Part 1 (2/2)

He has left us no penetrating criticisms of Byron, of Sh.e.l.ley, or of Keats; and in a very interesting letter about Blake, written in 1818, he is unable to take the poems merely as poems, and chooses among them with a scrupulous care ”not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from the too probable want of it in many readers.”

Lamb, concerned only with individual things, looks straight at them, not through them, seeing them implacably. His notes to the selections from the Elizabethan dramatists are the surest criticisms that we have in English; they go to the roots. Coleridge's critical power was wholly exercised upon elements and first principles; Lamb showed an infinitely keener sense of detail, of the parts of the whole. Lamb was unerring on definite points, and could lay his finger on flaws in Coleridge's work that were invisible to Coleridge; who, however, was unerring in his broad distinctions, in the philosophy of his art.

”The ultimate end of criticism,” said Coleridge, ”is much more to establish the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pa.s.s judgment on what has been written by others.” And for this task he had an incomparable foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning, almost every critical quality united in one; and he was a poet who allowed himself to be a critic. Those pages of the ”Biographia Literaria,” in which he defines and distinguishes between imagination and fancy, the researches into the abstract ent.i.ties of poetry in the course of an examination of Wordsworth's theories and of the popular objections to them, all that we have of the lectures on Shakespeare, into which he put an illuminating idolatry, together with notes and jottings preserved in the ”Table-Talk,” ”Anima Poetae,” the ”Literary Remains,” and on the margins of countless books, contain the most fundamental criticism of literature that has ever been attempted, fragmentary as the attempt remains. ”There is not a man in England,” said Coleridge, with truth, ”whose thoughts, images, words, and erudition have been published in larger quant.i.ties than _mine_; though I must admit, not _by_, nor _for_, myself.” He claimed, and rightly, as his invention, a ”science of reasoning and judging concerning the productions of literature, the characters and measures of public men, and the events of nations, by a systematic subsumption of them, under principles deduced from the nature of man,” which, as he says, was unknown before the year 1795. He is the one philosophical critic who is also a poet, and thus he is the one critic who instinctively knows his way through all the intricacies of the creative mind.

Most of his best criticism circles around Shakespeare; and he took Shakespeare almost frankly in the place of Nature, or of poetry. He affirms, ”Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place.” This granted (and to Coleridge it is essential that it should be granted, for in less than the infinite he cannot find s.p.a.ce in which to use his wings freely) he has only to choose and define, to discover and to illuminate. In the ”myriad-minded man,” in his ”oceanic mind,” he finds all the material that he needs for the making of a complete aesthetics. Nothing with Coleridge ever came to completion; but we have only to turn over the pages about Shakespeare, to come upon fragments worth more than anyone else's finished work. I find the whole secret of Shakespeare's way of writing in these sentences: ”Shakespeare's intellectual action is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or pa.s.sage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems forever twisting and untwisting its own strength. ”And here are a few axioms: 'The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind'; or, in other words, ”The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to instill that energy into the mind which compels the imagination to produce the picture.” ”Poetry is the ident.i.ty of all other knowledges,” ”the blossom and fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human pa.s.sions, emotions, language.” ”Verse is in itself a music, and the natural symbol of that union of pa.s.sion with thought and pleasure, which const.i.tutes the essence of all poetry ”; ”a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order,” as he has elsewhere defined it. And, in one of his spoken counsels, he says: ”I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose-- words in their best order; poetry--the best words in the best order.”

Unlike most creative critics, or most critics who were creative artists in another medium, Coleridge, when he was writing criticism, wrote it wholly for its own sake, almost as if it were a science. His prose is rarely of the finest quality as prose writing. Here and there he can strike out a phrase at red-heat, as when he christens Shakespeare ”the one Proteus of the fire and flood”; or he can elaborate subtly, as when he notes the judgment of Shakespeare, observable in every scene of the ”Tempest,” ”still preparing, still inviting, and still gratifying, like a finished piece of music”; or he can strike us with the wit of the pure intellect, as when he condemns certain work for being ”as trivial in thought and yet enigmatic in expression, as if Echo and the Sphinx had laid their heads together to construct it.” But for the most part it is a kind of thinking aloud, and the form is wholly lost in the pursuit of ideas. With his love for the absolute, why is it that he does not seek after an absolute in words considered as style, as well as in words considered as the expression of thought? In his finest verse Coleridge has the finest style perhaps in English; but his prose is never quite reduced to order from its tumultuous amplitude or its snake-like involution. Is it that he values it only as a medium, not as an art? His art is verse, and this he dreads, because of its too mortal closeness to his heart; the prose is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

The poetry of Coleridge, though it is closely interwoven with the circ.u.mstances of his life, is rarely made directly out of those circ.u.mstances. To some extent this is no doubt explained by a fact to which he often refers in his letters, and which, in his own opinion, hindered him not only from writing about himself in verse, but from writing verse at all. ”As to myself,” he writes in 1802, ”all my poetic genius ... is gone,”

and he attributes it ”to my long and exceedingly severe metaphysical investigations, and these partly to ill-health, and partly to private afflictions which rendered any subjects, immediately connected with feeling, a source of pain and disquiet to me.” In 1818 he writes: ”Poetry is out of the question. The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of acute feelings from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion, presents an asylum.” But theory worked with a natural tendency in keeping him for the most part away from any attempt to put his personal emotions into verse. ”A sound promise of genius,” he considered, ”is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circ.u.mstances of the writer himself.” With only a few exceptions, the wholly personal poems, those actually written under a shock of emotion, are vague, generalized, turned into a kind of literature. The success of such a poem as the almost distressingly personal ”Ode on Dejection” comes from the fact that Coleridge has been able to project his personal feeling into an outward image, which becomes to him the type of dejection; he can look at it as at one of his dreams which become things; he can sympathize with it as he could never sympathize with his own undeserving self. And thus one stanza, perhaps the finest as poetry, becomes the biography of his soul:

”There was a time when, though my path was rough, This joy within me dallied with distress, And all misfortunes were but as the stuff Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine But now afflictions bow me down to earth: Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth; But oh! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination.

For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient all I can, And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man-- This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.”

Elsewhere, in personal poems like ”Frost at Midnight,” and ”Fears in Solitude,” all the value of the poem comes from the delicate sensations of natural things which mean so much more to us, whether or not they did to him, than the strictly personal part of the matter. You feel that there he is only using the quite awake part of himself, which is not the essential one. He requires, first of all, to be disinterested, or at least not overcome by emotion; to be without pa.s.sion but that of abstract beauty, in Nature, or in idea; and then to sink into a quiet lucid sleep, in which his genius came to him like some attendant spirit.

In the life and art of Coleridge, the hours of sleep seem to have been almost more important than the waking hours. ”My dreams became the substance of my life,” he writes, just after the composition of that terrible poem on ”The Pains of Sleep,” which is at once an outcry of agony, and a yet more disturbing vision of the sufferer with his fingers on his own pulse, his eyes fixed on his own hardly awakened eyes in the mirror. In an earlier letter, written at a time when he is trying to solve the problem of the five senses, he notes: ”The sleep which I have is made up of ideas so connected, and so little different from the operations of reason, that it does not afford me the due refreshment.” To Coleridge, with the help of opium, hardly required, indeed, there was no conscious division between day and night, between not only dreams and intuitions, but dreams and pure reason. And we find him, in almost all his great poems, frankly taking not only his substance but his manner from dreams, as he dramatizes them after a logic and a pa.s.sion of their own. His technique is the transposition into his waking hours of the unconscious technique of dreams. It is a kind of verified inspiration, something which came and went, and was as little to be relied upon as the inspiration itself. On one side it was an exact science, but on the other a heavenly visitation. Count and balance syllables, work out an addition of the feet in the verse by the foot-rule, and you will seem to have traced every miracle back to its root in a natural product. Only, something, that is, everything, will have escaped you. As well dissect a corpse to find out the principle of life. That elusive something, that spirit, will be what distinguishes Coleridge's finest verse from the verse of, well, perhaps of every conscious artist in our language. For it is not, as in Blake, literally unconscious, and wavering on every breath of that unseen wind on which it floats to us; it is faultless; it is itself the wind which directs it, it steers its way on the wind, like a seagull poised between sky and sea, and turning on its wings as upon s.h.i.+fted sails.

This inspiration comes upon Coleridge suddenly, without warning, in the first uncertain sketch of ”Lewti,” written at twenty-two; and then it leaves him, without warning, until the great year 1797, three years later, when ”Christabel” and ”The Ancient Mariner” are begun. Before and after, Coleridge is seen trying to write like Bowles, like Wordsworth, like Southey, perhaps, to attain ”that impetuosity of transition and that precipitancy of fancy and feeling, which are the _essential_ qualities of the sublimer Ode,” and which he fondly fancies that he has attained in the ”Ode on the Departing Year,” with its one good line, taken out of his note-book. But here, in ”Lewti,” he has his style, his lucid and liquid melody, his imagery of moving light and the faintly veiled transparency of air, his vague, wildly romantic subject matter, coming from no one knows where, meaning one hardly knows what; but already a magic, an incantation.

”Lewti” is a sort of preliminary study for ”Kubla Khan”; it, too, has all the imagery of a dream, with a breathlessness and awed hush, as of one not yet accustomed to be at home in dreams.

”Kubla Khan,” which was literally composed in sleep, comes nearer than any other existing poem to that ideal of lyric poetry which has only lately been systematized by theorists like Mallarme. It has just enough meaning to give it bodily existence; otherwise it would be disembodied music. It seems to hover in the air, like one of the island enchantments of Prospero. It is music not made with hands, and the words seem, as they literally were, remembered. ”All the images,” said Coleridge, ”rose up before me as _things_, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions.” Lamb, who tells us how Coleridge repeated it ”so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour when he says or sings it to me,” doubted whether it would ”bear daylight.”

It seemed to him that such witchcraft could hardly outlast the night. It has outlasted the century, and may still be used as a touchstone; it will determine the poetic value of any lyric poem which you place beside it.

Take as many poems as you please, and let them have all the merits you please, their ultimate merit as poetry will lie in the degree of their approach to the exact, unconscious, inevitable balance of qualities in the poetic art of ”Kubla Khan.”

In ”The Ancient Mariner,” which it seems probable was composed before, and not after ”Kubla Khan,” as Coleridge's date would have us suppose, a new supernaturalism comes into poetry, which, for the first time, accepted the whole responsibility of dreams. The impossible, frankly accepted, with its own strict, inverted logic; the creation of a new atmosphere, outside the known world, which becomes as real as the air about us, and yet never loses its strangeness; the s.h.i.+ver that comes to us, as it came to the wedding- guest, from the simple good faith of the teller; here is a whole new creation, in subject, mood, and technique. Here, as in ”Kubla Khan,”

Coleridge saw the images ”as _things_”; only a mind so overshadowed by dreams, and so easily able to carry on his sleep awake, could have done so; and, with such a mind, ”that willing suspension of disbelief for a moment, which const.i.tutes poetic faith,” was literally forced upon him. ”The excellence aimed at,” says Coleridge, ”was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations,” those produced by supernatural agency, ”supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever sense of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.” To Coleridge, whatever appealed vitally to his imagination was real; and he defended his belief philosophically, disbelieving from conviction in that sharp marking off of real from imaginary which is part of the ordinary att.i.tude of man in the presence of mystery.

It must not be forgotten that Coleridge is never fantastic. The fantastic is a playing with the imagination, and Coleridge respects it. His intellect goes always easily as far as his imagination will carry it, and does not stop by the way to play tricks upon its bearer. Hence the conviction which he brings with him when he tells us the impossible. And then his style, in its ardent and luminous simplicity, flexible to every bend of the spirit which it clothes with flesh, helps him in the idiomatic translation of dreams. The visions of Swedenborg are literal translations of the imagination, and need to be retranslated. Coleridge is equally faithful to the thing seen and to the laws of that new world into which he has transposed it.

”The Ancient Mariner” is the most sustained piece of imagination in the whole of English poetry; and it has almost every definable merit of imaginative narrative. It is the only poem I know which is all point and yet all poetry; because, I suppose, the point is really a point of mystery.

It is full of simple, daily emotion, transported, by an awful power of sight, to which the limits of reality are no barrier, into an unknown sea and air; it is realized throughout the whole of its ghastly and marvellous happenings; and there is in the narrative an ease, a buoyancy almost, which I can only compare with the music of Mozart, extracting its sweetness from the stuff of tragedy; it presents to us the utmost physical and spiritual horror, not only without disgust, but with an alluring beauty. But in ”Christabel,” in the first part especially, we find a quality which goes almost beyond these definable merits. There is in it a literal spell, not acting along any logical lines, not attacking the nerves, not terrifying, not intoxicating, but like a slow, enveloping mist, which blots out the real world, and leaves us unchilled by any ”airs from heaven or blasts from h.e.l.l,” but in the native air of some middle region. In these two or three brief hours of his power out of a lifetime, Coleridge is literally a wizard. People have wanted to know what ”Christabel” means, and how it was to have ended, and whether Geraldine was a vampire (as I am inclined to think) or had eyes in her b.r.e.a.s.t.s (as Sh.e.l.ley thought). They have wondered that a poem so transparent in every line should be, as a whole, the most enigmatical in English. But does it matter very much whether ”Christabel”

means this or that, and whether Coleridge himself knew, as he said, how it was to end, or whether, as Wordsworth declared, he had never decided? It seems to me that Coleridge was fundamentally right when he said of the ”Ancient Mariner,” ”It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the sh.e.l.ls aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he _must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date-sh.e.l.ls had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son.” The ”Ancient Mariner,”

if we take its moral meaning too seriously, comes near to being an allegory. ”Christabel,” as it stands, is a piece of pure witchcraft, needing no further explanation than the fact of its existence.

Rossetti called Coleridge the Turner of poets, and indeed there is in Coleridge an aerial glitter which we find in no other poet, and in Turner only among painters. With him colour is always melted in atmosphere, which it s.h.i.+nes through like fire within a crystal. It is liquid colour, the dew on flowers, or a mist of rain in bright suns.h.i.+ne. His images are for the most part derived from water, sky, the changes of weather, shadows of things rather than things themselves, and usually mental reflections of them. ”A poet ought not to pick Nature's pocket,” he said, and it is for colour and sound, in their most delicate forms, that he goes to natural things. He hears

”the merry nightingale That crowds and hurries and precipitates With fast thick warble his delicious notes;”

and an ecstasy comes to him out of that natural music which is almost like that of his own imagination. Only music or strange effects of light can carry him swiftly enough out of himself, in the presence of visible or audible things, for that really poetic ecstasy. Then all his languor drops off from him, like a clogging garment.

The first personal merit which appears in his almost wholly valueless early work is a sense of colour. In a poem written at twenty-one he sees Fancy

<script>