William Hazlitt

Although William Hazlitt notes early in his Examiner review (2 June 1816) that "Christabel" has "been much admired in manuscript," he finds little to admire in the poem. Of the bedroom scene in Part I, for example, he remarks:

If the beauties of 'Christabel' should not be sufficiently admired, Mr. Coleridge may lay it to two lines which he had too much manliness to omit in complaisance to the bad taste of his contemporaries... he has omitted... a line which is absolutely necessary to the understanding [of] the whole story.(1)

The line Hazlitt has in mind comes from the a Sarah Stoddart transcript: "Are lean and old and foul of Hue"--a perfect copy of the line as it appears in Coleridge's autograph. Hazlitt compares the Stoddart manuscript with the 1816 printed text and argues that Coleridge was trying to hide, if not silence, elements of “Christabel.” To substantiate his accusation that there is “something disgusting at the bottom of [Coleridge’s] subject,” Hazlitt turns to the Stoddart transcript:

Christabel’s dread of [Geraldine] arises from her discovering… [that Geraldine is a “witch”], which is told in a single line, which line, from an exquisite refinement in efficiency is here omitted. When the unknown lady gets to Christabel’s chamber, and is going to undress, it is said:

Behold! Her bosom and half her side A sight to dream of, not to tell And she is to sleep by Christabel! The manuscript runs thus, or nearly thus: Behold her bosom and half her side— Hideous, deformed and pale of hue.(2)

Hazlitt misquotes (or mis-remembers) both versions of the poem: in the 1816 edition, he alters Coleridge's punctuation, changing a period to an exclamation mark (the latter is found in the Stoddart transcript); and in the second, he changes the line "Are lean and old and foul of Hue" in the Stoddart manuscript to "Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue." The line, Hazlitt argues, "is necessary to make common sense of the first and second part. 'It is the keystone that makes up the arch'."(3)

Hazlitt's reduplication--or rather, mis-duplication--of the bedroom scene in the 1816 printed edition and the second Stoddart transcript exemplifies the instability of these particular lines in the history of the transmission of "Christabel." Other versions of the poem are similarly varied: Coleridge annotates the bedroom scene in two presentation copies of the 1816 edition (giving one to his physician, James Gillman, and the other to David Hinves). The Gillman annotation is repeated in an unidentified hand in a copy of Coleridge's 1828 Poetical Works found in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University. And finally, an unidentified Bodleian copyist mis-copies the second Stoddart transcript in 1812. To view Hazlitt's and the above versions of lines 246-47, click here.

Although Hazlitt's Examiner piece on "Christabel" is the most hostile of all of the contemporary reviews of the poem, he does find some commendable lines in "Christabel." Like Lord Byron, Hazlitt praises the "friends in youth" passage (396-414) in his review, and in his essays "Lectures on the English Poets" and "The Spirit of the Age."(4) The passage, Coleridge writes to Thomas Poole on 13 February 1813, contains "the best & sweetest Lines I ever wrote."(5)

But Hazlitt is also thought to have a hand in a piece on "Christabel" for the Edinburgh Review. The opinion of "Christabel" in the September 1816 issue of the Edinburgh Review is clear:

we defy any man to point out a passage of poetical merit in any of these three pieces... except perhaps the following lines, and even these are not very brilliant; nor is the leading thought original [Quotes lines 396-414 of "Christabel"]. With this one exception, there is literally not one couplet in the publication before us which would be reckoned poetry... Must we then be doomed to hear such a mixture of raving and driv'ling, extolled as the work of a wild and original genius... Upon the whole we look upon this publication as one of the most notable pieces of impertinence of which the press has lately been guilty; and one of the boldest experiments that has yet been made on the patience of the public.(6)

Coleridge responds to the Edinburgh's attack in Biographia Literaria in 1817 (and, not surprisingly, the Edinburgh Review retaliates in its review of Biographia Literaria later that same year), but it is in his personal correspondence that Coleridge most openly records his feelings toward Hazlitt's treatment of "Christabel." On 5 December 1816, Coleridge writes to R.H. Brabant that

the man who has so grossly calumniated me in the Examiner and the Ed. Review is a WM Hazlitt, one who owed to me more than to his own parents--for at my risk I saved perhaps his Life from the Gallows, most certainly his character from blasting infamy-- His reason I give in his own words--'Damn him! I hate him: FOR I am under no obligations to him.'--When he was reproached for writing against his own convictions, and reminded that he had repeatedly declared the Christabel the finest poem in the language of its size--he replied--I grumbled part to myself, while I was writing--but nothing stings a man so much, as making people believe Lies of him.(7)

But it is a single copy of the 1816 edition that most dramatically conveys Coleridge's attitude toward Hazlitt. The copy becomes a vehicle for Coleridge's complaint as he records the following note on the flyleaf:

I still cherish the hope of finishing the poem... I hope to finish it in the course of the present year. Enough at present to assure you, that Geraldine is not a Witch, in any proper sense of that word. That she is a man in disguise is a wicked rumour sent abroad with malice prepense, and against his own belief and knowledge, by poor Hazlitt. Unhappy man! I understand that when one of his Faction had declared in a pamphlet ("Hypocrisy Unveiled") the Christabel "the most obscene poem in the English language" he shrugged himself up with a sort of sensual orgasm of enjoyment, and exclaimed--How he'll stare (i.e. meaning me) Curse him! I hate him.-- S.T. Coleridge Feb. 3. 1819.(8)

Notes

1. The Romantics Reviewed, Part A: The Lake Poets, ed. Donald H. Reiman, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1972), 2: 530. (back)
2. Romantics Reviewed, 2: 530-31; Hazlitt's emphasis. (back)
3. Romantics Reviewed, 2: 531. (back)
4. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 1930-34, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols. (New York: AMS, 1967), 5: 167, 11: 35. (back)
5. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956-71), 3: 435-38. (back)
6. Romantics Reviewed, 2: 473; original emphasis. (back)
7. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4: 692-93; Coleridge's emphasis. (back)
8. John Beer, "Coleridge, Hazlitt and 'Christabel'." Review of English Studies 37 (1986), 40; Coleridge's emphasis. (back)