The Art Of Letters Part 9

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_ a.s.serted 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 a.s.sociations, just as a bright pan of bra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sage 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.

He had no love for Jews, or Dissenters, or Catholics, and antic.i.p.ated Carlyle's hostility to the emanc.i.p.ation of the negroes. He raged against the Reform Bill, Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation, and the education of the poor in schools. He was indignant with Belgium for claiming national independence.

One cannot read much of his talk about politics without amazement that so wise a man should have been so frequently a fool. At the same time, he generally remained an original fool. He never degenerated into a mere partisan. He might be deceived by reactionary ideals, but he was not taken in by reactionary leaders. He was no more capable than Sh.e.l.ley of mistaking Castlereagh for a great man, and he did not join in the glorification of Pitt. Like Dr. Johnson, he could be a Tory without feeling that it was necessary at all costs to bully Ireland. Coleridge, indeed, went so far as to wish to cut the last link with Ireland as the only means of saving England. Discussing the Irish question, he said:

I am quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by England from the disannexing and independence of Ireland at all comparable with the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to England by the Union. We have never received one particle of advantage from our a.s.sociation with Ireland.... Mr. Pitt has received great credit for effecting the Union; but I believe it will sooner or later be discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon which, he effected it made it the most fatal blow that ever was levelled against the peace and prosperity of England. From it came the Catholic Bill. From the Catholic Bill has come this Reform Bill!

And what next?

When one thinks of the injury that the subjection of Ireland has done the English name in America, in Russia, in Australia, and elsewhere in quite recent times, one can hardly deny that on this matter Coleridge was a sound prophet.

It is the literary rather than the political opinions, however, that will bring every generation of readers afresh to Coleridge's _Table Talk_. No man ever talked better in a few sentences on Shakespeare, Sterne, and the tribe of authors. One may not agree with Coleridge in regarding Jeremy Taylor as one of the four chief glories of English literature, or in thinking Southey's style "next door to faultless." But one listens to his _obiter dicta_ eagerly as the sayings of one of the greatest minds that have interested themselves in the criticism of literature. There are tedious pages in _Table Talk_, but these are, for the most part, concerned with theology. On the whole, the speech of Coleridge was golden. Even the leaden parts are interesting because they are Coleridge's lead. One wishes the theology was balanced, however, by a few more glimpses of his lighter interests, such as we find in the pa.s.sage: "Never take an iambus for a Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do very well. Edith and Rotha are my favourite names for women." What we want most of all in table talk is to get an author into the confession alb.u.m. Coleridge's _Table Talk_ would have stood a worse chance of immortality were it not for the fact that he occasionally came down out of the pulpit and babbled.

XIII.--TENNYSON: A TEMPORARY CRITICISM

If Tennyson's reputation has diminished, it is not that it has fallen before hostile criticism: it has merely faded through time. Perhaps there was never an English poet who loomed so large to his own age as Tennyson--who represented his contemporaries with the same pa.s.sion and power. Pope was sufficiently representative of his age, but his age meant, by comparison, a limited and aristocratic circle. Byron represented and shocked his age by turns. Tennyson, on the other hand, was as close to the educated middle-cla.s.s men and women of his time as the family clergyman.

That is why, inevitably, he means less to us than he did to them. That he was ahead of his age on many points on which this could not be said of the family clergyman one need not dispute. He was a kind of "new theologian."

He stood, like Dean Farrar, for the larger hope and various other heresies. Every representative man is ahead of his age--a little, but not enough to be beyond the reach of the sympathies of ordinary people. It may be objected that Tennyson is primarily an artist, not a thinker, and that he should be judged not by his message but by his song. But his message and his song sprang from the same vision--a vision of the world seen, not _sub specie aeternitatis_, but _sub specie_ the reign of Queen Victoria.

Before we appreciate Tennyson's real place in literature, we must frankly recognize the fact that his muse wore a crinoline. The great ma.s.s of his work bears its date stamped upon it as obviously almost as a copy of _The Times_. How topical, both in mood and phrasing, are such lines as those in _Locksley Hall:_

Then her cheek was pale, and thinner than should be for one so young.

And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.

And I said "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me, Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee."

One would not, of course, quote these lines as typical of Tennyson's genius. I think, however, they may be fairly quoted as lines suggesting the mid-Victorian atmosphere that clings round all but his greatest work.

They bring before our minds the genteel magazine ill.u.s.trations of other days. They conjure up a world of charming, vapid faces, where there is little life apart from sentiment and rhetoric. Contrast such a poem as _Locksley Hall_ with _The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess_. Each contains at once a dramatization of human relations, and the statement of a creed. The human beings in Browning's poem, however, are not mere shadows out of old magazines; they are as real as the men and women in the portraits of the masters, as real as ourselves. Similarly, in expressing his thought, Browning gives it imaginative dignity as philosophy, while Tennyson writes what is after all merely an exalted leading article. There is more in common between Tennyson and Lytton than is generally realized. Both were fond of windy words. They were slaves of language to almost as great an extent as Swinburne. One feels that too often phrases like "moor and fell"

and "bower and hall" were mere sounding subst.i.tutes for a creative imagination. I have heard it argued that the lines in _Maud_:

All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, ba.s.soon;

introduce a curiously inappropriate instrument into a ball-room orchestra merely for the sake of euphony. The mistake about the ba.s.soon is a small one, and is, I suppose, borrowed from Coleridge, but it is characteristic.

Tennyson was by no means the complete artist that for years he was generally accepted as being. He was an artist of lines rather than of poems. He seldom wrote a poem which seemed to spring full-armed from the imagination as the great poems of the world do. He built them up haphazard, as Thackeray wrote his novels. They are full of sententious padding and prettiness, and the wordiness is not merely a philosopher's vacuous babbling in his sleep, as so much of Wordsworth is; it is the word-spinning of a man who loves words more than people, or philosophy, or things. Let us admit at once that when Tennyson is word perfect he takes his place among the immortals. One may be convinced that the bulk of his work is already as dead as the bulk of Longfellow's work. But in his great poems he awoke to the vision of romance in its perfect form, and expressed it perfectly. He did this in _Ulysses_, which comes nearer a n.o.ble perfection, perhaps, than anything else he ever wrote. One can imagine the enthusiasm of some literary discoverer many centuries hence, when Tennyson is as little known as Donne was fifty years ago, coming upon lines hackneyed for us by much quotation:

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

There, even if you have not the stalwart imagination which makes Browning's people alive, you have a most beautiful fancy ill.u.s.trating an old story. One of the most beautiful lines Tennyson ever wrote:

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing,

has the same suggestion of having been forged from the gold of the world's romance.

Tennyson's art at its best, however, and in these two instances is art founded upon art, not art founded upon life. We used to be asked to admire the vivid observation shown in such lines as:

More black than ashbuds in the front of March;

and it is undoubtedly interesting to learn that Tennyson had a quick eye for the facts of nature. But such lines, however accurate, do not make a man a poet. It is in his fine ornamental moods that Tennyson means most to our imaginations nowadays--in the moods of such lines as:

Now droops the milk-white peac.o.c.k like a ghost.

The truth is, Tennyson, with all his rhetoric and with all his prosaic Victorian opinions, was an aesthete in the immortal part of him no less than were Rossetti and Swinburne. He seemed immense to his contemporaries, because he put their doubts and fears into music, and was master of the fervid rhetoric of the new gospel of Imperialism. They did not realize that great poetry cannot be founded on a basis of perishable doubts and perishable gospels. It was enough for them to feel that _In Memoriam_ gave them soothing anchorage and shelter from the destructive hurricanes of science. It was enough for them to thrill to the public-speech poetry of _Of old sat Freedom on the Heights_, the patriotic triumph of _The Relief of Lucknow_, the glorious contempt for foreigners exhibited in his references to "the red fool-fury of the Seine." Is it any wonder that during a great part of his life Tennyson was widely regarded as not only a poet, but a teacher and a statesman? His sneering caricature of Bright as the "broad-brimmed hawker of holy things" should have made it clear that in politics he was but a party man, and that his political intelligence was commonplace.

He was too deficient in the highest kind of imagination and intellect to achieve the greatest things. He seldom or never stood aloof from his own time, as Wordsworth did through his philosophic imagination, as Keats did through his aesthetic imagination, as Browning did through his dramatic imagination. He wore a poetical cloak, and avoided the vulgar crowd physically; he had none of Browning's taste for tea-parties. But Browning had not the tea-party imagination; Tennyson, in a great degree, had. He preached excellent virtues to his time; but they were respectable rather than spiritual virtues. Thus, _The Idylls of the King_ have become to us mere ancient fas.h.i.+on-plates of the virtues, while the moral power of _The Ring and the Book_ is as commanding to-day as in the year in which the poem was first published.

It is all the more surprising that no good selection from Tennyson has yet appeared. His "complete works" contain so much that is ephemeral and uninspired as to be a mere book of reference on our shelves. When will some critic do for him what Matthew Arnold did for Wordsworth, and separate the gold from the dross--do it as well as Matthew Arnold did it for Wordsworth? Such a volume would be far thinner than the Wordsworth selection. But it would ent.i.tle Tennyson to a much higher place among the poets than in these years of the reaction he is generally given.

XIV.--THE POLITICS OF SWIFT AND SHAKESPEARE

(1) SWIFT