Journals become overfull of entries such as "sad about Coleridge," "We talked about Coleridge": Monday, Feb. 8th, 1802. After dinner...we went towards Rydale for letters....Before we had come to the shore of the Lake we met our patient bow-bent friend (the postman)....' I have two for you in my box.' We lifted up the lid, and there they lay....We broke the seal of Coleridge's letters, and I had light enough just to see that he was not ill. I put it in my pocket. At the top of the White Moss I took it to my bosom, a safer place for it.... The moon caine out suddenly when we were at John's Grove, and a star or two besides. But let us not load our minds with regrets for many things that never could be. "The country becomes every day more and more lovely," wrote Wordsworth: and the splendours of that summer in the Quantocks have passed into the history of our literature. The brother and sister quitted Alfoxden in June. In September Coleridge met them in London and voyaged with them on a happy, almost rollicking, jaunt to Hamburg. The Lyrical Ballads had been published a few days before, Coleridge contributing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Nightingale, The Foster-Mother's Tale and The Dungeon. The friends had launched their thunderbolt, and went off in high spirits. It was a real thunderbolt, too: though for the moment England took it with her habitual phlegm. Mrs Coleridge sent news that "the Lyrical Ballads are not liked at all, by any." At Hamburg, after a few crowded days, the travellers separated the Wordsworths for Goslar, Coleridge for Ratzeburg, intent on acquiring a thorough knowledge of German. II As everybody knows, the famous Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads-the explicit challenge urbi et orbiwas written by Wordsworth; and we have to choose between the alternatives either that he never submitted it to Coleridge before putting it into the Second Edition (which sounds incredible), or that Coleridge read it and was too indolent or too good-natured to protest. As time went on, and the public grew angry, other prefaces, notes and supplements appeared, and all these satellites were by Wordsworth. He pullulated pugnacity. On this then we must observe: (1) That although the two poets were at one in the main, and especially in their protest against "poetic diction" as understood by the pseudo-classical followers of Pope—the sort of people who could not write "sun" or "moon" but supposed "Dian's bright orb and Sol's imperious ray" to be no less than "the Muse" deserved-in the Ballads themselves. the two men worked on different methods; Wordsworth endeavouring to poetise the common and familiar, Coleridge the uncommon and fantastic: and it was precisely this difference which had assigned over The Ancient Mariner to Coleridge's sole charge. (2) Wordsworth, being a self-centred man, naturally in the Preface laid all the stress on his own innovation. Moreover, to quote Mr Saintsbury, "as so often happens, resentment, and a dogged determination to 'spite the fools,' made him here represent the principle as much more deliberately carried out than it actually was. And the same doggedness," Mr Saintsbury goes on, "was no doubt at the root of his repetition of this principle in all his subsequent prose observations, though, as has been clear from the first to almost all impartial observers, he never, from Tintern Abbey onwards, achieves his highest poetry, and very rarely achieves high poetry at all, without putting that principle in his pocket." (3) Although the Prefaces contain much shrewd writing and some that is highly felicitous, Wordsworth had not, as Coleridge had, a trained philosophical mind. He is apt to be at sea with his vocabulary; even has small sense that terms, as they have a history, should have their bounds respected. No doubt it were asking too much of Wordsworth (as of Blake), having to say just then what he had to say, to learn that older men had, after all, provided him with a way of saying it accurately: but it remains that, through not knowing it, Wordsworth and Blake sometimes presented old thoughts with a solemn air of discovery, and sometimes meant what they could not say, or said what they could not possibly have meant. The blame of Wordsworth's lapses into bathos may often be divided between lack of humour and lack of a sense of words-in so far as these defects can be separated: and it is noticeable that whenever Coleridge, years after, pounced on such a lapse, Wordsworth almost invariably altered the passage before his next edition. For an instance: His widowed Mother, for a second mate Even less had Wordsworth a sense of clean classification-perhaps the surest test of a trained logician. Indeed his later groupings of his work into "Poems of the Fancy," "of Sentiment," "of Reflection" and so forth make a logician's heart bleed. They are as near a fundamentum divisionis as the famous legend over the Oxford tradesman's shop: "University, Pork and Family Butcher." Now Coleridge had this skill of fence, this knowledge of dialectic, which Wordsworth lacked. And not only could he have done it better, but its having been done worse intimately concerned him. For he had been part-author of the poems, and as he quite justly said at last, in the fourth chapter of Biographia, A careful and repeated examination of these [the two volumes of the Second Edition] confirms me in the belief, that the omission of less than a hundred lines would have precluded nine-tenths of the criticism of his work. He goes on, a page later: In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the Lyrical Ballads, I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of the unexampled opposition which Mr Wordsworth's writings have been since doomed to encounter. Yes, but not "Mr Wordsworth's writings" only. Coleridge himself had been the sufferer and had only too good occasion to protest, as he does in Chapter 111, his surprise that, having run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of faults which I had, nothing having come before the judgment-seat in the interim, I should, year after year, quarter after quarter, month after inonth (not to mention sundry petty periodicals of still quicker revolution, "or weekly or diurnal") have been, for at least seventeen years consecutively, dragged forth by them into the foremost lists of the proscribed, and forced to abide the brunt of abuse for faults directly opposite, and which I had not. How shall I explain this? He explains this quite simply, and the explanation is historically true. Noscitur a sociis: The solution appears to be this, I was in habits of intimacy with Mr Wordsworth.... Coleridge, then, had the ability to define his poetical faith, correcting, wherever they were false, the impressions of it left implicit by Wordsworth's Prefaces. He had an absolute right to do this. One may even say he owed this to his reputation. He had further every incentive under persistent attack. Yet for seventeen years he held his tongue. Why? "Opium," say some. "Constitutional indolence," say others. No: surely when these have been taken into full and more than full account, we must seek a third reason, and a fourth. III Let us go back to 1798 and to Hamburg, where on the 21st of October Coleridge said goodbye to the Wordsworths and betook him to Ratzeburg, to master the German language by assiduous study. With a sufficient stock of it, four months later, he proceeded to Göttingen, matriculated at the University, attended lectures, and, for another four months, worked like a horse "harder than I trust in God Almighty I shall ever have occasion to work again." His chief efforts he directed "towards a grounded knowledge of the German language and literature," studying Gothic also, and making collections for a life of Lessing and for a history of the belles lettres in Germany before Lessing. He left Göttingen on the 24th of June and arrived home at Nether Stowey in July. In his absence his second child, an infant, had died, and the blow had almost broken Mrs Coleridge's heart. Husband and wife spent some three months together. But in October the old magnetism draws Coleridge north, and in a few weeks he and Wordsworth are touring through the Lake Country. "Both poets were most strongly attracted by Grasmere, and with Wordsworth it became merely a question. of whether he should build a house by the lake-side or, as he finally decided, to take one which was then available. Before Christmas, he and his sister had taken up their abode in Dove Cottage, which all the world now goes to see." (J. Dykes Campbell.) Coleridge did not return to Stowey as a householder. After a short interval-mostly spent in London, in writing for The Morning Post-he travelled with wife and family to Cumberland, for a short month enjoyed the Wordsworths' hospitality, and on July 24th moved into a house of his own-"Greta Hall," Keswick-above the shore of Derwentwater, and some twelve miles from Dove Cottage. This migration from Stowey hurt poor Tom Poole, who felt himself left in the lurch and even accused his friend of "prostration" before Wordsworth. The word, no doubt, was too vivacious, as words spoken in anger are apt to be. But probably Mrs Sandford does not overshoot the truth in guessing that "Coleridge would never have been contented to live in the West of England while Wordsworth was living in the north." The relevance of this to our enquiry will appear by and by. |