Coleridge Part 2

The lines, of which the above are a part, are important in so far as they show that even on his honeymoon and in the most delightful country Coleridge was not yet on intimate terms with natural objects. He writes of rose and myrtle and jasmine and "the bare bleak mountain speckled thin with sheep." He knew neither the small nor the great on terms of intimacy, and here again we have further proof that there is nothing local about his genius, and that his homes and haunts did little more than influence his health upon occasions; they never stirred his pen or turned him to seek nature knowledge. Doubtless, had he been left to spend his boyhood by the Otter's banks, he would have gathered some small lore of tree, and bird, and plant, but London, though it did much for him, left him quite ill-equipped. The Clevedon cottage where he spent his honeymoon is still to be seen by the tourist and lover of the poet, who may well pause to wonder how Wordsworth would have sung such a peaceful and yet stimulating spot. In the February of 1796 come lines "On observing a blossom on the first of February," and this will make the most modest botanist smile, for by the first of February the winter jasmine, the Christmas rose, and the winter aconite, to name but three flowers at random, have been blossoming for some time, and so, too, has many a pleasant weed. Later in the same year the first primrose of the season tempted him to some charming lines, of which four may be quoted:

"But, tender blossom, why so pale, Dost hear stern winter in the gale?

And didst thou tempt the ungentle sky To catch one vernal glance and die?"

This is very pretty and nave, but quite childish, and the lines are prefaced by a quotation from Ovid. In June 1797, at Nether Stowey, Coleridge wrote the exquisite poem, "This Lime Tree Bower my Prison." It was addressed to Charles Lamb, and on a copy of this poem, thirty-seven years later, he wrote his last words, "Charles and Mary Lamb, dear to my heart, yea, as it were, my heart." Here for once the spirit of Nature descends for a moment upon him. He sees his surroundings with what Sir Joshua would have called "a dilated eye." There are lines in it with which memory loves to dwell; they bring Coleridge nearer to some of us than many of the poems upon which his reputation stands secure:

"....In this bower, This little lime tree bower, have I not marked Much that has soothed me? Pale beneath the blaze Hung the transparent foliage, and I watched Some broad and sunny leaf and stem above Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut tree Was richly tinged, and a deep radiance lay Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest ma.s.s Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue Through the late twilight, and though now the bat Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters, Yet still the solitary humble bee Sings in the bean flower!"

The recurrence of the word "and" in four consecutive lines is perhaps the most noticeable blemish here.

It is at Nether Stowey when Coleridge was five-and-twenty years old that we find the first utterance which seems to treat Nature as the theme and not merely as a subsidiary aid to the expression of certain thoughts.

"Frost at Midnight," belonging to 1798, has some fine lines addressed to little Hartley:

"Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun thaw, whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles Quietly shining to the quiet Moon."

This is full of promise, and so too is the "Conversation Poem" called "The Nightingale," written in April of that year, in which Coleridge shows the true instinct by rejecting the suggestion that the bird's notes are sad:

"....'Tis the merry Nightingale That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates With fast thick warble his delicious notes As he were fearful that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul Of all its music."

If the presence of Lamb inspired the "Lime Tree Bower" music, it is undoubtedly to the happy a.s.sociation at Alfoxden with the Wordsworths that we owe the "Nightingale" song, though the image of his child, presumably little Berkeley, the short-lived second-born, runs sparkling through the closing lines.

Some years pa.s.s now before Coleridge responds again to Nature, this time in his magnificent "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni." This is as stately an invocation as ever the poet penned, and to the same year belongs the well-known "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath."

After this date one will look in vain to Coleridge for a direct response to Nature or for any prolonged utterance founded upon the beauty of earth, sea, or sky. The year 1802, in which this side of the poet's work seems to fail, is the date of the "Ode to Dejection," a twelvemonth before the visit to Scotland and two years before the visit to Malta and Italy. Is it unreasonable, then, to suggest that the Nature love and study that the poems of Coleridge reveal are a.s.sociated only with the early years of courtship and marriage, and the first long a.s.sociation with the Wordsworths in and around Nether Stowey and Alfoxden? We know that by the time "Kubla Khan" was written (1798) Coleridge was already beginning to surrender himself to opium, and a very few years of close devotion to this drug would have served to deprive him, not only of the spring joy of life, but of response to Nature. He was not a Nature lover at heart, and consequently there was little to be rooted out. Courtship and the birth of children kindled some light that the drug was to quench effectually, and after 1802, Coleridge turned but seldom to Nature even for pictorial imagery. His mind wandered farther and farther into fields of abstruse and difficult speculation, the poet in him mingled with the scholar, and in the later years his essays were, from the standpoint of fine thought, expressed in terse, vigorous English that lacked neither wit nor humour upon occasion, far more important than his poetry. Lamb's essays breathe the spirit of a poet; much of Coleridge's later work, whether dramatic or lyrical, is in the first place the effort of an accomplished man of letters and philosopher. This brings me back to the first statement of the chapter; Coleridge was not influenced by residence, but by the circ.u.mstances of his life, by his failure to earn sufficient money, a failure due in its turn to his besetting weakness.

We cannot name any place of the poet's uneasy sojourn and say the district exercised an abiding influence upon his poetry.

Here we have material for a very painful reflection. We know how largely some of the saddest lives in literature have been soothed or brightened by close communion with what we call common things, because they are within reach of all. Had Coleridge been able to take comfort in them, had he possessed, with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, the "inward eye that is the bliss of solitude," his life would have been immeasurably happier, long periods of keen distress would have been spared him. No man stands so much alone as he who, having no home-life to which he can turn for comfort, is unable to find any abiding happiness in contemplation of the life the seasons show. To make matters worse, we can see Coleridge was profoundly conscious that such a healing power existed. Surely n.o.body who was in Wordsworth's company, or even in Robert Southey's, could have failed to realise this. Coleridge and Southey lived together, and Southey, though he walked book in hand, tells us of the sights that delighted him on his rambles, and how on winter mornings he would take his little ones to the hill-tops "for the sake of getting the first sunshine on the mountains." But Coleridge could not grasp this gift, so keenly appreciated by the two future Poets Laureate, any more than he could grasp the opportunities extended to him on every side by men who realised at once the extent of his troubles and his gifts. To him the sources of most human consolations "were barr'd and bann'd, forbidden fare." If only for this, his harshest critic who can see his life in true perspective must respond to the appeal of the epitaph the poet wrote for himself when he saw the end of a weary pilgrimage in sight. Never did man so richly blessed with friends and well-wishers travel along a more lonely road, and when we consider the conditions under which the most of his work was written, the comparatively few hours in which he was the master of his own soul, we are left with a feeling of surprise at the quant.i.ty and quality of his accomplishment. Coleridge will receive from most kindly human judges the mercy and forgiveness for which he pleads, but at the same time the fame remains, nor can the praise be withheld.

But by reason of his close a.s.sociation with Wordsworth, and his considerable sojourn by the Lakes and in Somersetshire, Coleridge is often considered in his relations to Nature, and a few selected poems from which free quotation has been made here, are brought forward to suggest that he too was in his turn a Nature poet. It has been shown that such an opinion is hard to justify; it would be more fair to say that as far as the introduction of the imagery of nature is concerned, Coleridge bears the same relation to Wordsworth that Horace bears to Virgil. Horace used nature to ill.u.s.trate his philosophy, to clothe or adorn his imagery dealing with matters outside the countryside; Coleridge did the same, but not so well, for he lacked the Horatian humour. The second epode of Horace explodes for all time in its closing lines the theory that Horace has the country man's love for the country.

It suggests that the Augustan age had its cry of "back to the land," and that the cry was insincere. Horace turned it to good account, though doubtless the little estate among the Sabine hills near Roccagiavone and the Licenza valley that he owed to the kindness of Maecenas was a source of infinite delight to him. But the pleasure came from the opportunity it afforded of quiet and uninterrupted work when Rome was too hot to be pleasant and all the interesting people had left the city. One can imagine that Coleridge would have looked with much the same regard upon a country-house that cost him nothing and gave complete a.s.surance of privacy. With Virgil, as with Wordsworth, the case was different. The Mantuan loved the country as Wordsworth loved it, and, for his time, with a much more studied appreciation. Virgil and Wordsworth hold the ear and stimulate the mind when they write of rural life and scenery.

Horace and Coleridge, for all their exquisite facility, fail to utter the litany to which the heart of the country lover responds. The comparison between the Mantuan peasant and the son of a slave on the one hand, and two eighteenth-century poets who had their education rounded off by the University on the other, may seem at first a little strained, but if it were possible to pursue it here we might find many points that, _mutatis mutandis_, connect Coleridge with Horace and Wordsworth with Virgil in the relation of the poets to the country and the country life. Moreover, each of the latter-day poets was indebted to patrons, as were their great prototypes, if such a word be permissible. There is something in the Bucolics and Georgics which connects Virgil with the best period of Wordsworth, if we will remember that the men saw life in a different age, under different skies, and in the light of different faiths. Even those who will not admit as much will acknowledge that Virgil and Wordsworth ring true to the country man, while neither Horace nor Coleridge, though they call the country to their aid for an ill.u.s.tration, or a moral or philosophical lesson, could have written:

"O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint Agricolas!"

But it is time to turn from a general survey of Coleridge's work to a more detailed consideration of certain examples.

CHAPTER VI

COLERIDGE AS POET AND CRITIC

Before entering upon any attempt, however brief and inadequate it be, to estimate the multiform genius of Coleridge, it is well to remember that its permanent expression was, at least, three-sided. To-day he is regarded chiefly as a poet; for a dozen who know something of his poetry, there is hardly one who troubles to read his prose. The _Biographia Literaria_, for example, attracts few students; the _Table Talk_ recorded by his nephew, and Thomas Allsop's _Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge_, pa.s.sed out of fashion about the middle of the Victorian Era. His _Aids to Reflection_ is only now returning to public notice after long neglect. The book enjoyed about twenty years' popularity in England and America, and then seemed to pa.s.s from the service of readers. But it is clear that quite apart from his poetry and prose, Coleridge's gifts found complete expression not only in lectures and letters, but in those casual discourses which held complete strangers entranced. He has been described as the finest conversationalist since Samuel Johnson. The printed work that bears his name falls far short of doing him justice.

It suffers on the prose side from the modern lack of interest in his precise att.i.tude towards the metaphysical speculations that meant so much to him and his times. On the side of poetry it suffers from the widening of the boundaries that then marked the confines of legitimate poetic expression, and from the unfortunate truth that the poet in him died young. Coleridge the poet employed a very limited palette, not because he had no more colours, but because their use was discountenanced by his own early training and by the canons of contemporary criticism. To estimate the tradition that went to the making of the poet, and the long road he had to follow before he could find himself, turn to his Sonnet to the Evening Star, written when he was eighteen. It opens:

"O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze I hail, sweet star, thy chaste efulgent glow."

And it closes:

"Her spirit in thy kindred orb, O star benign."

Though it is generally unfair to divorce lines from their context, it is permissible here, just to show what pa.s.sed current as legitimate poetic expression, and we have to remember that within ten years of the writing of the sonnet, the poet in Coleridge had given place to the critic, after enriching poetry with many immortal lines. Clearly one may not hope, save in certain inspired moments, for much in the way of beauty of untrammelled form; the thought must be sought beneath the c.u.mbrous wrapping, and modern readers have less leisure for this than was granted to Coleridge's contemporaries. The "Lines on an Autumnal Evening," written perhaps three years later than the sonnet, show a marked improvement: the poet is beginning to prove stronger than the formal limitations that beset him, but the spirit of the time is displayed through a curious incident. The poem was first printed in the little volume offered to the public in 1796, and is accompanied by an apology for printing such "intolerable stuff" as lines 57-70. At the same time he declares that he has not imitated Rogers' "Pleasure of Memory" in certain other lines (27-36), and suggests that Rogers himself had borrowed his story from "Lochleven," a poem by Michael Bruce. In a second edition Coleridge gives reasons for "reprieving his own poem from immediate oblivion," and proceeds to apologise to Rogers in terms of which the following are part: "No one can see more clearly the _littleness_ and futility of imagining plagiarisms in the works of men of genius; but _nemo omnibus horis sapit_; and my mind at the time of writing that note was sick and sore with anxiety and weakened through much suffering. I have not the most distant knowledge of Mr. Rogers save as a correct and elegant poet. If any of my readers should know him personally, they would oblige me by informing him that I have expiated a sentence of unfounded detraction by an unsolicited and self-originating apology."

One can hardly resist the temptation of applying to the youthful writer of such stuff as this his own opening line of the address "To a Young a.s.s," written one year after the lines to the Autumnal Evening, and three years earlier than the above apology:

"Poor little foal of an oppressed race."

It is in his "Ode on the Departing Year" (1796) that Coleridge seems for the first time to discover his own full power, but the cla.s.sical top-hamper accompanying it shows that the limitations upon freedom of expression are still there. The poem is preceded by a quotation from the "Agamemnon" of aeschylus, and when published in a small quarto pamphlet held dedicatory letter to Tom Poole, into which a long quotation from Statius forces unwelcome way. Capital letters, quotations, italics, notes of exclamation were ever to the fore in the early days of the nineteenth century. But 1797-8 brought some of the finest lines the poet has given us. "The Three Graves" has much that one is pleased to remember, and the lines addressed to Charles Lamb--"This Lime Tree Bower my Prison," and referred to with a quotation in a previous chapter, show keen appreciation of Nature and natural beauty. Reference has been made elsewhere in this little paper to the limited response that Coleridge shows to his surroundings, but this poem shows that he was not quite oblivious of them. One cannot help feeling that the inspiration came suddenly and unexpectedly, born of compulsory solitude and the fine June evening; the limited appeal of Nature to the poet is shown by the fact that the poem was omitted from the 1803 edition of his work, and that, in the lines near the end, "My Sarah and my friends" was subst.i.tuted for "My gentle-hearted Charles," rather to Elia's annoyance.

Of the famous "Kubla Khan" fragment, written in a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire, it has been pointed out that opium was in all probability the source of inspiration. The poet had been reading a pa.s.sage from _Purchas his Pilgrimage_--it runs as follows:

"In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompa.s.sing sixteene miles of plaine ground within a wall wherein are fertile Meadowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middle thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure."

Coleridge used to recite his strange fragment to Lamb, who told Wordsworth that it brought Heaven and Elysian bowers into his parlour, but added in the same letter his fear lest in the light of cold print it should appear "no better than nonsense."

There is a clear suggestion of transient force behind the lines. For example, we read in the beginning (lines 3-5):

"Where Alph the sacred river ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea."

And in line 18:

"A mighty fountain momently was forced."

Then in line 27 the poet harks back to an earlier image:

"Then reached the caverns measureless to man";

while earlier in line 24 he reverts to the ill-conditioned adverb of his 18th line:

"It flung up momently the sacred river."

But, as was suggested earlier, the explanation of "Kubla Khan" may be found in its last two lines:

"For he on honey dew hath fed And drunk the milk of Paradise."

Next in order of composition comes "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,"

the poem which is the most widely read of any that Coleridge wrote, though it may be doubted whether the full extent of the poet's achievement is grasped by more than a minority of those who know it. The "Ancient Mariner" has many merits; it is one of the greatest ballads in English poetry. The sheer music of the lines, the romance they enshrine, the sense they convey of a vivid description of things actually seen, have given an abridged version of the poem a place in schoolbooks without number, and will probably continue to do so for generations to come, so that "The Mariner" is the first figure of his kind to touch the youthful imagination. Wordsworth has told us how the poem came to be written, when he, his sister Dorothy, and Coleridge had left Stowey to visit the Valley of Rocks, near Linton, on a November day in 1797. They had planned an excursion, and proposed to pay for it out of the proceeds of some poetry then to be written. In the course of the walk Coleridge discussed the poem with his two friends; he was founding it upon the dream of Mr. Cruickshank, a friend of his. Wordsworth, who had been reading a book of travels dealing with a journey round Cape Horn (Shelvocke's _Voyage Round the World_), suggested the incident of the albatross and the navigation of the ship by dead men. On the same evening the work started, Wordsworth contributing a few lines--less than a dozen at most. A great deal has been written about the Wordsworth contribution, which, upon his own showing, was quite slight in substance, though it was valuable in suggestion. Shelvocke's story of the doubling of Cape Horn and the meeting with albatrosses prompted Wordsworth, and Coleridge may have derived some of his details from a book by Captain Thomas James, published in 1633, and dealing with the "intended discovery of a North-West Pa.s.sage in to the South Sea." But we are less concerned with this than with the implicit logic that Coleridge has packed into his poem. His vivid imagination traced the whole course of the Ancient Mariner's journey in fashion that demands and will repay the closest observation.

For example, turn to the sixth stanza:

"Below the kirk, below the hill, Below the lighthouse top";

and it will be realised that here we have the natural order of the disappearance of objects seen by a vessel leaving the sh.o.r.e. The position stands reversed in the pa.s.sage describing the Mariner's return.

In the opening line of Part II we read:

"The sun now rose upon the right."

This is, because they have doubled Cape Horn.