may have sometimes written upon unworthy subjects; but I am less apprehensive on this
account, than that my language may frequently have suffered from those arbitrary
connexions of feelings and ideas with particular words and phrases, from which no man
can altogether protect himself. Hence I have no doubt, that, in some instances, feelings,
even of the ludicrous, may be given to my Readers by expressions which appeared to me
tender and pathetic. Such faulty expressions, were I convinced they were faulty at
present, and that they must necessarily continue to be so, I would willingly take all
reasonable pains to correct. But it is dangerous to make these alterations on the simple
authority of a few individuals, or even of certain classes of men; for where the
understanding of an Author is not convinced, or his feelings altered, this cannot be done
without great injury to himself: for his own feelings are his stay and support; and, if he
set them aside in one instance, he may be induced to repeat this act till his mind shall lose
all confidence in itself, and become utterly debilitated. to this it may be added, that the
critic ought never to forget that he is himself exposed to the same errors as the Poet, and,
perhaps, in a much greater degree: for there can be no presumption in saying of most
readers, that it is not probable they will be so well acquainted with the various stages of
meaning through which words have passed, or with the fickleness or stability of the
relations of particular ideas to each other; and, above all, since they are so much less
interested in the subject, they may decide lightly and carelessly.
Long as the Reader has been detained, I hope he will permit me to caution him against a
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mode of false criticism which has been applied to Poetry, in which the language closely
resembles that of life and nature. Such verses have been triumphed over in parodies, of
which Dr. Johnson's stanza is a fair specimen:-
I put my hat upon my head
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand.
Immediately under these lines let us place one of the most justly admired stanzas of the
'Babes in the Wood.'
These pretty Babes with hand in hand
Went wandering up and down;
But never more they saw the Man
Approaching from the town.
In
both these stanzas the words, and the order of the words, in no respect differ from the
most unimpassioned conversation. There are words in both, for example, 'the Strand,'
and 'the town,' connected with none but the most familiar ideas; yet the one stanza we
admit as admirable, and the other as a fair example of the superlatively contemptible.
Whence arises this difference? Not from the metre, not from the language, not from the
order of the words; but the
matter
expressed in Dr. Johnson's stanza is contemptible. The
proper method of treating trivial and simple verses, to which Dr. Johnson's stanza would
be a fair parallelism, is not to say, this is a bad kind of poetry, or, this is not poetry; but,
this wants sense; it is neither interesting in itself nor can
lead
to anything interesting; the
images neither originate in that sane state of feeling which arises out of thought, nor can
excite thought or feeling in the Reader. This is the only sensible manner of dealing with
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