At no time in his incoherent life did Coleridge show any notable common sense. There are many men, often of the highest order of mind, who should be exempted from the pres- sures of normal living. Coleridge was one of them. He had no capacity for marriage, little for fatherhood, not much for earn- ing his board and lodging. He tried soldiering, preaching, peri- odical journalism, lecturing, even foreign service under the governor of Malta. During his latter years he wasted part of what might have been productive energy in incessant and apparently uniquely brilliant monologues. ("The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind.") Tortured by neuralgia and other ills, plus intense melancholy, he sought relief in laudanum and became an addict. For the last eighteen years of his life, withdrawn from his wife, he lived under the medicai care of a kindly friend, James Gillman.
In a sense the "person from Porlock" who is said to have interrupted him as he was writing down the dream-dictated lines of Kubla Khan (modern scholarship is skeptical of this story) was a real-life reflection of his own inner disorder. He was continually interrupting himself. His mind was too active and associative for him to complete any project. His whole life is like a mass of notes, undigested, erratic, sometimes baffling, sometimes profound, rich in wonders.
The fruitful association with Wordsworth produced the Lyrical Ballads, to which Coleridge contributed his lone undis- puted masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Here, as also in the unfinished Kubla Khan and Christabel, he success- fully compelled "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith" and so contributed to the mainstream of romanticism. That magic, eerie note he never again quite sounded.
What fascinates in Coleridge is that, along with his genius for the fairy tale (these poems, though not for children, belong to the literature of the fairy tale), he possessed a speculative mind of the rarest power. He wrote on metaphysics, politics, theology. Never reducing his insights to a system, he nonethe- less remains a psychologist of most original gifts. And as a literary critic of the romantic school he has no peer in the language.
When you think of Coleridge you may quite naturally think also of Poe. Neither was able to manage practical life. Both had minds that worked as well in the area of ratiocination as in that of dreams. But there the parallel more or less ends. Poe's erudition was spotty, Coleridge's incredibly vast ("I have read everything"). Poe's mind was acute, Coleridge's brooding, pen- etrating, and hungry for vast unities. Poe was an interesting minor failure. Coleridge was a fascinating major failure. But he was so fascinating and so major that even as a failure he bulks larger than his admired friend Wordsworth, who finished work he never should have started and ended as poet laureate, while Coleridge died in poverty.
C.F.
66
JANE AUSTEN
1775-1817
Pride and Prejudice, Emma
By common consent Jane Austen is what Virginia Woolf [111] calls her: "the most perfect artist among women." True enough. But today we might well question Virginia Woolfs well-intentioned qualification. Jane Austen is simply a great artist. Some critics, usually male, emphasize her genius for small-scale but deadly accurate domestic comedy as feminine rather than masculine, or point to the circumstance that she lived right through ali of the Napoleonic wars without men- tioning them in her work. But in the very long run ali of us,
male and female, might agree that a profound insight into the perennial human comedy is more valuable than the most con- scientious observation of historical events.
Miss Austen, as it somehow seems proper to call her, was the daughter of a rural rector, and one of a large family. Though her own circumstances were always modest, she was well connected with the middling-rich landed gentry of southern England, and it is their traits and worldly interests that she reflects in her novйis. Though there is some evidence of a frus- trated love affair, she never married. During ali the years of her brief life she lived quietly with her family, writing her novйis in the midst of the domestic come-and-go, for years on end not even boasting a room of her own. Her social life was pleas- ant, active, genteelly restricted. While her genius generally is a sufficiently bewildering phenomenon, it is particularly hard to figure out how she could have known so much about human life when she saw so little of it. But great artists, as Henry James [96] pointed out, need only a suggestion, a donnйe, and they are off and running.
Among other qualities, Jane Austen had one many modern novelists lack: She knew her own mind. Her novйis are not (like those, let us say, of Thomas Wolfe) experiments in self- discovery and self-education. She knew precisely what inter- ested her—"those little matters," as Emma puts it, "on which the daily happiness of private life depends." She knew that the private lives of her special world turned not on high ideais, intense ambitions, or tragic despairs, but mainly on money, marriage (sometimes but not always complicated by love), and the preservation of a comfortable division between social classes. The activities of these limited people she viewed as a comedy, more or less as a highly intelligent, observant, articu- late maiden aunt might view the goings-on of a large family. Jane Austen is sensible, rational in the eighteenth-century manner, ironical, humorous. She would think little of philoso- phers and perhaps not much of poets.
What gives Miss Austen her high rank, despite her restricted subject matter, is the exquisite rightness of her art, the graceful neat forms of her stories, the matchless epigram- matic phrasing of her unremitting wit. She has little passion, no mystery, and she prefers to avert her face in a well-bred way from the tragedy that lies on the other side of the comedy she understands so well. She was born to delight readers, not to shake their souls.
There is no agreement as to her best book. Pride and Prejudice has perhaps had the most readers, but Emma, I think, is a more searching as well as a gayer story; so I have suggested these two. If you have read them, try Mansfield Park or Persuasion or Sense and Sensibility. They are ali pure Miss Austen, a writer so charming that it seems clumsy to call her a classic.
C.F.
67
STENDHAL
1783-1842
The Red and the Black
One hundred years ago Stendhal (one of his more than 150 pseudonyms, his real name being Marie-Henri Beyle) would not have been listed among the major novelists of Europe. Fifty years later the situation would have changed: He would have been named among the first half-dozen novelists of France. Today the shift is even greater: Many rank him among the foremost novelists of any time and place. Stendhal lived partially in the future, and so he would have foreseen ali this. Indeed he did foresee it. "I have drawn a lottery ticket," he wrote, "whose winning number is: to be read in 1935."
So, though most of StendhaPs stories are laid in Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic Europe, we would expect his feeling for life and his way of expressing it to be modern. And that is roughly what we do find. Some qualifications should be made, however. His plots seem to us to smack of opera. His dialogue is more formal than that to which our phonographic realists have accustomed us. And, in the case of his masterpiece The Red and the Black, the title refers to forces no longer opera- tive—the Red standing for the uniform of Napoleon's soldiers, the Black for the cassock of the clergy. The hero, Julien Sorel, wears the black because in his day a poor youth with his special talents could advance himself only through the church, whereas Julien's heart and imagination belong to the Napoleonic era he thinks of as more glorious than his own. However, the deeper tensions in Julien are not peculiar to the France of his generation. They are part of our modern con- sciousness.