Appreciations, with an Essay on Style Part 3

In Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken dreaming over the aspects and transitions of nature--a reflective, though altogether unformulated, a.n.a.lysis of them.

[86] There are in Coleridge's poems expressions of this conviction as deep as Wordsworth's. But Coleridge could never have abandoned himself to the dream, the vision, as Wordsworth did, because the first condition of such abandonment must be an unvexed quietness of heart.

No one can read the Lines composed above Tintern without feeling how potent the physical element was among the conditions of Wordsworth's genius--"felt in the blood and felt along the heart."

My whole life I have lived in quiet thought!

The stimulus which most artists require of nature he can renounce. He leaves the ready-made glory of the Swiss mountains that he may reflect glory on a mouldering leaf. He loves best to watch the floating thistledown, because of its hint at an unseen life in the air.

Coleridge's temperament, aei en sphodra orexei,+ with its faintness, its grieved dejection, could never have been like that.

My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west I may not hope from outward forms to win The pa.s.sion and the life whose fountains are within.

Wordsworth's flawless temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of mind, that calm, sabbatic, mystic, wellbeing which De Quincey, [87] a little cynically, connected with worldly (that is to say, pecuniary) good fortune, kept his conviction of a latent intelligence in nature within the limits of sentiment or instinct, and confined it to those delicate and subdued shades of expression which alone perfect art allows. In Coleridge's sadder, more purely intellectual, cast of genius, what with Wordsworth was sentiment or instinct became a philosophical idea, or philosophical formula, developed, as much as possible, after the abstract and metaphysical fashion of the transcendental schools of Germany.

The period of Coleridge's residence at Nether Stowey, 1797-1798, was for him the annus mirabilis. Nearly all the chief works by which his poetic fame will live were then composed or planned. What shapes itself for criticism as the main phenomenon of Coleridge's poetic life, is not, as with most true poets, the gradual development of a poetic gift, determined, enriched, r.e.t.a.r.ded, by the actual circ.u.mstances of the poet's life, but the sudden blossoming, through one short season, of such a gift already perfect in its kind, which thereafter deteriorates as suddenly, with something like premature old age.

Connecting this phenomenon with the leading motive of his prose writings, we might note it as the deterioration of a productive or creative power into one merely metaphysical or discursive. In his unambitious conception of his function as a poet, and in the very limited quant.i.ty of his [88] poetical performance, as I have said, he was a contrast to his friend Wordsworth. That friendship with Wordsworth, the chief "developing" circ.u.mstance of his poetic life, comprehended a very close intellectual sympathy; and in such a.s.sociation chiefly, lies whatever truth there may be in the popular cla.s.sification of Coleridge as a member of what is called the "Lake School." Coleridge's philosophical speculations do really turn on the ideas which underlay Wordsworth's poetical practice. His prose works are one long explanation of all that is involved in that famous distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination. Of what is understood by both writers as the imaginative quality in the use of poetic figures, we may take some words of Shakespeare as an example.--

My cousin Suffolk, My soul shall thine keep company to heaven Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly abreast.

The complete infusion here of the figure into the thought, so vividly realised, that, though birds are not actually mentioned, yet the sense of their flight, conveyed to us by the single word "abreast," comes to be more than half of the thought itself:--this, as the expression of exalted feeling, is an instance of what Coleridge meant by Imagination.

And this sort of identification of the poet's thought, of himself, with the image or figure which serves him, is the secret, sometimes, [89] of a singularly entire realisation of that image, such as makes these lines of Coleridge, for instance, "imaginative"--

Amid the howl of more than wintry storms, The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours Already on the wing.

There are many such figures both in Coleridge's verse and prose. He has, too, his pa.s.sages of that sort of impa.s.sioned contemplation on the permanent and elementary conditions of nature and humanity, which Wordsworth held to be the essence of a poet; as it would be his proper function to awaken such contemplation in other men--those "moments," as Coleridge says, addressing him--

Moments awful, Now in thy inner life, and now abroad, When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received The light reflected, as a light bestowed.

The entire poem from which these lines are taken, "composed on the night after Wordsworth's recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual mind," is, in its high-pitched strain of meditation, and in the combined justice and elevation of its philosophical expression--

high and pa.s.sionate thoughts To their own music chanted;

wholly sympathetic with The Prelude which it celebrates, and of which the subject is, in effect, the generation of the spirit of the "Lake poetry." [90] The Lines to Joseph Cottle have the same philosophically imaginative character; the Ode to Dejection being Coleridge's most sustained effort of this kind.

It is in a highly sensitive apprehension of the aspects of external nature that Coleridge identifies himself most closely with one of the main tendencies of the "Lake School"; a tendency instinctive, and no mere matter of theory, in him as in Wordsworth. That record of the

green light Which lingers in the west,

and again, of

the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green,

which Byron found ludicrously untrue, but which surely needs no defence, is a characteristic example of a singular watchfulness for the minute fact and expression of natural scenery pervading all he wrote--a closeness to the exact physiognomy of nature, having something to do with that idealistic philosophy which sees in the external world no mere concurrence of mechanical agencies, but an animated body, informed and made expressive, like the body of man, by an indwelling intelligence. It was a tendency, doubtless, in the air, for Sh.e.l.ley too is affected by it, and Turner, with the school of landscape which followed him. "I had found," Coleridge tells us,

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That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive Their finer influence from the world within; Fair ciphers of vague import, where the eye Traces no spot, in which the heart may read History and prophecy:...

and this induces in him no indifference to actual colour and form and process, but such minute realism as this--

The thin grey cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky.

The moon is behind and at the full; And yet she looks both small and dull;

or this, which has a touch of "romantic" weirdness--

Nought was green upon the oak But moss and rarest misletoe

or this--

There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky

or this, with a weirdness, again, like that of some wild French etcher--

Lo! the new-moon winter-bright!

And overspread with phantom light (With swimming phantom light o'erspread, But rimmed and circled with a silver thread) I see the old moon in her lap, foretelling The coming on of rain and squally blast.

He has a like imaginative apprehension of the silent and unseen processes of nature, its "ministries" [92] of dew and frost, for instance; as when he writes, in April--

A balmy night! and though the stars be dim, Yet let us think upon the vernal showers That gladden the green earth, and we shall find A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.

Of such imaginative treatment of landscape there is no better instance than the description of The Dell, in Fears in Solitude--

A green and silent spot amid the hills, A small and silent dell! O'er stiller place No singing skylark ever poised himself-- But the dell, Bathed by the mist is fresh and delicate As vernal cornfield, or the unripe flax When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve, The level sunshine glimmers with green light:--

The gust that roared and died away To the distant tree--

heard and only heard In this low dell, bowed not the delicate gra.s.s.

This curious insistence of the mind on one particular spot, till it seems to attain actual expression and a sort of soul in it--a mood so characteristic of the "Lake School"--occurs in an earnest political poem, "written in April 1798, during the alarm of an invasion"; and that silent dell is the background against which the tumultuous fears of the poet are in strong relief, while the quiet sense of the place, maintained all through them, gives a true poetic unity to the piece.

Good political poetry--[93] political poetry that shall be permanently moving--can, perhaps, only be written on motives which, for those they concern, have ceased to be open questions, and are really beyond argument; while Coleridge's political poems are for the most part on open questions. For although it was a great part of his intellectual ambition to subject political questions to the action of the fundamental ideas of his philosophy, he was nevertheless an ardent partisan, first on one side, then on the other, of the actual politics proper to the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, where there is still room for much difference of opinion. Yet The Destiny of Nations, though formless as a whole, and unfinished, presents many traces of his most elevated manner of speculation, cast into that sort of imaginative philosophical expression, in which, in effect, the language itself is inseparable from, or essentially a part of, the thought. France, an Ode, begins with a famous apostrophe to Liberty--

Ye Clouds! that far above me float and pause, Whose pathless march no mortal may control!

Ye Ocean-waves! that wheresoe'er ye roll, Yield homage only to eternal laws!

Ye Woods! that listen to the night-bird's singing, Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined, Save when your own imperious branches swinging, Have made a solemn music of the wind!

Where like a man beloved of G.o.d, Through glooms which never woodman trod, How oft, pursuing fancies holy,

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My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound, Inspired, beyond the guess of folly, By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound!

O ye loud Waves! and O ye Forests high!

And O ye Clouds that far above me soar'd!

Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky!

Yea, everything that is and will be free!

Bear witness for me, wheresoe'er ye be, With what deep worship I have still adored The spirit of divinest liberty.

And the whole ode, though, after Coleridge's way, not quite equal to that exordium, is an example of strong national sentiment, partly in indignant reaction against his own earlier sympathy with the French Republic, inspiring a composition which, in spite of some turgid lines, really justifies itself as poetry, and has that true unity of effect which the ode requires. Liberty, after all his hopes of young France, is only to be found in nature:--

Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!