English Men of Letters: Coleridge

by H. D. Traill

"The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;"

what more weirdly imagined of the "cracks and growls" of the rending iceberg than that they sounded "like noises in a swound"? And how beautifully steals in the passage that follows upon the cessation of the spirit's song –

"It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like to a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune."

Then, as the ballad draws to its close, after the ship has drifted over the harbour-bar –

"And I with sobs did pray –
O let me be awake, my God;
Or let me sleep alway,"

with what consummate art are we left to imagine the physical traces which the mariner's long agony had left behind it by a method far more terrible than any direct description – the effect, namely, which the sight of him produces upon others –

"I moved my lips – the Pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit; The holy Hermit raised his eyes, And prayed where he did sit.

"I took the oars: the Pilot's boy, Who now doth crazy go, Laughed loud and long, and all the while His eyes went to and fro. 'Ha! ha!' quoth he, 'full plain I see, The Devil knows how to row.'"

Perfect consistency of plan, in short, and complete equality of execution, brevity, self-restraint, and an unerring sense of artistic propriety – these are the chief notes of the Ancient Mariner, as they are not, in my humble judgment, the chief notes of any poem of Coleridge's before or since. And hence it is that this masterpiece of ballad minstrelsy is, as has been said, so confounding to the "pigeon-holing" mind.

The next most famous poem of this or indeed of any period of Coleridge's life is the fragment of Christabel, which, however, in spite of the poet's own opinion on that point, it is difficult to regard as "a more effective realisation" of the "natural-supernatural" idea. Beautiful as it is, it possesses none of that human interest with which, according to this idea, the narrator of the poetic story must undertake to invest it. Nor can the unfinished condition in which it was left be fairly held to account for this, for the characters themselves – the lady Christabel, the witch Geraldine, and even the baron Sir Leoline himself – are somewhat shadowy creations, with too little hold upon life and reality, and too much resemblance to the flitting figures of a dream. Powerful in their way as are the lines descriptive of the spell thrown over Christabel by her uncanny guest – lines at the recitation of which Shelley is said to have fainted – we cannot say that they strike a reader with such a sense of horror as should be excited by the contemplation of a real flesh-and-blood maiden subdued by "the shrunken serpent eyes" of a sorceress, and constrained "passively to imitate" their "look of dull and treacherous hate." Judging it, however, by any other standard than that of the poet's own erecting, one must certainly admit the claim of Christabel to rank very high as a work of pure creative art. It is so thoroughly suffused and permeated with the glow of mystical romance, the whole atmosphere of the poem is so exquisitely appropriate to the subject, and so marvellously preserved throughout, that our lack of belief in the reality of the scenes presented to us detracts but little from the pleasure afforded by the artistic excellence of its presentment. It abounds, too, in isolated pictures of surpassing vividness and grace – word-pictures which live in the "memory of the eye" with all the wholeness and tenacity of an actual painting. Geraldine appearing to Christabel beneath the oak, and the two women stepping lightly across the hall "that echoes still, pass as lightly as you will," are pictures of this kind; and nowhere out of Keats's Eve of St. Agnes is there any "interior" to match that of Christabel's chamber, done as it is in little more than half a dozen lines. These beauties, it is true, are fragmentary, like the poem itself, but there is no reason to believe that the poem itself would have gained anything in its entirety – that is to say, as a poetic narrative – by completion. Its main idea – that the purity of a pure maiden is a charm more powerful for the protection of those dear to her than the spells of the evil one for their destruction – had been already sufficiently indicated, and the mode in which Coleridge, it seems, intended to have worked would hardly have added anything to its effect. [[4]] And although he clung till very late in life to the belief that he could have finished it in after days with no change of poetic manner – "If easy in my mind," he says in a letter to be quoted hereafter, "I have no doubt either of the reawakening power or of the kindling inclination" – there are few students of his later poems who will share his confidence. Charles Lamb strongly recommended him to leave it unfinished, and Hartley Coleridge, in every respect as competent a judge on that point as could well be found, always declared his conviction that his father could not, at least qualis ab incepto, have finished the poem.