Analysis of it.
The examination begins with an interesting, and (whether Epimethean or not) quite probable and very illuminative account of the actual plan of the Ballads, and the principle on which the shares were allotted. He and his friend, he tells us, had, during their neighbourly intercourse in Somerset, often talked of the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. And he illustrates this finely, by instancing the sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, of moonlight[moonlight] or sunset, communicate to familiar objects.
The “suspension of disbelief.”
The Ballads were to illustrate both kinds: and the poets were to divide the parts generally on the principle of Coleridge endeavouring to make the unfamiliar credible,[[356]] and Wordsworth the familiar charming. And with a charity which, I fear, the Preface will not bear, he proceeds to represent its contentions as applying only to the practical poetical attempt which Wordsworth, in accordance with the plan, was on this occasion making. He admits however, that Wordsworth’s expressions are at any rate sometimes equivocal, and indicates his own standpoint pretty early and pretty decisively by calling the phrase “language of real life” unfortunate. And then he proceeds to state his own view with very frequent glances—and more than glances—at his companion’s.
Attitude to metre.
From the first, however, it is obvious that on one of the two cardinal points—the necessity or non-necessity of metre in poetry—he is, though hardly to be called in two minds, for some reason or other reluctant to speak out his one mind. The revival of this old heresy among such men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, is the more to be wondered at, in that their predecessors of the eighteenth century had by no means pronounced on the other side in theory, and that therefore they themselves had no excuse of reaction. No one who, at however many removes, followed or professed to follow the authority of Aristotle, could deny that the subject, not the form, made poetry and poems. But just as the tyranny of a certain poetic diction led Wordsworth and others to strike at all poetic diction, so the tyranny of certain metres seems to have induced them to question the necessity of metre in general. At any rate Coleridge’s language, though not his real drift, is hesitating and sometimes almost self-contradictory. He will on the same page grant that “all compositions to which this charm of metre is superadded, whatever their contents, may be called poems,” and yet lay down that a poem is “that species of composition which is opposed to works of science by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth,” and (after adding to this a limitation, doubtless intended to take in metre, but nebulous enough to justify Peacock himself,[[357]]) will once more clear off his own mist by saying that if any one “chooses to call every composition a poem which is rhyme or measure or both, I must leave his opinion uncontroverted.”
That he himself saw the muddle is beyond doubt, and the opposite page contains a curious series of aporiæ which show the difficulty of applying his own definition.[[358]] The first (i.e., fourteenth) chapter ends with a soft shower of words, rhetorically pleasing rather than logically cogent, about the poet “bringing the whole soul of man into activity”; “fusing the faculties, each into each, by the synthetic and magical power of imagination,” reconciling differences and opposites. “Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, emotion its life, and imagination the soul.” In the fifteenth and sixteenth the author turns with evident relief from the definition of the perhaps indefinable to an illustration of it by discussing Venus and Adonis. Here, though it would be pleasant, it would be truancy to follow him.
This study, however, is by no means otiose. It leads him to make a comparison between the poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that of “the present age,” a comparison of which not the least notable point is a reference to the De Vulgari Eloquio.[[359]] Excursus on Shakespeare’s Poems. Coleridge seems only to have known it in the Italian translation; but it is much that he should have known it at all: and though he does not try to bring out its diametrical opposition to Wordsworth, that opposition must have been, consciously or unconsciously, in his mind. And then he comes back to Wordsworth himself.