God bless you! I am, and never have been other than your most affectionate S. T. COLERIDGE.

In fact, Coleridge was saying of The Excursion what Jeffrey had said just before and what many readers have said since, "This will never do." Certainly The Excursion does not contain the worst of Wordsworth; but just as certainly it does not contain his best. The charge laid by Matthew Arnold against Shelley, viz. the want of a sound subject-matter, might have been laid with greater cogency against The Excursion. It is in nine books and nine thousand lines, and it seems to be just one unhappy story told over and over again. It has its fine and noble passages; but they are not strong enough or numerous enough to carry off the effect of its relentless garrulity and its almost unvaried lugubriousness. We come to it, as Coleridge did, prepared by The Prelude and the fine passage of The Recluse quoted in the preface, to find an utter

ance,

Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope,

And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith;

Of blessed consolations in distress;

Of moral strength, and intellectual Power;
Of joy in widest commonalty spread;

and we find instead three elderly persons and one who was never young sitting in a churchyard and " thinking of the old 'uns" at immoderate length. The poet of The Thorn, who is also the prose defender of The Thorn as a piece of systematic garrulity, is too obviously discernible in The Excursion. The usual defence is that The Excursion is only part of a great projected poem and that we should not judge it till we know the whole. The obvious answer is that The Excursion is all there is of it to know, and that it is always unsafe to judge a poem by the parts that were never written. I hope, too, it is not unkind to point out that Wordsworth's philosophical poem like Coleridge's philosophical treatise was never finished.

The letter to Lady Beaumont clearly indicates the double purpose at work in Coleridge's mind. It was one thing to say that The Excursion was beneath Wordsworth, and quite another to say that The Excursion was beneath contempt. Disappointed as he was by The Excursion, Coleridge was stung into active indignation by the ribald obtuseness of Jeffrey.

Si natura negat, facit indignatio versus; and out of a mingled desire to disentangle the best of Wordsworth from the worst and to defend him as a purely inspired poet of lofty aims against the coarse malice of reviewers, Coleridge shook off his apathy and began to develop his first autobiographical sketch into a reasoned and self-sacrificing exposition

C. B. L.

17

of a great poet's genius. Hence the too frequent appearance of the now negligible Jeffrey in allusions or lengthy notes which the editors of 1847 wisely mitigated or omitted as they could. When, very shortly after, came Wordsworth's own two volumes of 1815 with the Lyrical Ballads essays retained in full and buttressed by two new pieces of massy prose criticism that showed, nevertheless, distinct signs of a faulty foundation, Coleridge felt that he must speak out clearly on the whole subject. Observe that sentence in the letter to Dr Brabant, "The necessity of extending what I first intended as a preface to an Autobiographia Literaria." Observe, too, that we hear nothing of Coleridge's intention to issue a work in two volumes, the first in prose and the second in verse, until after the appearance of Wordsworth's two volumes. We may assume that the one suggested the other. In fact, the volumes of 1815 with their essays new and old had taken Coleridge back again to the great days of 1797 and re-opened the glorious controversy about the nature and language of poetry. There was, as Coleridge had always known, something wrong with a theory that offered equal justification for Andrew Jones and Lucy Gray, and something wrong with a poet who was conscious of no difference between them. Wordsworth had to be defended against himself as well as against Jeffrey. In the "fragments of Autobiography" Coleridge saw a chance of making his own position clear; and thus it comes about that the book which begins with Coleridge ends with Wordsworth. The Biographia grew out of the necessities. of the moment, and we must be grateful to those necessities; for without them it would probably never have grown at all. Chapters 1 to 11 are mainly autobiographical, and represent, no doubt, the "fragments of AUTO-biography" first mentioned to Stuart in the letter of September 1814, before The Excursion and its reviewer had given a specific direction. and purpose to the writer's desultory prose. It may be mentioned that a long footnote to Chapter 111 (omitted by the 1847 editors) in which precise charges of malice are brought against Jeffrey, makes no allusion whatever to his review of The Excursion. Up to that point Coleridge seems more concerned to defend Southey than to defend Wordsworth, who is, in fact, very little mentioned. With Chapter IV, however, Wordsworth definitely appears. The first part of the chapter deals entirely with Lyrical Ballads and its Preface; but later there are allusions to the volumes of 1815, which had just been published. Then the fatal words "fancy" and "imagination" are mentioned and away goes our Logosophist in hot pursuit through Hartley and Hobbes and Spinoza and Des Cartes and Schelling and Kant, for nine long chapters," and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost." Becoming at last aware that if he did not soon pull up he would actually achieve those "two volumes of not less than six hundred pages each" instead of writing a defence.

of Wordsworth, he sought for some quick way of getting back to his subject, and found it by writing a letter to himself advising himself to stop, printed the letter at the end of Chapter XIII, and returned abruptly to Wordsworth in Chapter xiv almost where he had left him in Chapter v. But from this point the allusions to The Excursion and Poems of 1815 become more detailed and exact, actual pages being cited in the text. All thoughts of autobiography are abandoned, and the book really ends with Wordsworth, though, for reasons to be given presently, it was continued for another hundred and sixty pages.

So far we have dealt with the composition of the book-its sudden development, under the stimulus of The Excursion, The Edinburgh Review and the Poems of 1815, from a desultory and prefatory autobiographical fragment into a critical examination and defence of Wordsworth's poetical achievement. The printing and publication form a separate chapter of its history--a chapter of accidents. First we have Coleridge announcing in July 1816, with characteristic optimism, that it was printed:

8 July, 1816.

...From several causes my literary reputation has been lately on the increase and as two dramatic pieces of mine will be brought out at Drury Lane at or before Christmas, and as the poems of my maturer years, and my literary life, (which are printed and have passed the revision of the first Critics of this country, and of those who exert most influence in the higher circles from their rank, and on the Public by their connection with the most important of our works of periodical criticism) will appear at the same time, I have every reason to hope that the disposition to enquire after my works will become still more extended....

As a matter of fact Coleridge was at this time supplying copy so copiously that the limits of a single volume were exceeded and the Biographia had to overflow into a second volume of its own; and so the original scheme of a work in two volumes, one of prose and one of verse, broke down. Before the end of 1816 troubles had arisen with the printers at Bristol, and after some delay and much irritation the work was transferred for completion to Messrs Gale and Fenner in London, for whom Coleridge had written the Lay Sermon. The second volume of Biographia had then reached p. 128, i.e. Chapter XXI. To make this volume uniform in size with the first Coleridge had to provide another 160 pages of matter. As usual he began to think of something else:

...I often converse better than I can compose; and hence too, it is, that a collection of my letters written before my mind was so much oppressed would, in the opinion of all who have ever seen any number of them, be thrice the value of my set publications. Take as a specimen--'s Letters, which never

260 Stages in the Growth of Biographia Literaria

received a single correction, or that letter addressed to myself as from a friend, at the close of the first volume of the Literary Life, which was written without taking my pen off the paper except to dip it in the inkstand,

However, he writes thus to Rest Fenner, the publisher, in Sept. 1816,

22 Sept. 1816.

...The scheme of my labours is this;—having despatched the Lay Sermon addressed to the Labouring Classes, and, if I do not succeed, to give it up, and, at all events, to commence the next week with the matter which I have been forced by the blunder and false assurance of the printer to add to the "Literary Life," in order to render the volumes of something like the same size. I not only shall not, but I cannot think of or do anything till the three volumes complete are in Mr Gale's House....

The additional matter was thus provided: another critical chapter on Wordsworth was written (Ch. xx11), and then (the original impulse having died away) recourse was had to old material-the three Satyrane's Letters from The Friend, and the lengthy criticism in The Courier of Maturin's utterly unimportant tragedy Bertram. This was rounded off with a diffuse and speculative chapter, slightly personal but mainly theological, and in that unhappy fashion the volume was padded out to the requisite size. Even as late as March 1817 we find Coleridge exclaiming with irritation at receiving a sheet of Zapolya instead of Biographia. But all things come to an end, even the delays of printers; and Biographia Literaria actually emerged into published existence in the summer of 1817, followed soon afterwards by Sibylline Leaves, dissociated from it and issued as a separate publication.

G. S.

NOTES

CHAPTER I

p. I, 1. 21. true nature of poetic diction. The stages of this "long continued controversy" are (1) Lyrical Ballads (1798), written, according to the preliminary Advertisement, "as experiments...to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure"; (2) Lyrical Ballads, 2 vols. (1800), in which the Advertisement of (1) becomes a lengthy Preface denying to poetry a conventional diction of its own and assigning as its proper vocabulary "a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation"; (3) Lyrical Ballads (1802), in which the Preface of (2) is enlarged, and defended by an Appendix on what is usually called Poetic Diction; (4) Wordsworth's Poems, 2 vols. (1815) with a new Preface, and (5) The Essay supplementary to the Preface, also contained in Vol. 1 of the Poems of 1815.

P. I, 1. 26. p. 2, footnote. The authority of Milton. Double epithets, like everything else in poetry, must be justified solely by success, not by age, precedent or authority. In the year of Biographia was published the first volume of a poet remarkable for his coinage of double epithets; but the "rapier-pointed epigram," the "sky-searching lark" and the "deep-brow'd Homer" of Keats's earliest poems are certainly not less happy than the "heart high-sorrowful," the "droop-headed flowers" or the azure-lidded sleep" of his latest.

a small volume. No. 8 in the list of works.

p. 2, footnote. Ut tanquam scopulum, etc. From the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius (2nd century A.D.), Bk. 1, Chap. 10. The passage reads: "Vive ergo moribus praeteritis; loquere verbis praesentibus; atque id, quod a C. Caesare, excellentis ingenii ac prudentiae viro, in primo De Analogia libro, scriptum est, habe semper in memoria atque in pectore, ut tanquam scopulum, sic fugias inauditum atque insolens verbum." It may be rendered thus: "Order your life according to the manners of older times, but speak in the language of the present; and keep always in mind and soul what Caesar-a man of extraordinary genius and sagacity-has written in the first book of his Analogy: Like a dangerous rock shun the new and unusual word." Caesar's treatise De Analogia has not come down to us.

p. 2, 1. 19. pruned the double epithets. The passage in the text was used almost word for word twenty years earlier in the preface to the second edition of the Poems (1797), and repeated later; but a comparison of the three editions (8, 11, 19 in List of Works) shows that the alleged rigour of the pruning was one of Coleridge's fancies. Some rather egregious examples in 8 disappear from 11 and 19, among them, "tyrant-murdered multitudes," "wildly-bowered sequestered walk"