A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century. Henry A. Beers

a certain epistle by Paulinus, a bishop of the fourth century, describing a vessel which came ashore on the coast of Lucania with only one sailor on board, who reported that the ship had been deserted, as a wreck, by the rest of the crew, and had since been navigated by spirits.

      But all this is nothing and less than nothing. "The Ancient Mariner" is the baseless fabric of a vision. We are put under a spell, like the wedding guest, and carried off to the isolation and remoteness of mid-ocean. Through the chinks of the narrative, the wedding music sounds unreal and far on. What may not happen to a man alone on a wide, wide sea? The line between earthly and unearthly vanishes. Did the mariner really see the spectral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all but the phantasmagoria of the calenture, the fever which attacks the sailor on the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and water brooks on the level brine? No one can tell; for he is himself the only witness, and the ship is sunk at the harbour mouth. One conjectures that no wreckers or divers will ever bring it to the top again. Nay, was not the mariner, too, a spectre? Now he is gone, and what was all this that he told me, thinks the wedding guest, as he rises on the morrow morn. Or did he tell me, or did I only dream it? A light shadow cast by some invisible thing swiftly traverses the sunny face of nature and is gone. Did we see it, or imagine it? Even so elusive, so uncertain, so shadowy and phantom-like is the spiriting of this wonderful poem. "Poetry," says Coleridge, "gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood. It was so by me with Gray's 'Bard' and Collins' odes. 'The Bard' once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure." [19] There is no danger that his own poem will ever lose its attractiveness in this way. Something inexplicable will remain to tease us, like the white Pater Noster and St. Peter's sister in Chaucer's night-spell.[20]

      Pater subtly connects Coleridge's poetic method with his philosophical idealism. "The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world, in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of coarseness or crudeness, … 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' has the plausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and life, which belongs to the marvellous, when actually presented as part of a credible experience in our dreams. … The spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has become plausible, as 'the spot upon the brain that will show itself without,' and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for which—according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our modern philosophy—the so-called real things themselves are but spectra after all. It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, the fruit of his more delicate psychology, which Coleridge infuses into romantic narrative, itself also then a new or revived thing in English literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in 'The Ancient Mariner' unknown in those old, more simple, romantic legends and ballads. It is a flower of mediaeval, or later German romance, growing up in the peculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation, and putting forth in it wholly new qualities."

      In "The Ancient Mariner," as in most purely romantic poetry, the appeal is more to the imagination than to the heart or the conscience. Mrs. Barbauld complained that it was improbable and had no moral. Coleridge admitted its improbability, but said that it had too much moral; that, artistically speaking, it should have had no more moral than a fairy tale. The lesson of course is that of kindness to animals—"He prayeth well who loveth well," etc. But the punishment of the mariner, and still more of the mariner's messmates, is so out of proportion to the gravity of the offence as to be slightly ludicrous when stated by Leslie Stephen thus: "People who approve of the unnecessary killing of an albatross will die a lingering death by starvation." The moral, as might be guessed, was foisted upon the poem by Wordsworth, and is identical with that of "Hart-Leap Well." Wordsworth and Coleridge started to write "The Ancient Mariner" jointly; and two or three lines in the poem, as it stands, were contributed by Wordsworth. But he wanted to give the mariner himself "character and profession"; and to have the dead seamen come to life and sail the ship into port; and in other ways laid so heavy a hand upon Coleridge's airy creation that it became plain that a partnership on these terms was out of the question, and Wordsworth withdrew altogether. If we must look for spiritual sustenence in the poem, we shall find it perhaps not so much in any definite warning against cruelty to creatures, as in the sentiment of the blessedness of human companionship and the omnipresence of God's mercy; in the passage, e.g.,

      "O wedding guest! this soul hath been

       Alone on a wide, wide sea," etc.—

      where the thought is the same as in Cowper's "Soliloquy of Alexander Selkirk," even to the detail of the "church-going bell."

      The first part of "Christabel" was written in 1797; the second in 1800; and the poem, in its unfinished state, was given to the press in 1816. Meanwhile it had become widely known in manuscript. Coleridge used to read it to literary circles, and copies of it had got about. We have seen its influence upon Scott. Byron too admired it greatly, and it was by his persuasion that Coleridge finally published it as a fragment, finding himself unable to complete it, and feeling doubtless that the public regarded him much as the urchins in Keats' poem regarded the crone

      "Who keepeth close a wondrous riddle book,

       As spectacled she sits in chimney nook."

      "Christabel" is more distinctly mediaeval than "The Ancient Mariner," and is full of Gothic elements: a moated castle, with its tourney court and its great gate

      … "ironed within and without,

       Where an army in battle array had marched out":

      a feudal baron with a retinue of harpers, heralds, and pages; a lady who steals out at midnight into the moon-lit oak wood, to pray for her betrothed knight; a sorceress who pretends to have been carried off on a white palfrey by five armed men, and who puts a spelt upon the maiden.

      If "The Ancient Mariner" is a ballad, "Christabel" is, in form, a roman d'aventures, or metrical chivalry tale, written in variations of the octosyllabic couplet. These variations, Coleridge said, were not introduced wantonly but "in correspondence with some transition, in the nature of the imagery or passion." A single passage will illustrate this: