'Fishing for Elephants'

From Henry Nelson Coleridge's The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2 vols, 1836), 1:148:

Speaking of the small German potentates, I dictated the phrase—officious for equivalents. This my amanuensis wrote—fishing for elephants;—which, as I observed at the time, was a sort of Noah's angling, that could hardly have occurred, except at the commencement of the Deluge.

It's an expressive phrase, especially in the context of Coleridge and his lifelong attempts to snare in the tendrils of his tangling prose some very large truths indeed. Why fish for minnows when we can fish for elephants? Truth, genius, God. It's the elephant in the Rhine.

One wrinkle: I can't find anywhere in Coleridge's works where he refers to German potentates, or anybody else, being officious for equivalents. Might he simply have made this rather delicious mis-hearing up? It wouldn't be the first time he did such a thing.

The 'elephant in the Rhine' line was bad, I admit it. But originally I was going to go with an 'it's the elephant in the Rhûn' gag, so you can count yourselves lucky.

The Mysterious Statuary

So: I'm making an edition of Coleridge's Lectures on Shakespeare and part of that involves tracking down hitherto unidentified quotations and allusions, explaining references and so on. Foakes's edition does a pretty good job with the notes, actually, although there are about a dozen references that he can't nail. Of those I think I've identified the sources of all but two. The one that bugs me the most is this one, from the fourth lecture of the 1811-12 series. 'Statuary', in this passage, of course means 'sculptor':

There is said to be a statuary in ancient Greece whose figures were awkward and unideal in every respect but one—he had gained much praise from the beautiful feet and ancles of Venus. His name was introduced in a company of which his wife formed a part, and with as much delicacy as possible the merits of the husband were discussed. One person dwelt with much warmth of praise on the symmetry and grace of the feet and ancles of the Venus he had just completed. The wife was so transported at the compliment that she interrupted the eulogist by observing that her husband always took her for his model and she was always reckoned to have a most beautiful foot and ancle.

Gotta love that Regency spelling of 'ankle'. OK, so STC's point is straightforward enough: he is arguing that a true poet (or artist, or sculptor) must do more than merely 'copy' things to be great. But I cannot for the life of me find the source for Coleridge's anecdote here. Anybody know?

Is This A Previously Undiscovered Coleridge Poem?

The answer is, probably not. At any rate, if I had any hard evidence I'd be submitting to a high-profile academic journal in Romanticism studies, not piffling around with it on this blog. Still: it is at least interesting.

Even if (outside chance) it is by Coleridge, it wouldn't really count as an original poem, since it is a translation from the German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803): very famous in his day, almost wholly forgotten nowadays. When Coleridge and Wordsworth spent time in Germany in the late 1790s one of the things they did was pay the (by now, elderly) Klopstock a visit. This was before Coleridge acquired his fluent German, and K. spoke no English, so the whole conversation had to be mediated through Wordsworth's French (which K. spoke not very well and STC not at all). There's an account of this 1798 meeting in the third of 'Satyrane's Letters', published in The Friend (1809), and later in the Biographia Literaria (1817). 'Wordsworth told him,' Coleridge reports, 'that I intended to translate a few of his odes as specimens of German lyrics.' These translations, if they were ever undertaken, have not been discovered; although by the end of 1799 STC's German was pretty good, and he certainly exercised his linguistic skills by translating German poetry, including Schiller's Wallenstein and Goethe's Faust.

So might the following anonymous 'Ode, from Klopstock' [from the London-based magazine, The German Museum, Or, Monthly Repository of the Literature of Germany, the North and the Continent in General (1801), 400] be by STC?

Moons move round earths,
Earths round suns;
All the host of suns move
Round one great sun.
Our Father who art in Heaven.

On all these worlds, lightened and giving light,
Live spirits unresembling each other, in powers, in bodies;
But all Conceive God, and rejoice in God.
Hallowed be thy name.

He the great supreme of all,
Who can alone wholly conceive himself,
And in himself wholly rejoice,
Formed the vast design
For the happiness of all the Inhabitants of his Worlds.
To us thy kingdom come.

Well for them, that he, not they,
Their present, and their future regulated.
Well for them, well!
And well also for us.
Thy will be done in Heaven,
As it is on Earth.

He raises with the straw, the car on high;
He ripens the golden apple, the blushing grape;
He feeds the lamb on the hill, the roe in the wood;
But his thunder also rolls along;
And the hail lays it low
On the straw on the branch, on the hill, and in the wood.
Give us this day our daily bread.

Do mortals and sinners also dwell
High over the thunders path?
Does there the friend become the enemy?
Must there the friend by death be separated?
Our debts forgive us
As we forgive our debtors
Separate roads lead to the great end,
To happiness;
Some wind through desarts,
Yet in these some joys spring forth
And refresh the thirsty.
Lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil
Adoration to thee, who the great sun encompassed
With suns, with earths and moons:
Who created spirits,
Regulated their bliss,
Raises the ears,
Calls to death,
Who leads through desarts to the great end and refreshes the traveller.
Adoration to thee,

For thine is the kingdom, the power,
And the glory,
For ever and ever. Amen.

There's no direct evidence linking this to STC, but it has a certain Coleridgean flavour, I'd say. And after his return to Britain in 1800 Coleridge was certainly known (and known as a Germanist) to the London literary scene from which the editors (amongst them, the Rev Peter Will) sourced their copy: he earned his living as a journalist during these years, after all. And to speculate further, 1801 might be close enough to the (anonymous) publication of the Lyrical Ballads to mean that Coleridge would keep his name from this translation—although such anonymity was also German Museum house style. It's a possible, then; though it would be nice to have some harder evidence.

Coleridge: Metal

I'm proper grateful to the estimable @keatsandchapman for permission to post this pen-and-ink sketch of our man. I may bung it onto the side-bar in due course: it's vastly better than the 'official' portraits. Check out his blog: well worth your time.

Coleridge's Kubla Khan: What Happens Next?

Let's take Coleridge at his word, and believe that 'Kubla Khan' was originally going to be a much longer poem. The work's celebrated preface dates composition to 'the summer of the year 1797', in 'a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton'. Coleridge says he read 'the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas Pilgrimes':

Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.

Then a sleep, during which he dreamt the 'two to three hundred lines' of a completed poem: a marvellous, wonderful poem, it seems. On waking he began to transcribe this dream-vision only to be interrupted by the most famous interruptor in all world literature, the person from Porlock, after whose ill-timed visit STC found 'to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast'. Boo!

Now this story might be, as some editors have suggested it is, mere chaff. Maybe STC never had a larger poem in mind. But, as I say, let's take Coleridge's word: but for Porlock-person, the 50-line poem would have gone on for another, what: 250 lines? 2500 lines? For a while, at any rate. So what was going to happen to Kubla?

There aren't any clues in Purchas His Pilgrimes as to subsequent events. That book merely describes the arrangement of his palace: 

And of course we can never know for certain the direction STC's poem would have taken, had he written the whole of it. The only real hint in the poem itself is that events are going to take a martial turn: 'And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far/Ancestral voices prophesying war!'

What war? Well, here is an account from The Annual Register (a periodical Coleridge did sometimes read, although I can't prove he read this specific issue of it) in which John Reinhold Forster speculates about certain columnar stones discovered by Jesuits in North America:

Kublai-Khan, one of the successors of Genghiz-khan, after the conquest of the southern part of China, sent ships out, to conquer the kingdom of Japan, or, as they call it, Nipan-gri; but in a terrible storm the whole fleet was cast away, and nothing was ever heard of the men in that fleet. It seems that some of these ships were cast to the shores, opposite the great American lakes, between forty and fifty degrees north latitude, and there probably erected these monuments, and were the ancestors of some nations, who are called Mozemlecks, and have some degree of civilization. Another part of this fleet, it seems, reached the country opposite Mexico, and there founded the Mexican empire, which, according to their own records, as preserved by the Spaniards, and in their painted annals, in Purchas's Pilgrimage, are very recent; so that they can scarcely remember any more than seven princes before Motezuma II, who was reigning when the Spaniards arrived there, 1519, under Fernando Cortez; consequently the first of these princes, supposing each had a reign of thirty-three years and four months, and adding to it .the sixteen years of Motezuma, began to reign in the year 1270, when Kublai-Khan, the conqueror of all China and of Japan, was on the throne, and in whose time happened, I believe, the first abortive expedition to Japan, which I mentioned above, and probably furnished North-America with civilized inhabitants. There is, if I am not mistaken, a great similarity between the figures of the Mexican idols, and those which are usually among the Tartars, who embrace the doctrines and religion of the Dalai-Lama, whose religion Kublai-Khan first; introduced among the Monguls, or Moguls. [‘An Account of Some Vestiges of Cultivation and Antiquity which the French met with in their Attempt to Trace Out the Passage By Land from Canada to the South Sea’, Annual Register (1771), 192]

This was quite a fashionable speculation for a while. Here, from the Critical Review (a journal Coleridge certainly read, and indeed was writing for in the 1790s), is another account of the same idea:

Kublai Khan fitted out a fleet from the Chinese sea, in order to conquer Nipon; and this fleet was scattered by storms ... Kublai-Khan reigned from the year 1259 to 1294 of the Christian æra, when he sent a fleet and army to Nipon (or Japan), for the purpose of conquering that country. The ships composing this fleet, were very much shattered by the storm, and it is probable that some of them may not have been able to get back to Japan and China. About this period there sprung up in America, almost at one and the same time, two great empires (those of Mexico and Peru) which had regular institutes of religion; notions of rank and subordination, were in some measure civilized, were connected with each other by various kinds of association, practised agriculture, and in tho matrimonial state did not allow of polygamy. In Mexico, indeed, they even had a kind of hieroglyphic writing, together with many other marks of cultivation; notwithstanding that both these empires are surrounded on all sides by savage and rude nations very inconsiderable in point of extent, and are besides at a distance from each other. Now all this favours the supposition, that these two colonies came thither by sea, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; perhaps they are some of the people that were lost in the expedition to Japan, their ships having been driven by the storm to America. ['Forster's History of Discoveries and Voyages', Critical Review (1786) 334]

Might this have been in Coleridge's mind? A tempest at sea; a war fleet destroyed; a perilous ocean crossing, and a new civilisation being founded. It's suggestive, certainly.

If there's a more serious Coleridgean point here (and I appreciate it's hard to insist there is, given the speculative nature of this sort of thing), then it would be about linking the genesis of Kubla Khan in 1797 to Coleridge's own hopes and anxieties about Pantisocracy. This occupied a very large a portion of STC's energies in the mid 1790s, and although by the end of 1795 the scheme had been downgraded from a settlement in America to a settlement in Wales, and by 1796 it was more or less dead-in-the-water (and never to be revived), still it would be surprising if it didn't work its way through the poet's subconscious and into his work in the years immediately following. In which case, what do we have? Kubla Khan, frittering his life away in his pleasure dome, departs on a perilous journey that eventually leads to the founding of a great new civilisation—in America. Which is to say, Cobler Ridge frittering his life away in his pleasure dome, dreams of departing on a perilous journey that will eventually leads to the founding of a great new civilisation—in America.

Coleridge's Lecture on Poetry, 21st Nov 1811, London Philosophical Society

To bring this blog back to the specific research project in hand: here is one small example of the kind of the problems involved in producing a reader-friendly version of Coleridge's lectures.

It's a passage from Lecture 2 of the 1811-12 series. This lecture is written up in toto in Collier's Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton (1856). We also have some MS notes of Coleridge's, which only cover the material of the first five or six paragraphs of the lecture Collier transcribed. So let's take, for example, this passage here, as transcribed by Collier.



That's clear enough, and is the sort of thing Coleridge might say. But there's a wrinkle.

The passage above was written in 1856, when Collier transcribed the shorthand notes he made in 1811. Usually his transcription is quite close to what his notes say (although quite often Collier changes individual words and monkeys around with the order within sentences, which is annoying). But the Gulliver's Travels point is, well, what's-the-word, let's see, wrong. Here, as deciphered by R A Foakes, is what Collier's shorthand note actually said.

He illustrated this sentiment further by an allusion to Gulliver’s Travels, which I did not exactly comprehend [CC 5:1, 204].

Uh-oh. 'This sentiment' is the question whether Pope is a good or bad poet. Going through his young-man notes, old-man Collier did his best. But, since we happen to have STC's own lecture notes for this paragaph (alas, not for the rest of the lecture), we can see that he got this wrong. Here's STC:

I[t] has, I doubt not, occurred to many of my Auditors, as well as to myself, to hear literary when the conversation has turned on literature, to hear it asked—whether we think Mr Pope a great Poet—offence and shock given to many—the dispute follows–the disputants leave off with but a mean opinion of each another–yet never thought that the dispute was strictly preposterous, i.e., began at the wrong end—and that they each should have first ascertained what the other understood by the word Poetry. If the veracious Lemuel Gulliver on his return from his celebrated Travels, and previous to his publication, had asked of us mentioned to us the names of two public characters in the country which he had unfortunately heard at an unfortunate alien act had compelled him to leave, and then asked—which of the two we thought the nobler Houynmn, we should most certainly if only we could neigh out the word, answer him by asking him—what is a H.? What do you mean by the word?

Here, I think, I have to relegate Collier's guess to a footnote, and insert Coleridge's actual point; but I also have to write it so that it fits smoothly with the rest of the lecture, not revert suddenly to note form. There's an element of the fake antique about this, but I can't see another way. Here's what I'm thinking of going with.

It has, I doubt not, occurred often to many of my Auditors, as well as to myself, when the conversation has turned on literature, to hear it asked –whether we think Mr Pope a great Poet. This is a matter that has been warmly discussed on both sides, some positively maintaining the affirmative, and others dogmatically insisting upon the negative, with offence and shock given to many, and the disputants leave off with but a mean opinion of each another. Yet it never occurred to either party that the dispute was strictly preposterous, that is, began at the wrong end, and that each should have first ascertained what the other understood by the word Poetry. If the veracious Lemuel Gulliver on his return from his celebrated Travels, and previous to his publication, had mentioned to us the names of two public characters in the country which an unfortunate alien act had compelled him to leave, and then asked—which of the two we thought the nobler Houyhnhnm, we should most certainly, if only we could neigh out the word, answer him by asking him—what is a Houyhnhnm? What do you mean by the word?

Coleridge, Digresser

To bring this blog back to its main purpose.

The anonymous satirical poem Sortes Horatianae: a Poetical Review of Poetical Talent, with notes (London: T, Hamilton, 1814), written by somebody who calls Byron his 'patron', includes some lively mockery of the Lake school. The relevant passage opens with general chaff about the Pantisocratic scheme of American emigration:

Three English Bards, with hacknied logic smit,
Their native shore resolved for aye to quit;
To stem the fury of the winds and waves,
For wild Columbia's lakes, and gloomy caves.
There breathed, they said, on every hill and plain,
The Mountain-Goddess and her free-born train;
And there they'd dwell beneath the sacred tree
Of ever youthful, blooming Liberty!
In sooth, 't were pity, ere the bubble burst,
By minds diseas'd and brains disorder'd nurst,
They had not flown, and kindly with them ta'en
Each silly smatt'rer of the Muse's train:
The "SHIPPE OF FOOLLES" had borne them o'er the floods,
To awful wilds, and never ending woods;
And there, when morn had deck'd the radiant sky,
Each, as his Genius prompted him, might fly,
In all the charms of Solitude, to rove
The wide Savannah, or the shady grove.
[Sortes Horatianae (1814), 705-22]

The three, of course, are Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge; although in fact only the latter two ever planned to relocate to the banks of the Susquehanna River. Then there's a six-line dig at Southey, followed by this:

Coleridge* should mount some rock's o'erjutting height,
And tell his tale in accents of delight;
Fancy his seat "Apollo's forked hill,"
The high tribunal of poetic skill;
Or Surrey's chair, in which he toil'd in vain,
While tittering students mocked the tragic strain;
And think the winds that round would gently blow
Teem'd with the praises of the crowd below. [729-36]

The poem goes on to the third ('Wordsworth should stray adown the fragrant vale,/And breathe soft nonsense to the balmy gale'), but I'm going to pause at the thumbnail of Coleridge. The 'Apollo's hill' reference is to Pope (the Epistle to Arbuthnot, where the toadlike Bufo is 'Proud as Apollo on his forked hill') and the 'Surrey's chair' is a reference to Coleridge's London lectures. Here is the appended footnote:

*Mr. Coleridge is well known as having produced, at divers times, a dainty volume of Poetics, and a Play, which will be honorably mentioned hereafter.——He is also a Lecturer, at the Surrey Institution, on Poetry and "les Belles Lettres." With no very prominent talents, either natural or acquired, for a public Speaker, he endeavours to supply the absence of propriety with pathos, but seldom succeeds in interesting the feelings of his auditors, till he has completely overwhelmed his own; as the following anecdote will prove:

In the course of his lecture, one evening, he had wandered from the subject matter to the story of two lovers—in the moon! So completely absorbed was he in their imaginary distresses, that he failed to observe its effect upon his hearers, until bending from his desk to make a last appeal, he saw, as well as he could through eyes suffused with tears, that they were literally laughing at him.

Constitit et lacrymans.

The Latin is from the Aeneid, and describes what happened when Aeneas retold the story of the fall of Troy: 'he stopped, and began weeping'.

This, though, is fascinating stuff. In fact, Coleridge's 1808 lectures were delivered at the Royal Institution, not the Surrey Institution (though the latter was modelled on the former); unless the author of the Sortes is thinking of Coleridge's 1811-12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, which were delivered at the London Philosophical Society (again, not the Surrey Institution). It would be good to know, actually; since it's otherwise hard to pin-down at which point in which lecture Coleridge might have wandered from his brief to a tear-jerking discussion of two lovers in the moon.

Still, though it's presented to us here to mock its subject, I'd say there's genuine pathos in the picture of Coleridge, moved to tears by his own extempore lecturing, suddenly realising that his audience was literally laughing at him. I don't believe anybody else has noticed this little biographical nugget.

To be clear: there's plenty of evidence that Coleridge was a digressive lecturer. Most accounts of his lecturing, though, imply that his digressions were brilliant and successful, and that Coleridge was received by his audiences as a great and profound speaker. This from the intro to R A Foake's standard edition of the Lectures on Literature (2 vols, Princeton Univ. Press 1987):

[Crabb Robinson reported the lectures] quite dazzling ... 'Coleridge's digressions are not the worst part of his lectures' ... another who attended one lecture was delighted by Coleridge's eloquence ... what Mary Russell Mitford called the 'electric power of [his] genius ... James Gillman said of them 'in his lectures he was brilliant, fluent and rapid; his words seemed to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy some delightful poem.

Foakes records that some people found some of the lectures a bit dull; but not that on occasion STC's audience literally laughed at him and that he, in response, burst into tears. That last thing is the new bit, I think.