Once more from Christabel:-
“The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone,
She nothing sees—no sight but one!
The maid, devoid of guile and sin,
I know not how, in fearful wise,
So deeply had she drunken in
That look, those shrunken serpent eyes,
That all her features were resigned
To this sole image in her mind:
And passively did imitate
That look of dull and treacherous hate.”
What Wordsworth intended we have already heard from
Coleridge, and Wordsworth confirms him. It was,
says the Preface of 1802, “to present ordinary
things to the mind in an unusual way.”
In Wordsworth the miraculous inherent in the commonplace,
but obscured by “the film of familiarity,”
is restored to it. This translation is effected
by the imagination, which is not fancy nor dreaming,
as Wordsworth is careful to warn us, but that power
by which we see things as they are. The authors
of The Ancient Mariner and Simon Lee are justified
in claiming a common object. It is to prove
that the metaphysical in Shakespeare’s sense
of the word interpenetrates the physical, and serves
to make us see and feel it.
Poetry, if it is to be good for anything, must help
us to live. It is to this we come at last in
our criticism, and if it does not help us to live
it may as well disappear, no matter what its fine qualities
may be. The help to live, however, that is most
wanted is not remedies against great sorrows.
The chief obstacle to the enjoyment of life is its
dulness and the weariness which invades us because
there is nothing to be seen or done of any particular
value. If the supernatural becomes natural and
the natural becomes supernatural, the world regains
its splendour and charm. Lines may be drawn
from their predecessors to Coleridge and the Wordsworths,
but the work they did was distinctly original, and
renewed proof was given of the folly of despair even
when fertility seems to be exhausted. There
is always a hidden conduit open into an unknown region
whence at any moment streams may rush and renew the
desert with foliage and flowers.
The reviews which followed the publication of the
Lyrical Ballads were nearly all unfavourable.
Even Southey discovered nothing in The Ancient Mariner
but “a Dutch attempt at German sublimity.”
A certain learned pig thought it “the strangest
story of a cock and bull that he ever saw on paper,”
and not a single critic, not even the one or two who
had any praise to offer, discerned the secret of the
book. The publisher was so alarmed that he hastily
sold his stock. Nevertheless Coleridge, Wordsworth,
and his sister quietly went off to Germany without
the least disturbance of their faith, and the Ballads
are alive to this day.
