Though it must be confessed that this is a sermon, it is a sermon in the very best style. In that same Naturalism which in due time consistently developed into pure humanism and revolt against convention, there was at first an inclination to admonition and to evangelic piety. It sought out the simple-hearted, the poor, the mean in the eyes of the world—for this was Gospel morality. It rejected the highly cultured, and chose as its heroes fishermen and peasants—in this also following Gospel example. Hence it is that we have in Wordsworth perfectly consistent worship of nature along with the exhortatory and evangelically homiletic element which finds such favour in England. And even his purely didactic poems are not to be indiscriminately rejected. There is often a peculiar grandeur in the manner in which the simple lesson is enforced. There is, for instance, real sublimity in the passage inLaodamiain which it is impressed upon the sorrowing wife that, instead of craving for the return of her husband, she ought to renounce her desire, and purify herself through her love to enjoy another, nobler, more spiritual life:—
"Learn by a mortal yearning to ascendTowards a higher object.—Love was given,Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for that end:For this the passion to excess was driven—That self might be annulled."
Even the abstractOde to Duty, which is inspired by an enthusiasm of the nature of Kant's, contains a couple of magnificent lines which are as contrary to reason as one of the sublime paradoxes of the Fathers of the Church. It is to Duty that the poet cries:
"Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong;And the most ancient Heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong."
From all the poems of this species, however, the reader will quickly turn again to Wordsworth's specialty, his idylls.
Let us cast another glance at these, and at the theory which their author intended them to illustrate. It is quite certain that Wordsworth attributed more poetical importance to the representation of rural life than is really its due. His surroundings were calculated to produce this theoretical overvaluation. The possibility of making heroes of the shepherd-farmers of Cumberland and Westmoreland was due to the fact that these men (who, though they were independent enough not to be compelled to work for others, were nevertheless obliged to lead an industrious, frugally simple life) possessed real poetical qualifications. The theory that rural life in itself improves and ennobles, is a superstition; it is quite as apt to dull and blunt. Coleridge has, for example, pointed out that when the manner in which the poor-laws were administered in Liverpool, Manchester, and Bristol, was compared with the manner in which relief was distributed in the country, the result was distinctly in favour of the towns.
Wordsworth has, further, over-estimated the importance of the part which the representation of rural occupations plays in his own poetry. Not only do we observe that many of the principal personages in his best poems (such asRuth, Michael, The Brothers) are not expressly peasants or dwellers in the country; but we are also conscious that his passion for Naturalism and, in close connection with this, his inclination to try to edify by glorification of the lower classes, have often led him to attribute to a man or woman of low position, qualities and powers which there is little probability of his or her possessing. A paradox which he enounces with evident satisfaction inThe Excursionis, that many a gifted poet exists, unsuspected, among the lower classes.[4]It is satisfactory to a man with Wordsworth's religious tendencies to believe that talent is independent of wealth and outward position. But even allowing this to be true, would it not still be absurd to make the poet-hero of a poem a chimney-sweep by profession, and then explain in a carefully invented biography how it came to pass that he was, at one and the same time, poet, philosopher, and sweep? Only in real biography are such phenomena permissible; in fiction, Naturalism carried to such an extreme repels by its unlikeliness. And what difference is there between this and the many cases in which Wordsworth puts into the mouth of a pedlar, a leech-gatherer, a labourer, words which we cannot but be astonished to hear from such lips? Hence, to justify and explain his characters, he is obliged to introduce numbers of accidental, subordinate details of the kind required to prove the possibility of a fact in real life, but of the kind which we willingly forgo in poetry. The excessive attention paid to probability, the petty anxiety to explain the reason of everything, have a fatiguing effect—especially in the long introductions and descriptions inThe Excursion, which Byron wittily calls Wordsworth's "eternal: Here we go up, up, and up, and here we go down, down, and here round about, round about!"
Wordsworth's choice of themes leads him, moreover, to a singularity in the matter of language which may be termed the extreme literary issue of this Naturalism. It was his theory that the language spoken by the class which he described was, when purified from its defects, the best of all, "because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and emotions in simple and unelaborated expressions." It is, consequently, his opinion, that it is impossible for any author to find a better manner of expression, no matter whether he is writing in prose or in verse. And this leads him to the enunciation of his famous and interesting paradox:that there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition. If this only meant disapprobation of all the tiresome and foolish distortions of language, to which the scarcity of rhymes and the lack of the gift of rhythm have driven so many of even the most eminent poets, we should heartily agree with him. Théodore de Banville has, with reason on his side—though it is the severe reason which demands the impossible—given as contents to the chapter in hisPetit Traité de Poésie françaiseentitledLicentia poetica, simply the words: "Il n'y en a pas." But it is an entirely different meaning which Wordsworth intends his maxim to convey. He maintains not only that the language of a large portion of every good poem must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but likewise that some of the most interesting parts of the very best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose. For, however lively and truthful the poet's language may be, there cannot be a doubt, says Wordsworth, that it must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that which is uttered by men in real life; in other words—it can never surpass, and only at its best approach, the prose of reality. This theory he defended with genuine English obstinacy against the attacks made upon it from every direction. He quotes, as a specimen of the parodies of poetry in which the language closely resembles that of life and nature, Dr. Johnson's stanza:
"I put my hat upon my headAnd walked into the Strand,And there I met another man,Whose hat was in his hand."
This is not poetry, says the public. Granted! says Wordsworth. But the proper thing to be said is not: This is not poetry; but: This is wanting in meaning; it is neither interesting in itself, nor can it lead to anything interesting; consequently it cannot excite thought or feeling in the reader. "Why take pains to prove that an ape is not a Newton, when it is self-evident that he is not a man?" The accepted idea is, according to Wordsworth, that an author, by the act of writing in verse, makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association, that certain classes of idea and expression will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded. This doctrine Wordsworth opposes with the declaration of his conviction of the similarity of good poetry and good prose, a conviction which was founded on dislike of poetic affectation, but which led him in his own poetry, now to the narrowest limitation, now to the utmost possible flattening out of his own in many respects masterly and model style.
There is more than one argument against the extremely high estimation of the language of the rural population which forms Wordsworth's starting-point, and which is not without its resemblance to the cult of the peasant language initiated in Denmark by Grundtvig and in Norway by the "Maalstrævere" (agitators for the universal employment of a Norwegian based on the peasant dialects). The principal one is, that the language of the peasant, purified, as Wordsworth demands, from provincial expressions and subjected to the rules of grammar, is not different from that of any other sensible man, except in this, that the peasant's ideas are fewer and vaguer. By reason of its inferior degree of development, his mind dwells only upon single, isolated facts, drawn from his own narrow experience, or from the records of traditional belief, whereas the educated man sees the connection between things, and seeks for universal laws. Wordsworth is of opinion that thebestpart of language is derived from the objects which surround and occupy the peasant. But the ideas connected with food, shelter, safety, comfort, are surely not those which provide the best part of language. Nor can we agree with him when he asserts that nothing but the infusion of a certain degree of passion into this language is required to entitle it to be called poetic; for passion neither creates new thoughts nor new provision of words; it only increases the force of those already in existence; it cannot be expected to make the language of daily intercourse poetry, when it is hardly capable of making it prose.
What strikes us from the very first in Wordsworth's vindication of Naturalism is his confounding of two things—prose, and what he calls "ordinary language" terms which he applies indiscriminately. Good prose is language which has been purified from the vain and meaningless repetitions and the uncertain, halting phraseology which are the inevitable outcome of the confusion due to insufficient education. Wordsworth has too frequently neglected this purifying process, when introducing dramatic dialogue into his own poems. It is this unfortunate passion for the most grovellingly exact imitation, which produces the sudden and disagreeable transitions from passages in a noble, elevated style, to passages with no style at all. See, for example,The Blind Highland Boy.
"Poetry," says Wordsworth, "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." The aim of the poet is the truthful imitation of nature, with the one restriction, that of the necessity of giving pleasure—not merely the straightforward, direct truth; therefore he employs the metrical form of composition, which provides the reader with small, but continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise. Metre produces its effect by continually arousing and satisfying curiosity, but in such a simple manner that it does not draw any separate attention to itself. It acts powerfully but unobservedly upon the mind, like artificially altered air, or the wine drunk during an eager discussion. By its steady recurrence it tempers and modifies the excitement or pain produced by the intelligence communicated; and by its tendency to divest language of its reality, it throws a sort of half consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition. Except for this, declares Wordsworth, even the best poetry can in no respect differ from prose. He forgets to ask himself if there are not numbers of common phrases and expressions which, though they are perfectly allowable in prose, would produce a most unpleasant effect in poetry; and forgets, too, to ask if it is not possible that in every serious poem there may occur, without any artificiality, sentences of a construction, and imagery of a kind, which would be impossible in prose.
The only way in which the best poetry corresponds with "the very language of men," is in its expressions resembling those which some few of the most highly cultivated would use on the rarest occasions. In daily converse language wanders unrestrainedly; in public speech it is restrained by imperative connection and continuity of thought; in the prose work, the carefully elaborated sentence progresses naturally through all its twists and turnings; in verse, the form cannot be too exquisite or too compact. Here the doctrine applies which Théophile Gautier preached in his splendid poem,L'Art:—
"Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belleD'une forme au travailRebelle,Vers, marbre, onyx, émail!Point de contraintes fausses!Mais que pour marcher droitTu chausses,Muse, un cothurne étroit!"
But, however much there is to be said against Wordsworth's poetics, or "prosaics," as they might more correctly be called—against theories which were at first accepted as synonymous with the "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" of the witches in Macbeth—they are in the highest degree interesting to the student of literature to-day as an accurate and unambiguous expression of the first literary extreme to which English Naturalism went.
[1]R. S. Mackenzie:Life of Dickens, p. 243.
[1]R. S. Mackenzie:Life of Dickens, p. 243.
[2]Masson:Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and other Essays.
[2]Masson:Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and other Essays.
[3]Johannes Ewald, a Danish poet.—Transcriber's note.
[3]Johannes Ewald, a Danish poet.—Transcriber's note.
[4]Oh! many are the poets that are sownBy nature! men endowed with highest gifts,The vision and the faculty divine,Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.—Excursion: Book I.
[4]Oh! many are the poets that are sownBy nature! men endowed with highest gifts,The vision and the faculty divine,Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.—Excursion: Book I.
We have for a moment lost sight of Coleridge. When Wordsworth and he divided the new kinds of poetry between them, there fell to his share, as the reader will remember, a task which was the exact opposite of Wordsworth's, namely, the treating of supernatural subjects in a natural manner. He fulfilled it in his contributions to the volume published under the title ofLyrical Ballads, and indeed in the greater proportion of the little collection of poems which entitles him to rank high among English poets.
S. T. COLERIDGE
S. T. COLERIDGE
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a country boy, the son of a Devonshire clergyman. He was born in October 1772. From 1782 to 1790 he was at school in London. It was during those school-days, spent at Christ's Hospital, that his friendship with another English Romanticist, his warm admirer, Charles Lamb, was formed. From 1791 to 1793 he studied at Cambridge. He had neither means nor prospects, and in a fit of despair, occasioned either by his debts or by an unhappy love affair, he suddenly enlisted in the 15th Regiment of Light Dragoons, under the name of Silas Titus Cumberback.[1]It certainly does not seem to have been ambition (as in the case of Johannes Ewald a few years earlier) which prompted him to try his fortune as a soldier, but simply want of any other means of subsistence. He was only four months a dragoon. On the stable wall underneath his saddle, he one day scribbled the Latin lament:—
"Eheu quam infortuni miserrimum est fuisse felicem!"
This was discovered by his captain, who inquired into the position of affairs, and arranged with Coleridge's family for his return to Cambridge. On this followed the short period during which the young poet was an anti-orthodox democrat. As such he could expect no advancement in the University. His and Southey's glorification of Robespierre (the first act ofThe Fall of Robespierrewas written by Coleridge, the second and third are Southey's) and their wild project of a communistic settlement have been already mentioned. The little emigrant society they founded consisted only of themselves and two other members, a young Quaker named Lovell, and George Burnet, a school friend of Southey's. But the God Hymen had decided that the year 1795 should witness the wreck of the plans which boded so ill for society. In 1795 Coleridge went to lecture at Bristol, where he displayed the eloquence which (as in the case of the similarly eloquent and persuasive Welhaven) seems to have sapped his power of poetic production. A young lady in the town of Bristol won his heart; and before the year was over, Sara Fricker was married to Coleridge, her sisters, Edith and Mary, to Lovell and Southey—and the emigration plan was abandoned. Coleridge, who was without will-power all his life, could never have carried out a plan laid so long beforehand. He never succeeded in doing anything except what he had not determined to do, or what, from its nature, could not be determined beforehand.
In 1796 the young man, who was still an enthusiastic Unitarian, allowed himself to be persuaded by some other philanthropists—he is always "persuaded"—to publish a weekly magazine calledThe Watchman, which was to consist of thirty-two pages, large octavo, and to cost the reasonable price of fourpence. Its flaming prospectus bore the motto, "Knowledge is power." With the object of enlisting subscribers, the young and ardent propagandist undertook a tour of the country between Bristol and Sheffield, preaching in most of the great towns, "as an hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might be seen on me." The description he has given of this, his Odyssey, shows us the young English Romanticist as he was then and as he continued to be—imprudent in worldly matters, enthusiastic in behalf now of this, now of that religious or political half-truth, yet with a humorous appreciation of his own and others' ridiculousness.
"My campaign commenced at Birmingham; and my first attack was on a rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall, dingy man, in whom length was so predominant over breadth that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundry poker. O that face! I have it before me at this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair,pinguinitescent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder eyebrows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage that I suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck (the only approach to flexure in his whole figure) slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance, lank, dark, very hard, and with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of some one looking at me through a used gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron! But he was one of the thorough-bred, a true lover of liberty, and (I was informed) had proved to the satisfaction of many, that Mr. Pitt was one of the horns of the second beast in the Revelation,that spoke like a dragon." For half-an-hour Coleridge employed all the resources of his eloquence—argued, described, promised, prophesied, beginning with the captivity of nations and ending with the millennium. "My taper man of lights listened with perseverance and praiseworthy patience, though (as I was afterwards told on complaining of certain odours that were not altogether ambrosial) it was a melting-day with him. 'And what, sir,' he said, after a short pause, 'might the cost be?' 'Only fourpence, only fourpence, sir, each number, to be published on every eighth day.' 'That comes to a good deal of money at the end of the year. And how much did you say there was to be for the money?' 'Thirty-two pages, sir! large octavo, closely printed.' 'Thirty and two pages? Bless me, why, except what I does in a family way on the Sabbath, that's more than I ever reads, sir! all the year round. I am as great a one as any man in Brummagem, sir! for liberty and truth and all them sort of things, but as to this, no offence, sir, I must beg to be excused.'"
Thus ended Coleridge's first attempt at recruiting for the war against the Holy Trinity. His second he made in Manchester, where he tried to enlist a stately and opulent wholesale dealer in cottons. This man measured him from top to toe, and asked if he had any bill or invoice of the thing. Coleridge presented him with the prospectus. He rapidly skimmed and hummed over the first side, and still more rapidly the second and concluding page, then most deliberately and significantly rubbed and smoothed one part against the other, put it in his pocket, turned his back with an "Overrun with these articles!" and retired into his counting-house.
After these unsuccessful attempts, the young man gave up the plan of canvassing from house to house, but nevertheless returned from this memorable tour with almost a thousand names on his list of subscribers. But, alas! the publication of the very first number was, as any one knowing Coleridge might have expected, delayed beyond the day announced for its appearance; the second, which contained an essay against fast-days, lost him nearly five hundred subscribers at a blow; and the two following numbers, which were full of attacks on French philosophy and morals, and directed against those "who pleaded to the poor and ignorant instead of pleading for them," made enemies of all his Jacobin and democratic patrons. Coleridge, who communicates all these details himself, does not seem to have any suspicion that he was only receiving a natural punishment for his indecision—an indecision which consisted in never being prepared to accept the consequences of his own theories. He was undecided in politics, undecided in religion. Writing, as an old man, of this time, he himself says: "My head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John;" and he hastens to provide his readers with those convincing proofs of the existence of God and the Holy Trinity which he had not been capable of perceiving in his youth.[2]After the appearance of about a dozen numbers,The Watchmanhad to be given up, and Coleridge took to writing for the newspapers. He began by attacking Pitt's Government, but in course of time, his opinions tending ever more in a conservative direction, he became its ardent supporter, and also, after the occupation of Switzerland by the French, an enemy of France. So hostile to that country were his articles in theMorning Post, that they even attracted the attention of Napoleon, and Coleridge became the object of the First Consul's special enmity. He would probably have been arrested during his residence in Italy, if he had not received timely warning from the Prussian ambassador, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and, through an inferior official, from Napoleon's own uncle, Cardinal Fesch.
The year 1797, in the course of which Coleridge became acquainted with Wordsworth, was, as regards his poetry, the most important in his life; for it was in this year that he wrote his famous ballad,The Ancient Mariner, andChristabel, the fragment which marks a new era in English poetry.
Christabelwas planned as the first of a series of poetical romances, the remainder of which never came into being. It is, without doubt, the first English poem which is permeated by the genuine Romantic spirit; and the new cadences, the new theme, the new style of versification, the novelty generally, made a powerful impression on contemporary poets. The irregular and yet melodious metre appealed so strongly to Scott that he employed it in his first Romantic poem,The Lay of the Last Minstrel. He frankly confesses how much he owed to the beautiful and tantalising fragment,Christabel, which he, like the other poets of the period, made acquaintance with in manuscript; for Coleridge read it aloud in social gatherings for twenty years before it saw the light as public property. Byron, too, heard it first on one of these occasions. Before hearing it he had, in one of his longer poems (The Siege of Corinth, xix.), written some lines which were not unlike some inChristabel. To these lines he, on a future occasion, appended a note in which he praises Coleridge's "wild and singularly original and beautiful poem." But we see from Moore'sLife and Lettersthat there were critics who refused the meed of admiration accorded toChristabelby Scott and Byron, and still more freely by Wordsworth. Jeffrey and Moore himself consider it affected (Memoirs, ii 101; iv. 48). Danish critics, thoroughly initiated into the mysteries of this style by Tieck and the brothers Schlegel, and by their own poet Ingemann, cannot possibly attach so much importance to this fragment. Its excessive naïveté and simplicity, the intentional childishness in style and tone, are to us what buns are to bakers' children. The chief merit of the poem, apart from its full-toned, sweet melody, lies in the peculiar power with which the nature of the wicked fairy is presented to us, thedæmonicelement, which had never been present in such force in English literature before. We must, however, remember that, though the first part of the poem was written in 1797, the second was written and the first revised in 1800—that is to say,afterColeridge had travelled with Wordsworth in Germany, and there made acquaintance with contemporary German poetry, its medieval ground-work, and its latest tendency.
Coleridge's one other poem of any length,The Ancient Mariner, which is even more artificially naïve in style thanChristabel, and is provided, in the manner of the medieval ballads retailed in the little shops in back streets, with a prose index of contents on the margin of the pages, is now the most popular of all his poems, although it was fiercely attacked on its first appearance. On a very unnatural introduction (three guests on their way to a wedding are stopped, and one of them is led to forget his destination, so eloquent is the ancient mariner—"and on the street, too," as Falstaff says) follows a story of all the horrors, ghostly and material, which ensue, because one of the sailors on a ship has been thoughtless enough to kill an albatross which had alighted on the rigging. The whole crew, with the exception of this one man, die, as a punishment for the act of inhospitality. Swinburne tells that, when the poem was new, the English critics were greatly occupied with the question whether its moral (that one should not shoot albatrosses) was not so preponderant that it destroyed the fantastic effect of the poem; whilst others maintained that the defect of the poem was its want of a practical moral. Long afterwards the same matter formed the subject of a dispute between Freiligrath and Julian Schmidt. Modern criticism would willingly excuse the absence of any moral in the ballad if it could find a poetic central idea in it.
A comparison may serve to show its chief shortcoming. In a collection of poems by the Austrian lyric poet, Moritz Hartmann, entitledZeitlosen, there is to be found one which, although it does not profess to owe its origin toThe Ancient Mariner, at first sight strikes the reader as being a direct imitation of it. The metrical form is the same, and in the theme there is a close resemblance.Der Camaois the title of the poem. The Camao, which answers to Coleridge's albatross, is a bird which, in the Middle Ages, was kept in every house in the Pyrenean Peninsula, and treated with a reverence which had its source in a widespread superstition. It was believed, namely, that this bird could not thrive in a house on which rested the stain of a wife's infidelity; it died if there was even the slightest spot on the honour of its master. Its beautiful cage generally hung in the entrance chamber. In Hartmann's poem the old, deranged man who answers to Coleridge's demented mariner, tells how he, as a page, was seized with a violent passion for his master's wife, and how, every time he rushed from her presence, in despair at her coldness and displeasure, he was tortured as he left her apartments by the bird's song in honour of the chastity of the lady to whom it owed its life. The master of the house returns from the war bringing with him his friend, a handsome young minstrel and hero, whom the lady honours with her friendship, and who is, in consequence, soon hated by the jealous page. Quite beside himself, the young man denounces the lady and her friend to his master; but the latter calmly answers that Camao is still alive, and at that moment singing in his mistress's honour. In his jealous, vindictive rage the page kills the bird; Vasco kills his wife; and thenceforward the criminal wanders, demented and restless, from country to country, seeking rest, but finding it nowhere.
As regards virtuosity and originality in the matter of diction,Der Camaois not for a moment to be compared withThe Ancient Mariner; but as regards the poetic central idea, the German poem is not only much superior to its English model, but is in itself a complete, satisfactory criticism of Coleridge's ballad and all the artificial English theories which it represents. InDer Camaothe slaughter of the bird is a real human action performed with a real human motive; the punishment is not a caprice, but a just and natural consequence of the misdeed. The misfortune which the killing of the bird brings to Vasco and his wife has a natural cause and effect connection with that deed, whilst the death of the whole ship's crew, as the result of the cruelty shown to the albatross, is folly. The comparison assists us to a clear understanding of the difference between a true poetical conception of the superstitious idea and a Romantic treatment of it. The story in both poems is founded on a superstition. Hartmann has no desire to submit the superstition to the criticism of reason; but he forces it upon no one; the beauty of his poem is quite independent of the belief or disbelief of his reader in the miraculous susceptibility of the Camao. Romantic extravagance, on the other hand, proclaims reverence for the marvellous and inexplicable to be the sum and substance of all wisdom and of all poetry.
But thoughThe Ancient Marinermay not take a high place when compared with poetry which has extricated itself from Romantic swaddling-bands, it stands high above most of the kindred productions of German Romanticism. In spite of all its Romantic fictitiousness, it breathes of the sea, the real, natural sea, whose changing moods and whose terrifying, menacing immensity it describes. The fresh breeze, the seething foam, the horrible fog, and the hot, copper-coloured evening sky with its blood-red sun—all these elements are nature's own; and the misery of the men tossing helplessly on the ocean, the starvation, the burning thirst that drives them to suck the blood from their own arms, the pallid countenances, the terrible death-rattle, the horrible putrefaction—all these elements are realities, represented with English realistic force.
And it is a very English trait that Coleridge himself should have been thoroughly capable of seeing the weak points of such a poem as his own famous ballad. The national quality of humour assisted him to this independence of judgment. We have the following anecdote from his own pen. "An amateur performer in verse expressed a strong desire to be introduced to me, but hesitated in accepting my friend's immediate offer, on the score that he was, he must acknowledge, the author of a confounded severe epigram on myAncient Mariner, which had given me great pain. I assured my friend that if the epigram was a good one, it would only increase my desire to become acquainted with the author, and begged to hear it recited, when, to my no less surprise than amusement, it proved to be one which I had myself inserted in theMorning Post." When Coleridge tells us, too, that he himself wrote three sonnets expressly for the purpose of exciting a good-natured laugh at the artificial simplicity and doleful egotism of the new poetical tendency, and that he took the elaborate and swelling language and imagery of these sonnets from his own poems, we cannot deny that his endeavours to keep free from the entanglement in theories which was the weak point in German Romanticism, bespeak rare intellectual superiority.
It was, nevertheless, from Germany that Coleridge's intellect received its most invigorating and essential nourishment. He was the first Englishman who penetrated into the forest of German literature, which was as yet unexplored by foreigners; he made his way into it about the same time as Madame de Staël, the pioneer of the Latin races. Whilst he was producing the famous poems just described, he began the study of German. Schiller and Kant attracted him first. In 1798 he and Wordsworth went to Germany on a literary voyage of discovery. In Hamburg they visited the patriarch Klopstock, who praised Bürger to them, but spoke coldly and disparagingly of the rest of the younger literary men, and especially of Coleridge's idols, Kant and Schiller. The latter'sDie Räuberhe professed himself unable to read. But he had plenty to say on the subject ofThe Messiahand his extreme satisfaction with the English translations of it. While in Germany, Coleridge studied the Gothic language, and read the Meistersingers and Hans Sachs; and on his return he published a translation of Schiller'sWallenstein, the play which Benjamin Constant was soon afterwards to adapt for the French stage.
It was about this time that Coleridge settled in theLakedistrict, where Wordsworth and Southey had already taken up their abode—the district which gave its name to the literary school constituted, as their contemporaries chose to consider, by these three poets. The name, as a matter of fact, does not mean much more than if, in Denmark in 1830, Hauch, Ingemann, Wilster, and Peder Hjort, had been dubbed Sorists. The English poets of the Lake School were quite as unlike each other in their gifts as were these Sorö professors[3]But the criticism of the day always coupled Coleridge's name with Wordsworth's and Southey's because it was known that he was on intimate and friendly terms with them, because he never missed an opportunity of praising them, nor they of praising him, and because he and the other Lakists were crowned every three months with fresh laurels in theQuarterly Review, whilst the sinner Byron was chastised with fresh scorpions. Though Coleridge published almost nothing, Wordsworth and Southey were hardly ever under the cascade of criticism without some drops of it falling upon him. The circumstance that the Lake poets aimed (in much the same manner as the Pre-Raphaelite and the Nazarene painters) at poetic intensity, a childlike disposition and a childlike faith, pious blandness and priestly unction, exposed the man who could not but be regarded as the teacher of the school to much satire and derision. As a youth, in his poemFire, Famine, and Slaughter, Coleridge had made all the horrors, one by one, reply to the question: Who bid you rage? with the following refrain, applying to Pitt:—
"Who bade you do't?The same! the same!Letters four do form his name.He let me loose, and cried Halloo!To him alone the praise is due."
Now he was Mr. Pitt’s journalistic henchman, and, like all the other members of the Lake School, a strict Tory, the enemy of liberal opinions in everything relating to church and state. What wonder that he was classed along with the others in the constant party attacks made by the Liberals! And yet it would have been so easy and so natural to distinguish him as a poet from all the others, and to pay him the honour which was due to his originality. The few poems which he wrote in the course of a comparatively long life are distinguished by the exquisite melodiousness of their language; their harmonies are not only delicate and insinuating like Shelley's, but contrapuntally constructed and rich; they have a peculiar, ponderous sweetness; each line has the taste and weight of a drop of honey. In poems such asLoveandLewti, which are the two sweetest, and in an Oriental fantasy likeKubla Khan, which was inspired by a dream, we hear Coleridge flute and pipe and sing with all the changing cadences of the most exquisite nightingale voice. It is Swinburne who makes the apt remark that, in the matter of harmonies, Shelley is, compared with Coleridge, what a lark is compared with a nightingale.
But Coleridge's poetry is as unplastic as it is melodious, and as unimpassioned as it is mellifluous. It is of the fantastic Romantic order; that is to say, it neither expresses strong, personally experienced emotions, nor reproduces what the author has observed in the surrounding world. In this last connection it is interesting to know that Coleridge's long tour in the south was altogether without results as far as his poetry was concerned. The only poem he brought home with him, theHymn Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, a valley in which he never set foot, was composed with the assistance of the description of the locality given by the well-known Danish authoress, Friederike Brun. His historic sense was as defective as his sense of locality. He says himself: "Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself are exact, but harmonious opposites in this—that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations ... whereas for myself, I believe I should walk on the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features.... Charles Lamb wrote an essay on a man who lived in past time:—I thought of adding another to it on one who lived notin timeat all, past, present, or future—but beside or collaterally."[4]His poetry is, thence, in the literal sense of the word, visionary; the poem which the best critics consider the finest, he composed in a dream.
In his own life there was as little of will and plan as in a dream. Somewhat indolent by nature, he became more and more procrastinating as years went on; and the result of his procrastination was an accumulation of difficulties which he had not energy and application enough to overcome. To relieve physical suffering he had recourse to opium, and soon became a confirmed opium-eater, thereby increasing his incapacity to carry out any plan. After a period of wandering, living first in one, then in another friend's house, and either writing for magazines or giving lectures on the history of literature, he decided that he was unfit to manage himself and his affairs, and from 1816 onwards he lived at Highgate in the house and under the control of a doctor named Gillman—separated from his own family, whom he left to the care of his friend and brother-in-law, Southey.
On the indulgence in opium followed remorse and self-reproach and increasingly orthodox piety. Most of what Coleridge now wrote was written with the object of refuting the heresies of his youth and defending the doctrine of the Trinity and the Church of England against all attacks.[5]Emerson, who paid him a visit, describes him as "old and preoccupied"; enraged by the effrontery with which a handful of Priestleians dared to attack the doctrine of the Trinity propounded by Paul and accepted unchallenged for centuries; and falling in his talk into all manner of commonplaces. Eighteen years passed, spent in dreaming, talking, and composing edifying essays. His influence during this period was due much less to his productive power than to the manner in which he incited to production. He stimulated and goaded others to the pitch of expressing themselves publicly. Residing close to London, and constantly visited, because of his conversational powers, by the best writers of the day—Charles Lamb, Wordsworth, Southey, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Carlyle—he was a looker-on on life during the years when the great representatives of the opposite intellectual tendency to his, Shelley and Byron, were pouring forth their fiery denunciations of the order of society and state which he considered so excellent. Without will of his own, under control, and himself protected like a child, Coleridge became ever more and more the would-be protector of society, whilst the two great poets of liberty, banished from their homes and thrown entirely on their own resources, developed an independence unexampled in the history of literature, and, protected neither by themselves nor any one else, were shattered long before their time by the ardour of conflict. The right of personal investigation and personal liberty were as precious treasures to them as the Church of England was to Coleridge.
[1]"Being at a loss, when suddenly asked my name, I answered Cumberback; and verily my habits were so little equestrian, that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion."
[1]"Being at a loss, when suddenly asked my name, I answered Cumberback; and verily my habits were so little equestrian, that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion."
[2]SeeBiographia Literaria.
[2]SeeBiographia Literaria.
[3]Sorö Akademi is a Danish public school. (Transcriber's note.)
[3]Sorö Akademi is a Danish public school. (Transcriber's note.)
[4]Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel T. Coleridge, ii 225.
[4]Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel T. Coleridge, ii 225.
[5]"On the Constitution of Church and State according to the Ideal of Each":Lay Sermons.
[5]"On the Constitution of Church and State according to the Ideal of Each":Lay Sermons.
Coleridge and the other members of the Lake School would never have dreamt of calling themselves anything but warm friends of liberty; the days were past when the reactionaries called themselves by another name. Coleridge wrote one of his most beautiful poems, theOde to France, in the form of a hymn to liberty, to his constant love for which he calls clouds, waves, and forests to testify; and Wordsworth, who dedicated two long series of his poems to liberty, regarded himself as her acknowledged champion. A cursory glance at the works of these poets might well leave us with the impression that they were as true lovers of liberty as Moore, or Shelley, or Byron. But the word liberty in their mouths meant something different from what it did in Moore's, or Shelley's, or Byron's. To understand this we must dissect the word by means of two simple questions: freedom, from what?—liberty, to do what?
To these conservative poets freedom is a perfectly definite thing, a right which England has and the other countries of Europe have not—the right of a country to govern itself, un-tyrannised over by an autocratic ruler of foreign extraction. The country which has this privilege is free. By liberty, then, the men in question understood freedom from foreign political tyranny; there is no thought of liberty of action in their conception at all. Look through Wordsworth'sSonnets Dedicated to Liberty, and see what it is they celebrate. It is the struggle of the different nations against Napoleon, who is described as a species of Antichrist. (Scott calls him "the Devil on his burning throne.")
The poet mourns the conquest of Spain, Switzerland, Venice, the Tyrol, by the French; he chants the praises of Hofer, the undaunted, of brave Schill, and daring Toussaint L'Ouverture, the men who ventured to face the fierce conquerors; and he sings with quite as great admiration of the King of Sweden, who with romantically chivalrous folly threw down the gauntlet to Napoleon, and proclaimed his longing for the restoration of the Bourbons. (Ere long Victor Hugo and Lamartine, in their character of supporters of the Legitimist monarchy, followed suit in singing the praises of the Swedish king and his son, Prince Gustavus Vasa.) Hatred of Napoleon becomes aversion for France. In one of the sonnets ("Inland, within a hollow vale, I stood") Wordsworth tells how the "barrier flood" between England and France for a moment seemed to him to have dwindled to the dimensions of a river, and how he shrank from the thought of "the frightful neighbourhood"; in another he rejoices in the remembrance of the great men and great books England has produced, and remarks that France has brought forth "no single volume paramount ... no master spirit," that with her there is "equally a want of books and men."
He always comes back to England. His sonnets are one long declaration of love to the country for which he feels "as a lover or a child," the country of which he writes: "Earth's best hopes are all with thee." He follows her through her long war, celebrating, like Southey, each of her victories; and it is significant of his attitude that, appended to theSonnets Dedicated to Liberty, we find the great, pompous thanksgiving ode for the battle of Waterloo. We of to-day ask what kind of liberty it was that Waterloo gained; but we know full well that the group of poets whose heroes were the national heroes—Pitt, Nelson, and Wellington, and who sang the praises of the English constitution as being in itself liberty, and lauded England as the model nation, won a degree of favour with the majority of their countrymen to which their great poetic antagonists have not even yet attained. Wordsworth and his school considered the nation ideal as it was, whereas the others tried to compel it to turn its eyes towards an ideal, not only unattained, but as yet unrecognised; the former flattered it, and were rewarded with laurels; the latter educated and castigated it, and were spurned by it. Scott was offered the post of Poet Laureate, and Southey and Wordsworth in turn occupied it; but to this day the English nation has shown no public recognition of what it owes to Shelley and Byron.[1]And the reason is, that these men's conception of liberty was utterly different from that of the Lake School. To them it was not realised in a nation or a constitution—for it was no accomplished, finished thing; neither was their idea of the struggle for liberty realised in a highly egoistic war against a revolutionary conqueror. They felt strongly what an absence of liberty, political as well as intellectual, religious as well as social, there might be under a so-calledfreeconstitution. They had no inclination to write poems in honour of the glorious attainments of the human race, and more especially of their own countrymen; for in the so-called land of freedom they felt a terrible, oppressive want of freedom—of liberty to think without consideration of recognised dogmas, to write without paying homage to public opinion, to act as it was natural to men of their character to act, without injury from the verdict of those who, because they had no particular character of their own, were the most clamorous and unmerciful condemners of the faults which accompanied independence, originality, and genius. They saw that in this "free" country the ruling caste canted and lied, extorted and plundered, curbed and constrained quite as much as did the one great autocrat with his absolute power—and without his excuse, the authority of intellect and of genius.
To the poets of the Lake School, coercion was not coercion when it wasEnglish, tyranny was not tyranny when it was practised under aconstitutional monarchy, hostility to enlightenment was not hostility to enlightenment when it was displayed by aProtestantchurch. The Radical poets called coercion coercion, even when it proceeded to action with the English flag flying and the arms of England as its policemen's badge; they cherished towards monarchs generally, the objection of the Lake School poets to absolute monarchs; they desired to free the world not only from the dominion of the Roman Catholic priesthood, but from priestly tutelage of every description. When they heard poets of the other school, who in the ardour of youth had been as progressive as themselves, extolling the Tory Government of England with the fervour which distinguishes renegades, they could not but regard them as enemies of liberty. Therefore it is that Shelley, in his sonnet to Wordsworth, writes:—
"In honoured poverty thy voice did weaveSongs consecrate to truth and liberty.Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be."
Therefore it is that Byron is tempted again and again "to cut up Southey like a gourd." And therefore it is that the love of liberty of the Radical poets is a divine frenzy, a sacred fire, of which not a spark is to be found in the Platonic love of the Lake School. When Shelley sings to liberty:—
"But keener thy gaze than the lightning's glare,And swifter thy step than the earthquake's tramp;Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stareMakes blind the volcanoes; the sun's bright lampTo thine is a fen-fire damp;"
we feel that this liberty is not a thing which we can grasp with our hands, or confer as a gift in a constitution, or inscribe among the articles of a state-church. It is the eternal cry of the human spirit, its never-ending requirement of itself; it is the spark of heavenly fire which Prometheus placed in the human heart when he formed it, and which it has been the work of the greatest among men to fan into the flame that is the source of all light and all warmth in those who feel that life would be dark as the grave and cold as stone without it. This liberty makes its appearance in each new century with a new name. In the Middle Ages it was persecuted and stamped out under the name of heresy; in the sixteenth century it was championed and opposed under the name of the Reformation; in the seventeenth it was sentenced to the stake as witchcraft and atheism; in the eighteenth it became first a philosophical gospel, and then, through the Revolution, a political power; in the nineteenth it receives from the champions of the past the new nickname of Radicalism.
What the poets of the Lake School extolled was a definite, actually existingsum of liberties—not liberty. What the revolutionary poets extolled was undoubtedly true liberty; but their conception was so extremely ideal, that in practical matters they too often shot beyond the mark. In the weakening of all established government they saw only the weakening of bad government; in the half-barbaric revolts of oppressed races they saw the dawn of perfect liberty. Shelley had so little knowledge of his fellow-men that he thought the great victory would be won if he could exterminate kings and priests at a blow; and Byron's life was almost over before he learned by experience how few republican virtues the European revolutionists leagued together in the name of liberty possessed. The poets of the Lake School were safeguarded against the generous delusions and overhastiness of the Radical poets; but posterity has derived more pleasure and profit from the aberrations due to the love of liberty in the latter than from the carefully hedged in and limited Liberalism of the former.