THE year 1798 was a year of great excitement: England was alone in the
struggle against Buonaparte; the mutiny at the Nore had only just been
quelled: the 3 per cent. Consols had been marked at 49 or 50; the
Gazettes were occupied with accounts of bloody captures of French ships;
Ireland may be said to have been in rebellion, and horrible murders were
committed there; the King sent a message to Parliament telling it that an
invasion might be expected and that it was to be assisted by
“incendiaries” at home; and the Archbishop of Canterbury and eleven
bishops passed a resolution declaring that if the French should land, or
a dangerous insurrection should break out, it would be the duty of the
clergy to take up arms against an enemy whom the Bishop of Rochester
described as “instigated by that desperate malignity against the Faith he
has abandoned, which in all ages has marked the horrible character of the
vile apostate.”
In the midst of this raving political excitement three human beings were
to be found who although they were certainly not unmoved by it, were able
to detach themselves from it when they pleased, and to seclude themselves
in a privacy impenetrable even to an echo of the tumult around them.
In April or May, 1798, the _Nightingale_ was written, and these are the
sights and sounds which were then in young Coleridge’s eyes and ears:—
“No cloud, no relique of the sunken day
Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip
Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues.
Come, we will rest on this old mossy bridge!
You see the glimmer of the stream beneath,
But hear no murmuring: it flows silently,
O’er its soft bed of verdure. All is still,
A balmy night! and tho’ the stars be dim,
Yet let us think upon the vernal showers
That gladden the green earth, and we shall find
A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.”
We happen also to have Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal for April and May.
Here are a few extracts from it:—
April 6th.—“Went a part of the way home with Coleridge. . . . The
spring still advancing very slowly. The horse-chestnuts budding, and
the hedgerows beginning to look green, but nothing fully expanded.”
April 9th.—“Walked to Stowey . . . The sloe in blossom, the hawthorns
green, the larches in the park changed from black to green in two or
three days. Met Coleridge in returning.”
April 12th.—“ . . . The spring advances rapidly, multitudes of
primroses, dog-violets, periwinkles, stitchwort.”
April 27th.—“Coleridge breakfasted and drank tea, strolled in the
wood in the morning, went with him in the evening through the wood,
afterwards walked on the hills: the moon; a many-coloured sea and
sky.”
May 6th, Sunday.—“Expected the painter {101} and Coleridge. A rainy
morning—very pleasant in the evening. Met Coleridge as we were
walking out. Went with him to Stowey; heard the nightingale; saw a
glow-worm.”
What was it which these three young people (for Dorothy certainly must be
included as one of its authors) proposed to achieve by their book?
Coleridge, in the _Biographia Literaria_, says (vol. ii. c. 1): “During
the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our
conversations 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 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 agents and incidents were to be, in part
at least, supernatural; and the excellence 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. And real
in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever
source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural
agency. 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_, {103} by
awakening the mind’s attention to 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, yet see not,
ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.
“With this view I wrote THE ANCIENT MARINER, and was preparing, among
other poems, THE DARK LADIE and the CHRISTABEL, in which I should
have more nearly have realised my ideal, than I had done in my first
attempt.”
Coleridge, when he wrote to Cottle offering him the _Lyrical Ballads_,
affirms that “the volumes offered to you are, to a certain degree, _one
work in kind_” {104a} (_Reminiscences_, p. 179); and Wordsworth declares,
“I should not, however, have requested this assistance, had I not
believed that the poems of my Friend would in a great measure _have the
same tendency as my own_, {104b} and that though there would be found a
difference, there would be found no discordance in the colours of our
style; as our opinions on the subject of poetry do almost entirely
coincide” (Preface to _Lyrical Ballads_, 1800).
It is a point carefully to be borne in mind that we have the explicit and
contemporary authority of both poets that their aim was the same.
There are difficulties in the way of believing that _The Ancient Mariner_
was written for the _Lyrical Ballads_. It was planned in 1797 and was
originally intended for a magazine. Nevertheless, it may be asserted
that the purpose of _The Ancient Mariner_ and of _Christabel_ (which was
originally intended for the _Ballads_) was, as their author said,
_truth_, living truth. He was the last man in the world to care for a
story simply as a chain of events with no significance, and in these
poems the supernatural, by interpenetration with human emotions, comes
closer to us than an event of daily life. In return the emotions
themselves, by means of the supernatural expression, gain intensity. The
texture is so subtly interwoven that it is difficult to illustrate the
point by example, but take the following lines:—
“Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
* * * *
The self-same moment I could pray:
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
* * * *
And the hay was white with silent light
Till rising from the same,
Full many shapes, that shadows were,
In crimson colours came.
A little distance from the prow
Those crimson shadows were:
I turned my eyes upon the deck—
Oh, Christ! what saw I there!
Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,
And, by the holy rood!
A man all light, a seraph-man,
On every corse there stood.”
Coleridge’s marginal gloss to these last stanzas is “The angelic spirits
leave the dead bodies, and appear in their own forms of light.”