The great man of whom I am about to speak seems to me a figure more utterly companionless,
more incomparable with others, than any of his kind. Receptive at once and communicative
of many influences, he has received from none and to none did he communicate any of
those which mark him as a man memorable to all students of men. What he learnt and
what he taught are not the precious things in him. He has founded no school of poetry,
as Wordsworth has, or Byron, or Tennyson; happy in this, that he has escaped the plague of pupils and parodists. Has he founded
a school of philosophy? He has helped men to think; he has touched their thought with
passing colours of his own thought; but has he moved and moulded it into new and durable
shapes? Others may judge better of this than I, but to me, set beside the deep direct
work of those thinkers who have actual power to break down and build up thought, to
construct faith or destroy it, his work seems not as theirs is. And yet how very few
are even the great names we could not better afford to spare, would not gladlier miss
from the roll of “famous men and our fathers that were before us.” Of his best verses
I venture to affirm that the world has nothing like them, and can never have: that
they are
of the highest kind, and of their own. They are jewels of the diamond’s price, flowers
of the rose’s rank, but unlike any rose or diamond known. In all times there have
been gods that alighted and giants that appeared on earth; the ranks of great men
are properly divisible, not into thinkers and workers, but into Titans and Olympians.
Sometimes a supreme poet is both at once: such above all men is Æschylus; so also
Dante, Michel Angelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Hugo, are gods at once and giants; they have the lightning as well as the light of the
world, and in hell they have command as in heaven; they can see in the night as by
day. As godlike as these, even as the divinest of them, a poet such as Coleridge needs
not the thews and organs of any Titan to make him greater. Judged by the justice of other men, he is assailable and condemnable
on several sides; his good work is the scantiest in quantity ever done by a man so
famous in so long a life; and much of his work is bad. His genius is fluctuant and
moonstruck as the sea is, and yet his mind is not, what he described Shakespeare’s
to be, “an oceanic mind.” His plea against all accusers must be that of Shakespeare,
a plea unanswerable:
“I am that I am; and they that levelAt my abuses reckon up their own.”
“I am that I am;” it is the only solid and durable reply to any impertinence of praise
or blame. We hear too much and too often of circumstances or accidents which extenuate
this thing or qualify that; and such, no doubt, there always may be; but usually—at
least it seems so to me—we get out of each man
what he has in him to give. Probably at no other time, under no other conditions,
would Coleridge for example have done better work or more. His flaws and failures are as much ingrained
in him as his powers and achievements.
For from the very first the two sides of his mind are visible and palpable. Among
all verses of boys who were to grow up great, I remember none so perfect, so sweet
and deep in sense and sound, as those which he is said to have written at school,
headed “Time, Real and Imaginary.” And following hard on these come a score or two of “poems” each more feeble and
more flatulent than the last. Over these and the like I shall pass with all due speed,
being undesirous to trouble myself or any possible reader with the question whether
“Religious Musings” be more damnable than “Lines to a Young Ass,” or less damnable. Even when clear of these brambles, his genius walked for some
time over much waste ground with irregular and unsure steps. Some poems, touched with
exquisite grace, with clear and pure harmony, are tainted with somewhat of feeble
and sickly which impairs our relish; “Lewti” for instance, an early sample of his admirable melody, of tender colour and dim
grace as of clouds, but effeminate in build, loosehung, weak of eye and foot. Yet
nothing of more precious and rare sweetness exists in verse than that stanza of the
swans disturbed. His style indeed was a plant of strangely slow growth, but perfect
and wonderful in its final flower. Even in the famous versed called “Love” he has not attained to that strength and solidity of beauty which was his special
gift at last. For melody rather than for harmony
it is perfect; but in this œnomel there is as yet more of honey than of wine.
Coleridge was the reverse of Antæus; the contact of earth took all strength out of him. He could not handle to much purpose
any practical creed; his political verse is most often weak of foot and hoarse of
accent. There is a graceful Asiatic legend cited by his friend Southey of “the footless birds of Paradise” who have only wings to sustain them, and live
their lives out in a perpetual flight through the clearest air of heaven. Ancient
naturalists, Cardan and Aldrovandus, had much dispute and dissertation as to the real or possible existence of these
birds, as to whether the female did in effect lay her eggs in a hollow of the male’s
back, designed by nature to that end; whether they could indeed live on falling dew;
and so forth. These questions we may presume to be decided; but it is clear and certain
enough that men have been found to live in much this fashion. Such a footless bird
of Paradise was Coleridge; and had his wings always held out it had been well for him and us. Unhappily this
winged and footless creature would perforce too often furl his wings in mid air and
try his footing on earth, where his gait was like a swan’s on shore.
Of his flight and his song when in the fit element, it is hard to speak at all, hopeless
to speak adequately. It is natural that there should be nothing like them discoverable
in any human work; natural that his poetry at its highest should be, as it is, beyond
all praise and all words of men. He who can define it could “unweave a rainbow;” he
who could praise it aright would be such another as the poet The “Christabel,” the “Kubla Khan,” with one or two more, are outside all law and jurisdiction of ours. When it has
been said that such melodies were never heard, such dreams never dreamed, such speech
never spoken, the chief thing remains unsaid, and unspeakable. There is a charm upon
these poems which can only be felt in silent submission of wonder. Any separate line
has its own heavenly beauty, but to cite separate lines is intolerable. They are to
be received in a rapture of silence; such a silence as Chapman describes; silence
like a god “peaceful and young,” which
“Left so free mine ears,That I might hear the music of the spheres,And all the angels singing out of heaven”
Note
Euthymiae Raptus; The Tears of Peace (1609).
More amenable to our judgement, and susceptible of a more definite admiration, the
“Ancient Mariner,” and the few other poems cast in something of a ballad type which we may rank around
or below it, belong to another class. The chief of these is so well known that it
needs no fresh comment. Only I will say that to some it may seem as though this great
sea-piece might have had more in it of the air and savour of the sea. Perhaps it is
none the worse; and indeed any one speaking of so great and famous a poem must feel
and know that it cannot but be right, although he or another may think it would be
better if this were retrenched or that appended. And this poem is beyond question
one of the supreme triumphs of poetry. Witness the men who brought batteries to bear
on it right and left. Literally: forone critic said that the “moral sentiment” had
impaired the imaginative excellence;
another, that it failed and fell through for want of a moral foothold upon facts.
Remembering these things, I am reluctant to proceed—but desirous to praise, as I best
may. Though I doubt if it be worth while, seeing how the “Ancient Mariner”—praised or dispraised—lives and is like to live for the delight equally of young
boys and old men; and seeing also that the last critic cited was no less a man than
Hazlitt. It is fortunate—among many misfortunes—that for Coleridge no warning word was needed against the shriek of the press-gang from this side or
that. He stooped once or twice to spurn them; but he knew that he stooped. His intense
and overwrought abstraction from things of the day or hour did him no ill service
here.
The “Ancient Mariner” has doubtless more of breadth and space, more of material force and motion, than
anything else of the poet’s. And the tenderness of sentiment which touches with significant
colour the pure white imagination is here no longer morbid or languid, as in the earlier
poems of feeling and emotion. It is soft and piteous enough, but womanly rather than
effeminate; and thus serves indeed to set off the strange splendours and boundless
beauties of the story. For the persecution, I presume no human eye is too dull to
see how perfect it is, and how high in kind of perfection. Here is not the speckless
and elaborate finish which shows everywhere the fresh rasp of file or chisel on its
smooth and spruce excellence; this is faultless after the fashion of a flower or a
tree. This it has grown: not thus has it been carved.
Nevertheless, were we compelled to the choice, I for one would rather preserve “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel” than any other of Coleridge’s poems. It is more conceivable that another man should
be born capable of writing the “Ancient Mariner” than one capable of writing these. The former is perhaps the most wonderful of all
poems. In reading it we seem rapt into that paradise revealed to Swedenborg, where music and colour and perfume were one, where you could hear the hues and see
the harmonies of heaven. For absolute melody and splendour it were hardly rash to
call it the first poem in the language. An exquisite instinct married to a subtle
science of verse has made it the supreme model of music in our language, a model unapproachable
except by Shelley. All the elements that compose the perfect form of English metre, as limbs and veins
and features a beautiful body of man, were more familiar, more subject as it were,
to this great poet than to any other. How, for instance, no less than rhyme, assonance
and alliteration are forces, requisite components of high and ample harmony, witness
once for all the divine passage
Note
Witness also the matchless fragments of metrical criticism in Coleridge’s “Remains,” which prove with what care and relish the most sweet and perfect melodist among
all our poets would set himself to examine and explain the alternations and sequences
of sound in the noblest verse of others.
which begins—
“Five miles meandering with a mazy motion,” &c.
All these least details and delicacies of work are worth notice when the result of
them is so transcendent. Every line of the poem might be subjected to the like scrutiny,
but the student would be none the nearer to the master’s secret The spirit, the odour
in it, the cloven tongue of fire that rests
upon its forehead, is a thing neither explicable nor communicable.
Of all Coleridge’s poems the loveliest is assuredly “Christabel.” It is not so vast in scope and reach of imagination as the “Ancient Mariner;” it is not so miraculous as “Kubla Khan;” but for simple charm of inner and outer sweetness it is unequalled by either. The
very terror and mystery of magical evil is imbued with this sweetness; the witch has
no less of it than the maiden; their contact has in it nothing dissonant or disfiguring,
nothing to jar or to deface the beauty and harmony of the whole imagination. As for
the melody, here again it is incomparable with any other poet’s. Shelley indeed comes
nearest; but for purity and volume of music Shelley is to Coleridge as a lark to a
nightingale; his song heaven-high and clear as heaven, but the other’s more rich and
weighty, more passionately various, and warmer in effusion of sound.
Note
From this general rule I except of course the transcendent antiphonal music which
winds up the “Prometheus” of Shelley, and should perhaps except also the “Ode to the West Wind,” and the close of the “Ode to Naples.” Against “Christabel” it would for example be fairer to set “The Sensitive Plant” for comparison of harmonies.
On the other hand, the nobler nature, the clearer spirit of Shelley, fills his verse
with a divine force of meaning, which Coleridge, who had it not in him, could not
affect the give. That sensuous fluctuation of soul, that floating fervour of fancy,
whence his poetry rose as from a shifting sea, in faultless completion of form and
charm, had absorbed—if indeed there were any to absorb—all emotion of love or faith,
all heroic beauty of moral passion, all inner and outer
life of the only kind possible to such other poets as Dante or Shelley, Milton or
Hugo. This is neither blameable nor regrettable; none of these could have done his
work; nor could he have done it had he been in any way other or better than he was.
Neither, for that matter, could we have had a Hamlet or a Faust from any of these,
the poets of moral faith and passion, any more than a “Divina Commedia” from Shakespeare, a “Prometheus Unbound” from Goethe. Let us give thanks for each after their kind to nature and the fates.
Alike by his powers and his impotences, by his capacity and his defect, Coleridge
was inapt for dramatic poetry. It were no discredit to have fallen short of Shelley
on this side, to be overcome by him who has written the one great English play of
modern times; but here the very comparison would seem a jest. There is little worth
praise or worth memory in the “Remorse” except such casual fragments of noble verse as may readily be detached from the
loose and friable stuff in which they lie embedded. In the scene of the incantation,
in the scene of the dungeon, there are two such pure and precious fragments of gold.
In the part of Alhadra there are lofty and sonorous interludes of declamation and reflection. The characters
are flat and shallow; the plot is at once languid, violent, and heavy. To touch the
string of the spirit, thread the weft of evil and good, feel out the way of the soul
through dark places of thought and rough places of action, was not given to this the
sweetest dreamer of dreams. In “Zapolya” there are no such patches of imperial purple sewn on, but there is more of air and
motion; little enough indeed of high dramatic quality, but a native grace and ease
which give it something of the charm of life. In this lighter and more rapid work,
the song of Glycine flashes out like a visible sunbeam; it is one of the brightest
bits of music ever done into words.
The finest of Coleridge’s odes is beyond all doubt the “Ode To France.” Shelley declared it the finest of modern times, and justly, until himself and Keats
had written up to it at least. It were profitless now to discuss whether it should
take or yield precedence when weighed with the “Ode to Liberty” or the “Ode to Naples.” There is in it a noble and loyal love of freedom, though less fiery at once and
less firm than Shelley’s, as it proved in the end less durable and deep. The prelude
is magnificent in music, and sentiment and emotion far above any other of his poems;
nor are the last notes inadequate to this majestic overture. Equal in force and sweetness
of style, the “Ode on Dejection” ranks next in my mind to this one; some may prefer its vaguer harmonies and sunset
colours to the statelier movement, the more august and solemn passion of the earlier
ode.
Note
Some time later, when France, already stripped of freedom and violated by treason,
was openly paraded in her prostitution to the first Buonaparte, Coleridge published his “Ode to Tranquillity,” beginning with two stanzas since retrenched. Having unearthed them in the “Annual Register for 1801” (vol. xliii., p. 525), I set them down here as better worth saving than most of
his political verse:—
“What statesmen scheme, and soldiers work;Whether the Pontiff or the TurkWill e’er renew th’ expiring leaseOf empire; whether war or peaceWill best play off the Consul’s game;What fancy-figures, and what name,Half-thoughted, sensual France, a natural slave,On those ne’er-broken chains, her self-forg’d chains, will grave;
Disturb[s] not me! Some tears I shedWhen bow’d the Swiss his noble head;Since then, with quiet heart have view’dBoth distant fights and treaties crude,Whose heap’d-up terms, which fear compels,(Live Discord’s green combustibles,And future fuel of the funeral pyre)Now hide, and soon, alas! will feed the low-burnt fire.”
It is noticeable that only his supreme gift of lyrical power could sustain Coleridge
on political ground. His attempts of the kind in blank verse are poor indeed:—
“Untimely breathings, sick and short assays”
Compare the nerveless and hysterical verses headed “Fears in Solitude” (exquisite as is the overture, faultless in tone and colour, and worthy of a better
sequel) with the majestic and masculine sonnet of Wordsworth, written at the same
time on the same subject: the lesser poet—for, great as he is, I at least cannot hold
Wordsworth, though so much the stronger and more admirable man, equal to Coleridge
as mere poet—speaks with a calm force of thought and resolution; Coleridge wails,
appeals, deprecates, objurgates in a flaccid and querulous fashion without heart or
spirit This debility of mind and manner is set off in strong relief by the loveliness
of landscape touches in the same poem. The eclogue of “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter,” being lyrical, is worthier of a great name; it has force and motion enough to keep
it alive yet and fresh, impeded and trammelled though it usually be by the somewhat
vain and verbose eloquence of a needlessly “Apologetic Preface.” Blank verse Coleridge could never handle with the security of conscious skill and
a trained strength; it grows in his hands too facile and feeble to carry the due weight
or accomplish the due work. I have not found any of his poems in this metre retouched
and reinvigorated as a few have been among his others. One such alteration is memorable
to all students of his art; the excision from the “Ancient Mariner” of a stanza (eleventh of the Third Part) which described the Death-mate of the Spectre-Woman,
his bones foul with leprous scruf and green corruption of the grave, in contrast to
the red lips and yellow locks of the fearfuller Nightmare Life-in-Death. Keats in like manner cut off from the “Ode on Melancholy” a first stanza preserved for us by his biographer, who has duly noted the delicate
justice of instinct implied by this rejection of all ghastly and violent images, however
noble and impressive in their violence and ghastliness, from a poem full only of the
subtle sorrow bom of beauty. The same keen and tender sense of right made Coleridge
reject from his work the horrors while retaining the terrors of death. But of his
studies in blank verse he seems to have taken no such care. They remain mostly in
a hybrid or an embryonic state, with birthmarks on them of debility or malformation.
Two of these indeed have a charm of their own, not shallow or transient: the “Nightingale” and “Frost at Midnight.” In colour they are perfect, and not (as usual) too effusive and ebullient in style.
Others, especially some of the domestic or religious sort, are offensive and grievous
to the human sense on that score. Coleridge had doubtless a sincere belief in his
own sincerity of belief a true feeling of his own truth of feeling; but he leaves
with us too often an unpleasant sense or taste—as it were a tepid dilution of sentiment,
a rancid unction of piety. A singular book published in 1835 without author’s name—the
work, as I find, of a Mr. Alsop, long after to be advertised for on public placards as an accomplice in the enterprise
which clouded the fiery fame and closed the heroic life of Felice Orsini—gives further samples of this in “Letters, Conversations and Recollections;” samples that we might well have spared.
Note
It contains however among others one elaborate letter of some interest and significance,
in which Coleridge, not without a tone of contempt, falls foul of the orthodox vulgarity
of Wordsworth’s theism (“what Hartley,” his son, I presume, “calls the popping in of the old man with a beard”) in a fashion
showing how far apart his own theosophic mysticism, though never so daintily dressed
up in cast church-clothes, had drifted from the more clear and rigid views of a harder
and sounder mind.
A selection from his notes and remains, from his correspondence and the records of
his “Table-Talk,” even from such books as Cottle’s and this anonymous disciple’s, would be of real interest and value, if well edited,
sifted and weeded of tares and chaff. The rare fragments of work done or speech spoken
in his latter years are often fragments of gold beyond price. His plastic power and
flexible charm of verse, though shown only in short flashes of song, lose nothing
of the old freshness and life. To the end he was the same whose
“sovereign sway and masterdom” of music could make sweet and strong even the feeble
and tuneless form of metre called hexameters in English; if form of metre that may
be called which has neither metre nor form. But the majestic rush and roll of that
irregular anapaestic measure used once or twice by this supreme master of them all,
no student can follow without an exultation or enjoyment. The “Hymn to the Earth” has a sonorous and oceanic strength of harmony, a grace and a glory of life, which
fill the sense with a vigorous delight. Of such later work as the divine verses on
“Youth and Age,” “The Garden of Boccaccio,” sun-bright and honey-sweet, “Work without Hope” (what more could be left to hope for when the man could already do such work?)—of
these, and of how many more! what can be said but that they are perfect, flawless,
priceless? Nor did his most delicate and profound power of criticism ever fail him
or fall off. To the perfection of that rare faculty there were but two things wanting:
self-command and the natural cunning of words which has made many lesser men as strong
as he was weak in the matter of verbal emendation. In that line of labour his hand
was unsure and infirm. Want of self-command, again, left him often to the mercy of
a caprice which swept him through tangled and tortuous ways of thought, through brakes
and byways of fancy, where the solid subject in hand was either utterly lost and thrown
over, or so transmuted and transfigured that any recognition of it was as hopeless
as any profit. In an essay well worth translating out of jargon into some human language,
he speaks of “the holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics.” Out of that holy and
pestilential jungle he emerged but too rarely into sunlight and clear air. It is not
depth of thought which makes obscure to others the work of a thinker; real and offensive
obscurity comes merely of inadequate thought embodied in inadequate language. What
is clearly comprehended or conceived, what is duly thought and wrought out, must find
for itself and seize upon the clearest and fullest expression. That grave and deep
matter should be treated with the fluency and facility proper to light and slight
things, no fool is foolish enough to desire: but we may at least demand that whatever
of message a speaker may have for us be delivered without impediment of speech. A
style that stammers and rambles and stumbles, that stagnates here, and there overflows
into waste marsh relieved only by thick patches of powdery bulrush and such bright
flowerage of barren blossom as is bred of the fogs and the fens—such a style gives
no warrant of depth or soundness in the matter thus arrayed and set forth. What grains
of truth or seeds of error were borne this way or that on the perpetual tide of talk
concerning “subject and object,” “reason and understanding,” those who can or who
care may at their leisure determine with the due precision. If to the man’s critical
and philosophic faculty there had been added a formative power as perfect as was added
to his poetic faculty, the fruit might possibly have been wellnigh as precious after
its kind. As it is, we must judge of his poetic faculty by what is accomplished; of
the other we must judge not by what is accomplished, but by what is suggested. And
the value of this is sometimes great, though the value of that be gene rally small:
so great indeed
that we cannot weigh or measure its influence and its work.
Our study and our estimate of Coleridge cannot now be discoloured or misguided by
the attraction or repulsion to which all contemporary students or judges of a great
man’s work cannot but be more or less liable. Few men, I suppose, ever inspired more
of either feeling than he in his time did. To us his moral or social qualities, his
opinion on this matter and his action in that, are nothing except in so far as they
affect the work done, the inheritance bequeathed us. With all fit admiration and gratitude
for the splendid fragments so bequeathed of a critical and philosophic sort, I doubt
his being remembered, except by a small body of his elect, as other than a poet. His
genius was so great, and in its greatness so many-sided, that for some studious disciples
of the rarer kind he will doubtless, seen from any possible point of view, have always
something about him of the old magnetism and magic. The ardour, delicacy, energy of
his intellect, his resolute desire to get at the roots of things and deeper yet if
deeper might be, will always enchant and attract all spirits of like mould and temper.
But as a poet his place is indisputable. It is high among the highest of all time.
An age that should forget or neglect him might neglect or forget any poet that ever
lived. At least, any poet whom it did remember such an age would remember as something
other than a poet; it would prize and praise in him, not the absolute and distinctive
quality, but something empirical or accidental. That may be said of this one which
can hardly be said of any but the greatest among men; that come what may
to the world in course of time, it will never see his place filled. Other and stronger
men, with fuller control and concentration of genius, may do more service, may bear
more fruit; but such as his was they will not have in them to give. The highest lyric
work is either passionate or imaginative; of passion Coleridge’s has nothing; but
for height and perfection of imaginative quality he is the greatest of lyric poets.
This was his special power, and this is his special praise.