TV and kerosene

 

Got a stinker, so I'm making things easy on myself with a few samples of what I'm currently reading.

*

I realized I had forgotten to say goodbye to my mother but, by the time I turned round, she had gone. I waved at the empty space she had left behind and followed the daunting Mrs Berwick into a room where twelve other girls were sitting on squishy sofas and beanbags. I sat cross-legged on the floor, as we used to do in assembly at Kingsclere Primary School.

"What's that pong?" I heard one girl with long hair scooped up in a scrunchie say to another, also with long, tumbling hair.

"I think it's coming from over thar." The other girl pointed towards me.

I sniffed at my clothes and realized that I did smell of Flossy. I tried to tuck myself into as tight a ball as I could, hoping I would disappear. Mrs Berwick looked down her beaky nose and told us all what we could and, mainly, what we couldn't do.

I was sharing a room with two other girls who were much older than me. Everyone was older than me by nearly a year and they all seemed to have been to boarding school before.

"What does your father do?" a girl asked me, as she wound her long blond hair round her index finger.

"My dad's a racehorse trainer," I answered.

There was a snort from one corner, giggles from another. I heard the word "Dad" being uttered with incredulity.

"You mean your father's a stable boy?" the blond girl said.

"No, he's a trainer. He trained Mill Reef." Usually, that was my get-out-of-jail card.

"Huh," said a girl whose father was a colonel in the army. "Mill Reef? Never heard of him. But if you were born in a barnful of horses, that explains why you stink of manure!"

The other girls started laughing hysterically, rolling around on the floor together. I got up and silently left the room.

"I can ride, I can ride," I said to myself.

It was the one thing I knew I could do better than anyone else at this school.

We were straight into lessons the next day, which meant wearing the uniform of green and white striped shirts, green skirt, red or green jumper and green blazer with red stripes. I chose to wear the red jumper as it was new, whereas my green one was second-hand. Everyone else had chosen green. My skirt needed to be rolled over a few times, as it was on the big side.

"You'll grow into it," my mother had promised me.

Mum had refused to buy me the burgundy penny loafers that were on the school uniform list because they were "ridiculously expensive". Instead, I had orthopaedic shoes that would support my arches. I hated them.

Clare Balding's first day at boarding school, from her irresistible memoir My Animals And Other Family (2012). (For non-UK readers, Clare Balding is a TV sports presenter. Initially her specialism was horse racing but she's doing Wimbledon this year.)

*

I stood on Brocken's sovran height, and saw
Woods crowding upon woods, hills over hills
A surging scene, and only limited
By the blue distance. Heavily my way
Downward I dragged through fir groves evermore,
Where bright green moss heaves in sepulchral forms
Speckled with sunshine; and, but seldom heard,
The sweet bird's song became a hollow sound;
And the breeze, murmuring indivisibly,
Preserved its solemn murmur most distinct
From many a note of many a waterfall,
And the brook's chatter; 'mid whose islet stones
The dingy kidling with its tinkling bell
Leaped frolicsome, or old romantic goat
Sat, his white beard slow waving. I moved on
In low and languid mood: for I had found
That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive
Their finer influence from the Life within;
Fair cyphers else: fair, but of import vague
Or unconcerning, where the heart not finds
History or prophecy of friend, or child,
Or gentle maid, our first and early love,
Or father, or the venerable name
Of our adored country! O thou Queen,
Thou delegated Deity of Earth,
O dear, dear England! how my longing eye
Turned westward, shaping in the steady clouds
Thy sands and high white cliffs!

My native Land! 
Filled with the thought of thee this heart was proud,
Yea, mine eye swam with tears: that all the view
From sovran Brocken, woods and woody hills,
Floated away, like a departing dream,
Feeble and dim! Stranger, these impulses
Blame thou not lightly; nor will I profane,
With hasty judgment or injurious doubt,
That man's sublimer spirit, who can feel
That God is everywhere! the God who framed
Mankind to be one mighty family,
Himself our Father, and the World our Home.

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Lines Written in the Album at Elbingerode, in the Hartz Forest"; the poet feeling the alienating force of a nature that had no personal association for him, but intrigued too.The original draft of the poem (apart, presumably, from the one in the album at the inn) was sent in a letter of 17 May 1799 to Sara Coleridge, who was keeping the home fires burning at Nether Stowey.  "Not that they possess a grain of merit as poetry," he wrote (as was his wont). But this poem's thinking about nationalism and internationalism, about our relations with nature in a local context and outside that context, holds my attention.

Like many readers of our time, I'm discovering Coleridge's poetry (other than the half-dozen standards) through Richard Holmes' inspiringly-curated Coleridge: Selected Poems (1996).

I must say that my own experience of coming back on the Calais-Dover ferry is that the fabled white cliffs are at least as dingy as a kidling!

*

She passes right by many dense patches, leaving them to sway in the breeze. "It's our way," she says, "to take only what we need. I've always been told that you never take more than half." Sometimes she doesn't take any at all, but just comes here to check the meadow, to see how the plants are doing. "Our teachings," she says, "are very strong. They wouldn't get handed on if they weren't useful. The most important thing to remember is what my grandmother always said: 'If we use a plant respectfully it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away. If you don't give it respect it will leave us.'" The plants themselves have shown us this -- Mishkos kenomagwen. As we leave the meadow for the path back through the woods, she twists a handful of timothy into a loose knot upon itself, beside the trail. "This tells other pickers that I've been here," she says, "so that they know not to take any more. This place always gives good sweetgrass since we tend to it right. But other places it's getting hard to find. I'm thinking that they might not be picking right. Some people, they're in a hurry and they pull up the whole plant. Even the roots come up. That's not the way I was taught."

From Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants (2013) by Robin Wall Kimmerer. 

*

Grisha, completely forgetting who was boss, hugged the berry commissioner and, squinting at him slyly, mischievously drawled out:

An old tramp helped me escape . . .

And the berry commissioner sang, sighing as though the words had been written for him personally:

I came to life, sensing freedom . . .

Ksiuta came out from behind the wall, rubbing her sleepy eyes, and gently put her finger to her lips. Out of respect for the infant, they stopped singing. 

And then Ivan Kuzmich Belomestnykh said, "People should live together the way they know how to sing together. Everything would be all right then. And, people should start talking and not be afraid of their thoughts. For if you're afraid of your thoughts, you won't have any at all.

"Thank you, dear guests, for coming with this precious present -- my grandson. I'm often not kind enough, and there's no point in even talking about education. Forgive me for that. And you forgive me, Ksiuta. People fight against each other, mostly over trifles. If we stop fighting over trifles, then, God willing, there won't be another big war either."

"To peace!" the berry commissioner cried out ecstatically, hugging Belomestnykh. "Hey, Ivan Kuzmich, you and I . . . You and I . . . And all of us . . . I'm staying with you, my native land. Yes, staying! Where else can I go?"

And he offered a large tear in place of the innumerable emotions he couldn't express with words. And then fell asleep in the chair where he sat, his head in the sauerkraut. Grisha and the geologist lay down in the haystack. The night wind, penetrating the cracks, rustled the hay, and it moved, breathing as if alive, trying to share its thoughts with people, but unable. The pole over the well creaked in the wind, its long neck swaying under the tired stars, which continued to shine for all their weariness. And they would have to shine for a long time more, so that people, weighed down by the earth's gravity, could sometimes raise their heads, look at the stars, and think that besides funny things and sad things, besides meanness and kindness, besides life and death on earth there was a universal eternity.

The mushroomer was put in the side room on a creaking iron bed with nickel-plated knobs, and when Ivan Kuzmich lit the way for him with a kerosene lantern, Nikanor Sergeyevich saw, hanging over his bed, an oilcloth with swans. They even flew this far, Nikanor Sergeyevich thought, and laughed sadly. But he slept soundly, dreaming that he and Kuroda were in some extraordinary forest, where giant mushrooms grew taller than a man. They were using a saw to cut the stem of an agaric so gigantic that your arm wouldn't fit around it. They would take it in Grisha's truck to Hiroshima and show all mankind, to make them ashamed of that other, terrifying mushroom, invented by men. 

And the infant, probably, didn't dream anything, because he still had no past and, therefore, no memories to give birth to dreams. 

From Wild Berries (1981) by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Antonina W. Bouis. 

*

despite the hopelessness of their position they didn't despair they were

not as hopeless as their           position         human beings do this fine

though you might say it's something they only do when the mood

takes them AS THEY SAY                  hey big spender despair is       quite

gratuitous and             never accurately quoted                    humanity is anti

-universe                     never curated Quixotically               do you know i

still don't really know what i'm made of not really i read the books         etc.

and watch Horizon but one day it will repeat itself too often to memorize

empty                                                                                            reminder

say 2 different words and the 2nd. will always be a repetition of the 1st.

sunlight                                                                                         labyrinth

see what i mean                       if only liars could be seen silhouetted against

the sun             white ash        black ash                        white lash blacklist the

star emerging from the wormhole                 rolling on quantum shingle an

empty reminder like a moth in the fist                      deluded into folly       by

the truth          the prisoners turn to dust                    visitors' book bleached

Extracts from two poems near the start of Tim Allen's Very Rare Poems Upon The Earth (128 Improvisations) (Aquifer, 2023). I only recently embarked on this, but I'm already hauling up treasures. (NB The extracts are the second half of "Intrusion", and the first half of "Modification".)

*

From tall rooms, largesse of peonies, 

the porches summercool, the bed upstairs

immaculate in its white counterpane,

to kerosene-lit evenings, the wind

an orphan roaming the silver maples,

sudden widowhood: to meaner comforts,

a trumpetvine above the kitchen door,

then one night her new husband didn't

come in from the milking: to the lot

she bought with what that place went

for, dwindlings in a doll's house: to

the high-rise efficiency condominium,

television on all day, to the cubicle

in the denominational home, to total

unprivacy of bed and bedpan, nurse shoes,

TV with no picture or else coming in waves,

a vertigo: to, one nightfall ...

The beginning of "A Winter Burial", from Amy Clampitt's Westward (1990). I had relished her three earlier collections when I first set about discovering modern poetry in English, but it wasn't long before I was focussing on kinds of poetry that were not so readily purchasable in Waterstones. Thirty-five years later, and closer to the poet's own age (she was a famously late starter), I now seem to hear different strands in the incredible weave of her verse. 

She died in 1994, just eleven years after the publication of her first book. I was actually surprised at how relatively little there is about her on the internet... She had been celebrated, so far as poets are ever celebrated, during that decade. But even celebrated modern poets drop out of public memory with staggering speed. (A thought that might also apply to Yevtushenko.)

Anyway, there's a couple of evenings of Amy Clampitt's poems here: https://www.amyclampitt.com/poems-main .

to its deep and lovely azure gives / The life of motion

Ille-sur-Têt

[Image source: https://www.thehotelguru.com/best-hotels-in/france/ille-sur-tet . Photo by Thierry Llansades.]

I've been reading Mérimée again, something I find myself doing every decade or so. 

Specifically "The Venus of Ille" ("La Vénus d'Ille", 1837) -- Surely, I thought, this story must have greatly influenced Daudet's Lettres de mon moulin (1869-79). Its opening very carefully establishes the location in Catalan Roussillon. 

I was descending the final slope of Mount Canigou, and although the sun had already set, on the plain I could make out the houses of the little town of Ille, which was my destination.

   "I don't suppose you know where Monsieur de Peyrehorade lives?" I asked the Catalan who had been acting as my guide since the previous day.

   "Why, of course I do!" he exclaimed. "I know his house as well as I know my own. If it weren't so dark I'd point it out to you. It's the finest house in Ille ..."

Perhaps this coming off the mountain was autobiographical. Mérimée travelled all over France, it was his job as Inspector-General of Historic Monuments, and he was in this area in 1834, a year before he wrote the story. You can pretty much identify the exact point on the map where the narrator and the guide are standing, looking down on Ille-sur-Têt. 

After a long dinner with his hosts, the narrator retires to his bedroom. It must be very late, but he can see the view.

The windows were shut. Before undressing I opened one of them so as to breathe in the fresh night air which, after that long supper, seemed delicious. Opposite lay Mount Canigou, a magnificent sight in any weather, but which that evening, by the light of a resplendent moon, seemed to me the most beautiful mountain in the world.

It's interesting to compare the pictures in our minds, reading this concise scene-setting, with actual photos. 

Le Canigou in the distance, from the railway station at Ille-sur-Têt.

[Image source: Wikipédia .]

The landscape presented to this reader's mind was radically simplified compared with the photo. The Canigou, I see now, is not a single up-and-down mountain but a large massif surrounded by a corrugation of snaking ridges running down to foothills. One of the longest ridges comes down here at Ille (that's where the reported conversation must be taking place). Ille-sur-Têt is on a tongue of the Roussillon plain, just where it narrows into a river valley. On one side the valley is bordered by the Canigou, and on the other side, unmentioned by Mérimée, are other lower hills; that's where people go to visit the Orgues d'Ille-sur-Têt, a dramatic rock formation  resembling the pipes of a church organ. 

And yet, though the landscape we readers imagine is so uncluttered compared to the real physical geography, it does express a kind of truth. The Canigou does stand out. It's the easternmost part of the high Pyrenees, so it can be seen from a great distance and from everywhere on the Roussillon plain. It's a mountain that's also a landmark. We don't just see such mountains, we keep an eye on them. We accord them a significance, we feel their vastness. Located in the centre of the Catalan-speaking world, the Canigou has also become a cultural symbol. 

*

The simplified terrain of fiction is, I think, one of its attractions for me. I love feeling so free of logistics and so privileged to be in on all the conversations. I can whistle around Paris in "The Etruscan Vase" ("Le Vase étrusque") so effortlessly, passing between crowded salon and boudoir and garden and luncheon party. I gain access to all these inner circles, I stand on the field with the duellists but with no risk of being shot. 

In "The Venus of Ille" we feel doubly insulated from the catastrophe because the story is mediated through a narrator who feels little emotional connection with the victims, son and father. Layers of irony and flippancy give the story its original flavour. We keep turning it round in our minds, uncertain what to focus on and how we should take it. The text is both concise and wandering. There seems to be a parable about the destructiveness of love, and yet there's not much real love in evidence. There's a credible sense of provincial life in the story, but this is combined with a sensational tale and a cosmopolitan shrug. Perhaps its clearest message is that life resists interpretation. 

Le Canigou, from Orgues d'Ille-sur-Têt.

[Image source: Wikipedia . Photo by Babsy.]

While reading about Le Canigou, I came across a poem by Sir Humphry Davy. 

The orb of light its flood of lustre pours
From the mid-heavens upon the tranquil sea
Without a tide, whose silver mirror spreads,
Reflecting forms of mountain-majesty
Along the Iberian coast; and, more remote,
In gentle agitation feels the breeze,
That to its deep and lovely azure gives
The life of motion. All the morning mists
Have vanished, and the mid-day sunbeams sleep
Upon thy snows, or glitter where the streams
They feed with crystal waters pour in foam
Amidst thy dark deep glens and shaggy woods,
Where the bright pine and darker cork trees blend:
Their varied foliage forms a boundary
Where winter seems to mingle with the spring.
And lower still, the olive tree appears —
The work of culture, and the leafless vine,
And the green meadows, where the torrents sleep,
Or move obedient to the wants of man.

(Excerpt from "The Canigou", written by Sir Humphry Davy on 26 January 1814. Poem source . The poem is quoted in his brother John Davy's Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy (1839).)

Humphry Davy (1778 -1829), the son of a Cornish woodcarver, was one of those geniuses who could do anything. He wrote quite a lot of poetry, though that's lost amid his scientific triumphs.  He discovered seven elements and discovered the elemental nature of two others. He created the first incandescent light. We use his words every day: sodium, calcium, chlorine ...

But I won't praise him for the Davy Lamp. That's the kind of technological advance, badged with the magical word "safety", that licenses small-scale exploitation to go large.  

Coleridge was a keen participant in Davy's larking about with nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Their high jinks would lead, in the 1840s, to the first use of general anaesthetic in the west  (the Japanese surgeon Hanaoka Seishū used a general anaesthetic from 1804). 

Davy knew Coleridge and Wordsworth when they lived near Bristol and once they'd moved away they asked him to oversee the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge asked him to proofread and Wordsworth asked him to fix the punctuation. (The evidence suggests that he skimped on this.) 

But if "The Canigou" is any indication then he certainly caught the music of "Tintern Abbey". Davy's restless mind is thinking about the tideless sea, the reflections,  the "gentle agitation" further out and what causes it. 

At this point the poet notices a British fleet standing out to sea, and the poem becomes patriotic. In January 1814 Napoleon's fall could be foreseen, Wellington was already in SW France.

                     Albion, thee I hail! —

Mother of heroes! mighty in thy strength!

Deliverer! from thee the fire proceeds

Withering the tyrant; not a fire alone

Of war destructive, but a living light

Of honour, glory, and security, —

A light of science, liberty, and peace!

(You would not suppose, reading these lines, that the reason Davy was in France was because he had just accepted Napoleon's Prix du galvanisme in recognition of his electro-chemical work.)

According to Dr Paris' Life of Sir Humphry Davy (1831), "A great poetic Genius has said, 'If Davy had not been the first Chemist, he would have been the first Poet of his age.'" (Paris mentions this in the context of criticizing the frivolity of those who lamented Davy's devotion to science.) I don't know if we should take this remark too seriously, or indeed if anyone really said it.  It's usually attributed to Coleridge or Southey. 

Le Canigou reflected in the sea at Porte-La-Nouvelle (near Narbonne)

[Image source: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/420115 . Photo by Amanclos, 16 January 2017.]

from Coleridge's to Wordsworth's

Today, sunny and clear, I walked from Coleridge's cottage in Nether Stowey over the brow of the Quantocks to Alfoxden Hall near Holford.

This was the surprisingly grand (though now derelict) house leased by the Wordsworths, for the peppercorn rent of £23 per annum,  in July 1797. They left on 25th June 1798 after receiving notice to quit (the St Albyns remaining concerned about Wordsworth's revolutionary sympathies despite Thomas Poole's assurances).

Coleridge, with his wife Sara and baby  son Hartley, had moved into 35 Lime Street, Nether Stowey, in January 1797, or perhaps late December 1796...  (he rented it from Poole, his friend and patron). He eventually gave up the house in October 1799, after his return from ten months in Germany.

Hartley had been born on 19th September 1796. Sara had a miscarriage in 1797, and on May 14th 1798 gave birth to Berkeley Coleridge. Pretty Berkeley suffered (and caused) great distress after a faulty smallpox innoculation; then he got consumption. Berkeley died in February 1799. Coleridge missed all this; he and the Wordsworths set sail from Yarmouth on 16th September 1798), and now he was studying in Germany (with the idea, as he conceived it, of being better able to support his family).

It's been remarked that it was really Sara who ran the cottage; a life of drudgery, children, damp, vermin and a lodger. Meanwhile Samuel enjoyed the long walks on the Quantocks, the almost daily Wordsworth visits, the residence in Germany... Though it should be added that he also did stints as a supply preacher as far away as the Midlands. (Coleridge seems to have been alternately super-energetic and utterly prostrated; probably he was bipolar.)

Prior to taking up residence at Nether Stowey, Coleridge had assured Poole that he intended to spend his days on practical horticulture, to do without a servant, and to work very hard indeed... that he no longer cared for society and that literature would always be for him only a "secondary object".

Poets are selfish creatures, especially needy ones like Coleridge. Anyway, he did write some rather special poems at Nether Stowey: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, This Lime-tree Bower my Prison, The Nightingale, Frost at Midnight, Kubla Khan, the first part of Christabel... On visits to Alfoxden he wrote Fears in Solitude and the Ode to Liberty.

At Alfoxden Dorothy wrote her first journal (20th January 1798 - 22nd May 1798) Her brother wrote, among other things, The Ruined Cottage (begun at Racedown), A Night Piece, The Discharged Soldier, The Old Cumberland Beggar, Lines Written at a Small Distance from my House, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, The Thorn, The Idiot Boy, Lines Written in Early Spring, Anecdote for Fathers, We are Seven, Simon Lee, The Last of the Flock, Peter Bell, and  The Tables Turned.

These poems (most of them) constituted the folky heart of Lyrical Ballads (1798). After leaving Alfoxden on 25th June 1798, the Wordsworths had no permanent home of their own. They stayed until July 2nd at Nether Stowey, then moved on to other friends, short-stay lodgings and walking tours until the voyage to Germany. William wrote "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey",  the capstone of Lyrical Ballads, between the 10th and 13th July 1798, during a four-day walking tour in the Wye valley. Cottle published Lyrical Ballads in mid-September. William, meanwhile, seems to have had a break from composition;  his next dated poem is "There was a boy", written in Oct-Nov 1798 after settling in Goslar.

I looked all this up later. On the walk itself, untroubled by knowledge, I thought of other things than poetry.

My heathy stroll along the Coleridge Way is not the regular route that the poets took to visit each other. They took the more direct route along the road, a distance of only three miles rather than nearly five. But that would be an unpleasant walk today, all along the busy A39.

But both poets would have roamed up here. Coleridge was an inveterate hiker, despite his complete indifference to historical aspects of a landscape. So to "walk in the footsteps of Coleridge" is to adopt a totally different attitude to Coleridge's own.

In hindsight, I feel I saw the same view across the Bristol Channel that Coleridge hoped Charles Lamb would relish.

And on my return journey Holford Combe was indeed a "roaring dell", not because of a waterfall but because a helicopter pilot was practising sub-skyline hovering.

The shaded waterfall described in "This Lime-tree Bower My Prison" and in Dorothy's journal is actually downstream from the Combe, lying between Holford village and Alfoxden Hall in steep Holford Glen. I must have passed close to it, but the waterfall (a popular topic of Victorian guidebooks) is no longer easy to see or access, due to loss of an old bridge.

Coleridge's cottage at Nether Stowey

Alfoxden Hall, home of the Wordsworths in 1797-1798

The spelling "Alfoxton" is used today. The house is also called Alfoxton House. 

Holford Church, near Alfoxden Hall

View of the Bristol Channel from the Quantocks

Bilberry stems ("ris" in Swedish), 2nd November 2018

Western Gorse and Bell Heather, 2nd November 2018

Sheep's Fescue, 2nd November 2018

Sheep's Fescue, 2nd November 2018

False-Brome, 2nd November 2018

Holly trees

They, meanwhile, 

Friends, whom I never more may meet again, 

On springy heath, along the hill-top edge, 

Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance, 

To that still roaring dell, of which I told; 

The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep, 

And only speckled by the mid-day sun; 

Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock 

Flings arching like a bridge;—that branchless ash, 

Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves 

Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still, 

Fann'd by the water-fall! 

(From S. T. Coleridge, "This Limetree Bower My Prison". Lamb's visit took place on 7th-14th July 1797. He walked with the Wordsworths, who were visiting from Racedown, Coleridge being confined to his home for the whole week after "dear Sara accidently emptied a skillet of boiling milk on my foot" (letter to Southey, c. 17th July 1797) .)

I heard a thousand blended notes, 

While in a grove I sate reclined, 

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts 

Bring sad thoughts to the mind. 

To her fair works did Nature link 

The human soul that through me ran; 

And much it grieved my heart to think 

What man has made of man. 

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower, 

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths; 

And ’tis my faith that every flower 

Enjoys the air it breathes...

(from William Wordsworth, "Lines Written in Early Spring")


Bright sunshine, went out at 3 o'clock. The sea perfectly calm blue, streaked with deeper colour by the clouds, and tongues or points of sand ; on our return of a gloomy red. The sun gone down. The crescent moon, Jupiter, and Venus. The sound of the sea distinctly heard on the tops of the hills, which we could never hear in summer. We attribute this partly to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of the singing of birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless noise which lives in the summer air. The villages marked out by beautiful beds of smoke. The turf fading into the mountain road. The scarlet flowers of the moss...

(Dorothy Wordsworth, Alfoxden Journal 23rd January 1798)

*

Eavan Boland on the Wordsworths at Alfoxden and the poem "To my sister", originally titled "Lines written at a Small Distance from my house,  and sent by my little boy to the person to whom they are addressed".

https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2016/12/25/romantic-readings-to-my-sister-by-william-wordsworth/

The little boy, named Edward both in this poem and in "Anecdote for Fathers", was Basil Montagu, the son of a widowed friend of the same name. Young Basil's unexplained presence at Alfoxden was another source of disquiet to the St Albyns.

Basil the elder, later a pioneer of bankruptcy reform and a founder member of the RSPCA, was one of the five  illegitimate children of the 4th Earl of Sandwich with the singer Martha Ray (his wife was insane). Martha was murdered by a jealous admirer in 1779. Wordsworth oddly adopts the name Martha Ray for the protagonist of his enigmatic poem "The Thorn", written in March-April 1798 after being struck by the appearance  of a lone thorn-bush in miserable weather while walking on the Quantocks with Dorothy and little Basil (Dorothy's journal, March 19th 1798). It's odd, I mean, if you reflect that the real Martha was little Basil's grandmother, but Martha in the poem is pictured as insane from grief and perhaps guilty of infanticide. Reading "The Thorn" must have given the elder Basil rather a jolt.

Perhaps this was inadvertent. There was no special reason that Wordsworth would know the name of his friend's long-dead mother, and some reasons why he might not.  Wordsworth may have come up with the name independently, or forgotten where he had heard it before. Martha Ray joins a set of metrically similar names in the Lyrical Ballads: Goody Blake, Harry Gill, Simon Lee, Betty Foy, Susan Gale and (in this poem) Stephen Hill. Evidently the patterning was intentional.

*

Recommended!

"Sara Coleridge: Wife of an Opium-Eater" by Cheryl Bolen.

https://www.cherylbolen.com/coleridge.htm

*

On "Tintern Abbey":

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/03/sent-up-in-silence-from-among-trees.html

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

Title-page of the first edition, 1794

[Image source: Biblio.com, where it's for sale at £4,750]

Born Ann Ward, in Holborn 1764, d. 1823.

When I was young, the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho was still usually known as "Mrs Radcliffe", but I'm not sure why, because here, loud and proud, is the name on the 1794 title page: Ann Radcliffe.  (Her earlier books had been unattributed. The first time she named herself was in the second edition (1792) of The Romance of the Forest.)

So she used her first name ("Ann" was already a very common spelling, in case you were wondering) and her husband's surname.

Her critical reputation in the 1790s grew, but not without controversy. Coleridge, for example, slated Udolpho on two occasions, though he later spoke up for The Italian. (Wordsworth despised the "Radcliffe school" altogether.) But she was admired by Hazlitt, Barbauld, Scott and Hunt.

After her death, she began to be named, when formally introduced in a title, as "Mrs Ann Radcliffe". This was the form used by her obituary-writers and also by Scott ('Prefatory Memoir to Mrs Ann Radcliffe' for Ballantyne's Novelist's Library series, 1825; reprinted in Miscellaneous Prose Works vol III, pp. 337-90). Subsequent to that first introductory mention, the writers then refer to her as "Mrs Radcliffe", e.g. throughout the text of Scott's brilliant essay. This is perfectly  in accord with the conventions of that time;  living or recently-deceased authors should be named "Mrs Smith" or "Mr Collins". Only once an author had been firmly established in the canon did they become unprefixed authorities: e.g. "Dryden", or "Fielding". But in 1825, shocking as it is to say, there were as yet no recognized canonical works of English literature by woman authors.

By 1905, when her work was seriously out of fashion, Andrew Lang's influential essay in Adventures Among Books was playfully titled "Mrs Radcliffe".  That's in effect an allusion to Scott and Hazlitt, to  the erstwhile reputation that defined an era. (Just as, today, an essay titled "Mr Eliot" would allude to F.R. Leavis.)

Lang's title struck a chord. Though his essay is in fact perceptive and enthusiastic about the novels, yet the primary meaning connoted by "Mrs Radcliffe" in early twentieth century usage is "a sensational author, once astonishingly popular, now deservedly unread".

No doubt it added a bit of extra spice that the forgotten author was a woman. As Germaine Greer pointed out in Slipshod Sybils, woman authors were particularly prone to become the sensation of one season and the jest of the next. That's merely the shape of misogyny.   "past reason hunted... past reason hated..."

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Disparagement of Radcliffe may, perhaps, be considered a sport authorized by Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.

It still shows up in Michel Foucault's "What is an Author?" (1969), where he contrasts the undoubtedly seminal Radcliffe with Marx and Freud. Foucault claims that Radcliffe's work yielded a rich legacy of motifs that could be redeployed by other writers, but Marx and Freud, the "founders of discourse", created possibilities that went far beyond their own achievements: the seeds, even, of the arguments that would eventually refute them.

Foucault's argument doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, but it's interesting that he chose Radcliffe to make it, rather than, say, Flaubert. It was a choice that meant he didn't have to spend too much effort arguing the literary toss; Radcliffe was already accepted as typifying the author who is influential without being great.

[Information about this came from Robert Archambeau's essay "The Future of Genius" in Body: 

http://bodyliterature.com/2016/03/04/the-future-of-genius/ ]


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I found this Chawton House Library introduction by Ruth Facer useful:
http://www.chawtonhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Ann-Radcliffe.pdf

There was some agreement that Radcliffe had founded a "school". She's without doubt the key influence in Scott's conception of what a romantic novelist can be. If he was the "wizard of the north", she had been "the enchantress".

The Mysteries of Udolpho is set well back in the past (1584) but its concern with history is impressionistic. As editors have pointed out, the lifestyle of Emily is pretty much that of the late 18th century. Nevertheless, there's enough here of the potential excitements of a historical setting (e.g. the armies criss-crossing Italy) to have inspired Scott.

And it should be said, Radcliffe writes remarkably strong dialogue for her colourful rough types like soldiers and banditti. (Gil Blas in the background maybe?) Emily's conversations with the sentries on the battlements of Udolpho are excellent. Best of all is the menacing conversation of Ugo and Bertrand during Emily's scary journeys away from and back to the castle.

Of course Radcliffe influenced many authors besides Scott,  both major and minor, in the heyday of romanticism.  Listening to Udolpho, Byron was another name that soon came to mind.

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Radcliffe's scenery of southern France and Italy is superb, though it has some puzzles. (At the time she wrote Udolpho she had never been outside Britain, apparently.)

In her descriptions of the Pyrenees, cedars are mentioned several times (not native to mainland Europe); so are larches (not native W. of the Alps). Palms are mentioned too, growing high up on mountains - this cannot mean the shrub-size palmito, Europe's only native palm. It's clear that here as in some of her mentions of the local flora Radcliffe is using her imagination. Putting together a description of Mediterranean scenery, she uses tree-names like counters: cork-oak, cedar, chestnut, larch... The latter is also used for panelling and furniture: she mentions "black larch" several times  (I suppose this describes the finish, like the "black oak" in Waverley); I'm not perfectly convinced that she knew what a larch looked like. But other Mediterranean descriptions, e.g. of the ruddy autumnal vines in the valleys, and the sub-montane chestnuts, the fragrant thyme and other mountain herbs, the summer thunderstorms, etc. carry plenty of conviction.

In the same year that Udolpho was published, Ann and her husband finally went on their travels, but not to Gascony or the Pyrenees. She published an account of them, which is well worth a look: A journey made in the summer of 1794, through Holland to the western frontier of Germany: with a return down the Rhine: to which are added Observations during a tour to the lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland and Cumberland (online text). 

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Scott, with the acuteness of an interested fellow-practitioner, has much to say about Radcliffe's rational and often disappointing explanations for the numerous mysteries that pepper her story. Sometimes these explanations appear so insufficient to account for the uncanny and terrifying experiences we have shared with the heroine,  as to seem like cheating.

Scott argues that the problem with Radcliffe's approach is that her novels don't bear re-reading: no-one is going to feel the thrill of Udolpho's uncertainties when they recall that the resolutions, some of them anyway, are so mundane. (I'm just finishing re-listening to Udolpho, and of course Scott is right about the mystery-elements losing their grip, but there are significant compensations.) As I argued recently, Fielding's Tom Jones is an enriched (though very different) reading experience second time around. Radcliffe's concerns are different from Fielding's. What matters in Udolpho is the initial impression, the experience of the uncanny and terrifying. The ultimate explanations are comparatively unimportant.

The sense of disappointment is perhaps less for a modern reader, who isn't likely to feel violently agitated by Radcliffe's mysteries in the first place. Speaking for myself, I didn't object much to the paltry explanations, the occasional lack of explanation (through oversight, I suppose), or even the eventual realization that the whole castle of Udolpho section has been nothing but a gigantic digression from Emily's main story-line, and that Signor Montoni once at the castle has only very fitful designs on her.

None of these things really matter. There is still plenty of real story with real distress (think of the death of St Aubert, the attempts by Montoni and Morano to bully Emily into a marriage against her will, and the more-or-less-murder of Emily's aunt).  But more interesting still than these meaty plot-lines is how Radcliffe's atmospheres and terrors are a kind of extended image of the life of any young woman under arbitrary patriarchy.

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Radcliffe's writing abounds in often-repeated motifs and phrases.

For example, in the opening chapters  (those opening chapters that in many ways remain for me the most affecting part of the novel, up to the death of St Aubert)  we keep coming up against the idea of leaving (or parting) "perhaps for ever".  In Radcliffe's novel, such presentiments tend to be false.  [In 1857, George Eliot used "perhaps for ever" in the same way at the climactic moment of "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton" (in Scenes of Clerical Life).]

Another example, during the Venice chapters, is "to indulge one's melancholy feeling". Emily longs to be left alone in order to etc..  A page or two later, Valancourt's letter shows him doing the same at La Vallée. To "indulge" (feelings or reveries) is a very central part of Radcliffe's language.

Soon after, the peremptory Montoni says (more than once) that he is not to be trifled with. You might describe it as his catch-phrase, he says it so often. But it's rather strange to hear (not long afterwards) Emily begging a loquacious Annette not to trifle with her.

The point is that in Radcliffe's world these important motifs transcend individuals. We see that the same motifs recur throughout society. What we have to do with here is, to a surprising extent, a social novel.


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Most people, designing a tale of terror such as Udolpho, would probably think of the master of the castle (Montoni) rapaciously pursuing his wife's pretty protégé (Emily).

That's a story-line that Radcliffe resolutely resists. She portrays Montoni as immoveable, heartless, and entirely indifferent or hostile to all women. His cutting short of old Carlo's attempts to talk about his dead wife is characteristic. He shows no sign of being attracted to Emily. He does, it turns out, have a regular mistress of his own, but that seems to be mainly a matter of drunken revels, of unspeakable things that Emily is terrified of witnessing. We have no sense of the way Montoni and his mistress might talk with each other.

For Emily, Montoni is simply the ultimate nightmare of a peremptory patriarch. Risen to a complete power over Emily that is founded on no tie of affection, nor even long acquaintance, Montoni commands her, menaces her, and otherwise demands complete silence. Most of the time she spends in the castle is spent in isolation. Most of the rest with female company.

But if Montoni's is the nakedest of tyrannies, yet it only amplifies  the normal experience of Emily and her peers. For this isolation, this world of reading, imagination and indulgence of melancholy, is essentially Emily's normal life as a dependent female writ large.  Before coming to Udolpho, she had no power outside her own room.  Travel, for example. Where, and when, and in what vehicle, and in whose company she travels: this is all determined for her by others. Even her own beloved father. Where and when she speaks to a man of her own class depends on the man approaching or summoning her. If he doesn't do either, she simply has to wait. (When Montoni orders her to attend to be married to Count Morano, Emily reflects that she can't be married if she refuses to say the words of the marriage ceremony. Such a refusal seems to her possible: Emily has an ingrained habit of silence. But the idea of simply declining to attend when summoned by Montoni is, apparently, inconceivable to her. Montoni's commands are absolute.)

At Udolpho, the disquieting second entrance into Emily's bed-chamber emphasizes that she now has no power even there. Curiously, this perception is eventually liberating. Chiefly because it brings her into closer intimacy with the irrepressible maid-servant Annette. Annette is, definitively, a talker; when Annette starts to occupy centre-stage, the reader experiences a palpable sense of relief.

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I must talk! (Annette)

The most important of Radcliffe's repeated motifs is non-communication. We've seen one aspect of that in Montoni's tyrannous demands for silence.

The fire was now lighted; Carlo swept the hearth, placed chairs, wiped the dust from a large marble table that stood near it, and then left the room.

Montoni and his family drew round the fire. Madame Montoni made several attempts at conversation, but his sullen answers repulsed her, while Emily sat endeavouring to acquire courage enough to speak to him. At length, in a tremulous voice, she said, 'May I ask, sir, the motive of this sudden journey?'—After a long pause, she recovered sufficient courage to repeat the question.

'It does not suit me to answer enquiries,' said Montoni, 'nor does it become you to make them; time may unfold them all: but I desire I may be no further harassed, and I recommend it to you to retire to your chamber, and to endeavour to adopt a more rational conduct, than that of yielding to fancies, and to a sensibility, which, to call it by the gentlest name, is only a weakness.'

Emily rose to withdraw. 'Good night, madam,' said she to her aunt, with an assumed composure, that could not disguise her emotion.

In fact, Montoni can even command silence at a distance. Many are the whispered warnings (chiefly to the loquacious Annette) that such-and-such a piece of talk would make Montoni angry.

But non-communication is often self-imposed, too. How often do we hear such phrases as "It is unnecessary for me to add", "I need not say", "Spare me the necessity of" etc etc. You wonder if there's an element of willed non-communication in the convention that strong emotion (chiefly Emily's and Valancourt's) leads to inarticulate states of faintness and tears, resistant to coherent speech.

This reluctance or inability to say things is of course very useful to the author because it leads to mix-ups such as  Emily's written submission to M. Quesnel, or the misunderstanding with Valancourt near the end. During the latter scene, Emily shuts up Valancourt with the words:

This explanation is now unnecessary

And soon afterwards shuts herself up thus:

Spare me the necessity of mentioning those circumstances of your conduct, which oblige me to break our connection forever.

In such moments the deeply interested reader becomes simply infuriated with Emily, and maybe dismisses her words as merely Radcliffe manufacturing mysteries. (She's pretty shameless about it. Think e.g.  of the conversation between Emily and Sister Francis, where Radcliffe manages to hint that Sister Agnes might be the Marchioness de Villeroy and also that she might be a close relative of Emily: both hints being entirely unjustified.)

But I think there's much more to it. The obsessive throttling of free dialogue rings decidedly true as an essential habit of Emily's way of life, where scrupulous observation of conventions is a substitute for the power of self-determination. And where, in any case, it's an understood thing that the deepest feelings resist statement. No book lays more emphasis on feelings of delicacy, the pain of statement and the shunning of "intelligence" (i.e. conveyed information).

One specific aspect of those conventions is not talking too much to the lower orders. When the virtually imprisoned Emily has a distinctly interesting talk with the sentries on the ramparts, there's still a part of her that feels discomfort: "she thought the conversation somewhat too much". And when a day or so later she has another conversation with the friendly Antonio, she's careful to bring it to a definite close:

'I commend your prudence,' said Emily. 'Good night, and accept this from me,' she added, throwing him a small piece of coin, and then closing the casement to put an end to the discourse.

It takes a long while for Emily to trust Annette and then Ludovico openly, though they are her salvation.

The point is that Radcliffe shows us that the imposed limitations of a woman's life under patriarchy tend to become, after a while, self-imposed limitations.

Emily is, after all, extremely loyal to her first patriarch, her lovable father M. St. Aubert.  Yet in a way the book is an extended critique of his benevolent rule. That he means the best towards Emily, we know. He's earnest in trying to check her excessive sensibility to impressions. It's unsettling that Montoni frequently levels the same charge against her; doesn't this male accord raise some questions, in hindsight?  (Emily, unsurprisingly, has internalized this language of reproof and at one point orders Annette, in her own turn, not to indulge in fancies.)

(It's a surprising thing, too,  that the "bad" patriarch Montoni, sometimes acts like a good one: for example, in sending Emily away from Udolpho when a siege approaches.)

What about the rest of St Aubert's legacy? In life he has always controlled the flow of information to his daughter, and on important matters he's been extremely secretive; she has imbibed this to such an extent that she considers it quite normal and feels guilty if she ever finds anything out. Dying, he extorts from her a promise to burn papers unread, thus leaving her in an ignorance that does nothing for her peace of mind. He also places her under the protection of her aunt Mme. Cheron, which is a catastrophic error.  These are not Emily's judgments; she would be shocked by them. But the novel makes you think about it.

No sooner escaped from Udolpho, than Emily finds herself under the wing of her third patriarch, the admirable and well-meaning Count de Villefort, who does his honest best to wreck Emily's relationship with Valancourt, and to "remonstrate gently" in favour of the unfortunate M. Dupont, who's thus kept hanging on to no purpose. (The Count, even when apprised of his error, fails to learn its lesson and keeps Emily in ignorance, thus precipitating the painful though happily short-lived misunderstanding that begins the final chapter.) Again, you feel that neither Emily nor probably her creator really object to the idea of nestling under the wing of a benevolent patriarch; in fact, this is the life in which they feel most comfortable. Shakespeare's idealization of the father-daughter relationship continues to resonate particularly strongly in Radcliffe's writing. (It's only the shallow, selfish female characters - like Mme. de Cheron and the Countess de Villefort - who put up a determined resistance to patriarchy.)

Late in the book, Emily does a bit of quasi-patriarching of her own, hearing Annette (whose beloved Ludovico has just reappeared as from the dead) with "extreme impatience", and peremptorily ordering a visitor to be turned away on no other basis than her own (mistaken) assumptions.

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As a pioneer of the mystery story Radcliffe tried out various things that subsequent authors mainly eschewed. There's a particular kind of indirection that comes out in e.g. the planet that appears each evening at the time of the music. Radcliffe sees no need to name the planet, and its behaviour doesn't sound right in the long term, though of course the recurrence of a planet at the same time of night  (-ish) is something we often experience over a period of a few days or weeks.

Similar to this is the motif of hearing a distant voice or groan, yet the text not telling us whether the voice appears to be male or female.

And the distant music where, for all the text informs us, no specific musical instrument is distinguishable. (In fact, we never learn the name of the instrument.)

This intentional cloudiness operates in unexpected ways: it transforms described experience into a subjective material. It puts us in touch with a mystery deeper than any that Radcliffe explains.

At a great distance, it's like the magical contradictions of the Kalevala:

Flee away, thou moose of Juntas,
Flee away, thou Hisi -reindeer,
Like the winds, thou rapid courser,
To the snow-homes of the ranger,
To the ridges of the mountains,
To the snow-capped hills of Lapland,

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It wouldn't be ridiculous to claim Radcliffe as the inventor of the poetic novel. She initiated the use of poetic quotations as chapter-epigraphs, which Scott refined further. Unique to Radcliffe is the liberal use of original inset poems. At its best, as for instance in the marvellous final chapter of Udolpho (vol 4 ch 18), the patterns made by this intermixture compose a structure that we notice and contemplate, in which the narrative is only one strand. Scott at his best can do that, too.


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Annette is a variant on the well-established literary type of a loquacious and materialistic servant, though I think Radcliffe's novel allows some questioning of that convention.

Annette's attempt to convince Emily of the ghost on the battlements by showing her the very cannon beside which it appeared, is a stock joke: the irrelevant evidence joke. It appears in Shakespeare (2H6 4.2.141 -- Cade's supposed parentage testified by a brick chimney). Dickens thought it good enough to use on the first page of Barnaby Rudge.


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The Librivox rendering of  The Mysteries of Udolpho is a fine thing. Many readers, mostly excellent; notable work by Michelle Crandall, Martin Geeson, Anna Simon, "redabrus", Andrew Drinkwater, Lucy Burgoyne and Sheila Morton among others.

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Stephen Gallagher's 2002 proposal for an Udolpho movie is fascinating and full of insight. Interesting to see how his proposed screenplay enhances the sexual threat of the castle, and also how he develops the character of Du Pont.

Sir Walter Scott, The Bridal of Triermain (1813)

The Castle Rock of Triermain

[Image source: https://www.wainwrightwalking.co.uk/high-rigg-and-low-rigg/ .]

audiobook

[As read for librivox.org by Nathan (antipodeanwriter.wordpress.org), who happily has an insatiable taste for what he terms English epic (Longfellow, Macaulay, Scott, etc).]

text

The poem consists of simple and familiar stories bolted together to make a less familiar structure - three pairs of lovers, centuries apart from each other, are involved. Not strictly true, I recall: Gyneth (2nd pair) does meet her father King Arthur (1st Pair) - but thereafter she's been in a Beauty Sleep for 600 years before the manly Sir Roland gets to her. The Cumberland locations - Gilsland (Triermain Castle), Threlkeld (St John's in the Vale) - are carefully established. (Perhaps relevantly, Scott met and courted Charlotte Carpentier when he visited the Lake District in September 1797; he married her at Carlisle on Christmas Eve.)

Sample-fantasia:

Yet shadows of constraint were there,
And oft cast down her large dark eye,
held back a soft voluptuous sigh
            that heav'd her bosom's pride.
the wily lover
shepherds know
how hot the mid-day sun shall glow
            from early- morning sky;
beakers rang
   one tyrant passion draws,
            Till, mastering all within,
Where lives the man that has not tried
How mirth

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reserve thy boon recall thine oath


Gone, too, were fence and fair array,
but desperate strength
made lunge at random through the bloody fray,
or slashed with whirring steel spray
on jerkin hauberk hand or helm
of whom no heed, or where it fell,

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woodst some demon

came mounted on that car of fire,
            to do his errand.

Far on the sloping valley's course,
on thicket, rock, and torrent hoarse,
Shingle and Scrae, and Fell and Force,
            A dusky light arose:
Display'd, yet alter'd was the scene;
Dark rock, and brook of silver sheen,
even the gay thicket's summer green,
            In bloody tincture glows.

Notes:

Erskine's preface

Scott had a lifelong relish for publishing things under invented or borrowed names - he'd be one of today's masked commenters and have 20 blogs. A poetical fragment he published anonymously in 1809 had been misattributed to his friend William Erskine. So in 1813, when Scott had worked the fragment up into the  full-length Bridal and was again planning anonymous publication, he decided to encourage the former mistake by persuading Erskine to write the preface. When the preface talks about the poem being written in friendly imitation of a  well-known Romantic poet,  it means Scott himself. In other words Erskine is saying to us: "If this poem strikes you as a bit Scott-like, don't jump to the conclusion that it's by Scott,  oh no, the true explanation is that I'm deliberately aping his manner." Later editions have often retained the preface but under Scott's own name,  which of course is extremely confusing!

The Bridal of Triermain and Christabel

"Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine" is mentioned in Coleridge's Christabel, line 395, as the imputed father of Geraldine.

Christabel eventually appeared in 1816, but Coleridge in his preface tells us that Christabel was composed in 1797-1800. Which is certainly the truth, or nearly the truth.

The dates are mentioned for the exclusive purpose of precluding charges of plagiarism or servile imitation from myself....

I am confident however, that as far as the present poem is concerned, the celebrated poets whose writings I might be suspected of having imitated, either in particular passages, or in the tone and the spirit of the whole, would be among the first to vindicate me from the charge, and who, on any striking coincidence, would permit me to address them in this doggerel verse of two monkish Latin hexameters:

'Tis mine and it is likewise your's,
But an if this will not do;
Let it be mine, good friend! for I
Am the poorer of the two."

Presumably this Roland de Vaux is a prime example of the "particular passages" and  "striking coincidence(s)" that Coleridge refers to.

Not everyone has believed Coleridge. Henry A. Beers seems to say that Coleridge took Roland from Scott's 1813 poem. "The wheels of his Christabel had got hopelessly mired, and he now borrowed a horse from Sir Walter and hitched it to his own wagon. He took over Sir Roland de Vaux of Triermain and made him the putative father of his Geraldine, although in compliance with Scott's romance, the embassy that goes over the mountains to Sir Roland's castle can find no trace of it." (A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century, 1901, p. 11). Well, but there is no such report of the embassy failing in Christabel. Nor in Tupper's sequel, Geraldine - on the contrary, Bracy brings back Sir Roland. Besides, in Scott it is not  Sir Roland's own castle that keeps disappearing, but Merlin's castle in the Vale of St John.

Beers was wrong. Christabel as published was a poem of 1797-1801, apart from some minor last-minute changes. The manuscripts show it clearly. Roland de Vaux of Tryermain is in the earliest manuscript of Christabel, which was given to Wordsworth in 1800. 

[Henry Augustin Beers was a Yale Professor.  His books are available online and they are very good reading.  Paul H. Fry's  History of the Yale English Department notes: "An eclectic and a sometime poet, Beers was known at the time for an Outline of English Literature (1886), but his lasting contribution was the first important delineation of “preromanticism” in English, History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century (1899)—which is arguably the earliest ancestor of the “Yale School” of romanticism." ]

Back in 1802 Christabel had been a crucial inspiration in kickstarting Scott's career as an original poet.


Scott recounts this "secret history" in his April 1830 Introduction to The Lay of the Last Minstrel (revised in the autumn of 1831).


https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/scott/walter/lay_of_the_last_minstrel/introduction.html


The subject of Gilpin Horner (the goblin of the poem) had been merrily imposed on him by the Countess of Dalkeith.  While staying at his leased cottage at Lasswade, Scott was visited by John Stoddart, then engaged in his own local history researches*. Stoddart had a strong memory and he was able to recite some passages of the unpublished Christabel by heart.  Scott immediately saw that the freedom of Coleridge's 4-stress line-without-fixed-syllable-count could be just the thing for the narrative poem he was meditating. A year later he began to write the poem, and he even varied a line of Christabel in the very first stanza of his story: "Jesu Maria, shield us well!" (LLM Canto 1 St 1) -- compare Coleridge's "Jesu Maria, shield her well!", line 55-ish. "Varied" is a word for "stole", and Scott owns the impeachment unblushingly:

In this specimen I had, in the phrase of the Highland servant, packed all that was my own at least, for I had also included a line of invocation, a little softened, from Coleridge —

“Mary, mother, shield us well.” 

(This may conceivably have been true of the specimen, which Scott afterwards threw in the fire. But in the published editions the line is "Jesu Maria, shield us well", a far more direct quotation.)

As it happens, Scott's use of the Christabel music sharply declines after the first few stanzas.  Later in Canto 2, Margaret's visit to the wood somewhat recalls the narrative of Coleridge's opening.

So, Scott very likely remembered the name Roland of Triermain from Christabel, though perhaps Stoddart might not have chosen that passage for recital. Scott's own note on BT Canto I implies that he found it in Nicolson and Burn's The History and Antiquities of Westmoreland and Cumberland (1777). [Unfortunately the digitized Volume I is about Westmoreland, so it doesn't include the vale of St John.]

Rossetti (Letter to Hall Caine, 1/4/1880) says of the second part of Christabel, so inferior to the first, that apart from one or two passages "The rest seems to have reached a fatal facility of jingling,  at the heels whereof followed Scott." He agreed with Charles Lamb (and later Camille Paglia)  that Coleridge should have stuck with Part I. (Incidentally he points out the source of the name "Christabel" in Percy's Reliques - contrary to those who, apparently, think Coleridge coined it from a combination of "Christ" and "Abel".)





The general tone of Coleridge's various comments suggests some ongoing resentment of Scott.

Before publication, he resented Scott for being successful and for having based this success, in some degree, on his own poem. Of course it wasn't the theft of one minor line that bothered him, but the feeling that Christabel had supplied the master-key to Scott's whole approach and the golden success that it met with. [The fresh-faced appeal of his preface almost submerges the charge, whose implication is nevertheless hard to avoid, that celebrated poets had plagiarized and servilely imitated him.]

And after publication, he complained that those people who had admired Christabel so much in the past appeared strangely silent now. Lord Byron, who did speak out in its praise, was evidently quite embarrassed when Coleridge pointedly contrasted Byron's generosity with his friend Scott's niggardliness.

Scott's 1830 Introduction to The Lay of the Last Minstrel shows that he was well aware of the kind of things Coleridge had been saying.

As applied to comic and humorous poetry, this mescolanza of measures had been already used by Anthony Hall, Anstey, Dr. Wolcott, and others; but it was in Christabel that I first found it used in serious poetry, and it is to Mr. Coleridge that I am bound to make the acknowledgment due from the pupil to the master. I observe that Lord Byron, in noticing my obligations to Mr. Coleridge, which I have been always most ready to acknowledge, expressed, or was understood to express, that I did not write an unfriendly review on Mr. Coleridge’s productions. On this subject I have only to say, that I do not even know the review which is alluded to; and were I ever to take the unbecoming freedom of censuring a man of Mr. Coleridge’s extraordinary talents, it would be on account of the caprice and indolence with which he has thrown from him, as if in mere wantonness, those unfinished scraps of poetry, which, like the Torso of antiquity, defy the skill of his poetical brethren to complete them. The charming fragments which the author abandons to their fate, are surely too valuable to be treated like the proofs of careless engravers, the sweepings of whose studios often make the fortune of some painstaking collector.

I feel that's a just statement. But justice is what a temperament like Coleridge's wasn't likely to relish. Indeed, Scott's implication is hard to resist: if Coleridge didn't have due public recognition, then it wasn't because it had been stolen from him but because of his own chronic incapacity when it came to delivering a finished work.

It was presumably after Scott's death in 1832 that Coleridge delivered the mellower though still mischievous remarks recorded in his Table Talk (1835):

Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious, opposites in this; that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations, just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees; whereas for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than any other plain of similar features. Yet I receive as much pleasure from Herodotus as any one can. ... When I am very ill indeed, I can read Scott's novels, and they are almost the only books I can then read. I cannot at such times read the Bible; my mind reflects on it, but I cannot bear the open page.

Coleridge alas has an even worse Wikipedia page than Scott's. The problem seems to be that someone has borrowed large chunks of it from a 1907 encyclopaedia. Though this material does not meet Wikipedia's standard (e.g. for references), it is substantial and so far has deterred anyone from starting all over again. But its view of Coleridge is completely out of date, reflecting the taste of 1900 and entirely without awareness of any modern studies or of the influence of Coleridge on later thinkers and writers.

Surely this is an aberration. Or must Coleridge be added to the list of classic authors whose reputation has crashed in my own lifetime (a list that would include Arnold and Fielding)?


*John Stoddart, a lawyer, was afterwards appointed the king's advocate at the admiralty court in Malta (1803-07).  Coleridge visited him for a short time and was appointed public secretary to the government. Stoddart's Toryism was so fierce that in 1816 he was dismissed from the job of Times leader-writer!







The Bridal of Triermain: Historical, Legendary and Topographical

Caliburn. =Excalibur. In this poem Scott preferred Geoffrey of Monmouth-era names if possible (as opposed to e.g. Malory).

Carodac. = Caradoc Briefbras? His story is told in the first continuation of Chretien's Perceval. In the original it is Caradoc's wife, not Caradoc, who has to undergo a chastity test (which involves being able to drink from a magic drinking horn).

Castle Rock [of Triermain]. The longer name alludes to Scott's poem. An impressive crag on the western flank of Watson's Dodd. A recent ominous crack in the north buttress, against which climbers are warned, suggests that Merlin's Castle may be about to break forth again.

Cumberland. A historic border County, called Carliol in the Middle Ages, comprising more or less the northern/northwestern half of modern Cumbria. To the south-east it was bordered by Westmoreland, and to the South-west by the isolated Furness area of Lancashire.

"And his who sleeps at Dunmailraise." i.e. King Dunmail, the last king of Cumbria; slain in a battle here against the united forces of Malcolm King of Scotland and Edmund, a Saxon King. A stone cairn is supposed to mark the spot where he fell.

Eamont vale. The Eamont runs from Ullswater to 3 miles E. of Penrith, where it joins the Eden.

Legbert, Legbert-head. Legburthwaite is a small village just north of Thirlmere.

The narrow valley of SAINT JOHN: Glaciated valley, connecting Threlkeld to the Thirlmere valley, and now known by the name of its village, St John's in the Vale.

Reged. = Rheged, an ancient north-western Brythonic kingdom, possibly centred on Cumbria.

Thirlmere. A reservoir created 1890-94, against fierce local opposition. In Scott's time the valley contained two smaller lakes, Leathes Water and Wythburn Water.

Scott's novels: A brief guide