Coleridge's Disappointment in The Excursion

Coleridge was disappointed in The Excursion, but his disappointment was intricate and fruitful. Wordsworth first came to learn about it through the offices of Lady Beaumont, who, for some inexplicable reason, thought it a good idea to show him a letter she had received from Coleridge which had touched on the subject (April 3, 1815: Griggs IV 564). As is characteristic of his complex discontent with the poem, Coleridge had in fact said very warm things about it: "I can truly say, that one half the number of its Beauties would make all the beauties of all his Contemporary Poets collectively mount to the balance." But, as he went on--while conceding that "the fault may be in my own mind"--"I do not think, I did not feel, it equal to the Work on the Growth of his own spirit." Coleridge is referring, of course, to the autobiographical poem that ultimately became The Prelude, which he had heard recited back in 1807, prompting his own poem "To William Wordsworth," a copy of which he had subsequently sent to Lady Beaumont. (The immediate occasion of his writing to her now was to get hold the poem, of which he apparently had kept no copy: he was collecting his verse into a volume, which would belatedly become Sibylline Leaves and appear in 1817.) Compared with that writing, Coleridge told Lady Beaumont, The Excursion showed no diminution of Wordsworth's "genius"; but there was a problem with it, nevertheless, which had something to do with individuality. The power of Wordsworth's autobiographical poetry lay partly in his ability to capture an experience that was generational, true; but it stemmed, too, from an audacious originality of purpose that was Wordsworth's and no-one else's: "high theme by Thee first sung aright," as Coleridge had put it in the lines to Wordsworth (1.4 Poems 436). The Excursion seemed to have forgone singing themes "aright" for the first time for the less satisfactory task of singing old themes as though they were something new. The new poetry betrayed a kind of philosophical naivete, having convinced himself of the truth of "doctrines and words" that most people take for granted since childhood, Coleridge explained to Lady Beaumont, Wordsworth came to attach an undue "depth and weight" to "doctrines and words, which come almost as Truisms or Common-place to others." He misappropriates generally received wisdoms as hard-won individual insights. No doubt what Coleridge is objecting to here is partly Wordsworth's piety, which looms large in the latter parts of the poem especially. In a long career of admiring Wordsworth, Coleridge never thought much of the quality of Wordsworth's Christianity, which had an unscrutinised ecumenical ease naturally irritating to someone who had wrestled with the Trinity on innumerable dark nights. As far as Wordsworth was concerned, Coleridge evidently shared with his theologically savvy son, Hartley, a distaste for "the odd occasional introduction of the popular, almost the vulgar, Religion in his later publications (the popping in, as Hartley says, of the old man with a beard)," and at one point even admitted "the painful suspicion of worldly prudence" (Letters V 95), as though murmuring solemnly about God were really a matter of what the market demanded. He did not express himself so sharply in his letter to Lady Beaumont, but the sting of his criticism was keen nevertheless. When Wordsworth learned about the letter, he picked up at once on the much broader point at issue: that something good about The Prelude was being compared unfavourably with something wrong in the new poem: "I have rather been perplexed than enlightened by your comparative censure." For one of Wordsworth's main ambitions in The Excursion had been, he told Coleridge, precisely to "put the commonplace truths, of the human affections especially, in an interesting point of view; and rather to remind men of their knowledge, as it lurks inoperative and unvalued in their own minds, than to attempt to convey recondite or refined truths. …