metre, in which nothing of the original force, swiftness or directness is
lost, while a new subtlety, a wholly new music, has come into it. The metre
of "Christabel" is even more of an invention, and it had more immediate
consequences. The poem was begun in 1797, and not published till 1816; but
in 1801 Scott heard it recited, and in 1805 reproduced what he could of it
in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and the other metrical romances which, in
their turn, led the way to Byron, who himself heard "Christabel" recited in
1811. But the secret of Coleridge's instinct of melody and science of
harmony was not discovered. Such ecstasy and such collectedness, a way of
writing which seems to aim at nothing but the most precisely expressive
simplicity, and yet sets the whole brain dancing to its tune, can hardly be
indicated more exactly than in Coleridge's own words in reference to the
Italian lyrists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They, attained
their aim, he says, "by the avoidance of every word which a gentleman would
not use in dignified conversation, and of every word and phrase which none
but a learned man would use; by the studied position of words and phrases,
so that not only each part should be melodious in itself, but contribute to
the harmony of the whole, each note referring and conducing to the melody
of all the foregoing and following words of the same period or stanza; and,
lastly, with equal labour, the greater because unbetrayed, by the variation
and various harmonies of their metrical movement." These qualities we may
indeed find in many of Coleridge's songs, part Elizabethan, part eighteenth
century, in some of his infantile jingles, his exuberant comic verse (in
which, however, there are many words "which a gentleman would not use"),
and in a poem like "Love," which has suffered as much indiscriminate praise
as Raphael's Madonnas, which it resembles in technique and sentiment, and
in its exquisite perfection of commonplace, its _tour de force _of an
almost flawless girlishness. But in "Christabel" the technique has an
incomparable substance to work upon; substance at once simple and abnormal,
which Coleridge required, in order to be at his best.