3 F heart of as sad a life as ever enacted itself Sometimes a-dropping from the sky, duos caff And now 'twas like all instruments, And now it is an angel's song, Which makes the heavens be mute." 7767 And what a tale it is! When the struggle between the actual and the invisible is over and the Mariner is triumphant, what a silence, as of the great deep, falls upon the strain! The sun came up out of the sea and went down into it grand image of the loneliness, the isolation from all other created things, of that speck upon When the tale has reached its limit of the noiseless, boundless waters. Through- mystery and emotion, a change ensues; out the poem this sentiment of isolation is gradually the greater spell is reversed, preserved with a magical and most im- the spirits depart, the strain softens; with pressive reality-all the action is abso- a weird yet gentle progression the ship lutely shut up within the doomed ship. comes "slowly and smoothly," without a The storm and the mist and snow, the flit- breeze, back to the known and visible. ting vision of the albatross, the spectre- As it approaches a conclusion, ordinary ship against the sun-set, the voices of the instrumentalities come in once more; spirits, all heighten the weird effect of there is first the rising of the soft familiar that one human centre, driven before the wind, "like a meadow gale in spring' tyrannous wind, or motionless upon the then the blessed vision of the lighthousestill more terrible calm. The meaning of top, the hill, the kirk, all those well-known all centres in the man who sees and hears, realities which gradually loosen the aband to whose fate everything refers sorbed excitement of the listener, and faour interest in him, our self-identification vour his slow return to ordinary daylight. with him, is never allowed for a moment And then comes the ineffable, half-childish, to waver. All humanity is there, shut half-divine simplicity of those soft moralwithin those rotting bulwarks, beneath |izings at the end, so strangely different those sails so thin and sear. The awful from the tenor of the tale, so wonderfully trance of silence in which his being is lost perfecting its visionary strain. After all, - silence and awe and pain, and a dumb, the poet seems to say, after this weird exenduring, unconquerable force-descends cursion into the very deepest awful heart upon us, and takes possession of us: no of nature and the seas, here is your child's loud bassoon, no festal procession can moral, a tender little half-trivial sentibreak the charm of that intense yet pas- ment, yet profound as the blue depths of sive consciousness. We grow silent with heavenhim, "with throat unslaked, with black. He prayeth best who loveth best lips baked" in a sympathy which is the very climax of pleasurable pain. And then what touches of tenderness are those which surprise us in that numbness and trance of awful solitude! up the the "For when it dawned they dropped their arms, And clustered round the mast; All things both great and small; He made and loveth all.". J G What Coleridge meant by this conclusion it would be hard to tell. It brings our feet back to the common soil with are bewildered sweetness of relief and gentle d quiet after the prodigious strain of mental excitement, which is like nothing else we remember in poetry. The effect is one off those which only supreme genius could produce-genius which dares to sink from the highest notes of spiritual music to the absolute simplicity of exhausted nature.Ja Thus we are set down on the soft grass, in a tender bewilderment, out of the clouds. It is over, this visionary voyage. we are 8 Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths, back again on the mortal soil from whence And from their bodies passed. Around, around flew each sweet sound, Then darted to the sun; Slowly the sounds came back again, 413 Now mixed, now one by one. we started; but never more, never again, can the visible and invisible have to us the same meaning. For once in our lives, if never before, we have crossed the borders of the unseen. It was thus that Coleridge carried out his first great poetical theory-the theory suggested to him in some celestial way by the flitting of the shadows and gleams of light over the Somersetshire valleys as seen from the heights of Quantock. There is nothing which the poetic eye more loves to watch than that mystic voiceless rhythm of nature; but never eye yet watched it to such purpose, and never has its still solemnity, its wayward lights, the pathos and splendour of shade and sunshine, been more wonderfully reflected in verse. We need not pause to remark upon the minor productions of this brief summer of the poet's life. His tragedy of "Remorse" was not a minor production to him, but something much more important than the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner ". -so wonderfully is ignorance mixed with insight even in the most clear-sighted. He let his great poem go lightly into the doomed volume which critics were to maul and booksellers despise; but it was a great and sore mortification to him that his tragedy was not performed, or even noticed, by the theatrical deities to whom it was submitted. We presume that of the myriads who honour Coleridge now, not one in a thousand knows this same tragedy, or would dreain of reading it except under compulsion. Wordsworth's Borderers," produced about the same time, has shared a similar fate; but at that moment the two young poets thought very magnificently of their tragedies, and trusted in them, though still not unwilling to dispose of them for the invariable sum of thirty guineas each, had the judicious Cottle thought fit which, wisely, he did not. Wordsworth, however, had his thirty guineas for the Lyrical Ballads." There is no record that Coleridge had anything at all for the "Ancient Mariner" perhaps, most likely, it had been paid for and eaten months before, as was the habit of the thriftless poet. However, the same period which produced the "Ancient Mariner " brought into being at least the first part of the never-completed tale of "Christabel." This wonderful poem has a more distinct character than its predecessor. The first was, as it were, introductory - the uplifting of the veil, the revelation of a vast unseen world, full of struggles and mysteries. The second is the distinct identification of a mystery of evil, an unseen harm and bane, working secretly in the dark places of the earth against white innocence, purity, and truth. The poet does not stop to tell us why this should be. Philos opher as he is to the depth of his soul, he is yet so much more poet as to see that any theory of spiritual hate against the happiness of earth would confuse the unity of his strain, and probably transfer, as it has done in "Paradise Lost," our interest to the despairing demon, whose envy and enmity arise out of that hopeless majesty of wretchedness, great enough to be sublime, which devours his own soul. Coleridge has avoided this danger. He has assigned no cause for the hideous and terrible persecution of which his lovely lady Christabel, symbolical even in name, is the object. The poem is a romance of Christianity, a legend of sainthood. The heroine is not only the lovely but the holy Christabel. For no fault of hers, but rather for her virtues, are the powers of evil raised against her; and one of the most subtle and wonderful touches of truth in the tale is the ignorance of her innocence her want of any knowledge or experience which can explain to her what the evil is, or how to deal with it. The witch Geraldine has all the foul wisdom of her wickedness to help her- her sorceries, her supernatural knowledge, her spells and cunning. But Christabel has nothing but her purity, and stands defenceless as a lamb, not even knowing where the danger is to come from; exposed at every point in her simplicity, and paralyzed, not instructed, by the first gleam of bewildering acquaintance with evil. Never was there a higher or more beautiful conception. It is finer in its indefiniteness than even the contrast of Una and Duessa -the pure and impure, the false and true of a more elaborate allegory. Spenser, who lived in a more downright age, keeps himself within a narrower circle, and is compelled by his story to direct action; but his very distinctness limits his power. The soceress or lovely demon of Coleridge does not at-1 tempt to ruin her victim in such an uncompromising way. What she does is to throw boundless confusion into the gentle soul, to fill its limpid depths with fear and horror, and distrust of all fair appearances, and of itself-a still more appalling doubt; to undermine the secret foundations of all that love and honour in which Christabel's very name is enshrined; and to establish herself a subtle enemy, an antagonist power of evil, at the pure creature's side, turning all her existence into chaos. Una is a foully-slandered and innocent maid; but Christabel is a martyr-soul, suffering for her race without knowing it-strug gling in a dumb consternation, yet resist ance, against the evil that holds her spell R 2 2 الان -i 19 bound. And all the more pathetic, all the And the very vagueness of the horror more enthralling, is the picture, that the helps its supreme effect. Had we known Christ-maiden is entirely human-too what the fatal mark was which she saw on young, too childlike, too simple even to Geraldine's side, half our consternation understand the high mission which has and dismay would have been dissipated. dropped upon her from the skies. She And then, too, the incompleteness of the knows nothing, neither her own wonderful tale, that broken thread of story which position a sight for angels to watch- has tantalized so many readers, increases nor all that depends upon her steadfast the power of the poem. Completion could adherence to her white banner of religious scarcely have failed to lessen its reality, faith and purity; but her antagonist for the reader could not have endured, knows everything, and has an armoury of neither could the poet's own theory have subtle perilous weapons at her disposal. endured, the sacrifice of Christabel, the Jesu, Maria, shield her well!" for she is triumph of evil over good; and had she at fearful odds. triumphed, there is a vulgar wellbeing in victory which has nothing to do with such a strain. It was indolence, no doubt, that left the tale half told indolence and misery - and a poetic instinct higher than all the better impulses of industry and virtuous gain. The subject by its very nature was incomplete; it had to be left, a lovely, weird suggestion a vision for every eye that could see. And once again, the poet fits all his accessories, all his scenery, into accordance with the soul of his meaning. The clock strikes in the middle of the night, a mysterious life in the stillness. The owls awake the crowing cock; the mastiff bays in answer to the chimes. There is nothing audible except this thrill of unrest among the dumb creatures, who are bound from all human communication by chains of nature. Why do they stir and make a movement in the silence? because the very air is full of harm unseen. They are aware of evil approaching with that subtle sense of supernatural danger which the lower creatures (so called) possess in a higher degree than ourselves. The very "thin grey cloud," which covers but does not hide the sky; the moon, which though at the full, looks "both small and dull," betray the same consciousness. All creation feels it with a pang of suppressed fear and pain, unable to warn or aid the only being who is unconscious, the innocent and fearless sufferer. All but she have an instinctive knowledge of her election to endure for them, to stand their spiritual representative in the mysterious conflict. And the dumb inexpressible support of the material world-which in some silent awful way is affected, we know not how, by every struggle for the mastery between good and evil-is with her; and the minstrel's instinctive adherence, and the listener's confused and aching sympathythese and no more. Such is the picture the poet sets before us, painting the scene, the struggle, and the beautiful fated creature who is the centre of the whole, with such a tender and exquisite touch, and with such mysterious reality, that we catch our very breath as we gaze. Christabel is. no allegorical martyr, and yet she is something other than a bewitched maiden. The very world seems to hang with a suspense beyond words upon the issue of her fiery trial. 1084 LIVING AGE. VOL. XXIII. We have said nothing of the poetry itself in which this vision is clothed, for language and music are both subservient to the noble conception of the poem. And perhaps it is unnecessary to quote what everybody knows or ought to know; but was there ever any ideal picture more exquisite and delicate than this opening. scene, which presents the holy maiden to us in her saintly unconsciousness, before thought of evil has come near her? With what sweet trust and fearless gentle freedom she accosts her supernatural enemy! "She stole along, she nothing spoke, The sighs she heaved were soft and low; The lady springs up suddenly, The night is chill, the forest bare:: Hush, beating heart of Christabel! She folded her arms beneath her cloak, There she sees a damsel bright, That shadowy in the moonlight shone : Mary, mother, save me now! (Said Christabel.) And who art thou? But when the fatal charm is upon her when her very consciousness of right in herself is disturbed, and her faith shaken, even in the duties and kindnesses of lifehow piteous is the change! The full measure of pain would not be filled up without the cloud of suspicion on her father's face, his pained wonder at her, and her still more agonized doubt of herself: "Geraldine, in maiden wise, Casting down her large bright eyes, A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy. And with somewhat of malice and more of dread, At Christabel she looked askance! The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone. We are tempted to but one quotation more, which sums up the entire motif of the strain, and with its heavenly confidence of victory in the end, gives a certain relief to the mystery and the hor "It was a lovely sight to see Of mossy leafless boughs, liber Kneeling in the moonlight, And both blue eyes more bright than clear, With open eyes (ah, woe is me!) O sorrow and shame! Can this be she, A star hath set, a star hath risen, From cliff and tower, tu- whoo! tu-whoo! Such is the unfinished and unfinishable tale of Christabel - a poem which, despite its broken notes and over-brevity, has raised its author to the highest rank of poets, and which in itself is at once one of the sweetest, loftiest, most spiritual utterances that has ever been framed in English words. We know of no existing poem in any language to which we can compare it. It stands by itself, exquisite, celestial, ethea song of the spheres yet full of such pathos and tenderness and sorrowful beauty as only humanity can give. real - It is difficult to make out from the confused and chaotic record of Coleridge's life when the poem called indifferently its beginning at least belongs to this beau- ness. "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, And feed its holy flame." Every word in these four lines breathes the "Hopes, and fears that kindle hopes, 1 |