Читать книгу Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 4. Naturalism in England - Георг Брандес - Страница 9

During the summer of 1797, the talk of the inhabitants of a village on the coast of Somersetshire ran much on the subject of two young men who had lately taken up their residence there, and were daily to be seen walking together, absorbed in eager, endless discussions, in which foreign words and foreign names, unintelligible to the natives, were of frequent occurrence. The elder of the two was twenty-seven. The expression of his face was profoundly serious, his manner dignified, almost solemn; he was not unlike a young Methodist parson, and had a monotonous and fatiguing voice. His companion, who was a year or two younger, and whose words, accompanied by much violent gesture, flowed in an unceasing stream, had a large round head (the shape of which indicated remarkable gifts), flatfish features, and deep hazel eyes, as full of confused depression as of inspiration. The whole figure and air might be called flabby and irresolute, expressive of weakness with a curious possibility of strength. The youth's voice was musical, and his eloquence seemed to entrance even his reserved auditor and friend. Who and what were these two young men, who desired acquaintance with no one in the place or neighbourhood? This was the question the inhabitants put to themselves. What could they be discussing so eagerly but politics? and if so, what could they be but conspirators, possibly Jacobins hatching treasonous plots?

The rumour soon spread that the elder of the two friends, Mr. Wordsworth, had been in France at the beginning of the Revolution, and had amply shared the enthusiasm of the day for social reform; and that the younger, Mr. Coleridge, had distinguished himself as a keen democrat and Unitarian, had written a drama called The Fall of Robespierre, and two political pamphlets entitled Conciones ad populum, and had even formed the plan of founding, with others holding the same opinions, a socialistic community in the backwoods of America. No further confirmation of the suspicions entertained was required. A kind neighbour communicated with the authorities in London, and a detective with a Bardolph nose promptly appeared on the scenes, and, himself unobserved, followed the two gentlemen closely. Seeing them with papers in their hands, he made no doubt that they were drawing maps of the neighbourhood. He occasionally addressed them, and he hid himself for hours at a time behind a sandbank at the seaside, which was their favourite seat. According to Coleridge's account of the affair, which is, however, not entirely to be relied on, he at first thought that the two conspirators were aware of their danger, for he often heard them talk of one Spy-nosy, which he was inclined to interpret as a reference to himself; but he was speedily convinced that it was the name of a man who had made a book and lived long ago. Their talk ran most upon books, and they were perpetually desiring each other to look at this and to listen to that; but he could not catch a word about politics, and ere long gave up the attempt and took himself off.

There was, as a matter of fact, nothing alarming to discover. The two friends had long ago slept off their revolutionary intoxication, and even with the Spinoza about whom they talked so much they had only a second-hand acquaintance; they discussed him without understanding him, much less assimilating him. Coleridge had made acquaintance with Spinozism in the course of his study of Schilling's early works, and he now initiated his friend, who was unlearned in philosophy, into his newly-acquired wisdom. But the name of Spinoza was in these conversations merely the symbol of a mystic worship of nature; Jacob Böhme's was to be heard in peaceful conjunction with it. The matter under consideration was not science, but poetry; and if, during these long discussions, there was any mention of a revolution, it was a purely literary and artistic revolution, with respect to which the two friends, from very different starting-points, had arrived at remarkably similar conclusions.

What was really accomplished in the course of these conversations was nothing less than that conscious literary rupture with the spirit of the eighteenth century, which, assuming different forms in different countries, took place at this time all over Europe.

Coleridge was of an inquiring nature. His antipathy to French Classical powder and paint dated from his schooldays, when a teacher of independent opinions had warned his intelligent pupil against harps, lutes, and lyres in his compositions, demanding pen and ink instead; had bid him beware of Muses, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene in poetry, affirming everything of the sort to be nothing but rococo style and convention. Coleridge, therefore, refused the title of poet to Pope and his successors, and swore by Bowies' sonnets. He decried Pope in the same manner as Oehlenschläger's young friends in Denmark soon afterwards decried Baggesen. His Germanic temperament made him the born enemy of esprit, epigram, and points. It appeared to him that the excellence of the school which had its origin in France had nothing to do with poetry. "The excellence consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form. Even when the subject was purely fanciful the poet appealed to the intellect; nay, even in the case of a consecutive narration, a point was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was, as it were, a chain of epigrams." In other words, the compositions of this school consisted, according to Coleridge, not of poetic thoughts, but of unpoetic thoughts translated into a language which was, by convention, called poetic. In the conception of the poem there was nothing fanciful; nay, so little imagination did the author possess, that "it depended on the compositor's putting or not putting a small capital, whether the words should be personifications or mere abstracts." England's great poets, Spenser for example, had been able to express the most fanciful ideas in the purest, simplest of English; but these newer writers could not express common, everyday thoughts except in such an extraordinarily bad and fantastic style that it seemed as if Echo and Sphinx had laid their heads together to produce it. Coleridge turned with aversion from these attempts to conceal want of imagination under affectation of style. He detested Odes to Jealousy, Hope, Forgetfulness, and all such abstractions. They reminded him of an Oxford poem on the subject of vaccination, which began: "Inoculation! heavenly maid, descend!" Even in the best English poetry of a later day the bad habit of personifying abstractions was too long adhered to. (Shelley, for example, presents us with "the twins Error and Truth.") All these affectations appeared to Coleridge to arise from the custom of writing Latin verses in the public schools. The model style, according to him, was that which expressed natural thoughts in natural language, "neither bookish nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp nor of the kennel." The old English ballads in Percy's collection, with their unadulterated natural, popular tone, seemed to him excellent guides. He, too, would fain write in such a tone.

It was at this stage that Coleridge was initiated into all Wordsworth's ideas and projects. Wordsworth's was one of those natures which find satisfaction and a sense of security in dogmatic and strongly condemnatory verdicts. His idea of the whole of English poetry after Milton was, that the nation, after producing that great man, had lost the poetic power it, formerly possessed and had preserved only a form of composition, so that poetry had come to mean the art of diction—the poet being judged by the degree of mastery he had attained in that art. Hence there had been an ever more marked departure in metrical composition from the rules of prose. The poet's aim now must be to retrace the path that had been taken, and produce verse which should be distinguished only by its metrical form from the language of daily life. Whilst Coleridge was all for natural melody, Wordsworth went the length of demanding that poetry should be simply rhymed conversation.

And with this naturalistic conception of form was combined a similar naturalistic conception of the subject matter of poetry. One of Wordsworth's favourite assertions and one of the most bitter reproaches he levelled at the prevailing literary taste was, that hardly one original image or new description of nature had been introduced into English verse in the age between Milton and Thomson. Himself endowed with an extraordinary receptivity for all the phenomena of external nature, he took the cry: "Nature! nature!" for his watchword—and by nature he meant the country as opposed to the town. In town life men forgot the earth on which they lived. They no longer really knew it; they remembered the general appearance of fields and woods, but not the details of the life of nature, not its varying play of smiling, sober, glorious, and terrible scenes. Who nowadays could tell the names of the various forest trees and meadow flowers? who knew the signs of the weather—what the clouds say when they hurry so, what those motions of the cattle mean, and why the mists roll down the hill? Wordsworth had known all these signs from the time when he played as a child among the Cumberland hills. He had a familiar acquaintance with all the varieties of English nature, at all seasons of the year; he was constituted to reproduce what he saw and felt, and to meditate profoundly over it before he reproduced it—was fitted to carry out, with full consciousness of what he was undertaking, the reformation of poetry which had been begun by poor Chatterton, "the sleepless soul," and by the peasant Burns, a much more gifted poet than himself. Though he was but one of the numerous exponents of that love of nature which at the beginning of the century spread like a wave over Europe, he had a stronger, more profound consciousness than any man in the United Kingdom of the fact that a new poetic spirit was abroad in England.

The friends agreed that there were three distinct periods of English poetry—the period of poetic youth and strength, from Chaucer to Dryden; the period of poetic barrenness, from (and including) Dryden to the end of the eighteenth century; and the period of regeneration, which was now beginning with themselves, after being heralded by their predecessors. Like the men of the new era in Germany and Denmark, these young Englishmen sought for imposing terms to express the difference between themselves and those whom they attacked; and the terms they found were exactly the same as those adopted by their Continental contemporaries. They credited themselves with imagination—in other words, with the true creative gift, and wrote page upon page of vague eulogy of it as opposed to fancy; exactly as Oehlenschläger and his school eulogised imagination and allowed Baggesen at best only humour. They themselves were distinguished by reason, their predecessors had only had understanding; they had genius, their predecessors had only had talent; they were creators, their predecessors had only been critics. Even an Aristotle, not being a poet, could lay claim to no more than talent. In England, too, Noureddin[1] was belittled; the new men were conscious of the infinite superiority of their methods to his "un-natural" procedure.

[1] A character in the Danish poet Oehlenschläger's play, Aladdin, who represents talent as opposed to genius, which is embodied in Aladdin.