possess, once wittily summed up a general objection to criticism of the
kind we advocate as 'always asking people to do what they can't.' But to
point out, as the philosophical critic would, that poetry itself must
inevitably languish if the more comprehensive kinds are neglected, or if
a non-poetic age is allowed complacently to call itself lyrical, is not
to urge the real masters in the less comprehensive kinds to desert their
work. Who but a fool would ask Mr De la Mare to write an epic or Miss
Mansfield to give us a novel? But he might be a wise man who called upon
Mr Eliot to set himself to the composition of a poetic drama; and
without a doubt he would deserve well of the commonwealth who should
summon the popular imitators of Mr De la Mare, Mr Davies, or Mr Eliot to
begin by trying to express something that they did comprehend or desired
to comprehend, even though it should take them into thousands of
unprintable pages. It is infinitely preferable that those who have so
far given evidence of nothing better than a fatal fluency in insipid
imitation of true lyric poets should fall down a precipice in the
attempt to scale the very pinnacles of Parnassus. There is something
heroic about the most unmitigated disaster at such an altitude.
Moreover, the most marked characteristic of the present age is a
continual disintegration of the consciousness; more or less deliberately
in every province of man's spiritual life the reins are being thrown on
to the horse's neck. The power which controls and disciplines
sensational experience is, in modern literature, daily denied; the
counterpart of this power which envisages the ideal in the conduct of
one's own or the nation's affairs and unfalteringly pursues it is held
up to ridicule. Opportunism in politics has its complement in
opportunism in poetry. Mr Lloyd George's moods are reflected in Mr
----'s. And, beneath these heights, we have the queer spectacle of a
whole race of very young poets who somehow expect to attain poetic
intensity by the physical intensity with which they look at any
disagreeable object that happens to come under their eye. Perhaps they
will find some satisfaction in being reckoned among the curiosities of
literature a hundred years hence; it is certainly the only satisfaction
they will have. They, at any rate, have a great deal to gain from the
acid of philosophical criticism. If a reaction to life has in itself the
seeds of an intuitive comprehension it will stand explication. If a
young poet's nausea at the sight of a toothbrush is significant of
anything at all except bad upbringing, then it is capable of being
refined into a vision of life and of being expressed by means of the
appropriate mechanism or myth. But to register the mere facts of
consciousness, undigested by the being, without assessment or
reinforcement by the mind is, for all the connection it has with poetry,
no better than to copy down the numbers of one's bus-tickets.
We do not wish to suggest that Sir Henry Newbolt would regard this
lengthy gloss upon his book as legitimate deduction. He, we think, is a
good deal more tolerant than we are; and he would probably hesitate to
work out the consequences of the principles which he enunciates and
apply them vigorously to the present time. But as a vindication of the
supreme place of poetry as poetry in human life, as a stimulus to
critical thought and a guide to exquisite appreciation of which his
essay on Chaucer is an honourable example--_A New Study of English
Poetry_ deserves all the praise that lies in our power to give.
[MARCH, 1920.
_Coleridge's Criticism_
It is probably true that _Biographia Literaria_ is the best book of
criticism in the English language; nevertheless, it is rash to assume
that it is a book of criticism of the highest excellence, even when it
has passed through the salutary process of drastic editing, such as that
to which, in the present case,[15] the competent hands of Mr George
Sampson have submitted it. Its garrulity, its digressions, its verbiage,
the marks which even the finest portions show of submersion in the tepid
transcendentalism that wrought such havoc upon Coleridge's mind--these
are its familiar disfigurements. They are not easily removed; for they
enter fairly deeply even in the texture of those portions of the book in
which Coleridge devotes himself, as severely as he can, to the proper
business of literary criticism.
[Footnote 15: _Coleridge: Biographia Literaria_, Chapters I.-IV.,
XIV.-XXII.--_Wordsworth: Prefaces and Essays on Poetry_, 1800-1815.
Edited by George Sampson, with an Introductory Essay by Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch. (Cambridge University Press.)]
It may be that the prolixity with which he discusses and refutes the
poetical principles expounded by Wordsworth in the preface of _Lyrical
Ballads_ was due to the tenderness of his consideration for Wordsworth's
feelings, an influence to which Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch directs our
attention in his introduction. That is honourable to Coleridge as a man;
but it cannot exculpate him as a critic. For the points he had to make
for and against Wordsworth were few and simple. First, he had to show
that the theory of a poetic diction drawn exclusively from the language
of 'real life' was based upon an equivocation, and therefore was
useless. This Coleridge had to show to clear himself of the common
condemnation in which he had been involved, as one wrongly assumed to
endorse Wordsworth's theory. He had an equally important point to make
for Wordsworth. He wished to prove to him that the finest part of his
poetic achievement was based upon a complete neglect of this theory, and
that the weakest portions of his work were those in which he most
closely followed it. In this demonstration he was moved by the desire to
set his friend on the road that would lead to the most triumphant
exercise of his own powers.
There is no doubt that Coleridge made both his points; but he made them,
in particular the former, at exceeding length, and at the cost of a good
deal of internal contradiction. He sets out, in the former case, to
maintain that the language of poetry is essentially different from the
language of prose. This he professes to deduce from a number of
principles. His axiom--and it is possibly a sound one--is that metre
originated in a spontaneous effort of the mind to hold in check the
workings of emotion. From this, he argues, it follows that to justify
the existence of metre, the language of a poem must show evidence of
emotion, by being different from the language of prose. Further, he
says, metre in itself stimulates the emotions, and for this condition of
emotional excitement 'correspondent food' must be provided. Thirdly, the
emotion of poetical composition itself demands this same 'correspondent
food.' The final argument, if we omit one drawn from an obscure theory
of imitation very characteristic of Coleridge, is the incontrovertible
appeal to the authority of the poets.
Unfortunately, the elaborate exposition of the first three arguments is
not only unnecessary but confusing, for Coleridge goes on to
distinguish, interestingly enough, between a language proper to poetry,
a language proper to prose, and a neutral language which may be used
indifferently in prose and poetry, and later still he quotes a beautiful
passage from Chaucer's _Troilus and Cressida_ as an example of this
neutral language, forgetting that, if his principles are correct,
Chaucer was guilty of a sin against art in writing _Troilus and
Cressida_ in metre. The truth, of course, is that the paraphernalia of
principles goes by the board. In order to refute the Wordsworthian
theory of a language of real life supremely fitted for poetry you have
only to point to the great poets, and to judge the fitness of the
language of poetry you can only examine the particular poem. Wordsworth
was wrong and self-contradictory without doubt; but Coleridge was
equally wrong and self-contradictory in arguing that metre
_necessitated_ a language essentially different from that of prose.
So it is that the philosophic part of the specifically literary
criticism of the _Biographia_ takes us nowhere in particular. The
valuable part is contained in his critical appreciation of Wordsworth's
poetry and that amazing chapter--a little forlorn, as most of
Coleridge's fine chapters are--on 'the specific symptoms of poetic power
elucidated in a critical analysis of Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_.
In these few pages Coleridge is at the summit of his powers as a critic.
So long as his attention could be fixed on a particular object, so long
as he was engaged in deducing his general principles immediately from
particular instances of the highest kind of poetic excellence, he was a
critic indeed. Every one of the four points characteristic of early
poetic genius which he formulates deserves to be called back to the mind
again and again:--
'The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty
excess, if it be evidently original and not the result of an easily
imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in the
compositions of a young man....
'A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote
from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself.
At least I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately
from the author's personal sensations and experiences the excellence
of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a
fallacious pledge, of genuine poetical power....
'Images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature,
and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves
characterise the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as
far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated
thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the
effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant;
or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them
from the poet's own spirit....
'The last character ... which would prove indeed but little, except
as taken conjointly with the former--yet without which the former
could scarce exist in a high degree ... is _depth_ and _energy_ of
_thought_. No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the
same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the
fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions,
emotions, language.'
In the context the most striking peculiarity of this enunciation of the
distinguishing marks of poetic power, apart from the conviction which it
brings, is that they are not in the least concerned with the actual
language of poetry. The whole subject of poetic diction is dropped when
Coleridge's critical, as opposed to his logical, faculty is at work;
and, although this Chapter XV is followed by many pages devoted to the
analysis and refutation of the Wordsworthian theory and to the
establishment of those principles of poetic diction to which we have
referred, when Coleridge comes once more to engage his pure critical
faculty, in the appreciation of Wordsworth's actual poetry in Chapter
XXII, we again find him ignoring his own principles precisely on those
occasions when we might have thought them applicable.
Coleridge enumerates Wordsworth's defects one by one. The first, he
says, is an inconstancy of style. For a moment he appears to invoke his
principles: 'Wordsworth sinks too often and too abruptly to that style
which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it
into the three species; _first_, that which is peculiar to poetry;
_second_, that which is proper only in prose; and _third_, the neutral
or common to both.' But in the very first instance which Coleridge
gives we can see that the principles have been dragged in by the hair,
and that they are really alien to the argument which he is pursuing. He
gives this example of disharmony from the poem on 'The Blind Highland
Boy' (whose washing-tub in the 1807 edition, it is perhaps worth noting,
had been changed at Coleridge's own suggestion, with a rash contempt of
probabilities, into a turtle shell in the edition of 1815):--
'And one, the rarest, was a shell
Which he, poor child, had studied well:
The Shell of a green Turtle, thin
And hollow;--you might sit therein,
It was so wide, and deep.
'Our Highland Boy oft visited
The house which held this prize; and led
By choice or chance, did thither come
One day, when no one was at home,
And found the door unbarred.'
The discord is, in any case, none too apparent; but if one exists, it
does not in the least arise from the actual language which Wordsworth
has used. If in anything, it consists in a slight shifting of the focus
of apprehension, a sudden and scarcely perceptible emphasis on the
detail of actual fact, which is a deviation from the emotional key of
the poem as a whole. In the next instance the lapse is, however,
indubitable:--
'Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest.
And though little troubled with sloth,
Drunken Lark! thou would'st be loth
To be such a traveller as I.
Happy, happy liver!
_With a soul as strong as a mountain River
Pouring out praise to th' Almighty Giver_,
Joy and jollity be with us both,
Hearing thee or else some other
As merry as a Brother
I on the earth will go plodding on,
By myself, cheerfully, till the day is done.'
The two lines in italics are discordant. But again it is no question of
language in itself; it is an internal discrepancy between the parts of a
whole already debilitated by metrical insecurity.
Coleridge's second point against Wordsworth is 'a _matter-of-factness_
in certain poems.' Once more there is no question of language. Coleridge
takes the issue on to the highest and most secure ground. Wordsworth's
obsession with realistic detail is a contravention of the essential
catholicity of poetry; and this accidentality is manifested in
laboriously exact description both of places and persons. The poet
sterilises the creative activity of poetry, in the first case, for no
reason at all, and in the second, because he proposes as his immediate
object a moral end instead of the giving of æsthetic pleasure. His
prophets and wise men are pedlars and tramps not because it is probable
that they should be of this condition--it is on the contrary highly
improbable--but because we are thus to be taught a salutary moral
lesson. The question of language in itself, if it enters at all here,
enters only as the indifferent means by which a non-poetic end is
sought. The accidentality lies not in the words, but in the poet's
intention.
Coleridge's third and fourth points, 'an undue predilection for the
dramatic form,' and 'an eddying instead of a progression of thought,'
may be passed as quickly as he passes them himself, for in any case they
could only be the cause of a jejuneness of language. The fifth, more
interesting, is the appearance of 'thoughts and images too great for the
subject ... an approximation to what might be called _mental_ bombast.'
Coleridge brings forward as his first instance of this four lines which
have taken a deep hold on the affections of later generations:--
'They flash upon the inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude!
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.'
Coleridge found an almost burlesque bathos in the second couplet after
the first. It would be difficult for a modern critic to accept that
verdict altogether; nevertheless his objection to the first couplet as a
description of physical vision is surely sound. And it is interesting to
note that the objection has been evaded by posterity in a manner which
confirms Coleridge's criticism. The 'inward eye' is almost universally
remembered apart from its context, and interpreted as a description of
the purely spiritual process to which alone, in Coleridge's opinion, it
was truly apt.
The enumeration of Wordsworth's excellences which follows is masterly;
and the exhilaration with which one rises through the crescendo to the
famous: 'Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
_Imagination_ in the highest and strictest sense of the word ...' is
itself a pleasure to be derived only from the gift of criticism of the
highest and strictest kind.
The object of this examination has been to show, not that the
_Biographia Literaria_ is undeserving of the high praise which has been
bestowed upon it, but that the praise has been to some extent
undiscriminating. It has now become almost a tradition to hold up to our
admiration Coleridge's chapter on poetic diction, and Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch, in a preface that is as unconventional in manner as it is
stimulating in most of its substance, maintains the tradition. As a
matter of fact, what Coleridge has to say on poetic diction is prolix
and perilously near commonplace. Instead of making to Wordsworth the
wholly sufficient answer that much poetry of the highest kind employs a
language that by no perversion can be called essentially the same as the
language of prose, he allows himself to be led by his German metaphysic
into considering poetry as a _Ding an sich_ and deducing therefrom the
proposition that poetry _must_ employ a language different from that of
prose. That proposition is false, as Coleridge himself quite adequately
shows from his remarks upon what he called the 'neutral' language of
Chaucer and Herbert. But instead of following up the clue and beginning
to inquire whether or not narrative poetry by nature demands a language
approximating to that of prose, and whether Wordsworth, in so far as he
aimed at being a narrative poet, was not working on a correct but
exaggerated principle, he leaves the bald contradiction and swerves off
to the analysis of the defects and excellences of Wordsworth's actual
achievement. Precisely because we consider it of the greatest importance
that the best of Coleridge's criticism should be studied and studied
again, we think it unfortunate that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch should
recommend the apprentice to get the chapters on poetic diction by heart.
He will be condemned to carry about with him a good deal of dubious
logic and a false conclusion. What is worth while learning from
Coleridge is something different; it is not his behaviour with 'a
principle,' but his conduct when confronted with poetry in the concrete,
his magisterial ordonnance (to use his own word) and explication of his
own æsthetic intuitions, and his manner of employing in this, the
essential task of poetic criticism, the results of his own deep study of
all the great poetry that he knew.
[APRIL, 1920.
_Shakespeare Criticism_
It is an exciting, though exhausting, experience to read a volume of the
great modern Variorum Shakespeare from cover to cover. One derives from
the exercise a sense of the evolution of Shakespeare criticism which
cannot be otherwise obtained; one begins to understand that Pope had his
merits as an editor, as indeed a man of genius could hardly fail to
have, to appreciate the prosy and pedestrian pains of Theobald, to
admire the amazing erudition of Steevens. One sees the phases of the
curious process by which Shakespeare was elevated at the beginning of
the nineteenth century to a sphere wherein no mortal man of genius could
breathe. For a dizzy moment every line that he wrote bore the authentic
impress of the divine. _Efflavit deus_. In a century, from being largely
beneath criticism Shakespeare had passed to a condition where he was
almost completely beyond it.
_King John_ affords an amusing instance of this reverential attitude.
The play, as is generally known, was based upon a slightly earlier and
utterly un-Shakespearean production entitled _The Troublesome Raigne of
King John_. The only character Shakespeare added to those he found ready
to his hand was that of James Gurney, who enters with Lady Falconbridge
after the scene between the Bastard and his brother, says four words,
and departs for ever.
'_Bast_.--James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?
_Gur_.--Good leave, good Philip.
_Bast_.--Philip! Sparrow! James.'
It is obvious that Shakespeare's sole motive in introducing Gurney is to
provide an occasion for the Bastard's characteristic, though not to a
modern mind quite obvious, jest, based on the fact that Philip was at
the time a common name for a sparrow. The Bastard, just dubbed Sir
Richard Plantagenet by the King, makes a thoroughly natural jibe at his
former name, Philip, to which he had just shown such breezy
indifference. The jest could not have been made to Lady Falconbridge
without a direct insult to her, which would have been alien to the
natural, blunt, and easygoing fondness of the relation which Shakespeare
establishes between the Bastard and his mother. So Gurney is quite
casually brought in to receive it. But this is not enough for the
Shakespeare-drunken Coleridge.
'For an instance of Shakespeare's power _in minimis_, I generally
quote James Gurney's character in _King John_. How individual and
comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!'
Assuredly it is not with any intention of diminishing Coleridge's title
as a Shakespearean critic that we bring forward this instance. He is the
greatest critic of Shakespeare; and the quality of his excellence is
displayed in one of the other few notes he left on this particular play.
In Act III, scene ii., Warburton's emendation of 'airy' to 'fiery' had
in Coleridge's day been received into the text of the Bastard's lines:--
'Now by my life, this day grows wondrous hot;
Some airy devil hovers in the sky.'
On which Coleridge writes:--
'I prefer the old text: the word 'devil' implies 'fiery.' You need
only to read the line, laying a full and strong emphasis on 'devil,'
to perceive the uselessness and tastelessness of Warburton's
alteration.'
The test is absolutely convincing--a poet's criticism of poetry. But
that Coleridge went astray not once but many times, under the influence
of his idolatry of Shakespeare, corroborates the general conclusion that
is forced upon any one who will take the trouble to read a whole volume
of the modern _Variorum_. There has been much editing, much comment, but
singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread
to an intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently from
niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing
exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a
typical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield's remarks upon
the play: 'Like the best Shakespearean tragedies, _King John_ is an
intellectual form in which a number of people with obsessions illustrate
the idea of treachery.' We remember that Mr Masefield has much better
than this to say of Shakespeare in his little book; but we fasten upon
this sentence because it is set before us in the _Variorum_, and because
it too 'is an intellectual form in which a literary man with obsessions
illustrates his idea of criticism.' Genetically, it is a continuation of
the shoddy element in Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism, a continual
bias towards transcendental interpretation of the obvious. To take the
origin a phase further back, it is the portentous offspring of the
feeble constituent of German philosophy (a refusal to see the object)
after it had been submitted to an idle process of ferment in the softer
part of Coleridge's brain.
_King John_ is not in the least what Mr Masefield, under this dangerous
influence, has persuaded himself it is. It is simply the effort of a
young man of great genius to rewrite a bad play into a good one. The
effort was, on the whole, amazingly successful; that the play is only a
good one, instead of a very good one, is not surprising. The miracle is
that anything should have been made of _The Troublesome Raigne_ at all.
The _Variorum_ extracts show that, of the many commentators who studied
the old play with Shakespeare's version, only Swinburne saw, or had the
courage to say, how utterly null the old play really is. To have made
Shakespeare's Falconbridge out of the old lay figure, to have created
the scenes between Hubert and John, and Hubert and Arthur, out of that
decrepit skeleton--that is the work of a commanding poetical genius on
the threshold of full mastery of its powers, worthy of all wonder, no
doubt, but doubly worthy of close examination.