The Road to Xanadu
A Blessed Companion Is a Book.
by . Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1927. 8vo. xviii+600 pp. $6.00.
LITERARY ‘ research,’ and more especially that branch of it that is known as Quellenstudien, is regarded, not altogether unjustifiably, by the nonacademic layman of average general culture as an occupation on a par with the milking of hegoats, in which, as Tennyson observed, there is neither pleasure nor profit. The source hunter, eager to prove that A stole this metaphor from B and that simile from C, is a candidate for the Deanship of the Academy of Legado, wherein ‘there was a man born blind, who had several apprentices in his own condition: their employment was to mix colours for painters, which their master taught them to distinguish by feeling and smelling.’ The outsider, observing the patient painstaking of these investigators, is inclined to cry with Dryden, ‘Trust Nature; do not labour to be dull!’ and to dismiss such scholarship as ‘a combing of cows’ tails to gather the seeds of weeds.’Occasionally a book appears, thoroughly scholarly in method, which by its inherent vigor and vitality refutes these charges and vindicates ‘research.’ The author of such a book is one who loves life more than literature and loves literature because it is a part of life.
No finer vindication of literary scholarship has appeared in this country in our time than Professor Lowes’s study of the genesis of The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. Regarded merely as a source study it is an amazing piece of work, for through the wide ramifications of Coleridge’s reading this scholar has tracked down the hints and suggestions and minute details whence the poet derived the material which went to the making of the two poems. To discover this enormous mass of sheer fact required patience and acumen of a high order, for many a clue was so slight that it might easily have been overlooked. The starting point of this piece of literary detective work was the Gutch Memorandum book in the British Museum, a document whose great importance was first recognized by Mr. Lowes. Had nothing else been accomplished than the assembling of all these innumerable details (drawn from travel books, Neo-Platonic philosophy, transactions of scientific associations, current melodramas, sea lore picked up at Bristol, and a hundred other sources), the result would have been worth while. We should have a clearer conception of Coleridge’s Belesenheit. But Professor Lowes has not been content to stop at this point; and his determination to push his inquiry deeper has turned what might have been merely an excellent example of Quellenstudien into a profound and intensely interesting study of the workings of the poetic mind.
Professor Lowes draws an analogy between the experience of the poet and the experience of the mathematician, quoting Poincaré’s account of the unconscious work which seems to spring from sodden and haphazard inspiration, but which requires both a preceding and a subsequent period of conscious work. From his omnivorous and extremely attentive reading Coleridge gathered together ideas and impressions which, in Henry James’s pregnant phrase, were dropped ‘into the deep well of unconscious cerebration,’ where they grappled with other ideas and impressions, taking on an increase of weight and significance, and ready, if and when the appropriate suggestion came, to surge up again into the field of consciousness. When these ‘sleeping images’ of things have again reached the light they are dominated and directed by the ‘shaping spirit’ which moulds them into poetic form. This phenomenon is illustrated, with an unexampled wealth of detail, by the case of The Ancient Mariner. For instance, Coleridge had been on several occasions impressed by the legend of the Wandering Jew and the character of Cain, and possibly by some form of the tale of the Flying Dutchman. These impressions sank into the ‘deep well’ and coalesced; and when they emerged again it was in the form of the Old Navigator, neither Jew nor Cain nor Dutchman, but a new creation, yet partaking in some measure of the character of each. The polar and tropical background is another such new synthesis of many elements; so are the albatross and its dæmon, the crew of the doomed ship, the ship itself, the sun in its various aspects, and the journeying moon with a star between its tips.
The Ancient Mariner is a highly finished and articulated piece of conscious craftsmanship, the result of the will moving the shaping spirit to mould the multitudinous and diverse materials that have risen from the subconscious. Kubla Khan presents a different phenomenon. No deliberate artistry fashioned it. The phantasmagoria of the poem arose as pictures, magnificent and fleeting, which were transformed immediately into words. A single example of the ‘results’ obtained by Mr. Lowes must suffice. He shows, from Coleridge’s reading, that the ‘sacred river’ is the Nile, which, according to old tradition, plunged under the sea. But that tradition suggests another submarine river, Alpheus; and the association of ideas within the ‘deep well’ of the subconscious has produced the dream river ‘Alph.’ The stately pleasure dome, the deep romantic chasm, the Abyssinian maid, and the youth with flashing eyes and floating hair are similar upsurgings from unconscious depths.
It is a singular and alluring fact, not noticed by Mr. Lowes’s reviewers, that the inquiries that have produced such rich results in the case of these two poems have failed utterly to cast light, upon the origination of Christabel. The author frankly admits that the mysterious tracks from whence that poem came lie off the road that leads to the palace in Xanadu and the adventures of the Ancient Mariner. The scholar who uncovers the missing clue will have at hand the material for a sequel to Professor Lowes’s admirable and delightful book.
S. C. CHEW