The years 1797 and 1798 are generally and justly regarded as the blossoming-time of Coleridge"s poetic genius. It would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that they were even more than this, and that within the brief period covered by them is included not only the development of the poet"s powers to their full maturity but the untimely beginnings of their decline. For to pa.s.s from the poems written by Coleridge within these two years to those of later origin is like pa.s.sing from among the green wealth of summer foliage into the well-nigh naked woods of later autumn. During 1797 and 1798 the _Ancient Mariner_, the first part of _Christabel_, the fine ode to France, the _Fears in Solitude_, the beautiful lines ent.i.tled _Frost at Midnight_, the _Nightingale_, the _Circa.s.sian Love-Chant_, the piece known as _Love_ from the poem of the _Dark Ladie_, and that strange fragment _Kubla Khan_, were all of them written and nearly all of them published; while between the last composed of these and that swan-song of his dying Muse, the _Dejection_, of 1802, there is but one piece to be added to the list of his greater works. This therefore, the second part of _Christabel_ (1800), may almost be described by the picturesque image in the first part of the same poem as
"The one red leaf, the last of its clan, Hanging so light and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky."
The first to fail him of his sources of inspiration was his revolutionary enthusiasm; and the ode to France--the _Recantation_, as it was styled on its first appearance in the _Morning Post_--is the record of a reaction which, as has been said, was as much speedier in Coleridge"s case than in that of the other ardent young minds which had come under the spell of the Revolution as his enthusiasm had been more pa.s.sionate than theirs. In the winter of 1797-98 the Directory had plunged France into an unnatural conflict with her sister Republic of Switzerland, and Coleridge, who could pardon and had pardoned her fierce animosity against a country which he considered not so much his own as Pitt"s, was unable to forgive her this. In the _Recantation_ he casts her off for ever; he perceives at last that true liberty is not to be obtained through political, but only through spiritual emanc.i.p.ation; that--
"The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game They burst their manacles, and wear the name Of Freedom graven on a heavier chain";
and arrives in a n.o.ble peroration at the somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion, that the spirit of liberty, "the guide of homeless winds and playmate of the waves," is to be found only among the elements, and not in the inst.i.tutions of man. And in the same quaintly ingenuous spirit which half touches and half amuses us in his earlier poems he lets us perceive a few weeks later, in his _Fears in Solitude_, that sympathy with a foreign nation threatened by the invader may gradually develop into an almost filial regard for one"s own similarly situated land. He has been deemed, he says, an enemy of his country.
"But, O dear Britain! O my mother Isle,"
once, it may be remembered, "doomed to fall enslaved and vile," but now--
"Needs must them prove a name most dear and holy, To me a son, a brother, and a friend, A husband and a father! who revere All bonds of natural love, and find them all Within the limits of thy rocky sh.o.r.es."
After all, it has occurred to him, England is not only the England of Pitt and Grenville, and in that capacity the fitting prey of the insulted French Republic: she is also the England of Sara Coleridge, and little Hartley, and of Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey. And so, to be sure, she was in 1796 when her downfall was predicted, and in the spirit rather of the Old Testament than of the New. But there is something very engaging in the candour with which the young poet hastens to apprise us of this his first awakening to the fact.
_France_ may be regarded as the last ode, and _Fears in Solitude_ as the last blank-verse poem of any importance, that owe their origin to Coleridge"s early political sentiments. Henceforth, and for the too brief period of his poetic activity, he was to derive his inspiration from other sources. The most fruitful and important of these was unquestionably his intercourse with Wordsworth, from whom, although there was doubtless a reciprocation of influence between them, his much more receptive nature took a far deeper impression than it made. [1] At the time of their meeting he had already for some three years been acquainted with Wordsworth"s works as a poet, and it speaks highly for his discrimination that he was able to discern the great powers of his future friend, even in work so immature in many respects as the _Descriptive Sketches_. It was during the last year of his residence at Cambridge that he first met with these poems, of which he says in the _Biographia Literaria_ that "seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced;" and the effect produced by this volume was steadily enhanced by further acquaintance both with the poet and his works. Nothing, indeed, is so honourably noticeable and even touching in Coleridge"s relation to his friend as the tone of reverence with which, even in the days of his highest self-confidence and even almost haughty belief in the greatness of his own poetic mission, he was accustomed to speak of Wordsworth. A witness, to be more fully cited hereafter, and whose testimony is especially valuable as that of one who was by no means blind to Coleridge"s early foible of self- complacency, has testified to this unbounded admiration of his brother- poet. "When," records this gentleman, "we have sometimes spoken complimentarily to Coleridge of himself he has said that he was nothing in comparison with Wordsworth." And two years before this, at a time when they had not yet tested each other"s power in literary collaboration, he had written to Cottle to inform him of his introduction to the author of "near twelve hundred lines of blank verse, superior, I dare aver, to anything in our language which in any way resembles it," and had declared with evident sincerity that he felt "a little man" by Wordsworth"s side.
His own impression upon his new friend was more distinctively personal in its origin. It was by Coleridge"s total individuality, by the sum of his vast and varied intellectual powers, rather than by the specific poetic element contained in them, that Wordsworth, like the rest of the world indeed, was in the main attracted; but it is clear enough that this attraction was from the first most powerful. On that point we have not only the weighty testimony of Dorothy Wordsworth, as conveyed in her often-quoted description [2] of her brother"s new acquaintance, but the still more conclusive evidence of her brother"s own acts. He gave the best possible proof of the fascination which had been exercised over him by quitting Racedown with his sister for Alfoxden near Nether Stowey within a few weeks of his first introduction to Coleridge, a change of abode for which, as Miss Wordsworth has expressly recorded, "our princ.i.p.al inducement was Coleridge"s society."
By a curious coincidence the two poets were at this time simultaneously sickening for what may perhaps be appropriately called the "poetic measles." They were each engaged in the composition of a five-act tragedy, and read scenes to each other, and to each other"s admiration, from their respective dramas. Neither play was fortunate in its immediate destiny. Wordsworth"s tragedy, the _Borderers_, was greatly commended by London critics and decisively rejected by the management of Covent Garden. As for Coleridge, the negligent Sheridan did not even condescend to acknowledge the receipt of his ma.n.u.script; his play was pa.s.sed from hand to hand among the Drury Lane Committee; but not till many years afterwards did _Osorio_ find its way under another name to the footlights.
For the next twelvemonth the intercourse between the two poets was close and constant, and most fruitful in results of high moment to English literature. It was in their daily rambles among the Quantock Hills that they excogitated that twofold theory of the essence and functions of poetry which was to receive such notable ill.u.s.tration in their joint volume of verse, the _Lyrical Ballads_; it was during a walk over the Quantock Hills that by far the most famous poem of that series, the _Ancient Mariner_, was conceived and in part composed.
The publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ in the spring of the year 1798 was, indeed, an event of double significance for English poetry.
It marked an epoch in the creative life of Coleridge, and a no less important one in the critical life of Wordsworth. In the _Biographia Literaria_ the origination of the plan of the work is thus described:--
"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our conversation turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the interest aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real.... For the second cla.s.s, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the _Lyrical Ballads_, in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which const.i.tutes poetic faith. Mr.
Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to excite a feeling a.n.a.logous to the supernatural by awakening the mind"s attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes which see not, ears that hear not, and hearts which neither feel nor understand."
We may measure the extent to which the poetic teaching and practice of Wordsworth have influenced subsequent taste and criticism by noting how completely the latter of these two functions of poetry has overshadowed the former. To lend the charm of imagination to the real will appear to many people to be not one function of poetry merely but its very essence. To them it is poetry, and the only thing worthy of the name; while the correlative function of lending the force of reality to the imaginary will appear at best but a superior kind of metrical romancing, or clever telling of fairy tales. Nor of course can there, from the point of view of the highest conception of the poet"s office, be any comparison between the two. In so far as we regard poetry as contributing not merely to the pleasure of the mind but to its health and strength--in so far as we regard it in its capacity not only to delight but to sustain, console, and tranquillise the human spirit-- there is, of course, as much difference between the idealistic and the realistic forms of poetry as there is between a narcotic potion and a healing drug. The one, at best, can only enable a man to forget his burdens; the other fortifies him to endure them. It is perhaps no more than was naturally to be expected of our brooding and melancholy age, that poetry (when it is not a mere voluptuous record of the subjective impressions of sense) should have become almost limited in its very meaning to the exposition of the imaginative or spiritual aspect of the world of realities; but so it is now, and so in Coleridge"s time it clearly was _not_. Coleridge, in the pa.s.sage above quoted, shows no signs of regarding one of the two functions which he attributes to poetry as any more accidental or occasional than the other; and the fact that the realistic portion of the _Lyrical Ballads_ so far exceeded in amount its supernatural element, he attributes not to any inherent supremacy in the claims of the former to attention but simply to the greater industry which Wordsworth had displayed in his special department of the volume. For his own part, he says, "I wrote the _Ancient Mariner_, and was preparing, among other poems, the _Dark Ladie_ and the _Christabel_, in which I should have more nearly realised my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth"s industry had proved so much more successful, and the number of the poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter." There was certainly a considerable disparity between the amount of their respective contributions to the volume, which, in fact, contained nineteen pieces by Wordsworth and only four by Coleridge.
Practically, indeed, we may reduce this four to one; for, of the three others, the two scenes from _Osorio_ are without special distinction, and the _Nightingale_, though a graceful poem, and containing an admirably-studied description of the bird"s note, is too slight and short to claim any importance in the series. But the one long poem which Coleridge contributed to the collection is alone sufficient to a.s.sociate it for ever with his name. _Unum sed leonem._ To any one who should have taunted him with the comparative infertility of his Muse he might well have returned the haughty answer of the lioness in the fable, when he could point in justification of it to the _Rime of the Ancient Marinere_.
There is, I may a.s.sume, no need at the present day to discuss the true place in English literature of this unique product of the human imagination. One is bound, however, to attempt to correlate and adjust it to the rest of the poet"s work, and this, it must be admitted, is a most difficult piece of business. Never was there a poem so irritating to a critic of the "pigeon-holing" variety. It simply defies him; and yet the instinct which he obeys is so excusable, because in fact so universal, that one feels guilty of something like disloyalty to the very principles of order in smiling at his disappointment. Complete and symmetrical cla.s.sification is so fascinating an amus.e.m.e.nt; it would simplify so many subjects of study, if men and things would only consent to rank themselves under different categories, and remain there; it would, in particular, be so inexpressibly convenient to be able to lay your hand upon your poet whenever you wanted him by merely turning to a shelf labelled "Realistic" or "Imaginative" (nay, perhaps, to the still greater saving of labour--Objective or Subjective), that we cannot be surprised at the strength of the aforesaid instinct in many a critical mind. Nor should it be hard to realise its revolt against those single exceptions which bring its generalisations to nought. When the pigeon-hole will admit every "doc.u.ment" but one, the case is hard indeed; and it is not too much to say that the _Ancient Mariner_ is the one doc.u.ment which the pigeon-hole in this instance declines to admit. If Coleridge had only refrained from writing this remarkable poem, or if, having done so, he had written more poems like it, the critic might have ticketed him with a quiet mind, and gone on his way complacent. As it is, however, the poet has contrived in virtue of this performance not only to defeat cla.s.sification but to defy it.
For the weird ballad abounds in those very qualities in which Coleridge"s poetry with all its merits is most conspicuously deficient, while on the other hand it is wholly free from the faults with which he is most frequently and justly chargeable. One would not have said in the first place that the author of _Religious Musings_, still less of the _Monody on the Death of Chatterton_, was by any means the man to have compa.s.sed triumphantly at the very first attempt the terseness, vigour, and _navete_ of the true ballad-manner. To attain this, Coleridge, the student of his early verse must feel, would have rather more to retrench and much more to restrain than might be the case with many other youthful poets. The exuberance of immaturity, the want of measure, the "not knowing where to stop," are certainly even more conspicuous in the poems of 1796 than they are in most productions of the same stage of poetic development; and these qualities, it is needless to say, require very stern chastening from him who would succeed in the style which Coleridge attempted for the first time in the _Ancient Mariner_.
The circ.u.mstances of this immortal ballad"s birth have been related with such fulness of detail by Wordsworth, and Coleridge"s own references to them are so completely reconcilable with that account, that it must have required all De Quincey"s consummate ingenuity as a mischief-maker to detect any discrepancy between the two.
In the autumn of 1797, records Wordsworth in the MS. notes which he left behind him, "Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and myself started from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon with a view to visit Linton and the Valley of Stones near to it; and as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem to be sent to the _New Monthly Magazine_. Accordingly we set off, and proceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet; and in the course of this walk was planned the poem of the _Ancient Mariner_, founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr.
Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge"s invention, but certain parts I suggested; for example, some crime was to be committed which should bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been reading in Shelvocke"s _Voyages_, a day or two before, that while doubling Cape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses in that lat.i.tude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet.
"Suppose," said I, "you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime." The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the poem. The gloss with which it was subsequently accompanied was not thought of by either of us at the time, at least not a hint of it was given to me, and I have no doubt it was a gratuitous afterthought. We began the composition together on that to me memorable evening. I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular--
""And listened like a three years" child: The Mariner had his will."
"These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with unnecessary scrupulosity recorded,[3] slipped out of his mind, as they well might. As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly (I speak of the same evening) our respective manners proved so widely different that it would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog.... The _Ancient Mariner_ grew and grew till it became too important for our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; and we began to think of a volume which was to consist, as Mr.
Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects." Except that the volume ultimately determined on was to consist only "partly" and not "chiefly" of poems on supernatural subjects (in the result, as has been seen, it consisted "chiefly" of poems upon natural subjects), there is nothing in this account which cannot be easily reconciled with the probable facts upon which De Quincey bases his hinted charge against Coleridge in his _Lake Poets_. It was not Coleridge who had been reading Shelvocke"s _Voyages_, but Wordsworth, and it is quite conceivable, therefore, that the source from which his friend had derived the idea of the killing of the albatross may (if indeed he was informed of it at the time) have escaped his memory twelve years afterwards, when the conversation with De Quincey took place. Hence, in "disowning his obligations to Shelvocke," he may not by any means have intended to suggest that the albatross incident was his own thought. Moreover, De Quincey himself supplies another explanation of the matter, which we know, from the above-quoted notes of Wordsworth"s, to be founded upon fact. "It is possible," he adds, "from something which Coleridge said on another occasion, that before meeting a fable in which to embody his ideas he had meditated a poem on delirium, confounding its own dream- scenery with external things, and connected with the imagery of high lat.i.tudes." Nothing, in fact, would be more natural than that Coleridge, whose idea of the haunted seafarer was primarily suggested by his friend"s dream, and had no doubt been greatly elaborated in his own imagination before being communicated to Wordsworth at all, should have been unable, after a considerable lapse of time, to distinguish between incidents of his own imagining and those suggested to him by others. And, in any case, the "unnecessary scrupulosity," rightly attributed to him by Wordsworth with respect to this very poem, is quite incompatible with any intentional denial of obligations.
Such, then, was the singular and even prosaic origin of the _Ancient Mariner_--a poem written to defray the expenses of a tour; surely the most sublime of "pot-boilers" to be found in all literature. It is difficult, from amid the astonishing combination of the elements of power, to select that which is the most admirable; but, considering both the character of the story and of its particular vehicle, perhaps the greatest achievement of the poem is the simple realistic force of its narrative. To achieve this was of course Coleridge"s main object: he had undertaken to "transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imaginations that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which const.i.tutes poetic faith." But it is easier to undertake this than to perform it, and much easier to perform it in prose than in verse--with the a.s.sistance of the everyday and the commonplace than without it.
Balzac"s _Peau de Chagrin_ is no doubt a great feat of the realistic-supernatural; but no one can help feeling how much the author is aided by his "broker"s clerk" style of description, and by the familiar Parisian scenes among which he makes his hero move. It is easier to compa.s.s verisimilitude in the Palais-Royal than on the South Pacific, to say nothing of the thousand a.s.sisting touches, out of place in rhyme and metre, which can be thrown into a prose narrative. The _Ancient Mariner_, however, in spite of all these drawbacks, is as real to the reader as is the hero of the _Peau de Chagrin_; we are as convinced of the curse upon one of the doomed wretches as upon the other; and the strange phantasmagoric haze which is thrown around the ship and the lonely voyager leaves their outlines as clear as if we saw them through the sunshine of the streets of Paris. Coleridge triumphs over his difficulties by sheer vividness of imagery and terse vigour of descriptive phrase--two qualities for which his previous poems did not prove him to possess by any means so complete a mastery. For among all the beauties of his earlier landscapes we can hardly reckon that of intense and convincing truth. He seems seldom before to have written, as Wordsworth nearly always seems to write, "with his eye on the object;" and certainly he never before displayed any remarkable power of completing his word-picture with a few touches. In the _Ancient Mariner_ his eye seems never to wander from his object, and again and again the scene starts out upon the canvas in two or three strokes of the brush. The skeleton ship, with the dicing demons on its deck; the setting sun peering "through its ribs, as if through a dungeon- grate;" the water-snakes under the moonbeams, with the "elfish light"
falling off them "in h.o.a.ry flakes" when they reared; the dead crew, who work the ship and "raise their limbs like lifeless tools"--everything seems to have been actually _seen_, and we believe it all as the story of a truthful eye-witness. The details of the voyage, too, are all chronicled with such order and regularity, there is such a diary- like air about the whole thing, that we accept it almost as if it were a series of extracts from the ship"s "log." Then again the execution--a great thing to be said of so long a poem--is marvellously equal throughout; the story never drags or flags for a moment, its felicities of diction are perpetual, and it is scarcely marred by a single weak line. What could have been better said of the instantaneous descent of the tropical night than
"The Sun"s rim dips; the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark;"
what more weirdly imagined of the "cracks and growls" of the rending iceberg than that they sounded "like noises in a swound"? And how beautifully steals in the pa.s.sage that follows upon the cessation of the spirit"s song--
"It ceased; yet still the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon, A noise like to a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune."
Then, as the ballad draws to its close, after the ship has drifted over the harbour-bar--
"And I with sobs did pray-- O let me be awake, my G.o.d; Or let me sleep alway,"
with what consummate art are we left to imagine the physical traces which the mariner"s long agony had left behind it by a method far more terrible than any direct description--the effect, namely, which the sight of him produces upon others--
"I moved my lips--the Pilot shrieked And fell down in a fit; The holy Hermit raised his eyes, And prayed where he did sit.
"I took the oars: the Pilot"s boy, _Who now doth crazy go_, Laughed loud and long, and all the while His eyes went to and fro.
"Ha! ha!" quoth he, "full plain I see, The Devil knows how to row.""
Perfect consistency of plan, in short, and complete equality of execution, brevity, self-restraint, and an unerring sense of artistic propriety--these are the chief notes of the _Ancient Mariner_, as they are _not_, in my humble judgment, the chief notes of any poem of Coleridge"s before or since. And hence it is that this masterpiece of ballad minstrelsy is, as has been said, so confounding to the "pigeon-holing" mind.
The next most famous poem of this or indeed of any period of Coleridge"s life is the fragment of _Christabel_, which, however, in spite of the poet"s own opinion on that point, it is difficult to regard as "a more effective realisation" of the "natural-supernatural" idea. Beautiful as it is, it possesses none of that human interest with which, according to this idea, the narrator of the poetic story must undertake to invest it. Nor can the unfinished condition in which it was left be fairly held to account for this, for the characters themselves--the lady Christabel, the witch Geraldine, and even the baron Sir Leoline himself--are somewhat shadowy creations, with too little hold upon life and reality, and too much resemblance to the flitting figures of a dream. Powerful in their way as are the lines descriptive of the spell thrown over Christabel by her uncanny guest--lines at the recitation of which Sh.e.l.ley is said to have fainted--we cannot say that they strike a reader with such a sense of horror as should be excited by the contemplation of a real flesh-and-blood maiden subdued by "the shrunken serpent eyes" of a sorceress, and constrained "pa.s.sively to imitate" their "look of dull and treacherous hate." Judging it, however, by any other standard than that of the poet"s own erecting, one must certainly admit the claim of _Christabel_ to rank very high as a work of pure creative art. It is so thoroughly suffused and permeated with the glow of mystical romance, the whole atmosphere of the poem is so exquisitely appropriate to the subject, and so marvellously preserved throughout, that our lack of belief in the reality of the scenes presented to us detracts but little from the pleasure afforded by the artistic excellence of its presentment. It abounds, too, in isolated pictures of surpa.s.sing vividness and grace-- word-pictures which live in the "memory of the eye" with all the wholeness and tenacity of an actual painting. Geraldine appearing to Christabel beneath the oak, and the two women stepping lightly across the hall "that echoes still, pa.s.s as lightly as you will," are pictures of this kind; and nowhere out of Keats"s _Eve of St. Agnes_ is there any "interior" to match that of Christabel"s chamber, done as it is in little more than half a dozen lines. These beauties, it is true, are fragmentary, like the poem itself, but there is no reason to believe that the poem itself would have gained anything in its entirety--that is to say, as a poetic narrative--by completion. Its main idea--that the purity of a pure maiden is a charm more powerful for the protection of those dear to her than the spells of the evil one for their destruction--had been already sufficiently indicated, and the mode in which Coleridge, it seems, intended to have worked would hardly have added anything to its effect. [4] And although he clung till very late in life to the belief that he _could_ have finished it in after days with no change of poetic manner--"If easy in my mind," he says in a letter to be quoted hereafter, "I have no doubt either of the reawakening power or of the kindling inclination"--there are few students of his later poems who will share his confidence. Charles Lamb strongly recommended him to leave it unfinished, and Hartley Coleridge, in every respect as competent a judge on that point as could well be found, always declared his conviction that his father could not, at least _qualis ab incepto_, have finished the poem.
The much-admired little piece first published in the _Lyrical Ballads_ under the t.i.tle of _Love_, and probably best known by its (original) first and most pregnant stanza, [5] possesses a twofold interest for the student of Coleridge"s life and works, as ill.u.s.trating at once one of the most marked characteristics of his peculiar temperament, and one of the most distinctive features of his poetic manner. The lines are remarkable for a certain strange fascination of melody--a quality for which Coleridge, who was not unreasonably proud of his musical gift, is said to have especially prized them; and they are noteworthy also as perhaps the fullest expression of the almost womanly softness of Coleridge"s nature. To describe their tone as effeminate would be unfair and untrue, for effeminacy in the work of a male hand would necessarily imply something of falsity of sentiment, and from this they are entirely free. But it must certainly be admitted that for a man"s description of his wooing the warmth of feeling which pervades them is as nearly s.e.xless in character as it is possible to conceive; and, beautiful as the verses are, one cannot but feel that they only escape the "namby-pamby" by the breadth of a hair.
As to the wild dream-poem _Kubla Khan_, it is hardly more than a psychological curiosity, and only that perhaps in respect of the completeness of its metrical form. For amid its picturesque but vague imagery there is nothing which might not have presented itself, and the like of which has not perhaps actually presented itself, to many a half-awakened brain of far lower imaginative energy during its hours of full daylight consciousness than that of Coleridge. Nor possibly is it quite an unknown experience to many of us to have even a fully-written record, so to speak, of such impressions imprinted instantaneously on the mind, the conscious composition of whole pages of narrative, descriptive, or cogitative matter being compressed as it were into a moment of time. Unfortunately, however, the impression made upon the ordinary brain is effaced as instantaneously as it is produced; the abnormal exaltation of the creative and apprehensive power is quite momentary, being probably indeed confined to the single moment between sleep and waking; and the mental tablet which a second before was covered so thickly with the transcripts of ideas and images, all far more vivid, or imagined to be so, than those of waking life, and all apprehended with a miraculous simultaneity by the mind, is converted into a _tabula rasa_ in the twinkling of a half-opened eye. The wonder in Coleridge"s case was that his brain retained the word-impressions sufficiently long to enable him to commit them, to the extent at least of some fifty odd lines, to paper, and that, according to his own belief, this is but a mere fraction of what but for an unlucky interruption in the work of transcribing he would have been able to preserve. His own account of this curious incident is as follows:--
"In the summer of 1797 the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading, the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas"s _Pilgrimage_:--"Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed by a wall." The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the corresponding expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effect. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and, taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had pa.s.sed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter."
This poem, though written in 1797, remained, like _Christabel_, in MS. till 1816. These were then published in a thin quarto volume, together with another piece called the _Pains of Sleep_, a composition of many years" later date than the other two, and of which there will be occasion to say a word or two hereafter.
At no time, however, not even in this the high-tide of its activity, was the purely poetic impulse dominant for long together in Coleridge"s mind. He was born with the instincts of the orator, and still more with those of the teacher, and I doubt whether he ever really regarded himself as fulfilling the true mission of his life except at those moments when he was seeking by spoken word to exercise direct influence over his fellow-men. At the same time, however, such was the restlessness of his intellect, and such his instability of purpose, that he could no more remain constant to what he deemed his true vocation than he could to any other. This was now to be signally ill.u.s.trated. Soon after the _Ancient Mariner_ was written, and some time before the volume which was to contain it appeared, Coleridge quitted Stowey for Shrewsbury to undertake the duties of a Unitarian preacher in that town. This was in the month of January 1798, [6] and it seems pretty certain, though exact dates are not to be ascertained, that he was back again at Stowey early in the month of February. In the pages of the _Liberal_ (1822) William Hazlitt has given a most graphic and picturesque description of Coleridge"s appearance and performance in his Shrewsbury pulpit; and, judging from this, one can well believe, what indeed was to have been antecedently expected, that had he chosen to remain faithful to his new employment he might have rivalled the reputation of the greatest preacher of the time. But his friends the Wedgwoods, the two sons of the great potter, whose acquaintance he had made a few years earlier, were apparently much dismayed at the prospect of his deserting the library for the chapel, and they offered him an annuity of 150 a year on condition of his retiring from the ministry and devoting himself entirely to the study of poetry and philosophy. Coleridge was staying at the house of Hazlitt"s father when the letter containing this liberal offer reached him, "and he seemed," says the younger Hazlitt, "to make up his mind to close with the proposal in the act of tying on one of his shoes."
Another inducement to so speedy an acceptance of it is no doubt to be found in the fact of its presenting to Coleridge an opportunity for the fulfilment of a cherished desire--that, namely, of "completing his education," as he regarded it, by studying the German language, and acquiring an acquaintance with the theology and philosophy of Germany in that country itself. This prospect he was enabled, through the generosity of the Wedgwoods, to put into execution towards the end of 1798. But before pa.s.sing on from this culminating and, to all intents and purposes, this closing year of Coleridge"s career as a poet it will be proper to attempt something like a final review of his poetic work.
Admirable as much of that work is, and unique in quality as it is throughout, I must confess that it leaves on my own mind a stronger impression of the unequal and imperfect than does that of any poet at all approaching Coleridge in imaginative vigour and intellectual grasp.
It is not a mere inequality and imperfection of style like that which so seriously detracts from the pleasure of reading Byron. Nor is it that the thought is often _impar sibi_--that, like Wordsworth"s, it is too apt to descend from the mountain-tops of poetry to the flats of commonplace, if not into the bogs of bathos. In both these respects Coleridge may and does occasionally offend, but his workmanship is, on the whole, as much more artistic than Byron"s as the material of his poetry is of more uniformly equal value than Wordsworth"s. Yet, with almost the sole exception of the _Ancient Mariner_, his work is in a certain sense more disappointing than that of either. In spite of his theory as to the twofold function of poetry we must finally judge that of Coleridge, as of any other poet, by its relation to the actual.
Ancient Mariners and Christabels--the people, the scenery, and the incidents of an imaginary world--may be handled by poetry once and again to the wonder and delight of man; but feats of this kind cannot-- or cannot in the Western world, at any rate--be repeated indefinitely, and the ultimate test of poetry, at least for the modern European reader, is its treatment of actualities--its relations to the world of human action, pa.s.sion, sensation, thought. And when we try Coleridge"s poetry in any one of these four regions of life, we seem forced to admit that, despite all its power and beauty, it at no moment succeeds in convincing us, as at their best moments Wordsworth"s and even Byron"s continually does, that the poet has found his true poetic vocation--that he is interpreting that aspect of life which he can interpret better than he can any other, and which no other poet, save the one who has vanquished all poets in their own special fields of achievement, can interpret as well as he. In no poem of actuality does Coleridge so victoriously show himself to be the right man at the right work as does Wordsworth in certain moods of seership and Byron in certain moments of pa.s.sion. Of them at such moods and moments we feel a.s.sured that they have discovered where their real strength lies, and have put it forth to the utmost. But we never feel satisfied that Coleridge has discovered where _his_ real strength lies, and he strikes us as feeling no more certainty on the point himself. Strong as is his pinion, his flight seems to resemble rather that of the eaglet than of the full-grown eagle even to the last. He continues "mewing his mighty youth" a little too long. There is a tentativeness of manner which seems to come from a conscious apt.i.tude for many poetic styles and an incapacity to determine which should be definitively adopted and cultivated to perfection. Hence one too often returns from any prolonged ramble through Coleridge"s poetry with an unsatisfied feeling which does not trouble us on our return from the best literary country of Byron or Wordsworth. Byron has taken us by rough roads, and Wordsworth led us through some desperately flat and dreary lowlands to his favourite "bits;" but we feel that we have seen mountain and valley, wood and river, glen and waterfall at their best. But Coleridge"s poetry leaves too much of the feeling of a walk through a fine country on a misty day. We may have had many a peep of beautiful scenery and occasional glimpses of the sublime; but the medium of vision has been of variable quality, and somehow we come home with an uneasy suspicion that we have not seen as much as we might. It is obvious, however, even upon a cursory consideration of the matter, that this disappointing element in Coleridge"s poetry is a necessary result of the circ.u.mstances of its production; for the period of his productive activity (at least after attaining manhood) was too short to enable a mind with so many intellectual distractions to ascertain its true poetic bent, and to concentrate its energies thereupon. If he seems always to be feeling his way towards the work which he could do best, it is for the very good reason that this is what, from 1796 to 1800, he was continually doing as a matter of fact. The various styles which he attempted--and for a season, in each case, with such brilliant results--are forms of poetic expression corresponding, on the face of them, to poetic impulses of an essentially fleeting nature. The political or politico-religious odes were the offspring of youthful democratic enthusiasm; the supernatural poems, so to call them for want of a better name, had their origin in an almost equally youthful and more than equally transitory pa.s.sion for the wild and wondrous.
Political disillusion is fatal to the one impulse, and mere advance in years extinguishes the other. Visions of Ancient Mariners and Christabels do not revisit the mature man, and the Toryism of middle life will hardly inspire odes to anything.
With the extinction of these two forms of creative impulse Coleridge"s poetic activity, from causes to be considered hereafter, came almost entirely to an end, and into what later forms it might subsequently have developed remains therefore a matter more or less of conjecture.
Yet I think there is almost a sufficiency of _ priori_ evidence as to what that form would have been. Had the poet in him survived until years had "brought the philosophic mind," he would doubtless have done for the human spirit, in its purely isolated self-communings, what Wordsworth did for it in its communion with external nature. All that the poetry of Wordsworth is for the mind which loves to hold converse with the world of things; this, and more perhaps than this--if more be possible--would the poetry of Coleridge have been for the mind which abides by preference in the world of self-originating emotion and introspective thought. Wordsworth"s primary function is to interpret nature to man: the interpretation of man to himself is with him a secondary process only-the response, in almost every instance, to impressions from without. This poet can n.o.bly brace the human heart to fort.i.tude; but he must first have seen the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor. The "presence and the spirit interfused" throughout creation is revealed to us in moving and majestic words; yet the poet requires to have felt it "in the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air" before he feels it "in the mind of man." But what Wordsworth grants only to the reader who wanders with him in imagination by lake and mountain, the Muse of Coleridge, had she lived, would have bestowed upon the man who has entered into his inner chamber and shut to the door. This, it seems to me, is the work for which genius, temperament, and intellectual habit would alike have fitted him. For while his feeling for internal nature was undoubtedly less profound, less mystically penetrating than Wordsworth"s, his sensibilities in general were incomparably quicker and more subtle than those of the friend in whom he so generously recognised a master; and the reach of his sympathies extends to forms of human emotion, to subjects of human interest which lay altogether outside the somewhat narrow range of Wordsworth"s.
And, with so magnificent a furniture of those mental and moral qualities which should belong to "a singer of man to men," it must not be forgotten that his technical equipment for the work was of the most splendidly effective kind. If a critic like Mr. Swinburne seems to speak in exaggerated praise of Coleridge"s lyrics, we can well understand their enchantment for a master of music like himself.
Probably it was the same feeling which made Sh.e.l.ley describe _France_ as "the finest ode in the English language." With all, in fact, who hold--as it is surely plausible to hold--that the first duty of a singer is to sing, the poetry of Coleridge will always be more likely to be cla.s.sed above than below its merits, great as they are.
For, if we except some occasional lapses in his sonnets--a metrical form in which, at his best, he is quite "out of the running" with Wordsworth--his melody never fails him. He is a singer always, as Wordsworth is not always, and Byron almost never. The _"olian Harp_ to which he so loved to listen does not more surely respond in music to the breeze of heaven than does Coleridge"s poetic utterance to the wind of his inspiration. Of the dreamy fascination which Love exercises over a listening ear I have already spoken; and there is hardly less charm in the measure and a.s.sonances of the _Circa.s.sian Love Chant. Christabel_ again, considered solely from the metrical point of view, is a veritable _tour de force_--the very model of a metre for romantic legend: as which, indeed, it was imitated with sufficient grace and spirit, but seldom with anything approaching to Coleridge"s melody, by Sir Walter Scott.
Endowed therefore with so glorious a gift of song, and only not fully master of his poetic means because of the very versatility of his artistic power and the very variety and catholicity of his youthful sympathies, it is unhappily but too certain that the world has lost much by that perversity of conspiring accidents which so untimely silenced Coleridge"s muse. And the loss is the more trying to posterity because he seems, to a not, I think, too curiously considering criticism, to have once actually struck that very chord which would have sounded the most movingly beneath his touch,--and to have struck it at the very moment when the failing hand was about to quit the keys for ever.
"Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra Esse sinunt."
I cannot regard it as merely fantastic to believe that the _Dejection_, that dirge of infinite pathos over the grave of creative imagination, might, but for the fatal decree which had by that time gone forth against Coleridge"s health and happiness, have been but the cradle-cry of a new-born poetic power, in which imagination, not annihilated but transmigrant, would have splendidly proved its vitality through other forms of song.