Coleridge and Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads & Other Poems. William Wordsworth

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      NOSCITUR A SOCIIS

      One may best judge of men by their pleasures. Who has not known men who have passed the day in honourable toil with honour and ability, and at night sought the vilest pleasure in the vilest society? This is the man's self. The other is a trick learnt by heart (for we may even learn the power of extemporaneous elocution and instant action as an automatic trick); but a man's pleasures—children, books, friends, nature, the Muse—O these deceive not.

      TEMPERAMENT AND MORALS October, 1803

      Even among good and sensible men, how common it is that one attaches himself scrupulously to the rigid performance of some minor virtue or makes a point of carrying some virtue into all its minutiæ, and is just as lax in a similar point, professedly lax. What this is depends, seemingly, on temperament. A makes no conscience of a little flattery in cases where he is certain that he is not acting from base or interested motives—in short, whenever his only motives are the amusement, the momentary pleasure given, &c., a medley of good nature, diseased proneness to sympathy, and a habit of being wiser behind the curtain than his own actions before it. B would die rather than deviate from truth and sincerity in this instance, but permits himself to utter, nay, publish the harshest censure of men as moralists and as literati, and that, too, on his simple ipse dixit, without assigning any reason, and often without having any, save that he himself believes it—believes it because he dislikes the man, and dislikes him probably for his looks, or, at best, for some one fault without any collation of the sum total of the man's qualities. Yet A and B are both good men, as the world goes. They do not act from conscious self-love, and are amenable to principles in their own minds.

      BRIGHT OCTOBER October 21, 1803, Friday morning

      A drizzling rain. Heavy masses of shapeless vapour upon the mountains (O the perpetual forms of Borrowdale!) yet it is no unbroken tale of dull sadness. Slanting pillars travel across the lake at long intervals, the vaporous mass whitens in large stains of light—on the lakeward ridge of that huge arm-chair of Lodore fell a gleam of softest light, that brought out the rich hues of the late autumn. The woody Castle Crag between me and Lodore is a rich flower-garden of colours—the brightest yellows with the deepest crimsons and the infinite shades of brown and green, the infinite diversity of which blends the whole, so that the brighter colours seem to be colours upon a ground, not coloured things. Little woolpacks of white bright vapour rest on different summits and declivities. The vale is narrowed by the mist and cloud, yet through the wall of mist you can see into a bower of sunny light, in Borrowdale; the birds are singing in the tender rain, as if it were the rain of April, and the decaying foliage were flowers and blossoms. The pillar of smoke from the chimney rises up in the mist, and is just distinguishable from it, and the mountain forms in the gorge of Borrowdale consubstantiate with the mist and cloud, even as the pillar'd smoke—a shade deeper and a determinate form.

      TELEOLOGY AND NATURE WORSHIP A PROTEST October 26, 1803

      A most unpleasant dispute with Wordsworth and Hazlitt. I spoke, I fear, too contemptuously; but they spoke so irreverently, so malignantly of the Divine Wisdom that it overset me. Hazlitt, how easily raised to rage and hatred self-projected! but who shall find the force that can drag him up out of the depth into one expression of kindness, into the showing of one gleam of the light of love on his countenance. Peace be with him! But thou, dearest Wordsworth—and what if Ray, Durham, Paley have carried the observation of the aptitude of things too far, too habitually into pedantry? O how many worse pedantries! how few so harmless, with so much efficient good! Dear William, pardon pedantry in others, and avoid it in yourself, instead of scoffing and reviling at pedantry in good men and a good cause and becoming a pedant yourself in a bad cause—even by that very act becoming one. But, surely, always to look at the superficies of objects for the purpose of taking delight in their beauty, and sympathy with their real or imagined life, is as deleterious to the health and manhood of intellect as, always to be peering and unravelling contrivance may be to the simplicity of the affection and the grandeur and unity of the imagination. O dearest William! would Ray or Durham have spoken of God as you spoke of Nature?

      W. H.

      Hazlitt to the feelings of anger and hatred, phosphorus—it is but to open the cork and it flames—but to love and serviceable friendship, let them, like Nebuchadnezzar, heat the furnace with a sevenfold heat, this triune, Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego, will shiver in the midst of it.

      THE ORIGIN OF EVIL Thursday October 27, 1803

      I sate for my picture [to Hazlitt]—heard from Southey the "Institution of the Jesuits," during which some interesting idea occurred to me, and has escaped. I made out, however, the whole business of the origin of evil satisfactorily to my own mind, and forced H. to confess that the metaphysical argument reduced itself to this, Why did not infinite Power always exclusively produce such beings as in each moment of their duration were infinite? why, in short, did not the Almighty create an absolutely infinite number of Almighties? The hollowness and impiety of the argument will be felt by considering that, suppose a universal happiness, a perfection of the moral as well as natural world, still the whole objection applies just as forcibly as at this moment. The malignity of the Deity (I shudder even at the assumption of this affrightful and Satanic language) is manifested in the creation of archangels and cherubs and the whole company of pure Intelligences burning in their unquenchable felicity, equally as in the creation of Neros and Tiberiuses, of stone and leprosy. Suppose yourself perfectly happy, yet, according to this argument, you ought to charge God with malignity for having created you—your own life and all its comforts are in the indictment against the Creator—for surely even a child would be ashamed to answer, "No! I should still exist, only in that case, instead of being a man, I should be an infinite being." As if the word I here had even the remotest semblance of a meaning. Infinitely more absurd than if I should write the fraction ¹⁄₁₀₀₀ on a slate, then rub it out with my sponge, and write in the same place the integral number 555,666,879, and then observe that the former figure was greatly improved by the measure, that it was grown a far finer figure!—conceiting a change where there had been positive substitution. Thus, then, it appears that the sole justification of those who, offended by the vice and misery of the created world, as far as we know it, impeach the power and goodness of the Almighty, making the proper cause of such vice and misery to have been a defect either of power or goodness—it appears, I say, that their sole justification rests on an argument which has nothing to do with vice and misery, as vice and misery—on an argument which would hold equally good in heaven as in hell—on an argument which it might be demonstrated no human being in a state of happiness could ever have conceived—an argument which a millennium would annihilate, and which yet would hold equally good then as now! But even in point of metaphysic the whole rests at last on the conceivable. Now, I appeal to every man's internal consciousness, if he will but sincerely and in brotherly simplicity silence the bustle of argument in his mind and the ungenial feelings that mingle with and fill up the mob, and then ask his own intellect whether, supposing he could conceive the creation of positively infinite and co-equal beings, and whether, supposing this not only possible but real, this has exhausted his notion of creatability? whether the intellect, by an unborn and original law of its essence, does not demand of infinite power more than merely infinity of number, infinity of sorts and orders? Let him have created this infinity of infinites, still there is space in the imagination for the creation of finites; but instead of these, let him again create infinites; yet still the same space is left, it is no way filled up. I feel, too, that the whole rests on a miserable sophism of applying to an Almighty Being such words as all. Why were not all Gods? But there is no all in creation. It is composed of infinites, and the imagination, bewildered by heaping infinites on infinites and wearying of demanding increase of number to a number which it conceives already infinite, deserted by images and mocked by words, whose sole substance is the inward sense of difficulty that accompanies all our notions of infinity applied to numbers—turns with delight to СКАЧАТЬ