Two Lines on the Poet Laureate

Mays in his Poetical Works [1:89] prints this couplet as original Coleridge (though not, as you can see, without reservations). In fact it's Ovid, or more precisely Ovid as translated by Charles Avison.

Ovid's Latin is Metamorphosis 1:111-112, and means more strictly ‘rivers of milk and nectar ran across the plains, and golden honey was distilled out of the oak.’ Conceivably Coleridge quotes the translation rather than the original because Evans lacked Latin. ‘Canary’ is Canary wine, the stuff Shakespeare calls ‘Sack’; the ‘Guineas’ referred to are guinea peaches, a variety of the fruit much prized in the eighteenth-century.

Charles Avison (1709-70) was an English composer (many decades later Robert Browning wrote a poem in dialogue with him) and musical theorist. The passage screenshotted above is from pp.24-25 of An Essay on Musical Expression (1752), Avison's influential, if controversial, treatise on music composition and practice that argues (inter alia) that music expresses things words cannot.

Now I'm aware of course that tracking down hitherto unidentified quotations in the Coleridgean corpus is more-or-less dry and dusty work. But in this case the identification has some potentially interesting implications. It shows something that, so far as I know, has not previously been known about Coleridge: namely, that he was reading Avison's Essay (in late 1792 or more likely in early 1793), something that connects with youthful Coleridge's enthusiasm for Hartley. This is because as Herbert M. Schueller argues Avison's affective model of musical expressiveness was linked to Hartley, and more specifically Hartley's argument ‘that the pleasures of music which are of real value are the intellectual ones, and the most easily described of the intellectual pleasures seemed to be the associative type. Charles Avison thought that music elevates and enlivens the Fancy, obviously an associative faculty for him’ [Herbert M. Schueller, ‘The Pleasures of Music: Speculation in British Music Criticism, 1750-1800’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 8:3 (1950), pp. 155-171]. Schueller calls Avison's Essay ‘the focal point for the eighteenth century doctrine of music as imitation and expression’. It's interesting that Coleridge was reading it.

The big book on Coleridge and music is yet to be written, and this small datum might have some place in it, when it is finally assembled. Here's elderly Coleridge's Table Talk (July 1833 this, so right at the end of his life) on the topic:

Some music is above me; most music is beneath me., I like Beethoven and Mozart — or else some of the aerial compositions of the elder Italians, as Palestrina and Carissimi. And I love Purcell. The best sort of music is what it should be — sacred; the next best, the military, has fallen to the lot of the Devil. Good music never tires me, nor sends me to sleep. I feel physically refreshed and strengthened by it, as Milton says he did. I could write as good verses now as ever I did, if I were perfectly free from vexations, and were in the ad libitum hearing of fine music, which has a sensible effect in harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as it were, lubricating my inventive faculty.

Quite a lot of potentially interesting stuff here, I think.