BROWSINGS IN BOOKLAND

Otago Daily Times, Issue 14156, 7 March 1908, Page 7

BROWSINGS IN BOOKLAND

Bv CoxsTiNx Rkadkii.

After tho usual cessation in publishing ,fflnch always accompanies the endim- 01 one year 'and the beginning of another the output of new books for 1908 Ims commenced, and one or two of the fres'i volumes have reached me during t | lu wek There „ B delight in opening up a pared ol books, never before kindled, which lime can never dim; and 1 eagerly seized upon the volume of "Poems, Annotate! by Alfred Lord-Tennyson, and Edited by itallam Lord lennyson," issuing from the house of Macmillan. A fortnight since I referred to this edition as exceedingly to 7, desired by all lovers of Tennyson,' and alter an examination of this first volume 1 have no hesitation in pronounciii" it the edition par excellence, which no student of. the poetry of the pcricd can afford to do without. This and the succeeding' volume are to be devoted to the "Poems," Volume II will contain "Enoch Afden"'and "In Memoriam," and Volume IV "The Princess" and "Maud" (with other six volumes to follow). These books «re issued in the well-known "Eversley"' series, which for format, paper, type, and I binding can scarcely be excelled at the i price (4s net per volume). The chief interest in this lirst volume centres around the Appendix and Notes. The Appendix contains ,two poems, "Timbuctoo" and' "The Hesperides," with the following editorial notes prefixed :■— On June 6, 1829, the announcement was made that AJfrcd Tennyson had won the Chancellor's medal at Cambridge for his poeni in blank verse on "Timbuctoo." To win the prize in anything but rhymed: heroics was an innovation. His father had desired him to compete, so unwillingly he patched up an old poem on "The Battle of Armageddon," and came out prizeman. Matthew Arnold told G. L. Craik that, when as a youth he first read the poem, he prophesied the gieatness of Tennyson. . "The Hesperides" was published and suppressed by my father, and republished by me ihere (with accents written • by him) in consequence of a talk 'with him, in which he regretted that he had done away with it from among his "Juvenilia." • > \

The "Author's Prefatory Notes" begin as follow :—" I am told that my young countrymen would like notes to my poems. Shall I writs what dictionaries tell, k save some of the idle folk trouble? Or am I to try to fix a moral to each poem! Or to add an analysis of passages? Or t< give the history of my similes? Ido no like the task. 'Artist first, then Poet, critic said\of me. I should answe: Pceta nascitur non fit.' I suppose I wu; nearer thirty than twenty before I wa; Anything of an artist, and in my earlies kens I wrote an epic—between 5000 am 6000 verses-chiefly a la Scott, and ful of battles, dealing with, sea and savagi mountain scenery.- I used to compossixty or seventy lines all at once, am shout them about the fields as I leap >ve r the hedges. I never felt so inspired * ii , l

though, of course, the poem was not worti preserving, and into the fire it went." To which the editor attaches this explanation;— The following' notes were left by my father, some of them in his own handwriting, some of them taken down from bis table talk. He went through the first proofs and corrected them, and sanctioned their revision and publication under my editorship. But he wished it to be dearly understood that in his opinion, to use his own words, "Poetry is like shot silk, with many glancing colours," and that "every reader must find his own internretation according to his ability and according to his sympathy with the poet." Out of the parcel of new books came two volumes from which' I hope to derive much pleasure and) profit in the days to "Impressions Of the Poets, from Chaucer to Tennyson," by William Stabbing. Although i' have so far only glanced through the two volumes, these impressions appear to me to form a-fine introduction to the study of any poet j with whose works one ha 6 at present but • a slight acquaintance. Mr Stubbing justly i eulogises the genius of Alfred Tennyson, I and then goes on to say: '.'The initiated : were enraptured with all. The present generation discriminates. To a certain extent it has lost touch with much of the philosophv of ' The Two Voices,' ' Tho Palace of Art,' 'The Vision of Sin.' It has outgrown the gladness, the sweet limpid sorrow of the' May Queen' and its sequels, the early Victorian elegance of the Mailer's and Gardener's Daughters; even ' Locksley Hall' the First, with its play of panoramic heart ilutterings. Though scarce one discarded favourite but has lines, words, to set the puke beat- : ing faster, the Lilians, Isabels, Madelines, : - Adelines, Margarets, and Eleanors, Mer- . men -and Mermaidens, Orianas, Lords of . Burleigh, and ladies Claire and' Clara elicit smiles now instead | of emotion. A large part, how-' ever, is fully as fresh as wh'en first: it danced into daylight. . Custom cannot stale the radiant humours of ' Becollections : of the Arabian Nights.'" Concerning these "Recollections," which were first published ,in 1830, Tennyson has this note: " Haroun Alraschid lived at the time . of Charlemagne, and was renowned for ' his splei'Jour and his patronage of literary ; men. I had only the translation—from i the .trench of Galland-of 'The Arabian 1 .Nights when this was written, so l| talked of sofas, etc. Lane was vet ,m----born." ' i Running over these annotations of In's ' Own peorns by Tennyson, I found them i wonarously suggestive. For instance, the I note on the lines "To J. 5.," first pub-

Lshed m 1832 runs as follows:—"Addressed to-James Spedding, the biographer of Bacon. His brother was Edward Spedding, a friend of mine, who died in his youth. The lines are fraught with genuine sympathy and set'in tuneful lays: I knew your brother; his mute dust " I honour and his living worth: A man more pure and bold and just \va*s nover born into the earth. His memory long will live alono In all our hearts, as mournful light that broods above the fallen sun And. dwells in heaven half the'night. Words weaker than your frief would make Grief more. 'Twere better I should cease, , Although myself could almost take The place of him that sleeps.

This same James Spedding was born a hundred years ago, or, to be precise, on June 26, 1808. Edward Fitzgerald the oldest of Spedding's many brilliant friends —both Tennyson and Carlyle were of the number—wrote to him.that he had devoted his life to "re-edit Bacon's works, which did not want any such rc-editing, and to vindicate Bacon's diameter, which could not bo vindicated." Spedding was one of the fiist scholars to examine—and denounce—the attribution to Bacon of Shakespeare's plays. He was the secretary of the famous "Sterling Club," formed in 1638 and which included in its list of members such notable names as Thomas Carlyle, Julius Hare, Jolm Stuart Mill, Kicnard Monckton Milnes, Francis Palgrave, and Alfred Tennyson. Concerning this club Carlyle says in his "Life of John Sterling":—

Calvert and he (Sterling) returned from Madeira in spring, 1838. Mrs Sterling and the family had lived in •K-mghtsbridge with his father's people through winter; they now dunged to JJlackheath, or ultimakly Hastings, hi with them coming up to London pretty often; uncertain what was to be done for next winter. . j

On tkse and other .businesses, slight or important, be was often running °up to London and gave us almost the feeling of his being resident among us. Jfl .order. Jo- meet the m&i> pg a eood

many of his friends at once on such occasions, he now furthermore contrived the scheme of a little club, wheie monthly, over a frugal dinner, some rel unioir might take pice; that is where 1 friends of Jiis, and withal such friends '» of theirs as suited—and in fine, where •| a small selected company definable as I j persons to whom it was pleasant (o talk • together—niieiit have a little oppor- '! tuuity of talking. . . . The club Jj grew; was at first called the " Anonyj inous Club"; then after some months II of success, in compliment to the founder, ' : who had now left us again, the " Sterling • Club," under which name it once lately t for u time, owing l» the religious nows- » papers, became rather' famous in the I world. In wnich strange circumstances ! the name was again, altered, to suit weak brethren; and the chip still subsists in a sufficiently flourishing, though happily once more 'in a private, condition. Of all Carlyles works '"The (French Revolution" has held first place in my estimation; I could never away with . "Sartor"; but n recent reading of "John | Sterling'' has strongly disposed me in ; favour of that masterpiece of biography. It impressed me as a. superb piece of cine-' matograph literature, for upon almost every page is thrown a clear-cut picture or , portrait, which rivets attention and fixes . itself upon the memory of the reader U ho that has once read it can ever forget the inimitable portrait of Coleridge. At the risk of being tedious, I mustbazard a short extract:— The good man, he was now getting old—towards sixty perhaps-and gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a life heavy laden, half vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round, and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of_ sorrow as of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in I a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and aimable otherwise, might, be called flabby and ] irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely 1 on his limbs, with knees bent and

stooping attitude; in walking he rather shuffled thnD decisively stept; and a lady once-remarked, he never could fix which side of the garden walk would suit him best,, but continually shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and sing-song; he spoke as if preaching— you would have said preaching earnestly, and also hopelessly, tho weightiest things. I still recollect his " object" and " subject," words of continual recurrence m the 'Banten province, aiit' how he sang and snuffled then into "om-m----mject" and " sum-in-mject" with a kind of, solemn shake and quaver as ho rolled along. No talk in his century, or in any other, could be more surprising.

, J'opford Brooke, in his introduction tc 'The Golden Book of Coleridge"—a capital selection for anyone who desires to make first acquaintance with the poeteavs of Carlyle's portrait: "That, indeed was drawn of him when Philosophy had rnad© him older than, he ought to have been, and by the hand of cynicism." And hfc further contrasts Wordsworth's description of Coleridge: "The image of his youth, when poetry had made him as young as he is in heaven; and it was drawn by the hand of Love. We keep the one and ignore the other, or if we wish to contrast the ago of Coleridge with his youth, we will do it as he has done it himself in his poem of 'Youth mxl Age:'" A lino or two from that poem may not be amiss here: — When I was young?—Ah, woful when! . \h\ for the change 'twixt now and then! This breathing house not built with hands, tins body that does mo grievous wrong 3'er airy cliffs and glittering sands, ' , How lightly then it flashed along:— Nought cared this body for wind or weather When youth and I lived in't together. . Dewdrops aro the gems of morning, But -the tears of mournful eve! Where no hope is, life's' a warning That .only serves to make us grieve, When we are o'A. Those who are curious as to contrasts should refer to the description of Coleridge oy Haditt in "My First Acquaintance ffith the Poets." I may not stay to quote it here beyond remarking that Hazlitt confesses: "I was at that time dumb inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the A-ayside, crushed, blee&ng lifeless. But that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length :ound a language to express itself, I owe ■ii Coleridge." -Stopford Brooke with :orce remarks: — When we wish, to see Coleridge kindly —and the ' sight of kindness is the truest—there is no judgment on him better than that made by the friend who knew him in his brilliant youth and in. Ms broken years; who spent day after day with him on the hill's o 'f Somerset; who walked and sat with him for hours at Dove Cottage; who wandered with him in the trying companionship of summer tours; who, though there was once a disagreement' cherished with him an unbroken friendship till death parted them from one another; and who, in lines which touch the notes of his ancient power, records in 1855 bow undiminished by age and weakness was the impression of Coleridge on Wordsworth:— Nor has tho rolling year twice measured, From sign to sign its steadfast course, When every mortal power of Co!crid»e \\as frozen at its marvellous source! The rapt one with the godlike forehead lno Heaven-eyed creature sleeps in death.

I S'tonford .Brooke especially commends » the student of Coleridge .Air Dykes Campbell's edition of the l'oems with the admirable "Life" which accompanies it Lnfortunatcly my shelves lack that coveted compilation, and perforce I must content myself with 11. D. Traill's "Monograph" in the English Men of Letters. In a "Prefatory Note" Mr Traill mentions: " In a tolerably well-known passage in ono of Ms essays De Quincey enumerates the uniform attainments and powers of Coleridge, and .the corresponding varieties of demand made by them on anyone who should aspire to become this many-sided man's Jiiographer." The article' to which Mr Traill refers is on "Coleridge and Opium-eating," which Be Quincey published originally in Blackwood for January, 1815, as a review of/jjllman's "Life of Coleridge,'' an ill-advised essay, which was not continued beyond the first volume. It was this book which caused fie Quincey to prophesy that instead of saying "Dead as a door nail,' people would henceforth employ the phrase "Dead as Gillmans Coleridge." And m the course of his article, which even after a lapse of more than sixty years possesses considerable interest, De Quincey exclaims: —

Heavy, indeed, are l he arrears still due to philosophic curiosity on the real merits and on the separate merits of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge as a poet, Coleridge as a philospher—how extensive aro those two questions, if those were all. . . . Blind is the man who can persuade himself that the interest in Coleridge, taken as a total object, is becoming an obsolete interest. Wo m of opinion that even Milton, now viewed from a distance of two centuries, is still inadequately judged or appreciated in his character of poet, of i patriot, and partisan, or. finally, in bis character of accomplished Bcho'.ar. But if so, how much less can it be pretended that satisfaction has himi rendered to the claims of Coleridge, for upon Milton libraries have been written. I . . . On the other hand, upon I Coleridgo little comparatively has been I writtenj whilst the separate characters I

on which judgment is awaited are more by one than I hose which Milton sustained. Coleridge is also n poet. Coleridge also was mixed up with I lie fervent politics of his age—an age memorably reflecting the revolutionaries of Ms'ton's age. Coleridge also was an extensive and brilliant scholar. ... How

alarming, therefore, for any honest critic who should undertake this later subject of Coleridge to recollect! that lifter pursuing him through a zodiac of splendours corresponding to those, of Milton in Kind, however different in degree—after weighing him as a poet, as a philosophic politician, as a scholaiy-he will 'tave to when! after him into another orbit, into the unfathomable nimbus of transcendental metaphysics! Weigh him, the critic must, in the golden balance of philosophy, or he will have done nothing that can be received for an estimate of the composite Coleridge. This astonishing man, be it again remembered, besides being an exquisite poet, a profound political speculator, a philosophic student of literature through all its chambers and recesses, was,also a circumnavigator on the pathless waters of scholasticism and metaphysics! He had .sounded, without guiding charts, the secret deeps' of Proclus and Plotinns; he had laid down buoys nn the twilight or moonlight ocean of Jacob Boehman; he had cruised over the broad Atlantic of Kant and Schelling, of Fichto and Oken. Where is the. man who shall be equal to these things?

I had little notion when I started "Browsings" of being led into a discussion upon Coleridge. The idea I had in my mind was to use Carlyle's "John Sterling" ns a peg upon which to ban* a word or two concerning John Sterling's father Captain Edward Sterling, "whom, indeed all England with a curious mixture of mockery and respect and even fear knew well as 'The Thunderer' of the Times newspaper." It seemed to me tho subject would be apropos, after the recent rumours concerning the change pending in the proprietorship of The Times, together with the promised early publication of Delane's letters. But Coleridge, true to his character, is so large a "subject" that when once broached he talks all else into oblivion. "He distinguished himself," says Carlyle, "as the most surprising talker extant in this world." Naturally, therefore, having been caught m the current, I turned to Stebbing's second volume to see what that student of poetry has to say of Coleridge the poet. And there I found the following:

"What a poet but for,the metaphysician! A poet feels; a metaphysician reasons. The one leaps, the other'digs. Without imagination the one cannot breathe and tho other cannot guess at the lie of a '•ode. But for the poet it is life, for the metaphysician a stimulant. In the same mind the two tendencies conflict, unless one consent to serve. To his

1 friends and the Highgate circle Coleridge was the more signal mai'vcl because he united both. For posterity he would have been a profounder philosopher had he been, less of a poet. Had -he concerned himself less with the solution of mental problems, he must have filled a wider 1 , not a more exalted, space in the history of poetry." Hazlitt's criticism upon Coleridgo's appearance was that " his nose, the rudder of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing—like what he has done." Which gives point to the 1 following from Stebbing's book :— Poetry demands the choices of a man's powers, if great powers, the greatest, and fill of them. He should have a will and the will to mass the whole and throw it into the lap of his theme. Ulendge had no- sufficient sincerity in his vocation, no full conviction of the supreme obligations of the poet's mantle. Nature had bestowed the gift of verse upon him, as his proper mode of expression, and he used it lightly as he. ameby it. Apparently he was not :ons«ous that there is agony as well as •apture in tlio due utterance of such a oicc. . . •. Coleridge's career as a-1

■vriter of poetry terminated by the tin), he was 30. The body of his poeiica, work is comprised within three to five . years. Had he died in 1802, after the composition of the "Ode to Dejection" he would have left the world of poetry as rich as when he finally departed. As a thinker he survived and reigned for 32 years more. Inspiration ceases for most in midde life. Few, once inspired, cease while they breathe from versifying. They versify, because .verse was wont to be their highest mental medium and instrument. Coleridge, when no longer minded to write "Ancient Manners" and "Christabels" had an alternative. He remained an intellectual autocrat, and proceeded to utilise his other gifts as a suggester of problems, a setter of texts.

It is interesting to contrast Stebbinp's estimate of Colaridge as a poef with the following paragraph taken from H. D. Traill s "Life." Traill, it must be remembered, wrote in 1883, and thus had f'ot the advantage of consulting Dykes Campbell, whose' "Memoir" came 10 years later. But this in no way affects rraill s standpoint, which is the antipodes to Stebbmg s :— .

Endowed, therefore, with so glorious . a_g]ft of song, and only not fully master of his poetic means -because of the very versatility of his artistic powers, and the variety and catholicity of his youthful sympathies, it is unhappily but too certain that the world has lost much by that perversity of conspiring accidents which so untimely silenced Coleridge's muse. And the loss is the more trying to posterity Because he seems to a not" I think, too curiously considering criticism to have once actually struck that very chord which would 'have sounded the most movingly bencafli his touch, and to have struck it at the very moment when the falling hand was about to quit the keys for ever. I cannot regard it as merely fantastic to believe that the Dejection," that dirge of infinite pathos over the grave of creative imagination, might, but for the fatal decree which had by that time gone forth _ against Coleridge's health and happiness, have been but the cradle cry of a new-bom poetic power in which imagination, not annihilated but transmigrant, would have splendidly proved its vitality through other forms' of sonir

There are two volumes in liveryman's Library which contain good examples of Coleridge's prose. The first the " Biograj.hia.Lrteraria," described by Mr Arthur Symons in his introduction as "the greatest book of criticism in English, -md one of the most annoying books in any language. The thongtit of Coleridge has to be pursued across stones' ditches, and morasses, with haste, lingering, and disappointment; it turns back, loses itself, fetches wide circuits, and comes to no visible end. But yon must follow it step by step, and, if you are ceaselessly attentive, will be ceaselessly rewarded." The other volume contains Cole'ridee's Essays and Lectures on Milton and Shakespeare, and some other Poet Dramatists. Coleridge in his second lecture divides readers into four classes (1) Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a Utile dirtied:" (2) sand glasses, who retain nothing, and arc content to get through a book for the sakeof getting through the time; (3) Strain Bags, who retain merelv the dre*s of what they read; and (4) 'Mogul Diamonds, eoually rare and valuable, who profit iW what they read and enable others to profit ■by it also. With which reflections- and all the morals that they point, both in regard to myself and to others, I will 'conclude for yet another week.