are not aware that there is no precise measure of thought or expression.) ‘What, in strict reasoning, can be meant by the impression of a feeling?’ (The impression which it makes on the mind, as distinct from some other to which it gives birth, is what I meant.) ‘How can actual and ordinary be used as synonymous?’ (They are not.) ‘Every impression must be an actual impression’; (there is then no such thing as an imaginary impression;) ‘and the use of that epithet annihilates the limitations which Mr. Hazlitt meant’ (in the total want of all meaning,) ‘to guard his proposition.’ We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. You say, ‘you have not the faintest conception of what I mean by the heavenly bodies returning on the squares of the distances or on Dr. Chalmers’s Discourses.’ Nor will I tell you what I meant. A knavish speech sleeps in a fool’s ear. ‘As to the assertion that there can never be another Jacob’s dream, we see no reason why dreams should be scientific.’ Shakespear says, that dreams ‘denote a foregone conclusion.’ You quote what I say of Swift, and misrepresent it. ‘Mr. Hazlitt’s doctrine, therefore, is, that the inability to become mad, is very likely to drive a man mad.’ My doctrine is, that the inability to get rid of a favourite idea, when constantly thwarted, or of the impression of any object, however painful, merely because it is true, is likely to drive a man mad. It is this tenaciousness on a particular point that almost always destroys the general coherence of the understanding. I do not say that the inability to get rid of the distinction between right and wrong continued in Swift’s mind after he was mad—I say it contributed to drive him mad. I mean that a sense of great injustice often produces madness in individual cases, and that a strong sense of general injustice, and an abstracted view of human nature such as it is, compared with what it ought to be, is likely to produce the same effect in a mind like that of the author of Gulliver’s Travels. Do you understand yet? You do not go into my general character of Swift, which might have drawn you into something of a wider field of speculation; and you pick out a straggling sentence or two to cavil at in my account of Pope, of Chaucer, of Milton, and Shakespear, on which you are glad to discharge the gall that has been accumulating in your mind for several pages. If you think by this means, to put me or the public out of conceit with my writings, you have mistaken the matter entirely. You can only put down my arguments by meeting them fairly, or my style, by writing better than you do.
‘We occasionally,’ you proceed, ‘discover a faint semblance of connected thinking in Mr. Hazlitt’s pages; but wherever this is the case, his reasoning is for the most part incorrect.’ This is a curious inference. ‘This faint semblance of connected thinking,’ is, it appears, when I maintain some opinion, which is ‘a sprout from some popular doctrine’; but if I push it a little farther than you were aware of, my reasoning becomes incorrect. Thus it has been a popular doctrine with some critics, (which yet you do not admit)—‘That the progress of science is unfavourable to the culture of the imagination. It is no doubt true, that the individual who devotes his labour to the investigation of abstract truth, must acquire habits of thought very different from those which the exercise of the fancy demands.’ You add in italics, ‘the cause lies in the exclusive appropriation of his time to reasoning, and not in the logical accuracy with which he reasons.’ Whenever I have any discovery to communicate, which I think you cannot comprehend, I will in future put it in italics, to make it equally profound and clear. It appears by you, that the incompatibility between the successful pursuit of different studies does not arise from anything incompatible in the studies themselves, but from the time devoted to each. The mind is equally incapacitated from passing from one to the other, whether they are the most opposite or the most alike. The dreams of alchemy, and the schemes of astrology, the traditional belief in the doctrine of ghosts and fairies, though made up almost entirely of imagination, self-will, superstition and romance, were not a jot more favourable to the caprices and fanciful exaggerations of poetry, either in the public mind, or in that of individuals, than the modern system which excludes (both by the logical accuracy with which it proceeds, and a constant appeal to demonstrable facts), every alloy of passion, and all exercise of the imagination. You should never put your thoughts in italics. If I were to attempt a character of verbal critics, I should be apt to say, that their habits of mind disqualify them for general reasoning or fair discussion: that they are furious about trifles, because they have nothing else to interest them; that they have no way of giving dignity to their insignificant discoveries, but by treating those who have missed them with contempt; that they are dogmatical and conceited, in proportion as they have little else to guide them in their quaint researches but caprice and accident; that the want of intellectual excitement gives birth to increasing personal irritability, and endless petty altercation. You, Sir, would make all this self-evident, by the help of italics, and say, that the cause lies not in anything in the nature of verbal criticism, but the exclusive appropriation of their time to it.
You next run foul of my account of the pleasure derived from tragedy. You are afraid to understand what I say on any subject, and it is not therefore likely you should ever detect what is erroneous in it. I have shewn by a reference to facts, and to the authority of Mr. Burke (whom you would rather contradict than believe me) that the objects which are supposed to please only in fiction, please in reality; that ‘if there were known to be a public execution of some state criminal in the next street, the theatre would soon be empty’—that therefore the pleasure derived from tragedy is not anything peculiar to it, as poetry or fiction; but has its ground in the common love of strong excitement. You say, I have misstated the fact, to give a false view of the question, which, according to you, is ‘why that which is painful in itself, pleases in works of fiction.’ I answer, I have shewn that this is not a fair statement of the question, by stating the fact, that what is painful in itself, pleases not the sufferer indeed, but the spectator, in reality as well as in works of fiction. The common proverb proves it—‘What is sport to one, is death to another.’
You observe, that ‘Some lines I have quoted from Chaucer, are very pleasing—
——“Emelie that fayrer was to sene
Than is the lilie upon his stalke grene,
And fresher than the May with floures newe:
For with the rose-colour strove hire hewe;
I n’ot which was the finer of hem too.”