During the summer of 1797, the talk of the inhabitants of a village
on the coast of Somersetshire ran much on the subject of two young
men who had lately taken up their residence there, and were daily to
be seen walking together, absorbed in eager, endless discussions, in
which foreign words and foreign names, unintelligible to the natives,
were of frequent occurrence. The elder of the two was twenty-seven. The
expression of his face was profoundly serious, his manner dignified,
almost solemn; he was not unlike a young Methodist parson, and had a
monotonous and fatiguing voice. His companion, who was a year or two
younger, and whose words, accompanied by much violent gesture, flowed
in an unceasing stream, had a large round head (the shape of which
indicated remarkable gifts), flatfish features, and deep hazel eyes,
as full of confused depression as of inspiration. The whole figure
and air might be called flabby and irresolute, expressive of weakness
with a curious possibility of strength. The youth's voice was musical,
and his eloquence seemed to entrance even his reserved auditor and
friend. Who and what were these two young men, who desired acquaintance
with no one in the place or neighbourhood? This was the question the
inhabitants put to themselves. What could they be discussing so eagerly
but politics? and if so, what could they be but conspirators, possibly
Jacobins hatching treasonous plots?
The rumour soon spread that the elder of the two friends, Mr.
Wordsworth, had been in France at the beginning of the Revolution,
and had amply shared the enthusiasm of the day for social reform;
and that the younger, Mr. Coleridge, had distinguished himself as a
keen democrat and Unitarian, had written a drama called _The Fall
of Robespierre_, and two political pamphlets entitled _Conciones ad
populum_, and had even formed the plan of founding, with others holding
the same opinions, a socialistic community in the backwoods of America.
No further confirmation of the suspicions entertained was required.
A kind neighbour communicated with the authorities in London, and a
detective with a Bardolph nose promptly appeared on the scenes, and,
himself unobserved, followed the two gentlemen closely. Seeing them
with papers in their hands, he made no doubt that they were drawing
maps of the neighbourhood. He occasionally addressed them, and he hid
himself for hours at a time behind a sandbank at the seaside, which was
their favourite seat. According to Coleridge's account of the affair,
which is, however, not entirely to be relied on, he at first thought
that the two conspirators were aware of their danger, for he often
heard them talk of one Spy-nosy, which he was inclined to interpret as
a reference to himself; but he was speedily convinced that it was the
name of a man who had made a book and lived long ago. Their talk ran
most upon books, and they were perpetually desiring each other to look
at _this_ and to listen to _that_; but he could not catch a word about
politics, and ere long gave up the attempt and took himself off.
There was, as a matter of fact, nothing alarming to discover. The two
friends had long ago slept off their revolutionary intoxication, and
even with the Spinoza about whom they talked so much they had only a
second-hand acquaintance; they discussed him without understanding
him, much less assimilating him. Coleridge had made acquaintance with
Spinozism in the course of his study of Schilling's early works,
and he now initiated his friend, who was unlearned in philosophy,
into his newly-acquired wisdom. But the name of Spinoza was in these
conversations merely the symbol of a mystic worship of nature; Jacob
Böhme's was to be heard in peaceful conjunction with it. The matter
under consideration was not science, but poetry; and if, during these
long discussions, there was any mention of a revolution, it was a
purely literary and artistic revolution, with respect to which the two
friends, from very different starting-points, had arrived at remarkably
similar conclusions.
What was really accomplished in the course of these conversations was
nothing less than that _conscious_ literary rupture with the spirit of
the eighteenth century, which, assuming different forms in different
countries, took place at this time all over Europe.
Coleridge was of an inquiring nature. His antipathy to French Classical
powder and paint dated from his schooldays, when a teacher of
independent opinions had warned his intelligent pupil against harps,
lutes, and lyres in his compositions, demanding pen and ink instead;
had bid him beware of Muses, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene in
poetry, affirming everything of the sort to be nothing but rococo
style and convention. Coleridge, therefore, refused the title of poet
to Pope and his successors, and swore by Bowies' sonnets. He decried
Pope in the same manner as Oehlenschläger's young friends in Denmark
soon afterwards decried Baggesen. His Germanic temperament made him
the born enemy of _esprit_, epigram, and points. It appeared to him
that the excellence of the school which had its origin in France had
nothing to do with poetry. "The excellence consisted in just and acute
observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as
its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth
and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form. Even when the subject
was purely fanciful the poet appealed to the intellect; nay, even in
the case of a consecutive narration, a _point_ was looked for at the
end of each second line, and the whole was, as it were, a chain of
epigrams." In other words, the compositions of this school consisted,
according to Coleridge, not of poetic thoughts, but of unpoetic
thoughts translated into a language which was, by convention, called
poetic. In the conception of the poem there was nothing fanciful; nay,
so little imagination did the author possess, that "it depended on the
compositor's putting or not putting _a small capital_, whether the
words should be personifications or mere abstracts." England's great
poets, Spenser for example, had been able to express the most fanciful
ideas in the purest, simplest of English; but these newer writers could
not express common, everyday thoughts except in such an extraordinarily
bad and fantastic style that it seemed as if Echo and Sphinx had laid
their heads together to produce it. Coleridge turned with aversion from
these attempts to conceal want of imagination under affectation of
style. He detested Odes to Jealousy, Hope, Forgetfulness, and all such
abstractions. They reminded him of an Oxford poem on the subject of
vaccination, which began: "Inoculation! heavenly maid, descend!" Even
in the best English poetry of a later day the bad habit of personifying
abstractions was too long adhered to. (Shelley, for example, presents
us with "the twins Error and Truth.") All these affectations appeared
to Coleridge to arise from the custom of writing Latin verses in the
public schools. The model style, according to him, was that which
expressed natural thoughts in natural language, "neither bookish
nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp nor of the kennel." The
old English ballads in Percy's collection, with their unadulterated
natural, popular tone, seemed to him excellent guides. He, too, would
fain write in such a tone.
It was at this stage that Coleridge was initiated into all Wordsworth's
ideas and projects. Wordsworth's was one of those natures which
find satisfaction and a sense of security in dogmatic and strongly
condemnatory verdicts. His idea of the whole of English poetry after
Milton was, that the nation, after producing that great man, had lost
the poetic power it, formerly possessed and had preserved only a form
of composition, so that poetry had come to mean the art of diction--the
poet being judged by the degree of mastery he had attained in that
art. Hence there had been an ever more marked departure in metrical
composition from the rules of prose. The poet's aim now must be to
retrace the path that had been taken, and produce verse which should
be distinguished only by its metrical form from the language of daily
life. Whilst Coleridge was all for natural melody, Wordsworth went the
length of demanding that poetry should be simply rhymed conversation.
And with this naturalistic conception of form was combined a similar
naturalistic conception of the subject matter of poetry. One of
Wordsworth's favourite assertions and one of the most bitter reproaches
he levelled at the prevailing literary taste was, that hardly one
original image or new description of nature had been introduced into
English verse in the age between Milton and Thomson. Himself endowed
with an extraordinary receptivity for all the phenomena of external
nature, he took the cry: "Nature! nature!" for his watchword--and by
nature he meant the country as opposed to the town. In town life men
forgot the earth on which they lived. They no longer really knew it;
they remembered the general appearance of fields and woods, but not
the details of the life of nature, not its varying play of smiling,
sober, glorious, and terrible scenes. Who nowadays could tell the names
of the various forest trees and meadow flowers? who knew the signs
of the weather--what the clouds say when they hurry so, what those
motions of the cattle mean, and why the mists roll down the hill?
Wordsworth had known all these signs from the time when he played as
a child among the Cumberland hills. He had a familiar acquaintance
with all the varieties of English nature, at all seasons of the year;
he was constituted to reproduce what he saw and felt, and to meditate
profoundly over it before he reproduced it--was fitted to carry out,
with full consciousness of what he was undertaking, the reformation of
poetry which had been begun by poor Chatterton, "the sleepless soul,"
and by the peasant Burns, a much more gifted poet than himself. Though
he was but one of the numerous exponents of that love of nature which
at the beginning of the century spread like a wave over Europe, he had
a stronger, more profound consciousness than any man in the United
Kingdom of the fact that a new poetic spirit was abroad in England.
The friends agreed that there were three distinct periods of English
poetry--the period of poetic youth and strength, from Chaucer to
Dryden; the period of poetic barrenness, from (and including) Dryden
to the end of the eighteenth century; and the period of regeneration,
which was now beginning with themselves, after being heralded by their
predecessors. Like the men of the new era in Germany and Denmark, these
young Englishmen sought for imposing terms to express the difference
between themselves and those whom they attacked; and the terms they
found were exactly the same as those adopted by their Continental
contemporaries. They credited themselves with _imagination_--in other
words, with the true creative gift, and wrote page upon page of vague
eulogy of it as opposed to _fancy_; exactly as Oehlenschläger and his
school eulogised imagination and allowed Baggesen at best only humour.
They themselves were distinguished by _reason_, their predecessors
had only had _understanding_; they had genius, their predecessors had
only had talent; they were creators, their predecessors had only been
critics. Even an Aristotle, not being a poet, could lay claim to no
more than talent. In England, too, Noureddin[1] was belittled; the new
men were conscious of the infinite superiority of their methods to his
"un-natural" procedure.
[1] A character in the Danish poet Oehlenschläger's play, _Aladdin_,
who represents talent as opposed to genius, which is embodied in
Aladdin.
V