He covered his tracks to some extent by referring several times to "the author," although the joint authorship was well known to him. While severe in most of his strictures on Wordsworth, Southey reserved his special malice for The Ancient Mariner. He called it "a Dutch attempt at German sublimity"; and in a letter written to William Taylor on September 5, 1798—probably while he was writing his discreditable critique—he characterized the poem as "the clumsiest attempt at German sublimity I ever saw." Southey's responsibility for the article became known to Cottle, who communicated the fact to the poets on their return a year later. Wordsworth declared that "if Southey could not conscientiously have spoken differently of the volume, he ought to have declined the task of reviewing it." Coleridge indited an epigram, To a Critic, and let the matter drop. Shortly afterwards he showed his renewed good-will by aiding Southey in preparing the second Annual Anthology (1800).
The subsequent reviews of the Lyrical Ballads adopted the tone of the Critical (then recognized as the leading review) and internal evidence shows that they did not hesitate to borrow ideas from Southey's article. The Analytical Review also saw German extravagances in The Ancient Mariner; the Monthly borrowed Southey's figure of the Italian and Flemish painters, and called The Ancient Mariner "the strangest story of a cock and bull that we ever saw on paper ... a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence." The belated review in the British Critic was probably written by Coleridge's friend, Rev. Francis Wrangham, and was somewhat more appreciative than the rest. For further details, consult Mr. Thomas Hutchinson's reprint (1898) of the Lyrical Ballads, pp. (xiii-xxviii). Despite the unfavorable reviews, the Ballads reached a fourth edition in 1805 (besides an American edition in 1802), thus achieving the popularity alluded to by Jeffrey at the beginning of our next review.
Poems (1807)
Wordsworth's fourth publication, the Poems (1807), included most of the pieces written after the first appearance of the Lyrical Ballads. It was likewise his first venture subsequent to the founding of the Edinburgh Review. Jeffrey had assailed the theories of the "Lake Poets" (and, incidentally, coined that unfortunate term) in the first number of the Review, in an article on Southey's Thalaba, and three years later (1805), in criticizing Madoc, he again expressed his views on the subject. Now came the first opportunity to deal with the recognized leader of the "Lakers"—the poet whose work most clearly illustrated the poetic theories that Jeffrey deemed pernicious.
The article here reprinted from the Edinburgh Rev., XI (214-231), of October, 1807, and Jeffrey's review of The Excursion, in ibid., XXIV (1-30), are perhaps the two most important critiques of their kind. No student of Wordsworth's theory of poetry, as set forth in his various prefaces, can afford to ignore either of these interesting discussions of the subject. (For details, see A.J. George's edition of the Prefaces of Wordsworth, Gates' Selections from Jeffrey, Beers' Nineteenth Century Romanticism, Hutchinson's edition of Lyrical Ballads, etc.) It was undoubtedly true that Jeffrey, although an able critic, failed to grasp the real significance of the new poetic movement, and to appreciate the influence wrought by the doctrines of the Lake Poets on modern conceptions of poetry. Yet he was far from wrong in many of his criticisms of Wordsworth. While deprecating the latter's theories, it is clear that Jeffrey regarded him as a poet of great power who was being led astray by his perverse practice. The popular conception of Jeffrey as a hectoring and blatant opponent of Wordsworth is not substantiated by the review. The impartial reader must agree with Jeffrey at many points, and if he will take the trouble to collate Jeffrey's quotations with the revised text of Wordsworth, he will learn that the poet did not disdain to take an occasional suggestion for the improvement of his verse.
We recognize Wordsworth to-day as the most unequal of English poets. There is little that is common to the inspired bard of Tintern Abbey, the Immortality Ode and the nobler Sonnets, and the unsophisticated scribe of Peter Bell and The Idiot Boy. Like Browning, he wrote too much to write well at all times, and if both poets were capable of the sublimest flights, they likewise descended to unimagined depths; but the fault of Wordsworth was perhaps the greater, because his bathos was the result of a deliberate and persistent attempt to enrich English poetry with prosaically versified incidents drawn at length from homely rural life.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The first part of Coleridge's Christabel was written in 1797 during the brief period of inspiration that also gave us The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan—in short, that small group of exquisite poems which in themselves suffice to place Coleridge in the front rank of English poets. The second part was written in 1800, after the author's return from Germany. The fragment circulated widely in manuscript among literary men, bewitched Scott and Byron into imitating its fascinating rhythms, and, at Byron's suggestion, was finally published by Murray in 1816 with Kubla Khan and The Pains of Sleep. It is probable that the high esteem in which these poems were held by Coleridge's literary friends led him to expect a favorable reception at the hands of the critics; hence his keen disappointment at the general tone of their sarcastic analysis and their protests against the absurdity and obscurity of the poems. The principal critiques on Christabel were:—(1) Edinburgh Rev., XXVII (58-67), which is here reprinted; (2) Monthly Rev., LXXXII, n.s. (22-25), reprinted in Stevenson's Early Reviews; (3) The Literary Panorama, IV, n.s. (561-565); and (4) Anti-Jacobin Rev., L (632-636).
It is evident that Coleridge was eminently successful in the gentle art of making enemies. We have seen that Southey's attack on the Lyrical Ballads was a direct result of his ill-will toward Coleridge; the outrageous article in the Edinburgh Review was written by William Hazlitt under similar inspiration, and was followed by abusive papers in The Examiner (1816, p. 743, and 1817, p. 236). There was no justification for Hazlitt, and none has been attempted by his biographers. Judged by its intrinsic merits, the Edinburgh article is one of the most absurd reviews ever written by a critic of recognized ability. Hazlitt followed the method of outlining the story by quotation with interspersed sarcasm and ironical criticism. As a coarse boor might crumple a delicate and beautifully wrought fabric to prove that it has not the wearing qualities of a blacksmith's apron, Hazlitt seized upon the ethereal story of Christabel, with its wealth of mediæval and romantic imagery, and held up to ridicule the incidents that did not conform to modern English conceptions of life. It requires no great art to produce such a critique; the same method was applied to Christabel with hardly less success by the anonymous hack of the Anti-Jacobin. Whatever may have been Hazlitt's motives, we cannot understand how a critic of his unquestioned ability could quote with ridicule some of the very finest lines of Kubla Khan, and expect his readers to concur with his opinion. The lack of taste was more apparent because he quoted, with qualified praise, six lines of no extraordinary merit from Christabel and insisted, that with this one exception, there was not a couplet in the whole poem that achieved the standard of a newspaper poetry-corner or the effusions scratched by peripatetic bards on inn-windows. An interesting discussion between Mr. Thomas Hutchinson and Col. Prideaux concerning Hazlitt's responsibility for this and other critiques on Coleridge in the Edinburgh Review will be found in Notes and Queries (Ninth Series), X, pp. 388, 429; XI, 170, 269.