CHAPTER II._A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century

Coleridge, Bowles, and the Pope Controversy.

While Scott was busy collecting the fragments of Border minstrelsy and

translating German ballads,[1] two other young poets, far to the south,

were preparing their share in the literary revolution. In those same

years (1795-98) Wordsworth and Coleridge were wandering together over the

Somerset downs and along the coast of Devon, catching glimpses of the sea

towards Bristol or Linton, and now and then of the skeleton masts and

gossamer sails of a ship against the declining sun, like those of the

phantom bark in "The Ancient Mariner." The first fruits of these walks

and talks was that epoch-making book, the "Lyrical Ballads"; the first

edition of which was published in 1798, and the second, with an

additional volume and the famous preface by Wordsworth, in 1800. The

genesis of the work and the allotment of its parts were described by

Coleridge himself in the "Biographia Literaria" (1817), Chapter XIV.

"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 thought suggested itself

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; . . .

for the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary

life. . . . It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to

persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic. . . . 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 realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt."

Coleridge's contributions to romantic poetry are few though precious.

Weighed against the imposing array of Scott's romances in prose and

verse,[2] they seem like two or three little gold coins put into the

scales to balance a handful of silver dollars. He stands for so much in

the history of English thought, he influenced his own and the following

generation on so many sides, that his romanticism shows like a mere

incident in his intellectual history. His blossoming time was short at

the best, and ended practically with the century. After his return from

Germany in 1799 and his settlement at Keswick in 1800, he produced little

verse of any importance beyond the second part of "Christabel" (written

in 1800, published in 1816). His creative impulse failed him, and he

became more and more involved in theology, metaphysics, political

philosophy, and literary criticism.

It appears, therefore, at first sight, a little odd that Coleridge's

German biographer, Professor Brandl, should have treated his subject

under this special aspect,[3] and attributed to him so leading a place in

the romantic movement. Walter Scott, if we consider his life-long and

wellnigh exclusive dedication of himself to the work of historic

restoration--Scott, certainly, and not Coleridge was the "high priest of

Romanticism." [4] Brandl is dissatisfied with the term Lake School, or

Lakers, commonly given to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and

proposes instead to call them the Romantic School, Romanticists

(_Romantiker_), surely something of a misnomer when used of an eclectic

versifier like Southey, or a poet of nature, moral reflection, and humble

life like Wordsworth. Southey, in casting about him for a theme,

sometimes became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a romancer; as

in "Joan of Arc" (1799), "Madoc" (1805), and "Roderick the Goth" (1814);

not to speak of translations like "Amadis of Gaul," "Palmerin of

England," and "The Chronicle of the Cid." But these were not due to the

compelling bent of his genius, as in Scott. They were miscellaneous

jobs, undertaken in the regular course of his business as a manufacturer

of big, irregular epics, Oriental, legendary, mythological, and what not;

and as an untiring biographer, editor, and hack writer of all

descriptions. Southey was a mechanical poet, with little original

inspiration, and represents nothing in particular. Wordsworth again,

though innovating in practice and theory against eighteenth-century

tradition, is absolutely unromantic in contrast with Scott and Coleridge.

But it will be fair to let the critic defend his own nomenclature; and

the passage which I shall quote will serve not only as another attempt to

define romanticism, but also to explain why Brandl regards the Lake poets

as our romantic school _par excellence_. "'Lake School' is a name, but

no designation. This was felt in England, where many critics have

accordingly fallen into the opposite extreme, and maintained that the

members of this group of poets had nothing in common beyond their

personal and accidental conditions. As if they had only lived together,

and not worked together! In truth they were bound together by many a

strong tie, and above all by one of a polemical kind, namely, by the

aversion for the monotony that had preceded them, and by the struggle

against merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniformity is death! Let us be

various and individual as life itself is. . . . Away with dry

Rationalism! Let us fight it with all the powers we possess; whether by

bold Platonism or simple Bible faith; whether by enthusiastic hymns, or

dreamy fairy tales; whether by the fabulous world of distant times and

zones, or by the instincts of the children in the next village. Let us

abjure the ever-recommended nostrum of imitation of the old masters in

poetry, and rather attach ourselves to homely models, and endeavour, with

their help, lovingly and organically to develop their inner life. These

were the aims of Walter Scott and his Scotch school, only with such

changes as local differences demanded. Individuality in person,

nationality, and subject, and therefore the emphasis of all natural

unlikeness, was the motto on both sides of the Tweed. And, as these men,

when confronted by elements peculiar, rare, and marvellous, designated

such elements as 'romantic,' so may they themselves be justly called the

'Romantic School.' But the term is much misused, and requires a little

elucidation. Shakespeare is usually called a romantic poet. He,

however, never used the expression, and would have been surprised if any

one had applied it to him. The term presupposes opposition to the

classic style, to rhetorical deduction, and to measured periods, all of

which were unknown in the time of the Renaissance, and first imported in

that of the French Revolution. On the other hand, Wordsworth, Coleridge,

Southey, Lamb, and Walter Scott's circle all branched off from the

classical path with a directness and consistency which sharply

distinguish them from their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.

Their predecessors had not broken with the Greek and Latin school, nor

with the school of Pope; Chatterton copied Homer; Cowper translated him;

Burns in his English verses, and Bowles in his sonnets, adhered to what

is called the 'pig-tail period'! The principal poems composed in the

last decennium of the eighteenth century . . . adhered still more to

classic tradition. In London the satires of Mathias and Gifford renewed

the style of the 'Dunciad,' and the moral poems of Rogers that of the

'Essay on Man.' Landor wrote his youthful 'Gebir' in the style of

Virgil, and originally in Latin itself. The amateur in German

literature, William Taylor of Norwich, and Dr. Sayers, interested

themselves especially for those works by Goethe which bear an antique

character--for 'Iphigenia,' 'Proserpina,' 'Alexis and Dora.' Only when

the war with France drew near was the classical feeling interrupted.

Campbell, the Scotchman, and Moore, the Irishman, both well schooled by

translations from the Greek, recalled to mind the songs of their own

people, and rendered them popular with the fashionable world--though only

by clothing them in classic garb. How different to the 'artificial rust'

of 'Christabel'; to the almost exaggerated homeliness of 'We Are Seven';

and to the rude 'Lay of the Last Minstrel'! When at last, with the fall

of Napoleon, the great stars--Byron, Shelley, Keats, and later the mature

Landor--rose in the hemisphere, they had all imbibed from the Romantic

school a warmer form of thought and feeling, and a number of productive

impulses; though, Euphorion-like, they still regarded the antique as

their parent. They expressed much appreciation of the Romantic school,

but their hearts were with Aeschylus and Pindar. They contended for

national character, but only took pleasure in planting it on classic

soil. Byron's enthusiasm for Pope was not only caprice; nor was it mere

chance that Byron should have died in Greece, and Shelley and Keats in

Italy. Compared with what we may call these classical members of the

Romantic school, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott . . . may be said to

have taken nothing, whether in the form of translation or imitation, from

classical literature; while they drew endless inspiration from the Middle

Ages. In their eyes Pope was only a lucid, able, and clever journeyman.

It is therefore fair to consider them, and them alone, as exponents of

the Romantic school." [5]

As to Byron and Shelley this criticism may do; as to Chatterton and Keats

it is misleading. Wordsworth more romantic than Chatterton! More

romantic than Keats, because the latter often, and Wordsworth seldom,

treats subjects from the antique! On the contrary, if "the name is

graven on the workmanship," "Michael" and "The Brothers" are as classical

as "Hyperion" or "Laodamia" or "The Hamadryad"; "bald as the bare

mountain-tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur." Bagehot

expressly singles Wordsworth out as an example of pure or classic art, as

distinguished from the ornate art of such poets as Keats and Tennyson.

And Mr. Colvin hesitates to classify him with Landor only because of his

"suggestive and adumbrative manner"--not, indeed, he acknowledges, a

romantic manner, and yet "quite distinct from the classical"; i.e.,

because of the transcendental character of a portion of his poetry. But

whatever may be true of the other members of the group, Coleridge at his

best was a romantic poet. "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner,"

creations so exquisite sprung from the contact of modern imagination with

mediaeval beliefs, are enough in themselves to justify the whole romantic

movement.

Among the literary influences which gave shape to Coleridge's poetry,

Percy's ballads and Chatterton's "Rowley Poems" are obvious and have

already been mentioned. In his first volume of verse (1796), there is

manifest a still stronger impulse from the sonnets of the Rev. William

Lisle Bowles. We have noticed the reappearance of this discarded stanza

form in the work of Gray, Mason, Edwards, Stillingfleet, and Thomas

Warton, about the middle of the last century.[6] In 1782 Mrs. Charlotte

Smith published a volume of sonnets, treating motives from Milton, Gray,

Collins, Pope's "Eloisa" and Goethe's "Werther." But the writer

who--through his influence upon Wordsworth more especially--contributed

most towards the sonnet revival, was Bowles. In 1789 he had published a

little collection of fourteen sonnets,[7] which reached a second edition

with six pieces additional, in the same year. "His sonnets came into

Wordsworth's hands (1793)," says Brandl, "just as he was leaving London

with some friends for a morning's excursion; he seated himself in a

recess on Westminster Bridge, and was not to be moved from his place till

he had finished the little book. Southey, again, owned in 1832 that for

forty years, he had taken the sweet and artless style of Bowles for a

model." [8] In the first chapter of his "Biographia Literaria" (1817)

Coleridge tells how, when he had just entered on his seventeenth year,

"the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number and just then published in a

quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented" to him by his

school-fellow at Christ's Hospital, Thomas Middleton, afterwards Bishop

of Calcutta. "It was a double pleasure to me . . . that I should have

received, from a friend so revered, the first knowledge of a poet by

whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and

inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the

undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make

proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed,

of whatever rank and in whatever place. As my school finances did not

permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half,

more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to

those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight

did I receive the three or four following publications of the same

author." To Bowles' poems Coleridge ascribes the credit of having

withdrawn him from a too exclusive devotion to metaphysics and also a

strengthened perception of the essentially unpoetic character of Pope's

poetry. "Among those with whom I conversed there were, of course, very

many who had formed their taste and their notions of poetry from the

writings of Pope and his followers; or, to speak more generally, in that

school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English

understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I was not

blind to the merits of this school, yet . . . they gave me little

pleasure. . . . I saw that the excellence of this kind 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. . . . The

matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic

thoughts as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry."

Coleridge goes on to say that, in a paper written during a Cambridge

vacation, he compared Darwin's "Botanic Garden" to a Russian ice palace,

"glittering, cold, and transitory"; that he expressed a preference for

Collins' odes over those of Gray; and that in his defence of the lines

running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet; and of

natural language . . . such as "_I will remember thee_," instead of

". . . Thy image on her wing

Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring"

he had continually to appeal to the example of the older English poets

from Chaucer to Milton. "The reader," he concludes, "must make himself

acquainted with the general style of composition that was at that time

deemed poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect produced

on me by the sonnets, the 'Monody at Matlock' and the 'Hope' of Mr.

Bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less

striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and

judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed, had the merit

of chaste and manly diction, but they were cold, and, if I may so express

it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton's, there is a

stiffness which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from

the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse, Percy's

collection of ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the present

day, yet in the more sustained and elevated style of the then living

poets, Cowper and Bowles were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who

combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled

the heart with the head." Coleridge adds in a note that he was not

familiar with Cowper's "Task" till many years after the publication of

Bowles' sonnets, though it had been published before them (1785).

It would be hard to account for the effect of Bowles' sonnets on

Coleridge, did we not remember that it is not necessarily the greatest

literature that comes home to us most intimately, but that which, for

some reason, touches us where we are peculiarly sensitive. It is a

familiar experience with every reader, that certain books make an appeal

to him which is personal and individual, an appeal which they make to few

other readers--perhaps to no other reader--and which no other books make

to him. It is something in them apart from their absolute value or

charm, or rather it is something in him, some private experience of his

own, some occult association in depths below consciousness. He has a

perfectly just estimate of their small importance in the abstract, they

are not even of the second or third rank. Yet they speak to him; they

seem written to him--are more to him, in a way, than Shakspere and Milton

and all the public library of the world. In the line of light bringers

who pass from hand to hand the torch of intelligential fire, there are

men of most unequal stature, and a giant may stoop to take the precious

flambeau from a dwarf. That Scott should have admired Monk Lewis, and

Coleridge reverenced Bowles, only proves that Lewis and Bowles had

something to give which Scott and Coleridge were peculiarly ready to

receive.

Bowles' sonnets, though now little read, are not unreadable. They are

tender in feeling, musical in verse, and pure in diction. They were

mostly suggested by natural scenery, and are uniformly melancholy.

Bowles could suck melancholy out of a landscape as a weasel sucks eggs.

His sonnets continue the elegiac strain of Shenstone, Gray, Collins,

Warton, and the whole "Il Penseroso" school, but with a more personal

note, explained by a recent bereavement of the poet. "Those who know

him," says the preface, "know the occasions of them to have been real, to

the public he might only mention the sudden death of a deserving young

woman with whom

"Sperabat longos heu! ducere soles,

Et fido acclinis consumuisse sinu. . . .

"This is nothing to the public; but it may serve in some measure to

obviate the common remark on melancholy poetry, that it has been very

often gravely composed, when possibly the heart of the writer had very

little share in the distress he chose to describe. But there is a great

difference between _natural_ and _fabricated_ feelings even in poetry."

Accordingly while the Miltonic group of last-century poets went in search

of dark things--grots, caverns, horrid shades, and twilight vales;

Bowles' mood bestowed its color upon the most cheerful sights and sounds

of nature. The coming of summer or spring; the bells of Oxford and

Ostend; the distant prospect of the Malvern Hills, or the chalk cliffs of

Dover; sunrise on the sea, touching "the lifted oar far off with sudden

gleam"; these and the like move him to tears equally with the glimmer of

evening, the sequestered woods of Wensbeck, the ruins of Netley Abbey,[9]

or the frowning battlements of Bamborough Castle, where

"Pity, at the dark and stormy hour

Of midnight, when the moon is hid on high,

Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tower."

In "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" Byron calls Bowles "the maudlin

prince of mournful sonneteers," whose

". . . muse most lamentably tells

What merry sounds proceed from Oxford bells." [10]

Bowles' attitude had thus something more modern than that of the

eighteenth-century elegiacs, and in unison with Coleridge's doctrine, that

". . . we receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does nature live:

Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud." [11]

A number of Bowles' sonnets were addressed to rivers, the Tweed, the

Cherwell at Oxford, the Wensbeck, and the Itchin near Winton, poems which

stand midway between Thomas Warton's "To the River Lodon" and Coleridge's

"To the River Otter," with Wordsworth's sonnet sequence, "On the River

Duddon." A single sonnet of Bowles will be enough to give a taste of his

quality and to show what Coleridge got from him.[12]

Bowles was a disciple in the "School of Warton." He was "one of Joseph

Warton's Winchester wonders," says Peter Cunningham, in a note in the

second edition of Campbell's "Specimens of the British Poets"; "and the

taste he imbibed there for the romantic school of poetry was strengthened

and confirmed by his removal to Trinity College, Oxford, when Tom Warton

was master there." Bowles was always prompt to own that he had learned

his literary principles from the Wartons; and among his poems is a monody

written on the death of his old teacher, the master of Winchester

College. His verses abound in Gothic imagery quite in the Wartonian

manner; the "castle gleaming on the distant steep"; "the pale moonlight

in the midnight aisle"; "some convent's ancient walls," along the Rhine.

Weak winds complain like spirits through the ruined arches of Netley

Abbey:

"The beam

Of evening smiles on the gray battlement,

And yon forsaken tower that time has rent."

His lines on Shakspere recall Collins in their insistence upon the

"elvish" things in the plays; "The Tempest," "Midsummer Night's Dream,"

the weird sisters in "Macbeth," Ophelia's songs, the melancholy Jacques.

The lines to Burke on his "Reflections on the Revolution in France," echo

his celebrated dirge over fallen chivalry:

"Though now no more proud chivalry recalls

The tourneys bright and pealing festivals;

Though now on high her idle spear is hung,

Though time her mouldering harp has half unstrung," etc.[13]

The "Hymn to Woden" alludes to Gray's "Fatal Sisters." "St. Michael's

Mount" summons up the forms of the ancient Druids, and sings how Fancy,

"Sick of the fluttering fancies that engage

The vain pursuits of a degenerate age, . . .

Would fain the shade of elder days recall,

The Gothick battlements, the bannered hall;

Or list of elfin harps the fabling rhyme;

Or, wrapt in melancholy trance sublime,

Pause o'er the working of some wondrous tale,

Or bid the spectres of the castle hail!"

Bowles' influence is traceable in Coleridge's earliest volume of verse

(1796) in a certain diffused softness and gentle sensibility. This

elegiac tone appears particularly in effusions like "Happiness," "The

Sigh," "To a Young Ass," "To the Autumnal Moon," "Lines on an Autumnal

Evening," "To the Nightingale"; in "Melancholy: A Fragment" and "Elegy;

imitated from Akenside," both in the "Sibylline Leaves" (1797); and in

numerous "lines," "monodies," "epitaphs," "odes," and "stanzas." [14]

Coleridge soon came to recognise the weakness of his juvenile verses, and

parodied himself--and incidentally Bowles--in three sonnets printed at

the end of Chapter I. of the "Biographia Literaria," designed to

burlesque his own besetting sins, a "doleful egotism," an affected

simplicity, and the use of "elaborate and swelling language and imagery."

He never attained much success in the use of the sonnet form. A series

of twelve sonnets in his first collection opens with one to Bowles:

"My heart has thanked thee, Bowles! for those soft strains

Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring

Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring," etc.

More important to our inquiries than the poetry of Bowles is the occasion

which he gave to the revival, under new conditions, of the Pope

controversy. For it was over the body of Pope that the quarrel between

classic and romantic was fought out in England, as it was fought out in

France, a few years later, over the question of the dramatic unities and

the mixture of tragedy and comedy in the _drame_. In 1806, just a half

century after Joseph Warton published the first volume of his "Essay on

Pope," Bowles' edition of the same poet appeared. In the life of Pope

which was prefixed, the editor made some severe strictures on Pope's

duplicity, jealousy, and other disagreeable traits, though not more

severe than have been made by Pope's latest editor, Mr. Elwin, who has

backed up his charges with an array of evidence fairly overwhelming. The

edition contained likewise an essay on "The Poetical Character of Pope,"

in which Bowles took substantially the same ground that had been taken by

his master, Joseph Warton, fifty years before. He asserted in brief

that, as compared with Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, Pope was a poet of

the second order; that in his descriptions of nature he was inferior to

Thomson and Cowper, and in lyrical poetry to Dryden and Gray; and that,

except in his "Eloisa" and one or two other pieces, he was the poet of

artificial manners and of didactic maxims, rather than of passions.

Bowles' chief addition to Warton's criticism was the following paragraph,

upon which the controversy that ensued chiefly hinged: "All images drawn

from what is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature are more

beautiful and sublime than any images drawn from art, and they are

therefore _per se_ (abstractedly) more poetical. In like manner those

passions of the human heart, which belong to nature in general, are _per

se_ more adapted to the higher species of poetry than those derived from

incidental and transient manners."

The admirers of Pope were not slow in joining issue with his critic, not

only upon his general estimate of the poet, but upon the principle here

laid down. Thomas Campbell, in his "Specimens of the British Poets"

(1819), defended Pope both as a man and a poet, and maintained that

"exquisite descriptions of artificial objects are not less characteristic

of genius than the description of simple physical appearances." He

instanced Milton's description of Satan's spear and shield, and gave an

animated picture of the launching of a ship of the line as an example of

the "sublime objects of artificial life." Bowles replied in a letter to

Campbell on "The Invariable Principles of Poetry." He claimed that it

was the appearances of nature, the sea and the sky, that lent sublimity

to the launch of the ship, and asked: "If images derived from art are as

beautiful and sublime as those derived from nature, why was it necessary

to bring your ship off the stocks?" He appealed to his adversary whether

the description of a game of ombre was as poetical as that of a walk in

the forest, and whether "the sylph of Pope, 'trembling over the fumes of

a chocolate pot,' be an image as poetical as that of delicate and quaint

Ariel, who sings 'Where the bee sucks, there lurk (_sic_) I.'" Campbell

replied in the _New Monthly Magazine_, of which he was editor, and this

drew out another rejoinder from Bowles. Meanwhile Byron had also

attacked Bowles in two letters to Murray (1821), to which the

indefatigable pamphleteer made elaborate replies. The elder Disraeli,

Gifford, Octavius Gilchrist, and one Martin M'Dermot also took a hand in

the fight--all against Bowles--and William Roscoe, the author of the

"Life of Lorenzo de Medici," attacked him in an edition of Pope which he

brought out in 1824. The rash detractor of the little Twitnam

nightingale soon found himself engaged single-handed against a host; but

he was equal to the occasion, in volubility if not in logic, and poured

out a series of pamphlets, covering in all some thousand pages, and

concluding with "A Final Appeal to the Literary Public" (1825), followed

by "more last words of Baxter," in the shape of "Lessons in Criticism to

William Roscoe" (1825).

The opponents of Bowles maintained, in general, that in poetry the

subject is nothing, but the execution is all; that one class of poetry

has, as such, no superiority over another; and that poets are to be

ranked by their excellence as artists, and not according to some

imaginary scale of dignity in the different orders of poetry, as epic,

didactic, satiric, etc. "There is, in fact," wrote Roscoe, "no poetry in

any subject except what is called forth by the genius of the poet. . . .

There are no great subjects but such as are made so by the genius of the

artist." Byron said that to the question "whether 'the description of a

game of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution of the artists

equal, as a description of a walk in a forest,' it may be answered that

the materials are certainly not equal, but that the _artist_ who has

rendered the game of cards poetical is by far the greater of the two.

But all this 'ordering' of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr.

Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different 'orders' of poetry,

but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not

according to his branch of the art." Byron also contended, like

Campbell, that art is just as poetical as nature, and that it was not the

water that gave interest to the ship but the ship to the water. "What

was it attracted the thousands to the launch? They might have seen the

poetical 'calm water' at Wapping or in the London lock or in the

Paddington Canal or in a horse-pond or in a slop-basin." Without natural

accessories--the sun, the sky, the sea, the wind--Bowles had said, the

ship's properties are only blue bunting, coarse canvas, and tall poles.

"So they are," admits Byron, "and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and

flesh is grass; and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much

poesy. . . . Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the

Parthenon or the rock on which it stands. . . . Take away Stonehenge

from Salisbury plain and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath or any

other unenclosed down. . . . There can be nothing more poetical in its

aspect than the city of Venice; does this depend upon the sea or the

canals? . . . Is it the Canal Grande or the Rialto which arches it, the

churches which tower over it, the palaces which line and the gondolas

which glide over the waters, that render this city more poetical than

Rome itself? . . . Without these the water would be nothing but a

clay-coloured ditch. . . . There would be nothing to make the canal of

Venice more poetical than that of Paddington."

There was something futile about this whole discussion. It was marked

with that fatally superficial and mechanical character which

distinguished all literary criticism in Europe before the time of Lessing

in Germany, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge in England. In particular,

the cardinal point on which Pope's rank as a poet was made to turn was

really beside the question. There is no such essential distinction as

was attempted to be drawn between "natural objects" and "objects of

artificial life," as material for poetry. In a higher synthesis, man and

all his works are but a part of nature, as Shakspere discerned:

"Nature is made better by no mean

But nature makes that mean: so over that art

Which you say adds to nature, is an art

That nature made: the art itself is nature."

Shakspere, as well as Pope, dealt with artificial life, _i.e._, with the

life of man in society, but how differently! The reason why Pope's

poetry fails to satisfy the heart and the imagination resides not in his

subjects--so far Campbell and Byron were right--but in his mood; in his

imperfect sense of beauty and his deficiency in the highest qualities of

the poet's soul. I may illustrate this by an arrow from Byron's own

quiver. To prove how much poetry may be associated with "a simple,

household, 'indoor,' artificial, and ordinary image," he cites the famous

stanza in Cowper's poem to Mrs. Unwin:

"Thy needles, once a shining store,

For my sake restless heretofore.

Now rust disused and shine no more,

My Mary."

Let us contrast with this a characteristic passage from "The Rape of the

Lock," which also contains an artificial image:

"On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore

Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore."

What is the difference? It is in the feeling of the poet Pope's couplet

is very charming, but it is merely gallantry, a neatly turned compliment,

playful, only half sincere, a spice of mockery lurking under the sugared

words; while in Cowper's lines the humble domestic implement is made

sacred by the emotions of pity, sorrow, gratitude, and affection with

which it is associated. The reason why Pope is not a high poet--or

perhaps a poet at all in the best sense of the word--is indicated by

Coleridge with his usual acuteness and profundity in a sentence already

quoted; that Pope's poetry both in matter and diction was "characterised

not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts _translated_ into the

language of poetry."

Bowles, on the whole, had hold of the right end of the controversy; his

instinct was correct, but he was a wretched controversialist. As a poet

in the minor key, he was tolerable, but as a prose writer, he was a very

dull person and a bore. He was rude and clumsy; he tried to be sarcastic

and couldn't, he had damnable iteration. Lowell speaks of his

"peculiarly helpless way," and says: "Bowles, in losing his temper, lost

also what little logic he had, and though, in a vague way, aesthetically

right, contrived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worse

confusion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the scholarship

nor the critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis.

Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dreadful

punishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of

polemic prose." Indeed, the most interesting feature of the Pope

controversy is Byron's part in it and the light which it sheds on his

position in relation to the classic and romantic schools. Before the

definite outbreak of the controversy, Byron had attacked Bowles for his

depreciation of Pope, in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (1809), in

a passage in which he wished that Bowles had lived in Pope's time, so

that Pope might have put him into the "Dunciad."

It seems at first sight hard to reconcile Byron's evidently sincere

admiration for Pope with the ultra-romantic cast of his own

poetry--romantic, as Pater says, in mood if not in subject. In his early

fondness for Ossian, his intense passion, his morbid gloom, his

exaltation in wild and solitary places, his love of night and storm, of

the desert and the ocean, in the careless and irregular outpour of his

verse, in his subjectivity, the continual presence of the man in the

work--in all these particulars Byron was romantic and would seem to have

had little in common with Pope. But there was another side to Byron--and

William Rossetti thinks his most characteristic side--viz., his wit and

understanding; and this side sympathised heartily with Pope. It is well

known that when Byron came back from the East he had in his trunk besides

the manuscript of "Childe Harold," which he thought little of, certain

"Hints from Horace" which the world thinks less of, but which he was

eager to have published, while Dallas was urging him to print "Childe

Harold." "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is a thoroughly Popeian

satire, and "The Vision of Judgment," though not in couplets but in

_ottava rima_, is one of the best personal satires in English. It has

all of Pope's malicious wit, with a sweep and glow, which belonged to

Byron as a poet rather than as a satirist, and which Pope never had.

Lowell thinks, too, that what Byron admired in Pope was "that patience in

careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most of his

contemporaries."

With all this there probably mingled something of perversity and

exaggeration in Byron's praises of Pope. He hated the Lakers, and he

delighted to use Pope against them as a foil and a rod. He at least was

everything that they were not. Doubtless in the Pope controversy, his

"object was mainly mischief," as Lowell says. Byron loved a fight; he

thought the Rev. W. L. Bowles an ass, and he determined to have some fun

with him. Besides the two letters to Murray in 1821, an open letter of

Byron's to Isaac Disraeli, dated March 15, 1820, and entitled "Some

Observations upon an article in _Blackwood's Magazine_," [15] contains a

long passage in vindication of Pope and in denunciation of contemporary

poetry--a passage which is important not only as showing Byron's

opinions, but as testifying to the very general change in taste which had

taken place since 1756, when Joseph Warton was so discouraged by the

public hostility to his "Essay on Pope" that he withheld the second

volume for twenty-six years. "The great cause of the present deplorable

state of English poetry," writes Byron, "is to be attributed to that

absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope in which, for the last few

years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most

opposite opinions have united upon this topic." He then goes on to

praise Pope and abuse his own contemporaries, especially the Lake poets,

both in the most extravagant terms. Pope he pronounces the most perfect

and harmonious of poets. "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge," he says,

"had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope . . . but they have

been joined in it by . . . the whole heterogeneous mass of living English

poets excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by

precept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who have

shamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope's

poetry with my whole soul." There is ten times more poetry, he thinks,

in the "Essay on Man" than in the "Excursion"; and if you want passion,

where is to be found stronger than in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard"?

To the sneer that Pope is only the "poet of reason" Byron replies that he

will undertake to find more lines teeming with _imagination_ in Pope than

in any two living poets. "In the mean time," he asks, "what have we got

instead? . . . The Lake school," and "a deluge of flimsy and

unintelligible romances imitated from Scott and myself." He prophesies

that all except the classical poets, Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell, will

survive their reputation, acknowledges that his own practice as a poet is

not in harmony with his principles, and says; "I told Moore not very long

ago, 'We are all wrong except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell.'" In the

first of his two letters to Murray, Byron had taken himself to task in

much the same way. He compared the romanticists to barbarians who had

"raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest

architecture"; and who were "not contented with their own grotesque

edifice unless they destroy the prior and purely beautiful fabric which

preceded, and which shames them and theirs for ever and ever. I shall be

told that amongst those I _have_ been (or it may be still _am_)

conspicuous--true, and I am ashamed of it. I _have_ been amongst the

builders of this Babel . . . but never among the envious destroyers of

the classic temple of our predecessor." "Neither time nor distance nor

grief nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great

moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all

stages of existence. The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood,

perhaps he may be the consolation of my age. His poetry is the Book of

Life." [16]

Strange language this from the author of "Childe Harold" and "The

Corsair"! But the very extravagance of Byron's claims for Pope makes it

plain that he was pleading a lost cause. When Warton issued the first

volume of his "Essay on Pope," it was easy for leaders of literary

opinion, like Johnson and Goldsmith, to pooh-pooh the critical canons of

the new school. But when Byron wrote, the aesthetic revolution was

already accomplished. The future belonged not to Campbell and Gifford

and Rogers and Crabbe, but to Wordsworth and Scott and Coleridge and

Shelley and Keats; to Byron himself, the romantic poet, but not to Byron

the _laudator temporis acti_. The victory remained with Bowles, not

because he had won it by argument, but because opinion had changed, and

changed probably once and for all.[17]

Coleridge's four contributions to the "Lyrical Ballads" included his

masterpiece, "The Ancient Mariner." This is the high-water mark of

romantic poetry; and, familiar as it is, cannot be dismissed here without

full examination. As to form, it is a long narrative ballad in seven

"fyts" or parts, and descends from that "Bible of the romantic

reformation," Bishop Percy's "Reliques." The verse is the common ballad

stanza--eights and sixes--enriched by a generous use of medial rhyme and

alliteration:

"The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

The furrow followed free:

We were the first that ever burst

Into that silent sea";

varied and prolonged, moreover, by the introduction of additional lines

with alternate riming, with couplets and sometimes with triplets. There

are many five-lined and six-lined stanzas, and one--the longest in the

poem--of nine lines. But these metric variations are used with

temperance. The stanza form is never complex; it is built up naturally

from the ballad stanza upon which it rests and to which it constantly

returns as its norm and type. Of the one hundred and forty-two stanzas

in the poem, one hundred and six are the ordinary four-lined stanzas of

popular poetry. The language, too, is not obtrusively archaic as it is

in Chatterton and some of the Spenserians; at most an occasional "wist"

or "eftsoons"; now and then a light accent, in ballad fashion, on the

final syllable of a rime-word like mariner or countrie. There is no

definite burden, which would have been out of place in a poem that is

narrative and not lyrical; but the ballad habits of phrase repetition and

question and answer are sparingly employed.[18] In reproducing the

homely diction of old popular minstrelsy, Coleridge's art was nicer than

Scott's and more perfect at every point. How skilfully studied, _e.g._

is the simplicity of the following:

"The moving moon went up the sky

And nowhere did abide:

_Softly she was going up_."

"Day after day, day after day

_We stuck_."

"The naive artlessness of the Middle Ages," says Brandl, "became in

the hands of the Romantic school, an intentional form of art." The

impression of antiquity is heightened by the marginal gloss which

the poet added in later editions, composed in a prose that has a

quaint beauty of its own, in its mention of "the creatures of the

calm"; its citation of "the learned Jew Josephus and the Platonic

Constantinopilitan, Michael Psellus," as authorities on invisible

spirits; and in passages like that Dantesque one which tells how the

mariner "in his loneliness and fixedness yearneth towards the journeying

moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onwards; and

everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and

their native country, and their own natural homes, which they enter

unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a

silent joy at their arrival."

In "The Ancient Mariner" there are present in the highest degree the

mystery, indefiniteness, and strangeness which are the marks of romantic

art. The period is not strictly mediaeval, for mariners in the Middle

Ages did not sail to the south polar regions or lie becalmed in the

equatorial seas. But the whole atmosphere of the poem is mediaeval. The

Catholic idea of penance or expiation is the moral theme enwrought with

the story. The hermit who shrives the mariner, and the little vesper

bell which biddeth him to prayer are Catholic touches, and so are the

numerous pious oaths and ejaculations;

"By him who died on cross":

"Heaven's mother send us grace":

"The very deep did rot. O Christ

That ever this should be!"

The albatross is hung about the mariner's neck instead of the crucifix,

and drops off only when he blesses the creatures of the calm and is able

to pray. The sleep which refreshes him is sent by "Mary Queen" from

heaven. The cross-bow with which he shoots the bird is a mediaeval

property. The loud bassoon and the bride's garden bower and the

procession of merry minstrels who go nodding their heads before her are

straight out of the old land of balladry. One cannot fancy the wedding

guest dressed otherwise than in doublet and hose, and perhaps wearing

those marvellous pointed shoes and hanging sleeves which are shown in

miniature paintings of the fifteenth century. And it is thus that

illustrators of the poem have depicted him. Place is equally indefinite

with time. What port the ill-fated ship cleared from we do not know or

seek to know; only the use of the word _kirk_ implies that it was

somewhere in "the north countree"--the proper home of ballad poetry.

Coleridge's romances were very differently conceived from Scott's. He

wove them out of "such stuff as dreams are made on." Industrious

commentators have indeed traced features of "The Ancient Mariner" to

various sources. Coleridge's friend, Mr. Cruikshank. had a dream of a

skeleton ship. Wordsworth told him the incident, which he read in

Shelvocke's voyages, of a certain Captain Simon Hatley who shot a black

albatross south of Terra del Fuego, in hopes that its death might bring

fair weather. Brandl thinks that the wedding banquet in Monk Lewis'

"Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," furnished a hint; and

surmises--what seems unlikely--that Coleridge had read a certain epistle

by Paulinus, a bishop of the fourth century, describing a vessel which

came ashore on the coast of Lucania with only one sailor on board, who

reported that the ship had been deserted, as a wreck, by the rest of the

crew, and had since been navigated by spirits.

But all this is nothing and less than nothing. "The Ancient Mariner" is

the baseless fabric of a vision. We are put under a spell, like the

wedding guest, and carried off to the isolation and remoteness of

mid-ocean. Through the chinks of the narrative, the wedding music sounds

unreal and far on. What may not happen to a man alone on a wide, wide

sea? The line between earthly and unearthly vanishes. Did the mariner

really see the spectral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all but

the phantasmagoria of the calenture, the fever which attacks the sailor

on the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and water

brooks on the level brine? No one can tell; for he is himself the only

witness, and the ship is sunk at the harbour mouth. One conjectures that

no wreckers or divers will ever bring it to the top again. Nay, was not

the mariner, too, a spectre? Now he is gone, and what was all this that

he told me, thinks the wedding guest, as he rises on the morrow morn. Or

did he tell me, or did I only dream it? A light shadow cast by some

invisible thing swiftly traverses the sunny face of nature and is gone.

Did we see it, or imagine it? Even so elusive, so uncertain, so shadowy

and phantom-like is the spiriting of this wonderful poem. "Poetry," says

Coleridge, "gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly

understood. It was so by me with Gray's 'Bard' and Collins' odes. 'The

Bard' once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure." [19]

There is no danger that his own poem will ever lose its attractiveness in

this way. Something inexplicable will remain to tease us, like the white

Pater Noster and St. Peter's sister in Chaucer's night-spell.[20]

Pater subtly connects Coleridge's poetic method with his philosophical

idealism. "The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world, in almost

all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of

coarseness or crudeness, . . . 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' has the

plausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and life, which belongs to

the marvellous, when actually presented as part of a credible experience

in our dreams. . . . The spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has

become plausible, as 'the spot upon the brain that will show itself

without,' and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for

which--according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our

modern philosophy--the so-called real things themselves are but _spectra_

after all. It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism,

the fruit of his more delicate psychology, which Coleridge infuses into

romantic narrative, itself also then a new or revived thing in English

literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in 'The Ancient Mariner'

unknown in those old, more simple, romantic legends and ballads. It is a

flower of mediaeval, or later German romance, growing up in the

peculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation, and

putting forth in it wholly new qualities."

In "The Ancient Mariner," as in most purely romantic poetry, the appeal

is more to the imagination than to the heart or the conscience. Mrs.

Barbauld complained that it was improbable and had no moral. Coleridge

admitted its improbability, but said that it had too much moral; that,

artistically speaking, it should have had no more moral than a fairy

tale. The lesson of course is that of kindness to animals--"He prayeth

well who loveth well," etc. But the punishment of the mariner, and still

more of the mariner's messmates, is so out of proportion to the gravity

of the offence as to be slightly ludicrous when stated by Leslie Stephen

thus: "People who approve of the unnecessary killing of an albatross will

die a lingering death by starvation." The moral, as might be guessed,

was foisted upon the poem by Wordsworth, and is identical with that of

"Hart-Leap Well." Wordsworth and Coleridge started to write "The Ancient

Mariner" jointly; and two or three lines in the poem, as it stands, were

contributed by Wordsworth. But he wanted to give the mariner himself

"character and profession"; and to have the dead seamen come to life and

sail the ship into port; and in other ways laid so heavy a hand upon

Coleridge's airy creation that it became plain that a partnership on

these terms was out of the question, and Wordsworth withdrew altogether.

If we must look for spiritual sustenence in the poem, we shall find it

perhaps not so much in any definite warning against cruelty to creatures,

as in the sentiment of the blessedness of human companionship and the

omnipresence of God's mercy; in the passage, _e.g._,

"O wedding guest! this soul hath been

Alone on a wide, wide sea," etc.--

where the thought is the same as in Cowper's "Soliloquy of Alexander

Selkirk," even to the detail of the "church-going bell."

The first part of "Christabel" was written in 1797; the second in 1800;

and the poem, in its unfinished state, was given to the press in 1816.

Meanwhile it had become widely known in manuscript. Coleridge used to

read it to literary circles, and copies of it had got about. We have

seen its influence upon Scott. Byron too admired it greatly, and it was

by his persuasion that Coleridge finally published it as a fragment,

finding himself unable to complete it, and feeling doubtless that the

public regarded him much as the urchins in Keats' poem regarded the crone

"Who keepeth close a wondrous riddle book,

As spectacled she sits in chimney nook."

"Christabel" is more distinctly mediaeval than "The Ancient Mariner," and

is full of Gothic elements: a moated castle, with its tourney court and

its great gate

. . . "ironed within and without,

Where an army in battle array had marched out":

a feudal baron with a retinue of harpers, heralds, and pages; a lady who

steals out at midnight into the moon-lit oak wood, to pray for her

betrothed knight; a sorceress who pretends to have been carried off on a

white palfrey by five armed men, and who puts a spelt upon the maiden.

If "The Ancient Mariner" is a ballad, "Christabel" is, in form, a _roman

d'aventures_, or metrical chivalry tale, written in variations of the

octosyllabic couplet. These variations, Coleridge said, were not

introduced wantonly but "in correspondence with some transition, in the

nature of the imagery or passion." A single passage will illustrate this:

"They passed the hall that echoes still,

Pass as lightly as you will.

The brands were flat, the brands were dying

Amid their own white ashes lying;

But when the lady passed, there came

A tongue of light, a fit of flame;

And Christabel saw the lady's eye,

And nothing else saw she thereby,

Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall,

Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall.

O softly tread, said Christabel,

My father seldom sleepeth well."

When, after the hurrying anapaests, the verse returns to the strict

iambic measure in the last couplet, the effect is a hush, in harmony with

the meaning of the words.[21]

"Christabel" is not so unique and perfect a thing as "The Ancient

Mariner," but it has the same haunting charm, and displays the same

subtle art in the use of the supernatural. Coleridge protested that it

"pretended to be nothing more than a common fairy tale." [22] But Lowell

asserts that it is "tantalising in the suggestion of deeper meanings than

were ever there." There is, in truth, a hint of allegory, like that

which baffles and fascinates in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"; a

hint so elusive that the comparison often made between Geraldine and

Spenser's Duessa, is distressing to a reader of sensitive nerves. That

mystery which is a favourite weapon in the romanticist armoury is used

again here with consummate skill. What was it that Christabel saw on the

lady's bosom? We are left to conjecture. It was "a sight to dream of,

not to tell," [23] and the poet keeps his secret. Lamb, whose taste was

very fine in these matters, advised Coleridge never to finish the poem.

Brandl thinks that the idea was taken from the curtained picture in the

"Mysteries of Udolpho"; and he also considers that the general

situation--the castle, the forest, the old father and his young daughter,

and the strange lady--are borrowed from Mrs. Radcliffe's "Romance of the

Forest"; and that Bürger's "Lenore," Lewis' "Alonzo," and some of the

Percy ballads contributed a detail here and there. But

_Quellenforschungen_ of this kind are very unimportant. It is more

important to note the superior art with which the poet excites curiosity

and suspends--not simply, like Mrs. Radcliffe, postpones--the

gratification of it to the end, and beyond the end, of the poem. Was

Geraldine really a witch, or did she only seem so to Christabel? The

angry moan of the mastiff bitch and the tongue of flame that shot up as

the lady passed--were they omens, or accidents which popular superstition

interprets into omens? Was the malignant influence which Geraldine

exerted over the maiden supernatural possession, or the fascination of

terror and repugnance? Did she really utter the words of a charm, or did

her sweet bedfellow dream them? And once more, what was that upon her

breast--"that bosom old--that bosom cold"? Was it a wound, or the mark

of a serpent, or some foul and hideous disfigurement--or was it only the

shadows cast by the swinging lamp?

That isolation and remoteness, that preparation of the reader's mind for

the reception of incredible things, which Coleridge secured in "The

Ancient Mariner" by cutting off his hero from all human life amid the

solitude of the tropic sea, he here secured--in a less degree, to be

sure--by the lonely midnight in Sir Leoline's castle. Geraldine and her

victim are the only beings awake except the hooting owls. There is dim

moonlight in the wood, dim firelight in the hall, and in Christabel's

chamber "the silver lamp burns dead and dim."

The second part of the poem was less successful, partly for the reason,

as the reviewers pointed out, that it undertakes the hardest of tasks,

"witchery by daylight." But there were other reasons. Three years had

passed since the poem was begun. Coleridge had been to Germany and had

settled at Keswick. The poet had been lost in the metaphysician, and he

took up his interrupted task without inspiration, putting force upon

himself. The signs of effort are everywhere visible, and it is painfully

manifest that the poet cannot recover the genial, creative mood in which

he had set out. In particular it is observable that, while there is no

mention of place in the first part, now we have frequent references to

Windermere, Borrowdale, Dungeon Ghyll, and other Lake Country localities

familiar enough in Wordsworth's poetry, but strangely out of place in

"Christabel." It was certainly an artistic mistake to transfer Sir

Leoline's castle from fairyland to Cumberland.[24] There is one noble

passage in the second part, the one which Byron prefixed to his

"Farewell" to Lady Byron:

"Alas! they had been friends in youth," etc.

But the stress of personal emotion in these lines is not in harmony with

the romantic context. They are like a patch of cloth of gold let into a

lace garment and straining the delicate tissue till it tears.

The example of "The Ancient Mariner," and in a still greater degree of

"Christabel," was potent upon all subsequent romantic poetry. It is seen

in Scott, in Byron, and in Keats, not only in the modelling of their

tales, but in single lines and images. In the first stanza of the "Lay"

Scott repeats the line which occurs so often in "Christabel"--"Jesu Maria

shield her well!" In the same poem, the passage where the Lady Margaret

steals out of Branksome Tower at dawn to meet her lover in the wood,

gliding down the secret stair and passing the bloodhound at the portal,

will remind all readers of "Christabel." The dialogue between the river

and mountain spirits will perhaps remind them of the ghostly antiphonies

which the "Mariner" hears in his trance. The couplet

"The seething pitch and molten lead

Reeked like a witch's caldron red."

is, of course, from Coleridge's

"The water, like a witch's oils,

Burned green and blue and white."

In "The Lord of the Isles" Scott describes the "elvish lustre" and "livid

flakes" of the phosphorescence of the sea, and cites, in a note, the

description, in "The Ancient Mariner," of the sea snakes from which

"The elvish light

Fell off in hoary flakes."

The most direct descendant of "Christabel" was "The Eve of St. Agnes."

Madeline's chamber, "hushed, silken, chaste," recalls inevitably the

passage in the older poem:

"The moon shines dim in the open air,

And not a moonbeam enters here.

But they without its light can see

The chamber carved so curiously,

Carved with figures strange and sweet,

All made out of the carver's brain,

For a lady's chamber meet:

The lamp with twofold silver chain

Is fastened to an angel's feet."

The rest of Coleridge's ballad work is small in quantity and may be

dismissed briefly. "Alice du Clos" has good lines, but is unimportant as

a whole. The very favourite poem "Love" is a modern story enclosing a

mediaeval one. In the moonshine by the ruined tower the guileless

Genevieve leans against the statue of an armed man, while her lover sings

her a tale of a wandering knight who bore a burning brand upon his shield

and went mad for the love of "The Lady of the Land." [25]

The fragment entitled "The Dark Ladie" was begun as a "sister tale" to

"Love." The hero is a "knight that wears the griffin for his crest."

There are only fifteen stanzas of it, and it breaks off with a picture of

an imaginary bridal procession, whose "nodding minstrels" recall "The

Ancient Mariner," and incidentally some things of Chatterton's. Lines of

a specifically romantic colouring are of course to be found scattered

about nearly everywhere in Coleridge; like the musical little song that

follows the invocation to the soul of Alvar in "Remorse":

"And at evening evermore,

In a chapel on the shore,

Shall the chanters sad and saintly--

Yellow tapers burning faintly--

Doleful masses chant for thee,

_Miserere Domine_!"

or the wild touch of folk poesy in that marvellous opium dream, "Kubla

Khan"--the "deep romantic chasm":

"A savage place, as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon lover."

Or the well-known ending of "The Knight's Grave":

"The knight's bones are dust,

And his good sword rust;

His soul is with the saints, I trust."

In taking account of Coleridge's services to the cause of romanticism,

his critical writings should not be overlooked. Matthew Arnold declared

that there was something premature about the burst of creative activity

in English literature at the opening of the nineteenth century, and

regretted that the way had not been prepared, as in Germany, by a

critical movement. It is true that the English romantics put forth no

body of doctrine, no authoritative statement of a theory of literary art.

Scott did not pose as the leader of a school, or compose prefaces and

lectures like Hugo and Schlegel.[26] As a contributor to the reviews on

his favourite topics, he was no despicable critic; shrewd, good-natured,

full of special knowledge, anecdote, and illustration. But his criticism

was never polemic, and he had no quarrel with the classics. He cherished

an unfeigned admiration for Dryden, whose life he wrote and whose works

he edited. Doubtless he would cheerfully have admitted the inferiority

of his own poetry to Dryden's and Pope's. He had no programme to

announce, but just went ahead writing romances; in practice an innovator,

but in theory a literary conservative.

Coleridge, however, was fully aware of the scope of the new movement. He

represented, theoretically as well as practically, the reaction against

eighteenth-century academicism, the Popean tradition[27] in poetry, and

the maxims of pseudo-classical criticism. In his analysis and

vindication of the principles of romantic art, he brought to bear a

philosophic depth and subtlety such as had never before been applied in

England to a merely belletristic subject. He revolutionised, for one

thing, the critical view of Shakspere, devoting several lecture courses

to the exposition of the thesis that "Shakspere's judgment was

commensurate with his genius." These lectures borrowed a number of

passages from A. W. von Schlegel's "Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst

und Litteratur," delivered at Vienna in 1808, but engrafted with original

matter of the highest value. Compared with these Shakspere notes, with

the chapters on Wordsworth in the "Biographia Literaria," and with the

_obiter dicta_, sown through Coleridge's prose, all previous English

criticism appears crude and superficial, and the contemporary squabble

over Pope like a scolding match in the nursery.

Coleridge's acute and sympathetic insight into the principles of

Shaksperian drama did not save him from producing his abortive "Zapolya"

in avowed imitation of the "Winter's Tale." What curse is on the English

stage that men who have done work of the highest grade in other

departments, as soon as they essay playwriting, become capable of

failures like "The Borderers" and "John Woodville" and "Manfred" and

"Zapolya"? As for "Remorse," with its Moorish sea-coasts, wild

mountains, chapel interiors with painted windows, torchlight and

moonlight, dripping caverns, dungeons, daggers and poisoned goblets, the

best that can be said of it is that it is less bad than "Zapolya." And

of both it may be said that they are romantic not after the fashion of

Shakspere, but of those very German melodramas which Coleridge ridiculed

in his "Critique on Bertram." [28]

[1] For Coleridge's relations with German romance, see vol. i., pp.

419-21. For his early interest in Percy, Ossian, and Chatterton, ibid.,

pp. 299, 328, 368-70.

[2] "There is as much difference between Coleridge's brief poem

'Christabel' and all the narrative poems of Walter Scott . . . as between

a precious essence and a coarse imitation of it got up for sale." (Leigh

Hunt's "Autobiography," p. 197).

[3] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge und die Englische Romantik," Alois Brandl,

Berlin, 1886.

[4] It is in view of his critical attitude, not of his poetry, that

Saintsbury applies this title to Coleridge. "The attitude was that of a

mediaevalism inspired by much later learning, but still more by that

intermediate or decadent Greek philosophy which had so much influence on

the Middle Ages themselves. This is, in other words, the Romantic

attitude, and Coleridge was the high priest of Romanticism, which,

through Scott and Byron, he taught to Europe, repreaching it even to

Germany, from which it had partly come." ("A Short History of English

Literature," by George Saintsbury, London, 1898, p. 656).

[5] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School," by Alois

Brandl. Lady Eastlake's translation, London, 1887, pp. 219-23.

[6] See vol. i., pp. 160-61.

[7] "Fourteen Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque Spots." Bath, 1789.

[8] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge," p. 37. _Cf._ Wordsworth's Sonnets "Upon

Westminster Bridge" (1802) and "Scorn Not the Sonnet."

[9] _Cf._ vol. i., p. 182.

[10] See Sonnet xvii., "On Revisiting Oxford."