CRASHAW
MODERN poets have singled out Crashaw as a man of genius and a source of inspiration. Coleridge declared that Crashaw's Hymn to St. Teresa was present to his mind while he was writing the second part of Ckristahel; ' if, indeed, by some subtle process of the mind, it did not suggest the first thought of the whole poem.'
Lyric poetry is a very inclusive term. It includes Milton and Herrick, Burns and Shelley, Tintern Abbey and The Grecian Urn, the odes of Coventry Patmore and the songs of Tennyson. But its highest form — that which is to other lyric forms what the epic is to the narrative poem or the ballad — is the form typically represented by the ode. This order of lyric may again be divided into such lyrics as are distinguished by stately stru6lure, and such as are distinguished by ardorous abandonment. In the former kind ardour may be present, though under the continual curb of the structure; and this is the highest species of the lyric. In the latter kind the ardour is naked and predominant: it is to the former kind what the flight of the skylark is to the flight of the eagle. The conspicuous first appearance of the former kind in English poetry was the monumental Epithalamion of Spenser. Ardour cannot, as a rule, be predicated of Spenser; but there is ardour of the most ethereal impulse, equipoised throughout with the most imperial and imperious structure. For the development of the latter kind English poetryhad to await the poet of Prometheus Unbound. But its first, almost unnoticed and unperfe6fed appearance, was in the work of Richard Crashaw. His age gave the preference to Cowley, in whose odes there is unlimited ostentation of dominating ardour vidthout the reality, the result being mere capricious and unmeaning dislocation of form. Too much of the like is there in Crashaw; but every now and again he ascends into real fervour, such as makes metre and di6lion plastic to its own shaping spirit of inevitable rightness. This is the eminent praise of Crashaw, that he marks an epoch, a turn of the tide in English lyric, though the crest of the tide was not to come till long after, though — like all first innovators — he not only suffered present negle6f, but has been overshadowed by those who came a century after him.
He is fraught with suggestion — infinite suggestion. More than one poet has drawn much from him, yet much remains to be drawn. But it is not only for poets he exists. Those who read for enjoyment can find in him abundant delight, if they will be content (as they are content with Wordsworth) to grope through his plenteous infelicity. He is no poet of the human and household emotions; he has not pathos, or warm love, or any of the qualities whicli come home to the natural kindly race of men. But how fecund is his brilliant imagery, rapturous ethereality! He has, at his best, an extraordinary cunning of di(Slion, cleaving like gold-leaf to its obje61:. In such a poem as The Musician and the Nightingale the marvel of di(SHon becomes even too conscious; in the moment of wondering at the miracle, we feel that the miracle is too researched: it is the feat of an amazing gymnast in words rather than of an unpremeditating angel. Yet this poem is an extraordinary verbal achievement, and there are numerous other examples in which the miracle seems as unconscious as admirable.
For an example of his sacred poems, take the Nativity^ which has less deforming conceit than most. Very different from Milton's great Ode, which followed it, yet it has its own chara6leristic beauty. The shepherds sing it turn by turn — as thus:
Gloomy night embraced the place
^Vhere the noble Infant lay. The Babe looked up and showed His face;
In spite of darkness, it was day. It was Thy day, Sweet! and did rise, Not from the East, but from Thine eyes.
Here is seen one note of Crashaw — the human and lover-like tenderness which informs Jiis sacred poems, differentiating them from the conventional style of English sacred poetry, with its solemn aloofness from celestial things,
I saw the curled drops, soft and slow, Come hovering o'er the place's head;
Offering their whitest sheets of snow To furnish the fair Infant's bed:
Forbear, said I; be not too bold,
Your fleece is white, but 'tis too cold.
I saw the obsequious Seraphim Their rosy fleece of fire bestow,
For well they now can spare their wings, Since heaven itself lies here below.
Well done, said I; but are you sure
Your down so warm will pass for pure?
In the second star.za is shown the fire of his fancy; in ' The curled drops,' etc., the happiness of his diftion. In The Weeper (a poem on the Magdalen), amid stanzas of the most frigid conceit, are others of the loveliest art in conception and expression:
The dew no more will weep
The primrose's pale cheek to deck:
The dew no more will sleep Nuzzled in the Lily's neck;
Much rather would it be thy tear,
And leave them both to tremble here.
Not in the Evening's eyes
When they red with weeping are
For the Sun that dies.
Sits Sorrow with a face so fair.
Nowhere but here did ever meet Sweetness so sad, sadness so sweet.
Two more alien poets could not be conceived than Ciashaw and Browning. Yet in the last couplet of these most exquisite stanzas we have a dirc(!l coincidence with Browning's line:
Its sad in sweet, its sweet in sad.
In the Hymn to St Teresa are to be found the most beautiful dehcacies of language and metr«. Listen to this {a propos of Teresa's childish attempt to run away and become a martyr among the Moors):
She never undertook to know
What Death with Love should have to do;
Nor has she e'er yet understood
Why to show love she should shed blood;
Yet though she cannot tell you why.
She can love, and she can die.
The wonderfully dainty Wishes to a Supposed Mistress shows what Crashaw might have been as an amative poet:
Wlioe'er she be,
That not impossible She,
That shall command my heart and me;
Locked up from mortal eye In shady leaves of Destiny:
And so on through a series of unequal but often lovely stanzas. So, too, does Love's Horoscope. His epitaphs are among the sweetest and most artistic even of that age, so cunning in such kind of verse. For instance, that on a young gentleman:
Eyes are vocal, tears have tongues, And there be words not made with lungs — Sententious showers; O let them fall! Their cadence is rhetorical!
With what finer example can I end than the close of T^he Flaming Hearty Crashaw's second hymn to St Teresa?
Oh, thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large draughts of intelleftual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;
By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire,
By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss.
That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His;
By all the Heaven thou hast in Him
(Fair Sister of the seraphim!)
By all of Him we have in thee;
Leave nothing of myself in me. »
Let me so read thy life, that I
Unto all life of mine may die.
It has all the ardour and brave-soaring transport of the highest lyrical inspiration.
COLERIDGE
COLERIDGE is (with the exception of Pope) perhaps the only poet who was a genius to liis schoolfellows — and, more wonderful still, to his schoolmaster. At Christ's Hospital his Greek and philosophy were things sensational to all. How he afterwards left Cambridge and enlisted, how he made an indifferent trooper and was bought out, how he came in contact with Southey and later with Wordsworth; of the Pantisocratic scheme and its failure; of the Lyrical Ballads and their failure, Macaulay's schoolboy would think it trite to speak. Those were the golden days of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel; the days when even women like Dorothy Wordsworth sat entranced while the young man eloquent poured out talk the report of which is immortal. Of that Coleridge one could wish a Sargent or Watts to have left us a portrait, to settle, for one thing, whether his eyes were brown, as some observers say, or grey, as others declare — though it is by a curious error that even De Quincey attaches to him the famous line of Wordsworth about the ' noticeable man with large grey eyes.'* Then came ill-health and opium. Laudanum by the wine-glassful and halfpint at a time soon reduced him to the jour-
* As De Quincey himself shows elsewhere, the passage in question refers probably to Sir Humphry Davy — certainly not 10 Coleridge.
nalist le6lurer and philosopher who projecfted all things, executed nothing; only the eloquent tongue left. So he perished — the mightiest intelle£l of his day; and great was the fall thereof. There remain of him his poems, and a quantity of letters painful to read. They show him wordy, full of weak lamentation, deplorably strengthless.
No other poet, perhaps, except Spenser, has been an initial influence, a generative influence, on so many poets. Having with that mild Elizabethan much affinitv, it is natural that he also should be ' a poets' poet,' in the rarer sense — the sense of fecundating other poets. As wdth Spenser, it is not that other poets have made him their model, have reproduced essentials of his style (accidents no great poet will consciously perpetuate). The progeny are sufficiently unlike the parent. It is that he has incited the very sprouting in them of the laurel-bough, has been to them a fostering sun of song. Such a primary influence he was to Rossetti — Rossetti, whose model was far more Keats than Coleridge. Such he was to Coventry Patmore, in whose work one might trace many masters rather than Coleridge. ' I did not try to imitate his style,' said that great singer. ' I can hardly explain how he influenced me: he was rather an ideal of perfed: style than a model to imitate; but in some indescribable way he did influence my development more than any other poet,'
No poet, indeed, has been senseless enough to imitate the inimitable. One might as well try to paint air as to catch a style so void of all manner that it is visible, like air, only in its results. All other poets have not only a style, but a manner; not only style, but features of style. The style of Coleridge is bare of manner, without feature, not ' distinguishable in member, joint, and limb '; it is, in the Roman sense of merum, mere style; style unalloyed and integral. Imitation has no foothold; it would tread on glass. Therefore poets, diverse beyond other men in their appreciation of poets, have agreed with a single mind in their estimate of this poet; no artist could refrain his homage to the miracle of such utterance. To the critic has been left the peculiar and purblind shame of finding eccentricity in this speech unliawed. It seems beyond belief; yet we could point to an edition of Coleridge, published during his lifetime, and preceded by a would-be friendly memoir, which justifies our saying, ' Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.' The admiring critic complains of Mr Coleridge's affectations and wilful fantasticalness of style; and he dares to cite as example that wonderfully perfect union of language and metre:
The night is chill, the forest bare; Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the aiy
To move away the ringlet curl
From the lovely lady's cheek —
There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high.
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.
Critics wrapped, in * cocksureness ' — to warn, not to discourage you, poets branded with affectation — to give you heart, not recklessness, we recall the fad: that this lovely passage was once thought affefted and fantastic. There is not one great poet who has escaped the charge of obscurity, fantasticalness, or affeftation of utterance. It was hurled, at the outset of their careers, against Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning. Wordsworth wrote simple diftion, and his simplicity was termed affefted; Shelley gorgeous didlion, and his gorgeousness was alfedled; Keats rich diftion, and his richness was affefted; Tennyson cunning diftion, and his cunning was affefted; Browning rugged didion, and his ruggedness was affeded. Why Coleridge was called affefted passes the wit of man, except it be that he did not write like Pope or the elegant Mr Rogers — or, indeed, that all critical tradition would be outraged if a mere recent poet were not labelled with the epithet made and provided for him by wise critical precedent. If this old shoe were not thrown at the wedding of every poet with the Muse, what would become of our ancient EngHsh customs? But critic and poet, Hon and lamb, have now lain down together in their judgement of Coleridge; and abundance of the most excellent appreciation has left no new word about him possible. The critic, it is to be supposed, feels much the same delicacy in praising a Hve poet as in eulogizing a man to his face: when the poet goes out of the room, so to speak, and the door of the tomb closes behind him, the too sensitive critic breathes freely, and finds vent for his suppressed admiration. For at least thirty years criticism has unburdened its suppressed feelings about Coleridge, which it considerately spared him while he was alive; and his position is clear, unquestioned; his reputation beyond the power of wax or wane. Alone of modern poets, his fame sits above the power of flu£luation. Wordsworth has fluftuated; Tennyson stands not exaftly as he did; there is reailion in some quarters against the worship of Shelley; though all are agreed Keats is a great poet, not all are agreed as to his place. But around Coleridge the clamour of partisans is silent: none attacks, none has need to defend. ^he Ancient Mariner, Ckristabel, Kubla Khan, Genevieve, are recognized as perfectly unique masterpieces of triumphant utterance and triumphant imagination of a certain kind. They bring down magic to the earth. Shelley has followed it to the skies; but not all can companion him in that rarefied ether, and breathe. Coleridge brings it in to us, floods us round with it, makes it native and apprehensible as the air of our own earth. To do so he seeks no remote splendours of language, uses no brazier of fuming imagery. He waves his wand, and the miracle is accomplished before our eyes in the open light of day; he takes words which have had the life used out of them by the common cry of poets, puts them into relation, and they rise up like his own dead mariners, wonderful with a supernatural animation.
The poems take the reason prisoner, and the spell is renewed as often as they are read. The only question on which critics differ is the respedive places of the two longer poems. The Ancient Mariner has the advantage of completion, and its necromancy is performed, so to speak, more in the sight of the reader, with a more absolutely simple didion, and a simpler metre. The apparatus — if we may use such a degrading image — is less, Christahel is not only a fragment, but incapable of being anything else. Not even Coleridge, we do believe, could have maintained through the intricacies of plot and in denouement the expectations aroused by the opening. The second part, as has been said, dechnes its level in portions. Yet, in opposition to the general opinion, we think that a more subtle magic is effeded in the first part than in The Ancient Mariner — marvellous though that be. The Ancient
Mariner passes in a region of the supernatural; Christahd brings the supernatural into the regions of everyday. Nor can we see, as some critics have seen, any flaw in the success with which this is done. Yet, perhaps, there are a few — chiefly poetic — readers to whom the most unique and enthralling achievement of all is Kuhla Khan. The words, the music — one and indivisible — come through the gates of dream as never has poem come before or since. This, we believe, might have been completed, so far as a dream is ever completed; that is to say, there might have been more of it. Obviously, the thing has no plot, difflcult sustainedly to execute. It is pure lyrism; and the tapestry of shifting vision might unroll indefinitely to the point at which the dream melted. For, unlike many, we have no difficulty in believing Coleridge's account of how the poem arose. We should feel it difficult to believe any other origin. We could no more see a shower without postulating a cloud than we could doubt this poem to have been rained out of dream. If there were a day of judgement against the preventers of poetry, heavy would be the account of that unnamed visitor who interrupted Coleridge in the transcription of his dream-music, and lost to the world for ever the remainder of Kubla Khan. In the other world, we trust, this wretched ^ individual will be condemned eternally to go out of ear-shot when the angels prelude on their harps; together with all those who by choice enter concert-rooms during the divinest passage of a symphony.
The minor poems of this great poet are minor indeed. Touth and Age^ Frost at Midnight, passages of The Nightingale and one or two more which might be named, in spite of a real measure of quiet beauty, could never support a great reputation. The Ode to Dejection has unquestionably fine passages, but hardly aims at sustained power. The Odes To France and The Departing Tear are terrible bombast, though here again occur fine lines. The fingers of one hand number the poems on which Coleridge's fame is adamantinely based; and they were all written in about two years of his youth.
A portrait shows the Coleridge of those younger days, with the poet not yet burned out in him; when we are told his face had beauty in the eyes of many women. But it is of the later Coleridge that we possess the most luminous descriptions. A slack, shambling man, flabby in face and form and charafter, redeemed by noble brow and dim yet luminous eyes; womanly and unstayed of nature, torrentuous of golden talk, the poet submerged and feebly struggling in opium-darkened oceans of German philosophy, amid which he finally foundered, striving to the last to fish up gigantic projefts from the bottom of a daily half-pint of laudanum. And over that wreck most piteous and terrible in all our literary history, shines, and will shine for ever, the five-pointed star of his glorious youth; those poor five resplendent poems, for which he paid the devil's price of a desolated life and unthinkably blasted powers. Other poets may have done greater things; none a thing more perfect and uncompanioned. Other poets belong to this class or that; he to the class of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.