Coleridge and Wordsworth--Publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_--The
_Ancient Mariner_--The first part of _Christabel_--Decline of
Coleridge's poetic impulse--Final review of his poetry.
[1797-1799.]
The years 1797 and 1798 are generally and justly regarded as the
blossoming-time of Coleridge's poetic genius. It would be scarcely an
exaggeration to say that they were even more than this, and that within
the brief period covered by them is included not only the development
of the poet's powers to their full maturity but the untimely beginnings
of their decline. For to pass from the poems written by Coleridge
within these two years to those of later origin is like passing from
among the green wealth of summer foliage into the well-nigh naked woods
of later autumn. During 1797 and 1798 the _Ancient Mariner_, the first
part of _Christabel_, the fine ode to France, the _Fears in Solitude_,
the beautiful lines entitled _Frost at Midnight_, the _Nightingale_,
the _Circassian Love-Chant_, the piece known as _Love_ from the poem of
the _Dark Ladie_, and that strange fragment _Kubla Khan_, were all of
them written and nearly all of them published; while between the last
composed of these and that swan-song of his dying Muse, the
_Dejection_, of 1802, there is but one piece to be added to the list of
his greater works. This therefore, the second part of _Christabel_
(1800), may almost be described by the picturesque image in the first
part of the same poem as
"The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
Hanging so light and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky."
The first to fail him of his sources of inspiration was his
revolutionary enthusiasm; and the ode to France--the _Recantation_, as
it was styled on its first appearance in the _Morning Post_--is the
record of a reaction which, as has been said, was as much speedier in
Coleridge's case than in that of the other ardent young minds which had
come under the spell of the Revolution as his enthusiasm had been more
passionate than theirs. In the winter of 1797-98 the Directory had
plunged France into an unnatural conflict with her sister Republic of
Switzerland, and Coleridge, who could pardon and had pardoned her
fierce animosity against a country which he considered not so much his
own as Pitt's, was unable to forgive her this. In the _Recantation_ he
casts her off for ever; he perceives at last that true liberty is not
to be obtained through political, but only through spiritual
emancipation; that--
"The sensual and the dark rebel in vain,
Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game
They burst their manacles, and wear the name
Of Freedom graven on a heavier chain";
and arrives in a noble peroration at the somewhat unsatisfactory
conclusion, that the spirit of liberty, "the guide of homeless winds
and playmate of the waves," is to be found only among the elements, and
not in the institutions of man. And in the same quaintly ingenuous
spirit which half touches and half amuses us in his earlier poems he
lets us perceive a few weeks later, in his _Fears in Solitude_, that
sympathy with a foreign nation threatened by the invader may gradually
develop into an almost filial regard for one's own similarly situated
land. He has been deemed, he says, an enemy of his country.
"But, O dear Britain! O my mother Isle,"
once, it may be remembered, "doomed to fall enslaved and vile," but
now--
"Needs must them prove a name most dear and holy,
To me a son, a brother, and a friend,
A husband and a father! who revere
All bonds of natural love, and find them all
Within the limits of thy rocky shores."
After all, it has occurred to him, England is not only the England of
Pitt and Grenville, and in that capacity the fitting prey of the
insulted French Republic: she is also the England of Sara Coleridge,
and little Hartley, and of Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey. And so,
to be sure, she was in 1796 when her downfall was predicted, and in the
spirit rather of the Old Testament than of the New. But there is
something very engaging in the candour with which the young poet
hastens to apprise us of this his first awakening to the fact.
_France_ may be regarded as the last ode, and _Fears in Solitude_ as
the last blank-verse poem of any importance, that owe their origin to
Coleridge's early political sentiments. Henceforth, and for the too
brief period of his poetic activity, he was to derive his inspiration
from other sources. The most fruitful and important of these was
unquestionably his intercourse with Wordsworth, from whom, although
there was doubtless a reciprocation of influence between them, his much
more receptive nature took a far deeper impression than it made. [1] At
the time of their meeting he had already for some three years been
acquainted with Wordsworth's works as a poet, and it speaks highly for
his discrimination that he was able to discern the great powers of his
future friend, even in work so immature in many respects as the
_Descriptive Sketches_. It was during the last year of his residence at
Cambridge that he first met with these poems, of which he says in the
_Biographia Literaria_ that "seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an
original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently
announced;" and the effect produced by this volume was steadily
enhanced by further acquaintance both with the poet and his works.
Nothing, indeed, is so honourably noticeable and even touching in
Coleridge's relation to his friend as the tone of reverence with which,
even in the days of his highest self-confidence and even almost haughty
belief in the greatness of his own poetic mission, he was accustomed to
speak of Wordsworth. A witness, to be more fully cited hereafter, and
whose testimony is especially valuable as that of one who was by no
means blind to Coleridge's early foible of self-complacency, has
testified to this unbounded admiration of his brother-poet. "When,"
records this gentleman, "we have sometimes spoken complimentarily to
Coleridge of himself he has said that he was nothing in comparison with
Wordsworth." And two years before this, at a time when they had not yet
tested each other's power in literary collaboration, he had written to
Cottle to inform him of his introduction to the author of "near twelve
hundred lines of blank verse, superior, I dare aver, to anything in our
language which in any way resembles it," and had declared with evident
sincerity that he felt "a little man" by Wordsworth's side.
His own impression upon his new friend was more distinctively personal
in its origin. It was by Coleridge's total individuality, by the sum of
his vast and varied intellectual powers, rather than by the specific
poetic element contained in them, that Wordsworth, like the rest of the
world indeed, was in the main attracted; but it is clear enough that
this attraction was from the first most powerful. On that point we have
not only the weighty testimony of Dorothy Wordsworth, as conveyed in
her often-quoted description [2] of her brother's new acquaintance, but
the still more conclusive evidence of her brother's own acts. He gave
the best possible proof of the fascination which had been exercised
over him by quitting Racedown with his sister for Alfoxden near Nether
Stowey within a few weeks of his first introduction to Coleridge, a
change of abode for which, as Miss Wordsworth has expressly recorded,
"our principal inducement was Coleridge's society."
By a curious coincidence the two poets were at this time simultaneously
sickening for what may perhaps be appropriately called the "poetic
measles." They were each engaged in the composition of a five-act
tragedy, and read scenes to each other, and to each other's admiration,
from their respective dramas. Neither play was fortunate in its
immediate destiny. Wordsworth's tragedy, the _Borderers_, was greatly
commended by London critics and decisively rejected by the management
of Covent Garden. As for Coleridge, the negligent Sheridan did not even
condescend to acknowledge the receipt of his manuscript; his play was
passed from hand to hand among the Drury Lane Committee; but not till
many years afterwards did _Osorio_ find its way under another name to
the footlights.
For the next twelvemonth the intercourse between the two poets was
close and constant, and most fruitful in results of high moment to
English literature. It was in their daily rambles among the Quantock
Hills that they excogitated that twofold theory of the essence and
functions of poetry which was to receive such notable illustration in
their joint volume of verse, the _Lyrical Ballads_; it was during a
walk over the Quantock Hills that by far the most famous poem of that
series, the _Ancient Mariner_, was conceived and in part composed. The
publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ in the spring of the year 1798
was, indeed, an event of double significance for English poetry. It
marked an epoch in the creative life of Coleridge, and a no less
important one in the critical life of Wordsworth. In the _Biographia
Literaria_ the origination of the plan of the work is thus described:--
"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our
conversation turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,
the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful
adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest
of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination. The sudden
charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset
diffused over a known and familiar landscape appeared to represent the
practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The
thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a
series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one the
incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and
the interest aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the
affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally
accompany such situations, supposing them real.... For the second
class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters
and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its
vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after
them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea
originated the plan of the _Lyrical Ballads_, in which it was agreed
that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters
supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our
inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to
procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of
disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr.
Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his
object, to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to
excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's
attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the
loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible
treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and
selfish solicitude, we have eyes which see not, ears that hear not, and
hearts which neither feel nor understand."
We may measure the extent to which the poetic teaching and practice of
Wordsworth have influenced subsequent taste and criticism by noting how
completely the latter of these two functions of poetry has overshadowed
the former. To lend the charm of imagination to the real will appear to
many people to be not one function of poetry merely but its very
essence. To them it is poetry, and the only thing worthy of the name;
while the correlative function of lending the force of reality to the
imaginary will appear at best but a superior kind of metrical
romancing, or clever telling of fairy tales. Nor of course can there,
from the point of view of the highest conception of the poet's office,
be any comparison between the two. In so far as we regard poetry as
contributing not merely to the pleasure of the mind but to its health
and strength--in so far as we regard it in its capacity not only to
delight but to sustain, console, and tranquillise the human
spirit--there is, of course, as much difference between the idealistic
and the realistic forms of poetry as there is between a narcotic potion
and a healing drug. The one, at best, can only enable a man to forget
his burdens; the other fortifies him to endure them. It is perhaps no
more than was naturally to be expected of our brooding and melancholy
age, that poetry (when it is not a mere voluptuous record of the
subjective impressions of sense) should have become almost limited in
its very meaning to the exposition of the imaginative or spiritual
aspect of the world of realities; but so it is now, and so in
Coleridge's time it clearly was _not_. Coleridge, in the passage above
quoted, shows no signs of regarding one of the two functions which he
attributes to poetry as any more accidental or occasional than the
other; and the fact that the realistic portion of the _Lyrical Ballads_
so far exceeded in amount its supernatural element, he attributes not
to any inherent supremacy in the claims of the former to attention but
simply to the greater industry which Wordsworth had displayed in his
special department of the volume. For his own part, he says, "I wrote
the _Ancient Mariner_, and was preparing, among other poems, the _Dark
Ladie_ and the _Christabel_, in which I should have more nearly
realised my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr.
Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the
number of the poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of
forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous
matter." There was certainly a considerable disparity between the
amount of their respective contributions to the volume, which, in fact,
contained nineteen pieces by Wordsworth and only four by Coleridge.
Practically, indeed, we may reduce this four to one; for, of the three
others, the two scenes from _Osorio_ are without special distinction,
and the _Nightingale_, though a graceful poem, and containing an
admirably-studied description of the bird's note, is too slight and
short to claim any importance in the series. But the one long poem
which Coleridge contributed to the collection is alone sufficient to
associate it for ever with his name. _Unum sed leonem._ To any one who
should have taunted him with the comparative infertility of his Muse he
might well have returned the haughty answer of the lioness in the
fable, when he could point in justification of it to the _Rime of the
Ancient Marinere_.
There is, I may assume, no need at the present day to discuss the true
place in English literature of this unique product of the human
imagination. One is bound, however, to attempt to correlate and adjust
it to the rest of the poet's work, and this, it must be admitted, is a
most difficult piece of business. Never was there a poem so irritating
to a critic of the "pigeon-holing" variety. It simply defies him; and
yet the instinct which he obeys is so excusable, because in fact so
universal, that one feels guilty of something like disloyalty to the
very principles of order in smiling at his disappointment. Complete and
symmetrical classification is so fascinating an amusement; it would
simplify so many subjects of study, if men and things would only
consent to rank themselves under different categories, and remain
there; it would, in particular, be so inexpressibly convenient to be
able to lay your hand upon your poet whenever you wanted him by merely
turning to a shelf labelled "Realistic" or "Imaginative" (nay, perhaps,
to the still greater saving of labour--Objective or Subjective), that
we cannot be surprised at the strength of the aforesaid instinct in
many a critical mind. Nor should it be hard to realise its revolt
against those single exceptions which bring its generalisations to
nought. When the pigeon-hole will admit every "document" but one, the
case is hard indeed; and it is not too much to say that the _Ancient
Mariner_ is the one document which the pigeon-hole in this instance
declines to admit. If Coleridge had only refrained from writing this
remarkable poem, or if, having done so, he had written more poems like
it, the critic might have ticketed him with a quiet mind, and gone on
his way complacent. As it is, however, the poet has contrived in virtue
of this performance not only to defeat classification but to defy it.
For the weird ballad abounds in those very qualities in which
Coleridge's poetry with all its merits is most conspicuously deficient,
while on the other hand it is wholly free from the faults with which he
is most frequently and justly chargeable. One would not have said in
the first place that the author of _Religious Musings_, still less of
the _Monody on the Death of Chatterton_, was by any means the man to
have compassed triumphantly at the very first attempt the terseness,
vigour, and _naïveté_ of the true ballad-manner. To attain this,
Coleridge, the student of his early verse must feel, would have rather
more to retrench and much more to restrain than might be the case with
many other youthful poets. The exuberance of immaturity, the want of
measure, the "not knowing where to stop," are certainly even more
conspicuous in the poems of 1796 than they are in most productions of
the same stage of poetic development; and these qualities, it is
needless to say, require very stern chastening from him who would
succeed in the style which Coleridge attempted for the first time in
the _Ancient Mariner_.
The circumstances of this immortal ballad's birth have been related
with such fulness of detail by Wordsworth, and Coleridge's own
references to them are so completely reconcilable with that account,
that it must have required all De Quincey's consummate ingenuity as a
mischief-maker to detect any discrepancy between the two.
In the autumn of 1797, records Wordsworth in the MS. notes which he
left behind him, "Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and myself started from
Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon with a view to visit Linton and
the Valley of Stones near to it; and as our united funds were very
small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem to
be sent to the _New Monthly Magazine_. Accordingly we set off, and
proceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet; and in the course
of this walk was planned the poem of the _Ancient Mariner_, founded on
a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruikshank. Much the
greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention, but certain
parts I suggested; for example, some crime was to be committed which
should bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted
to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime
and his own wanderings. I had been reading in Shelvocke's _Voyages_, a
day or two before, that while doubling Cape Horn they frequently saw
albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, some
extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. 'Suppose,' said I, 'you
represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South
Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to
avenge the crime.' The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and
adopted accordingly. I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the
dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the
scheme of the poem. The gloss with which it was subsequently
accompanied was not thought of by either of us at the time, at least
not a hint of it was given to me, and I have no doubt it was a
gratuitous afterthought. We began the composition together on that to
me memorable evening. I furnished two or three lines at the beginning
of the poem, in particular--
"'And listened like a three years' child:
The Mariner had his will.'
"These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with
unnecessary scrupulosity recorded,[3] slipped out of his mind, as they
well might. As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly (I speak of the
same evening) our respective manners proved so widely different that it
would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate
from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog.... The
_Ancient Mariner_ grew and grew till it became too important for our
first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; and
we began to think of a volume which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge
has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects." Except
that the volume ultimately determined on was to consist only "partly"
and not "chiefly" of poems on supernatural subjects (in the result, as
has been seen, it consisted "chiefly" of poems upon natural subjects),
there is nothing in this account which cannot be easily reconciled with
the probable facts upon which De Quincey bases his hinted charge
against Coleridge in his _Lake Poets_. It was not Coleridge who had
been reading Shelvocke's _Voyages_, but Wordsworth, and it is quite
conceivable, therefore, that the source from which his friend had
derived the idea of the killing of the albatross may (if indeed he was
informed of it at the time) have escaped his memory twelve years
afterwards, when the conversation with De Quincey took place. Hence, in
"disowning his obligations to Shelvocke," he may not by any means have
intended to suggest that the albatross incident was his own thought.
Moreover, De Quincey himself supplies another explanation of the
matter, which we know, from the above-quoted notes of Wordsworth's, to
be founded upon fact. "It is possible," he adds, "from something which
Coleridge said on another occasion, that before meeting a fable in
which to embody his ideas he had meditated a poem on delirium,
confounding its own dream-scenery with external things, and connected
with the imagery of high latitudes." Nothing, in fact, would be more
natural than that Coleridge, whose idea of the haunted seafarer was
primarily suggested by his friend's dream, and had no doubt been
greatly elaborated in his own imagination before being communicated to
Wordsworth at all, should have been unable, after a considerable lapse
of time, to distinguish between incidents of his own imagining and
those suggested to him by others. And, in any case, the "unnecessary
scrupulosity," rightly attributed to him by Wordsworth with respect to
this very poem, is quite incompatible with any intentional denial of
obligations.
Such, then, was the singular and even prosaic origin of the _Ancient
Mariner_--a poem written to defray the expenses of a tour; surely the
most sublime of "pot-boilers" to be found in all literature. It is
difficult, from amid the astonishing combination of the elements of
power, to select that which is the most admirable; but, considering
both the character of the story and of its particular vehicle, perhaps
the greatest achievement of the poem is the simple realistic force of
its narrative. To achieve this was of course Coleridge's main object:
he had undertaken to "transfer from our inward nature a human interest
and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of
imaginations that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which
constitutes poetic faith." But it is easier to undertake this than to
perform it, and much easier to perform it in prose than in verse--with
the assistance of the everyday and the commonplace than without it.
Balzac's _Peau de Chagrin_ is no doubt a great feat of the
realistic-supernatural; but no one can help feeling how much the author
is aided by his "broker's clerk" style of description, and by the
familiar Parisian scenes among which he makes his hero move. It is
easier to compass verisimilitude in the Palais-Royal than on the South
Pacific, to say nothing of the thousand assisting touches, out of place
in rhyme and metre, which can be thrown into a prose narrative. The
_Ancient Mariner_, however, in spite of all these drawbacks, is as real
to the reader as is the hero of the _Peau de Chagrin_; we are as
convinced of the curse upon one of the doomed wretches as upon the
other; and the strange phantasmagoric haze which is thrown around the
ship and the lonely voyager leaves their outlines as clear as if we saw
them through the sunshine of the streets of Paris. Coleridge triumphs
over his difficulties by sheer vividness of imagery and terse vigour of
descriptive phrase--two qualities for which his previous poems did not
prove him to possess by any means so complete a mastery. For among all
the beauties of his earlier landscapes we can hardly reckon that of
intense and convincing truth. He seems seldom before to have written,
as Wordsworth nearly always seems to write, "with his eye on the
object;" and certainly he never before displayed any remarkable power
of completing his word-picture with a few touches. In the _Ancient
Mariner_ his eye seems never to wander from his object, and again and
again the scene starts out upon the canvas in two or three strokes of
the brush. The skeleton ship, with the dicing demons on its deck; the
setting sun peering "through its ribs, as if through a dungeon-grate;"
the water-snakes under the moonbeams, with the "elfish light" falling
off them "in hoary flakes" when they reared; the dead crew, who work
the ship and "raise their limbs like lifeless tools"--everything seems
to have been actually _seen_, and we believe it all as the story of a
truthful eye-witness. The details of the voyage, too, are all
chronicled with such order and regularity, there is such a diary-like
air about the whole thing, that we accept it almost as if it were a
series of extracts from the ship's "log." Then again the execution--a
great thing to be said of so long a poem--is marvellously equal
throughout; the story never drags or flags for a moment, its felicities
of diction are perpetual, and it is scarcely marred by a single weak
line. What could have been better said of the instantaneous descent of
the tropical night than
"The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;"
what more weirdly imagined of the "cracks and growls" of the rending
iceberg than that they sounded "like noises in a swound"? And how
beautifully steals in the passage that follows upon the cessation of
the spirit's song--
"It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like to a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune."
Then, as the ballad draws to its close, after the ship has drifted over
the harbour-bar--
"And I with sobs did pray--
O let me be awake, my God;
Or let me sleep alway,"
with what consummate art are we left to imagine the physical traces
which the mariner's long agony had left behind it by a method far more
terrible than any direct description--the effect, namely, which the
sight of him produces upon others--
"I moved my lips--the Pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit;
The holy Hermit raised his eyes,
And prayed where he did sit.
"I took the oars: the Pilot's boy,
_Who now doth crazy go_,
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.
'Ha! ha!' quoth he, 'full plain I see,
The Devil knows how to row.'"
Perfect consistency of plan, in short, and complete equality of
execution, brevity, self-restraint, and an unerring sense of artistic
propriety--these are the chief notes of the _Ancient Mariner_, as they
are _not_, in my humble judgment, the chief notes of any poem of
Coleridge's before or since. And hence it is that this masterpiece of
ballad minstrelsy is, as has been said, so confounding to the
"pigeon-holing" mind.
The next most famous poem of this or indeed of any period of
Coleridge's life is the fragment of _Christabel_, which, however, in
spite of the poet's own opinion on that point, it is difficult to
regard as "a more effective realisation" of the "natural-supernatural"
idea. Beautiful as it is, it possesses none of that human interest with
which, according to this idea, the narrator of the poetic story must
undertake to invest it. Nor can the unfinished condition in which it
was left be fairly held to account for this, for the characters
themselves--the lady Christabel, the witch Geraldine, and even the
baron Sir Leoline himself--are somewhat shadowy creations, with too
little hold upon life and reality, and too much resemblance to the
flitting figures of a dream. Powerful in their way as are the lines
descriptive of the spell thrown over Christabel by her uncanny
guest--lines at the recitation of which Shelley is said to have
fainted--we cannot say that they strike a reader with such a sense of
horror as should be excited by the contemplation of a real
flesh-and-blood maiden subdued by "the shrunken serpent eyes" of a
sorceress, and constrained "passively to imitate" their "look of dull
and treacherous hate." Judging it, however, by any other standard than
that of the poet's own erecting, one must certainly admit the claim of
_Christabel_ to rank very high as a work of pure creative art. It is so
thoroughly suffused and permeated with the glow of mystical romance,
the whole atmosphere of the poem is so exquisitely appropriate to the
subject, and so marvellously preserved throughout, that our lack of
belief in the reality of the scenes presented to us detracts but little
from the pleasure afforded by the artistic excellence of its
presentment. It abounds, too, in isolated pictures of surpassing
vividness and grace--word-pictures which live in the "memory of the
eye" with all the wholeness and tenacity of an actual painting.
Geraldine appearing to Christabel beneath the oak, and the two women
stepping lightly across the hall "that echoes still, pass as lightly as
you will," are pictures of this kind; and nowhere out of Keats's _Eve
of St. Agnes_ is there any "interior" to match that of Christabel's
chamber, done as it is in little more than half a dozen lines. These
beauties, it is true, are fragmentary, like the poem itself, but there
is no reason to believe that the poem itself would have gained anything
in its entirety--that is to say, as a poetic narrative--by completion.
Its main idea--that the purity of a pure maiden is a charm more
powerful for the protection of those dear to her than the spells of the
evil one for their destruction--had been already sufficiently
indicated, and the mode in which Coleridge, it seems, intended to have
worked would hardly have added anything to its effect. [4] And although
he clung till very late in life to the belief that he _could_ have
finished it in after days with no change of poetic manner--"If easy in
my mind," he says in a letter to be quoted hereafter, "I have no doubt
either of the reawakening power or of the kindling inclination"--there
are few students of his later poems who will share his confidence.
Charles Lamb strongly recommended him to leave it unfinished, and
Hartley Coleridge, in every respect as competent a judge on that point
as could well be found, always declared his conviction that his father
could not, at least _qualis ab incepto_, have finished the poem.
The much-admired little piece first published in the _Lyrical Ballads_
under the title of _Love_, and probably best known by its (original)
first and most pregnant stanza, [5] possesses a twofold interest for
the student of Coleridge's life and works, as illustrating at once one
of the most marked characteristics of his peculiar temperament, and one
of the most distinctive features of his poetic manner. The lines are
remarkable for a certain strange fascination of melody--a quality for
which Coleridge, who was not unreasonably proud of his musical gift, is
said to have especially prized them; and they are noteworthy also as
perhaps the fullest expression of the almost womanly softness of
Coleridge's nature. To describe their tone as effeminate would be
unfair and untrue, for effeminacy in the work of a male hand would
necessarily imply something of falsity of sentiment, and from this they
are entirely free. But it must certainly be admitted that for a man's
description of his wooing the warmth of feeling which pervades them is
as nearly sexless in character as it is possible to conceive; and,
beautiful as the verses are, one cannot but feel that they only escape
the "namby-pamby" by the breadth of a hair.
As to the wild dream-poem _Kubla Khan_, it is hardly more than a
psychological curiosity, and only that perhaps in respect of the
completeness of its metrical form. For amid its picturesque but vague
imagery there is nothing which might not have presented itself, and the
like of which has not perhaps actually presented itself, to many a
half-awakened brain of far lower imaginative energy during its hours of
full daylight consciousness than that of Coleridge. Nor possibly is it
quite an unknown experience to many of us to have even a fully-written
record, so to speak, of such impressions imprinted instantaneously on
the mind, the conscious composition of whole pages of narrative,
descriptive, or cogitative matter being compressed as it were into a
moment of time. Unfortunately, however, the impression made upon the
ordinary brain is effaced as instantaneously as it is produced; the
abnormal exaltation of the creative and apprehensive power is quite
momentary, being probably indeed confined to the single moment between
sleep and waking; and the mental tablet which a second before was
covered so thickly with the transcripts of ideas and images, all far
more vivid, or imagined to be so, than those of waking life, and all
apprehended with a miraculous simultaneity by the mind, is converted
into a _tabula rasa_ in the twinkling of a half-opened eye. The wonder
in Coleridge's case was that his brain retained the word-impressions
sufficiently long to enable him to commit them, to the extent at least
of some fifty odd lines, to paper, and that, according to his own
belief, this is but a mere fraction of what but for an unlucky
interruption in the work of transcribing he would have been able to
preserve. His own account of this curious incident is as follows:--
"In the summer of 1797 the author, then in ill health, had retired to a
lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of
Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an
anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep
in his chair at the moment that he was reading, the following sentence,
or words of the same substance, in Purchas's _Pilgrimage_:--'Here the
Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden
thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed by a
wall.' The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep,
at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most
vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to
three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which
all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production
of the corresponding expressions, without any sensation or
consciousness of effect. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a
distinct recollection of the whole, and, taking his pen, ink, and
paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here
preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person
on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his
return to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification,
that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the
general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or
ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the
images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast,
but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter."
This poem, though written in 1797, remained, like _Christabel_, in MS.
till 1816. These were then published in a thin quarto volume, together
with another piece called the _Pains of Sleep_, a composition of many
years' later date than the other two, and of which there will be
occasion to say a word or two hereafter.
At no time, however, not even in this the high-tide of its activity,
was the purely poetic impulse dominant for long together in Coleridge's
mind. He was born with the instincts of the orator, and still more with
those of the teacher, and I doubt whether he ever really regarded
himself as fulfilling the true mission of his life except at those
moments when he was seeking by spoken word to exercise direct influence
over his fellow-men. At the same time, however, such was the
restlessness of his intellect, and such his instability of purpose,
that he could no more remain constant to what he deemed his true
vocation than he could to any other. This was now to be signally
illustrated. Soon after the _Ancient Mariner_ was written, and some
time before the volume which was to contain it appeared, Coleridge
quitted Stowey for Shrewsbury to undertake the duties of a Unitarian
preacher in that town. This was in the month of January 1798, [6] and
it seems pretty certain, though exact dates are not to be ascertained,
that he was back again at Stowey early in the month of February. In the
pages of the _Liberal_ (1822) William Hazlitt has given a most graphic
and picturesque description of Coleridge's appearance and performance
in his Shrewsbury pulpit; and, judging from this, one can well believe,
what indeed was to have been antecedently expected, that had he chosen
to remain faithful to his new employment he might have rivalled the
reputation of the greatest preacher of the time. But his friends the
Wedgwoods, the two sons of the great potter, whose acquaintance he had
made a few years earlier, were apparently much dismayed at the prospect
of his deserting the library for the chapel, and they offered him an
annuity of £150 a year on condition of his retiring from the ministry
and devoting himself entirely to the study of poetry and philosophy.
Coleridge was staying at the house of Hazlitt's father when the letter
containing this liberal offer reached him, "and he seemed," says the
younger Hazlitt, "to make up his mind to close with the proposal in the
act of tying on one of his shoes." Another inducement to so speedy an
acceptance of it is no doubt to be found in the fact of its presenting
to Coleridge an opportunity for the fulfilment of a cherished
desire--that, namely, of "completing his education," as he regarded it,
by studying the German language, and acquiring an acquaintance with the
theology and philosophy of Germany in that country itself. This
prospect he was enabled, through the generosity of the Wedgwoods, to
put into execution towards the end of 1798. But before passing on from
this culminating and, to all intents and purposes, this closing year of
Coleridge's career as a poet it will be proper to attempt something
like a final review of his poetic work. Admirable as much of that work
is, and unique in quality as it is throughout, I must confess that it
leaves on my own mind a stronger impression of the unequal and
imperfect than does that of any poet at all approaching Coleridge in
imaginative vigour and intellectual grasp. It is not a mere inequality
and imperfection of style like that which so seriously detracts from
the pleasure of reading Byron. Nor is it that the thought is often
_impar sibi_--that, like Wordsworth's, it is too apt to descend from
the mountain-tops of poetry to the flats of commonplace, if not into
the bogs of bathos. In both these respects Coleridge may and does
occasionally offend, but his workmanship is, on the whole, as much more
artistic than Byron's as the material of his poetry is of more
uniformly equal value than Wordsworth's. Yet, with almost the sole
exception of the _Ancient Mariner_, his work is in a certain sense more
disappointing than that of either. In spite of his theory as to the
twofold function of poetry we must finally judge that of Coleridge, as
of any other poet, by its relation to the actual. Ancient Mariners and
Christabels--the people, the scenery, and the incidents of an imaginary
world--may be handled by poetry once and again to the wonder and
delight of man; but feats of this kind cannot--or cannot in the Western
world, at any rate--be repeated indefinitely, and the ultimate test of
poetry, at least for the modern European reader, is its treatment of
actualities--its relations to the world of human action, passion,
sensation, thought. And when we try Coleridge's poetry in any one of
these four regions of life, we seem forced to admit that, despite all
its power and beauty, it at no moment succeeds in convincing us, as at
their best moments Wordsworth's and even Byron's continually does, that
the poet has found his true poetic vocation--that he is interpreting
that aspect of life which he can interpret better than he can any
other, and which no other poet, save the one who has vanquished all
poets in their own special fields of achievement, can interpret as well
as he. In no poem of actuality does Coleridge so victoriously show
himself to be the right man at the right work as does Wordsworth in
certain moods of seership and Byron in certain moments of passion. Of
them at such moods and moments we feel assured that they have
discovered where their real strength lies, and have put it forth to the
utmost. But we never feel satisfied that Coleridge has discovered where
_his_ real strength lies, and he strikes us as feeling no more
certainty on the point himself. Strong as is his pinion, his flight
seems to resemble rather that of the eaglet than of the full-grown
eagle even to the last. He continues "mewing his mighty youth" a little
too long. There is a tentativeness of manner which seems to come from a
conscious aptitude for many poetic styles and an incapacity to
determine which should be definitively adopted and cultivated to
perfection. Hence one too often returns from any prolonged ramble
through Coleridge's poetry with an unsatisfied feeling which does not
trouble us on our return from the best literary country of Byron or
Wordsworth. Byron has taken us by rough roads, and Wordsworth led us
through some desperately flat and dreary lowlands to his favourite
"bits;" but we feel that we have seen mountain and valley, wood and
river, glen and waterfall at their best. But Coleridge's poetry leaves
too much of the feeling of a walk through a fine country on a misty
day. We may have had many a peep of beautiful scenery and occasional
glimpses of the sublime; but the medium of vision has been of variable
quality, and somehow we come home with an uneasy suspicion that we have
not seen as much as we might. It is obvious, however, even upon a
cursory consideration of the matter, that this disappointing element in
Coleridge's poetry is a necessary result of the circumstances of its
production; for the period of his productive activity (at least after
attaining manhood) was too short to enable a mind with so many
intellectual distractions to ascertain its true poetic bent, and to
concentrate its energies thereupon. If he seems always to be feeling
his way towards the work which he could do best, it is for the very
good reason that this is what, from 1796 to 1800, he was continually
doing as a matter of fact. The various styles which he attempted--and
for a season, in each case, with such brilliant results--are forms of
poetic expression corresponding, on the face of them, to poetic
impulses of an essentially fleeting nature. The political or
politico-religious odes were the offspring of youthful democratic
enthusiasm; the supernatural poems, so to call them for want of a
better name, had their origin in an almost equally youthful and more
than equally transitory passion for the wild and wondrous. Political
disillusion is fatal to the one impulse, and mere advance in years
extinguishes the other. Visions of Ancient Mariners and Christabels do
not revisit the mature man, and the Toryism of middle life will hardly
inspire odes to anything.
With the extinction of these two forms of creative impulse Coleridge's
poetic activity, from causes to be considered hereafter, came almost
entirely to an end, and into what later forms it might subsequently
have developed remains therefore a matter more or less of conjecture.
Yet I think there is almost a sufficiency of _à priori_ evidence as to
what that form would have been. Had the poet in him survived until
years had "brought the philosophic mind," he would doubtless have done
for the human spirit, in its purely isolated self-communings, what
Wordsworth did for it in its communion with external nature. All that
the poetry of Wordsworth is for the mind which loves to hold converse
with the world of things; this, and more perhaps than this--if more be
possible--would the poetry of Coleridge have been for the mind which
abides by preference in the world of self-originating emotion and
introspective thought. Wordsworth's primary function is to interpret
nature to man: the interpretation of man to himself is with him a
secondary process only-the response, in almost every instance, to
impressions from without. This poet can nobly brace the human heart to
fortitude; but he must first have seen the leech-gatherer on the lonely
moor. The "presence and the spirit interfused" throughout creation is
revealed to us in moving and majestic words; yet the poet requires to
have felt it "in the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the
living air" before he feels it "in the mind of man." But what
Wordsworth grants only to the reader who wanders with him in
imagination by lake and mountain, the Muse of Coleridge, had she lived,
would have bestowed upon the man who has entered into his inner chamber
and shut to the door. This, it seems to me, is the work for which
genius, temperament, and intellectual habit would alike have fitted
him. For while his feeling for internal nature was undoubtedly less
profound, less mystically penetrating than Wordsworth's, his
sensibilities in general were incomparably quicker and more subtle than
those of the friend in whom he so generously recognised a master; and
the reach of his sympathies extends to forms of human emotion, to
subjects of human interest which lay altogether outside the somewhat
narrow range of Wordsworth's.
And, with so magnificent a furniture of those mental and moral
qualities which should belong to "a singer of man to men," it must not
be forgotten that his technical equipment for the work was of the most
splendidly effective kind. If a critic like Mr. Swinburne seems to
speak in exaggerated praise of Coleridge's lyrics, we can well
understand their enchantment for a master of music like himself.
Probably it was the same feeling which made Shelley describe _France_
as "the finest ode in the English language." With all, in fact, who
hold--as it is surely plausible to hold--that the first duty of a
singer is to sing, the poetry of Coleridge will always be more likely
to be classed above than below its merits, great as they are. For, if
we except some occasional lapses in his sonnets--a metrical form in
which, at his best, he is quite "out of the running" with
Wordsworth--his melody never fails him. He is a singer always, as
Wordsworth is not always, and Byron almost never. The _'olian Harp_ to
which he so loved to listen does not more surely respond in music to
the breeze of heaven than does Coleridge's poetic utterance to the wind
of his inspiration. Of the dreamy fascination which Love exercises over
a listening ear I have already spoken; and there is hardly less charm
in the measure and assonances of the _Circassian Love Chant.
Christabel_ again, considered solely from the metrical point of view,
is a veritable _tour de force_--the very model of a metre for romantic
legend: as which, indeed, it was imitated with sufficient grace and
spirit, but seldom with anything approaching to Coleridge's melody, by
Sir Walter Scott.
Endowed therefore with so glorious a gift of song, and only not fully
master of his poetic means because of the very versatility of his
artistic power and the very variety and catholicity of his youthful
sympathies, it is unhappily but too certain that the world has lost
much by that perversity of conspiring accidents which so untimely
silenced Coleridge's muse. And the loss is the more trying to posterity
because he seems, to a not, I think, too curiously considering
criticism, to have once actually struck that very chord which would
have sounded the most movingly beneath his touch,--and to have struck
it at the very moment when the failing hand was about to quit the keys
for ever.
"Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra
Esse sinunt."
I cannot regard it as merely fantastic to believe that the _Dejection_,
that dirge of infinite pathos over the grave of creative imagination,
might, but for the fatal decree which had by that time gone forth
against Coleridge's health and happiness, have been but the cradle-cry
of a new-born poetic power, in which imagination, not annihilated but
transmigrant, would have splendidly proved its vitality through other
forms of song.
FOOTNOTES
1. Perhaps the deepest impress of the Wordsworthian influence is to be
found in the little poem _Frost at Midnight_, with its affecting
apostrophe to the sleeping infant at his side--infant destined to
develop as wayward a genius and to lead as restless and irresolute a
life as his father. Its closing lines--
"Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness...
... whether the eave-drops fall,
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles
Quietly shining to the quiet moon"--
might have flowed straight from the pen of Wordsworth himself.
2. "You had a great loss in not seeing Coleridge. He is a wonderful
man. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so
benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests
himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very
plain, that is, for about three minutes; he is pale, thin, has a wide
mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish loose-growing
half-curling rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five
minutes you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not
very dark but gray, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the
dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind:
it has more of the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling than I ever
witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows and an overhanging forehead."
3. The lines--
"And it is long, and lank, and brown,
As is the ribbed sea-sand."
4. Mr. Gillman (in his _Life_, p. 301) gives the following somewhat
bald outline of what were to form the two concluding cantos, no doubt
on the authority of Coleridge himself. The second canto ends, it may be
remembered, with the despatch of Bracy the bard to the castle of Sir
Roland:--"Over the mountains the Bard, as directed by Sir Leoline,
hastes with his disciple; but, in consequence of one of those
inundations supposed to be common to the country, the spot only where
the castle once stood is discovered, the edifice itself being washed
away. He determines to return. Geraldine, being acquainted with all
that is passing, like the weird sisters in _Macbeth_, vanishes.
Reappearing, however, she awaits the return of the Bard, exciting in
the meantime by her wily arts all the anger she could rouse in the
Baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described to
have been susceptible. The old bard and the youth at length arrive, and
therefore she can no longer personate the character of Geraldine, the
daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but changes her appearance to that of
the accepted though absent lover of Christabel. Next ensues a courtship
most distressing to Christabel, who feels--she knows not why--great
disgust for her once favoured knight. This coldness is very painful to
the Baron, who has no more conception than herself of the supernatural
transformation. She at last yields to her father's entreaties, and
consents to approach the altar with the hated suitor. The real lover
returning, enters at this moment, and produces the ring which she had
once given him in sign of her betrothment. Thus defeated, the
supernatural being Geraldine disappears. As predicted, the castle-bell
tolls, the mother's voice is heard, and, to the exceeding great joy of
the parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a
reconciliation and explanation between father and daughter." 5.
"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame."
6. It may be suggested that this sudden resolution was forced upon
Coleridge by the _res angusta domi_. But I do not think that was the
case. In the winter of 1797 he had obtained an introduction to and
entered into a literary engagement with Mr. Stuart of the _Morning
Post_, and could thus have met, as in fact he afterwards did meet, the
necessities of the hour.