It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
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because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Yea, thus doth woman love!
"]
[Footnote 83: This sort of repetition is one of this writers peculiarities, and
there is scarce a page which does not furnish one or more instances--Ex.
gr. in the first page or two. Act I, line 7th, "and deemed that I might
sleep. "--Line 10, "Did rock and quiver in the bickering glare. "--Lines
14, 15, 16, "But by the momently gleams of sheeted blue, Did the pale
marbles dare so sternly on me, I almost deemed they lived. "--Line
37, "The glare of Hell. "--Line 35, "O holy Prior, this is no earthly
storm. "--Line 38, "This is no earthly storm. "--Line 42, "Dealing
with us. "--Line 43, "Deal thus sternly:"--Line 44, "Speak! thou hast
something seen? "--"A fearful sight! "--Line 45, "What hast thou seen! A
piteous, fearful sight. "--Line 48, "quivering gleams. "--Line 50, "In the
hollow pauses of the storm. "--Line 61, "The pauses of the storm, etc. "]
[Footnote 84: The child is an important personage, for I see not by what possible
means the author could have ended the second and third acts but for its
timely appearance. How ungrateful then not further to notice its fate! ]
[Footnote 85: Classically too, as far as consists with the allegorizing fancy
of the modern, that still striving to project the inward,
contradistinguishes itself from the seeming ease with which the poetry
of the ancients reflects the world without. Casimir affords, perhaps,
the most striking instance of this characteristic difference. --For his
style and diction are really classical: while Cowley, who resembles
Casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his Latinity, and even
his metre, by the heterogeneous nature of his thoughts. That Dr. Johnson
should have passed a contrary judgment, and have even preferred Cowley's
Latin Poems to Milton's, is a caprice that has, if I mistake not,
excited the surprise of all scholars. I was much amused last summer with
the laughable affright, with which an Italian poet perused a page of
Cowley's Davideis, contrasted with the enthusiasm with which he first
ran through, and then read aloud, Milton's Mansus and Ad Patrem. ]
[Footnote 86: Flectit, or if the metre had allowed, premit would have supported
the metaphor better. ]
[Footnote 87: Poor unlucky Metaphysicks! and what are they? A single sentence
expresses the object and thereby the contents of this science. Gnothi
seauton:
Nosce te ipsum,
Tuque Deum, quantum licet, inque Deo omnia noscas. ]
Know thyself: and so shalt thou know God, as far as is permitted to
a creature, and in God all things. --Surely, there is a strange--nay,
rather too natural--aversion to many to know themselves. ]
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**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers! *****
Title: Poems of Coleridge
Author: Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
Release Date: June, 2005 [EBook #8208]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 2, 2003]
Edition: 10
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS OF COLERIDGE ***
Jonathan Ingram, Jerry Fairbanks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
POEMS OF COLERIDGE
SELECTED AND ARRANGED
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
BY
ARTHUR SYMONS
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
CHRISTABEL
KUBLA KHAN
LEWTI
THE BALLAD OF THE DARK LADIE
LOVE
THE THREE GRAVES
DEJECTION: AN ODE
ODE TO TRANQUILLITY
FRANCE: AN ODE
FEARS IN SOLITUDE
THIS LIME-TREE BOWER MY PRISON
TO A GENTLEMAN (W. WORDSWORTH)
HYMN BEFORE SUN-RISE
FROST AT MIDNIGHT
THE NIGHTINGALE
THE EOLIAN HARP
THE PICTURE
THE GARDEN OF BOCCACCIO
THE TWO FOUNTS
A DAY-DREAM
SONNET
LINES TO W. LINLEY, ESQ.
DOMESTIC PEACE
SONG FROM _ZAPOLYA_
HUNTING SONG FROM _ZAPOLYA_
WESTPHALIAN SONG
YOUTH AND AGE
WORK WITHOUT HOPE
TIME, REAL AND IMAGINARY
LOVE'S APPARITION
LOVE, HOPE, AND PATIENCE
DUTY SURVIVING SELF-LOVE
LOVE'S FIRST HOPE
PHANTOM
TO NATURE
FANCY IN NUBIBUS
CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL OBJECT
PHANTOM OR FACT?
LINES SUGGESTED BY THE LAST WORDS OF BERENGARIUS
FORBEARANCE
_SANCTI DOMINICI PALLIUM_
ON DONNE'S POETRY
ON A BAD SINGER
_NE PLUS ULTRA_
HUMAN LIFE
THE BUTTERFLY
THE PANG MORE SHARP THAN ALL
THE VISIONARY HOPE
THE PAINS OF SLEEP
LOVE'S BURIAL-PLACE
LOVE, A SWORD
THE KISS
NOT AT HOME
NAMES (FROM LESSING)
To LESBIA (FROM CATULLUS)
THE DEATH OF THE STARLING (FROM CATULLUS)
ON A CATARACT (FROM STOLBERG)
HYMN TO THE EARTH (FROM STOLBERG)
THE VISIT OF THE GODS (FROM SCHILLER)
TRANSLATION (FROM OTTFRIED)
THE VIRGIN'S CRADLE-HYMN
EPITAPHS ON AN INFANT
AN ODE TO THE RAIN
ANSWER TO A CHILD'S QUESTION
SOMETHING CHILDISH, BUT VERY NATURAL
LINES ON A CHILD
THE KNIGHT'S TOMB
FIRE, FAMINE, AND SLAUGHTER
THE TWO ROUND SPACES ON THE TOMBSTONE
THE DEVIL'S THOUGHTS
COLOGNE
SONNETS ATTEMPTED IN THE MANNER OF CONTEMPORARY WRITERS
LIMBO
METRICAL FEET
THE HOMERIC HEXAMETER (FROM SCHILLER)
THE OVIDIAN ELEGIAC METRE (FROM SCHILLER)
CATULLIAN HENDECASYLLABLES (FROM MATTHISON)
To ----
EPITAPH ON A BAD MAN
THE SUICIDE'S ARGUMENT
THE GOOD, GREAT MAN
INSCRIPTION FOR A FOUNTAIN ON A HEATH
INSCRIPTION FOR A TIME-PIECE
A TOMBLESS EPITAPH
EPITAPH
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
In one of Rossetti's invaluable notes on poetry, he tells us that to him
"the leading point about Coleridge's work is its human love. " We may
remember Coleridge's own words:
"To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed. "
Yet love, though it is the word which he uses of himself, is not really
what he himself meant when using it, but rather an affectionate sympathy,
in which there seems to have been little element of passion. Writing to his
wife, during that first absence in Germany, whose solitude tried him so
much, he laments that there is "no one to love. " "Love is the vital air of
my genius," he tells her, and adds: "I am deeply convinced that if I were
to remain a few years among objects for whom I had no affection, I should
wholly lose the powers of intellect. "
With this incessant, passionless sensibility, it was not unnatural that his
thirst for friendship was stronger than his need of love; that to him
friendship was hardly distinguishable from love. Throughout all his letters
there is a series of causeless explosions of emotion, which it is hardly
possible to take seriously, but which, far from being insincere, is really,
no doubt, the dribbling overflow of choked-up feelings, a sort of moral
leakage. It might be said of Coleridge, in the phrase which he used of
Nelson, that he was "heart-starved. " Tied for life to a woman with whom he
had not one essential sympathy, the whole of his nature was put out of
focus; and perhaps nothing but "the joy of grief," and the terrible and
fettering power of luxuriating over his own sorrows, and tracing them to
first principles, outside himself or in the depths of his sub-
consciousness, gave him the courage to support that long, everpresent
divorce.
Both for his good and evil, he had never been able to endure emotion
without either diluting or intensifying it with thought, and with always
self-conscious thought. He uses identically the same words in writing his
last, deeply moved letter to Mary Evans, and in relating the matter to
Southey. He cannot get away from words; coming as near to sincerity as he
can, words are always between him and his emotion. Hence his over-emphasis,
his rhetoric of humility. In 1794 he writes to his brother George: "Mine
eyes gush out with tears, my heart is sick and languid with the weight of
unmerited kindness. " Nine days later he writes to his brother James: "My
conduct towards you, and towards my other brothers, has displayed a strange
combination of madness, ingratitude, and dishonesty. But you forgive me.
May my Maker forgive me! May the time arrive when I shall have forgiven
myself! " Here we see both what he calls his "gangrened sensibility" and a
complete abandonment to the feelings of the moment. It is always a self-
conscious abandonment, during which he watches himself with approval, and
seems to be saying: "Now that is truly 'feeling'! " He can never concentrate
himself on any emotion; he swims about in floods of his own tears. With so
little sense of reality in anything, he has no sense of the reality of
direct emotion, but is preoccupied, from the moment of the first shock, in
exploring it for its universal principle, and then nourishes it almost in
triumph at what he has discovered. This is not insincerity; it is the
metaphysical, analytical, and parenthetic mind in action. "I have
endeavoured to feel what I ought to feel," he once significantly writes.
Coleridge had many friends, to some of whom, as to Lamb, his friendship was
the most priceless thing in life; but the friendship which meant most to
him, not only as a man, but as a poet, was the friendship with Wordsworth
and with Dorothy Wordsworth. "There is a sense of the word Love," he wrote
to Wordsworth in 1812, "in which I never felt it but to you and one of your
household. " After his quarrel in that year he has "an agony of weeping. "
"After fifteen years of such religious, almost superstitious idolatry and
self-sacrifice! " he laments. Now it was during his first, daily
companionship with the Wordsworths that he wrote almost all his greatest
work. "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel" were both written in a kind of
rivalry with Wordsworth; and the "Ode on Dejection" was written after four
months' absence from him, in the first glow and encouragement of a return
to that one inspiring comradeship. Wordsworth was the only poet among his
friends whom he wholly admired, and Wordsworth was more exclusively a poet,
more wholly absorbed in thinking poetry and thinking about poetry, and in a
thoroughly practical way, than almost any poet who has ever lived. It was
not only for his solace in life that Coleridge required sympathy; he needed
the galvanizing of continual intercourse with a poet, and with one to whom
poetry was the only thing of importance. Coleridge, when he was by himself,
was never sure of this; there was his _magnum opus_, the revelation of
all philosophy; and he sometimes has doubts of the worth of his own poetry.
Had Coleridge been able to live uninterruptedly in the company of the
Wordsworths, even with the unsympathetic wife at home, the opium in the
cupboard, and the _magnum opus_ on the desk, I am convinced that we
should have had for our reading to-day all those poems which went down with
him into silence.
What Coleridge lacked was what theologians call a "saving belief" in
Christianity, or else a strenuous intellectual immorality. He imagined
himself to believe in Christianity, but his belief never realized itself in
effective action, either in the mind or in conduct, while it frequently
clogged his energies by weak scruples and restrictions which were but so
many internal irritations. He calls upon the religion which he has never
firmly apprehended to support him under some misfortune of his own making;
it does not support him, but he finds excuses for his weakness in what seem
to him its promises of help. Coleridge was not strong enough to be a
Christian, and he was not strong enough to rely on the impulses of his own
nature, and to turn his failings into a very actual kind of success. When
Blake said, "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise,"
he expressed a profound truth which Nietzsche and others have done little
more than amplify. There is nothing so hopeless as inert or inactive
virtue: it is a form of life grown putrid, and it turns into poisonous,
decaying matter in the soul. If Coleridge had been more callous towards
what he felt to be his duties, if he had not merely neglected them, as he
did, but justified himself for neglecting them, on any ground of
intellectual or physical necessity, or if he had merely let them slide
without thought or regret, he would have been more complete, more
effectual, as a man, and he might have achieved more finished work as an
artist.
To Coleridge there was as much difficulty in belief as in action, for
belief is itself an action of the mind. He was always anxious to believe
anything that would carry him beyond the limits of time and space, but it
was not often that he could give more than a speculative assent to even the
most improbable of creeds. Always seeking fixity, his mind was too fluid
for any anchor to hold in it. He drifted from speculation to speculation,
often seeming to forget his aim by the way, in almost the collector's
delight over the curiosities he had found in passing. On one page of his
letters he writes earnestly to the atheist Thelwall in defence of
Christianity; on another page we find him saying, "My Spinosism (if
Spinosism it be, and i' faith 'tis very like it)"; and then comes the
solemn assurance: "I am a Berkleyan. " Southey, in his rough,
uncomprehending way, writes: "Hartley was ousted by Berkeley, Berkeley by
Spinoza, and Spinoza by Plato; when last I saw him Jacob Behmen had some
chance of coming in. The truth is that he plays with systems"; so it seemed
to Southey, who could see no better. To Coleridge all systems were of
importance, because in every system there was its own measure of truth. He
was always setting his mind to think about itself, and felt that he worked
both hard and well if he had gained a clearer glimpse into that dark
cavern. "Yet I have not been altogether idle," he writes in December, 180O,
"having in my own conceit gained great light into several parts of the
human mind which have hitherto remained either wholly unexplained or most
falsely explained. " In March, 1801, he declares that he has "completely
extricated the notions of time and space. " "This," he says, "I have
_done_; but I trust that I am about to do more--namely, that I shall
be able to evolve all the five senses, and to state their growth and the
causes of their difference, and in this evolvement to solve the process of
life and consciousness. " He hopes that before his thirtieth year he will
"thoroughly understand the whole of Nature's works. " "My opinion is this,"
he says, defining one part at least of his way of approach to truth, "that
deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and that all
truth is a species of revelation. " On the other hand, he assures us,
speaking of that _magnum opus_ which weighed upon him and supported
him to the end of his life, "the very object throughout from the first page
to the last [is] to reconcile the dictates of common sense with the
conclusions of scientific reasoning. "
This _magnum opus_, "a work which should contain all knowledge and
proclaim all philosophy, had," says Mr. Ernest Coleridge, "been Coleridge's
dream from the beginning. " Only a few months before his death, we find him
writing to John Sterling: "Many a fond dream have I amused myself with, of
your residing near me, or in the same house, and of preparing, with your
and Mr. Green's assistance, my whole system for the press, as far as it
exists in any _systematic_ form; that is, beginning with the
Propyleum, On the Power and Use of Words, comprising Logic, as the Canons
of _Conclusion_, as the criterion of _Premises_, and lastly as
the discipline and evolution of Ideas (and then the Methodus et Epochee, or
the Disquisition on God, Nature, and Man), the two first grand divisions of
which, from the Ens super Ens to the _Fall_, or from God
to Hades, and then from Chaos to the commencement of living organization,
containing the whole of the Dynamic Philosophy, and the deduction of the
Powers and Forces, are complete. " Twenty years earlier, he had written to
Daniel Stuart that he was keeping his morning hours sacred to his "most
important Work, which is printing at Bristol," as he imagined. It was then
to be called "Christianity, the one true Philosophy, or Five Treatises on
the Logos, or Communicative Intelligence, natural, human, and divine. " Of
this vast work only fragments remain, mostly unpublished: two large quarto
volumes on logic, a volume intended as an introduction, a commentary on the
Gospels and some of the Epistles, together with "innumerable fragments of
metaphysical and theological speculation. " But out of those fragments no
system was ever to be constructed, though a fervent disciple, J. H. Green,
devoted twenty-eight years to the attempt. "Christabel" unfinished, the
_magnum opus_ unachieved: both were but parallel symptoms of a mind
"thought-bewildered" to the end, and bewildered by excess of light and by
crowding energies always in conflict, always in escape.
Coleridge's search, throughout his life, was after the absolute, an
absolute not only in thought but in all human relations, in love,
friendship, faith in man, faith in God, faith in beauty; and while it was
this profound dissatisfaction with less than the perfect form of every art,
passion, thought, or circumstance, that set him adrift in life, making him
seem untrue to duty, conviction, and himself, it was this also that formed
in him the double existence of the poet and the philosopher, each
supplementing and interpenetrating the other. The poet and the philosopher
are but two aspects of one reality; or rather, the poetic and the
philosophic attitudes are but two ways of seeing. The poet who is not also
a philosopher is like a flower without a root. Both seek the same
infinitude; one apprehending the idea, the other the image. One seeks truth
for its beauty; the other finds beauty, an abstract, intellectual beauty,
in the innermost home of truth. Poetry and metaphysics are alike a
disengaging, for different ends, of the absolute element in things.
In Coleridge, metaphysics joined with an unbounded imagination, in equal
flight from reality, from the notions of time and space. Each was an equal
denial of the reality of what we call real things; the one experimental,
searching, reasoning; the other a "shaping spirit of imagination," an
embodying force. His sight was always straining into the darkness; and he
has himself noted that from earliest childhood his "mind was habituated to
the Vast. " "I never regarded my senses," he says, "as the criteria of my
belief"; and "those who have been led to the same truths step by step,
through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to want a sense which
I possess. " To Coleridge only mind existed, an eternal and an eternally
active thought; and it was as a corollary to his philosophical conception
of the universe that he set his mind to a conscious rebuilding of the world
in space. His magic, that which makes his poetry, was but the final release
in art of a winged thought fluttering helplessly among speculations and
theories; it was the song of release.
De Quincey has said of Coleridge: "I believe it to be notorious that he
first began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pains or
nervous irritations--for his constitution was strong and excellent--but as
a source of luxurious sensations. " Hartley Coleridge, in the biographical
supplement to the "Biographia Literaria," replies with what we now know to
be truth: "If my Father sought more from opium than the mere absence of
pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing
phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but that the power of the medicine might
keep down the agitations of his nervous system, like a strong hand grasping
the strings of some shattered lyre. " In 1795. that is, at the age of
twenty-three, we find him taking laudanum; in 1796, he is taking it in
large doses; by the late spring of 1801 he is under the "fearful slavery,"
as he was to call it, of opium. "My sole sensuality," he says of this time,
"was not to be in pain. " In a terrible letter addressed to Joseph Cottle in
1814 he declares that he was "seduced to the _accursed_ habit
ignorantly"; and he describes "the direful moment, when my pulse began to
fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such a dreadful falling abroad, as it
were, of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness, and incipient
bewilderment . . . for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a
derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of the
intellectual faculties. " And, throughout, it is always the pains, never the
pleasures, of opium that he registers.
Opium took hold of him by what was inert in his animal nature, and not by
any active sensuality. His imagination required no wings, but rather
fetters; and it is evident that opium was more often a sedative than a spur
to his senses.
The effect of opium on the normal man is to bring him into something like
the state in which Coleridge habitually lived. The world was always a
sufficiently unreal thing to him, facts more than remote enough,
consequences unrelated to their causes; he lived in a mist, and opium
thickened the mist to a dense yellow fog. Opium might have helped to make
Southey a poet; it left Coleridge the prisoner of a cobweb-net of dreams.
What he wanted was some astringent force in things, to tighten, not to
loosen, the always expanding and uncontrollable limits of his mind. Opium
did but confirm what the natural habits of his constitution had bred in
him: an overwhelming indolence, out of which the energies that still arose
intermittently were no longer flames, but the escaping ghosts of flame,
mere black smoke.
At twenty-four, in a disinterested description of himself for the benefit
of a friend whom he had not yet met, he declares, "the walk of the whole
man indicates _indolence capable of energies_. " It was that walk which
Carlyle afterwards described, unable to keep to either side of the garden-
path. "The moral obligation is to me so very strong a stimulant," Coleridge
writes to Crabb Robinson, "that in nine cases out of ten it acts as a
narcotic. The blow that should rouse, _stuns_ me. " He plays another
variation on the ingenious theme in a letter to his brother: "Anxieties
that stimulate others infuse an additional narcotic into my mind. . . . Like
some poor labourer, whose night's sleep has but imperfectly refreshed his
overwearied frame, I have sate in drowsy uneasiness, and doing nothing have
thought what a deal I have to do. " His ideal, which he expressed in 1797 in
a letter to Thelwall, and, in 1813, almost word for word, in a poem called"
The Night-Scene," was, "like the Indian Vishnu, to float about along an
infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a
million years for a few minutes just to know that I was going to sleep a
million years more. " Observe the effect of the desire for the absolute,
reinforced by constitutional indolence, and only waiting for the
illuminating excuse of opium.
From these languors, and from their consequences, Coleridge found relief in
conversation, for which he was always ready, while he was far from always
ready for the more precise mental exertion of writing. "Oh, how I wish to
be talking, not writing," he cries in a letter to Southey in 1803, "for my
mind is so full, that my thoughts stifle and jam each other. " And, in 1816,
in his first letter to Gillman, he writes, more significantly, "The
stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when
I am alone, the horrors that I have suffered from laudanum, the
degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. " It was along one
avenue of this continual escape from himself that Coleridge found himself
driven (anywhere, away from action) towards what grew to be the main waste
of his life. Hartley Coleridge, in the preface to "Table-Talk," has told us
eloquently how, "throughout a long-drawn summer's day, would this man talk
to you in low, equable, but clear and musical tones, concerning things
human and divine"; we know that Carlyle found him "unprofitable, even
tedious," and wished "to worship him, and toss him in a blanket"; and we
have the vivid reporting of Keats, who tells us that, on his one meeting
with Coleridge, "I walked with him, at his alderman-after-dinner pace, for
near two miles, I suppose. In those two miles he broached a thousand
things. Let me see if I can give you a list--nightingales--poetry--on
poetical sensation--metaphysics--different genera and species of dreams--
nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single and double
touch--a dream related--first and second consciousness--the difference
explained between will and volition--so say metaphysicians from a want of
smoking the second consciousness--monsters--the Kraken--mermaids--Southey
believes in them--Southey's belief too much diluted--a ghost story--Good-
morning--I heard his voice as he came towards me--I heard it as he moved
away--I had heard it all the interval--if it may be called so. " It may be
that we have had no more wonderful talker, and, no doubt, the talk had its
reverential listeners, its disciples; but to cultivate or permit disciples
is itself a kind of waste, a kind of weakness; it requires a very fixed and
energetic indolence to become, as Coleridge became, a vocal utterance,
talking for talking's sake.
But beside talking, there was lecturing, with Coleridge a scarcely
different form of talk; and it is to this consequence of a readiness to
speak and a reluctance to write that we owe much of his finest criticism,
in the imperfectly recorded "Lectures on Shakespeare. " Coleridge as a
critic is not easily to be summed up. What may first surprise us, when we
begin to look into his critical opinions, is the uncertainty of his
judgments in regard to his own work, and to the work of his friends; the
curious bias which a feeling or an idea, affection or a philosophical
theory, could give to his mind. His admiration for Southey, his
consideration for Sotheby, perhaps in a less degree his unconquerable
esteem for Bowles, together with something very like adulation of
Wordsworth, are all instances of a certain loss of the sense of proportion.
He has left us no penetrating criticisms of Byron, of Shelley, or of Keats;
and in a very interesting letter about Blake, written in 1818, he is unable
to take the poems merely as poems, and chooses among them with a scrupulous
care "not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from the too probable
want of it in many readers. "
Lamb, concerned only with individual things, looks straight at them, not
through them, seeing them implacably. His notes to the selections from the
Elizabethan dramatists are the surest criticisms that we have in English;
they go to the roots. Coleridge's critical power was wholly exercised upon
elements and first principles; Lamb showed an infinitely keener sense of
detail, of the parts of the whole. Lamb was unerring on definite points,
and could lay his finger on flaws in Coleridge's work that were invisible
to Coleridge; who, however, was unerring in his broad distinctions, in the
philosophy of his art.
"The ultimate end of criticism," said Coleridge, "is much more to establish
the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pass judgment on
what has been written by others. " And for this task he had an incomparable
foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning, almost every critical
quality united in one; and he was a poet who allowed himself to be a
critic. Those pages of the "Biographia Literaria," in which he defines and
distinguishes between imagination and fancy, the researches into the
abstract entities of poetry in the course of an examination of Wordsworth's
theories and of the popular objections to them, all that we have of the
lectures on Shakespeare, into which he put an illuminating idolatry,
together with notes and jottings preserved in the "Table-Talk," "Anima
Poetae," the "Literary Remains," and on the margins of countless books,
contain the most fundamental criticism of literature that has ever been
attempted, fragmentary as the attempt remains. "There is not a man in
England," said Coleridge, with truth, "whose thoughts, images, words, and
erudition have been published in larger quantities than _mine_; though
I must admit, not _by_, nor _for_, myself. " He claimed, and
rightly, as his invention, a "science of reasoning and judging concerning
the productions of literature, the characters and measures of public men,
and the events of nations, by a systematic subsumption of them, under
principles deduced from the nature of man," which, as he says, was unknown
before the year 1795. He is the one philosophical critic who is also a
poet, and thus he is the one critic who instinctively knows his way through
all the intricacies of the creative mind.
Most of his best criticism circles around Shakespeare; and he took
Shakespeare almost frankly in the place of Nature, or of poetry. He
affirms, "Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate
workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of
place. " This granted (and to Coleridge it is essential that it should be
granted, for in less than the infinite he cannot find space in which to use
his wings freely) he has only to choose and define, to discover and to
illuminate. In the "myriad-minded man," in his "oceanic mind," he finds all
the material that he needs for the making of a complete aesthetics. Nothing
with Coleridge ever came to completion; but we have only to turn over the
pages about Shakespeare, to come upon fragments worth more than anyone
else's finished work. I find the whole secret of Shakespeare's way of
writing in these sentences: "Shakespeare's intellectual action is wholly
unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher.
[Footnote 83: This sort of repetition is one of this writers peculiarities, and
there is scarce a page which does not furnish one or more instances--Ex.
gr. in the first page or two. Act I, line 7th, "and deemed that I might
sleep. "--Line 10, "Did rock and quiver in the bickering glare. "--Lines
14, 15, 16, "But by the momently gleams of sheeted blue, Did the pale
marbles dare so sternly on me, I almost deemed they lived. "--Line
37, "The glare of Hell. "--Line 35, "O holy Prior, this is no earthly
storm. "--Line 38, "This is no earthly storm. "--Line 42, "Dealing
with us. "--Line 43, "Deal thus sternly:"--Line 44, "Speak! thou hast
something seen? "--"A fearful sight! "--Line 45, "What hast thou seen! A
piteous, fearful sight. "--Line 48, "quivering gleams. "--Line 50, "In the
hollow pauses of the storm. "--Line 61, "The pauses of the storm, etc. "]
[Footnote 84: The child is an important personage, for I see not by what possible
means the author could have ended the second and third acts but for its
timely appearance. How ungrateful then not further to notice its fate! ]
[Footnote 85: Classically too, as far as consists with the allegorizing fancy
of the modern, that still striving to project the inward,
contradistinguishes itself from the seeming ease with which the poetry
of the ancients reflects the world without. Casimir affords, perhaps,
the most striking instance of this characteristic difference. --For his
style and diction are really classical: while Cowley, who resembles
Casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his Latinity, and even
his metre, by the heterogeneous nature of his thoughts. That Dr. Johnson
should have passed a contrary judgment, and have even preferred Cowley's
Latin Poems to Milton's, is a caprice that has, if I mistake not,
excited the surprise of all scholars. I was much amused last summer with
the laughable affright, with which an Italian poet perused a page of
Cowley's Davideis, contrasted with the enthusiasm with which he first
ran through, and then read aloud, Milton's Mansus and Ad Patrem. ]
[Footnote 86: Flectit, or if the metre had allowed, premit would have supported
the metaphor better. ]
[Footnote 87: Poor unlucky Metaphysicks! and what are they? A single sentence
expresses the object and thereby the contents of this science. Gnothi
seauton:
Nosce te ipsum,
Tuque Deum, quantum licet, inque Deo omnia noscas. ]
Know thyself: and so shalt thou know God, as far as is permitted to
a creature, and in God all things. --Surely, there is a strange--nay,
rather too natural--aversion to many to know themselves. ]
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**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
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*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers! *****
Title: Poems of Coleridge
Author: Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
Release Date: June, 2005 [EBook #8208]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 2, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS OF COLERIDGE ***
Jonathan Ingram, Jerry Fairbanks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
POEMS OF COLERIDGE
SELECTED AND ARRANGED
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
BY
ARTHUR SYMONS
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
CHRISTABEL
KUBLA KHAN
LEWTI
THE BALLAD OF THE DARK LADIE
LOVE
THE THREE GRAVES
DEJECTION: AN ODE
ODE TO TRANQUILLITY
FRANCE: AN ODE
FEARS IN SOLITUDE
THIS LIME-TREE BOWER MY PRISON
TO A GENTLEMAN (W. WORDSWORTH)
HYMN BEFORE SUN-RISE
FROST AT MIDNIGHT
THE NIGHTINGALE
THE EOLIAN HARP
THE PICTURE
THE GARDEN OF BOCCACCIO
THE TWO FOUNTS
A DAY-DREAM
SONNET
LINES TO W. LINLEY, ESQ.
DOMESTIC PEACE
SONG FROM _ZAPOLYA_
HUNTING SONG FROM _ZAPOLYA_
WESTPHALIAN SONG
YOUTH AND AGE
WORK WITHOUT HOPE
TIME, REAL AND IMAGINARY
LOVE'S APPARITION
LOVE, HOPE, AND PATIENCE
DUTY SURVIVING SELF-LOVE
LOVE'S FIRST HOPE
PHANTOM
TO NATURE
FANCY IN NUBIBUS
CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL OBJECT
PHANTOM OR FACT?
LINES SUGGESTED BY THE LAST WORDS OF BERENGARIUS
FORBEARANCE
_SANCTI DOMINICI PALLIUM_
ON DONNE'S POETRY
ON A BAD SINGER
_NE PLUS ULTRA_
HUMAN LIFE
THE BUTTERFLY
THE PANG MORE SHARP THAN ALL
THE VISIONARY HOPE
THE PAINS OF SLEEP
LOVE'S BURIAL-PLACE
LOVE, A SWORD
THE KISS
NOT AT HOME
NAMES (FROM LESSING)
To LESBIA (FROM CATULLUS)
THE DEATH OF THE STARLING (FROM CATULLUS)
ON A CATARACT (FROM STOLBERG)
HYMN TO THE EARTH (FROM STOLBERG)
THE VISIT OF THE GODS (FROM SCHILLER)
TRANSLATION (FROM OTTFRIED)
THE VIRGIN'S CRADLE-HYMN
EPITAPHS ON AN INFANT
AN ODE TO THE RAIN
ANSWER TO A CHILD'S QUESTION
SOMETHING CHILDISH, BUT VERY NATURAL
LINES ON A CHILD
THE KNIGHT'S TOMB
FIRE, FAMINE, AND SLAUGHTER
THE TWO ROUND SPACES ON THE TOMBSTONE
THE DEVIL'S THOUGHTS
COLOGNE
SONNETS ATTEMPTED IN THE MANNER OF CONTEMPORARY WRITERS
LIMBO
METRICAL FEET
THE HOMERIC HEXAMETER (FROM SCHILLER)
THE OVIDIAN ELEGIAC METRE (FROM SCHILLER)
CATULLIAN HENDECASYLLABLES (FROM MATTHISON)
To ----
EPITAPH ON A BAD MAN
THE SUICIDE'S ARGUMENT
THE GOOD, GREAT MAN
INSCRIPTION FOR A FOUNTAIN ON A HEATH
INSCRIPTION FOR A TIME-PIECE
A TOMBLESS EPITAPH
EPITAPH
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
In one of Rossetti's invaluable notes on poetry, he tells us that to him
"the leading point about Coleridge's work is its human love. " We may
remember Coleridge's own words:
"To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed. "
Yet love, though it is the word which he uses of himself, is not really
what he himself meant when using it, but rather an affectionate sympathy,
in which there seems to have been little element of passion. Writing to his
wife, during that first absence in Germany, whose solitude tried him so
much, he laments that there is "no one to love. " "Love is the vital air of
my genius," he tells her, and adds: "I am deeply convinced that if I were
to remain a few years among objects for whom I had no affection, I should
wholly lose the powers of intellect. "
With this incessant, passionless sensibility, it was not unnatural that his
thirst for friendship was stronger than his need of love; that to him
friendship was hardly distinguishable from love. Throughout all his letters
there is a series of causeless explosions of emotion, which it is hardly
possible to take seriously, but which, far from being insincere, is really,
no doubt, the dribbling overflow of choked-up feelings, a sort of moral
leakage. It might be said of Coleridge, in the phrase which he used of
Nelson, that he was "heart-starved. " Tied for life to a woman with whom he
had not one essential sympathy, the whole of his nature was put out of
focus; and perhaps nothing but "the joy of grief," and the terrible and
fettering power of luxuriating over his own sorrows, and tracing them to
first principles, outside himself or in the depths of his sub-
consciousness, gave him the courage to support that long, everpresent
divorce.
Both for his good and evil, he had never been able to endure emotion
without either diluting or intensifying it with thought, and with always
self-conscious thought. He uses identically the same words in writing his
last, deeply moved letter to Mary Evans, and in relating the matter to
Southey. He cannot get away from words; coming as near to sincerity as he
can, words are always between him and his emotion. Hence his over-emphasis,
his rhetoric of humility. In 1794 he writes to his brother George: "Mine
eyes gush out with tears, my heart is sick and languid with the weight of
unmerited kindness. " Nine days later he writes to his brother James: "My
conduct towards you, and towards my other brothers, has displayed a strange
combination of madness, ingratitude, and dishonesty. But you forgive me.
May my Maker forgive me! May the time arrive when I shall have forgiven
myself! " Here we see both what he calls his "gangrened sensibility" and a
complete abandonment to the feelings of the moment. It is always a self-
conscious abandonment, during which he watches himself with approval, and
seems to be saying: "Now that is truly 'feeling'! " He can never concentrate
himself on any emotion; he swims about in floods of his own tears. With so
little sense of reality in anything, he has no sense of the reality of
direct emotion, but is preoccupied, from the moment of the first shock, in
exploring it for its universal principle, and then nourishes it almost in
triumph at what he has discovered. This is not insincerity; it is the
metaphysical, analytical, and parenthetic mind in action. "I have
endeavoured to feel what I ought to feel," he once significantly writes.
Coleridge had many friends, to some of whom, as to Lamb, his friendship was
the most priceless thing in life; but the friendship which meant most to
him, not only as a man, but as a poet, was the friendship with Wordsworth
and with Dorothy Wordsworth. "There is a sense of the word Love," he wrote
to Wordsworth in 1812, "in which I never felt it but to you and one of your
household. " After his quarrel in that year he has "an agony of weeping. "
"After fifteen years of such religious, almost superstitious idolatry and
self-sacrifice! " he laments. Now it was during his first, daily
companionship with the Wordsworths that he wrote almost all his greatest
work. "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel" were both written in a kind of
rivalry with Wordsworth; and the "Ode on Dejection" was written after four
months' absence from him, in the first glow and encouragement of a return
to that one inspiring comradeship. Wordsworth was the only poet among his
friends whom he wholly admired, and Wordsworth was more exclusively a poet,
more wholly absorbed in thinking poetry and thinking about poetry, and in a
thoroughly practical way, than almost any poet who has ever lived. It was
not only for his solace in life that Coleridge required sympathy; he needed
the galvanizing of continual intercourse with a poet, and with one to whom
poetry was the only thing of importance. Coleridge, when he was by himself,
was never sure of this; there was his _magnum opus_, the revelation of
all philosophy; and he sometimes has doubts of the worth of his own poetry.
Had Coleridge been able to live uninterruptedly in the company of the
Wordsworths, even with the unsympathetic wife at home, the opium in the
cupboard, and the _magnum opus_ on the desk, I am convinced that we
should have had for our reading to-day all those poems which went down with
him into silence.
What Coleridge lacked was what theologians call a "saving belief" in
Christianity, or else a strenuous intellectual immorality. He imagined
himself to believe in Christianity, but his belief never realized itself in
effective action, either in the mind or in conduct, while it frequently
clogged his energies by weak scruples and restrictions which were but so
many internal irritations. He calls upon the religion which he has never
firmly apprehended to support him under some misfortune of his own making;
it does not support him, but he finds excuses for his weakness in what seem
to him its promises of help. Coleridge was not strong enough to be a
Christian, and he was not strong enough to rely on the impulses of his own
nature, and to turn his failings into a very actual kind of success. When
Blake said, "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise,"
he expressed a profound truth which Nietzsche and others have done little
more than amplify. There is nothing so hopeless as inert or inactive
virtue: it is a form of life grown putrid, and it turns into poisonous,
decaying matter in the soul. If Coleridge had been more callous towards
what he felt to be his duties, if he had not merely neglected them, as he
did, but justified himself for neglecting them, on any ground of
intellectual or physical necessity, or if he had merely let them slide
without thought or regret, he would have been more complete, more
effectual, as a man, and he might have achieved more finished work as an
artist.
To Coleridge there was as much difficulty in belief as in action, for
belief is itself an action of the mind. He was always anxious to believe
anything that would carry him beyond the limits of time and space, but it
was not often that he could give more than a speculative assent to even the
most improbable of creeds. Always seeking fixity, his mind was too fluid
for any anchor to hold in it. He drifted from speculation to speculation,
often seeming to forget his aim by the way, in almost the collector's
delight over the curiosities he had found in passing. On one page of his
letters he writes earnestly to the atheist Thelwall in defence of
Christianity; on another page we find him saying, "My Spinosism (if
Spinosism it be, and i' faith 'tis very like it)"; and then comes the
solemn assurance: "I am a Berkleyan. " Southey, in his rough,
uncomprehending way, writes: "Hartley was ousted by Berkeley, Berkeley by
Spinoza, and Spinoza by Plato; when last I saw him Jacob Behmen had some
chance of coming in. The truth is that he plays with systems"; so it seemed
to Southey, who could see no better. To Coleridge all systems were of
importance, because in every system there was its own measure of truth. He
was always setting his mind to think about itself, and felt that he worked
both hard and well if he had gained a clearer glimpse into that dark
cavern. "Yet I have not been altogether idle," he writes in December, 180O,
"having in my own conceit gained great light into several parts of the
human mind which have hitherto remained either wholly unexplained or most
falsely explained. " In March, 1801, he declares that he has "completely
extricated the notions of time and space. " "This," he says, "I have
_done_; but I trust that I am about to do more--namely, that I shall
be able to evolve all the five senses, and to state their growth and the
causes of their difference, and in this evolvement to solve the process of
life and consciousness. " He hopes that before his thirtieth year he will
"thoroughly understand the whole of Nature's works. " "My opinion is this,"
he says, defining one part at least of his way of approach to truth, "that
deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and that all
truth is a species of revelation. " On the other hand, he assures us,
speaking of that _magnum opus_ which weighed upon him and supported
him to the end of his life, "the very object throughout from the first page
to the last [is] to reconcile the dictates of common sense with the
conclusions of scientific reasoning. "
This _magnum opus_, "a work which should contain all knowledge and
proclaim all philosophy, had," says Mr. Ernest Coleridge, "been Coleridge's
dream from the beginning. " Only a few months before his death, we find him
writing to John Sterling: "Many a fond dream have I amused myself with, of
your residing near me, or in the same house, and of preparing, with your
and Mr. Green's assistance, my whole system for the press, as far as it
exists in any _systematic_ form; that is, beginning with the
Propyleum, On the Power and Use of Words, comprising Logic, as the Canons
of _Conclusion_, as the criterion of _Premises_, and lastly as
the discipline and evolution of Ideas (and then the Methodus et Epochee, or
the Disquisition on God, Nature, and Man), the two first grand divisions of
which, from the Ens super Ens to the _Fall_, or from God
to Hades, and then from Chaos to the commencement of living organization,
containing the whole of the Dynamic Philosophy, and the deduction of the
Powers and Forces, are complete. " Twenty years earlier, he had written to
Daniel Stuart that he was keeping his morning hours sacred to his "most
important Work, which is printing at Bristol," as he imagined. It was then
to be called "Christianity, the one true Philosophy, or Five Treatises on
the Logos, or Communicative Intelligence, natural, human, and divine. " Of
this vast work only fragments remain, mostly unpublished: two large quarto
volumes on logic, a volume intended as an introduction, a commentary on the
Gospels and some of the Epistles, together with "innumerable fragments of
metaphysical and theological speculation. " But out of those fragments no
system was ever to be constructed, though a fervent disciple, J. H. Green,
devoted twenty-eight years to the attempt. "Christabel" unfinished, the
_magnum opus_ unachieved: both were but parallel symptoms of a mind
"thought-bewildered" to the end, and bewildered by excess of light and by
crowding energies always in conflict, always in escape.
Coleridge's search, throughout his life, was after the absolute, an
absolute not only in thought but in all human relations, in love,
friendship, faith in man, faith in God, faith in beauty; and while it was
this profound dissatisfaction with less than the perfect form of every art,
passion, thought, or circumstance, that set him adrift in life, making him
seem untrue to duty, conviction, and himself, it was this also that formed
in him the double existence of the poet and the philosopher, each
supplementing and interpenetrating the other. The poet and the philosopher
are but two aspects of one reality; or rather, the poetic and the
philosophic attitudes are but two ways of seeing. The poet who is not also
a philosopher is like a flower without a root. Both seek the same
infinitude; one apprehending the idea, the other the image. One seeks truth
for its beauty; the other finds beauty, an abstract, intellectual beauty,
in the innermost home of truth. Poetry and metaphysics are alike a
disengaging, for different ends, of the absolute element in things.
In Coleridge, metaphysics joined with an unbounded imagination, in equal
flight from reality, from the notions of time and space. Each was an equal
denial of the reality of what we call real things; the one experimental,
searching, reasoning; the other a "shaping spirit of imagination," an
embodying force. His sight was always straining into the darkness; and he
has himself noted that from earliest childhood his "mind was habituated to
the Vast. " "I never regarded my senses," he says, "as the criteria of my
belief"; and "those who have been led to the same truths step by step,
through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to want a sense which
I possess. " To Coleridge only mind existed, an eternal and an eternally
active thought; and it was as a corollary to his philosophical conception
of the universe that he set his mind to a conscious rebuilding of the world
in space. His magic, that which makes his poetry, was but the final release
in art of a winged thought fluttering helplessly among speculations and
theories; it was the song of release.
De Quincey has said of Coleridge: "I believe it to be notorious that he
first began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pains or
nervous irritations--for his constitution was strong and excellent--but as
a source of luxurious sensations. " Hartley Coleridge, in the biographical
supplement to the "Biographia Literaria," replies with what we now know to
be truth: "If my Father sought more from opium than the mere absence of
pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing
phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but that the power of the medicine might
keep down the agitations of his nervous system, like a strong hand grasping
the strings of some shattered lyre. " In 1795. that is, at the age of
twenty-three, we find him taking laudanum; in 1796, he is taking it in
large doses; by the late spring of 1801 he is under the "fearful slavery,"
as he was to call it, of opium. "My sole sensuality," he says of this time,
"was not to be in pain. " In a terrible letter addressed to Joseph Cottle in
1814 he declares that he was "seduced to the _accursed_ habit
ignorantly"; and he describes "the direful moment, when my pulse began to
fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such a dreadful falling abroad, as it
were, of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness, and incipient
bewilderment . . . for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a
derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of the
intellectual faculties. " And, throughout, it is always the pains, never the
pleasures, of opium that he registers.
Opium took hold of him by what was inert in his animal nature, and not by
any active sensuality. His imagination required no wings, but rather
fetters; and it is evident that opium was more often a sedative than a spur
to his senses.
The effect of opium on the normal man is to bring him into something like
the state in which Coleridge habitually lived. The world was always a
sufficiently unreal thing to him, facts more than remote enough,
consequences unrelated to their causes; he lived in a mist, and opium
thickened the mist to a dense yellow fog. Opium might have helped to make
Southey a poet; it left Coleridge the prisoner of a cobweb-net of dreams.
What he wanted was some astringent force in things, to tighten, not to
loosen, the always expanding and uncontrollable limits of his mind. Opium
did but confirm what the natural habits of his constitution had bred in
him: an overwhelming indolence, out of which the energies that still arose
intermittently were no longer flames, but the escaping ghosts of flame,
mere black smoke.
At twenty-four, in a disinterested description of himself for the benefit
of a friend whom he had not yet met, he declares, "the walk of the whole
man indicates _indolence capable of energies_. " It was that walk which
Carlyle afterwards described, unable to keep to either side of the garden-
path. "The moral obligation is to me so very strong a stimulant," Coleridge
writes to Crabb Robinson, "that in nine cases out of ten it acts as a
narcotic. The blow that should rouse, _stuns_ me. " He plays another
variation on the ingenious theme in a letter to his brother: "Anxieties
that stimulate others infuse an additional narcotic into my mind. . . . Like
some poor labourer, whose night's sleep has but imperfectly refreshed his
overwearied frame, I have sate in drowsy uneasiness, and doing nothing have
thought what a deal I have to do. " His ideal, which he expressed in 1797 in
a letter to Thelwall, and, in 1813, almost word for word, in a poem called"
The Night-Scene," was, "like the Indian Vishnu, to float about along an
infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a
million years for a few minutes just to know that I was going to sleep a
million years more. " Observe the effect of the desire for the absolute,
reinforced by constitutional indolence, and only waiting for the
illuminating excuse of opium.
From these languors, and from their consequences, Coleridge found relief in
conversation, for which he was always ready, while he was far from always
ready for the more precise mental exertion of writing. "Oh, how I wish to
be talking, not writing," he cries in a letter to Southey in 1803, "for my
mind is so full, that my thoughts stifle and jam each other. " And, in 1816,
in his first letter to Gillman, he writes, more significantly, "The
stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when
I am alone, the horrors that I have suffered from laudanum, the
degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. " It was along one
avenue of this continual escape from himself that Coleridge found himself
driven (anywhere, away from action) towards what grew to be the main waste
of his life. Hartley Coleridge, in the preface to "Table-Talk," has told us
eloquently how, "throughout a long-drawn summer's day, would this man talk
to you in low, equable, but clear and musical tones, concerning things
human and divine"; we know that Carlyle found him "unprofitable, even
tedious," and wished "to worship him, and toss him in a blanket"; and we
have the vivid reporting of Keats, who tells us that, on his one meeting
with Coleridge, "I walked with him, at his alderman-after-dinner pace, for
near two miles, I suppose. In those two miles he broached a thousand
things. Let me see if I can give you a list--nightingales--poetry--on
poetical sensation--metaphysics--different genera and species of dreams--
nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single and double
touch--a dream related--first and second consciousness--the difference
explained between will and volition--so say metaphysicians from a want of
smoking the second consciousness--monsters--the Kraken--mermaids--Southey
believes in them--Southey's belief too much diluted--a ghost story--Good-
morning--I heard his voice as he came towards me--I heard it as he moved
away--I had heard it all the interval--if it may be called so. " It may be
that we have had no more wonderful talker, and, no doubt, the talk had its
reverential listeners, its disciples; but to cultivate or permit disciples
is itself a kind of waste, a kind of weakness; it requires a very fixed and
energetic indolence to become, as Coleridge became, a vocal utterance,
talking for talking's sake.
But beside talking, there was lecturing, with Coleridge a scarcely
different form of talk; and it is to this consequence of a readiness to
speak and a reluctance to write that we owe much of his finest criticism,
in the imperfectly recorded "Lectures on Shakespeare. " Coleridge as a
critic is not easily to be summed up. What may first surprise us, when we
begin to look into his critical opinions, is the uncertainty of his
judgments in regard to his own work, and to the work of his friends; the
curious bias which a feeling or an idea, affection or a philosophical
theory, could give to his mind. His admiration for Southey, his
consideration for Sotheby, perhaps in a less degree his unconquerable
esteem for Bowles, together with something very like adulation of
Wordsworth, are all instances of a certain loss of the sense of proportion.
He has left us no penetrating criticisms of Byron, of Shelley, or of Keats;
and in a very interesting letter about Blake, written in 1818, he is unable
to take the poems merely as poems, and chooses among them with a scrupulous
care "not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from the too probable
want of it in many readers. "
Lamb, concerned only with individual things, looks straight at them, not
through them, seeing them implacably. His notes to the selections from the
Elizabethan dramatists are the surest criticisms that we have in English;
they go to the roots. Coleridge's critical power was wholly exercised upon
elements and first principles; Lamb showed an infinitely keener sense of
detail, of the parts of the whole. Lamb was unerring on definite points,
and could lay his finger on flaws in Coleridge's work that were invisible
to Coleridge; who, however, was unerring in his broad distinctions, in the
philosophy of his art.
"The ultimate end of criticism," said Coleridge, "is much more to establish
the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pass judgment on
what has been written by others. " And for this task he had an incomparable
foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning, almost every critical
quality united in one; and he was a poet who allowed himself to be a
critic. Those pages of the "Biographia Literaria," in which he defines and
distinguishes between imagination and fancy, the researches into the
abstract entities of poetry in the course of an examination of Wordsworth's
theories and of the popular objections to them, all that we have of the
lectures on Shakespeare, into which he put an illuminating idolatry,
together with notes and jottings preserved in the "Table-Talk," "Anima
Poetae," the "Literary Remains," and on the margins of countless books,
contain the most fundamental criticism of literature that has ever been
attempted, fragmentary as the attempt remains. "There is not a man in
England," said Coleridge, with truth, "whose thoughts, images, words, and
erudition have been published in larger quantities than _mine_; though
I must admit, not _by_, nor _for_, myself. " He claimed, and
rightly, as his invention, a "science of reasoning and judging concerning
the productions of literature, the characters and measures of public men,
and the events of nations, by a systematic subsumption of them, under
principles deduced from the nature of man," which, as he says, was unknown
before the year 1795. He is the one philosophical critic who is also a
poet, and thus he is the one critic who instinctively knows his way through
all the intricacies of the creative mind.
Most of his best criticism circles around Shakespeare; and he took
Shakespeare almost frankly in the place of Nature, or of poetry. He
affirms, "Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate
workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of
place. " This granted (and to Coleridge it is essential that it should be
granted, for in less than the infinite he cannot find space in which to use
his wings freely) he has only to choose and define, to discover and to
illuminate. In the "myriad-minded man," in his "oceanic mind," he finds all
the material that he needs for the making of a complete aesthetics. Nothing
with Coleridge ever came to completion; but we have only to turn over the
pages about Shakespeare, to come upon fragments worth more than anyone
else's finished work. I find the whole secret of Shakespeare's way of
writing in these sentences: "Shakespeare's intellectual action is wholly
unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher.
