NOTE ON COLERIDGE'S CHRISTABEL.
Should the English language ever become after the lapse of years a dead language, it is a curious question, whether the works of our poets and prose writers would present such difficulties to students at that remote period, as the pages of the Greek and Roman authors present to ourselves. Our text, it is to be hoped, would not prove so corrupt as theirs, or afford so much scope to the ingenuity of scholars; but the lax phraseology now in vogue would amply supply its place. As to downright inherent obscurity, I think it is not at all clear that we are a whit behind the ancients. More than one, even of our living poets, would require a Delphin interpretation. As a fair sample of what English poetry is able to offer in the way of difficulty, I would refer to the "conclusion" of Coleridge's unfinished poem of Christabel.
The few lines, of which this conclusion consists, form an unquestionably difficult passage. How many persons, and they of no mean abilities, read it over and over again, and, after all, confess they can make nothing of it! How many are there, who have come to regard it in the light of a quaint enigma, and "give it up!" The passage certainly seems to possess one property of the enigma, inasmuch as it requires a key to elucidate it; but, as soon as this is obtained it becomes not only perfectly plain, but, I think, forces an acknowledgment from the reader, that it could hardly have been more clearly or more justly expressed.
To say that this conclusion is the most beautiful and the most valuable portion of the poem of Christabel, may appear to savour a little of extravagance; still, I cannot but think that it is, and that the author intended to convey by it far more than is usually contained in the common-place "moral." In support of this opinion I will briefly discuss these two-and-twenty lines.
Of the first six lines I will only remark, where shall we find, in the whole range of English poetry, a more exquisite picture than is here contained in this small compass?
"A little child, a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself,
A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
That always finds, and never seeks,
Makes such a vision to the sight,
As fills a father's eyes with light."
The poet then proceeds to unite in a manner true in nature and in fact, yet equally strange and startling, two opposite and contending feelings:
"And pleasures flow in so thick and fast
Upon his heart, that he at last
Must needs express his love's excess,
With words of unmeant bitterness."
The habit, if it may be so called, alluded to in these lines, must be more or less familiar to most persons as an anomaly in our nature; the habit, I mean, ridiculous as it may appear, of applying evil, though "unmeant" names to children in a transport of affection. This is a trait in the human character which, slight, and faint, and trifling as it may seem, the acute mind of Coleridge has seized, and analysed, and exhibited in its legitimate development. Whether the propensity, thus delicately described, be really innocent in itself, or whether it be only the παρεκβασις, or excess, which the poet held to be the guilty state, it is hardly worth while stopping to inquire; still we cannot avoid his own startling suggestion,
"What, if in a world of sin
(O sorrow and shame should this be true!)
Such giddiness of heart and brain"
springs generally from some evil source, implies the existence of some evil principle. Familiar as this habit, this instance of "giddiness of heart and brain," is to most of us, I am not aware that it has ever been expressed in poetry, or even in prose, by any other writer; if so, this passage is a rarity, similar to those four stanzas in Gray's Elegy, beginning, "Yet e'en these bones," &c., of which Dr. Johnson says, "they are to me original; I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them."
The author then endeavours to offer some explanation of this phenomenon, and carries out the germ of ill to its full extent, as exemplified in Sir Leoline:
"Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together
Thoughts so all unlike each other;
To mutter and mock a broken charm,
To dally with wrong that does no harm;
Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty,
At each wild word to feel within
A sweet recoil of love and pity."
It appears to me that the third line in this passage, from its being introduced too early (if I may venture to say so), on this account unnecessarily increases the difficulty; it occurs before the idea has been sufficiently developed; while it belongs rather to the result of this evil leaven than to the explanation of it, with which the poet is here engaged. The "charm" to which he alludes is, of course, the tie that binds us to the object of affection, and which forbids us to speak any but words of love and tenderness.
The poet, then, from the aspect of this strange anomaly, as exemplified in Sir Leoline, is forced to the following conclusion:
"And what, if in a world of sin
(O sorrow and shame should this be true!)
Such giddiness of heart and brain
Comes seldom save from rage and pain,
So talks as it's most used to do."
If we turn now to the last two paragraphs of the poem, we find all this illustrated; in these two paragraphs the poet has
"Forced together
Thoughts so all unlike each other."
In the former are enumerated all those memorials which could move the Baron to "love and pity;" in the latter we are told of the "rage and pain" of his heart; and on this strange union the poet soliloquises in the conclusion.
A full discussion of this subject would be perhaps unsuited to the pages of "N. & Q.;" for, various as are the subjects to which they are open, ethics can hardly be reckoned one of them. I will conclude, therefore, with the following suggestion, viz. that the delicacy, the acuteness, and the truth evinced in this last scene of Christabel and its conclusion, tell of a deeper mind than has, perhaps, fallen to the lot of any English poet since the days of William Shakspeare.
H. C. K.
—— Rectory, Hereford.