Marshall "went to sleep while
the 'Ancient Mariner' was reading," and the book was mainly bought by
seafaring men, deceived by the title, and supposing that the "Ancient
Mariner" was a nautical treatise.
In verse, then, Coleridge succeeds with the supernatural, both by way of
description in detail, and of suggestion. If you wish to see a failure,
try the ghost, the moral but not affable ghost, in Wordsworth's
"Laodamia." It is blasphemy to ask the question, but is the ghost in
"Hamlet" quite a success? Do we not see and hear a little too much of
him? Macbeth's airy and viewless dagger is really much more successful
by way of suggestion. The stage makes a ghost visible and familiar, and
this is one great danger of the supernatural in art. It is apt to insist
on being too conspicuous. Did the ghost of Darius, in "AEschylus,"
frighten the Athenians? Probably they smiled at the imperial spectre.
There is more discretion in Caesar's ghost--
"I think it is the weakness of mine eyes
That shapes this monstrous apparition,"
says Brutus, and he lays no very great stress on the brief visit of the
appearance. For want of this discretion, Alexandre Dumas's ghosts, as in
"The Corsican Brothers," are failures. They make themselves too common
and too cheap, like the spectre in Mrs. Oliphant's novel, "The Wizard's
Son." This, indeed, is the crux of the whole adventure. If you paint
your ghost with too heavy a hand, you raise laughter, not fear.
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