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An Unidentified Criticism by Coleridge Related to Christabel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
For a brief period of about eight months, from June 1796 through February 1797, Coleridge sought to augment his income by reviewing for the Critical Review and the Monthly Magazine. The enthusiasm with which he embraced this hope is shown by numerous references in his letters and in those of Lamb. I have found evidence which identifies two more of Coleridge's uncollected reviews—one of them an essay on Greek, Latin, and English prosody which Coleridge wrote as a review of Bishop Samuel Horslèy's On the Prosodies of the Greek and Latin Languages (1796). Unknown to me, Professor George Whalley was at the same time preparing to authenticate this review, and he recently published his evidence together with a complete text. I have some further evidence to add to Whalley's and a demonstration of the significance of the review.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952
References
1 Liters of S. T. Coleridge (Boston, 1895), i, 185, 189, 193, 194; A Wiltshire Parson and his Friends, ed. Garland Greever (London: Constable, 1926), p. 165; Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb (London: J. M. Dent, 1935), i, 36.
2 “Coleridge on Classical Prosody: An Unidentified Review of 1797,” RES, ii (July 1951), 238-248. [The present article was submitted to PMLA in August 1951.—Ed.]
3 A thin little book of 171 pages including an appendix, dated 1796, and printed by J. Nichols for J. Robson in New Bond Street, London.
4 Whalley has demonstrated (op. cit., p. 240) that Coleridge had not completed the review on 8 Dec. 1796, when he had lost his review copy and was requesting another from Bristol, and that he probably did not complete it until after his removal to Nether Stowey at the very end of the year.
5 Unpublished Letters of S. T. Coleridge, ed. Earl L. Griggs (London: Constable, 1932), ii, 407-408 (original in the Brit. Mus.). Whalley (p. 238 n.) notes that the review of Thomas Clarkson's book was published in the Edinburgh Rev. of July 1808.
6 In a previous article (JEGP, Oct. 1951) I have offered other evidence along with this letter to show that Coleridge could not have written reviews of Mrs. Radcliffe's The Italian and Mrs. Mary Robinson's Hubert de Sevrac which appeared in the Critical Review in 1798—that is, more than a year after what he called his last review except for Clarkson—but which nevertheless were attributed to Coleridge by Garland Greever in A Wiltshire Parson and his Friends (1926), and have been accepted as Coleridge's ever since. My evidence also indicates that Coleridge could not have written a long review of the Mysteries of Udolpho in the Critical Review for August 1794, also attributed to him by Greever. Whalley does not question the authenticity of these reviews (p. 239).
7 Greever, pp. 165 ff.
8 Coleridge did not elucidate the cause—Miss Wordsworth's “remark.”
9 Lawrence Hanson, The Life of S. T. Coleridge (New York, 1939), pp. 229-230, 256, 472-474, 482.
10 For example, Leigh Hunt in Imagination and Fancy (1844); Jakob Schipper, Englische Metrik (1888); Earnest Hartley Coleridge, ed. Christabel (1907); T. S. Omond, English Metrists (1921); and Karl Shapiro, “English Prosody and Modern Poetry,” ELE, xiv (1947). Saintsbury is a notable exception. Ada Snell, who has given the most complete metrical analysis (Fred Newton Scott Anniversary Papers, 1929), thinks that the poem scans regularly in iambic-anapestic measures with an occasional extra syllable, except for a very few lines which defy scansion. This analysis should be studied with H. D. Bateson's in the Manchester Quart., xiii (1894), 275-287; and cf. x (1891), 57-70.
11 History of English Prosody (London, 1906-10), iii, 65.
12 Letter to Thomas Poole, 16 March 1801, Letters, I, 349: “I shall, therefore, as I said, immediately publish my ‘Christabel’ with two essays annexed to it, on the ‘Preternatural’ and on ‘Metre’. ” Of course, Ch. xviii of Biographia Literaria constitutes an essay on metre, but it is not of the same nature as the proposed essay relating to the metre of Christabel.
13 See the text of the review as edited by Whalley, RES, ii (July 1951), 242, 243, 244. Cf. Horsley, p. 23.
14 Page numbers given with these items and with the subsequent points from Dr. Henry Gaily's treatise refer to the following edition, the only one which I could obtain: John Foster, An Essay on the Different Nature of Accent and Quantity … in the English, Latin, and Greek Languages … : Containing Dr. G[ally's] Two Dissertations Against Pronouncing the Greek Language According to Accents, with a Reply ... (London, 1820). Page numbers run in one series throughout the volume.
15 Coleridge used Horsley's exact words (p. 76) without quotation marks (Whalley text, p. 243).
16 Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. by T. M. Raysor (Cambridge, 1936), pp. 66-67. (The italics are Coleridge's and the brackets are the editor's.) The last statement recalls Coleridge's organic conception of metre as expounded in Ch. xviii of B. L.
17 One cannot help suspecting that Coleridge had read Joshua Steele's Prosodia Rationalis (1779), and evidence may some day be uncovered to show that he had done so.
18 Miscellaneous Criticism, pp. 77, 337. Cf. pp. 72, 90, 186.
19 Literary Remains (London, 1836), i, 337, 366.
20 English Metrists (Oxford, 1921), p. 118.
21 Karl Shapiro (see n. 10, above), p. 85.
22 Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ed. by T. M. Raysor (Cambridge, 1930), ii, 121. It is interesting to recall here the great use of monosyllables in Christabel, one of which often fills the time value of a whole beat, while conversely three sometimes divide the time equally among them.
23 Ibid., i, 252-253.
24 Miss Ada Snell (see n. 10), p. 96, designates the basic metre as “iambic with monosyllabic and anapestic substitutions.” Saintsbury designates it as follows: “(the first is] five-lined ballad stanza, freely equivalenced with anapests …. The rest of the piece is not in ballad stanza, but in octosyllabic couplet, again more or less freely but regularly equivalenced …. Thus the succeeding lines are in two batches, where the substitution—anapestic, trochaic, spondaic, or monosyllabic—increases, dwindles, disappears, and reappears ad libitum” (Manual of English Prosody, p. 98).
25 Cf. Foster, p. 167 n., quoted above.
26 Requoted from Snell, p. 112 n.
27 Cf. B. L., ii, 62, where Coleridge disparages “metre to the eye only.”
28 By now it has become evident that Coleridge most often discusses metre in terms of time rather than in terms of stresses and syllables.
29 Sir Oliver Elton, A Survey of English Literature (New York, 1928), ii, 113; Ada Snell, p. 115.
30 Unpub. Letters, i, 133. Although we naturally assume that Coleridge knew William Taylor personally during this period because they both were writing for the Critical Review, there is evidence to the contrary. In the present letter Coleridge wrote: “My dear Sir, I feel a kind of conviction that one time or other we shall meet.” In 1808 Coleridge wrote to Southey: “Mr. W. Taylor called again this morning; I regretted, that I was quite incapable of seeing any body …. He seems very amiable and it would be a twofold sin of impudence and uncharitableness to [have] presumed to have gaged a man's understanding in a first conversation, of little more than half an hour” (p. 401).
31 Lamb, Letters, i, 37.
32 The Road to Tryermaine (Chicago, 1939), pp. 159-161 and n.; The Road to Xanadu (Boston, 1927), pp. 578-580.
33 Coleridge may not have looked into some of the books he mentioned, as for example Montfauçon's Palaegraphia Graeca, which also had been cited by Dr. Gaily in dating the use of the accentual marks in the seventh century. See Foster, pp. 107, 280.
This research has been supported by the Grant-in-Aid Program of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute. I gratefully acknowledge also the germinal suggestions of my colleague Professor Carl Benson.