John Livingstone Lowes

The Road to Xanadu

SAGA Egmont

The Road to Xanadu

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TO

MARY CORNETT LOWES

WHO

LIKE THE WEDDING-GUEST

COULD NOT CHOOSE

BUT HEAR

Faust. Wohin der Weg?

Mephistopheles. Kein Weg! Ins Unbetretene.

Eight chapters of this book and parts if six other chapters were read in 1926 as lectures on two Foundations — an endowed lectureship in the University College of Wales, and the Norman Wait Harris Foundation in Northwestern University — each of which stipulates the publication of its lectures as a book. The Harris Lectures of 1926 and the corresponding lectures at the University College of Wales consist, accordingly, of Chapters I (in part); II and III; VII and parts of IX, X, and XI; XIII and XIV; XV (in part) and XVI; XIX (in part), XX, and XXII. And I wish to acknowledge the generosity of the Trustees of both Foundations in their willingness to accept, as fulfilling their requirement, a book of which the lectures constitute but a part.

PREFACE

The story which this book essays to tell was not of the teller’s choosing. It simply came, with supreme indifference to other plans, and autocratically demanded right of way. A glittering eye and a skinny hand and a long gray beard could not have done more summary execution, nor, for that matter, could the Wedding-Guest himself (who also had other fish to fry) have been, at the outset, a more reluctant auditor. But the reluctance swiftly passed into absorbing interest, as the meaning of the chance glimpse which did the business was disclosed. For the agency which cast the spell was not, as it happened, a pair of marvellous fairy-tales at all, nor even the provocative and baffling personality of their creator. It was the imaginative energy itself, surprised (as it seemed to me) at work behind these fabrics of its weaving. If I was right, and if I could make clear to others what I thought I saw myself, I had no alternative. That the aperçu, such as it was, should come through ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ when I was intent at the moment upon Chaucer’s rich humanity, was, to be sure, more than a little disconcerting. It was so, however, that it chose to come, and Wyrd goeth as she will.

Once started on, however, the story has been written in its present form (I fear I must confess) quite frankly for the writer’s own enjoyment — in part for the sheer pleasure of following into unfamiliar regions an almost untrodden path; not a little for that fearful joy one snatches from the effort to exhibit, with something that approaches clarity, the order which gives meaning to a chaos of details. It would have been easy in comparison to communicate, for the edification of a narrow circle only, a mass of observations to the pages of some learned journal, and let it go at that. But the subject in itself was far too interesting, and the light it seemed to throw upon a wider field far too significant, to warrant any but the broadest treatment I could give it. I am not sure, indeed, that one of the chief services which literary scholarship can render is not precisely the attempt, at least, to make its findings available (and interesting, if that may be) beyond the precincts of its own solemn troops and sweet societies. At all events, that is the adventurous enterprise of this volume. Its facts I think I can safely vouch for. As for the interpretation thereof, that is the core of the book. And nothing which I might say here has not already been said there.

A good deal, perhaps most, of the material of the study is what, in academic circles, we somewhat humorously call ‘ new.’ Since the term may be applied with equal relevance to exhumed treasure redolent of the dust of centuries and to facts still sparkling with their pristine dew, the adjective, to the uninitiated, is apt to be ambiguous. In so far as most of the facts which I have here attempted to interpret have either not been previously observed in this connection, or, if observed, have not been put upon their inferences, the term, in its faintly Pickwickian sense, is not impertinent. But this ‘newness’ is a quality of little moment, except as it renders possible a fresh synthesis. That I believe it does, and so the use of hitherto unused evidence becomes a factor of some importance in the reckoning.

There are, however, two matters about which I want to be quite clear. In the first place, this is not a study of Coleridge’s theory of the imagination. It is an attempt to get at the workings of the faculty itself. Coleridge wrote a great deal about the imagination, and (I am very sure) talked more. And in the course of his wanderings through what he once pleasantly called ‘the holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics’ he evolved the nebulous theory propounded in the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of the Biographia Literaria. With that I have just now nothing to do. It belongs to the history of critical opinion; our interest is in a study of the imaginative processes themselves. And I am deliberately excluding the one in favour of the other. For I cannot but think that Coleridge’s most precious contribution to our understanding of the imagination lies, not in his metaphysical lucubrations on it after it was lost, but in the implications of his practice while he yet possessed the power.

In the second place, there are considerations, in themselves of obvious importance, which, with reference to my purpose, are beside the point. How far ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ for example, is ‘romantic’; how far it has or has not the Aristotelian σπουδαιότης; where it stands in this or that hierarchy of eternal values — questions such as these are not, for the moment, my affair. I am attempting to do this only — to discover how, in two great poems, out of chaos the imagination frames a thing of beauty. The implications of the facts, I believe, have value far beyond these two poems. But I know, too, that the imagination operates in many ways, and before conclusions of universal application can be reached, other studies of other works must check and supplement the results of this.

Even these results have been subject to remorseless limitations. ‘I have read almost everything,’ said Coleridge, not without warrant, a year before he wrote ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ and he who sets out to track him through his reading leaves unread at his peril anything readable whatsoever that was extant in Coleridge’s day. Nothing short of the omne scibile will do. That, in a world of exacting duties, is a bliss to die with, rather than a goal attained. And I am sadly certain that there is much which I have overlooked — a regret which has its compensation in the fact that there is left for others a chance at the joy of the chase which I have had. It is far too much to hope, moreover, that in weighing particulars like the sand for multitude, every appraisal of details has been correct. There will be without question specific inferences which may challenge doubt or dissent. But making all allowances for tracts still unexplored and human fallibility, the mass of cumulative evidence, I think, is overwhelming, and it is as a whole — a whole of which the parts are mutually corroborative — that I could wish this essay at interpretation to be judged. More than that no mortal can in reason ask..

Since the date on the title-page is 1927, it is proper to state that the substance of the book, though not in its present form, was given as lectures at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in March and April, 1920. And much of it had already found place in courses at Harvard and Radcliffe as early as 1919. A number of chapters as they now stand have since been read at the Universities of California and Texas, in 1922 and 1924. The acknowledgement to the two Foundations which stipulate publication of their lectures has been made elsewhere. But I could not there acknowledge the charming courtesy which, both at Aberystwyth and Evanston, as at Austin and Berkeley, made my term as lecturer delightful.

Welcome confirmation of a few details has come while the book has been in preparation, through independent observations which have at intervals been printed here and there. But all such matters will be found, where they belong, in the notes. Mr. Hugh I’Anson Fausset’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge was published after this volume was completed and in the printer’s hands. I have referred in the notes to two or three of Mr. Fausset’s statements. Beyond these brief references it has been impossible, under the circumstances, to go.

There are those who find the notes in a book more interesting than the text. I often do myself. But for the sake of others otherwise inclined the notes in this book are, for the most part, securely kennelled in the rear. There they will molest no incurious reader who is circumspect enough to let them lie. Their objects, for those who care to turn to them, are two: to make possible the verification of all statements which rest in any way upon authority; and to sketch in, through details which would have violated the unity of n ordered treatment, the complex and often vividly human background of the poems. But the text may be read, by those who will, as if the notes did not exist.

Debts such as mine are pleasant to acknowledge, even though they can never be repaid. Grateful homage first of all is due to the memory of the two great recent editors of Coleridge, James Dykes Campbell and Ernest Hartley Coleridge, whose unwearied investigation of everything which bears upon the text has laid the only foundation on which a study such as this may safely build. And since I have had to make constant use of early editions, my debt to the monumental bibliography of Thomas Wise — whose personal kindness I, with many others, know — is scarcely less. With these three must be named for special thanks Professor Alois Brandl of Berlin. For he it was who printed, just thirty years ago, the manuscript in which lie the clues to much that follows. His edition of the so-called ‘Gutch Memorandum Book’ is not always accurate (as I shall now and then in these pages find it necessary to point out), and his notes, which are often of the utmost value, leave many important entries unidentified. A new edition is needed, and I hope before too long to publish one — with full knowledge that I too shall leave many riddles still unsolved. But to Professor Brandl belongs the honour of first recognizing the potential value of a priceless document — a recognition, one must add, in which few scholars since have followed him.

To colleagues and students and other friends I owe kindnesses far too many to enumerate. Most of them are, I hope, acknowledged in the notes. A few are too special to pass over here. Professor A. E. Longueil, Dr. George M. Vogt, Professors Stanley P. Chase, Paul F. Kaufman and Harold Golder, Bertram R. Davis, Esq., of Bristol, and Mr. Hale Moore have from time to time looked up for me various matters of detail at the British Museum, the Bristol Library, and elsewhere, and Mr. Kaufman sent me in manuscript, before it was printed, his record of the borrowings of Coleridge and Southey from the Bristol Library. Professor Garland Greever also sent me in manuscript the pages of his book, A Wiltshire Parson and his Friends, which deal with his discovery of Coleridge’s hitherto unrecognized reviews. Permission to print a letter from Joseph Conrad, which I had hoped to ask of Mr. Conrad himself, has been given me since his death by his literary executor, Mr. Richard Curle, and also by his publisher, Mr. F. N. Doubleday. To Dr. John L. Haney (over and above his bibliography) I am indebted for valuable help in tracing a number of volumes containing Coleridge’s annotations; nor may I omit the courtesy of many booksellers in London and New York who have given aid in the same quest. Mr. B. H. Blackwell and Mr. H. S. Rowles of Oxford have been especially kind. Particular acknowledgement is due to the Reverend Gerard H. B. Coleridge, great-grandson of the poet, for permission to print unpublished letters; and to Mrs. Lucy Gillman Watson, granddaughter of Dr. James Gillman, the late Miss Amy Lowell, H. T. Butler, Esq., Dr. James B. Clemens, W. van R. Whitall, Esq., Professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker, J. A. Spoor, Esq., Professor George McLean Harper (former custodian of the collection of the late Mrs. Henry A. St. John), and Professor Phillip Ogden (owner of the collection of the late Miss Frances Bennett) for generous permission to use important and unpublished notes in Coleridge’s hand in books which they owned or controlled.

To Norton Perkins, Esq. (and I leave the words as they stood before his death), I owe pleasure as great as the debt which goes with it. For his gift to the Harvard College Library of his collection of Coleridge editions, manuscripts, and marginalia came at a strategic moment in these investigations, and his continued generosity contributed, like the support of a friend, to the later stages of this study, and has particularly enriched the notes. And the additions to the collection made in his memory by Mrs. Norton Perkins and by his classmate, the late C. C. Stillman, Esq., have enhanced my debt.

At the British Museum I owe many courtesies to Mr. J. A. Herbert and the officials of the Manuscript Department. And without the wealth of documents and the large freedom of the Harvard College Library — with which must always be associated the cordial and unstinted coöperation of its officers (very specially Mr. Walter B. Briggs) and its attendants — there could really have been no book at all.

The deepest debt of all, however, must remain, save for the dedication, unexpressed.

J. L. L.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

10 January, 1927

PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION

The chief, indeed the sole function of this second Preface is the pleasant one of recording renewed indebtedness. The book grew out of a thousand questions, and in the happiest fashion for its writer it has provoked a response in kind. For from scores of readers has come a stream of suggestions, queries, and corrections, far too numerous for individual acknowledgment, except as that has been already made, or as quite special assistance calls for special note. The sheaf of Addenda and Corrigenda which follows the original Notes is largely made up of such contributions, and others would have been included had the exigencies of space allowed. Save for a few minor corrections, the body of the book remains unchanged.

I owe to Bertram R. Davis, Esq., of Bristol, the solution of the riddle of the (mythical!) ‘Erastus Galer’s hat’; and it was only through Professor Alice D. Snyder’s earlier researches that it became possible at last, with the aid of Edgar H. Wells, Esq., to trace the whereabouts of the long-lost manuscript in Coleridge’s hand, which contains, among other things, ‘that drama in which Got-fader performs.’ And my particular thanks are due to Dr. Max Farrand, Director of Research of the Henry E. Huntington Library, and to Captain R. B. Haselden, Curator of Manuscripts, for permission to use the document, and for invaluable information about it. Commander (Retired) I. V. Gillis, U.S.N., of Peking, has put me again and again in his debt, through the light which his knowledge of the Orient has thrown on this and that detail. Owen D. Young, Esq., and Frank Brewer Bemis, Esq., have generously allowed me the use of letters and marginalia in their collections. Still other obligations, incurred with no less gratitude, are recorded in the Addenda. And my Research Assistant, Miss Keith Glenn, has rendered invaluable aid.

J. L. L.

19 March, 1930

THE ROAD TO XANADU

BOOK I

The deep well knows it certainly.

HuGo von Hoffmansthal

CHAPTER I

CHAOS

The title of this volume is less cryptic than it seems. I propose to tell the story, so far as I have charted its course, of the genesis of two of the most remarkable poems in English, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ and ‘Kubia Khan.’ If that should appear a meagre theme on which to lavish all these pages, I can only crave of the judicial reader a suspended sentence. For a quest which began with a strange footprint caught sight of accidentally just off the beaten track became in the end an absorbing adventure along the ways which the imagination follows in dealing with its multifarious materials — an adventure like a passage through the mazes of a labyrinth, to come out at last upon a wide and open sky. Those ways are the theme of the book. ‘The Road to Xanadu’ is but a symbol of something which, when all is said, remains intangible.

But the road, as we shall actually travel it, leads through half the lands and all the seven seas of the globe. For we shall meet on the way with as strange a concourse as ever haunted the slopes of Parnassus — with alligators and albatrosses and auroras and Antichthones; with biscuit-worms, bubbles of ice, bassoons, and breezes; with candles, and Cain, and the Corpo Santo; Dioclesian, king of Syria, and the dæmons of the elements; earthquakes, and the Euphrates; frost-needles, and fog-smoke, and phosphorescent light; gooseberries, and the Gordonia lasianthus; haloes and hurricanes; lightnings and Laplanders; meteors, and the Old Man of the Mountain, and stars behind the moon; nightmares, and the sources of the Nile; footless birds of Paradise, and the observatory at Pekin; swoons, and spectres, and slimy seas; wefts, and water-snakes, and the Wandering Jew. Beside that compendious cross-section of chaos, nightmares are methodical. Yet of such is the kingdom of poetry. And in that paradox lies the warrant of our pilgrimage.

For out of the heart of the chaos sprang the poems. And our attempt to grasp the implications of that fact will bring us ultimately to the workings of the imaginative energy itself. No such outcome was foreseen or even suspected when, for the zest of the game, this tracking of a poet through heaven and earth was begun. It was only when facts pursued farther kept ramifying into other facts, and unforeseen links between them began by degrees to disclose themselves, that certain inferences became (as it seemed) inevitable, and certain tentative conclusions assumed gradually clearer form. Those conclusions are offered with reasonable confidence in their broad validity. But in any case this at least is true: they rest, every one of them, not upon preconceived notions, but on concrete facts. If the conclusions are faulty, the facts are there by which they may be tested, and (at need) amended. And therein lies, I think, such value as this study may possess.

Our first business, then, will be with the incongruous, chaotic, and variegated jumble out of which emerged the two unique poems which I have named.¹ The goal of our passage through chaos, however, lies, not in the phantasmagoria itself, but in the operations of that shaping spirit of imagination which, likewise moving through the welter, fashions its elements into lucid and ordered unity. That the moulding imagination in this instance happens to be Coleridge’s and not another’s, is the accident of a chance page of Purchas, which one day flew a signal and beckoned down a trail which turned out to lead through the uncharted regions tributary to ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan.’ Coleridge as Coleridge, be it said at once, is of secondary moment to our purpose; it is the significant process, not the man, which constitutes our theme. But the amazing modus operandi of his genius, in the fresh light which I hope I have to offer, becomes the very abstract and brief chronicle of the procedure of the creative faculty itself. I am not so rash, I trust, as to essay to pluck out the heart of the mystery. But the game of coming to close quarters with the riddle is more than worth the candle.

We shall be occupied first, accordingly, with the raw stuff of poetry. The finished product will concern us later. With that positive assurance to support us, we may strike at once into the thick of a farrago which will triumphantly justify, I think, the title of this chapter.

I

In the British Museum is a small manuscript volume of ninety leaves, which is, in my judgment, one of the most illuminating human documents even in that vast treasure-house.²It is a note book kept by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, partly in pencil, partly in ink, and always with most admired disorder. There are just two dates from cover to cover, but internal evidence makes clear that it embraces a period of about three years, from the spring of 1795 to the spring or summer of 1798,³ the years which lead up to and include the magnificent flowering of Coleridge’s genius on which his renown as a poet rests. It was printed thirty years ago by Professor Brandl of Berlin,⁴ but it lies so effectively buried in a German philological periodical that the latest English edition of Coleridge refers to it as vaguely as if it had been published in the moon.⁵ Yet its value is incalculable, not only for the understanding of Coleridge, but also as a document in the psychology of genius, and as a key to the secrets of art in the making. And its service is inestimable to our present enterprise.

It is, on the whole, the strangest medley that I know. Milton’s Commonplace Book is a severely ordered collectanea of extracts culled from his reading, docketed alphabetically, and methodical as a ledger.⁶ Shelley’s note books, written upside down, sidewise, and even right side up, with their scribbled marginal sketches of boats and trees and human faces — these battered and stained and happy-go-lucky little volumes are a priceless record of the birth-throes of poetry.⁷ But it is chiefly poetry, beating its wings against the bars of words, which they contain. There are few notes of Shelley’s reading. The Coleridge Note Book⁸ is like neither. It is a catch-all for suggestions jotted down chaotically from Coleridge’s absorbing adventures among books. It is a repository of waifs and strays of verse, some destined to find a lodgement later in the poems, others yet lying abandoned where they fell, like drifted leaves. It is a mirror of the fitful and kaleidoscopic moods and a record of the germinal ideas of one of the most supremely gifted and utterly incalculable spirits ever let loose upon the planet. And it is like nothing else in the world so much as a jungle, illuminated eerily with patches of phosphorescent light, and peopled with uncanny life and strange exotic flowers. But it is teeming and fecund soil, and out of it later rose, like exhalations, gleaming and aërial shapes.

How those shining shapes arose from chaos it will be our ultimate task to see. But our way at the moment lies through a veritable tohu-bohu, which is ‘neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, But all these in their pregnant causes mix’d Confusedly.’ And as expositor and guide I am at once confronted by the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand is a natural leaning toward all achievable lucidity of outline and arrangement. The document, on the other hand, of which above all things I wish to give a true impression, is almost everything else under Heaven, but lucid it emphatically is not. It is singularly like a collection of the flashing, fleeting, random, and disjointed thoughts and fancies which dart, with the happy inconsequence of aquatic insects, across the surface of the stream of consciousness — all jotted down impartially by an interested, and sometimes amazed, Recording Angel. A shower of meteors is not more erratic, and you cannot impose upon a shower of meteors the luminous sequence of the wheeling constellations without its forthwith ceasing to be the thing it is. And it is precisely the incredible olla-podrida as it is which I am anxious, before going farther, to set forth: confusion at its worst confounded, as the elemental stuff of poetry — its ‘materies … et corpora prima’ — waiting only for the informing spirit which broods over chaos to draw it (in Milton’s rendering of the magnificent Lucretian phrase) into ‘the precincts of light.’ In order, then, to exhibit at the outset the formlessness out of which eventually form was wrought, I must forego for the moment the aid of orderly arrangement, and can only ask those readers who may quite intelligibly object to being hurled unceasingly from alligators to maniacs and from birds of Paradise to rainbows in the spray to believe that the disorder of this opening chapter is itself an essential factor in an ordered plan.

Without more ado, then, let us plunge into the wilderness which the strange document before us exhibits. And I shall first excerpt a dozen consecutive pages,⁹ and shall then, without regard to sequence, pick from the remainder such characteristic jottings as may serve our later ends.

Let us begin with the most dramatic moment in the Note Book. Coleridge has been tinkering at some pretty verses, touched here and there with his own elfin magic, about ‘Moths in the Moonlight.’¹⁰ Then, without break, he has set down, as if oblivious of the implications of the contrast, one of the most profound and haunting phrases ever penned —

the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come —

and has followed it with a second excerpt from the Sonnets, more poignantly personal than the first:

Most true it is, that I have look’d on truth

Askance and strangely.¹¹

Next on the page appears a jotting later to find its way, transformed, into the magical opening of ‘Christabel’:

Behind the thin

Grey cloud that cover’d but not hid the sky

The round full moon look’d small. — ¹²

And then, on the heels of a bit of poetized observation of snow curling in the breeze,¹³ comes without warning ‘the alligators’ terrible roar,’ and the captivating entry thus proceeds:¹⁴

The alligators’ terrible roar, like heavy distant thunder, not only shaking the air and waters, but causing the earth to tremble — and when hundreds and thousands are roaring at the same time; you can scarcely be persuaded but that the whole globe is dangerously agitated —¹⁵

The eggs are layed in layers between a compost of earth, mud, grass, and herbage. —The female watches them — when born, she leads them about the shores, as a hen her chickens¹⁶ — and when she is basking on the warm banks, with her brood around, you may hear the young ones whining and barking, like young Puppies.¹⁷

20 feet long — lizard-shaped, plated — head vulnerable — tusked — eyes small and sunk —¹⁸

— Hartley fell down and hurt himself — I caught him up crying and screaming — and ran out of doors with him. — The Moon caught his eye — he ceased crying immediately — and his eyes and the tears in them, how they glittered in the Moonlight!¹⁹

— Some wilderness-plot, green and fountainous and unviolated by Man.²⁰

An old Champion who is perhaps absolute sovereign of a little Lake or Lagoon (when 50 less than himself are obliged to content themselves with roaring and swelling in little coves round about) darts forth from the reedy coverts all at once on the surface of the water, in a right line; at first, seemingly as rapid as lightning, but gradually more slowly until he arrives at the center of the lake, when he stops; he now swells himself by drawing in wind and water thro’ his mouth, which causes a loud sonorous rattling in the throat for near a minute; but it is immediately forced out again thro’ his mouth and nostrils with a loud noise, brandishing his tail in the air, and the vapor ascending from his nostrils like smoke. At other times when swollen to an extent ready to burst, his head and tail lifted up, he twirls round on the surface of the water. He retires — and others, who dare, continue the exhibition — all to gain the attention of the favorite Female —²¹

The distant thunder sounds heavily — the crocodiles answer it like an echo —²²

Now Coleridge got his alligators from one of the most delightful books which he or anybody ever read, William Bartram’s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (the amplitude of the title is prophetic of the book’s own leisured pace), the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. There is more of the title,²³ but just now the crocodiles and not Bartram hold the stage. Coleridge wanted his alligators badly, but even his genius found them a trifle intractable as boon companions for moths in the moonlight, and in the strange and demon-haunted setting to which he finally transferred them they stubbornly declined to stay.²⁴ Poor little hapless Hartley, sandwiched weeping between their layered egg-heaps and their thunder-echoing roars, he extricated later in the closing lines of ‘The Nightingale.’²⁵ And the green and fountainous wilderness-plot belongs in the complicated history of ‘Kubla Khan.’²⁶

From the exciting domestic life of alligators Coleridge now passes to exotic plants:

Describe —

— the never-bloomless Furze —

and then transi to the Gordonia Lasianthus. Its thick foliage of a dark green colour is flowered over with large milkwhite fragrant blossoms on long slender elastic peduncles at the extremities of the numerous branches — from the bosom of the leaves, and renewed every morning — and that in such incredible profusion that the Tree appears silvered over with them and the ground beneath covered with the fallen flowers. It at the same time continually pushes forth new twigs, with young buds on them; and in the winter and spring the third year’s leaves, now partly concealed by the new and perfect ones, are gradually changing colour from green to a golden yellow, from that to a scarlet; from scarlet to crimson; and lastly to a brownish purple, and then fall to the ground. So that the Gordonia Lasianthus may be said to change and renew its garments every morning thro’out the year. And moreover after the general flowering is past, there is a thin succession of scattering blossoms to be seen, on some parts of the tree, almost every day thro’out the remaining months until the floral season returns again. — It grows by ponds and the edges of rivers – – –²⁷

The never-bloomless furze later found a modest place in ‘a green and silent spot, amid the hills’ where ‘Fears in Solitude’ was written.²⁸ The Gordonia lasianthus wasted its sweetness on the desert air, so far as Coleridge is concerned, for he never used it — though Wordsworth, in a poem fairly steeped in Bartram, did.²⁹ That, however, is another story, and sticking to Coleridge we pass, still under Bartram’s conduct, from alligators and never-fading trees to birds:³⁰

Perhaps — the Snake bird with slender longest neck, long, strait and slender bill, glossy black, like fish-scales except on the breast which is cream-coloured — the tail is very long of a deep black tipped³¹ with a silvery white; and when spread, represent an unfurled fan. They delight to sit in little peaceable communities on the dry limbs of trees, hanging over the still waters, with their wings and tails expanded — I suppose to cool themselves, when at the same time they behold their images below — when approached, they drop off as if dead — invisible for a minute or two — then at a vast distance their long slender head and neck only appear, much like a snake — no other part to be seen except sometimes the silvery tip of their Tail.

Bartram hazards the guess that ‘if this bird had been an inhabitant of the Tiber in Ovid’s days, it would have furnished him with a subject, for some beautiful and entertaining metamorphoses.’³² And with a dubious ‘perhaps,’ which is, I think, unique in the annals of his projects, Coleridge files the old traveller’s hint away for future reference.

The next entry is somewhat startling, even for the Note Book:³³

A dunghill at a distance sometimes smells like musk, and a dead dog like elder-flowers. —

Whether that amazing dictum is to be regarded merely as a symptom of olfactory perversion, or as a truth hitherto hidden from the wise and prudent, I can only guess. All I know is that one half of the apothegm turns up again in Omniana, where the musk of the dunghill has played puss-in-the-corner with the dead dog’s elder flowers: ‘We here in England received a very high character of Lord during his stay abroad. Not unlikely, sir, replied the traveller; a dead dog at a distance is said to smell like musk.’³⁴ Brandl, in his edition of the Note Book, still further enriches the potpourri by misreading ‘musk’ as ‘mush.’³⁵ The theme is tempting, but we may not linger.³⁶ And so, passing over four brief memoranda on plagiarists, abrupt beginnings, an infant playing with its mother’s shadow, and a flat pink-coloured stone adorned with lichens,³⁷ we return to the green savannahs of Florida:³⁸

The Life of the Siminole playful from infancy to Death compared to the Snow, which in a calm day falling scarce seems to fall and plays and dances in and out, to the very moment that it reaches the ground —

The ‘Siminole’ (misread by Brandl as ‘Simioli,’ a vocable which calls up distracting images of little apes), together with the wilderness-plot, the Gordonia lasianthus, and the snake-birds were all, like the alligators, drawn from Bartram. And I shall only add that in Omniana this last entry, slightly changed, has shifted its application from the Seminoles to Sophocles!³⁹ The next four entries will round out the dozen pages I have chosen.

The Sun-shine lies on the cottage-wall

Ashining thro’ the snow —⁴⁰

A maniac in the woods – –

She crosses (heedlessly) the woodman’s path —

Scourg’d by rebunding [sic] boughs —/⁴¹

— The merry nightingale

That crowds and hurries and precipitates

With fast thick warble his delicious notes;

As he were fearful, that an April night

Would be too short for him to utter forth

His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul

Of all its music!—⁴²

That last is a fragment of the poem which was the destined setting for Hartley’s tranquillizing visit to the glimpses of the moon. ‘Written in April, 1798,’ says the title as it stood in the Lyrical Ballads; and the reading of Bartram’s fascinating pages, interrupted only long enough to pick up Hartley, belongs, it is clear, to those same vernal hours. But for the moment alligators and Indians and maniacs in the woods have passed away, and it is the exceeding loveliness of spring in Somerset — the spring which this year had come slowly up that way — seen and poignantly felt on moonlit walks with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, which now filled Coleridge’s mind. ‘A rainy morning — very pleasant in the evening,’ wrote Dorothy in her Journal on May sixth. ‘Met Coleridge as we were walking out. Went with him to Stowey; heard the nightingale; saw a glow-worm.’⁴³ There is record in the Journal of similar evening strolls in April too, and in nothing that Coleridge ever wrote is the comradeship between the ‘ three persons, one soul’ so interpenetrated with the beauty in the midst of which they lived as in the poem which grew from the hurried scrawl about Hartley’s tumble and the magic of the moon, and from the rapturous lines which I have just quoted from the Note Book. And then Coleridge’s wayward fancy veered sharply back to an alien world:

A country fellow in a village Inn, winter night—tells a long story — all attentive etc. except one fellow who is toying with the Maid —/ The Countryman introduces some circumstance absolutely incompatible with a prior one —/ The Amoroso detects it/ —/ etc. — The philosophy of this.— Yes! I do’nt tell it for a true story — you would not have found it out if you had [not. been?] smooring with Mall—⁴⁴

And since ‘smoor’ is good Somerset dialect,⁴⁵ it is a safe guess that the quaint psychological problem which Coleridge propounded for Heaven knows what excogitation later, had its birth in some alehouse tale, native, like the nightingale, to the environs of that ‘dear gutter of Stowey’ which he once so feelingly apostrophized.

The next two pages of the book are blank.

II

Chaos precedes cosmos, and it is into chaos without form and void that we have plunged. But a spirit was moving upon the face of the waters. Latent in that circumscribed tract of the bewildering gallimaufry which we have just traversed lay germs that were to come to their development, by devious ways, in ‘Christabel,’ ‘The Wanderings of Cain,’ ‘The Nightingale,’ ‘Kubla Khan,’ ‘Lewti,’ ‘Fears in Solitude,’ ‘Love,’ Wordsworth’s ‘Ruth,’ and indirectly in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’

I am not sure, indeed, that the greatest value of the Note Book does not lie in this: that it gives us some inkling of the vast, diffused, and amorphous nebula out of which, like asteroids, the poems leaped. It makes possible, in other words, at least a divination of that thronging and shadowy mid-region of consciousness which is the womb of the creative energy. For it is the total content of a poet’s mind, which never gets itself completely expressed, and never can, that suffuses and colours everything which flashes or struggles into utterance. Every expression of an artist is merely a focal point of the surging chaos of the unexpressed. And it is that surging and potent chaos which a document like the Note Book re-creates.

III

It is worth while, then, to penetrate the jungle a little farther. This time, however, we shall turn the pages of the Note Book rapidly, and cull here and there. And in order to preserve unimpaired the distinctive flavour of the document itself, I shall, so far as possible, refrain from comment. But complete abstention, in the face of some of the entries, is a virtue too high for human frailty to attain to.

The first seven memoranda in the list are also the first seven in the manuscript.⁴⁶ And the mocking spirit which presides over the fall of the cards in the Note Book is from the outset dealing true to form. For the dance of the Epicurean atoms is no more capricious than the piquant juxtapositions of these seven notes.

The Vernal Hours.

Leg. Thomson

Moon at present uninhabited owing to it’s little or no atmosphere but may in Time — An atheistic Romance might be formed — a Theistic one too. — Mem! —

I mix in life and labor to seem free,

With common persons pleas’d and common things —

While every Thought and action tends to thee

And every impulse from thy Influence springs.⁴⁷

Sometimes to a gibbet, sometimes to a Throne — always to Hell.

The flames of two Candles joined give a much stronger light than both of them separate — evid. by a person holding the two Candles near his Face, first separate, and then joined in one.

Picture of Hymen —

The lowest part of the flame [of a] Candle is always blue — w[hen] the flame is sufficiently el[ongated] so as to be just ready to [smoke] the Tip is always red. —⁴⁸

Little Daisy — very late Spring. March — Quid si vivat? — Do all things in Faith. Never pluck a flower again! — Mem. —⁴⁹

And so, with the queerest jumble ever conceived — a fleeting him of spring, freakish fantasy run wild, tender sentiment, sardonic humour, keen observations of ocular phenomena, and pious resolve— a record begins which seldom belies the manifest token of its opening. We are by no means done with some of these seven notes; but their purpose for the moment is fulfilled.⁵⁰

Jonas — a monodrama —

Vide Hunter’s Anatomy of a Whale —⁵¹

That speaks for itself, but its implications are too exquisite to let pass without a word. For Coleridge cannily proposed to make sure of the structural equipment of the whale before committing himself to a dramatization of Jonah’s great ad venture. And his reference is to a ponderous Memoir of seventy five pages in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.⁵²The monodrama (‘I detest monodramas,’ he wrote Southey in 1794)⁵³ got no farther than its title.

Upas Tree — a poem — or article.

Mem.⁵⁴

A Ruffian flesh’d in murthers⁵⁵

Dioclesian King of Syria

fifty Daughters in a ship unmann’d

same as Danaides — land in England — commit⁵⁶

with Devils.⁵⁷

It is a little disconcerting to identify behind this none to edifying memorandum the grave features of John Milton, bi there is no mistaking them. Milton, however, like Spenser, washes his hands of the unseemly gossip of the chroniclers. ‘But too absurd and too unconscionably gross,’ he writes severely in the History of Britain, ‘is that fond invention that wafted hither the fifty daughters of a strange Dioclesian king of Syria … turned out to sea in a ship unmanned’ — and so on through the rest of the episode, Danaus, devils, and all.⁵⁸Whether or not Coleridge saw in the uncanny legend fit stuff for his loom I do not know; but the fact remains that this belated echo of a notorious antediluvian scandal was apparently the only thing which he jotted down from his reading of the History. The antechamber of consciousness was rapidly being peopled with strange shapes.

Protoplast —⁵⁹

Wandering Jew, a romance

A Robber concealed over a room and hearing the noise of Mirth and dancing— his Reflections/—

Strait Waistcoat Madhouse etc. — a stratagem — ⁶⁰

The key to this sinister seeming project is happily extant, with little doubt, in a chef d’œuvre of undergraduate humour, preserved, through an act of prescient piety, in the University Library at Cambridge. The record of the diverting episode, which takes us back to Coleridge’s college days, will be found in the Notes.⁶¹

Light cargoes waft of modulated Sound

From viewless Hybla brought, when Melodies

Like Birds of Paradise on wings, that aye

Disport in wild variety of hues

Murmur around the honey-dropping flowers.⁶²

My Clock here (patting his guts) chime twelve —

The Sister of Haroun — beloved by the Caliph — Giafar

Her verses to Giafar — Giafar’s answer — good subjects.⁶³

The memories which rose to the surface in this entry had lain deep. Three times Coleridge’s vivid recollection of the spell worked upon his early childhood by the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments found words — that ‘anxious and fearful eagerness’ (‘a strange mixture of obscure dread and intense desire,’ he calls it again), ‘with which I used to watch the window in which the books lay, and whenever the sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask and read.’ And with the ‘one volume of these tales’ he read, in the Vicarage at Ottery St. Mary, other ‘romances, and relations of giants and magicians and genii’ — ‘Tom Hickathrift,’ and ‘Jack the Giant-Killer,’ and Belisariusy and Robinson Crusoe, and The Seven Champions of Christendom, and that now long forgotten tale of a mysterious island, The Hermit of Philip Quarll.⁶⁴‘My whole being was,’ he wrote of his boyhood again, ‘with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read, read, read.’⁶⁵ And the passionate intensity with which the boy read books remained a characteristic of the man, and is the key to much that lies before us.

The next entry but one, however, brings us to a later love:

Burnet’s theoria telluris translated into Blank Verse, the original at the bottom of the page.⁶⁶

The prose of Burnet’s’ grand Miltonic romance,’ which Pepys once lent to Evelyn to reread,⁶⁷ and which Coleridge himself names in the same breath with Plato,⁶⁸ appears again, still challenging to versification, a little later in the Note Book:

Burnet/de montibus in English Blank Verse.⁶⁹

No one who knows Burnet’s blending of imaginative splendours with a daringly impossible cosmogony (and the Telluris Theoria Sacra is well worth knowing) will wonder that Coleridge was stirred. Even Lucretius might have been, I think, could Burnet’s grandiose cosmic drama have reached him beyond the flammantia mœnia mundi. But Coleridge’s reach had a trick of exceeding his grasp, and his visions of the Theoria Sacra in epic verse smack, I fear, of those vanished pipe-dreams which in the early ‘nineties glorified the ‘Salutation and Cat.’ We are by no means done, however, with The Sacred Theory. Its ‘Tartarean fury and turbulence’ (as Coleridge once put it)⁷⁰ will cross our path again.

Dumb Waiter — Bed — Little Tommy — Cerberus — and D[u]pp[e] —⁷¹

This cryptic utterance, beside which the abracadabra is lucid as waters stilled at even, awaits its Œdipus. I think I know what ‘Cerberus’ stands for, and for whom ‘Little Tommy.’ The mysterious final word, which ends exasperatingly in a curlicue instead of in a letter, may be ‘Duppe,’ or ‘Dappe,’ or ‘Dupper,’ or ‘Dapper,’ but scarcely (as, scenting a bit of West Indian folk-lore, I once hopefully surmised) ‘Duppies.’ A ‘dumb Waiter’ then was a portable affair with revolving shelves, and might readily be associated with a bed.⁷² I strongly suspect that the entry stands in close relation to a letter of November, 1796, written under the influence of ‘twenty-five drops of laudanum every five hours,’⁷³ and one is at liberty under the circumstances to choose between a Freudian complex and a mute, inglorious ‘Kubla Khan.’

By an accurate computation 90 millions of Mites’ Eggs make one Pigeon’s Egg! — Encyclo —⁷⁴

And the two mighty Bears walk round and round the Pole — in spite of Mr. Gunston — Watts.⁷⁵

The point (for it has one) of this once tantalizing entry has been lost in the printed text through Brandl’s misreading of the last three words as ‘Mr. Grinston-Watt’ — ‘wohl ein unbedeutender Mensch aus Coleridge’s Bekanntschaft.’ There never was a Mr. Grinston-Watt. But what, one still inquires (the name once rightly read), had Mr. Gunston done — or tried to do— to stay the two Bears in their march? The answer is as simple as it is beguilingly complete. Thomas Gunston was a friend of Isaac Watts, and Isaac Watts had written a long Funeral Poem upon his death. And in it occurs this somewhat magniloquent assertion of an incontrovertible fact:

Yet nature’s wheels will on without control,

The sun will rise, and tuneful spheres will roll,

And the two nightly bears walk round and watch the pole.⁷⁶

Coleridge’s sense of humour had been tickled by the implications of the passage, and incidentally we gain another glimpse into his reading at this period.

an horrible phiz that would castrate a cantharadized Satyr —⁷⁷

Some hundred years ago, when the Devil was a little boy and my grandmother had teeth in her head — ⁷⁸

as difficult

as to separate two dew-drops blended together on a

bosom of a new-blown Rose.⁷⁹

A belly of most majestic periphery!⁸⁰

her eyes sparkled, as if they had been cut out of a diamond quarry in some Golconda of Faery land — and cast such meaning glances, as would have vitrified the Flint in a Murderer’s blunderbuss —⁸¹

Describe a Tartarean Forest all of Upas Trees —⁸²

The Recording Angel would have smiled a little disdainfully at that, celestially aware, as Coleridge was not, that the tale of the Upas Tree of Java was a howling myth. It had turned up in England ten or a dozen years before this entry, for the hoax had found a place in the London Magazine as early as 1783.⁸³ Coleridge, however, owed his acquaintance with the yarn to irreproachable scientific authority, for he undoubtedly got it from Erasmus Darwin, who, in ‘The Loves of the Plants,’ not only expatiates with gusto on the subject in his text and notes, but also clinches the matter by solemnly including among his Additional Notes two highly circumstantial accounts — one Dutch, one Swedish — of the ‘Hydra-Tree of death.’⁸⁴ Now it so happens that Coleridge quotes verbatim, in a curious and hitherto unidentified note of his own on ‘Light from Plants,’ practically the whole of Darwin’s long Additional Note which immediately precedes the sensational tidings of the tree.⁸⁵ And Coleridge was certainly not the man to skip that toothsome morsel when the gods and Dr. Darwin threw it in his way. A single paragraph from Darwin is enough to give an inkling of what was stirring in his brain behind the entry in the Note Book:

This, however, is certain, though it may appear incredible, that from fifteen to eighteen miles round this tree, not only no human creature can exist, but that, in that space of ground, no living animal of any kind has ever been discovered. I have also been assured by several persons of veracity, that there are no fish in the waters, nor has any rat, mouse, or any other vermin, been seen there; and when any birds fly so near this tree that the effluvia reaches them, they fall a sacrifice to the effects of the poison.⁸⁶

For what Gothic tale of terror Coleridge’s baleful setting was designed it is, alas! impossible to say. But of one ironical pleasure we are not deprived. For the sinister conception of ‘A Tartarean Forest all of Upas Trees’ (which Poe, had he known it, might have envied) was born of a perusal of that amiable and innocuous performance ‘The Loves of the Plants’! The four things too wonderful for Agur the son of Jakeh should be supplemented by a fifth: the way of a genius with a book. As for the Upas trees, they were no fleeting impression only. For earlier in the Note Book, in the harmonious context of ‘A Ruffian fleshed in murthers,’ and the monstrous legend of Dioclesian’s fifty daughters, stands, as we have seen, this memorandum: ‘Upas Tree — a poem — or article. Mem.’⁸⁷

Mars rising over a gibbet —

Two Lover’s [sic] privileged by a faery to know each other’s Lives and Health in Absence by olfaction of⁸⁸

What object it was, the odour of which was to play the courier between the lovers, we shall probably never know. For in the place where the revealing word should be is a row of faint loops and spirals, as if Coleridge’s hand had been idly moving while he cudgelled his brain for an object to fit his fantastic theme.⁸⁹The one thing of importance which the entry does disclose is another nook of the bizarre and visionary regions through which his mind was roving.

The next nine pages of the Note Book are packed with matter of uncommon interest. The first of them is headed

My Works⁹⁰

Here they are:⁹¹

Imitations of the Modern Latin Poets with an Essay Biog. and Crit. on the Rest. of Lit. — 2 Vol. Octavo.

Answer to the System of Nature –

Oct.

The Origin of Evil, an Epic Poem.

Essay on Bowles

Strictures on Godwin, Paley etc. etc. —

Pantisocracy, or a practical Essay on the abolition of Indiv[id]ual Property.

Carthon an Opera

Poems.

Edition of Collins and Gray with a preliminary Dissertation

What (it is worth while to ask) became of these portentous plans? The ‘Imitations’ lived for a year or so in that vast limbo of unrealized dreams which was Coleridge’s brain. They were in his mind even before the discharge of the quondam Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke from the dragoons, when, with only one shirt to his back that was not ‘worn to rags,’ and ‘so sick at stomach that it is with difficulty I can write,’ he asked his brother George to buy back for him the books he meant to translate, but which he had, unfortunately, been obliged to sell.⁹²That was in March, 1794, and in June of the same year the ‘intended translation’ was advertised in the Cambridge Intelligencer.⁹³ The following October, torn between his love for Mary Evans and his pledge to Sarah Fricker, and between his growing doubts of pantisocracy and his loyalty to his associates, he writes Southey in a long and distracted letter: ‘When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry, I find. My Imitations too depress my spirits — the task is arduous, and grows upon me. Instead of two octavo volumes, to do all I hoped to do two quartos would hardly be sufficient.’⁹⁴ In December he proposes to ‘accept of the reporter’s place to the Telegraph, live upon a guinea a week … finishing in the same time my Imitations.’⁹⁵ The next October, four days after his marriage, the Imitations,’ still unfinished, already divided his thoughts with Sara: ‘In the course of half a year I mean to return to Cambridge … and taking lodgings there for myself and wife, finish my great work of Imitations, in two volumes. My former works may, I hope, prove somewhat of genius and of erudition. This will be better; it will show great industry and manly consistency.’⁹⁶One is in a strait betwixt tears such as angels shed, and inextinguishable laughter. The painful truth is that ‘there is a good deal of omne meus oculus’ (as Coleridge once elegantly phrased the proverbial ‘All my eye and Betty Martin’)⁹⁷ in this high asseveration of the last quality on earth which he possessed. For the only list of Coleridge’s works in which the magnum opus will be found is that on the manuscript page before us.

As for the Epic on the Origin of Evil: ‘I have a dim recollection,’ wrote Lamb to Coleridge in February, 1797, ‘that, when in town, you were talking of the Origin of Evil as a most prolific subject for a long poem. Why not adopt it, Coleridge? there would be room for imagination.’⁹⁸ But the Epic, like the ‘Imitations,’ never saw the light.

The Opera faintly glimmers through a letter too. Ten days after the queasily written note about buying back the books he needed for the ‘Imitations,’ Coleridge blithely wrote his brother George again: ‘Clagget has set four songs of mine most divinely, for two violins and a pianoforte…. He wishes me to write a serious opera…. It is to be a joint work. I think of it.’⁹⁹ The Opera lived long enough to reach the Note Book, and then vanished into oblivion with the rest.

What of ‘Pantisocracy’? ‘In the book of pantisocracy,’ writes Coleridge in October, 1794, ‘I hope to have comprised all that is good in Godwin.’¹⁰⁰ The book of pantisocracy, then, as Coleridge saw it, was written. In a later letter, however, that same autumn, he again writes Southey:’ But must our system be thus necessarily imperfect? I ask the question that I may know whether or not I should write the Book of Pantisocracy.’¹⁰¹ The book of pantisocracy, accordingly, was not yet written. But to Coleridge the thing.thought was always as the thing which is; and that eager and vivid realization of thoughts as things, which incorrigibly kept seeing in ambitious projects accomplished actualities, gave to its world of dreams, when that became the theme of poetry, the clear and palpable verity of the world of corporeal fact. The quality of mind which dictated the proud caption ‘My Works’ for a list of unwritten octavos was but the obverse of the very quality which, given its true direction, created ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ and ‘Christabel,’ and ‘Kubla Khan.’¹⁰²

The rest of ‘My Works’ need not detain us. ‘You spawn plans like a herring,’ Southey wrote Coleridge in 1802.¹⁰³ The only phantom in the galaxy, besides the Poems, which materialized was ‘A Tragedy.’

And now, as if Coleridge, like the Psalmist, were weary of exercising himself in things too high for him, the next entry comes down from the clouds with a leap:¹⁰⁴

Six Gallons of Water —

Twelve

Eighteen pounds of Sugar.

Half a pound of Ginger

Eighteen Lemons

Ginger to be sliced — Lemons to be peeled — The Sugar and Water to be boiled together, and the Scum — viz — the Monarchica[l] part must go to Pot — and out of the Pot — Then put in the Ginger with the Peels of the Lemons, and let the whole be boiled together gently for half an hour — When cold, put in the Lemon juice strained etc — then let the Sum total be put in the Barrel with three Spoonfuls of Yeast — let it work three Days (Sundays excepted — ) and then put in a Gallon of Barrel [sic] — Close up the Barrel — Nota bene: you may do it legally the habeas corpus act being suspended,¹⁰⁵— let it remain a fortnight — then bottle it. — The Wine not to be used even in warm weather till three Weeks after Bottling—in Winter not till after a month. —¹⁰⁶

It is to creatures not too bright and good for human nature’s daily food that the next entry also confines itself:

Very fond of Vegetables, particularly Bacon and Peas. — Bacon and Broad Beans. —¹⁰⁷

Brandl, mistaking a cancelled opening of the note for ‘P,’ surmises that the reference is to Thomas Poole. But Coleridge had his own autobiography in mind. ‘I am remarkably fond of beans and bacon,’ he wrote in the memoranda of his life; ‘and this fondness I attribute to my father having given me a penny for having eat a large quantity of beans on Saturday. For the other boys did not like them, and as it was an economic food, my father thought that my attachment and penchant for it ought to be encouraged.’¹⁰⁸ And since ‘manly consistency’ has been in question, it is pleasant to observe that in the matter of broad beans Coleridge obeyed the voice at eve obeyed at prime. ‘Shall I trouble you,’ he wrote the long-suffering Cottle in 1795 ‘(I being over the mouth and nose, in doing something of importance …) to send your servant into the market and buy a pound of bacon and two quarts of broad beans; and when he carries it down to College Street, to desire the maid to dress