The strangest thing is that, in the very height of the opium
fever, he should have been capable of efforts which, though
lamentably unequal, still gave evidence of powers which not one
of his contemporaries could have rivalled.
fever, he should have been capable of efforts which, though
lamentably unequal, still gave evidence of powers which not one
of his contemporaries could have rivalled.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v11
Here, we have, without doubt, one of the
‘
essentials of Wordsworth's poetry.
The same character is to be found in Nutting, where we are
told of 'the intruding sky,' that struck with remorse the boyish
nut-gatherer after he had torn the boughs of a virgin bower; or,
again, in Skating-scene, where the poet describes the strange
appearance of the surrounding hills, which, to the skater who has
just stopped short after gliding at full speed, still seem to wheel
by 'as if the earth had rolled with visible motion her diurnal
round. Here we have a mere illusion of the senses, but one of
the existence of which, as of its weirdness and beauty, no doubt
can be entertained.
One English poet only can be compared with Wordsworth here :
Shelley, whose senses were endowed with an unusual, almost
a superhuman, gift of insight. He, too, was to enrich our
knowledge of sensation by his verse. His sensitiveness goes into
things even deeper than Wordsworth’s. He can see further
through the screen, even spy ‘the warm light of life. ' But few, if
any, can follow him to the end, or remember having themselves ex-
perienced his wonderful ecstasies. He is alone. On the contrary,
Wordsworth has no abnormal and hypertrophied sensitiveness.
It was the common healthy sensibility of mankind which he found
himself sharing. He merely reveals to us what everyone has felt,
or may feel any day.
There may be a poetry of nature less obvious than that
founded on a multitudinous notation of her detailed aspects, less
subtle than the analysis of exquisite sensations, but, perhaps, of
more breadth and grandeur. Hazlitt has said that one could infer
that Wordsworth's poetry was written in a mountainous country,
from its bareness, its simplicity, its loftiness and its depth. ' It is
not, indeed, by description that the characters of nature are most
deeply caught and expressed ; it is by incorporation, so to say,
when the image of the outward world, instead of being directly
6
## p. 113 (#135) ############################################
v]
Michael
I13
presented, is reflected in the feelings and shines through the most
indifferent words ; thus deeply had the scenery among which he
spent his days penetrated into Wordsworth's mind and soul. If
we had to praise him as the poet of mountains, we might, of
course, choose the noble descriptive pages that abound in his
volumes ; but, rather than to these, rather than to the famous
mountain scenes in his Excursion—which are too conscious—we
should turn to a poem like Michael, where scenery, characters
and style form a perfect harmony of lines and tints that could
not have existed without a secret process of assimilation. Lofty
and bare, indeed, is this pastoral ; few flowers grow on the
heights where old Michael meant to build his sheepfold. The
land is unadorned. It has no other features than the sheer linea-
ments of its sweeps and pastures or its steep rocks, over which
are spread by turns the naked sky and the winter mists. All this,
together with the bracing air, you feel from the first to the last
line, not less when the poet gives you the speech of his ancient
'statesman' or a glimpse of his stern mind, than when he paints
the landscape itself. Even as the scenery is composed of essentials,
so is the old man's character, and so his language. In such
passages there is not one word of description, and yet the 'pastoral
mountains' are constantly conjured up with their raw atmosphere,
behind the discoursing shepherd. Every syllable he utters is their
emanation.
Another summit is reached by the poet when he freely allows
his creed of the refining agency of the senses to pass into a sort
of waking dream, instead of asserting itself by argument as in
The Prelude, or even, as in Tintern Abbey, by lyrical proclama-
tion. Few will deny one of the very first ranks in his verse to
the fourth of the Lucy poems, where he tells us how his beloved
had been cared for by nature since her tenderest years, how nature
had vowed to make her a Lady of her own,' imparting to her 'the
silence and the calm of mute insensate things,' either bidding the
storm ‘mould the maiden's form by silent sympathy, or causing
'beauty born of murmuring sound to pass into her face. Here,
Wordsworth joins company with the most aerial of poets. He
drops to the earth, for once, all that matter-of-factness of which
Coleridge complained. He sets common observation at defiance
and simply ignores the objections of common sense, with which he
is elsewhere only too prone to argue. Though most thoroughly
himself when shaping Lucy's natural education, he gives wings,
not feet, to his most cherished belief. We have, in this lyric, “the
E. L. XI.
сн. у.
8
## p. 114 (#136) ############################################
114
[CH.
William Wordsworth
fine excess' of poetry. Whatever may be said of these country
maids who, though brought up under the clouds and stars, and by
the side of dancing rivulets, failed to be informed with grace and
beauty, Wordsworth has used his privilege as a poet of embodying
a vision made, after all, of mysterious possibilities, perhaps of
truths in the making.
But nature never engrossed all his thoughts. Many were
given to man, chiefly to the feelings of man. He shows the same
mastery in his delineation of the hidden germs of feeling as of
those of sensation. He, again, excels when describing the moral
emotions in the blending of the subtle and the simple, of the
strange and the essential. But the beauty of his verse seems, in
this case, to come less from intuitive discovery than from long
brooding. Fullness and compactness of meaning now characterise
his greatest utterances. All readers catch their pathos at once ;
few, immediately, if ever, their entire signification. A noticeable
instance is the finale of the plain prosaic story Simon Lee, a short
stanza full to overflowing of his prolonged meditations on the
present iniquity and harshness of society. Poets and moralists
have vied in easy railings at man's ingratitude. Shakespeare,
among others, is full of such denunciations. Alas! the greater
cause for grief is the existence of gratitude, chiefly of excessive
gratitude, which implies that there is a scarcity of fellow-feeling,
a dearth of benevolence, a lack of mutual neighbourly assistance
in this world. That exaggerated thanks should be offered for
the merest trifle, for a deed of easy and imperative kindness,
betrays daily uncharitableness and opens vistas of the insensibility
of existing society ; it shows 'what man has made of man':
I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of man
Hath oftener left me mourning.
This is one of his many reflections which are more pregnant and
sink deeper into the mind and heart than those of almost any
other poet.
From such deep sources do many of his sonnets, chiefly of his
political sonnets, draw their rare intensity of moral feeling. It is
enough to remind the reader of a few familiar passages : his
melancholy on hearing of the extinction of the republic of Venice;
his energy of tone when he comforts poor Toussaint Louverture,
the liberator of San Domingo, now thrown into a prison ; the bitter
P
co
## p. 115 (#137) ############################################
v]
His Sonnets
115
restrained irony of his ‘high-minded Spaniard,' who resents, more
than the devastation of his country, Napoleon's so-called benefits,
and so forth. In his more strictly English sonnets, the greatness
is not due to novelty of thought. It so happens that almost every
idea and emotion expressed by Wordsworth in 1802 and the years
following had been more than foreshadowed by Coleridge as
early as 1798 in his Ode to France or Fears in Solitude. But
the truly Wordsworthian power of the sonnets is owing to the
protracted sojourn of these feelings in his breast before he gave
utterance to them, to his long reluctance against their admission,
to his repeated inward debates. Hence, instead of Coleridge's
extemporised effusions, which have been aptly compared, by
Angellier, to the sea-scud which is thrown off by a storm, here we
have the distilled elixir. Nearly ten years of vexed thoughts
went to the making, in 1803, of the final line of the sonnet to
England, where, after enumerating and condemning what he calls
her many political crimes, he sighs (with a unique mixture of
reproof and tenderness, of grief and repressed pride) at the
thought that she, nevertheless, is the least unworthy champion
of liberty left in the world :
O grief that Earth's best hopes rest all in thee!
It would be hard to match these ten monosyllables for compactness
of historical allusion and complex feeling. Such condensed moral
utterances are among the glories of Wordsworth’s verse.
Other characteristics ought to be added, regarding bis more
purely artistic gifts-gifts of verse-writing and style, gifts of com-
position. But this would land us in endless discussions ; for, in
these respects, Wordsworth’s mastery is surely relative and inter-
mittent. He reaches, at times, so high a degree of excellence that
the mere verbal felicity of some of his simplest lines baffles the
imitation of the most refined artists:
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago. . . .
But he frequently mixes the highest poetry with the flatness of
unimpassioned, uninspired prose. He also shows himself, in many
a period or stanza, devoid of ease, elegance and pliancy. He is
more than once awkwardly naïve, clumsily familiar, or, on the
contrary, more solemn and pompous than needs be. The talent
for construction, niggardly bestowed on the romantic poets of all
countries, is particularly weak in him. He could never frame and
8-2
## p. 116 (#138) ############################################
116
[CH. V
William Wordsworth
fashion a considerable poem with due equilibrium of substance
and form, of thought and story. In this respect, The Excursion
is a memorable failure. As to The Prelude, it owes its permanent
interest partly to its admirable passages of poetry, partly to its
philosophical or to its autobiographical value, which we feel, as we
read, to be merits not strictly poetic. Only in compositions of
moderate length, like The Ruined Cottage, Michael, Laodamia
did he achieve perfect harmony, and in many of his lyrics and
sonnets.
That he often tries to lift us and himself to the poetic mood
rather than takes this mood for granted, cannot be denied. Poetry
often seems to be his object rather than his possession. He made
the training of man to poetry his chief office here below.
leads us warily from the inlands of prose to the shore, marking out
the way with unprecedented care; but he is sometimes content
with gazing on the element and leaves it to others boldly to sail
upon it or plunge into it. The main body of his poems is educative
and preparatory. Yet he has left sufficient of absolute verse,
heart-searching and beautiful, enough for a Wordsworthian an-
thology that will remain among the most enduring treasures of
romanticism.
He
1
1
1
## p. 117 (#139) ############################################
CHAPTER VI
COLERIDGE
COLERIDGE survives for us as poet: a poet unique in inspiration,
unique, also, if sadly fitful, in achievement. But he was also philo-
sopher, critic, theologian, moralist, talker-above all, a talker.
And, with the strongest will in the world, it would have been hard
for one so variously endowed not to dissipate his genius. Given a
will exceptionally infirm, the wonder is that he should have left so
much, rather than so little, as a monument of what he was.
The strange complexity of his nature, reflected, as it is, in the
whole tenor of his life, is a challenge to all who love to follow the
mysterious windings of the soul. His character is an enthralling,
as well as a deeply pathetic, study in itself. And it may even be
that we shall find it throw some light upon his genius, as a poet.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in October 1772; two years
after Wordsworth, one year after Walter Scott. He was crossing
the threshold into manhood at the time when the French revolution
was rousing the more active minds to revolt against the traditions
of the past: a revolt which, in his case as in others, extended to
things literary no less than to those social and political. He reached
middle life with the reaction which followed the downfall of Napoleon.
He died (1834) in the period immediately succeeding the arrest of
that reaction: some dozen years later than Keats and Shelley; ten
years after Byron; two years after Walter Scott. And, of all the
movements connected with those names and events, there was not
one, unless we except the creations of Keats and Shelley, which did
not, whether by way of action or reaction, leave some trace upon
his soul.
From his father he inherited a reverence for verbal niceties
which went with him throughout life; a curious strain of pedantry,
which crops up in the most unlikely places; above all, a dreamy
nature, which always made him a stranger and pilgrim among the
bustling figures and harsh incidents of daily life. To his mother,
## p. 118 (#140) ############################################
118
[CH.
Coleridge
a woman of keen practical instincts, he does not seem to have owed
much beyond the priceless boon of affection. And even this was
largely lost to him when, on the death of his father, he was des-
patched, according to the practice even then too common in
English households, to school (Christ's hospital) at the age of nine
(1781). Henceforth, he was to see his family only at the rarest
intervals; and the outlet of home affections was virtually closed.
Even as a child, he had laid hold on all the books--especially,
imaginative works-that came within his reach. At school, he
—
became a prodigy of youthful learning and philosophy: logician,
metaphysician, bard,' the 'inspired charity boy' of Lamb's wistful
recollections. For a time, as he tells us -and it was not for the
last time—the ‘bard’ was quite driven out by the ‘metaphysician. '
And it needed what we should now consider the rather weak
stimulus of Bowles's sonnets to rouse him from this preposterous
pursuit' (1789). The remedy, such as it was, proved undeniably
efficacious. For the next five years, sentiment, of the kind repre-
sented by Bowles, was the most powerful factor in his growth.
In the excitement of Cambridge life (1791-3)-partly, too,
under the spell of love for Mary Evans--his whole being seems
to have expanded. But there was nothing to mark him off from
the ordinary student of talent until, under the spur of debt or ill-
starred love, or both, he suddenly bolted from the university and
enlisted in a regiment of light dragoons (December 1793). After four
months of this ludicrously unsuitable employment, he was discharged,
by the efforts of his friends, and readmitted, with due penalties, to
his college. Some two months later (June 1794) began that ac-
quaintance with Southey, then an Oxford undergraduate, which
was deeply to colour the next few years of his life.
Up to this time, there is nothing beyond the doubtful evidence
of a school exercise to show that the revolution in France had
roused any deep interest, or even attention, in his mind. Now,
under the tenser will of Southey, he became a fiery revolutionist,
of a brand, however, peculiarly his own! In hatred of Pitt and the
war, he was, no doubt, at one with the other Jacobins of the time.
But the Pantisocracy, which the two friends beat out between them,
ran decisively athwart the main stream of revolutionary aspirations.
It was intended only for the select few; it was no part of a general
1 “We never were, at any period of our lives, converts to the system of French
politics,' he writes, in an article on Jacobinism (1802). And the lightness with which
he dropped the cause of France-as may be seen from his fine, but somewhat rhetorical,
Ode (1798)—bears witness to the fact.
## p. 119 (#141) ############################################
VI]
The French Revolution
119
scheme of social reconstruction. Again, the ‘Jacobinism’of Coleridge,
though not that of Southey, was always strongly charged with a
mystical and religious element, which stands in the sharpest contrast
with the purely secular, often atheist, temper more common among
the reformers of that day. Lastly-and here, once again, he joins
hands with Southey—the whole creed and being of the young
convert were drowned in a flood of sentiment which woke in him,
for the first time in good earnest, the need of poetic utterance, and
which at once sets a barrier between him and most of the leading
figures among the rebel band: Godwin, for instance, or Holcroft,
or even Thelwall.
It was in pleading the cause of Pantisocracy that he first
discovered—to himself, perhaps, as well as to others—his amazing
powers of eloquence. His letters of that time are full of boyish
delight in the discovery: ‘Up I arose, terrible in reasoning' is a
typical sentence. And, so long as he could convince, or even
vanquish, his opponents, it is clear that he did not much trouble
himself to put his convictions into act. Even his breach with
Southey, who soon became lukewarm in the cause, would seem to
have partly sprung from an uneasy sense that he, too, had said more
than he was willing or able to make good, and from the consequent
impulse, very natural though not very just, to prove that some one
else was yet more guilty than himself. Still more ominous, even
in an age of overwrought sentiment, is the sentimentalism of his
letters. Since I quitted this room,' he writes on his return from
the fateful visit to Oxford, 'what and how important events have
been evolved! America ! Southey! Miss Fricker! Yes, Southey,
you are right. Even love is the creature of strong motive. I
certainly love her. It is small wonder that the love which began
as 'the creature of strong motive'—that is, Southey's fiat-should
have ended disastrously for both. A year later (October 1795) the
marriage duly took place.
The poetry of these years (1794–6) is a mirror of the man :
eloquent, loose-girt, strongly inclined to preach; in all things, the
very reverse of the inspired pieces soon to follow. It is, doubt-
less, the sincere expression of the generous convictions and aspira-
tions which he held in common with others. But it lacks the
individuality which is the soul of poetry; and, only in one passage-
some three or four lines of The Eolian Harpidoes it offer even
a faint promise of the works by which he lives. It is a glorified
6
1 I find that these lines (26—9) were first inserted in the Errata to Sibylline Leares
(1817). Thus, the one redeeming exception falls to the ground.
## p. 120 (#142) ############################################
I 20
[CH.
Coleridge
6
version of sermons such as Hazlitt heard in the enchanted walls of
the Shropshire chapel. It has nothing in common with The Ancient
Mariner, or Christabel, or even the ode Dejection.
It was the genius of Wordsworth-and, with Wordsworth, we
must always think of his 'exquisite sister'—that first revealed him
to himself. It was in daily intercourse with a stronger spirit than
his own-first at Stowey (1797—8), then, more fitfully, in the lake
country (1800—3)—that all his enduring poetry was composed.
The spell of Wordsworth, however, went far deeper than this. It
not only awakened the younger poet to creative energies which
had hitherto lain asleep. It was a transforming influence upon his
whole cast of thought, upon the whole character of his soul. His
whole nature was roused, for the first time, to a full consciousness
of its powers; and powers of which he had hitherto given no
suspicion were suddenly called to light. A sense of the beauty
of outward things, as deep as Wordsworth's, but still more delicate
and more subtle; a sense of the boundless mystery of life—the
inner yet more than the outer life-and a power of interpreting
it in terms of thought: these were the two gifts which came to
him with this new birth; and, however idly he may have used
them, they remained with him to the end. Well might he say
that 'a new earth and a new heaven' were now given to him in
dower. ' For he saw the world with a keener and more radiant
vision than had ever been granted to him before; and he saw into
it more deeply. In the full sense of the terms, he became, for the
first time, both philosopher and poet.
That his use of these magic gifts was not what it might have
been, is too clear. But it is only just to remember that this applies
more to his work as philosopher than as poet. Poetry 'comes not
with observation. ' And, if that be true, in a measure, of all poetry, of
none is it so true as of that to which the peculiar genius of Coleridge
was manifestly ordained. Is it reasonable to
Is it reasonable to suppose that any poet
could have gone on living for ever in an air so rarefied as that of
The Ancient Mariner, or Kubla Khan, or Christabel? Given cir-
cumstances so happy as almost to amount to a miracle, perhaps he
might. But the miracle did not happen to Coleridge; and, even
if his will had been as strong as it was weak, there is no warrant
that it would have happened. To condemn him on this score,
however much he himself would have accepted the condemnation,
seems, therefore, unwarrantably harsh. But his other gifts lay in
a region more under his control. And, had he been a man of
ordinary resolution-above all, had he not let himself become the
## p. 121 (#143) ############################################
а
vi]
Bondage to Opium
I 21
slave of opium-there was nothing to prevent him from accom-
plishing a giant's work in philosophy and criticism. In criticism
and the theory of criticism, he might have done for his own country
the double work which was done for Germany by Lessing and
Hegel, and something more besides. In philosophy, he might have
recast and even extended the massive fabric of Kant. As it is, in
neither field has he left more than a heap of disjointed, but imposing,
fragments.
The opium habit, the beginnings of which go back as far as 1797,
seems to have grown upon him during his time at Malta (1804-6);
and, by the time he returned to England, the bondage must have
been confirmed. Again and again, he strove to throw off the yoke;
but only to fall back again more helplessly than before. Degraded
in his own eyes, he felt life to be a burden almost too heavy to be
borne; and the letters which, now and again, were wrung from him
by remorse, are, perhaps, among the most terrible ever written. Two
things alone saved him from total shipwreck: the unwearied tender-
ness of friends, old and new-Poole, Wordsworth, Mrs Clarkson and
the Morgans; and the innate rectitude, winged by a strong religious
impulse, which did not cease to assert itself against reiterated
defeat. At length, after ten years of debasement, he nerved himself
to seek refuge with James Gillman, a physician of Highgate (1816).
And, thanks to the devoted friendship and watchfulness of this man
and his wife—he remained their 'inmate' till his death-he slowly
tore himself loose from the bondage in which he had been held.
That he never wholly gave up the drug, is tolerably clear. But he
so far mastered himself as to take it in rarer and smaller doses;
and, for practical purposes, the hard-fought victory was won. Thus,
the last eighteen years of his life were years of inward peace and
of fruitful service to others. The old weakness, no doubt, still
dogged his steps and prevented the fulfilment of the task —a work
on Spiritual Philosophy and half a dozen alternative titles—to
which he was conscious of being called. But, in familiar talk, in
formal lecturing and even in published writings, this was the
richest period of his life; and it left a deep mark upon some of
the strongest and most eager spirits of the younger generation.
The victory was won. But the long years of apparently hopeless
struggle had left scars which nothing could wholly heal. The prime
of his life had been largely wasted. And he had strained the
patience of some of his best friends. Josiah Wedgwood had with-
drawn, perhaps with undue harshness, his half of the pension that
he and his brother had granted in days when nothing seemed beyond
## p. 122 (#144) ############################################
I 22
[CH.
Coleridge
the reach of the young poet and thinker. Southey, who had
gallantly shouldered the charge of the truant's wife and children,
was embittered, if not estranged. Even Wordsworth, by an un-
guarded utterance made with the best intentions, had caused a
breach which could never wholly be made up? This was probably
the deepest sorrow of his life; all else,' he says, 'is as a flea-bite. '
His family life, too-though this was from causes which, in the
first instance, at any rate, had little to do with opium-had been
entirely broken up. And, though a formal separation was avoided,
he never lived with his wife after 1810; and had, in fact, seen as
little as he could of her since 1804. The real secret of the estrange-
ment was that, by temperament, the two were ill sorted with each
other. But it is impossible not to feel the deepest sympathy with
a woman who battled bravely with the hardships of her lot; and
hard to check the suspicion that, but for opium, the difficulties
might have been smoothed over. In any case, the breach was a
worse thing for Coleridge than he was ever willing to acknowledge.
It robbed him of the steadying influences of home life, to which
he was by nature peculiarly open. And it left a sting in his con-
science which he may have ignored, but which, just for that reason,
was never healed.
The strangest thing is that, in the very height of the opium
fever, he should have been capable of efforts which, though
lamentably unequal, still gave evidence of powers which not one
of his contemporaries could have rivalled. It was between 1808
and 1815 that he delivered the bulk of the critical lectures which
make an era in the history of English literary criticism; that he
composed The Friend, in its earlier and, doubtless, far inferior
version (1809); and, finally, that he wrote all save a few passages
of Biographia literaria (1815), the only one of his prose works
which can be said to survive to the present day. Even in the
depth of his debasement, he must have retained an amazing
spring, a power of throwing off weights which would have crushed
another man, of recovering something, at any rate, of the free flight
to which he was born. It was this boundless power of self-retrieval
-
that, at length, enabled him to cast off the yoke of opium. It was
this, even more than his genius, which drew men to him as a magnet
and never allowed him to forfeit the admiration, and even the
respect, of his friends.
i The details of this misunderstanding are set forth in the MS of Robinson's diary,
in the published version of which they are briefly summarised (vol. 1, pp. 210—211).
See, also, Coleridge's Letters, vol. II, pp. 577—8, 586—595.
## p. 123 (#145) ############################################
VI]
His Relation to Wordsworth
123
The work of Coleridge naturally falls under three heads :
poetry, criticism and philosophy. It remains to attempt a brief
estimate of each.
All that endures of Coleridge's poetry could easily be contained
in fifty pages; and, with few and doubtful exceptions, it was all
written during the six years when he was in constant intercourse
with Wordsworth (1797-1803). The greatest of all his poems,
almost the only one which stands as a rounded and finished whole,
The Ancient Mariner, is an indirect tribute to the liberating
influences which flowed in upon him from the elder poet. And the
ode Dejection, with the lines written after hearing Wordsworth
recite The Prelude, is a direct acknowledgment of the same debt.
Yet, the powers were there before they were set free by the wand
of the enchanter. And it may well be that he had this in mind
when he wrote
O Wordsworth! we receive but what we give,
in the one poem; and
Power streamed from thee, and thy soul received
The light reflected, as a light bestowed,
in the other. So subtle is the action and reaction in such cases
that, if this were so, it would be only just. For, after all, the
spirit of Wordsworth was here met and answered by one as potent
as itself. And what he did for Coleridge was not to mark out the
channels along which his genius was to flow, but only to loose the
springs of a fountain which, till that moment, had lain half frozen
beneath the earth.
A greater contrast than that between the two poets it would,
indeed, be hard to imagine: the one drawing his strength from the
'common things of sky and earth,' to which his vision gave a
meaning they had never taken before; the other building for him-
self a gorgeous palace in the clouds, the colours and forms of
which may have been reflected from those he had known upon the
earth, but which, to us as to him, come charged with a thousand
hints of an unearthly, enchanted world, known only to the spirit.
As both were well aware, there is a central point where the two
visions meet and blend. Biographia and the preface to Lyrical
Ballads speak clearly enough to that. So, to anyone who can
read beneath the surface, do the Ballads themselves. Still,
what is bound to strike us first is not the resemblance, but the
difference. And, however much we may recognise the former, the
more we live ourselves into the world of the two poets, the less
shall we be ready to make light of the latter.
## p. 124 (#146) ############################################
I 24
[ch.
Coleridge
a
Before 1797, Coleridge had given no promise of what he was to
be. “I cannot write without a body of thought,' he laments in a
letter to Southey (11 December 1794). And the 'thought’his poetry
embodied had little to distinguish it from what we might expect
in the more highly wrought forms of prose. Indignation at the
social wrongs of the old order and the wickedness of its rulers,
pity for the outcast and oppressed, bitter cries to the Spirit in
whom alone is the harmony which can resolve the discord—these
form the staple of such poems as Religious Musings and Ode
to the Departing Year; and the style, stiff with Miltonic phrases,
rich in echoes of Gray and Collins, is no more original than the
matter. Byron was not far wrong when, in his early satire, he
mocked at the bard 'to turgid ode and tumid stanza dear. ' But
the scoff leaves the true Coleridge, the Coleridge of Kubla Khan
and The Ancient Mariner, utterly untouched.
With these poems, the first-fruits of his friendship with Words-
worth, we are in a different world. It is hard to believe they can
have come from the same man. The 'body of thought' and the
imagery which hung round it like an ill-fitting garment have both
vanished. Every idea presents itself unbidden as an image ; and
every image suggests a world of wonder and enchantment-the
world of which he holds the key as no poet has done before or
since, and in which, as poet, he was, henceforth, to have his home.
In Kubla Khan, an enemy might say that the body of thought'
does not obtrude itself for the simple reason that there is no
thought to obtrude. And it is true that, of all poems, this is the
most airy and unsubstantial: a 'vision,' a 'dream,' if there ever was
one; as the author himself tells us, an opium dream--the one good
service the accursed drug' ever did him. This, however, does not
rob the poem either of its power or its charm. On the contrary,
it is, perhaps, the secret of both. And, even if there were no other
argument which forced us to confess it, this one poem would be
enough to prove that, while thought alone, however inspiring, is
powerless to make poetry, pure imagery and pure music, even
without thought (if such a thing be possible), suffice, when working
in absolute harmony, to constitute what pedantry alone could deny
to be a great poem. And, when a poem is so charged with sug-
gestion, when, at each touch, it transports us into a world of the
poet's making, when each shading of the colours, each modulation
of the rhythm, presents that world in a new light, when our own
mood finds itself forced, step by step, to follow the ever-changing
mood of the poet, can we be quite sure that thought is absent?
1
1
## p. 125 (#147) ############################################
VI]
The Ancient Mariner
I 25
Reflection is ; reasoning is ; but that subtler, more impalpable,
process, which plays a real part not only in our dreams but even
in our waking resolves and inferences--this, assuredly, is not.
Unconscious though this may be in the process, it is conscious
enough in the result. It brings about a frame of mind as distinct, as
unmistakable, as any of those universally recognised to be thought. '
In the case of The Ancient Mariner, no such question could
be raised. 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)?
‘
essentials of Wordsworth's poetry.
The same character is to be found in Nutting, where we are
told of 'the intruding sky,' that struck with remorse the boyish
nut-gatherer after he had torn the boughs of a virgin bower; or,
again, in Skating-scene, where the poet describes the strange
appearance of the surrounding hills, which, to the skater who has
just stopped short after gliding at full speed, still seem to wheel
by 'as if the earth had rolled with visible motion her diurnal
round. Here we have a mere illusion of the senses, but one of
the existence of which, as of its weirdness and beauty, no doubt
can be entertained.
One English poet only can be compared with Wordsworth here :
Shelley, whose senses were endowed with an unusual, almost
a superhuman, gift of insight. He, too, was to enrich our
knowledge of sensation by his verse. His sensitiveness goes into
things even deeper than Wordsworth’s. He can see further
through the screen, even spy ‘the warm light of life. ' But few, if
any, can follow him to the end, or remember having themselves ex-
perienced his wonderful ecstasies. He is alone. On the contrary,
Wordsworth has no abnormal and hypertrophied sensitiveness.
It was the common healthy sensibility of mankind which he found
himself sharing. He merely reveals to us what everyone has felt,
or may feel any day.
There may be a poetry of nature less obvious than that
founded on a multitudinous notation of her detailed aspects, less
subtle than the analysis of exquisite sensations, but, perhaps, of
more breadth and grandeur. Hazlitt has said that one could infer
that Wordsworth's poetry was written in a mountainous country,
from its bareness, its simplicity, its loftiness and its depth. ' It is
not, indeed, by description that the characters of nature are most
deeply caught and expressed ; it is by incorporation, so to say,
when the image of the outward world, instead of being directly
6
## p. 113 (#135) ############################################
v]
Michael
I13
presented, is reflected in the feelings and shines through the most
indifferent words ; thus deeply had the scenery among which he
spent his days penetrated into Wordsworth's mind and soul. If
we had to praise him as the poet of mountains, we might, of
course, choose the noble descriptive pages that abound in his
volumes ; but, rather than to these, rather than to the famous
mountain scenes in his Excursion—which are too conscious—we
should turn to a poem like Michael, where scenery, characters
and style form a perfect harmony of lines and tints that could
not have existed without a secret process of assimilation. Lofty
and bare, indeed, is this pastoral ; few flowers grow on the
heights where old Michael meant to build his sheepfold. The
land is unadorned. It has no other features than the sheer linea-
ments of its sweeps and pastures or its steep rocks, over which
are spread by turns the naked sky and the winter mists. All this,
together with the bracing air, you feel from the first to the last
line, not less when the poet gives you the speech of his ancient
'statesman' or a glimpse of his stern mind, than when he paints
the landscape itself. Even as the scenery is composed of essentials,
so is the old man's character, and so his language. In such
passages there is not one word of description, and yet the 'pastoral
mountains' are constantly conjured up with their raw atmosphere,
behind the discoursing shepherd. Every syllable he utters is their
emanation.
Another summit is reached by the poet when he freely allows
his creed of the refining agency of the senses to pass into a sort
of waking dream, instead of asserting itself by argument as in
The Prelude, or even, as in Tintern Abbey, by lyrical proclama-
tion. Few will deny one of the very first ranks in his verse to
the fourth of the Lucy poems, where he tells us how his beloved
had been cared for by nature since her tenderest years, how nature
had vowed to make her a Lady of her own,' imparting to her 'the
silence and the calm of mute insensate things,' either bidding the
storm ‘mould the maiden's form by silent sympathy, or causing
'beauty born of murmuring sound to pass into her face. Here,
Wordsworth joins company with the most aerial of poets. He
drops to the earth, for once, all that matter-of-factness of which
Coleridge complained. He sets common observation at defiance
and simply ignores the objections of common sense, with which he
is elsewhere only too prone to argue. Though most thoroughly
himself when shaping Lucy's natural education, he gives wings,
not feet, to his most cherished belief. We have, in this lyric, “the
E. L. XI.
сн. у.
8
## p. 114 (#136) ############################################
114
[CH.
William Wordsworth
fine excess' of poetry. Whatever may be said of these country
maids who, though brought up under the clouds and stars, and by
the side of dancing rivulets, failed to be informed with grace and
beauty, Wordsworth has used his privilege as a poet of embodying
a vision made, after all, of mysterious possibilities, perhaps of
truths in the making.
But nature never engrossed all his thoughts. Many were
given to man, chiefly to the feelings of man. He shows the same
mastery in his delineation of the hidden germs of feeling as of
those of sensation. He, again, excels when describing the moral
emotions in the blending of the subtle and the simple, of the
strange and the essential. But the beauty of his verse seems, in
this case, to come less from intuitive discovery than from long
brooding. Fullness and compactness of meaning now characterise
his greatest utterances. All readers catch their pathos at once ;
few, immediately, if ever, their entire signification. A noticeable
instance is the finale of the plain prosaic story Simon Lee, a short
stanza full to overflowing of his prolonged meditations on the
present iniquity and harshness of society. Poets and moralists
have vied in easy railings at man's ingratitude. Shakespeare,
among others, is full of such denunciations. Alas! the greater
cause for grief is the existence of gratitude, chiefly of excessive
gratitude, which implies that there is a scarcity of fellow-feeling,
a dearth of benevolence, a lack of mutual neighbourly assistance
in this world. That exaggerated thanks should be offered for
the merest trifle, for a deed of easy and imperative kindness,
betrays daily uncharitableness and opens vistas of the insensibility
of existing society ; it shows 'what man has made of man':
I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of man
Hath oftener left me mourning.
This is one of his many reflections which are more pregnant and
sink deeper into the mind and heart than those of almost any
other poet.
From such deep sources do many of his sonnets, chiefly of his
political sonnets, draw their rare intensity of moral feeling. It is
enough to remind the reader of a few familiar passages : his
melancholy on hearing of the extinction of the republic of Venice;
his energy of tone when he comforts poor Toussaint Louverture,
the liberator of San Domingo, now thrown into a prison ; the bitter
P
co
## p. 115 (#137) ############################################
v]
His Sonnets
115
restrained irony of his ‘high-minded Spaniard,' who resents, more
than the devastation of his country, Napoleon's so-called benefits,
and so forth. In his more strictly English sonnets, the greatness
is not due to novelty of thought. It so happens that almost every
idea and emotion expressed by Wordsworth in 1802 and the years
following had been more than foreshadowed by Coleridge as
early as 1798 in his Ode to France or Fears in Solitude. But
the truly Wordsworthian power of the sonnets is owing to the
protracted sojourn of these feelings in his breast before he gave
utterance to them, to his long reluctance against their admission,
to his repeated inward debates. Hence, instead of Coleridge's
extemporised effusions, which have been aptly compared, by
Angellier, to the sea-scud which is thrown off by a storm, here we
have the distilled elixir. Nearly ten years of vexed thoughts
went to the making, in 1803, of the final line of the sonnet to
England, where, after enumerating and condemning what he calls
her many political crimes, he sighs (with a unique mixture of
reproof and tenderness, of grief and repressed pride) at the
thought that she, nevertheless, is the least unworthy champion
of liberty left in the world :
O grief that Earth's best hopes rest all in thee!
It would be hard to match these ten monosyllables for compactness
of historical allusion and complex feeling. Such condensed moral
utterances are among the glories of Wordsworth’s verse.
Other characteristics ought to be added, regarding bis more
purely artistic gifts-gifts of verse-writing and style, gifts of com-
position. But this would land us in endless discussions ; for, in
these respects, Wordsworth’s mastery is surely relative and inter-
mittent. He reaches, at times, so high a degree of excellence that
the mere verbal felicity of some of his simplest lines baffles the
imitation of the most refined artists:
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago. . . .
But he frequently mixes the highest poetry with the flatness of
unimpassioned, uninspired prose. He also shows himself, in many
a period or stanza, devoid of ease, elegance and pliancy. He is
more than once awkwardly naïve, clumsily familiar, or, on the
contrary, more solemn and pompous than needs be. The talent
for construction, niggardly bestowed on the romantic poets of all
countries, is particularly weak in him. He could never frame and
8-2
## p. 116 (#138) ############################################
116
[CH. V
William Wordsworth
fashion a considerable poem with due equilibrium of substance
and form, of thought and story. In this respect, The Excursion
is a memorable failure. As to The Prelude, it owes its permanent
interest partly to its admirable passages of poetry, partly to its
philosophical or to its autobiographical value, which we feel, as we
read, to be merits not strictly poetic. Only in compositions of
moderate length, like The Ruined Cottage, Michael, Laodamia
did he achieve perfect harmony, and in many of his lyrics and
sonnets.
That he often tries to lift us and himself to the poetic mood
rather than takes this mood for granted, cannot be denied. Poetry
often seems to be his object rather than his possession. He made
the training of man to poetry his chief office here below.
leads us warily from the inlands of prose to the shore, marking out
the way with unprecedented care; but he is sometimes content
with gazing on the element and leaves it to others boldly to sail
upon it or plunge into it. The main body of his poems is educative
and preparatory. Yet he has left sufficient of absolute verse,
heart-searching and beautiful, enough for a Wordsworthian an-
thology that will remain among the most enduring treasures of
romanticism.
He
1
1
1
## p. 117 (#139) ############################################
CHAPTER VI
COLERIDGE
COLERIDGE survives for us as poet: a poet unique in inspiration,
unique, also, if sadly fitful, in achievement. But he was also philo-
sopher, critic, theologian, moralist, talker-above all, a talker.
And, with the strongest will in the world, it would have been hard
for one so variously endowed not to dissipate his genius. Given a
will exceptionally infirm, the wonder is that he should have left so
much, rather than so little, as a monument of what he was.
The strange complexity of his nature, reflected, as it is, in the
whole tenor of his life, is a challenge to all who love to follow the
mysterious windings of the soul. His character is an enthralling,
as well as a deeply pathetic, study in itself. And it may even be
that we shall find it throw some light upon his genius, as a poet.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in October 1772; two years
after Wordsworth, one year after Walter Scott. He was crossing
the threshold into manhood at the time when the French revolution
was rousing the more active minds to revolt against the traditions
of the past: a revolt which, in his case as in others, extended to
things literary no less than to those social and political. He reached
middle life with the reaction which followed the downfall of Napoleon.
He died (1834) in the period immediately succeeding the arrest of
that reaction: some dozen years later than Keats and Shelley; ten
years after Byron; two years after Walter Scott. And, of all the
movements connected with those names and events, there was not
one, unless we except the creations of Keats and Shelley, which did
not, whether by way of action or reaction, leave some trace upon
his soul.
From his father he inherited a reverence for verbal niceties
which went with him throughout life; a curious strain of pedantry,
which crops up in the most unlikely places; above all, a dreamy
nature, which always made him a stranger and pilgrim among the
bustling figures and harsh incidents of daily life. To his mother,
## p. 118 (#140) ############################################
118
[CH.
Coleridge
a woman of keen practical instincts, he does not seem to have owed
much beyond the priceless boon of affection. And even this was
largely lost to him when, on the death of his father, he was des-
patched, according to the practice even then too common in
English households, to school (Christ's hospital) at the age of nine
(1781). Henceforth, he was to see his family only at the rarest
intervals; and the outlet of home affections was virtually closed.
Even as a child, he had laid hold on all the books--especially,
imaginative works-that came within his reach. At school, he
—
became a prodigy of youthful learning and philosophy: logician,
metaphysician, bard,' the 'inspired charity boy' of Lamb's wistful
recollections. For a time, as he tells us -and it was not for the
last time—the ‘bard’ was quite driven out by the ‘metaphysician. '
And it needed what we should now consider the rather weak
stimulus of Bowles's sonnets to rouse him from this preposterous
pursuit' (1789). The remedy, such as it was, proved undeniably
efficacious. For the next five years, sentiment, of the kind repre-
sented by Bowles, was the most powerful factor in his growth.
In the excitement of Cambridge life (1791-3)-partly, too,
under the spell of love for Mary Evans--his whole being seems
to have expanded. But there was nothing to mark him off from
the ordinary student of talent until, under the spur of debt or ill-
starred love, or both, he suddenly bolted from the university and
enlisted in a regiment of light dragoons (December 1793). After four
months of this ludicrously unsuitable employment, he was discharged,
by the efforts of his friends, and readmitted, with due penalties, to
his college. Some two months later (June 1794) began that ac-
quaintance with Southey, then an Oxford undergraduate, which
was deeply to colour the next few years of his life.
Up to this time, there is nothing beyond the doubtful evidence
of a school exercise to show that the revolution in France had
roused any deep interest, or even attention, in his mind. Now,
under the tenser will of Southey, he became a fiery revolutionist,
of a brand, however, peculiarly his own! In hatred of Pitt and the
war, he was, no doubt, at one with the other Jacobins of the time.
But the Pantisocracy, which the two friends beat out between them,
ran decisively athwart the main stream of revolutionary aspirations.
It was intended only for the select few; it was no part of a general
1 “We never were, at any period of our lives, converts to the system of French
politics,' he writes, in an article on Jacobinism (1802). And the lightness with which
he dropped the cause of France-as may be seen from his fine, but somewhat rhetorical,
Ode (1798)—bears witness to the fact.
## p. 119 (#141) ############################################
VI]
The French Revolution
119
scheme of social reconstruction. Again, the ‘Jacobinism’of Coleridge,
though not that of Southey, was always strongly charged with a
mystical and religious element, which stands in the sharpest contrast
with the purely secular, often atheist, temper more common among
the reformers of that day. Lastly-and here, once again, he joins
hands with Southey—the whole creed and being of the young
convert were drowned in a flood of sentiment which woke in him,
for the first time in good earnest, the need of poetic utterance, and
which at once sets a barrier between him and most of the leading
figures among the rebel band: Godwin, for instance, or Holcroft,
or even Thelwall.
It was in pleading the cause of Pantisocracy that he first
discovered—to himself, perhaps, as well as to others—his amazing
powers of eloquence. His letters of that time are full of boyish
delight in the discovery: ‘Up I arose, terrible in reasoning' is a
typical sentence. And, so long as he could convince, or even
vanquish, his opponents, it is clear that he did not much trouble
himself to put his convictions into act. Even his breach with
Southey, who soon became lukewarm in the cause, would seem to
have partly sprung from an uneasy sense that he, too, had said more
than he was willing or able to make good, and from the consequent
impulse, very natural though not very just, to prove that some one
else was yet more guilty than himself. Still more ominous, even
in an age of overwrought sentiment, is the sentimentalism of his
letters. Since I quitted this room,' he writes on his return from
the fateful visit to Oxford, 'what and how important events have
been evolved! America ! Southey! Miss Fricker! Yes, Southey,
you are right. Even love is the creature of strong motive. I
certainly love her. It is small wonder that the love which began
as 'the creature of strong motive'—that is, Southey's fiat-should
have ended disastrously for both. A year later (October 1795) the
marriage duly took place.
The poetry of these years (1794–6) is a mirror of the man :
eloquent, loose-girt, strongly inclined to preach; in all things, the
very reverse of the inspired pieces soon to follow. It is, doubt-
less, the sincere expression of the generous convictions and aspira-
tions which he held in common with others. But it lacks the
individuality which is the soul of poetry; and, only in one passage-
some three or four lines of The Eolian Harpidoes it offer even
a faint promise of the works by which he lives. It is a glorified
6
1 I find that these lines (26—9) were first inserted in the Errata to Sibylline Leares
(1817). Thus, the one redeeming exception falls to the ground.
## p. 120 (#142) ############################################
I 20
[CH.
Coleridge
6
version of sermons such as Hazlitt heard in the enchanted walls of
the Shropshire chapel. It has nothing in common with The Ancient
Mariner, or Christabel, or even the ode Dejection.
It was the genius of Wordsworth-and, with Wordsworth, we
must always think of his 'exquisite sister'—that first revealed him
to himself. It was in daily intercourse with a stronger spirit than
his own-first at Stowey (1797—8), then, more fitfully, in the lake
country (1800—3)—that all his enduring poetry was composed.
The spell of Wordsworth, however, went far deeper than this. It
not only awakened the younger poet to creative energies which
had hitherto lain asleep. It was a transforming influence upon his
whole cast of thought, upon the whole character of his soul. His
whole nature was roused, for the first time, to a full consciousness
of its powers; and powers of which he had hitherto given no
suspicion were suddenly called to light. A sense of the beauty
of outward things, as deep as Wordsworth's, but still more delicate
and more subtle; a sense of the boundless mystery of life—the
inner yet more than the outer life-and a power of interpreting
it in terms of thought: these were the two gifts which came to
him with this new birth; and, however idly he may have used
them, they remained with him to the end. Well might he say
that 'a new earth and a new heaven' were now given to him in
dower. ' For he saw the world with a keener and more radiant
vision than had ever been granted to him before; and he saw into
it more deeply. In the full sense of the terms, he became, for the
first time, both philosopher and poet.
That his use of these magic gifts was not what it might have
been, is too clear. But it is only just to remember that this applies
more to his work as philosopher than as poet. Poetry 'comes not
with observation. ' And, if that be true, in a measure, of all poetry, of
none is it so true as of that to which the peculiar genius of Coleridge
was manifestly ordained. Is it reasonable to
Is it reasonable to suppose that any poet
could have gone on living for ever in an air so rarefied as that of
The Ancient Mariner, or Kubla Khan, or Christabel? Given cir-
cumstances so happy as almost to amount to a miracle, perhaps he
might. But the miracle did not happen to Coleridge; and, even
if his will had been as strong as it was weak, there is no warrant
that it would have happened. To condemn him on this score,
however much he himself would have accepted the condemnation,
seems, therefore, unwarrantably harsh. But his other gifts lay in
a region more under his control. And, had he been a man of
ordinary resolution-above all, had he not let himself become the
## p. 121 (#143) ############################################
а
vi]
Bondage to Opium
I 21
slave of opium-there was nothing to prevent him from accom-
plishing a giant's work in philosophy and criticism. In criticism
and the theory of criticism, he might have done for his own country
the double work which was done for Germany by Lessing and
Hegel, and something more besides. In philosophy, he might have
recast and even extended the massive fabric of Kant. As it is, in
neither field has he left more than a heap of disjointed, but imposing,
fragments.
The opium habit, the beginnings of which go back as far as 1797,
seems to have grown upon him during his time at Malta (1804-6);
and, by the time he returned to England, the bondage must have
been confirmed. Again and again, he strove to throw off the yoke;
but only to fall back again more helplessly than before. Degraded
in his own eyes, he felt life to be a burden almost too heavy to be
borne; and the letters which, now and again, were wrung from him
by remorse, are, perhaps, among the most terrible ever written. Two
things alone saved him from total shipwreck: the unwearied tender-
ness of friends, old and new-Poole, Wordsworth, Mrs Clarkson and
the Morgans; and the innate rectitude, winged by a strong religious
impulse, which did not cease to assert itself against reiterated
defeat. At length, after ten years of debasement, he nerved himself
to seek refuge with James Gillman, a physician of Highgate (1816).
And, thanks to the devoted friendship and watchfulness of this man
and his wife—he remained their 'inmate' till his death-he slowly
tore himself loose from the bondage in which he had been held.
That he never wholly gave up the drug, is tolerably clear. But he
so far mastered himself as to take it in rarer and smaller doses;
and, for practical purposes, the hard-fought victory was won. Thus,
the last eighteen years of his life were years of inward peace and
of fruitful service to others. The old weakness, no doubt, still
dogged his steps and prevented the fulfilment of the task —a work
on Spiritual Philosophy and half a dozen alternative titles—to
which he was conscious of being called. But, in familiar talk, in
formal lecturing and even in published writings, this was the
richest period of his life; and it left a deep mark upon some of
the strongest and most eager spirits of the younger generation.
The victory was won. But the long years of apparently hopeless
struggle had left scars which nothing could wholly heal. The prime
of his life had been largely wasted. And he had strained the
patience of some of his best friends. Josiah Wedgwood had with-
drawn, perhaps with undue harshness, his half of the pension that
he and his brother had granted in days when nothing seemed beyond
## p. 122 (#144) ############################################
I 22
[CH.
Coleridge
the reach of the young poet and thinker. Southey, who had
gallantly shouldered the charge of the truant's wife and children,
was embittered, if not estranged. Even Wordsworth, by an un-
guarded utterance made with the best intentions, had caused a
breach which could never wholly be made up? This was probably
the deepest sorrow of his life; all else,' he says, 'is as a flea-bite. '
His family life, too-though this was from causes which, in the
first instance, at any rate, had little to do with opium-had been
entirely broken up. And, though a formal separation was avoided,
he never lived with his wife after 1810; and had, in fact, seen as
little as he could of her since 1804. The real secret of the estrange-
ment was that, by temperament, the two were ill sorted with each
other. But it is impossible not to feel the deepest sympathy with
a woman who battled bravely with the hardships of her lot; and
hard to check the suspicion that, but for opium, the difficulties
might have been smoothed over. In any case, the breach was a
worse thing for Coleridge than he was ever willing to acknowledge.
It robbed him of the steadying influences of home life, to which
he was by nature peculiarly open. And it left a sting in his con-
science which he may have ignored, but which, just for that reason,
was never healed.
The strangest thing is that, in the very height of the opium
fever, he should have been capable of efforts which, though
lamentably unequal, still gave evidence of powers which not one
of his contemporaries could have rivalled. It was between 1808
and 1815 that he delivered the bulk of the critical lectures which
make an era in the history of English literary criticism; that he
composed The Friend, in its earlier and, doubtless, far inferior
version (1809); and, finally, that he wrote all save a few passages
of Biographia literaria (1815), the only one of his prose works
which can be said to survive to the present day. Even in the
depth of his debasement, he must have retained an amazing
spring, a power of throwing off weights which would have crushed
another man, of recovering something, at any rate, of the free flight
to which he was born. It was this boundless power of self-retrieval
-
that, at length, enabled him to cast off the yoke of opium. It was
this, even more than his genius, which drew men to him as a magnet
and never allowed him to forfeit the admiration, and even the
respect, of his friends.
i The details of this misunderstanding are set forth in the MS of Robinson's diary,
in the published version of which they are briefly summarised (vol. 1, pp. 210—211).
See, also, Coleridge's Letters, vol. II, pp. 577—8, 586—595.
## p. 123 (#145) ############################################
VI]
His Relation to Wordsworth
123
The work of Coleridge naturally falls under three heads :
poetry, criticism and philosophy. It remains to attempt a brief
estimate of each.
All that endures of Coleridge's poetry could easily be contained
in fifty pages; and, with few and doubtful exceptions, it was all
written during the six years when he was in constant intercourse
with Wordsworth (1797-1803). The greatest of all his poems,
almost the only one which stands as a rounded and finished whole,
The Ancient Mariner, is an indirect tribute to the liberating
influences which flowed in upon him from the elder poet. And the
ode Dejection, with the lines written after hearing Wordsworth
recite The Prelude, is a direct acknowledgment of the same debt.
Yet, the powers were there before they were set free by the wand
of the enchanter. And it may well be that he had this in mind
when he wrote
O Wordsworth! we receive but what we give,
in the one poem; and
Power streamed from thee, and thy soul received
The light reflected, as a light bestowed,
in the other. So subtle is the action and reaction in such cases
that, if this were so, it would be only just. For, after all, the
spirit of Wordsworth was here met and answered by one as potent
as itself. And what he did for Coleridge was not to mark out the
channels along which his genius was to flow, but only to loose the
springs of a fountain which, till that moment, had lain half frozen
beneath the earth.
A greater contrast than that between the two poets it would,
indeed, be hard to imagine: the one drawing his strength from the
'common things of sky and earth,' to which his vision gave a
meaning they had never taken before; the other building for him-
self a gorgeous palace in the clouds, the colours and forms of
which may have been reflected from those he had known upon the
earth, but which, to us as to him, come charged with a thousand
hints of an unearthly, enchanted world, known only to the spirit.
As both were well aware, there is a central point where the two
visions meet and blend. Biographia and the preface to Lyrical
Ballads speak clearly enough to that. So, to anyone who can
read beneath the surface, do the Ballads themselves. Still,
what is bound to strike us first is not the resemblance, but the
difference. And, however much we may recognise the former, the
more we live ourselves into the world of the two poets, the less
shall we be ready to make light of the latter.
## p. 124 (#146) ############################################
I 24
[ch.
Coleridge
a
Before 1797, Coleridge had given no promise of what he was to
be. “I cannot write without a body of thought,' he laments in a
letter to Southey (11 December 1794). And the 'thought’his poetry
embodied had little to distinguish it from what we might expect
in the more highly wrought forms of prose. Indignation at the
social wrongs of the old order and the wickedness of its rulers,
pity for the outcast and oppressed, bitter cries to the Spirit in
whom alone is the harmony which can resolve the discord—these
form the staple of such poems as Religious Musings and Ode
to the Departing Year; and the style, stiff with Miltonic phrases,
rich in echoes of Gray and Collins, is no more original than the
matter. Byron was not far wrong when, in his early satire, he
mocked at the bard 'to turgid ode and tumid stanza dear. ' But
the scoff leaves the true Coleridge, the Coleridge of Kubla Khan
and The Ancient Mariner, utterly untouched.
With these poems, the first-fruits of his friendship with Words-
worth, we are in a different world. It is hard to believe they can
have come from the same man. The 'body of thought' and the
imagery which hung round it like an ill-fitting garment have both
vanished. Every idea presents itself unbidden as an image ; and
every image suggests a world of wonder and enchantment-the
world of which he holds the key as no poet has done before or
since, and in which, as poet, he was, henceforth, to have his home.
In Kubla Khan, an enemy might say that the body of thought'
does not obtrude itself for the simple reason that there is no
thought to obtrude. And it is true that, of all poems, this is the
most airy and unsubstantial: a 'vision,' a 'dream,' if there ever was
one; as the author himself tells us, an opium dream--the one good
service the accursed drug' ever did him. This, however, does not
rob the poem either of its power or its charm. On the contrary,
it is, perhaps, the secret of both. And, even if there were no other
argument which forced us to confess it, this one poem would be
enough to prove that, while thought alone, however inspiring, is
powerless to make poetry, pure imagery and pure music, even
without thought (if such a thing be possible), suffice, when working
in absolute harmony, to constitute what pedantry alone could deny
to be a great poem. And, when a poem is so charged with sug-
gestion, when, at each touch, it transports us into a world of the
poet's making, when each shading of the colours, each modulation
of the rhythm, presents that world in a new light, when our own
mood finds itself forced, step by step, to follow the ever-changing
mood of the poet, can we be quite sure that thought is absent?
1
1
## p. 125 (#147) ############################################
VI]
The Ancient Mariner
I 25
Reflection is ; reasoning is ; but that subtler, more impalpable,
process, which plays a real part not only in our dreams but even
in our waking resolves and inferences--this, assuredly, is not.
Unconscious though this may be in the process, it is conscious
enough in the result. It brings about a frame of mind as distinct, as
unmistakable, as any of those universally recognised to be thought. '
In the case of The Ancient Mariner, no such question could
be raised. 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
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6
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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
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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,
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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.
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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.
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[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.
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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)?
