Chapter XXIV: Book Reviewing (5)

Godwin is related to have said that "Shelley was so beautiful, it was a pity he was so wicked." I doubt if there is a single literate person in the world to-day who would apply the word "wicked" to Shelley. It is said that Browning, who had begun as so ardent a worshipper, never felt the same regard for Shelley after reading the full story of his desertion of Harriet Westbrook and her suicide. But Browning did not know the full story. No one of us knows the full story. On the face of it, it looks a peculiarly atrocious thing to desert a wife at a time when she is about to become a mother. It seems ungenerous, again, when a man has an income of £1,000 a year to make an annual allowance of only £200 to a deserted wife and her two children. Shelley, however, had not married Harriet for love. A nineteen-year-old boy, he had run away with a seventeen-year-old girl in order to save her from the imagined tyranny of her father. At the end of three years Harriet had lost interest in him. Besides this, she had an intolerable elder sister whom Shelley hated. Harriet's sister, it is suggested, influenced her in the direction of a taste for bonnet-shops instead of supporting Shelley's exhortations to her that she should cultivate her mind. "Harriet," says Mr. Ingpen in _Shelley in England_, "foolishly allowed herself to be influenced by her sister, under whose advice she probably acted when, some months earlier, she prevailed upon Shelley to provide her with a carriage, silver plate and expensive clothes." We cannot help sympathizing a little with Harriet. At the same time, she was making a breach with Shelley inevitable. She wished him to remain her husband and to pay for her bonnets, but she did not wish even to pretend to "live up to him" any longer. As Mr. Ingpen says, "it was love, not matrimony," for which Shelley yearned. "Marriage," Shelley had once written, echoing Godwin, "is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies." Having lived for years in a theory of "anti-matrimonialism," he now saw himself doomed to one of those conventional marriages which had always seemed to him a denial of the holy spirit of love. This, too, at a time when he had found in Mary Godwin a woman belonging to the same intellectual and spiritual race as himself--a woman whom he loved as the great lovers in all the centuries have loved. Shelley himself expressed the situation in a few characteristic words to Thomas Love Peacock: "Everyone who knows me," he said, "must know that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a noble animal, but she can do neither." "It always appeared to me," said Peacock, "that you were very fond of Harriet." Shelley replied: "But you did not know how I hated her sister." And so Harriet's marriage-lines were, torn up, as people say nowadays, like a scrap of paper. That Shelley did not feel he had done anything inconsiderate is shown by the fact that, within three weeks of his elopement with Mary Godwin, he was writing to Harriet, describing the scenery through which Mary and he had travelled, and urging her to come and live near them in Switzerland. "I write," his letter runs--

to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will at least
find one firm and constant friend, to whom your interests will be
always dear--by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured.
From none can you expect this but me--all else are unfeeling, or
selfish, or have beloved friends of their own, as Mrs. B[oinville],
to whom their attention and affection is confined.

He signed this letter (the Ianthe of whom he speaks was his daughter):

With love to my sweet little Ianthe, ever most affectionately
yours, S.

This letter, if it had been written by an amorist, would seem either base or priggish. Coming from Shelley, it is a miracle of what can only be called innocence.

The most interesting of the "new facts and letters" in Mr. Ingpen's book relate to Shelley's expulsion from Oxford and his runaway match with Harriet, and to his father's attitude on both these occasions. Shelley's father, backed by the family solicitor, cuts a commonplace figure in the story. He is simply the conventional grieved parent. He made no effort to understand his son. The most he did was to try to save his respectability. He objected to Shelley's studying for the Bar, but was anxious to make him a member of Parliament; and Shelley and he dined with the Duke of Norfolk to discuss the matter, the result being that the younger man was highly indignant "at what he considered an effort to shackle his mind, and introduce him into life as a mere follower of the Duke." How unpromising as a party politician Shelley was may be gathered from the fact that in 1811, the same year in which he dined with the Duke, he not only wrote a satire on the Regent _à propos_ of a Carlton House fête, but "amused himself with throwing copies into the carriages of persons going to Carlton House after the fête." Shelley's methods of propaganda were on other occasions also more eccentric than is usual with followers of dukes. His journey to Dublin to preach Catholic Emancipation and repeal of the Union was, the beginning of a brief but extraordinary period of propaganda by pamphlet. Having written a fivepenny pamphlet, _An Address to the Irish People_, he stood in the balcony of his lodgings in Lower Sackville Street, and threw copies to the passers-by. "I stand," he wrote at the time, "at the balcony of our window, and watch till I see a man _who looks likely_; I throw a book to him." Harriet, it is to be feared, saw only the comic side of the adventure. Writing to Elizabeth Hitchener--"the Brown Demon," as Shelley called her when he came to hate her--she said:

I'm sure you would laugh were you to see us give the pamphlets. We
throw them out of the window, and give them to men that we pass in
the streets. For myself, I am ready to die of laughter when it is
done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman's
hood and cloak. She knew nothing of it, and we passed her. I could
hardly get on: my muscles were so irritated.

Shelley, none the less, was in regard to Ireland a wiser politician than the politicians, and he was indulging in no turgid or fanciful prose in his _Address_ when he described the Act of Union as "the most successful engine that England ever wielded over the misery of fallen Ireland." Godwin, with whom Shelley had been corresponding for some time, now became alarmed at his disciple's reckless daring. "Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!" he wrote to him in his anxiety. It is evidence of the extent of Godwin's influence over Shelley that the latter withdrew his Irish publications and returned to England, having spent about six weeks on his mission to the Irish people.

Mr. Ingpen has really written a new biography of Shelley rather than a compilation of new material. The new documents incorporated in the book were discovered by the successors to Mr. William Whitton, the Shelleys' family solicitor, but they can hardly be said to add much to our knowledge of the facts about Shelley. They prove, however, that his marriage to Harriet Westbrook took place in a Presbyterian church in Edinburgh, and that, at a later period, he was twice arrested for debt. Mr. Ingpen holds that they also prove that Shelley "appeared on the boards of the Windsor Theatre as an actor in Shakespearean drama." But we have only William Whitton, the solicitor's words for this, and it is clear that he had been at no pains to investigate the matter. "It was mentioned to me yesterday," he wrote to Shelley's father in November, 1815, "that Mr. P.B. Shelley was exhibiting himself on the Windsor stage in the character of Shakespeare's plays, under the figured name of Cooks." "The character of Shakespeare's plays" sounds oddly, as though Whitton did not know what he was talking about, unless he was referring to allegorical "tableaux vivants" of some sort. Certainly, so vague a rumour as this--the sort of rumour that would naturally arise in regard to a young man who was supposed to have gone to the bad--is no trustworthy evidence that Shelley was ever "an actor in Shakespearean drama." At the same time, Mr. Ingpen deserves enthusiastic praise for the untiring pursuit of facts which has enabled him to add an indispensable book to the Shelley library. I wish that, as he has to some extent followed the events of Shelley's life until the end, he had filled in the details of the life abroad as well as the life in England. His book is an absorbing biography, but it remains of set purpose a biography with gaps. He writes, it should be added, in the spirit of a collector of facts rather than of a psychologist. One has to create one's own portrait of Shelley out of the facts he has brought together.

One is surprised, by the way, to find so devoted a student of Shelley--a student to whom every lover of literature is indebted for his edition of Shelley's letters as well as for the biography--referring to Shelley again and again as "Bysshe." Shelley's family, it may be admitted, called him "Bysshe." But never was a more inappropriate name given to a poet who brought down music from heaven. At the same time, as we read his biography over again, we feel that it is possible that the two names do somehow express two incongruous aspects of the man. In his life he was, to a great extent, Bysshe; in his poetry he was Shelley. Shelley wrote _The Skylark_ and _Pan_ and _The West Wind_. It was Bysshe who imagined that a fat old woman in a train had infected him with incurable elephantiasis. Mr. Ingpen quotes Peacock's account of this characteristic illusion:

He was continually on the watch for its symptoms; his legs were to
swell to the size of an elephant's, and his skin was to be crumpled
over like goose-skin. He would draw the skin of his own hands arms,
and neck, very tight, and, if he discovered any deviation from
smoothness, he would seize the person next to him and endeavour, by
a corresponding pressure, to see if any corresponding deviation
existed. He often startled young ladies in an evening party by this
singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of
lightning.

Mr. Ingpen has wisely omitted nothing about Bysshe, however ludicrous. After reading a biography so unsparing in tragi-comic narrative, however, one has to read _Prometheus_ again in order to recall that divine song of a freed spirit, the incarnation of which we call Shelley.

(2) THE EXPERIMENTALIST

Mr. Buxton Forman has an original way of recommending books to our notice. In an introduction to Medwin's _Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley_ he begins by frankly telling us that it is a bad book, and that the only point of controversy in regard to it is as to the kind of bad book it is. "Last century," he declares, "produced a plethora of bad books that were valuable, and of fairly good books with no lasting value. Medwin's distinction is that he left two bad books which were and still are valuable, but whether the _Byron Conversations_ and the _Life of Shelley_ should be called the two most valuable bad books of the century or the two worst valuable books of the century is a hard point in casuistry." Medwin, we may admit, even if he was not the "perfect idiot" he has been called, would have been a dull fellow enough if he had never met Shelley or Byron. But he did meet them, and as a result he will live to all eternity, or near it, a little gilded by their rays. He was not, Mr. Forman contends, the original of the man who "saw Shelley plain" in Browning's lyric. None the less, he is precisely that man in the imaginations of most of us. A relative of Shelley, a school friend, an intimate of the last years in Italy, even though we know him to have been one of those men who cannot help lying because they are so stupid, he still fascinates us as a treasury of sidelights on one of the loveliest and most flashing lives in the history of English literature.

Shelley is often presented to us as a kind of creature from fairyland, continually wounded in a struggle with the despotic realities of earth. Here and in his poetry, however, we see him rather as the herald of the age of science: he was a born experimentalist; he experimented, not only in chemistry, but in life and in politics. At school, he and his solar microscope were inseparable. Ardently interested in chemistry, he once, we are told, borrowed a book on the subject from Medwin's father, but his own father sent it back with a note saying: "I have returned the book on chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at Eton." During his life at University College, Oxford, his delight in chemical experiments continued.

His chemical operations seemed to an unskilful observer to premise
nothing but disasters. He had blown himself up at Eton. He had
inadvertently swallowed some mineral poison, which he declared had
seriously injured his health, and from the effects of which he
should never recover. His hands, his clothes, his books, and his
furniture, were stained and covered by medical acids--more than one
hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena of
combustion, especially in the middle of the room, where the floor
had also been burnt by his mixing ether or some other fluid in a
crucible, and the honourable wound was speedily enlarged by rents,
for the philosopher, as he hastily crossed the room in pursuit of
truth, was frequently caught in it by the foot.

The same eagerness of discovery is shown in his passion for kite-flying as a boy:

He was fond of flying kites, and at Field Place made an electrical
one, an idea borrowed from Franklin, in order to draw lightning
from The clouds--fire from Heaven, like a new Prometheus.

And his generous dream of bringing science to the service of humanity is revealed in his reflection:

What a comfort it would be to the poor at all times, and especially
in winter, if we could be masters of caloric, and could at will
furnish them with a constant supply!

Shelley's many-sided zeal in the pursuit of truth naturally led him early to invade theology. From his Eton days, he used to enter into controversies by letter with learned divines. Medwin declares that he saw one such correspondence in which Shelley engaged in argument with a bishop "under the assumed name of a woman." It must have been in a somewhat similar mood that "one Sunday after we had been to Rowland Hill's chapel, and were dining together in the city, he wrote to him under an assumed name, proposing to preach to his congregation."

Certainly, Shelley loved mystification scarcely less than he loved truth itself. He was a romanticist as well as a philosopher, and the reading in his childhood of novels like _Zofloya the Moor_--a work as wild, apparently, as anything Cyril Tourneur ever wrote--excited his imagination to impossible flights of adventure. Few of us have the endurance to study the effects of this ghostly reading in Shelley's own work--his forgotten novels, _Zastrossi_, and _St. Irvyne or the Rosicrucian_--but we can see how his life itself borrowed some of the extravagances of fiction. Many of his recorded adventures are supposed to have been hallucinations, like the story of the "stranger in a military cloak," who, seeing him in a post-office at Pisa, said, "What! Are you that d--d atheist, Shelley?" and felled him to the ground. On the other hand, Shelley's story of his being attacked by a midnight assassin in Wales, after being disbelieved for three-quarters of a century, has in recent years been corroborated in the most unexpected way. Wild a fiction as his life was in many respects, it was a fiction he himself sincerely and innocently believed. His imaginative appetite, having devoured science by day and sixpenny romances by night, still remained unsatisfied, and, quite probably, went on to mix up reality and make-believe past all recognition for its next dish. Francis Thompson, with all respect to many critics, was right when he noted what a complete playfellow Shelley was in his life. When he was in London after his expulsion from the University, he could throw himself with all his being into childish games like skimming stones on the Serpentine, "counting with the utmost glee the number of bounds, as the flat stones flew skimming over the surface of the water." He found a perfect pleasure in paper boats, and we hear of his making a sail on one occasion out of a ten-pound note--one of those myths, perhaps, which gather round poets. It must have been the innocence of pleasure shown in games like these that made him an irresistible companion to so many comparatively prosaic people. For the idea that Shelley in private life was aloof and unpopular from his childhood up is an entirely false one. As Medwin points out, in referring to his school-days, he "must have had a rather large circle of friends, since his parting breakfast at Eton cost £50."

Even at the distance of a century, we are still seized by the fascination of that boyish figure with the "stag eyes," so enthusiastically in pursuit of truth and of dreams, of trifles light as air and of the redemption of the human race. "His figure," Hogg tells us, "was slight and fragile, and yet his bones were large and strong. He was tall, but he stooped so much that he seemed of low stature." And, in Medwin's book, we even become reconciled to that shrill voice of his, which Lamb and most other people found so unpleasant. Medwin gives us nothing in the nature of a portrait of Shelley in these heavy and incoherent pages; but he gives us invaluable materials for such a portrait--in descriptions, for instance, of how he used to go on with his reading, even when he was out walking, and would get so absorbed in his studies that he sometimes asked, "Mary, have I dined?" More important, as revealing his too exquisite sensitiveness, is the account of how Medwin saw him, "after threading the carnival crowd in the Lung' Arno Corsos, throw himself, half-fainting, into a chair, overpowered by the atmosphere of evil passions, as he used to say, in that sensual and unintellectual crowd." Some people, on reading a passage like this, will rush to the conclusion that Shelley was a prig. But the prig is a man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by the miseries and imperfections of humanity. Shelley, no doubt, was more convinced of his own rightness than any other man of the same fine genius in English history. He did not indulge in repentance, like Burns and Byron. On the other hand, he was not in the smallest degree an egolator. He had not even such an innocent egoism as Thoreau's. He was always longing to give himself to the world. In the Italian days we find him planning an expedition with Byron to rescue, by main force, a man who was in danger of being burnt alive for sacrilege. He has often been denounced for his heartless treatment of Harriet Westbrook, and, though we may not judge him, it is possible that a better man would have behaved differently. But it was a mark of his unselfishness, at least, that he went through the marriage service with both his wives, in spite of his principles, that he so long endured Harriet's sister as the tyrant of his house, and that he neglected none of his responsibilities to her, in so far as they were consistent with his deserting her for another woman. This may seem a _bizarre_ defence, but I merely wish to emphasize the fact that Shelley behaved far better than ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done, given the same principles and the same circumstances. He was a man who never followed the line of least resistance or of self-indulgence, as most men do in their love affairs. He fought a difficult fight all his life in a world that ignored him, except when it was denouncing him as a polluter of Society. Whatever mistakes we may consider him to have made, we can hardly fail to admit that he was one of the greatest of English Puritans.

(3) THE POET OF HOPE

Shelley is the poet for a revolutionary age. He is the poet of hope, as Wordsworth is the poet of wisdom. He has been charged with being intangible and unearthly, but he is so only in the sense in which the future is intangible and unearthly. He is no more unearthly than the skylark or the rainbow or the dawn. His world, indeed, is a universe of skylarks and rainbows and dawns--a universe in which

Like a thousand dawns on a single night
The splendours rise and spread.

He at once dazzles and overwhelms us with light and music. He is unearthly in the sense that as we read him we seem to move in a new element. We lose to some extent the gravity of flesh and find ourselves wandering among stars and sunbeams, or diving under sea or stream to visit the buried day of some wonder-strewn cave. There are other great poets besides Shelley who have had a vision of the heights and depths. Compared with him, however, they have all about them something of Goliath's disadvantageous bulk. Shelley alone retains a boyish grace like David's, and does not seem to groan under the burden of his task. He does not round his shoulders in gloom in the presence of Heaven and Hell. His cosmos is a constellation. His thousand dawns are shaken out over the earth with a promise that turns even the long agony of Prometheus into joy. There is no other joy in literature like Shelley's. It is the joy not of one who is blind or untroubled, but of one who, in a midnight of tyranny and suffering of the unselfish, has learned

... to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

To write like this is to triumph over death. It is to cease to be a victim and to become a creator. Shelley recognized that the world had been bound into slavery by the Devil, but he more than anyone else believed that it was possible for the human race in a single dayspring to recover the first intention of God.

In the great morning of the world,
The Spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over Chaos.

Shelley desired to restore to earth not the past of man but the past of God. He lacked the bad sort of historical sense that will sacrifice the perfect to-morrow to pride in the imperfect yesterday. He was the devoted enemy of that dark spirit of Power which holds fast to the old greed as to a treasure. In _Hellas_ he puts into the mouth of Christ a reproof of Mahomet which is a reproof to all the Carsons and those who are haters of a finer future to-day.

Obdurate spirit!
Thou seest but the Past in the To-come.
Pride is thy error and thy punishment.
Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds
Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops
Before the Power that wields and kindles them.
True greatness asks not space.

There are some critics who would like to separate Shelley's politics from his poetry. But Shelley's politics are part of his poetry. They are the politics of hope as his poetry is the poetry of hope. Europe did not adopt his politics in the generation that followed the Napoleonic Wars, and the result is we have had an infinitely more terrible war a hundred years later. Every generation rejects Shelley; it prefers incredulity to hope, fear to joy, obedience to common sense, and is surprised when the logic of its common sense turns out to be a tragedy such as even the wildest orgy of idealism could not have produced. Shelley must, no doubt, still seem a shocking poet to an age in which the limitation of the veto of the House of Lords was described as a revolutionary step. To Shelley even the new earth for which the Bolsheviks are calling would not have seemed an extravagant demand. He was almost the only English poet up to his own time who believed that the world had a future. One can think of no other poet to whom to turn for the prophetic music of a real League of Nations. Tennyson may have spoken of the federation of the world, but his passion was not for that but for the British Empire. He had the craven fear of being great on any but the old Imperialist lines. His work did nothing to make his country more generous than it was before. Shelley, on the other hand, creates for us a new atmosphere of generosity. His patriotism was love of the people of England, not love of the Government of England. Hence, when the Government of England allied itself with the oppressors of mankind, he saw nothing unpatriotic in arraigning it as he would have arraigned a German or a Russian Government in the same circumstances.

He arraigned it, indeed, in the preface to _Hellas_ in a paragraph which the publisher nervously suppressed, and which was only restored in 1892 by Mr. Buxton Forman. The seditious paragraph ran:

Should the English people ever become free, they will reflect upon
the part which those who presume to represent them will have played
in the great drama of the revival of liberty, with feelings which
it would become them to anticipate. This is the age of the war of
the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those
ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers,
called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common
enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a
mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth
are virtual members. But a new race has arisen throughout Europe,
nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and
she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that
destiny which tyrants foresee and dread.

It is nearly a hundred years since Shelley proclaimed this birth of a new race throughout Europe. Would he have turned pessimist if he had lived to see the world infected with Prussianism as it has been in our time? I do not think he would. He would have been the singer of the new race to-day as he was then. To him the resurrection of the old despotism, foreign and domestic, would have seemed but a fresh assault by the Furies on the body of Prometheus. He would have scattered the Furies with a song.

For Shelley has not failed. He is one of those who have brought down to earth the creative spirit of freedom. And that spirit has never ceased to brood, with however disappointing results, over the chaos of Europe until our own time. His greatest service to freedom is, perhaps, that he made it seem, not a policy, but a part of Nature. He made it desirable as the spring, lovely as a cloud in a blue sky, gay as a lark, glad as a wave, golden as a star, mighty as a wind. Other poets speak of freedom, and invite the birds on to the platform. Shelley spoke of freedom and himself became a bird in the air, a wave of the sea. He did not humiliate beauty into a lesson. He scattered beauty among men not as a homily but as a spirit--

Singing hymns unbidden, till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

His politics are implicit in _The Cloud_ and _The Skylark_ and _The West Wind_, no less than in _The Mask of Anarchy_. His idea of the State as well as his idea of sky and stream and forest was rooted in the exuberant imagination of a lover. The whole body of his work, whether lyrical in the strictest sense or propagandist, is in the nature of a Book of Revelation.

It is impossible to say whether he might not have been a greater poet if he had not been in such haste to rebuild the world. He would, one fancies, have been a better artist if he had had a finer patience of phrase. On the other hand, his achievement even in the sphere of phrase and music is surpassed by no poet since Shakespeare. He may hurry along at intervals in a cloud of second-best words, but out of the cloud suddenly comes a song like Ariel's and a radiance like the radiance of a new day. With him a poem is a melody rather than a manuscript. Not since Prospero commanded songs from his attendant spirits has there been singing heard like the _Hymn of Pan_ and _The Indian Serenade_. _The Cloud_ is the most magical transmutation of things seen into things heard in the English language. Not that Shelley misses the wonder of things seen. But he sees things, as it were, musically.

My soul is an enchanted boat
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.

There is more of music than painting in this kind of writing.

There is no other music but Shelley's which seems to me likely to bring healing to the madness of the modern Saul. For this reason I hope that Professor Herford's fine edition of the shorter poems (arranged for the first time in chronological order) will encourage men and women to turn to Shelley again. Professor Herford promises us a companion volume on the same lines, containing the dramas and longer poems, if sufficient interest is shown in his book. The average reader will probably be content with Mr. Hutchinson's cheap and perfect "Oxford Edition" of Shelley. But the scholar, as well as the lover of a beautiful page, will find in Professor Herford's edition a new pleasure in old verse.

XII.--THE WISDOM OF COLERIDGE

(1) COLERIDGE AS CRITIC

Coleridge was the thirteenth child of a rather queer clergyman. The Rev. John Coleridge was queer enough in having thirteen children: he was queerer still in being the author of a Latin grammar in which he renamed the "ablative" the "quale-quare-quidditive case." Coleridge was thus born not only with an unlucky number, but trailing clouds of definitions. He was in some respects the unluckiest of all Englishmen of literary genius. He leaves on us an impression of failure as no other writer of the same stature does. The impression may not be justified. There are few writers who would not prefer the magnificent failure of a Coleridge to their own little mole-hill of success. Coleridge was a failure in comparison not with ordinary men, but only with the immense shadow of his own genius. His imperfection is the imperfection of a demi-god. Charles Lamb summed up the truth about his genius as well as about his character in that final phrase, "an archangel a little damaged." This was said at a time when the archangel was much more than a little damaged by the habit of laudanum; but even then Lamb wrote: "His face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory." Most of Coleridge's great contemporaries were aware of that glory. Even those who were afterwards to be counted among his revilers, such as Hazlitt and De Quincey, had known what it was to be disciples at the feet of this inspired ruin. They spoke not only of his mind, but even of his physical characteristics--his voice and his hair--as though these belonged to the one man of his time whose food was ambrosia. Even as a boy at Christ's Hospital, according to Lamb, he used to make the "casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the _speech_ and the _garb_ of the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus ... or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar--while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity-boy!_"

It is exceedingly important that, as we read Coleridge, we should constantly remember what an archangel he was in the eyes of his contemporaries. _Christabel_ and _Kubla Kahn_ we could read, no doubt, in perfect enjoyment even if we did not know the author's name. For the rest, there is so much flagging of wing both in his verse and in his prose that, if we did not remind ourselves what flights he was born to take, we might persuade ourselves at times that there was little in his work but the dull flappings and slitherings of a penguin. His genius is intermittent and comes arbitrarily to an end. He is inspired only in fragments and aphorisms. He was all but incapable of writing a complete book or a complete poem at a high level. His irresponsibility as an author is described in that sentence in which he says: "I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion." His literary plans had a ludicrous way of breaking down. It was characteristic of him that, in 1817, when he projected a complete edition of his poems, under the title _Sibylline Leaves_, he omitted to publish Volume I. and published only Volume II. He would announce a lecture on Milton, and then give his audience "a very eloquent and popular discourse on the general character of Shakespeare." His two finest poems he never finished. He wrote not by an act of the will but according to the wind, and when the wind dropped he came to earth. It was as though he could soar but was unable to fly. It is this that differentiates him from other great poets or critics. None of them has left such a record of unfulfilled purposes. It is not that he did not get through an enormous amount of work, but that, like the revellers in Mr. Chesterton's poem, he "went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head," and in the end he did not get to Birmingham. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch gives an amusing account of the way in which _Biographia Literaria_ came to be written. Originally, in 1815, it was conceived as a preface--to be "done in two, or at farthest three days"--to a collection of some "scattered and manuscript poems." Two months later the plan had changed. Coleridge was now busy on a preface to an _Autobiographia Literaria, sketches of my literary Life and Opinions_. This in turn developed into "a full account (_raisonné_) of the controversy concerning Wordsworth's poems and theory," with a "disquisition on the powers of Association ... and on the generic difference between the Fancy and the Imagination." This ran to such a length that he decided not to use it as a preface, but to amplify it into a work in three volumes. He succeeded in writing the first volume, but he found himself unable to fill the second. "Then, as the volume obstinately remained too small, he tossed in _Satyrane_, an epistolary account of his wanderings in Germany, topped up with a critique of a bad play, and gave the whole painfully to the world in July, 1817." It is one of the ironies of literary history that Coleridge, the censor of the incongruous in literature, the vindicator of the formal purpose as opposed to the haphazard inspiration of the greatest of writers, a missionary of the "shaping imagination," should himself have given us in his greatest book of criticism an incongruous, haphazard, and shapeless jumble. It is but another proof of the fact that, while talent cannot safely ignore what is called technique, genius almost can. Coleridge, in spite of his formlessness, remains the wisest man who ever spoke in English about literature. His place is that of an oracle among controversialists.

Even so, _Biographia Literaria_ is a disappointing book. It is the porch, but it is not the temple. It may be that, in literary criticism, there can be no temple. Literary criticism is in its nature largely an incitement to enter, a hint of the treasures that are to be found within. Persons who seek rest in literary orthodoxy are always hoping to discover written upon the walls of the porch the ten commandments of good writing. It is extremely easy to invent ten such commandments--it was done in the age of Racine and in the age of Pope--but the wise critic knows that in literature the rules are less important than the "inner light." Hence, criticism at its highest is not a theorist's attempt to impose iron laws on writers: it is an attempt to capture the secret of that "inner light" and of those who possess it and to communicate it to others. It is also an attempt to define the conditions in which the "inner light" has most happily manifested itself, and to judge new writers of promise according to the measure in which they have been true to the spirit, though not necessarily to the technicalities, of the great tradition. Criticism, then, is not the Roman father of good writing: it is the disciple and missionary of good writing. The end of criticism is less law-giving than conversion. It teaches not the legalities, but the love, of literature. _Biographia Literaria_ does this in its most admirable parts by interesting us in Coleridge's own literary beginnings, by emphasizing the strong sweetness of great poets in contrast to the petty animosities of little ones, by pointing out the signs of the miracle of genius in the young Shakespeare, and by disengaging the true genius of Wordsworth from a hundred extravagances of theory and practice. Coleridge's remarks on the irritability of minor poets--"men of undoubted talents, but not of genius," whose tempers are "rendered yet more irritable by their desire to _appear_ men of genius"--should be written up on the study walls of everyone commencing author. His description, too, of his period as "this age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with sort of Egyptian superstition if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail," conveys a warning to writers that is not of an age but for all time. Coleridge may have exaggerated the "manly hilarity" and "evenness and sweetness of temper" of men of genius. But there is no denying that, the smaller the genius, the greater is the spite of wounded self-love. "Experience informs us," as Coleridge says, "that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate." As for Coleridge's great service to Wordsworth's fame, it was that of a gold-washer. He cleansed it from all that was false in Wordsworth's reaction both in theory and in practice against "poetic diction." Coleridge pointed out that Wordsworth had misunderstood the ultimate objections to eighteenth-century verse. The valid objection to a great deal of eighteenth-century verse was not, he showed, that it was written in language different from that of prose, but that it consisted of "translations of prose thoughts into poetic language." Coleridge put it still more strongly, indeed, when he said that "the language from Pope's translation of Homer to Darwin's _Temple of Nature_ may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be too faithfully characterized as claiming to be poetical for no better reason than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose." Wordsworth, unfortunately, in protesting against the meretricious garb of mean thoughts, wished to deny verse its more splendid clothing altogether. If we accepted his theories we should have to condemn his _Ode_, the greatest of his sonnets, and, as Coleridge put it, "two-thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry." The truth is, Wordsworth created an engine that was in danger of destroying not only Pope but himself. Coleridge destroyed the engine and so helped to save Wordsworth. Coleridge may, in his turn, have gone too far in dividing language into three groups--language peculiar to poetry, language peculiar to prose, and language common to both, though there is much to be said for the division; but his jealousy for the great tradition in language was the jealousy of a sound critic. "Language," he declared, "is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests."

He, himself, wrote idly enough at times: he did not shrink from the phrase, "literary man," abominated by Mr. Birrell. But he rises in sentence after sentence into the great manner, as when he declares:

No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a
profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy
of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions,
language.

How excellently, again, he describes Wordsworth's early aim as being--

to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite
a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's
attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the
loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.

He explains Wordsworth's gift more fully in another passage:

It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought, the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed, and, above all, the original gift of spreading the tone, the _atmosphere_, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world, around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew-drops.

Coleridge's censures on Wordsworth, on the other hand, such as that on _The Daffodil_, may not all be endorsed by us to-day. But in the mass they have the insight of genius, as when he condemns "the approximation to what might be called _mental_ bombast, as distinguished from verbal." His quotations of great passages, again, are the very flower of good criticism.

Mr. George Sampson's editorial selection from _Biographia Literaria_ and his pleasant as well as instructive notes give one a new pleasure in re-reading this classic of critical literature. The "quale-quare-quidditive" chapters have been removed, and Wordsworth's revolutionary prefaces and essays given in their place. In its new form, _Biographia Literaria_ may not be the best book that could be written, but there is good reason for believing that it is the best book that has been written on poetry in the English tongue.

(2) COLERIDGE AS A TALKER

Coleridge's talk resembles the movements of one of the heavenly bodies. It moves luminously on its way without impediment, without conflict. When Dr. Johnson talks, half our pleasure is due to our sense of conflict. His sentences are knobby sticks. We love him as a good man playing the bully even more than as a wise man talking common sense. He is one of the comic characters in literature. He belongs, in his eloquence, to the same company as Falstaff and Micawber. He was, to some extent, the invention of a Scottish humourist named Boswell. "Burke," we read in Coleridge's _Table Talk_, "said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life." Coleridge's conversation is not to the same extent a coloured expression of personality. He speaks out of the solitude of an oracle rather than struts upon the stage of good company, a master of repartees. At his best, he becomes the mouthpiece of universal wisdom, as when he says: "To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed." He can give us in a sentence the central truth of politics, reconciling what is good in Individualism with what is good in Socialism in a score or so of words:

That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism
of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy
of the man.

And he can give common sense as well as wisdom imaginative form, as in the sentence:

Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels
of error, lest you get your brains knocked out.

"I am, by the law of my nature, a reasoner," said Coleridge, and he explained that he did not mean by this "an arguer." He was a discoverer of order, of laws, of causes, not a controversialist. He sought after principles, whether in politics or literature. He quarrelled with Gibbon because his _Decline and Fall_ was "little else but a disguised collection of ... splendid anecdotes" instead of a philosophic search for the ultimate causes of the ruin of the Roman Empire. Coleridge himself formulated these causes in sentences that are worth remembering at a time when we are debating whether the world of the future is to be a vast boxing ring of empires or a community of independent nations. He said:

The true key to the declension of the Roman Empire--which is not to
be found in all Gibbon's immense work--may be stated in two words:
the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the
_national_ character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a
nation.

One must not claim too much for Coleridge, however. He was a seer with his head among the stars, but he was also a human being with uneven gait, stumbling amid infirmities, prejudices, and unhappinesses. He himself boasted in a delightful sentence:

For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance--that, with all my
gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head
of a mountain in blue air and sunshine.

It is to be feared that Coleridge's "gastric and bowel distempers" had more effect on his head than he was aware of. Like other men, he often spoke out of a heart full of grievances. He uttered the bitterness of an unhappily married dyspeptic when he said: "The most happy marriage I can picture or image to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman." It is amusing to reflect that one of the many books which he wished to write was "a book on the duties of women, more especially to their husbands." One feels, again, that in his defence of the egoism of the great reformers, he was apologizing for a vice of his own rather than making an impersonal statement of truth. "How can a tall man help thinking of his size," he asked, "when dwarfs are constantly standing on tiptoe beside him?" The personal note that occasionally breaks in upon the oracular rhythm of the _Table Talk_, however, is a virtue in literature, even if a lapse in philosophy. The crumbs of a great man's autobiography are no less precious than the crumbs of his wisdom. There are moods in which one prefers his egotism to his great thoughts. It is pleasant to hear Coleridge boasting; "The _Ancient Mariner_ cannot be imitated, nor the poem _Love_. _They may be excelled; they are not imitable._" One is amused to know that he succeeded in offending Lamb on one occasion by illustrating "the cases of vast genius in proportion to talent and the predominance of talent in conjunction with genius in the persons of Lamb and himself." It is amusing, too, to find that, while Wordsworth regarded _The Ancient Mariner_ as a dangerous drag on the popularity of _Lyrical Ballads_, Coleridge looked on his poem as the feature that had sold the greatest number of the copies of the book. It is only fair to add that in taking this view he spoke not self-complacently, but humorously:

I was told by Longmans that the greater part of the _Lyrical
Ballads_ had been sold to seafaring men, who, having heard of the
_Ancient Mariner_, concluded that it was a naval song-book, or, at
all events, that it had some relation to nautical matters.

Of autobiographical confessions there are not so many in _Table Talk_ as one would like. At the same time, there are one or two which throw light on the nature of Coleridge's imagination. We get an idea of one of the chief differences between the poetry of Coleridge and the poetry of Wordsworth when we read the confession:

I had the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim
one of the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but
where I saw them I mostly forget.

The nephew who collected Coleridge's talk declared that there was no man whom he would more readily have chosen as a guide in morals, but "I would not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads." The author of _Kubla Khan_ asserted still more strongly on another occasion his indifference to locality:

Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact but harmonious
opposites in this--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called
up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations,
just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the
swarming bees; whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I
believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking
more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features.
Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the
battle, in Herodotus, as anyone can. Charles Lamb wrote an essay on
a man who lived in past time: I thought of adding another to it on
one who lived not _in time_ at all, past, present, or future--but
beside or collaterally.

Some of Coleridge's other memories are of a more trifling and amusing sort. He recalls, for instance, the occasion of his only flogging at school. He had gone to a shoemaker and asked to be taken on as an apprentice. The shoemaker, "being an honest man," had at once told the boy's master:

Bowyer asked me why I had made myself such a fool? to which I
answered, that I had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that I
hated the thought of being a clergyman. "Why so?" said he.
"Because, to tell you the truth, sir," said I, "I am an infidel!"
For this, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me--wisely, as I
think--soundly, as I know. Any whining or sermonizing would have
gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I
laughed at, and got heartily ashamed of my folly.

Among the reminiscences of Coleridge no passage is more famous than that in which he relates how, as he was walking in a lane near Highgate one day, a "loose, slack, not well-dressed youth" was introduced to him:

It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so.
After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said: "Let me
carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!"
"There is death in that hand," I said to ----, when Keats was gone;
yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself
distinctly.

Another famous anecdote relates to the time at which Coleridge, like Wordsworth, carried the fires of the French Revolution about him into the peace of the West Country. Speaking of a fellow-disciple of the liberty of those days, Coleridge afterwards said:

John Thelwall had something very good about him. We were once
sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks, when I said to him:
"Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!" "Nay!
Citizen Samuel," replied he, "it is rather a place to make a man
forget that there is any necessity for treason!"

Is there any prettier anecdote in literary history?

Besides the impersonal wisdom and the personal anecdotes of the _Table Talk_, however, there are a great number of opinions which show us Coleridge not as a seer, but as a "character"--a crusty gentleman, every whit as ready to express an antipathy as a principle. He shared Dr. Johnson's quarrel with the Scots, and said of them:

I have generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very
disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The
Scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the
English.