Read Ebook: Coleridge by Bensusan S L Samuel Levy

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 96 lines and 26060 words, and 2 pages

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 , 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 Passage 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 shore. The position stands reversed in the passage 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.

These instances of close observation of natural phenomena could be multiplied did space permit, the poem is full of them, only in the line "the furrow followed free" may he be held to have fallen into error. Yet this excellence has, after all, but a small concern with the poetic worth of the work, and it is astonishing to find that its music rang harshly in the ears of contemporary criticism, though its awesome and fantastic beauty moves the English-speaking world to this day. One lady told Coleridge that, while she liked the "Ancient Mariner," she had to find two faults. In the first place, the story was improbable, and secondly, it had no moral! Wordsworth himself had his doubts about it, and Southey somewhat obscurely called it "a Dutch attempt at German sublimity," for which quintessential criticism Charles Lamb took him to task.

Looking back upon the life and work of Coleridge, we know that his "Ancient Mariner" reaches the high-water mark of his poetic achievement in narrative verse, and that it will endure when the greater part of his writing, whether in verse or prose, has been forgotten--remembered not only on account of its beauty as a complete work of art, but on account of the irresistible music of many of the stanzas. It stands for the fruit of the supremely inspired hours of a greatly gifted man.

It may perhaps be suggested that the poetic genius in Coleridge needed nursing, and failed to get what it required; to a certain extent such a theory is permissible. We have to remember, in the first place, that his health was bad from youth. He was very susceptible to rheumatism; before middle age he was a martyr to gout; he could not endure extreme cold; and yet he elected to go and live at Greta Hall, in the Vale of Derwentwater, where the rain it raineth nearly every day, and strong harsh winds are the rule rather than the exception. These surroundings confirmed and strengthened the opium habit. To make matters worse, his home life was not of the kind that makes for poetry. Mrs. Coleridge was in many respects a deserving and worthy lady, but she had grave limitations. With things of the intellect she was not on any terms, however remote, and she had a weakness that is said to extend to others of her sex--she worried incessantly about trifles. Reading closely the history of the unhappy married life that involved husband and wife in so much trouble, the mistake of marrying the wrong woman may be condoned. To the overstrung "philosopher in a mist," as he describes himself in one of his earliest letters from Greta Hall, a querulous wife who found small grievances everywhere, who judged her husband's talent from the standpoint of what it brought in from the publishers, must have been a sore trial. In the same way, for the sake of justice, let us admit that the man who was always ready to undertake work that he could never be prevailed upon to begin, who was erratic, intemperate, and wholly unreliable, must have been a sore trouble to any woman who could not appreciate his gifts, and could discern nothing in the future save an increasing family and a diminishing income. But whatever the proper apportionment of praise or blame, one fact remains. At Greta Hall the fine flame of poetic inspiration burned low, and never afterwards recovered its pristine radiance. Professor Alois Brandl does not go too far when he says that at the age of thirty, that is by the year 1802, Coleridge was a broken man; and it was this failure of his health, this prolonged suffering from rheumatism and gout, which he sought so foolishly and so vainly to cure by the aid of opium, that turned him from poetry to the study of philosophy in order to find relief. He sought, as he says in that fine but mournful "Ode to Dejection,"

But if he did not write the books--and he once declared that the mere titles of those he had projected would fill a volume--Coleridge accomplished a very considerable amount of work. Much of it must be lost. He was an omnivorous reader, and his clear mind could detect flaws in any reasoning that was not sound. He studied Berkeley, Fichte, Hartley, Hegel, Herder, Hume, Kant, Lessing, Maass, Schelling, and Spinoza, studied them with complete understanding, and luminous criticism, and could discourse upon them brilliantly. It needed a well-equipped intelligence to follow him; few could, and the majority thought he talked brilliantly but irrelevantly. We know that this was not the case, the truth being that he was too big for the most of his audience.

He passed through a very considerable number of religious phases. His earlier Pantheism gave way to Rationalism and Unitarianism, and he arrived by way of the German transcendental philosophers to his ultimate reconciliation with the doctrines of Christianity. In the years in which he lived this ultimate orthodoxy was good alike for his reputation and his circulation. His influence affected profoundly great thinkers like F. D. Maurice and John Sterling, and it may be doubted whether cheap reprints of certain of his prose writings would not find a considerable measure of success to-day, for it is impossible to deny his gift of style, his capacity to reason closely and clearly, or the intense earnestness and conviction that vitalise his message. It is unfortunate, perhaps, that his most popular work as a poet has kept him from receiving due recognition first as a critic and then as a philosopher, and that his work as a philosopher has been clouded by his unfortunate inability to rule his own life on philosophic lines.

"I regard truth as a Divine ventriloquist, and care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words be audible and intelligible." In this passage Coleridge summed up an attitude that will satisfy all who can take a sane and dispassionate view of his life, and weigh its accomplishments and vicissitudes. Certain thoughts are the children of every era, and will reach more than one thinker at a time; they belong to the man who can make noblest use of them.

It is impossible to deny that for all his shortcomings Coleridge did more for his countrymen than his countrymen did for him, and harsh criticism is unbecoming the present generation, which enjoys the full benefit of his work, and has not suffered any of the disappointments that he inflicted upon his contemporaries. Let us remember, too, that he was a simple and modest man, and nowhere claims to be a distinguished poet or a great philosopher. He knew that he had more than the average mental gift, but instead of pride in his possession we find him regretting deeply his inability to justify it. Indeed, he goes further than this, for he says in one of his letters that Wordsworth taught him to recognise some of his limitations. The letter is written to Godwin when Coleridge was in his thirty-first year, and in it he says that Wordsworth, by showing him what true poetry was, made him know that he himself was no poet.

Coleridge had a very highly developed critical faculty, and exercised it brilliantly in his writings on Shakespeare. His criticisms sparkle with intelligence; terse and virile, they leave the reader regretting that they were not extended. He speaks of Polonius, "a statesman somewhat past his faculties"; of Lear as "the ample and open playground of Nature's passions."

Whether as poet, critic, or metaphysician, Coleridge was a progressive thinker, and broke away slowly but deliberately from the fetters of form that cripple his earliest utterances; nor were the flights of his thought less remarkable than his experiments in method.

Whatever his acts, his intentions were of the highest. He sought to do good, and he placed at the service of his countrymen the best that he had to offer. One can only speculate upon the extent of the loss that his chronic ill-health inflicted upon his own and succeeding generations. His were the instincts of the schoolmaster, but of the schoolmaster who takes all his fellow-countrymen for pupils. His discourses on poetry, founded so largely upon prolonged and intimate study of Wordsworth, stand to-day one of the finest examinations of the range and proper limitation of poetic expression.

Coleridge was destined to be overshadowed in his own time, and in the critical years immediately following his death, by more powerful personalities--men whose appeal to the public was more immediate and better sustained; but much that he wrote a hundred years ago is of importance to us to-day, and modern criticism, detached, impersonal, and with a true perspective, can hardly fail to do him justice in any of the departments of his life-work.

"Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years looking down on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there.... A sublime man, who alone in those dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood, escaping from the black materialism and revolutionary deluges with 'God, Freedom, Immortality' still his; a king of men."

And later he describes him with the true Carlyle touch as that "heavy laden, high aspiring, and surely much suffering man." Wordsworth said that Coleridge was the only wonderful man he had ever met; Nelson Coleridge said that a day spent with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a "sabbath past expression, deep, tranquil, and serene."

Find him at the right time and in happy mood, he was capable of great feats. For example, he was invited one morning to lecture before the London Philosophical Society. He went with Gillman to the secretary to inquire the subject chosen, but the secretary was out. In the evening Coleridge and Gillman went to the Society's rooms, and heard the announcement made that Mr. Coleridge would deliver an address on "The Growth of the Individual Mind." He spoke extempore for over an hour and a half, holding a critical audience enthralled.

With Coleridge, the metaphysician, it is impossible to deal here. Dr. Traill summed up his teaching very concisely in the following sentences:

"There is indeed no moral theory of life, there are no maxims of conduct, such as youth above all things craves for, in Coleridge's teaching. Apart from the intrinsic difficulties of the task to which he invites his disciples, it labours under a primary and essential disadvantage of postponing moral to intellectual liberation. Contrive somehow or other to attain to just ideas as to the capacities and limitations of the human consciousness, considered especially in relation to its two important and eternally distinct functions, the Reason and the Understanding: and peace of mind shall in due time be added unto you. That is in effect Coleridge's answer to the inquirer who consults him; and if the distinction between the Reason and the Understanding were as obvious as it is obscure to the average unmetaphysical mind, and of a value as assured for the purpose to which Coleridge applies it as it is uncertain, the answer would nevertheless send many a would-be disciple sorrowful away."

It is not necessary to pursue the subject. Between the reader and the metaphysician stands the poet and the critic, and for the greater part of the present and future generations these will suffice.

INDEX

De Quincey, 42, 88 Dove Cottage, 33, 34

Evans, Mary, 19, 21 Evening Star, Sonnet to, 26

Gillman, Dr., 47, 48, 52, 91 Grattan, Thomas Colley, 57 Green, Joseph Henry, 49, 59, 91 Greta Hall, 34, 84

Hamilton, Sir William, 88 Hazlitt, William, 31, 83 Horace, 72, 73 "Hymn before Sunrise," 69

"Inscription for a Fountain," 69

"Kubla Khan," 31, 48, 79, 84

Nether Stowey, 28, 29 "Nightingale," the, 69

Virgil, 73

"Youth and Age," 52

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. Edinburgh & London

THE PEOPLE'S BOOKS

General Editor--H. C. O'NEILL

NOW READY

THE FIRST EIGHTY-FOUR VOLUMES

THE PEOPLE'S BOOKS--

LONDON AND EDINBURGH: T. C. & E. C. JACK NEW YORK: DODGE PUBLISHING CO.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet