No More Learning

"All the images," said Coleridge, "rose up before me as
_things_, with a parallel production of the correspondent
expressions. " Lamb, who tells us how Coleridge repeated it "so enchantingly
that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour
when he says or sings it to me," doubted whether it would "bear daylight. "
It seemed to him that such witchcraft could hardly outlast the night. It
has outlasted the century, and may still be used as a touchstone; it will
determine the poetic value of any lyric poem which you place beside it.
Take as many poems as you please, and let them have all the merits you
please, their ultimate merit as poetry will lie in the degree of their
approach to the exact, unconscious, inevitable balance of qualities in the
poetic art of "Kubla Khan. "

In "The Ancient Mariner," which it seems probable was composed before, and
not after "Kubla Khan," as Coleridge's date would have us suppose, a new
supernaturalism comes into poetry, which, for the first time, accepted the
whole responsibility of dreams. The impossible, frankly accepted, with its
own strict, inverted logic; the creation of a new atmosphere, outside the
known world, which becomes as real as the air about us, and yet never loses
its strangeness; the shiver that comes to us, as it came to the wedding-
guest, from the simple good faith of the teller; here is a whole new
creation, in subject, mood, and technique. Here, as in "Kubla Khan,"
Coleridge saw the images "as _things_"; only a mind so overshadowed by
dreams, and so easily able to carry on his sleep awake, could have done so;
and, with such a mind, "that willing suspension of disbelief for a moment,
which constitutes poetic faith," was literally forced upon him. "The
excellence aimed at," says Coleridge, "was to consist in the interesting of
the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally
accompany such situations," those produced by supernatural agency,
"supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human
being who, from whatever sense of delusion, has at any time believed
himself under supernatural agency. " To Coleridge, whatever appealed vitally
to his imagination was real; and he defended his belief philosophically,
disbelieving from conviction in that sharp marking off of real from
imaginary which is part of the ordinary attitude of man in the presence of
mystery.

It must not be forgotten that Coleridge is never fantastic. The fantastic
is a playing with the imagination, and Coleridge respects it. His intellect
goes always easily as far as his imagination will carry it, and does not
stop by the way to play tricks upon its bearer. Hence the conviction which
he brings with him when he tells us the impossible.
And then his style, in
its ardent and luminous simplicity, flexible to every bend of the spirit
which it clothes with flesh, helps him in the idiomatic translation of
dreams. The visions of Swedenborg are literal translations of the
imagination, and need to be retranslated. Coleridge is equally faithful to
the thing seen and to the laws of that new world into which he has
transposed it.

"The Ancient Mariner" is the most sustained piece of imagination in the
whole of English poetry; and it has almost every definable merit of
imaginative narrative. It is the only poem I know which is all point and
yet all poetry; because, I suppose, the point is really a point of mystery.
It is full of simple, daily emotion, transported, by an awful power of
sight, to which the limits of reality are no barrier, into an unknown sea
and air; it is realized throughout the whole of its ghastly and marvellous
happenings; and there is in the narrative an ease, a buoyancy almost, which
I can only compare with the music of Mozart, extracting its sweetness from
the stuff of tragedy; it presents to us the utmost physical and spiritual
horror, not only without disgust, but with an alluring beauty. But in
"Christabel," in the first part especially, we find a quality which goes
almost beyond these definable merits. There is in it a literal spell, not
acting along any logical lines, not attacking the nerves, not terrifying,
not intoxicating, but like a slow, enveloping mist, which blots out the
real world, and leaves us unchilled by any "airs from heaven or blasts from
hell," but in the native air of some middle region. In these two or three
brief hours of his power out of a lifetime, Coleridge is literally a
wizard. People have wanted to know what "Christabel" means, and how it was
to have ended, and whether Geraldine was a vampire (as I am inclined to
think) or had eyes in her breasts (as Shelley thought). They have wondered
that a poem so transparent in every line should be, as a whole, the most
enigmatical in English. But does it matter very much whether "Christabel"
means this or that, and whether Coleridge himself knew, as he said, how it
was to end, or whether, as Wordsworth declared, he had never decided? It
seems to me that Coleridge was fundamentally right when he said of the
"Ancient Mariner," "It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian
Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a
well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he
_must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date-shells
had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son. " The "Ancient Mariner,"
if we take its moral meaning too seriously, comes near to being an
allegory. "Christabel," as it stands, is a piece of pure witchcraft,
needing no further explanation than the fact of its existence.