1818

LECTURES

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Shakspeare as a Poet generally

CLOTHED in radiant armour, and authorized by titles sure and manifold, as a poet, Shakspeare came forward to demand the throne of fame, as the dramatic poet of England. His excellencies compelled even his contemporaries to seat him on that throne, although there were giants in those days contending for the same honor. Hereafter I would fain endeavour to make out the title of the English drama as created by, and existing in, Shakspeare, and its right to the supremacy of dramatic excellence in general. But he had shown himself a poet, previously to his appearance as a dramatic poet; and had no Lear, no

Othello, no Henry IV., no Twelfth Night ever appeared, we must have admitted that Shakspeare possessed the chief, if not every, requisite of a poet,- deep feeling and exquisite sense of beauty, both as exhibited to the eye in the combinations of form, and to the ear in sweet and appropriate melody; that these feelings were under the command of his own will; that in his very first productions he projected his mind out of his own particular being, and felt, and made others feel, on subjects no way connected with himself, except by force of contemplation and that sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that, on which it meditates. To this must be added that affectionate love of nature and natural objects, without which no man could have observed so steadily, or painted so truly and passionately, the very minutest beauties of the external world:-

And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare,

Mark the poor wretch; to overshoot his troubles,

How he outruns the wind, and with what care,

He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles;

The many musits through the which he goes

Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes.

Sometimes he runs among the flock of sheep,

To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell;

And sometime where earth-delving conies keep,

To stop the loud pursuers in their yell;

And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer:

Danger deviseth shifts, wit waits on fear.

For there his smell with others' being mingled.

The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt,

Ceasing their clamorous cry, till they have singled,

With much ado, the cold fault cleanly out,

Then do they spend their mouths; echo replies.

As if another chase were in the skies.

By this poor Wat far off, upon a hill,

Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear,

To hearken if his foes pursue him still:

Anon their loud alarums he doth hear,

And now his grief may be compared well

To one sore-sick, that hears the passing bell.

Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch

Turn, and return, indenting with the way:

Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch,

Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay.

For misery is trodden on by many,

And being low, never relieved by any.

Venus and Adonis.

And the preceding description:-

But, lo! from forth a copse that neighbours by,

A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud, &c.

is much more admirable, but in parts less fitted for quotation.

Moreover Shakspeare had shown that he possessed fancy, considered as the faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the main by some one point or more of likeness, as in such a passage as this:-

Full gently now she takes him by the hand,

A lily prisoned in a jail of snow,

Or ivory in an alabaster band:

So white a friend ingirts so white a foe! Ib.

And still mounting the intellectual ladder, he had as unequivocally proved the indwelling in his mind of imagination, or the power by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others, and by a sort of fusion to force many into one;- that which afterwards showed itself in such might and energy in Lear, where the deep anguish of a father spreads the feeling of ingratitude and cruelty over the very elements of heaven;- and which, combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness, tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its principle and fountain, who is alone truly one. Various are the workings of this the greatest faculty of the human mind, both passionate and tranquil. In its tranquil and purely pleasurable operation, it acts chiefly by creating out of many things, as they would have appeared in the description of an ordinary mind, detailed in unimpassioned succession, a oneness, even as nature, the greatest of poets, acts upon us, when we open our eyes upon an extended prospect. Thus the flight of Adonis in the dusk of the evening:-

Look! how a bright star shooteth from the sky;

So glides he in the night from Venus' eye!