706 Coleridge's criticism of Wordsworth differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create: or, when this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead." Something of the same kind had already been said by Schiller and Schelling in Germany; and Coleridge, working on the views of the latter, constructed a theory of the association of ideas, to form a philosophical basis for that peculiar analytical exercise of the imagination which Wordsworth and he alike regarded as its proper function in poetry. Had their philosophy been founded on universal truth, new rules of practice might have been deduced from it ; for, when the design of Lyrical Ballads was framed, both poets were enthusiastic believers in the principles advocated by the apostles of the French Revolution. But, when the time came to reduce their conceptions to form, it was evident that the ideas of poetical expression, embodied, on the one hand, in lyrics like Alice Fell, and, on the other, in poems like The Ancient Mariner, were to each other as opposite poles. Wordsworth, on his side, had no conception of poetry regarded as an art. Restricting his view of it entirely to the ideas existing in the mind of the individual poet, he defined it as " the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion." And, holding that the true principles of poetical expression lay in the close imitation of the language actually used by men in a state of excitement, he thought that this could be observed in its most perfect, because its most simple form, in the idioms of the peasantry. Coleridge, on the contrary, a man endowed with the finest perceptions of artistic propriety, saw that the system of Wordsworth broke down both in theory and practice. In an admirable chapter of his Biographia Literaria (Vol. II, Chap. 5), he showed that metre is an essential element in the expression of poetic thought; that the use of metre entails a peculiar arrangement of words; that the kind of language in use among the peasantry is quite unsuitable for the higher purposes of poetry; and that, when Wordsworth himself wrote in a really poetical mannner, he discarded his own principles. But, though he criticised so destructively the philosophy of his friend, he made no attempt to organise any artistic system of his own. Satisfied with defining the sense in which he held the poet to be a creator, according to his theory of association, he left the subject with the dogma that poetry, as being the utterance of the true poet, was " the best words in the best places." The fundamentally weak point in the poetical philosophy of both Coleridge and Wordsworth was the ignoring of an historically-minded audience, as an essential condition in the art of metrical composition. They started on their career with the belief that human society was about to be regenerated by the French Revolution, but they were also fully The achievement of Wordsworth 707 persuaded that the Revolution would proceed according to their own ideas of it. Each held that the poet was, above all things, an inspired prophet, who could discover truths to which mankind in general were blind, and by the strength of imagination could place objects before the world in a new and true light. They therefore considered themselves entitled to dispense with the lessons of experience, and with historic continuity as a principle of action alike in politics and art. By degrees their eyes were opened to the tyrannic tendencies of the Revolutionary movement, which, when perceived, made them eager to burn the idols they had hitherto adored. Their desertion naturally exasperated their old allies ; and party prejudice, quite as much as critical antipathy, blinded a large portion of the nation to the merits of their poetical experiments. The Edinburgh Review, in particular, as the organ of the Whigs, was emphatic in its denunciation of their artistic principles. When the passion of partisanship on either side subsided, it was seen that the great achievement of Wordsworth was his enlargement of the domain of poetry. This had, before his time, been, as a rule, limited by forms devoted to the representation, in some shape, of the active life of men and manners ; Wordsworth, by his impassioned feeling, embraced in the art the contemplation of the still life of external Nature. The character of his poetical genius is best described in his own noble lines: Such was the Boy—but for the growing Youth What soul was his when, from the naked top Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked — Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth, And Ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched, And in their silent faces did he read Unutterable love. Sound needed none, Nor any voice of joy: his spirit drank The spectacle! sensation, soul, and form, All melted into him : they swallowed up His animal being; in them did he live, And by them did he live: they were his life. To find metrical forms for the expression of feelings like these was not easy; nor indeed was Wordsworth largely gifted with artistic invention. In his longer poems, where he adopts a narrative or dramatic manner, his style almost instinctively falls into prose ; his real poetical successes consist in his appropriation, for his own purposes, of vehicles like the Ode, the Sonnet, or some well-established stanza, which enable him to communicate to the reader lofty yet intelligible thoughts in the pure and noble English of which he was master. When he is writing about himself, or about common objects, in The Prelude and The Excursion, he seems never to be aware whether a thought, as he expresses it, will strike the reader as bald, trivial, or absurd: he is convinced that 708 The imaginative poems of Coleridge everything he says, as being " the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion," must be worth saying in metre. But in compositions like Laodamia, the Ode on Immortality, and the finer Sonnets, in which the thought has been carefully selected and assimilated, before being expressed, the maxim of Horace is fully justified, Cui lecta potenter erit res The genius of Coleridge was of an altogether opposite kind. He has informed us that the part assigned to him in Lyrical Ballads was to produce poems of which the incidents and agents were to be " supernatural." But the compositions to which these words seem to point, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Love, The Pains of Sleep, and the like, are not so much " supernatural" in scope and motive, as contrary to the usual order of nature; the aim of the poet being to link together detached images in metrical words, and in such a manner as to produce that effect of paradoxical reality experienced in dreams. No poet was ever so well qualified to accomplish this task as Coleridge. His vivid imagination, intensified by his habit of opium-eating, had made him acquainted with the "truths of emotion," familiar to " every human being, who from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency." His tine powers of invention enabled him to communicate these sensations to the reader by his skilful employment of the abrupt manner of the ancient ballads, which raises in the imagination an idea of wonder and mystery, quite different from that produced by the regular order of epic narrative. The more conventional compositions in which he seeks to embody the reasoned results of his philosophy — though many of them, such as France and the Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni, are nobly poetical — are much less characteristic of the man than tours de force like The Ancient Mariner or Christabel, and show the influence of Wordsworth on his imagination. He had a keen sense of humour which exhibits itself in his parodies of the sonnets ■of Lloyd, Lamb, and himself, as representing the new school of affected .-simplicity. Robert Southey (1774-1843) was associated with Coleridge and Wordsworth in early sympathy with the principles of the French Revolution. He made the acquaintance of Coleridge in 1792, when he was an undergraduate at Balliol, and, accepting the Unitarian views • of the latter, joined with him in framing a scheme of " pantisocracy." His early poems, Wat Tyler, Joan of Arc, and The Fall of Robespierre, :are all strongly coloured with republican sentiment. He abandoned sooner than his friends the Revolutionary cause, and in 1806 accepted .a government pension. In 1813 he was made Poet Laureate, after the post had been offered to Scott, who declined it. This political defection was thrown in his teeth in 1821, when, having written a poem in English Southey's poetry. — Landor 709 hexameters on the death of George III, entitled The Vision of Judgment, in the preface to which he alluded to Byron and Shelley as the " Satanic school," the Laureate was assailed by Byron in his famous satire of the same name, and was reminded of his youthful sympathies with the Revolution, illustrated in his Wat Tyler, which had been surreptitiously published in 1817. Southey's theories as to the art of poetry are less subversive than those of Wordsworth. He was above all things a student; and his imaginative efforts were for the most part devoted to enlarging the boundaries of poetry by excursions into the realms of literature. In the preface to his collected works in 1837 he described the character of his poetical genius as follows : " When I add, what has been the greatest of all advantages, that I have passed more than half my life in retirement, conversing with books rather than men, constantly and unweariably engaged in literary pursuits, communing with my own heart, and taking that course which upon mature reflection seemed best to myself, I have said everything necessary to account for the characteristics of my poetry, whatever they may be." This seclusion from society, which seemed to Southey a qualification for the composition of good poetry, was in the judgment of others rather a drawback. Byron's lines on the Lake School are suggestive: You, gentlemen, by dint of long seclusion And it is obvious that Southey's determination to follow his own line, without considering the expectations of his readers, is answerable for that frigidity and defect of human interest which petrify his long quasiepics. His scheme of a series of heroic poems, embodying the essence of the principal mythologies of the world, was formed after reading Picart's Religious Ceremonies. Thalaba and Madoc, its firstfruits, are too cold and abstract to be interesting; but the notes by which they are accompanied are attractive in their wide and curious learning. The Curse of Kehama is superior in structure to these poems, the conclusion of it — suggested by Beckford's Vathek — being really dramatic, and the movement of the verse at once stately and flexible. The style of Southey's ballads is marked by the homeliness and triviality which lower the character of too much of Wordsworth's poetry. Some of his characteristics as a poet are reflected in the Gebir and Hellenica of his friend Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), who, viewing all modern things through the medium of classical literature, failed to inspire his poetry with the movement of actual life, and the coldness of whose verse is emphasised by its striking contrast with the animation 710 Romantic revival. German influences of his Imaginary Conversations, which show an admirable power of entering into the thoughts and characters of the interlocutors. Half a generation passed away before the effects of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's theory and practice in the art of poetry became apparent. Their views had little influence with the leaders of organised society. Living remote from the centre of affairs, in secluded places like Nether Stowey or the English Lakes, they could make their ideas felt only through enterprising publishers or in the columns of newspapers. They were associated in the minds of the reading public with an unpopular and unpatriotic party. Opposed to them were all the powers of fashionable society, political interest, and literary culture. But, while their voices seemed to be those of men crying in the wilderness, their cause was being secretly aided by cosmopolitan forces which had long established a base in the heart of society, and continued to exercise a dissolving influence on the general fabric of opinion and belief. Prominent among these forces was the reaction in favour of medievalism, which had made great progress since the time of the two Wartons. Percy's Meluiues, Macpherson's Ossian, Chatterton's Rowley forgeries, had all allied themselves with the sentimental appreciation of the more primitive types of social emotion ; and Horace Walpole's experiments in Gothic architecture had revived, in an external form, the taste for the antique. The same dilettante critic had also with his Castle of Otranto opened the flood-gates of supernaturalism in fiction. In another direction, romantic and sentimental ideas kept pouring in from Germany. The dramatic tastes represented in some of the playsof Kotzebue and in The Robbers of Schiller were received with much favour in the theatres ; while German spectralism, illustrated in Burger's famous ballad of Lenore, inspired a whole army of English imitators, of whom the most successful was Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), best known as author of The Monk. Most powerful of all, as proceeding from the source of the highest genius, was the sentimental theorising of Rousseau, which, falling in with the selfsecluding, semi-monastic instincts of the time, seemed to offer a philosophic starting-point to all who chafed at the restraints of traditional law and order. These varied influences, working together, combined to produce in society an atmosphere of Romance, which inspired the national imagination with the ideas outwardly embodied in the poetry of Byron and Shelley. These poets possessed all the qualifications that were wanting to Coleridge and Wordsworth for promoting the cause of the Revolution from the interior of society. As the representatives, immediate or prospective, of the noble and gentle families of England, they could speak for the governing classes, and their poetry claimed a hearing from the public which was denied to those who spoke merely from the position of men of letters. Byron (1788-1824) in particular was possessed of the |