Appreciations, With An Essay on Style
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Walter Horatio Pater >> Appreciations, With An Essay on Style
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[91]
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 grass.
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 God,
Through glooms which never woodman trod,
How oft, pursuing fancies holy,
[94]
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!
In his changes of political sentiment, Coleridge was associated with
the "Lake School"; and there is yet one other very different sort of
sentiment in which he is one with that school, yet all himself, his
sympathy, namely, with the animal world. That was a sentiment
connected at once with the love of outward nature in himself and in
the "Lake School," and its assertion of the natural affections in
their simplicity; with the homeliness and pity, consequent upon [95]
that assertion. The Lines to a Young Ass, tethered--
Where the close-eaten grass is scarcely seen,
While sweet around her waves the tempting green,
which had seemed merely whimsical in their day, indicate a vein of
interest constant in Coleridge's poems, and at its height in his
greatest poems--in Christabel, where it has its effect, as it were
antipathetically, in the vivid realisation of the serpentine element
in Geraldine's nature; and in The Ancient Mariner, whose fate is
interwoven with that of the wonderful bird, at whose blessing of the
water-snakes the curse for the death of the albatross passes away,
and where the moral of the love of all creatures, as a sort of
religious duty, is definitely expressed.
Christabel, though not printed till 1816, was written mainly in the
year 1797: The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner was printed as a
contribution to the Lyrical Ballads in 1798; and these two poems
belong to the great year of Coleridge's poetic production, his
twenty-fifth year. In poetic quality, above all in that most poetic
of all qualities, a keen sense of, and delight in beauty, the
infection of which lays hold upon the reader, they are quite out of
proportion to all his other compositions. The form in both is that
of the ballad, with some of its terminology, and some also of its
quaint conceits. They connect themselves with that revival of ballad
literature, of which Percy's Relics, and, in another [96] way,
Macpherson's Ossian are monuments, and which afterwards so powerfully
affected Scott--
Young-eyed poesy
All deftly masked as hoar antiquity.
The Ancient Mariner, as also, in its measure, Christabel, is a
"romantic" poem, impressing us by bold invention, and appealing to
that taste for the supernatural, that longing for le frisson, a
shudder, to which the "romantic" school in Germany, and its
derivations in England and France, directly ministered. In
Coleridge, personally, this taste had been encouraged by his odd and
out-of-the-way reading in the old-fashioned literature of the
marvellous--books like Purchas's Pilgrims, early voyages like
Hakluyt's, old naturalists and visionary moralists, like Thomas
Burnet, from whom he quotes the motto of "The Ancient Mariner, Facile
credo, plures esse naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum
universitate, etc." Fancies of the strange things which may very
well happen, even in broad daylight, to men shut up alone in ships
far off on the sea, seem to have occurred to the human mind in all
ages with a peculiar readiness, and often have about them, from the
story of the stealing of Dionysus downwards, the fascination of a
certain dreamy grace, which distinguishes them from other kinds of
marvellous inventions. This sort of fascination The Ancient Mariner
brings to its highest degree: it is the delicacy, the dreamy [97]
grace, in his presentation of the marvellous, which makes Coleridge's
work so remarkable. The too palpable intruders from a spiritual
world in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even,
have a kind of crudity or coarseness. Coleridge's power is in the
very fineness with which, as by some really ghostly finger, he brings
home to our inmost sense his inventions, daring as they are--the
skeleton ship, the polar spirit, the inspiriting of the dead corpses
of the ship's crew. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner has the
plausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and the general aspect
of life, which belongs to the marvellous, when actually presented as
part of a credible experience in our dreams. Doubtless, the mere
experience of the opium-eater, the habit he must almost necessarily
fall into of noting the more elusive phenomena of dreams, had
something to do with that: in its essence, however, it is connected
with a more purely intellectual circumstance in the development of
Coleridge's poetic gift. Some one once asked William Blake, to whom
Coleridge has many resemblances, when either is at his best (that
whole episode of the re-inspiriting of the ship's crew in The Ancient
Mariner being comparable to Blake's well-known design of the "Morning
Stars singing together") whether he had ever seen a ghost, and was
surprised when the famous seer, who ought, one might think, to have
seen so many, answered frankly, "Only [98] once!" His "spirits," at
once more delicate, and so much more real, than any ghost--the
burden, as they were the privilege, of his temperament--like it, were
an integral element in his everyday life. And the difference of mood
expressed in that question and its answer, is indicative of a change
of temper in regard to the supernatural which has passed over the
whole modern mind, and of which the true measure is the influence of
the writings of Swedenborg. What that change is we may see if we
compare the vision by which Swedenborg was "called," as he thought,
to his work, with the ghost which called Hamlet, or the spells of
Marlowe's Faust with those of Goethe's. The modern mind, so minutely
self-scrutinising, if it is to be affected at all by a sense of the
supernatural, needs to be more finely touched than was possible in
the older, romantic presentment of it. The spectral object, so
crude, so impossible, has become plausible, as
The blot upon the brain,
That will show itself without;
and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for which,
according to the scepticism, latent at least, in so much of our
modern philosophy, the so-called real things themselves are but
spectra after all.
It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, fruit
of his more delicate [99] psychology, that Coleridge infuses into
romantic adventure, itself also then a new or revived thing in
English literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in The
Ancient Mariner, unknown in those older, more simple, romantic
legends and ballads. It is a flower of medieval or later German
romance, growing up in the peculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern
psychological speculation, and putting forth in it wholly new
qualities. The quaint prose commentary, which runs side by side with
the verse of The Ancient Mariner, illustrates this--a composition of
quite a different shade of beauty and merit from that of the verse
which it accompanies, connecting this, the chief poem of Coleridge,
with his philosophy, and emphasising therein that psychological
interest of which I have spoken, its curious soul-lore.
Completeness, the perfectly rounded wholeness and unity of the
impression it leaves on the mind of a reader who fairly gives himself
to it--that, too, is one of the characteristics of a really excellent
work, in the poetic as in every other kind of art; and by this
completeness, The Ancient Mariner certainly gains upon Christabel--a
completeness, entire as that of Wordsworth's Leech-gatherer, or
Keats's Saint Agnes' Eve, each typical in its way of such wholeness
or entirety of effect on a careful reader. It is Coleridge's one
great complete work, the one really finished thing, in a life of many
beginnings. Christabel remained a fragment. In The Ancient Mariner
[100] this unity is secured in part by the skill with which the
incidents of the marriage-feast are made to break in dreamily from
time to time upon the main story. And then, how pleasantly, how
reassuringly, the whole nightmare story itself is made to end, among
the clear fresh sounds and lights of the bay, where it began, with
The moon-light steeped in silentness,
The steady weather-cock.
So different from The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in regard to this
completeness of effect, Christabel illustrates the same complexion of
motives, a like intellectual situation. Here, too, the work is of a
kind peculiar to one who touches the characteristic motives of the
old romantic ballad, with a spirit made subtle and fine by modern
reflection; as we feel, I think, in such passages as--
But though my slumber had gone by,
This dream it would not pass away--
It seems to live upon mine eye;
and--
For she, belike, hath drunken deep
Of all the blessedness of sleep;
and again--
With such perplexity of mind
As dreams too lively leave behind.
And that gift of handling the finer passages of human feeling, at
once with power and delicacy, which was another result of his finer
psychology, [101] of his exquisitely refined habit of self-
reflection, is illustrated by a passage on Friendship in the Second
Part--
Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain.
And thus it chanced, as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart's best brother
They parted--ne'er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining--
They stood aloof the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between;
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.
I suppose these lines leave almost every reader with a quickened
sense of the beauty and compass of human feeling; and it is the sense
of such richness and beauty which, in spite of his "dejection," in
spite of that burden of his morbid lassitude, accompanies Coleridge
himself through life. A warm poetic joy in everything beautiful,
whether it be a moral sentiment, like the friendship of Roland and
Leoline, or only the flakes of falling light from the water-snakes--
this joy, visiting him, now and again, after sickly dreams, in sleep
or waking, as a relief not to be forgotten, [102] and with such a
power of felicitous expression that the infection of it passes
irresistibly to the reader--such is the predominant element in the
matter of his poetry, as cadence is the predominant quality of its
form. "We bless thee for our creation!" he might have said, in his
later period of definite religious assent, "because the world is so
beautiful: the world of ideas--living spirits, detached from the
divine nature itself, to inform and lift the heavy mass of material
things; the world of man, above all in his melodious and intelligible
speech; the world of living creatures and natural scenery; the world
of dreams." What he really did say, by way of A Tombless Epitaph, is
true enough of himself--
Sickness, 'tis true,
Whole years of weary days, besieged him close,
Even to the gates and inlets of his life!
But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm,
And with a natural gladness, he maintained
The citadel unconquered, and in joy
Was strong to follow the delightful Muse.
For not a hidden path, that to the shades
Of the beloved Parnassian forest leads,
Lurked undiscovered by him; not a rill
There issues from the fount of Hippocrene,
But he had traced it upward to its source,
Through open glade, dark glen, and secret dell,
Knew the gay wild flowers on its banks, and culled
Its med'cinable herbs. Yea, oft alone,
Piercing the long-neglected holy cave,
The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,
He bade with lifted torch its starry walls
Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame
[103]
Of odorous lamps tended by saint and sage.
O framed for calmer times and nobler hearts!
O studious Poet, eloquent for truth!
Philosopher! contemning wealth and death,
Yet docile, childlike, full of Life and Love.
The student of empirical science asks, Are absolute principles
attainable? What are the limits of knowledge? The answer he
receives from science itself is not ambiguous. What the moralist
asks is, Shall we gain or lose by surrendering human life to the
relative spirit? Experience answers that the dominant tendency of
life is to turn ascertained truth into a dead letter, to make us all
the phlegmatic servants of routine. The relative spirit, by its
constant dwelling on the more fugitive conditions or circumstances of
things, breaking through a thousand rough and brutal classifications,
and giving elasticity to inflexible principles, begets an
intellectual finesse of which the ethical result is a delicate and
tender justice in the criticism of human life. Who would gain more
than Coleridge by criticism in such a spirit? We know how his life
has appeared when judged by absolute standards. We see him trying to
apprehend the "absolute," to stereotype forms of faith and
philosophy, to attain, as he says, "fixed principles" in politics,
morals, and religion, to fix one mode of life as the essence of life,
refusing to see the parts as parts only; and all the time his own
pathetic history pleads for a more [104] elastic moral philosophy
than his, and cries out against every formula less living and
flexible than life itself.
"From his childhood he hungered for eternity." There, after all, is
the incontestable claim of Coleridge. The perfect flower of any
elementary type of life must always be precious to humanity, and
Coleridge is a true flower of the ennuye, of the type of Rene. More
than Childe Harold, more than Werther, more than Rene himself,
Coleridge, by what he did, what he was, and what he failed to do,
represents that inexhaustible discontent, languor, and homesickness,
that endless regret, the chords of which ring all through our modern
literature. It is to the romantic element in literature that those
qualities belong. One day, perhaps, we may come to forget the
distant horizon, with full knowledge of the situation, to be content
with "what is here and now"; and herein is the essence of classical
feeling. But by us of the present moment, certainly--by us for whom
the Greek spirit, with its engaging naturalness, simple, chastened,
debonair, tryphes, habrotetos, khlides, khariton, himerou, pothou
pater+, is itself the Sangrail of an endless pilgrimage, Coleridge,
with his passion for the absolute, for something fixed where all is
moving, his faintness, his broken memory, his intellectual disquiet,
may still be ranked among the interpreters of one of the constituent
elements of our life.
1865, 1880.
NOTES
65. *The latter part of this paper, like that on Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, was contributed to Mr. T. H. Ward's English Poets.
68. +Transliteration: ousia akhromatos, askhematistos, anaphes.
Translation: "the colorless, utterly formless, intangible essence."
Phaedrus 247C.
80. +The two passages are not indented in the original; they are in
smaller typeface that makes for difficult reading.
86. +Transliteration: aei en sphodra orexei. Translation: "always
greatly yearning."
104. +Transliteration: tryphes, habrotetos, khlides, khariton,
himerou, pothou pater. Translation: "Of daintiness, delicacy,
luxury, graces, father of desire."
CHARLES LAMB
[105] THOSE English critics who at the beginning of the present
century introduced from Germany, together with some other subtleties
of thought transplanted hither not without advantage, the distinction
between the Fancy and the Imagination, made much also of the cognate
distinction between Wit and Humour, between that unreal and
transitory mirth, which is as the crackling of thorns under the pot,
and the laughter which blends with tears and even with the
sublimities of the imagination, and which, in its most exquisite
motives, is one with pity--the laughter of the comedies of
Shakespeare, hardly less expressive than his moods of seriousness or
solemnity, of that deeply stirred soul of sympathy in him, as flowing
from which both tears and laughter are alike genuine and contagious.
This distinction between wit and humour, Coleridge and other kindred
critics applied, with much effect, in their studies of some of our
older English writers. And as the distinction between imagination
and fancy, made popular by Wordsworth, [106] found its best
justification in certain essential differences of stuff in
Wordsworth's own writings, so this other critical distinction,
between wit and humour, finds a sort of visible interpretation and
instance in the character and writings of Charles Lamb;--one who
lived more consistently than most writers among subtle literary
theories, and whose remains are still full of curious interest for
the student of literature as a fine art.
The author of the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century,
coming to the humourists of the nineteenth, would have found, as is
true preeminently of Thackeray himself, the springs of pity in them
deepened by the deeper subjectivity, the intenser and closer living
with itself, which is characteristic of the temper of the later
generation; and therewith, the mirth also, from the amalgam of which
with pity humour proceeds, has become, in Charles Dickens, for
example, freer and more boisterous.
To this more high-pitched feeling, since predominant in our
literature, the writings of Charles Lamb, whose life occupies the
last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the
nineteenth, are a transition; and such union of grave, of terrible
even, with gay, we may note in the circumstances of his life, as
reflected thence into his work. We catch the aroma of a singular,
homely sweetness about his first years, spent on Thames' side, amid
the red [107] bricks and terraced gardens, with their rich historical
memories of old-fashioned legal London. Just above the poorer class,
deprived, as he says, of the "sweet food of academic institution," he
is fortunate enough to be reared in the classical languages at an
ancient school, where he becomes the companion of Coleridge, as at a
later period he was his enthusiastic disciple. So far, the years go
by with less than the usual share of boyish difficulties; protected,
one fancies, seeing what he was afterwards, by some attraction of
temper in the quaint child, small and delicate, with a certain Jewish
expression in his clear, brown complexion, eyes not precisely of the
same colour, and a slow walk adding to the staidness of his figure;
and whose infirmity of speech, increased by agitation, is partly
engaging.
And the cheerfulness of all this, of the mere aspect of Lamb's quiet
subsequent life also, might make the more superficial reader think of
him as in himself something slight, and of his mirth as cheaply
bought. Yet we know that beneath this blithe surface there was
something of the fateful domestic horror, of the beautiful heroism
and devotedness too, of old Greek tragedy. His sister Mary, ten
years his senior, in a sudden paroxysm of madness, caused the death
of her mother, and was brought to trial for what an overstrained
justice might have construed as the greatest of crimes. She was
[108] released on the brother's pledging himself to watch over her;
and to this sister, from the age of twenty-one, Charles Lamb
sacrificed himself, "seeking thenceforth," says his earliest
biographer, "no connexion which could interfere with her supremacy in
his affections, or impair his ability to sustain and comfort her."
The "feverish, romantic tie of love," he cast away in exchange for
the "charities of home." Only, from time to time, the madness
returned, affecting him too, once; and we see the brother and sister
voluntarily yielding to restraint. In estimating the humour of Elia,
we must no more forget the strong undercurrent of this great
misfortune and pity, than one could forget it in his actual story.
So he becomes the best critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, a
dramatist of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre.
Rosamund Grey, written in his twenty-third year, a story with
something bitter and exaggerated, an almost insane fixedness of gloom
perceptible in it, strikes clearly this note in his work.
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