If, in literary criticism, there has
sometimes
been a disposition
to exaggerate the value of the work actually accomplished by
Coleridge, in philosophy, the tendency has almost always been
to give him less than his due ; certainly, as to what he achieved
in the way of writing ; too often, even as to his intrinsic capacity.
to exaggerate the value of the work actually accomplished by
Coleridge, in philosophy, the tendency has almost always been
to give him less than his due ; certainly, as to what he achieved
in the way of writing ; too often, even as to his intrinsic capacity.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v11
There, we have an ordered story which moves on
unchecked, doubtless through a world of wonder, from mysterious
preface to inevitable close. Each incident stands out clear-cut
and vivid; each corresponding change in the soul of the mariner
is registered, no less distinctly, as upon the plate of an enchanted
dial. That is one side of the matter; and a side which sets the
poem in the sharpest contrast with the phantasmagoria of Kubla
Khan. On the other hand, each incident in that long succession-
the sailing of the ship, the gradual disappearance of the land-
marks, the southward voyage and the rest is presented not with
the shorthand brevity which suits the needs of daily life, but in the
successive images, distinct and single, which struck the eye of the
mariner at the moment; and this with a persistency which is clearly
intentional, and which it would be hard to parallel from any other
poem. It is here that the method of Kubla Khan repeats itself.
In one respect, indeed, The Ancient Mariner carries that
method a step further. In Kubla Khan, there is a general sense
of colour diffused throughout the poem. But, when we come to
ask how that impression is conveyed, it is impossible to lay our
finger upon anything more definite than the
forests ancient as the hills,
Enclosing sunny spots of greenery.
In The Ancient Mariner, on the other hand, we are not at loss for
a moment. The ice ‘as green as emerald,' the 'copper sky' of the
tropics, the moonbeams 'like April hoar-frost spread upon the sultry
main,' the moonlight that 'steeped in silentness the steady weather-
cock'-these are but a remnant of the lavish store of colour which
brightens the whole poem. And the touches which mark the more
unearthly moments of the mariner's sufferings are still to add :
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green and blue and white;
The charmed water burnt alway,
A still and awful red;
not to speak of the ghastly colours which 'patched the bones' of
Death, in a verse which the subtle instinct of Coleridge led him
>
## p. 126 (#148) ############################################
126
Coleridge
[CH.
2
1
a
動
subsequently to strike out. Of all the elements that blend to make
an image, colour is the most potent. And, if there be any poem
which drives this truth home, it is The Ancient Mariner.
As to the significance of this imagery-above all, in the super-
natural episodes of the poem-Coleridge himself has done something
to mislead later critics. Even to friendly readers, such as Lamb
and, perhaps, Wordsworth, 'all the miraculous parts' seem to have
been things suspect. And Southey, with however ill a grace, was
probably giving voice to the common verdict when he pronounced
the poem to be 'an attempt at the Dutch sublime. It is small
wonder, therefore, that Coleridge, who was never too confident in
his own genius, should have taken fright. And, in Biographia,
he is a shade too anxious to explain that his stress lay not on the
incidents themselves, but on their working upon the soul of the
mariner. That there is some truth in this, is certain. But it is
not the whole truth, nor anything like it. The incidents them-
selves-and, not least, the marvels-have a compelling power upon
the imagination; the story, as a mere story, is among the most
thrilling ever told. And, when we remember that this story shapes
itself in a succession of images unsurpassed for poetic power and
aptness, how is it possible to deny that all this counts, and counts
unspeakably, in the total imaginative effect? It is, no doubt, still
more surprising that, when all is said, these things should be no
more than an element in a larger whole ; that, side by side with
these outward incidents and images, we should have to reckon,
and reckon at least as largely, with their reflection in the soul of
the man who saw and suffered from them; that, from beginning
to end, we should see them through his eyes and feel them through
his spirit. But this is the miracle of Coleridge. And it is a poor
tribute to his genius if we insist upon isolating one element and
asserting that it is all he had to give. It is only by taking both
elements together and giving full allowance to both that we do
justice to the unique quality of this 'miraculous' poem.
The first part of Christabel was written almost immediately
after The Ancient Mariner, and shortly before the little band of
Stowey was broken up, never again to meet under such ‘indulgent
skies. ' The theme is of the same nature as in the preceding poem.
It is handled with more artifice; but, just for that reason, perhaps
with less of inspiration; certainly, with less of buoyant and exultant
freedom. The 'spring of love' that had gushed from the poet's
heart, as, for the first time, he saw and felt how 'excellently fair'
were the outward shows of sky and earth' and how deep the
6
>
6
6
## p. 127 (#149) ############################################
VI]
Christabel
127
meaning that lay hidden within, could never again gush ‘unaware. '
And, when he speaks once more of the vision that had come in the
first instant of his awakening, it is only to lament that it had been
withdrawn almost as soon as it was given and had left nothing but
yearning and self-reproach behind. In any case, the personal note,
which is very strong in The Ancient Mariner and which some
have thought has found its way too loudly into its closing verses,
is deliberately banished from Christabel; or finds an echo only in
the poignant passage about broken friendship, which he himself
considered the best and sweetest lines he ever wrote,' and in the
epilogue to the second part, which is partly an obvious suggestion
from the 'breeze-borne' elfish nature of his son, Hartley, partly a
lament over the difficulty—the impossibility, as it proved—of the task
which he had set himself: the solution of which, unlike the hopes and
longings of the child, was always to seek and never, alas, to find.
The same elaboration is manifest, also, in the metre. Never
before had the four-foot couplet been used with such variety and
subtlety of effect. As the author himself points out, that effect is
largely produced by a frequent use of the anapæstic movement,
which had already found its way into the ballad measure of The
Ancient Mariner; as in the lines-
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.
But it is here invoked still more persistently; as, indeed, in
general, there is a subtlety, not to say a finesse, about the
rhythmical movement of this poem, which would have been quite
out of place in the rushing narrative and more homely metre of
the other. It is one more proof of the wide gulf by which, in
spirit and in total effect, the two poems are divided. Of the
subtlety which went to the creation of the metre in Christabel
there could be no clearer illustration than the failure both of
Scott and Byron--the one in the opening lines of The Lay of the
Last Minstrel, the other in a cancelled introduction of The Siege
of Corinth—to catch anything like the cadence of the rhythm
which, avowedly, served for their model.
It has been said that the thing attempted in Christabel is
the most difficult in the whole field of romance: witchery by
daylight. ' And nothing could come nearer the mark. The
miraculous element, which lies on the face of The Ancient Mariner,
is here driven beneath the surface. The incidents themselves are
hardly outside the natural order. It is only by a running fire
## p. 128 (#150) ############################################
I 28
[CH.
Coleridge
>
of hints and suggestions—which the unimaginative reader has
been known to overlook—that we are made aware of the super-
natural forces which lie in wait on every side. The lifting of
the lady across the threshold, the moan of the mastiff bitch, the
darting of the flame as the enchantress passes—to the heedful,
all these things are full of meaning ; but, to the unwary, they say
nothing ; they say nothing to Christabel. Yet, the whole signifi-
cance of the poem is bound up with these subtle suggestions ;
though it is equally true that, if they were more than suggestions,
its whole significance would be altered or destroyed. It would
no longer be witchery by daylight,' but by moonlight; which
is a very different thing.
To take a world not markedly different from that given to us
in nature, and fill it with the presence, unseen but felt, of the
supernatural ; to tell a tale of human joys and sorrows, and make
it seem 'a story from the world of spirits '—this, indeed, was the
aim of Coleridge. But no one was more keenly aware than he
what were the obstacles to its achievement. “I have, as I always
had,' he said about a year before his death, the whole plan entire
from beginning to end in my mind'-it may be suspected that
this is one of many similar delusions—but I fear I could not
[now] carry on with equal success the execution of the idea, an
extremely subtle and delicate one. ' So subtle and delicate, in
truth, that it is doubtful whether even a man of stronger will
and more mastery of self could ever have ended the poem in the
same tone in which it was begun. Even of the fragment, as it
now stands, it can hardly be said that the second part carries out
the design so perfectly as the first. The localisation of the scene
in a familiar country may, as has sometimes been said, have some-
thing to do with this comparative failure. But it is due much
more to other causes : to an almost inevitable inability on the
poet's part to maintain himself indefinitely in the doubly distilled
imaginings which were the essence of his undertaking. Even in
the earlier part, it would seem that the right note had not always
come to him at the first effort. For, if we are to believe a con-
temporary reviewer-it may have been Hazlitt-in The Escaminer
(2 June 1816), the original version of
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
was
Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue;
and there are other instances of the same kind. The reviewer
scornfully remarks that the rejected reading was the keystone to
6
## p. 129 (#151) ############################################
vi]
As Poet of Nature
129
the whole poem,' and that it was rejected by the author for that
very reason. In his heart, he must have known better. It is of the
essence of the poem not to feed the mind with facts-still less,
with gruesome facts—but to spur the imagination by a sense of
mystery. It is manifest that the original reading renounces the
latter purpose for the former. And, if this be the case, it is clear
that Coleridge would have ruined his poem by retaining it.
The sketch of the projected continuation, which Gillman gives
on the authority of the poet, reads poorly enough. But it is
impossible to say what it, or any other raw material, might have
become under the transforming breath of inspiration. Still,
temperament and opium between them had so clouded the sense
of fact in Coleridge that it would be rash to pronounce whether
this was really the plan which he had in his mind from the begin-
ning, or nothing more than the improvisation of the moment.
How did Coleridge stand towards outward nature and what
was his place in the poetic movement of his time? It is impossible
to leave his work, as poet, without a few words on each of these
crucial, but widely different, matters.
This was the golden age of the poetry of nature’; and
Coleridge may claim his place in it with the best. It is a place
entirely to himself; and it depends upon two qualities. The first
is a faculty of minute and subtle observation, which he may have
learned, in the first instance, from Wordsworth, but which he
fostered to a degree of delicacy to which neither Wordsworth
himself, nor, perhaps, any other 'worshipper of nature,' Keats
excepted, ever quite attained. The 'creaking of the rook's wing'
and the branchless ash,
Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fanned by the waterfall,
in This lime-tree bower, my prison, and that 'peculiar tint of
yellow-green’ which marks the sunset sky in the ode Dejection,
together with whole poems such as The Nightingale, bear witness
to this extraordinary power. And, if more were wanted, it is
supplied in abundance, though rather as raw material than as
poetic creation, by the notes written when he was once more in
constant communion with Wordsworth (1803), and published in
the book which, of all others, throws most light upon the secret
springs of his genius, Anima Poetve (pp. 34—52). Nor does this
command of minute detail in any sense bar the way to an equal
mastery of broad, general effects. What picture was ever painted
9
6
B. L. XI.
CH. VI,
## p. 130 (#152) ############################################
130
Coleridge
[CH.
>
6
9
with broader brush than that of the ice-fields or the tropical
ocean in The Ancient Mariner? What general effect was ever
caught more precisely than that of the moonlight 'steeping in
silentness the steady weathercock' of the same poem, or of April
as the month of dark brown gardens and of peeping flowers' in
the ode Dejection? It may be doubted whether full justice has
even yet been done to this side of the poet's genius.
Yet, even this quality, great though it be, would have availed
little, if it had not gone hand in hand with one of a very different
order. With such a store of observed images at his command,
there must have been a constant temptation to lavish it at every
turn. Nothing is more surprising than the reserve, the sleepless
sense of poetic fitness, with which it is employed by Coleridge.
Even this, indeed, does not give us the whole truth. It is not only
that such images recur seldom ; but that, when they do, they are
lifted into a rarer atmosphere, a more remote region, than that of
mere outward vision. In all his greater poems—The Ancient
Mariner, perhaps, alone excepted—we are made to feel, and we
should hardly have entered into their spirit unless we did feel,
that the outer world is presented to us not directly, but through
a veil of mystery, which softens all that is harsh in outline or
colour; by a kind of second sight, which rather recalls objects,
once familiar, to the memory, than offers their actual image to the
eye. "Sir George Beaumont,' he notes in Anima Poetae, 'found
great advantage in learning to draw from nature through gauze
spectacles. And, with a success which we may be very sure
Sir George never approached, he seems to have applied a like
process to the forms of nature, as reflected in his poetry. Not
that his eye was ever shut even to the crudest effects of the
‘inanimate cold world. The very chemists' jars of blue and
' '
'
green vitriol,' as reflected in the stagnant reaches of a London
canal, win an entry in his note-book? But when they appear in
his poetry, it is—or, did dates allow, it would be as the 'witch's
oils' that burnt green and blue and white' around the waterlogged
vessel in the charmed water' of the tropical sea. Nothing, in
short, that he found in the outer world attained its rightful value
for him until, ‘by sublimation strange,' it had passed into the
'realm of shadows' which Schiller conceived to be the true region
both of poetry and of action”.
1 Anima Poeta, p. 28.
2 See Das Ideal und das Leben, of which the original title was Das Reich der
Schatten.
## p. 131 (#153) ############################################
vi]
As Romantic Poet
131
>
Of his place in the poetic movement of his time there is no
need to speak at length. It was the hour of romance. And, of all
that is purest and most ethereal in the romantic spirit, his poetry
is the most finished, the supreme, embodiment. No doubt, some
of the strands which went to make up the intricate web of the
romantic tissue appear but faintly, if at all, in the poetry of
Coleridge. Medievalism, which plays a large part in the work
of Scott and others, is to Coleridge commonly no more than a
vague atmosphere, such as would give the needful sense of remote-
ness and supply the fit setting for the marvellous which it is his
purpose to hint at or openly display. Once only does he go
palpably beyond this : in the shadowy picture of
The chamber carved so curiously,
Carved with figures strange and sweet,
For a lady's chamber meet.
But, even this touch of medievalism is studiously vague ; nor are
the allusions to trial by combat which follow in the second part of
Christabel any more precise. Contrast these with the description
of Madeline's chamber in The Eve of Saint Agnes or of the
feudal castle and the moss-troopers in The Lay of the Last
Minstrel; and we have the measure of the gulf which parts
Coleridge from other romantic poets in this matter.
Of the historic instinct, strong both in Scott and Byron,
Coleridge, in truth, was defiantly destitute.
Of all the men I ever knew, Wordsworth himself not excepted,' he writes,
'I have the faintest pleasure in things contingent and transitory. . . . Nay, it
goes to a disease with me. As I was gazing at a wall in Carnarvon Castle, I
wished the guide fifty miles off that was telling me, In this chamber the Black
Prince was born-or whoever it was,'
he adds, as well he might. It is true that, when the first cantos
of Childe Harold appeared, he had the courage to assert: 'It is
exactly on the plan that I myself had not only conceived six years
ago, but have the whole scheme drawn out in one of my old
memorandum books ? . ' But this was a pure delusion, of the same
kind as that which led him to declare he had conceived a poem,
with Michael Scott for hero, much superior to Goethe's Fausta;
with this difference, that, whereas Faust lay within his field of
vision, Childe Harold, or any other poem that should make appeal
to the sense of a former world,' after the manner of Byron,
assuredly did not.
9
1 Letters, vol. 11, p. 583.
3 See Table Talk, vol. II, pp. 108–113.
942
## p. 132 (#154) ############################################
132
[CH.
Coleridge
It was in the subtler, more spiritual, regions of romance that
Coleridge found his home. As to his treatment of the marvellous,
ever 'the main region of his song,' little need be added to what
has been said already. In one form or another, the theme never
ceased to haunt his mind during the brief flowering time of his
genius ; and The Ancient Mariner, Christabel and The three
Graves stand for three quite distinct modes of approaching it.
In The Ancient Mariner, the poet openly proclaims his marvels,
and exults in them. In Christabel, they are thrown into the back-
ground, and conveyed to our mind rather by subtle suggestion
than direct assertion. Finally, in the three Graves, neither
,
incidents nor persons have, in themselves, anything of the marvel-
lous; it appears solely in the withering blight brought by a
mother's curse upon three innocent lives. It is here that Coleridge
most nearly approaches the field and method of Wordsworth;
whose Peter Bell—in another way, perhaps, The Thorn-offers a
curious analogy with this powerful but, as usual, unfinished poem.
In the homelier region, he was, manifestly, less at ease than among
the marvels and subtleties of the two other poems; and it is rather
there that the secret of his unique genius must be sought.
Two things, in particular, may be noted. The indirectness by
which the elusive touches of Christabel are made to work their
cumulative effect may be contrasted with the directness of the
method employed by Keats in his treatment of a like theme, the
transformation of a serpent into the guise of a woman, in Lamia.
But it is more important to bear in mind that, if Coleridge is
haunted by the marvellous, it is less for its own sake than as a
symbol of the abiding mystery which he, like Wordsworth, found
everywhere in life, within man and around him; a sign of the
spirit presence which, in his faith, bound 'man and bird and
beast' in one mystical body and fellowship; a token of the love
which is the life of all creation, and which is revealed to us in
the blue sky bent over all. ' It is this faith which gives a deeper
meaning to these fairy creations than they bear upon the surface,
and which raises the closing verses of The Ancient Mariner from
the mere irrelevant appendage they have seemed to some critics,
to an expression of the thought that lies at the core of the
And, if this be true, his wellknown retort to
Mrs Barbauld—“Madam, the fault of the poem is that it has too
much moral'—would take a wider significance than has commonly
been supposed. Only, the self-depreciation of the poet must not
be taken more seriously than it deserves.
whole poem.
## p. 133 (#155) ############################################
VI]
His Theory of Criticism
133
6
In treating of Coleridge as literary critic, there is no alternative
but to speak either very briefly or at considerable length. The
latter is here impossible. All that can be done, therefore, is to
indicate the main avenues which his criticism opened out.
The only written monument of his critical work is that con-
tained in Biographia Literaria (1815—17), and in a short series of
articles contributed to Farley's Bristol Journal a year or two
earlier (1814)? . All else has to be gleaned from the very imperfect
reports of his lectures, recorded by Collier, Crabb Robinson and
others. These lectures, of which there were, in all, some dozen
courses, were delivered, partly in London partly at Bristol, between
the years 1808 and 1819. Their avowed subjects, apart from a
course on the history of philosophy (1818—19), were, mainly, the
drama in general, or Shakespeare and Milton. But Coleridge was
never the man to be bound down by a syllabus ; and his audience
had, on occasion, to bear, as best they could, a defence of school-
flogging, an attack on the Lancastrian system of education' and
other such irrelevancies, when they had come to hear a discourse
on Romeo and Juliet. Yet, in spite of these glaring faults, the
lectures were not seldom worthy both of their subject and of their
author. And, with the written pieces, they form a body of work
such as makes an epoch in the history of English-it would hardly
be too much to say, of European--criticism.
Coleridge concerns himself not only with the practice of
criticism, but, also—perhaps, by preference—with its theory. On
both sides, he offers the sharpest contrast with the critics of the
century, and, not least, of the generation, preceding. The Wartons
and Hurd, no doubt, stand apart from the men of their day. In
sentiment, they rebel against the canons of the Augustans; and,
so far, they are at one with Coleridge. But they were content to
defend their instinctive judgments on purely literary grounds, and
made no attempt to justify them on more general principles.
Indeed, they seem never to have suspected that their revolt against
the established taste in poetry carried with it a revolt against
the established system in philosophy. Coleridge, on the other
hand, was philosopher just as much as poet. He lived in the full
ide of a philosophical, no less than a poetic, revival. He was him-
self among the leading figures in both. He had, therefore, on both
sides, a far richer store of material to draw from than had been open
1 They are reprinted in the appendix to Cottle's Early Recollections. To the works
mentioned above should be added a pregnant section of a Preliminary Treatise on
Method, prefixed to Encyclopædia Metropolitana. It was written in 1817 and published
in 1818.
## p. 134 (#156) ############################################
134
Coleridge
[CH.
to the earlier rebels. And it was the first instinct of his nature to
weave, or force, every side of his experience into a consistent whole.
At the first step, he rules out the assumption, which, from
Horace onwards, had wrought such havoc in criticism, that the
object of poetry is to instruct; or, as a less extreme form of the
heresy had asserted, to make men morally better. That this may
be an effect of poetry-of much that is noblest in poetry-he is
not in the least concerned to deny. That, however, is no more
than an incidental result. And the true end, or function, of poetry
is to give immediate pleasure: pleasure, he explains in a somewhat
disconcerting addition, “through the medium of beauty? '
This may not carry us very far. But, at least, it serves to warn
us off from the wrong road, and to set our feet at the beginning of
the right one. More than this : by further additions and modi-
fications, Coleridge so expands his original doctrine as to bring us
considerably further on the path. In the first place, the assertion
that the pleasure which imaginative art aims at giving is wrought
'through the medium of beauty,' however much it may check the
logical flow of the argument, at least serves to enforce the truth,
already laid down by Aristotle, that imaginative pleasure differs
in kind from all other forms of pleasure : nay, that one form of
imaginative pleasure differs in kind from all other forms of
imaginative pleasure: that given by poetry, for instance, from
that given by sculpture or painting ; that given by the drama
from that given by lyric or by epic. In the second place, his own
analysis of that which constitutes “beauty' is so illuminating, his
own exposition of the conditions necessary to poetic pleasure is so
subtle, as to bring us a great deal further on the road than, at the
first moment, we may have been aware. The former throws a
flood of light upon the points in which the various arts differ
from each other, as well as upon those they have in common.
The latter-enforced, as it is, by a criticism of Shakespeare's early
poetic work, and reinforced by an equally delicate criticism of
the charm attaching to the consummate presentment of common
form’ in poetry, particularly by the Italian poets of the later
renascence-is one of the most satisfying things ever written
in this kind. In applying the principles which he had already
laid down in theory, the author succeeds both in defining them
more closely and in extending them more widely; in the very
statement of his theory, he contrives to offer a model of the
method which critics should aim at following in practice.
1 Farley's B. J. art. 1.
## p. 135 (#157) ############################################
vi] As Critic and Philosopher 135
Of the rest of his work in practical criticism, no account can
be offered. It must suffice to mention his criticism of Words-
worth in Biographia, and that of Shakespeare, as dramatist, in
various courses of his lectures. The former, in itself, is a fine
and discriminating piece of work. But it is more than doubtful
whether Coleridge was the man to have undertaken it. He was
aware that the slightly astringent touch, which he felt justice
demanded, would give offence to his brother poet. And, con-
sidering the relation between the two men-a relation once of
the warmest friendship, now of strained forbearance—it would
have been more gracious to keep silence. Indeed, so far as the
criticism deals with Wordsworth’s theory of 'poetic diction, it
cannot but strike the reader as carping ; not to mention the
appearance of treachery involved in attacking a theory for which
he himself was commonly held, and, probably, with some justice,
to be, in part, responsible. As critic of Shakespeare's dramatic
genius, his part is less ambiguous, though even this is complicated
by questions of unacknowledged debts to Schlegel. He was the
first English writer to insist that every work of art-in this
instance, every play-is, by its very nature, an organic whole ;
and that, if this is harder to discern in the complicated structure
of Shakespearean and much other modern drama, it is because,
at least in the nobler examples, such plays are not less, but more,
vitally articulated ; not less, but more, spontaneous and organic
Structure, scenic effect, poetry, character-all are shown to spring
from the same common root in the spirit of the poet; each to
enhance the imaginative effect which, instinctively, he had in view.
And he enforces this, not as a mere abstract doctrine—though it
lies at the core of his theory of beauty—but by an exposition of
individual masterpieces which, for subtlety and suggestiveness,
had certainly, if we except Goethe's masterly criticism of Hamlet,
never been approached. It remains true that, having done so
,
much, he might justly have been expected to do even more; and
that nothing but his own nervelessness, at once the cause and
effect of the opium habit, could have prevented him from doing it.
If, in literary criticism, there has sometimes been a disposition
to exaggerate the value of the work actually accomplished by
Coleridge, in philosophy, the tendency has almost always been
to give him less than his due ; certainly, as to what he achieved
in the way of writing ; too often, even as to his intrinsic capacity.
Yet, his importance in the history of English philosophy is not
to be denied. It is neither more nor less than to have stood
## p. 136 (#158) ############################################
136
[ch.
Coleridge
against the current which, for the last century, had swept every-
thing before it; to have assailed the mechanical philosophy
which, from the time of Locke, had firmly entrenched itself in
this country and in France; and, however much he may have
been overborne by the prejudices of the moment, at least to
have paved the way for their ultimate exposure and defeat. Even
at the moment, in the high tide of Bentham's influence, his
labours were by no means in vain. As writer-still more, in his
talk and in his personal influence—he served for a rallying point
to all who felt, if they could not explain to themselves, the
inadequacy of the prevailing system : the one man who was
capable of laying bare its fallacies, the one man who was able
to give a reasoned account of the larger faith after which they
were blindly groping. The evidence of this is to be found in
the lives of such men as Arnold and Maurice ; or, more com-
pactly, in the generous essay of Mill and the brilliant, but not
too generous, chapter devoted to the subject in Carlyle's Life
of Sterling.
In philosophy, as he himself would have been the first to
acknowledge, he was building on the foundations laid by Kant
and, to a less degree, by Fichte and Schelling. At what time
he became acquainted with the writings of Kant, is a disputed
point. He himself seems to place it in 18002; and, though he was
constitutionally inaccurate about all matters of fact, it is hard to
see why this date, the period immediately following his return
from Germany, should not be accepted. The question is hardly
one of supreme importance. For, despite some unlucky borrowings
from Schelling (alas ! unacknowledged), he was in no sense a mere
adapter, still less a mere copyist, from the Germans? He worked,
as all philosophers must work, on hints furnished by his pre-
decessors; and that is all.
His aim was to show the necessity of replacing the mechanical
interpretation of life and nature, which he found in possession
of the field, by one consistently spiritual, indeed religious. And
he carries out this purpose over the whole field of experience :
in metaphysics and philosophy ; in ethics and politics ; not to
mention his application of the same principle to imaginative
creation, as briefly indicated in the preceding section. In
1 Biographia, chap. ix.
2 The passage in Biographia, chap. XI (pp. 124–7), which forms the introduction
to Coleridge's metaphysical system, is an unblushing translation (with a misquotation
from Horace faithfully reproduced) of Schelling's System des transzendentalen Idealismus,
$S 1, 2. The rest of the chapter is largely an adaptation from the same work.
## p. 137 (#159) ############################################
VI]
6
Metaphysics and Psychology 137
metaphysics, his work is probably less satisfactory than in any other
branch of his vast subject. And that, partly because he is here
more ready than elsewhere to follow the hazardous guidance of
Schelling ; partly because the temptation to press speculative
truth into the service of a particular religious creed was more
than he was able wholly to resist. Hence, with all his subtlety,
he does not succeed in driving home the essentially creative
action of the mind in the process of knowledge—and that, after
all, is the main point at issue—at all as clearly as Kant had
done before him. And, by his use of the distinction between
the “reason' and the understanding'-a distinction originally
due to Kant for the purpose of bolstering up opinions origin-
ally derived from a wholly different source, he opens the door to
all kinds of fallacies and perversions. With Kant, the distinction
between the reason and the understanding has a purely restrictive
purpose. Its effect is to deny to the former anything more than
a ‘regulative' or suggestive function in the ordering of knowledge;
and to claim from the latter, which, froin its nature, must always
go hand in hand with a sensible intuition, the sole title to the
discovery of truth. In other words, it is a distinction which leads
a
straight to what have since come to be known as agnostic con-
clusions. To Coleridge, it serves a purpose exactly the reverse.
So far from separating the spheres of the two faculties, he sweeps
away all barriers between them. He allows to the one an ap-
parently unlimited power of re-affirming what the other had found
it necessary to deny; and thus exposes himself to Carlyle's sarcasm
that he had discovered 'the sublime secret of believing by the
reason what the understanding had been obliged to fling out as
incredible. ' It would be grossly unfair to say that this exhausts
the teaching of Coleridge in the region of metaphysics. His
criticism of the mechanical system-and, in particular, of the
theory of association, as elaborated by Hume and Hartley-
would, in itself, suffice to overthrow any such assertion! But it
can hardly be denied that this is the side of his doctrine on which
he himself laid the heaviest stress ; nor, again, that it is the side
upon which he is most open to attack.
In the kindred field of psychology, his results are both sounder
in themselves and more absolutely his own. His records of the
working of the mind, especially under abnormal or morbid con-
ditions, are extraordinarily minute and subtle. It would hardly
be too much to say that he is the founder of what has since
1 Biographia, chaps. V-VIII.
6
## p. 138 (#160) ############################################
138
[CH.
Coleridge
become a distinct, and most fruitful, branch of philosophy: the
study of experimental psychology. And this, which is fully known
only to those who are familiar with Anima Poeto, is, perhaps, his
most original contribution to philosophy.
In ethics, he is more upon the beaten track. But it was a
track almost unknown to Englishmen of his day. And it is his
lasting service, at the moment when the utilitarian scheme of
things swept all before it, to have proclaimed the utter in-
sufficiency of any doctrine which did not start from the postulate
of duty. Here, once more, he bases his teaching upon that of
Kant. But he enters a just protest, as Schiller had done before
him, against the hard saying that the highest goodness is that
which tramples upon the natural instincts of the heart. And,
throughout his exposition, as given in Aids to Reflection, he
shows (as, from his personal experience, he well might) a sense of
human frailty—a sense, that is, of one of the two main elements
of the problem—which the noble stoicism of Kant had been too
apt to treat as matter for nothing but shame and contempt.
Few, probably, now think of Coleridge in connection with
political philosophy. Yet, there is no subject to which, through-
out life, he gave more time and thought; from the days of
Conciones ad populum and The Watchman (1795-6) to those of
The Friend (1809—10; 1818), or of The Constitution of Church
and State (1830). Coleridge habitually spoke of himself as the heir
of Burke. And that constitutes at once the strength and the
weakness of his position as political philosopher. More systematic,
but with far less of imaginative and historic insight than his
master, he inherited, in fact, both the loves and the hates of
Reflections and Letters on a Regicide Peace.
On the negative side, he is the fiery foe of the rights of man, of
Jacobinism, of the sovereignty of the people. And he makes no
effort to disentangle the truth which under a crude form, no
doubt-found expression in watchwords which, in his early man-
hood, had shaken Europe to her depths and had in no sense lost
their power when he died. To the end, he was unable to see that
no state, which does not draw its will from the whole body of its
members, can be regarded as fully organised or developed ; and
that this was the ideal which the French revolution, perhaps
before the time was ripe, certainly through many crimes and
blunders, was striving to make good. Against this ideal, he had
nothing to propose but that of a government, based upon the will
of the propertied classes only, and imposing itself upon the rest
## p. 139 (#161) ############################################
vi]
Political Philosophy
139
6
of the community from above. The result is that, at the present
day, his theory seems ludicrously out of date: far more so than
that of the Jacobins, or of Le Contrat social, which he does his
best to cover with ridicule and contempt. So childish, indeed, was
his fear of Jacobinism, so keen his scent for the faintest breath of
its approach that, when Erskine brought in a bill, the first of its
kind, for the prevention of cruelty to animals (1809), he denounced
it, in his largest capitals, as 'the strongest instance of legislative
Jacobinism? ' It was bad enough that rights should be demanded
for men; to concede them to animals was iniquitous and absurd.
In spite of these follies, it is right to acknowledge that his criticism
of Jacobinism and of Le Contrat social, however little we may
agree with it, reveals powers beyond the reach of any man living
in England at the time ; probably, if we except Hegel, beyond the
reach of any man in Europe? .
Yet, as with all thinkers worthy of the name, it is in expounding
the positive side of his doctrine that his powers are seen at their
brightest and most convincing. The core of his creed, as of Burke's,
lay in the conviction that the civic life of man is the offspring not
of deliberate calculation, the cautious balancing of comparative
advantages,' but of instincts, often working unknown to himself,
which are rooted in the deepest fibres of his nature. He is assured
that the state, so far from being a cunning piece of mechanism,
put together at the will of individuals and to be taken to pieces at
their pleasure, is something larger and more enduring than the
individuals who compose it. He knows that, in a very real sense, ,
it has a life of its own : a life which, at countless points, controls,
no less than it is controlled by, theirs. He believes that the moral,
as well as the material, existence of men is largely determined by
the civic order into which they are born. And he infers that, if
this order be roughly shaken, the moral, as well as the material,
well-being of those who belong to it is grievously emperilled.
These are the vital principles which lie behind all that he wrote
on political matters, and which find their best expression, charac-
teristically barbed by a bitter attack on Hume, in an eloquent
passage of one of his Lay Sermons.
1 Letters, vol. II, p. 635.
? The Friend, ed. 1837, vol. 1, pp. 240—266; vol. II, pp. 28–30. Essays on his
own Times, pp. 543—550.
3 The Statesman's Manual, 1816.
## p. 140 (#162) ############################################
CHAPTER VII
GEORGE CRABBE
-
t
6
GEORGE CRABBE was born at Aldeburgh, on the coast of Suffolk,
on 24 December 1754. His father, a collector of salt-duties at the
harbour, was a man of both high tastes and low. Rather dis-
reputable in his later years, he had, as a young man, kept school,
and used to read Milton, Young and other poets aloud to his family.
Destined for the profession of medicine, George was apprenticed
to a medical practitioner in Wickhambrook, near Bury St Edmunds,
from whose surgery, three years later, he passed into that of a
doctor at Woodbridge. Here he remained from 1771 to 1775, and
became acquainted with Sarah Elmy, who, though ten years were
to pass before they were married, exercised from the first a
softening and brightening influence on the rather grim nature of
the unformed youth. Just about the time of their meeting, Crabbe
made his first known appearance in print as a poet. In ‘the poets'
corner' of a ladies' magazine in 1772 appeared several pieces of
verse, some signed ‘G. Ebbare' and one ‘G. Ebbaac,' which are
held to be by Crabbel. One of these, consisting of two very pretty
stanzas, called The Wish, celebrates the poet's 'Mira,' which was
the poetical name given by Crabbe to Sarah Elmy.
In 1775, just before the close of his apprenticeship at Wood-
bridge, Crabbe put his powers to a severe test, by publishing with
an Ipswich bookseller a poem, in three parts, entitled Inebriety.
From the description of the cottage library in part 1 of The Parish
Register2 and other references in Crabbe's works, we know that, in
boyhood, his favourite reading had been romantic; but, by the
time he wrote Inebriety, he must have made a close study of the
poetic dictator of the day, Pope. Much of Inebriety is composed
of frank imitation, or parody, of An Essay on Man and The
Dunciad; while, here and there, Crabbe proves his knowledge
of Gray. Echoes of these poets, being mingled with language drawn
i George Crabbe, ed. Ward, A. W. , Cambridge English Classics, vol. I, pp. y-viii.
2 11. 95—126. See, also, The Borough, letter xx, Ellen Orford, 11. 11--119.
## p. 141 (#163) ############################################
CH. VII]
Early Life
141
by the doctor's apprentice from his art, and presented in rimed
heroic verse, at once laboured and slipshod, leave Inebriety one
of the rawest poems ever written. Yet, if there is plenty of
affectation about the youthful satirist, it is not sentimental
affectation. Crabbe shows signs already of that revolt against
idealisation which was to inspire his mature work. To him,
inebriety is an evil, and he describes with vigour and point its
evil effects in all classes of life.
His apprenticeship over, Crabbe returned home to Aldeburgh,
without any prospects and with very little knowledge of the science
of healing. Owing to his mother's illness and his father's intem-
perance and violent nature, his home was unhappy. During these
years, the iron must have entered into his soul. He tried to
practise his profession at Aldeburgh, and was appointed parish
doctor. Meanwhile, however, he was studying nature, and especially
botany, with results which, if of no service to him as doctor, were
to be of great value to his poetry. He continued to read much
and to think much, and he found his mind turning definitely to
faith and piety. Sarah Elmy was his consolation and hope (many
years later, in one of the Tales called The Lover's Journey, he
wrote a famous description of a visit to her); and he went on
writing poetry, a little of which has survived. To the years
1775—9 belong several religious poems, an impressive little
piece on Mira', which tells how she drew the author from the
relief of 'false pleasures' to 'loftier notions,' and a blank verse
work entitled Midnight, which, if very gloomy, ends on a note of
sane and sturdy courage.
At length, he could not endure life at Aldeburgh any longer.
Towards the end of 1779, he made up his mind to stake his all on
literary work in London and, in April 1780, with assistance from
Dudley North, a relative of the prime minister, he set sail from
Slaughden quay. In London, he took a lodging close to the Royal
Exchange, near some friends of Miss Elmy who lived in Cornhill,
and set to work revising a couple of plays and some prose essays
which he had brought with him, studying botany and entomology
in the country round London, and keeping a journal addressed to
Mira. The year was to him one of privation and disappointment.
Among the poems that, without success, he attempted to publish
were an epistle, in his favourite couplets, to prince William (after-
wards William IV), a satirical Epistle from the Devil (apparently
a revised version of an earlier poem, The Foes of Mankind) and
1 Ward, u. 8. vol. 1, p. 38.
6
## p. 142 (#164) ############################################
142
[CH.
George Crabbe
6
JM
4
an Epistle to Mira, in both of which he uses anapaests. No publisher
would accept these poems, in spite of a biting introduction by
their author, under the pseudonym ‘Martinus Scriblerus. Lords
North, Shelburne and Thurlow, one after another, turned
,
a deaf ear to the author, though his compliment in verse to
Shelburne deserved some reward. And when, probably in August
1780", he found a printer willing to print two hundred and fifty
copies of another poem, it did not bring him in anything but one
or two slighting reviews. Crabbe, who, in several works of this
period, describes his own feelings and condition, hereupon addressed
to 'the Authors of the Monthly Review' a letter in verse, in which
a
he practically asks them to advise him whether he should persevere
in poetry or not, bestowing on himself, by the way, some satirical
advice on the methods that lead to success. There is nothing re-
markable about the poem except the amazing simplicity of the idea.
The kindness of the wigmaker with whom he lodged, occasional
help from Sarah Elmy's family and the pawning of his possessions
just sufficed to save Crabbe from destitution; but his condition
was very bad indeed when, in something like despair, he wrote,
probably in February or March 1781, a letter to Edmund Burke.
This letter, which is still extant, he left, with some specimens of
his poetry in manuscript, at Burke's house in Charles street,
St James's. Burke granted an interview, found Crabbe to have
'the mind and feelings of a gentleman,' gave him money for his
immediate needs and became his patron. Among the poems then
submitted by Crabbe to Burke was The Library; and this was the
poem which Burke recommended for publication. First, however,
it must be revised; the thoughts were often better than the
The revision was carried out under Burke's eye. The
Library was published by Dodsley, 24 July 1781. It did not bear
any author's name, and there is not anything in the poem itself to
declare it Crabbe's. It smacks throughout of Pope and of the
poetical commonplace of the day. The author imagines himself in
a library and utters his glib reflections upon the provinces of
theology, history and so forth, and upon the relief from care afforded
by reading. Any other of the poets of the day might have written
it, and it did not advance Crabbe's reputation.
With the next publication, the case was different. The packet
left with Burke had contained portions of a poem which attempted
to contrast village life, as the writer knew it, with the Arcadian
| Huchon, R. , Un Poète Réaliste Anglais, p. 139, n. 1.
? It is reproduced in facsimile by Huchon, u. 8.
ve
es.
## p. 143 (#165) ############################################
VII]
The Village
143
life described by authors of pastorals. When completed, the poem
was published as The Village. Before, however, its appearance
turned the fortunes of Crabbe as poet, his fortunes as a man had
already been turned through the influence of Burke. Burke in-
vited him to stay at Beaconsfield, introduced him to his powerful
friends, Fox, Reynolds, Thurlow (who presented him with £100 and
forgave him an old insult), and then, finding the bent of his mind to
be towards holy orders, recommended him to the bishop of Norwich,
who ordained him, December 1781, when he was all but twenty-
seven years old, to the curacy of Aldeburgh. At Aldeburgh,
Crabbe, as usual, was not happy. His father was proud of him;
but the neighbours regarded him as an upstart. Change from one
awkward situation to another came with the offer of the post of
private chaplain to the duke of Rutland at Belvoir, whither Crabbe
went in 1782. In spite of 'the mind and feelings of a gentleman,'
which Burke had found in him, there seems to have been a kind
of bluntness, perhaps merely that of a strong and sincere mind
(Thurlow once said that he was 'as like Parson Adams as twelve
to a dozen '), which unfitted him for a ducal chaplaincy; and,
though the portrait of 'my lord,' in The Patron, is not drawn
from the duke of Rutland, who treated Crabbe with kindness and
consideration, some of John's difficulties there set out were,
doubtless, borrowed from the poet's own experience. However,
he was now free from anxiety, constantly meeting people of learn-
ing and taste and blessed with plenty of leisure for his poetic
work.
Crabbe went to Belvoir in or about August 1782. In May
1783, the publication of The Village revealed his peculiar qualities
as a poet. The poem had been completed and revised under
Burke's guidance, and submitted by Reynolds to Johnson, who
declared it'original, vigorous, and elegant,' and made an alteration
which cannot be wholly approved'. The originality of the poem
won it immediate success? Such a work may, almost, be said to
have been needed. The taste for pastorals, running down from
the Elizabethan imitations of Theocritus and Mantuan to Ambrose
6
1 The Village, 1, 11. 15—20. Crabbe's original lines may be seen in Works (1834),
114, n. 4.
2 The daring novelty of Crabbe's poetic treatment of the poor may be gauged by a
curious parallelism between The Borough, letter xvm, The Poor and their Dwellings,
11. 354 899. , and the lines recited by the poet'in letter XFV of Goldsmith's The Citizen
of the World. Goldsmith's lines were written as burlesque; Crabbe’s, copied in all
seriousness. The present writer is indebted to Canon A. C. Deane of Great Malvern for
pointing out this loan.
6
Xxx
myn
## p. 144 (#166) ############################################
144
[CH.
George Crabbe
whe
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2
ro
Philips, Allan Ramsay and Thomson, had worn itself out. Gay's
Shepherd's Week, with its parody of Philips, had helped to kill it ;
and Crabbe, certainly, owed something to the form and tone of
Gay's poem. Yet, the impulse had continued in another form.
Goldsmith, in The Deserted Village, and Gray, in An Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard, though completely free from
pastoral affectation, had, at any rate in Crabbe's opinion, idealised
the life and character of the villager. Crabbe, who, perhaps
from early youth, had contrasted his knowledge of life round
Aldeburgh with the smooth alternate verse' read aloud to him
by his father, where
fond Corydons complain,
And shepherds' boys their amorous pains reveal,
The only pains, alas! they never feel? ,
conceived the idea of telling the truth about country folk as he
saw it. For this task, he was peculiarly well equipped. He knew
the life of the country poor by personal experience; and his studies
in botany and other branches of natural science-possibly, even the
mental shortsight which, all his life, kept his vision very close to
its object-enabled him to substitute for the graceful vagueness
of pastoral poets a background drawn with minute exactness. In
seven consecutive lines of The Village, thistles, poppies, bugloss,
mallow and charlock are mentioned by name, each in a manner
which proves it to have been closely observed; and it is said that
Aldeburgh, Great Parham and the country around Belvoir are all
recognisable in the several descriptions of scenery. As with his
background, so with his persons. The desire to tell the truth as
he saw it was the intellectual passion which governed Crabbe in
all bis mature poetry. The side of truth which he saw was,
however, nearly always the gloomy side.
unchecked, doubtless through a world of wonder, from mysterious
preface to inevitable close. Each incident stands out clear-cut
and vivid; each corresponding change in the soul of the mariner
is registered, no less distinctly, as upon the plate of an enchanted
dial. That is one side of the matter; and a side which sets the
poem in the sharpest contrast with the phantasmagoria of Kubla
Khan. On the other hand, each incident in that long succession-
the sailing of the ship, the gradual disappearance of the land-
marks, the southward voyage and the rest is presented not with
the shorthand brevity which suits the needs of daily life, but in the
successive images, distinct and single, which struck the eye of the
mariner at the moment; and this with a persistency which is clearly
intentional, and which it would be hard to parallel from any other
poem. It is here that the method of Kubla Khan repeats itself.
In one respect, indeed, The Ancient Mariner carries that
method a step further. In Kubla Khan, there is a general sense
of colour diffused throughout the poem. But, when we come to
ask how that impression is conveyed, it is impossible to lay our
finger upon anything more definite than the
forests ancient as the hills,
Enclosing sunny spots of greenery.
In The Ancient Mariner, on the other hand, we are not at loss for
a moment. The ice ‘as green as emerald,' the 'copper sky' of the
tropics, the moonbeams 'like April hoar-frost spread upon the sultry
main,' the moonlight that 'steeped in silentness the steady weather-
cock'-these are but a remnant of the lavish store of colour which
brightens the whole poem. And the touches which mark the more
unearthly moments of the mariner's sufferings are still to add :
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green and blue and white;
The charmed water burnt alway,
A still and awful red;
not to speak of the ghastly colours which 'patched the bones' of
Death, in a verse which the subtle instinct of Coleridge led him
>
## p. 126 (#148) ############################################
126
Coleridge
[CH.
2
1
a
動
subsequently to strike out. Of all the elements that blend to make
an image, colour is the most potent. And, if there be any poem
which drives this truth home, it is The Ancient Mariner.
As to the significance of this imagery-above all, in the super-
natural episodes of the poem-Coleridge himself has done something
to mislead later critics. Even to friendly readers, such as Lamb
and, perhaps, Wordsworth, 'all the miraculous parts' seem to have
been things suspect. And Southey, with however ill a grace, was
probably giving voice to the common verdict when he pronounced
the poem to be 'an attempt at the Dutch sublime. It is small
wonder, therefore, that Coleridge, who was never too confident in
his own genius, should have taken fright. And, in Biographia,
he is a shade too anxious to explain that his stress lay not on the
incidents themselves, but on their working upon the soul of the
mariner. That there is some truth in this, is certain. But it is
not the whole truth, nor anything like it. The incidents them-
selves-and, not least, the marvels-have a compelling power upon
the imagination; the story, as a mere story, is among the most
thrilling ever told. And, when we remember that this story shapes
itself in a succession of images unsurpassed for poetic power and
aptness, how is it possible to deny that all this counts, and counts
unspeakably, in the total imaginative effect? It is, no doubt, still
more surprising that, when all is said, these things should be no
more than an element in a larger whole ; that, side by side with
these outward incidents and images, we should have to reckon,
and reckon at least as largely, with their reflection in the soul of
the man who saw and suffered from them; that, from beginning
to end, we should see them through his eyes and feel them through
his spirit. But this is the miracle of Coleridge. And it is a poor
tribute to his genius if we insist upon isolating one element and
asserting that it is all he had to give. It is only by taking both
elements together and giving full allowance to both that we do
justice to the unique quality of this 'miraculous' poem.
The first part of Christabel was written almost immediately
after The Ancient Mariner, and shortly before the little band of
Stowey was broken up, never again to meet under such ‘indulgent
skies. ' The theme is of the same nature as in the preceding poem.
It is handled with more artifice; but, just for that reason, perhaps
with less of inspiration; certainly, with less of buoyant and exultant
freedom. The 'spring of love' that had gushed from the poet's
heart, as, for the first time, he saw and felt how 'excellently fair'
were the outward shows of sky and earth' and how deep the
6
>
6
6
## p. 127 (#149) ############################################
VI]
Christabel
127
meaning that lay hidden within, could never again gush ‘unaware. '
And, when he speaks once more of the vision that had come in the
first instant of his awakening, it is only to lament that it had been
withdrawn almost as soon as it was given and had left nothing but
yearning and self-reproach behind. In any case, the personal note,
which is very strong in The Ancient Mariner and which some
have thought has found its way too loudly into its closing verses,
is deliberately banished from Christabel; or finds an echo only in
the poignant passage about broken friendship, which he himself
considered the best and sweetest lines he ever wrote,' and in the
epilogue to the second part, which is partly an obvious suggestion
from the 'breeze-borne' elfish nature of his son, Hartley, partly a
lament over the difficulty—the impossibility, as it proved—of the task
which he had set himself: the solution of which, unlike the hopes and
longings of the child, was always to seek and never, alas, to find.
The same elaboration is manifest, also, in the metre. Never
before had the four-foot couplet been used with such variety and
subtlety of effect. As the author himself points out, that effect is
largely produced by a frequent use of the anapæstic movement,
which had already found its way into the ballad measure of The
Ancient Mariner; as in the lines-
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.
But it is here invoked still more persistently; as, indeed, in
general, there is a subtlety, not to say a finesse, about the
rhythmical movement of this poem, which would have been quite
out of place in the rushing narrative and more homely metre of
the other. It is one more proof of the wide gulf by which, in
spirit and in total effect, the two poems are divided. Of the
subtlety which went to the creation of the metre in Christabel
there could be no clearer illustration than the failure both of
Scott and Byron--the one in the opening lines of The Lay of the
Last Minstrel, the other in a cancelled introduction of The Siege
of Corinth—to catch anything like the cadence of the rhythm
which, avowedly, served for their model.
It has been said that the thing attempted in Christabel is
the most difficult in the whole field of romance: witchery by
daylight. ' And nothing could come nearer the mark. The
miraculous element, which lies on the face of The Ancient Mariner,
is here driven beneath the surface. The incidents themselves are
hardly outside the natural order. It is only by a running fire
## p. 128 (#150) ############################################
I 28
[CH.
Coleridge
>
of hints and suggestions—which the unimaginative reader has
been known to overlook—that we are made aware of the super-
natural forces which lie in wait on every side. The lifting of
the lady across the threshold, the moan of the mastiff bitch, the
darting of the flame as the enchantress passes—to the heedful,
all these things are full of meaning ; but, to the unwary, they say
nothing ; they say nothing to Christabel. Yet, the whole signifi-
cance of the poem is bound up with these subtle suggestions ;
though it is equally true that, if they were more than suggestions,
its whole significance would be altered or destroyed. It would
no longer be witchery by daylight,' but by moonlight; which
is a very different thing.
To take a world not markedly different from that given to us
in nature, and fill it with the presence, unseen but felt, of the
supernatural ; to tell a tale of human joys and sorrows, and make
it seem 'a story from the world of spirits '—this, indeed, was the
aim of Coleridge. But no one was more keenly aware than he
what were the obstacles to its achievement. “I have, as I always
had,' he said about a year before his death, the whole plan entire
from beginning to end in my mind'-it may be suspected that
this is one of many similar delusions—but I fear I could not
[now] carry on with equal success the execution of the idea, an
extremely subtle and delicate one. ' So subtle and delicate, in
truth, that it is doubtful whether even a man of stronger will
and more mastery of self could ever have ended the poem in the
same tone in which it was begun. Even of the fragment, as it
now stands, it can hardly be said that the second part carries out
the design so perfectly as the first. The localisation of the scene
in a familiar country may, as has sometimes been said, have some-
thing to do with this comparative failure. But it is due much
more to other causes : to an almost inevitable inability on the
poet's part to maintain himself indefinitely in the doubly distilled
imaginings which were the essence of his undertaking. Even in
the earlier part, it would seem that the right note had not always
come to him at the first effort. For, if we are to believe a con-
temporary reviewer-it may have been Hazlitt-in The Escaminer
(2 June 1816), the original version of
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
was
Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue;
and there are other instances of the same kind. The reviewer
scornfully remarks that the rejected reading was the keystone to
6
## p. 129 (#151) ############################################
vi]
As Poet of Nature
129
the whole poem,' and that it was rejected by the author for that
very reason. In his heart, he must have known better. It is of the
essence of the poem not to feed the mind with facts-still less,
with gruesome facts—but to spur the imagination by a sense of
mystery. It is manifest that the original reading renounces the
latter purpose for the former. And, if this be the case, it is clear
that Coleridge would have ruined his poem by retaining it.
The sketch of the projected continuation, which Gillman gives
on the authority of the poet, reads poorly enough. But it is
impossible to say what it, or any other raw material, might have
become under the transforming breath of inspiration. Still,
temperament and opium between them had so clouded the sense
of fact in Coleridge that it would be rash to pronounce whether
this was really the plan which he had in his mind from the begin-
ning, or nothing more than the improvisation of the moment.
How did Coleridge stand towards outward nature and what
was his place in the poetic movement of his time? It is impossible
to leave his work, as poet, without a few words on each of these
crucial, but widely different, matters.
This was the golden age of the poetry of nature’; and
Coleridge may claim his place in it with the best. It is a place
entirely to himself; and it depends upon two qualities. The first
is a faculty of minute and subtle observation, which he may have
learned, in the first instance, from Wordsworth, but which he
fostered to a degree of delicacy to which neither Wordsworth
himself, nor, perhaps, any other 'worshipper of nature,' Keats
excepted, ever quite attained. The 'creaking of the rook's wing'
and the branchless ash,
Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fanned by the waterfall,
in This lime-tree bower, my prison, and that 'peculiar tint of
yellow-green’ which marks the sunset sky in the ode Dejection,
together with whole poems such as The Nightingale, bear witness
to this extraordinary power. And, if more were wanted, it is
supplied in abundance, though rather as raw material than as
poetic creation, by the notes written when he was once more in
constant communion with Wordsworth (1803), and published in
the book which, of all others, throws most light upon the secret
springs of his genius, Anima Poetve (pp. 34—52). Nor does this
command of minute detail in any sense bar the way to an equal
mastery of broad, general effects. What picture was ever painted
9
6
B. L. XI.
CH. VI,
## p. 130 (#152) ############################################
130
Coleridge
[CH.
>
6
9
with broader brush than that of the ice-fields or the tropical
ocean in The Ancient Mariner? What general effect was ever
caught more precisely than that of the moonlight 'steeping in
silentness the steady weathercock' of the same poem, or of April
as the month of dark brown gardens and of peeping flowers' in
the ode Dejection? It may be doubted whether full justice has
even yet been done to this side of the poet's genius.
Yet, even this quality, great though it be, would have availed
little, if it had not gone hand in hand with one of a very different
order. With such a store of observed images at his command,
there must have been a constant temptation to lavish it at every
turn. Nothing is more surprising than the reserve, the sleepless
sense of poetic fitness, with which it is employed by Coleridge.
Even this, indeed, does not give us the whole truth. It is not only
that such images recur seldom ; but that, when they do, they are
lifted into a rarer atmosphere, a more remote region, than that of
mere outward vision. In all his greater poems—The Ancient
Mariner, perhaps, alone excepted—we are made to feel, and we
should hardly have entered into their spirit unless we did feel,
that the outer world is presented to us not directly, but through
a veil of mystery, which softens all that is harsh in outline or
colour; by a kind of second sight, which rather recalls objects,
once familiar, to the memory, than offers their actual image to the
eye. "Sir George Beaumont,' he notes in Anima Poetae, 'found
great advantage in learning to draw from nature through gauze
spectacles. And, with a success which we may be very sure
Sir George never approached, he seems to have applied a like
process to the forms of nature, as reflected in his poetry. Not
that his eye was ever shut even to the crudest effects of the
‘inanimate cold world. The very chemists' jars of blue and
' '
'
green vitriol,' as reflected in the stagnant reaches of a London
canal, win an entry in his note-book? But when they appear in
his poetry, it is—or, did dates allow, it would be as the 'witch's
oils' that burnt green and blue and white' around the waterlogged
vessel in the charmed water' of the tropical sea. Nothing, in
short, that he found in the outer world attained its rightful value
for him until, ‘by sublimation strange,' it had passed into the
'realm of shadows' which Schiller conceived to be the true region
both of poetry and of action”.
1 Anima Poeta, p. 28.
2 See Das Ideal und das Leben, of which the original title was Das Reich der
Schatten.
## p. 131 (#153) ############################################
vi]
As Romantic Poet
131
>
Of his place in the poetic movement of his time there is no
need to speak at length. It was the hour of romance. And, of all
that is purest and most ethereal in the romantic spirit, his poetry
is the most finished, the supreme, embodiment. No doubt, some
of the strands which went to make up the intricate web of the
romantic tissue appear but faintly, if at all, in the poetry of
Coleridge. Medievalism, which plays a large part in the work
of Scott and others, is to Coleridge commonly no more than a
vague atmosphere, such as would give the needful sense of remote-
ness and supply the fit setting for the marvellous which it is his
purpose to hint at or openly display. Once only does he go
palpably beyond this : in the shadowy picture of
The chamber carved so curiously,
Carved with figures strange and sweet,
For a lady's chamber meet.
But, even this touch of medievalism is studiously vague ; nor are
the allusions to trial by combat which follow in the second part of
Christabel any more precise. Contrast these with the description
of Madeline's chamber in The Eve of Saint Agnes or of the
feudal castle and the moss-troopers in The Lay of the Last
Minstrel; and we have the measure of the gulf which parts
Coleridge from other romantic poets in this matter.
Of the historic instinct, strong both in Scott and Byron,
Coleridge, in truth, was defiantly destitute.
Of all the men I ever knew, Wordsworth himself not excepted,' he writes,
'I have the faintest pleasure in things contingent and transitory. . . . Nay, it
goes to a disease with me. As I was gazing at a wall in Carnarvon Castle, I
wished the guide fifty miles off that was telling me, In this chamber the Black
Prince was born-or whoever it was,'
he adds, as well he might. It is true that, when the first cantos
of Childe Harold appeared, he had the courage to assert: 'It is
exactly on the plan that I myself had not only conceived six years
ago, but have the whole scheme drawn out in one of my old
memorandum books ? . ' But this was a pure delusion, of the same
kind as that which led him to declare he had conceived a poem,
with Michael Scott for hero, much superior to Goethe's Fausta;
with this difference, that, whereas Faust lay within his field of
vision, Childe Harold, or any other poem that should make appeal
to the sense of a former world,' after the manner of Byron,
assuredly did not.
9
1 Letters, vol. 11, p. 583.
3 See Table Talk, vol. II, pp. 108–113.
942
## p. 132 (#154) ############################################
132
[CH.
Coleridge
It was in the subtler, more spiritual, regions of romance that
Coleridge found his home. As to his treatment of the marvellous,
ever 'the main region of his song,' little need be added to what
has been said already. In one form or another, the theme never
ceased to haunt his mind during the brief flowering time of his
genius ; and The Ancient Mariner, Christabel and The three
Graves stand for three quite distinct modes of approaching it.
In The Ancient Mariner, the poet openly proclaims his marvels,
and exults in them. In Christabel, they are thrown into the back-
ground, and conveyed to our mind rather by subtle suggestion
than direct assertion. Finally, in the three Graves, neither
,
incidents nor persons have, in themselves, anything of the marvel-
lous; it appears solely in the withering blight brought by a
mother's curse upon three innocent lives. It is here that Coleridge
most nearly approaches the field and method of Wordsworth;
whose Peter Bell—in another way, perhaps, The Thorn-offers a
curious analogy with this powerful but, as usual, unfinished poem.
In the homelier region, he was, manifestly, less at ease than among
the marvels and subtleties of the two other poems; and it is rather
there that the secret of his unique genius must be sought.
Two things, in particular, may be noted. The indirectness by
which the elusive touches of Christabel are made to work their
cumulative effect may be contrasted with the directness of the
method employed by Keats in his treatment of a like theme, the
transformation of a serpent into the guise of a woman, in Lamia.
But it is more important to bear in mind that, if Coleridge is
haunted by the marvellous, it is less for its own sake than as a
symbol of the abiding mystery which he, like Wordsworth, found
everywhere in life, within man and around him; a sign of the
spirit presence which, in his faith, bound 'man and bird and
beast' in one mystical body and fellowship; a token of the love
which is the life of all creation, and which is revealed to us in
the blue sky bent over all. ' It is this faith which gives a deeper
meaning to these fairy creations than they bear upon the surface,
and which raises the closing verses of The Ancient Mariner from
the mere irrelevant appendage they have seemed to some critics,
to an expression of the thought that lies at the core of the
And, if this be true, his wellknown retort to
Mrs Barbauld—“Madam, the fault of the poem is that it has too
much moral'—would take a wider significance than has commonly
been supposed. Only, the self-depreciation of the poet must not
be taken more seriously than it deserves.
whole poem.
## p. 133 (#155) ############################################
VI]
His Theory of Criticism
133
6
In treating of Coleridge as literary critic, there is no alternative
but to speak either very briefly or at considerable length. The
latter is here impossible. All that can be done, therefore, is to
indicate the main avenues which his criticism opened out.
The only written monument of his critical work is that con-
tained in Biographia Literaria (1815—17), and in a short series of
articles contributed to Farley's Bristol Journal a year or two
earlier (1814)? . All else has to be gleaned from the very imperfect
reports of his lectures, recorded by Collier, Crabb Robinson and
others. These lectures, of which there were, in all, some dozen
courses, were delivered, partly in London partly at Bristol, between
the years 1808 and 1819. Their avowed subjects, apart from a
course on the history of philosophy (1818—19), were, mainly, the
drama in general, or Shakespeare and Milton. But Coleridge was
never the man to be bound down by a syllabus ; and his audience
had, on occasion, to bear, as best they could, a defence of school-
flogging, an attack on the Lancastrian system of education' and
other such irrelevancies, when they had come to hear a discourse
on Romeo and Juliet. Yet, in spite of these glaring faults, the
lectures were not seldom worthy both of their subject and of their
author. And, with the written pieces, they form a body of work
such as makes an epoch in the history of English-it would hardly
be too much to say, of European--criticism.
Coleridge concerns himself not only with the practice of
criticism, but, also—perhaps, by preference—with its theory. On
both sides, he offers the sharpest contrast with the critics of the
century, and, not least, of the generation, preceding. The Wartons
and Hurd, no doubt, stand apart from the men of their day. In
sentiment, they rebel against the canons of the Augustans; and,
so far, they are at one with Coleridge. But they were content to
defend their instinctive judgments on purely literary grounds, and
made no attempt to justify them on more general principles.
Indeed, they seem never to have suspected that their revolt against
the established taste in poetry carried with it a revolt against
the established system in philosophy. Coleridge, on the other
hand, was philosopher just as much as poet. He lived in the full
ide of a philosophical, no less than a poetic, revival. He was him-
self among the leading figures in both. He had, therefore, on both
sides, a far richer store of material to draw from than had been open
1 They are reprinted in the appendix to Cottle's Early Recollections. To the works
mentioned above should be added a pregnant section of a Preliminary Treatise on
Method, prefixed to Encyclopædia Metropolitana. It was written in 1817 and published
in 1818.
## p. 134 (#156) ############################################
134
Coleridge
[CH.
to the earlier rebels. And it was the first instinct of his nature to
weave, or force, every side of his experience into a consistent whole.
At the first step, he rules out the assumption, which, from
Horace onwards, had wrought such havoc in criticism, that the
object of poetry is to instruct; or, as a less extreme form of the
heresy had asserted, to make men morally better. That this may
be an effect of poetry-of much that is noblest in poetry-he is
not in the least concerned to deny. That, however, is no more
than an incidental result. And the true end, or function, of poetry
is to give immediate pleasure: pleasure, he explains in a somewhat
disconcerting addition, “through the medium of beauty? '
This may not carry us very far. But, at least, it serves to warn
us off from the wrong road, and to set our feet at the beginning of
the right one. More than this : by further additions and modi-
fications, Coleridge so expands his original doctrine as to bring us
considerably further on the path. In the first place, the assertion
that the pleasure which imaginative art aims at giving is wrought
'through the medium of beauty,' however much it may check the
logical flow of the argument, at least serves to enforce the truth,
already laid down by Aristotle, that imaginative pleasure differs
in kind from all other forms of pleasure : nay, that one form of
imaginative pleasure differs in kind from all other forms of
imaginative pleasure: that given by poetry, for instance, from
that given by sculpture or painting ; that given by the drama
from that given by lyric or by epic. In the second place, his own
analysis of that which constitutes “beauty' is so illuminating, his
own exposition of the conditions necessary to poetic pleasure is so
subtle, as to bring us a great deal further on the road than, at the
first moment, we may have been aware. The former throws a
flood of light upon the points in which the various arts differ
from each other, as well as upon those they have in common.
The latter-enforced, as it is, by a criticism of Shakespeare's early
poetic work, and reinforced by an equally delicate criticism of
the charm attaching to the consummate presentment of common
form’ in poetry, particularly by the Italian poets of the later
renascence-is one of the most satisfying things ever written
in this kind. In applying the principles which he had already
laid down in theory, the author succeeds both in defining them
more closely and in extending them more widely; in the very
statement of his theory, he contrives to offer a model of the
method which critics should aim at following in practice.
1 Farley's B. J. art. 1.
## p. 135 (#157) ############################################
vi] As Critic and Philosopher 135
Of the rest of his work in practical criticism, no account can
be offered. It must suffice to mention his criticism of Words-
worth in Biographia, and that of Shakespeare, as dramatist, in
various courses of his lectures. The former, in itself, is a fine
and discriminating piece of work. But it is more than doubtful
whether Coleridge was the man to have undertaken it. He was
aware that the slightly astringent touch, which he felt justice
demanded, would give offence to his brother poet. And, con-
sidering the relation between the two men-a relation once of
the warmest friendship, now of strained forbearance—it would
have been more gracious to keep silence. Indeed, so far as the
criticism deals with Wordsworth’s theory of 'poetic diction, it
cannot but strike the reader as carping ; not to mention the
appearance of treachery involved in attacking a theory for which
he himself was commonly held, and, probably, with some justice,
to be, in part, responsible. As critic of Shakespeare's dramatic
genius, his part is less ambiguous, though even this is complicated
by questions of unacknowledged debts to Schlegel. He was the
first English writer to insist that every work of art-in this
instance, every play-is, by its very nature, an organic whole ;
and that, if this is harder to discern in the complicated structure
of Shakespearean and much other modern drama, it is because,
at least in the nobler examples, such plays are not less, but more,
vitally articulated ; not less, but more, spontaneous and organic
Structure, scenic effect, poetry, character-all are shown to spring
from the same common root in the spirit of the poet; each to
enhance the imaginative effect which, instinctively, he had in view.
And he enforces this, not as a mere abstract doctrine—though it
lies at the core of his theory of beauty—but by an exposition of
individual masterpieces which, for subtlety and suggestiveness,
had certainly, if we except Goethe's masterly criticism of Hamlet,
never been approached. It remains true that, having done so
,
much, he might justly have been expected to do even more; and
that nothing but his own nervelessness, at once the cause and
effect of the opium habit, could have prevented him from doing it.
If, in literary criticism, there has sometimes been a disposition
to exaggerate the value of the work actually accomplished by
Coleridge, in philosophy, the tendency has almost always been
to give him less than his due ; certainly, as to what he achieved
in the way of writing ; too often, even as to his intrinsic capacity.
Yet, his importance in the history of English philosophy is not
to be denied. It is neither more nor less than to have stood
## p. 136 (#158) ############################################
136
[ch.
Coleridge
against the current which, for the last century, had swept every-
thing before it; to have assailed the mechanical philosophy
which, from the time of Locke, had firmly entrenched itself in
this country and in France; and, however much he may have
been overborne by the prejudices of the moment, at least to
have paved the way for their ultimate exposure and defeat. Even
at the moment, in the high tide of Bentham's influence, his
labours were by no means in vain. As writer-still more, in his
talk and in his personal influence—he served for a rallying point
to all who felt, if they could not explain to themselves, the
inadequacy of the prevailing system : the one man who was
capable of laying bare its fallacies, the one man who was able
to give a reasoned account of the larger faith after which they
were blindly groping. The evidence of this is to be found in
the lives of such men as Arnold and Maurice ; or, more com-
pactly, in the generous essay of Mill and the brilliant, but not
too generous, chapter devoted to the subject in Carlyle's Life
of Sterling.
In philosophy, as he himself would have been the first to
acknowledge, he was building on the foundations laid by Kant
and, to a less degree, by Fichte and Schelling. At what time
he became acquainted with the writings of Kant, is a disputed
point. He himself seems to place it in 18002; and, though he was
constitutionally inaccurate about all matters of fact, it is hard to
see why this date, the period immediately following his return
from Germany, should not be accepted. The question is hardly
one of supreme importance. For, despite some unlucky borrowings
from Schelling (alas ! unacknowledged), he was in no sense a mere
adapter, still less a mere copyist, from the Germans? He worked,
as all philosophers must work, on hints furnished by his pre-
decessors; and that is all.
His aim was to show the necessity of replacing the mechanical
interpretation of life and nature, which he found in possession
of the field, by one consistently spiritual, indeed religious. And
he carries out this purpose over the whole field of experience :
in metaphysics and philosophy ; in ethics and politics ; not to
mention his application of the same principle to imaginative
creation, as briefly indicated in the preceding section. In
1 Biographia, chap. ix.
2 The passage in Biographia, chap. XI (pp. 124–7), which forms the introduction
to Coleridge's metaphysical system, is an unblushing translation (with a misquotation
from Horace faithfully reproduced) of Schelling's System des transzendentalen Idealismus,
$S 1, 2. The rest of the chapter is largely an adaptation from the same work.
## p. 137 (#159) ############################################
VI]
6
Metaphysics and Psychology 137
metaphysics, his work is probably less satisfactory than in any other
branch of his vast subject. And that, partly because he is here
more ready than elsewhere to follow the hazardous guidance of
Schelling ; partly because the temptation to press speculative
truth into the service of a particular religious creed was more
than he was able wholly to resist. Hence, with all his subtlety,
he does not succeed in driving home the essentially creative
action of the mind in the process of knowledge—and that, after
all, is the main point at issue—at all as clearly as Kant had
done before him. And, by his use of the distinction between
the “reason' and the understanding'-a distinction originally
due to Kant for the purpose of bolstering up opinions origin-
ally derived from a wholly different source, he opens the door to
all kinds of fallacies and perversions. With Kant, the distinction
between the reason and the understanding has a purely restrictive
purpose. Its effect is to deny to the former anything more than
a ‘regulative' or suggestive function in the ordering of knowledge;
and to claim from the latter, which, froin its nature, must always
go hand in hand with a sensible intuition, the sole title to the
discovery of truth. In other words, it is a distinction which leads
a
straight to what have since come to be known as agnostic con-
clusions. To Coleridge, it serves a purpose exactly the reverse.
So far from separating the spheres of the two faculties, he sweeps
away all barriers between them. He allows to the one an ap-
parently unlimited power of re-affirming what the other had found
it necessary to deny; and thus exposes himself to Carlyle's sarcasm
that he had discovered 'the sublime secret of believing by the
reason what the understanding had been obliged to fling out as
incredible. ' It would be grossly unfair to say that this exhausts
the teaching of Coleridge in the region of metaphysics. His
criticism of the mechanical system-and, in particular, of the
theory of association, as elaborated by Hume and Hartley-
would, in itself, suffice to overthrow any such assertion! But it
can hardly be denied that this is the side of his doctrine on which
he himself laid the heaviest stress ; nor, again, that it is the side
upon which he is most open to attack.
In the kindred field of psychology, his results are both sounder
in themselves and more absolutely his own. His records of the
working of the mind, especially under abnormal or morbid con-
ditions, are extraordinarily minute and subtle. It would hardly
be too much to say that he is the founder of what has since
1 Biographia, chaps. V-VIII.
6
## p. 138 (#160) ############################################
138
[CH.
Coleridge
become a distinct, and most fruitful, branch of philosophy: the
study of experimental psychology. And this, which is fully known
only to those who are familiar with Anima Poeto, is, perhaps, his
most original contribution to philosophy.
In ethics, he is more upon the beaten track. But it was a
track almost unknown to Englishmen of his day. And it is his
lasting service, at the moment when the utilitarian scheme of
things swept all before it, to have proclaimed the utter in-
sufficiency of any doctrine which did not start from the postulate
of duty. Here, once more, he bases his teaching upon that of
Kant. But he enters a just protest, as Schiller had done before
him, against the hard saying that the highest goodness is that
which tramples upon the natural instincts of the heart. And,
throughout his exposition, as given in Aids to Reflection, he
shows (as, from his personal experience, he well might) a sense of
human frailty—a sense, that is, of one of the two main elements
of the problem—which the noble stoicism of Kant had been too
apt to treat as matter for nothing but shame and contempt.
Few, probably, now think of Coleridge in connection with
political philosophy. Yet, there is no subject to which, through-
out life, he gave more time and thought; from the days of
Conciones ad populum and The Watchman (1795-6) to those of
The Friend (1809—10; 1818), or of The Constitution of Church
and State (1830). Coleridge habitually spoke of himself as the heir
of Burke. And that constitutes at once the strength and the
weakness of his position as political philosopher. More systematic,
but with far less of imaginative and historic insight than his
master, he inherited, in fact, both the loves and the hates of
Reflections and Letters on a Regicide Peace.
On the negative side, he is the fiery foe of the rights of man, of
Jacobinism, of the sovereignty of the people. And he makes no
effort to disentangle the truth which under a crude form, no
doubt-found expression in watchwords which, in his early man-
hood, had shaken Europe to her depths and had in no sense lost
their power when he died. To the end, he was unable to see that
no state, which does not draw its will from the whole body of its
members, can be regarded as fully organised or developed ; and
that this was the ideal which the French revolution, perhaps
before the time was ripe, certainly through many crimes and
blunders, was striving to make good. Against this ideal, he had
nothing to propose but that of a government, based upon the will
of the propertied classes only, and imposing itself upon the rest
## p. 139 (#161) ############################################
vi]
Political Philosophy
139
6
of the community from above. The result is that, at the present
day, his theory seems ludicrously out of date: far more so than
that of the Jacobins, or of Le Contrat social, which he does his
best to cover with ridicule and contempt. So childish, indeed, was
his fear of Jacobinism, so keen his scent for the faintest breath of
its approach that, when Erskine brought in a bill, the first of its
kind, for the prevention of cruelty to animals (1809), he denounced
it, in his largest capitals, as 'the strongest instance of legislative
Jacobinism? ' It was bad enough that rights should be demanded
for men; to concede them to animals was iniquitous and absurd.
In spite of these follies, it is right to acknowledge that his criticism
of Jacobinism and of Le Contrat social, however little we may
agree with it, reveals powers beyond the reach of any man living
in England at the time ; probably, if we except Hegel, beyond the
reach of any man in Europe? .
Yet, as with all thinkers worthy of the name, it is in expounding
the positive side of his doctrine that his powers are seen at their
brightest and most convincing. The core of his creed, as of Burke's,
lay in the conviction that the civic life of man is the offspring not
of deliberate calculation, the cautious balancing of comparative
advantages,' but of instincts, often working unknown to himself,
which are rooted in the deepest fibres of his nature. He is assured
that the state, so far from being a cunning piece of mechanism,
put together at the will of individuals and to be taken to pieces at
their pleasure, is something larger and more enduring than the
individuals who compose it. He knows that, in a very real sense, ,
it has a life of its own : a life which, at countless points, controls,
no less than it is controlled by, theirs. He believes that the moral,
as well as the material, existence of men is largely determined by
the civic order into which they are born. And he infers that, if
this order be roughly shaken, the moral, as well as the material,
well-being of those who belong to it is grievously emperilled.
These are the vital principles which lie behind all that he wrote
on political matters, and which find their best expression, charac-
teristically barbed by a bitter attack on Hume, in an eloquent
passage of one of his Lay Sermons.
1 Letters, vol. II, p. 635.
? The Friend, ed. 1837, vol. 1, pp. 240—266; vol. II, pp. 28–30. Essays on his
own Times, pp. 543—550.
3 The Statesman's Manual, 1816.
## p. 140 (#162) ############################################
CHAPTER VII
GEORGE CRABBE
-
t
6
GEORGE CRABBE was born at Aldeburgh, on the coast of Suffolk,
on 24 December 1754. His father, a collector of salt-duties at the
harbour, was a man of both high tastes and low. Rather dis-
reputable in his later years, he had, as a young man, kept school,
and used to read Milton, Young and other poets aloud to his family.
Destined for the profession of medicine, George was apprenticed
to a medical practitioner in Wickhambrook, near Bury St Edmunds,
from whose surgery, three years later, he passed into that of a
doctor at Woodbridge. Here he remained from 1771 to 1775, and
became acquainted with Sarah Elmy, who, though ten years were
to pass before they were married, exercised from the first a
softening and brightening influence on the rather grim nature of
the unformed youth. Just about the time of their meeting, Crabbe
made his first known appearance in print as a poet. In ‘the poets'
corner' of a ladies' magazine in 1772 appeared several pieces of
verse, some signed ‘G. Ebbare' and one ‘G. Ebbaac,' which are
held to be by Crabbel. One of these, consisting of two very pretty
stanzas, called The Wish, celebrates the poet's 'Mira,' which was
the poetical name given by Crabbe to Sarah Elmy.
In 1775, just before the close of his apprenticeship at Wood-
bridge, Crabbe put his powers to a severe test, by publishing with
an Ipswich bookseller a poem, in three parts, entitled Inebriety.
From the description of the cottage library in part 1 of The Parish
Register2 and other references in Crabbe's works, we know that, in
boyhood, his favourite reading had been romantic; but, by the
time he wrote Inebriety, he must have made a close study of the
poetic dictator of the day, Pope. Much of Inebriety is composed
of frank imitation, or parody, of An Essay on Man and The
Dunciad; while, here and there, Crabbe proves his knowledge
of Gray. Echoes of these poets, being mingled with language drawn
i George Crabbe, ed. Ward, A. W. , Cambridge English Classics, vol. I, pp. y-viii.
2 11. 95—126. See, also, The Borough, letter xx, Ellen Orford, 11. 11--119.
## p. 141 (#163) ############################################
CH. VII]
Early Life
141
by the doctor's apprentice from his art, and presented in rimed
heroic verse, at once laboured and slipshod, leave Inebriety one
of the rawest poems ever written. Yet, if there is plenty of
affectation about the youthful satirist, it is not sentimental
affectation. Crabbe shows signs already of that revolt against
idealisation which was to inspire his mature work. To him,
inebriety is an evil, and he describes with vigour and point its
evil effects in all classes of life.
His apprenticeship over, Crabbe returned home to Aldeburgh,
without any prospects and with very little knowledge of the science
of healing. Owing to his mother's illness and his father's intem-
perance and violent nature, his home was unhappy. During these
years, the iron must have entered into his soul. He tried to
practise his profession at Aldeburgh, and was appointed parish
doctor. Meanwhile, however, he was studying nature, and especially
botany, with results which, if of no service to him as doctor, were
to be of great value to his poetry. He continued to read much
and to think much, and he found his mind turning definitely to
faith and piety. Sarah Elmy was his consolation and hope (many
years later, in one of the Tales called The Lover's Journey, he
wrote a famous description of a visit to her); and he went on
writing poetry, a little of which has survived. To the years
1775—9 belong several religious poems, an impressive little
piece on Mira', which tells how she drew the author from the
relief of 'false pleasures' to 'loftier notions,' and a blank verse
work entitled Midnight, which, if very gloomy, ends on a note of
sane and sturdy courage.
At length, he could not endure life at Aldeburgh any longer.
Towards the end of 1779, he made up his mind to stake his all on
literary work in London and, in April 1780, with assistance from
Dudley North, a relative of the prime minister, he set sail from
Slaughden quay. In London, he took a lodging close to the Royal
Exchange, near some friends of Miss Elmy who lived in Cornhill,
and set to work revising a couple of plays and some prose essays
which he had brought with him, studying botany and entomology
in the country round London, and keeping a journal addressed to
Mira. The year was to him one of privation and disappointment.
Among the poems that, without success, he attempted to publish
were an epistle, in his favourite couplets, to prince William (after-
wards William IV), a satirical Epistle from the Devil (apparently
a revised version of an earlier poem, The Foes of Mankind) and
1 Ward, u. 8. vol. 1, p. 38.
6
## p. 142 (#164) ############################################
142
[CH.
George Crabbe
6
JM
4
an Epistle to Mira, in both of which he uses anapaests. No publisher
would accept these poems, in spite of a biting introduction by
their author, under the pseudonym ‘Martinus Scriblerus. Lords
North, Shelburne and Thurlow, one after another, turned
,
a deaf ear to the author, though his compliment in verse to
Shelburne deserved some reward. And when, probably in August
1780", he found a printer willing to print two hundred and fifty
copies of another poem, it did not bring him in anything but one
or two slighting reviews. Crabbe, who, in several works of this
period, describes his own feelings and condition, hereupon addressed
to 'the Authors of the Monthly Review' a letter in verse, in which
a
he practically asks them to advise him whether he should persevere
in poetry or not, bestowing on himself, by the way, some satirical
advice on the methods that lead to success. There is nothing re-
markable about the poem except the amazing simplicity of the idea.
The kindness of the wigmaker with whom he lodged, occasional
help from Sarah Elmy's family and the pawning of his possessions
just sufficed to save Crabbe from destitution; but his condition
was very bad indeed when, in something like despair, he wrote,
probably in February or March 1781, a letter to Edmund Burke.
This letter, which is still extant, he left, with some specimens of
his poetry in manuscript, at Burke's house in Charles street,
St James's. Burke granted an interview, found Crabbe to have
'the mind and feelings of a gentleman,' gave him money for his
immediate needs and became his patron. Among the poems then
submitted by Crabbe to Burke was The Library; and this was the
poem which Burke recommended for publication. First, however,
it must be revised; the thoughts were often better than the
The revision was carried out under Burke's eye. The
Library was published by Dodsley, 24 July 1781. It did not bear
any author's name, and there is not anything in the poem itself to
declare it Crabbe's. It smacks throughout of Pope and of the
poetical commonplace of the day. The author imagines himself in
a library and utters his glib reflections upon the provinces of
theology, history and so forth, and upon the relief from care afforded
by reading. Any other of the poets of the day might have written
it, and it did not advance Crabbe's reputation.
With the next publication, the case was different. The packet
left with Burke had contained portions of a poem which attempted
to contrast village life, as the writer knew it, with the Arcadian
| Huchon, R. , Un Poète Réaliste Anglais, p. 139, n. 1.
? It is reproduced in facsimile by Huchon, u. 8.
ve
es.
## p. 143 (#165) ############################################
VII]
The Village
143
life described by authors of pastorals. When completed, the poem
was published as The Village. Before, however, its appearance
turned the fortunes of Crabbe as poet, his fortunes as a man had
already been turned through the influence of Burke. Burke in-
vited him to stay at Beaconsfield, introduced him to his powerful
friends, Fox, Reynolds, Thurlow (who presented him with £100 and
forgave him an old insult), and then, finding the bent of his mind to
be towards holy orders, recommended him to the bishop of Norwich,
who ordained him, December 1781, when he was all but twenty-
seven years old, to the curacy of Aldeburgh. At Aldeburgh,
Crabbe, as usual, was not happy. His father was proud of him;
but the neighbours regarded him as an upstart. Change from one
awkward situation to another came with the offer of the post of
private chaplain to the duke of Rutland at Belvoir, whither Crabbe
went in 1782. In spite of 'the mind and feelings of a gentleman,'
which Burke had found in him, there seems to have been a kind
of bluntness, perhaps merely that of a strong and sincere mind
(Thurlow once said that he was 'as like Parson Adams as twelve
to a dozen '), which unfitted him for a ducal chaplaincy; and,
though the portrait of 'my lord,' in The Patron, is not drawn
from the duke of Rutland, who treated Crabbe with kindness and
consideration, some of John's difficulties there set out were,
doubtless, borrowed from the poet's own experience. However,
he was now free from anxiety, constantly meeting people of learn-
ing and taste and blessed with plenty of leisure for his poetic
work.
Crabbe went to Belvoir in or about August 1782. In May
1783, the publication of The Village revealed his peculiar qualities
as a poet. The poem had been completed and revised under
Burke's guidance, and submitted by Reynolds to Johnson, who
declared it'original, vigorous, and elegant,' and made an alteration
which cannot be wholly approved'. The originality of the poem
won it immediate success? Such a work may, almost, be said to
have been needed. The taste for pastorals, running down from
the Elizabethan imitations of Theocritus and Mantuan to Ambrose
6
1 The Village, 1, 11. 15—20. Crabbe's original lines may be seen in Works (1834),
114, n. 4.
2 The daring novelty of Crabbe's poetic treatment of the poor may be gauged by a
curious parallelism between The Borough, letter xvm, The Poor and their Dwellings,
11. 354 899. , and the lines recited by the poet'in letter XFV of Goldsmith's The Citizen
of the World. Goldsmith's lines were written as burlesque; Crabbe’s, copied in all
seriousness. The present writer is indebted to Canon A. C. Deane of Great Malvern for
pointing out this loan.
6
Xxx
myn
## p. 144 (#166) ############################################
144
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George Crabbe
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Philips, Allan Ramsay and Thomson, had worn itself out. Gay's
Shepherd's Week, with its parody of Philips, had helped to kill it ;
and Crabbe, certainly, owed something to the form and tone of
Gay's poem. Yet, the impulse had continued in another form.
Goldsmith, in The Deserted Village, and Gray, in An Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard, though completely free from
pastoral affectation, had, at any rate in Crabbe's opinion, idealised
the life and character of the villager. Crabbe, who, perhaps
from early youth, had contrasted his knowledge of life round
Aldeburgh with the smooth alternate verse' read aloud to him
by his father, where
fond Corydons complain,
And shepherds' boys their amorous pains reveal,
The only pains, alas! they never feel? ,
conceived the idea of telling the truth about country folk as he
saw it. For this task, he was peculiarly well equipped. He knew
the life of the country poor by personal experience; and his studies
in botany and other branches of natural science-possibly, even the
mental shortsight which, all his life, kept his vision very close to
its object-enabled him to substitute for the graceful vagueness
of pastoral poets a background drawn with minute exactness. In
seven consecutive lines of The Village, thistles, poppies, bugloss,
mallow and charlock are mentioned by name, each in a manner
which proves it to have been closely observed; and it is said that
Aldeburgh, Great Parham and the country around Belvoir are all
recognisable in the several descriptions of scenery. As with his
background, so with his persons. The desire to tell the truth as
he saw it was the intellectual passion which governed Crabbe in
all bis mature poetry. The side of truth which he saw was,
however, nearly always the gloomy side.
