September, 1798.  “The Lyrical Ballads.”

The year 1798 was a year of great excitement: England was alone in the struggle against Buonaparte; the mutiny at the Nore had only just been quelled: the 3 per cent. Consols had been marked at 49 or 50; the Gazettes were occupied with accounts of bloody captures of French ships; Ireland may be said to have been in rebellion, and horrible murders were committed there; the King sent a message to Parliament telling it that an invasion might be expected and that it was to be assisted by “incendiaries” at home; and the Archbishop of Canterbury and eleven bishops passed a resolution declaring that if the French should land, or a dangerous insurrection should break out, it would be the duty of the clergy to take up arms against an enemy whom the Bishop of Rochester described as “instigated by that desperate malignity against the Faith he has abandoned, which in all ages has marked the horrible character of the vile apostate.”

In the midst of this raving political excitement three human beings were to be found who although they were certainly not unmoved by it, were able to detach themselves from it when they pleased, and to seclude themselves in a privacy impenetrable even to an echo of the tumult around them.

In April or May, 1798, the Nightingale was written, and these are the sights and sounds which were then in young Coleridge’s eyes and ears:—

We happen also to have Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal for April and May.  Here are a few extracts from it:—

April 6th.—“Went a part of the way home with Coleridge. . . .  The spring still advancing very slowly.  The horse-chestnuts budding, and the hedgerows beginning to look green, but nothing fully expanded.”

April 9th.—“Walked to Stowey . . . The sloe in blossom, the hawthorns green, the larches in the park changed from black to green in two or three days.  Met Coleridge in returning.”

April 12th.—“ . . .  The spring advances rapidly, multitudes of primroses, dog-violets, periwinkles, stitchwort.”

April 27th.—“Coleridge breakfasted and drank tea, strolled in the wood in the morning, went with him in the evening through the wood, afterwards walked on the hills: the moon; a many-coloured sea and sky.”

May 6th, Sunday.—“Expected the painter [101] and Coleridge.  A rainy morning—very pleasant in the evening.  Met Coleridge as we were walking out.  Went with him to Stowey; heard the nightingale; saw a glow-worm.”

What was it which these three young people (for Dorothy certainly must be included as one of its authors) proposed to achieve by their book?  Coleridge, in the Biographia Literaria, says (vol. ii. c. 1): “During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on 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.  The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both.  These are the poetry of nature.  The thought suggested itself—(to which of us I do not recollect)—that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts.  In the one, the agents and incidents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real.  And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.  For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.

“In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.  Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, [103] by awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

“With this view I wrote The Ancient Mariner, and was preparing, among other poems, The Dark Ladie and the Christabel, in which I should have more nearly have realised my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt.”

Coleridge, when he wrote to Cottle offering him the Lyrical Ballads, affirms that “the volumes offered to you are, to a certain degree, one work in kind” [104a] (Reminiscences, p. 179); and Wordsworth declares, “I should not, however, have requested this assistance, had I not believed that the poems of my Friend would in a great measure have the same tendency as my own, [104b] and that though there would be found a difference, there would be found no discordance in the colours of our style; as our opinions on the subject of poetry do almost entirely coincide” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800).

It is a point carefully to be borne in mind that we have the explicit and contemporary authority of both poets that their aim was the same.

There are difficulties in the way of believing that The Ancient Mariner was written for the Lyrical Ballads.  It was planned in 1797 and was originally intended for a magazine.  Nevertheless, it may be asserted that the purpose of The Ancient Mariner and of Christabel (which was originally intended for the Ballads) was, as their author said, truth, living truth.  He was the last man in the world to care for a story simply as a chain of events with no significance, and in these poems the supernatural, by interpenetration with human emotions, comes closer to us than an event of daily life.  In return the emotions themselves, by means of the supernatural expression, gain intensity.  The texture is so subtly interwoven that it is difficult to illustrate the point by example, but take the following lines:—

“Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.

* * * *

The self-same moment I could pray:
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

* * * *

And the hay was white with silent light
Till rising from the same,
Full many shapes, that shadows were,
In crimson colours came.

A little distance from the prow
Those crimson shadows were:
I turned my eyes upon the deck—
Oh, Christ! what saw I there!

Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,
And, by the holy rood!
A man all light, a seraph-man,
On every corse there stood.”

Coleridge’s marginal gloss to these last stanzas is “The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies, and appear in their own forms of light.”

Once more from Christabel:—

“The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone,
She nothing sees—no sight but one!
The maid, devoid of guile and sin,
I know not how, in fearful wise,
So deeply had she drunken in
That look, those shrunken serpent eyes,
That all her features were resigned
To this sole image in her mind:
And passively did imitate
That look of dull and treacherous hate.”

What Wordsworth intended we have already heard from Coleridge, and Wordsworth confirms him.  It was, says the Preface of 1802, “to present ordinary things to the mind in an unusual way.”  In Wordsworth the miraculous inherent in the commonplace, but obscured by “the film of familiarity,” is restored to it.  This translation is effected by the imagination, which is not fancy nor dreaming, as Wordsworth is careful to warn us, but that power by which we see things as they are.  The authors of The Ancient Mariner and Simon Lee are justified in claiming a common object.  It is to prove that the metaphysical in Shakespeare’s sense of the word interpenetrates the physical, and serves to make us see and feel it.

Poetry, if it is to be good for anything, must help us to live.  It is to this we come at last in our criticism, and if it does not help us to live it may as well disappear, no matter what its fine qualities may be.  The help to live, however, that is most wanted is not remedies against great sorrows.  The chief obstacle to the enjoyment of life is its dulness and the weariness which invades us because there is nothing to be seen or done of any particular value.  If the supernatural becomes natural and the natural becomes supernatural, the world regains its splendour and charm.  Lines may be drawn from their predecessors to Coleridge and the Wordsworths, but the work they did was distinctly original, and renewed proof was given of the folly of despair even when fertility seems to be exhausted.  There is always a hidden conduit open into an unknown region whence at any moment streams may rush and renew the desert with foliage and flowers.

The reviews which followed the publication of the Lyrical Ballads were nearly all unfavourable.  Even Southey discovered nothing in The Ancient Mariner but “a Dutch attempt at German sublimity.”  A certain learned pig thought it “the strangest story of a cock and bull that he ever saw on paper,” and not a single critic, not even the one or two who had any praise to offer, discerned the secret of the book.  The publisher was so alarmed that he hastily sold his stock.  Nevertheless Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his sister quietly went off to Germany without the least disturbance of their faith, and the Ballads are alive to this day.